Author: AFP

‘Robocops’ take on Kinshasa traffic

One of three new human-like robots that were recently installed in Kinshasa to help tackle the hectic traffic usually experienced in the capital. (Pic: AFP)
One of three new human-like robots that were recently installed in Kinshasa to help tackle the hectic traffic usually experienced in the capital. (Pic: AFP)

In the teeming capital of DR Congo, where drivers often flout traffic rules, five chunky, arm-waving robots equipped with cameras and lights have been set up to watch over the roads.

The solar-powered aluminium robots are huge, towering over the jammed streets of Kinshasa, as cars and motorcyles jostle for road room, their horns blasting.

Each hand on the odd-looking machines – built to withstand the year-round hot climate – is fitted with green and red lights that regulate the flow of traffic in the sprawling city of nine million.

The robots are also equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of traffic and send real-time images to the police station.

Although the humanoids look more like giant toys than real policemen, motorists have given them a thumbs up.

“There are certain drivers who don’t respect the traffic police. But with the robot it will be different. We should respect the robot,” taxi driver Poro Zidane told AFP.

“We’re very happy about it,” he said, his taxi packed with passengers as drivers around him honked their horns in a desperate bid to cut through the traffic jam.

A traffic robot cop on Triomphal boulevard of Kinshasa at the crossing of Asosa, Huileries and Patrice Lubumba streets. (Pic: AFP)
A traffic robot cop on Triomphal boulevard of Kinshasa at the crossing of Asosa, Huileries and Patrice Lubumba streets. (Pic: AFP)

Of the five robots set up across the capital, two have been regulating traffic since 2013.

On Tuesday, three new and improved robots developed by a Congolese association of women engineers were set up across the city.

The newcomers even have names: Tamuke, Mwaluke and Kisanga. They each cost $27 500.

‘An asset for police’

Therese Izay, president of Women’s Technology, the group behind the robots, believes the invention will help make it far more difficult for motorists in Kinshasa to get away with traffic violations.

“In our city, someone can commit an offence and run away, and say that no one saw him. But now, day or night, we’ll be able to see him in real time and he will pay his fine like in all the serious countries of the world,” she said.

The new robots “react much more quickly” than the older models, she said.

“The electronic components work much better now than the ones from the first generation,” she said, adding that she had submitted a proposal for the authorities to purchase 30 more robots to watch over the country’s highways.

Five of the machines have already been sent to Katanga province, in the southeast of the country.

General Celestin Kanyama, chief of Kinshasa’s police force, said the new electronic cops were a welcome addition in a city where 2,276 people have died in traffic accidents since 2007.

“These robots will be an important asset for the police,” he told AFP.

But Kinshasa governor Andre Kimbuta said that while the machines could regulate traffic, they were no match for real policemen who could chase motorists who jump red lights and raise civic awareness.

“We should congratulate our Congolese engineers, but policemen also need to do their job,” he said.

 

From the slums to the silver screen: Uganda’s chess prodigy

Phiona Mutesi plays a game of chess with her colleagues at the chess academy in Kibuye, Kampala. (Pic: AFP)
Phiona Mutesi plays a game of chess with her colleagues at the chess academy in Kibuye, Kampala. (Pic: AFP)

Phiona Mutesi happened upon chess as a famished nine-year-old foraging for food in the sprawling and impoverished slums of the Ugandan capital.

“I was very hungry,” said Mutesi, aged about 18.

Now a chess champion who competes internationally, her tale of triumph over adversity is being turned into a Hollywood epic with Oscar-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o tipped to play her mother.

“My dad had died, and after the age of three we started struggling to get food to eat, my mum was not working,” Mutesi told AFP. They lived on one meal a day.

She was forced to drop out of school aged six when her mother could not pay the fees.

“You can’t just wake up and say ‘today’: you have to plan first.”

One day, Mutesi discovered a chess program held in a church in the Katwe slum districts in Kampala. Potential players were enticed with a free cup of porridge, and Mutesi began organising her days around this.

“It was so interesting,” she recalled of her introduction to pawns, rooks, bishops, knights and kings in 2005. “But I didn’t go there for chess, I went just to get a meal.”

As she returned week after week, something unexpected happened that would transform Mutesi’s life.

‘Incredible impact’
The young girl developed a talent for chess, which was only introduced in Uganda in the 1970s by foreign doctors and was still seen as a game played by the rich. And her talent turned into a passion.

“I like chess because it involves planning,” said Mutesi. “If you don’t plan, you will end up with your life so bad.”

The film, entitled Queen of Katwe, is based on a book of the same name about Mutesi by American writer Tim Crothers. It is to be shot in Uganda and South Africa, directed by Mira Nair. Filming will reportedly begin in late March.

Coach and mentor Robert Katende, of the Sports Outreach Ministry, remembers Mutesi wearing “dirty torn clothes” when he met her a decade ago.

“She was really desperate for survival,” said Katende, who is building a chess academy to accommodate 150 students outside Kampala.

Two years into the game, Mutesi became Uganda’s national women’s junior champion, defending her title the next year.

“Phiona Mutesi has flourished,” Vianney Luggya, president of the Uganda Chess Federation, told AFP. “She made history in the schools’ competition by becoming the first girl to compete in the boys’ category. It was certainly surprising.”

By the time she participated in her first international competition, Africa’s International Children’s Chess Tournament in South Sudan in 2009, Mutesi still had not read a book.

 ‘Believe in yourself’
“It was really wonderful because it was my first time abroad,” she said. “It was my first time to sleep in a hotel. We came back with a trophy.”

Since then Mutesi has competed in chess Olympiads in Russia’s Siberia, in Turkey – after which she was given the Woman Candidate Master ranking by FIDE, the World Chess Federation – and in Norway last year.

The teenager, who has two more years of high school left, hopes to go to the next Olympiad in 2016 in Azerbaijan.

Overseas, Mutesi has also played against her hero, Russian former world champion and Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and inspired school students in the US to start a tournament in her name.

Back home, her fame has had “an incredible impact”, said Luggya.

“The number of lady players participating in national chess championships has doubled,” he said, adding that each of the 26 schools set to compete in Uganda’s annual championships in April will have girls and boys teams.

Uganda’s female players have also been spurred on by the success of Ivy Amoko, who became east Africa’s first FIDE Master last year.

A recent week-long chess clinic, involving Mutesi, attracted more than 200 participants, most of them female, from Kampala slums and surrounding communities.

British-Nigerian actor David Oyelowo – nominated for a  Gold Globe Award for his portrayal of Martin Luther King in the 2014 drama “Selma” -is also set to star in Queen of Katwe.

Luggya hopes the film will “open doors” for all players in Uganda, saying: “I think Ugandans realise that it is a brain game that can enhance their potential in all other aspects of life.”

Though the country now has east Africa’s only International Master, Elijah Emojong, and the region’s biggest number of titled players, Uganda still struggles with kit and trainers – normally volunteers – plus sponsorship for overseas titles.

Mutesi is aware this may hold her back ultimately.

But while her goal is to rise to Grandmaster, she also hopes to become a paediatrician and open a home for children, especially girls facing the same predicament she overcame.

“Girls are always under-looked, even in chess,” said Mutesi. “But I don’t think there’s any reason why a girl cannot beat a boy. It comes from believing in yourself.”

Mali government signs peace deal, Tuareg rebels delay

Fighters from the Tuareg separatist rebel group MNLA take shade under a tree in the desert near Tabankort.  Mali's government and Tuareg-led rebels resumed U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Algeria on Monday in pursuit of an accord to end uprisings by separatists seeking more self-rule for the northern region they call Azawad. Picture taken February 13, 2015. (Souleymane Ag Anara, Reuters)
Fighters from the Tuareg separatist rebel group MNLA take shade under a tree in the desert near Tabankort. Mali’s government and Tuareg-led rebels resumed U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Algeria on Monday in pursuit of an accord to end uprisings by separatists seeking more self-rule for the northern region they call Azawad. Picture taken February 13, 2015. (Souleymane Ag Anara, Reuters)

The Malian government signed a peace agreement with some northern armed groups on Sunday but the main Tuareg rebel alliance asked for more time to consult its grassroots.

The deal, hammered out in eight months of tough negotiations in neighbouring Algeria, provides for the transfer of a raft of powers from Bamako to the north, an area the size of Texas that the rebels refer to as “Azawad”.

The Tuareg rebel alliance that includes the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad said it had asked for a “reasonable delay” for consultations before signing.

“An agreement that has not been shared with the people of the region has little chance of being implemented on the ground,” an alliance representative said.

But a spokesperson for the Algerian mediators who helped broker the agreement expressed optimism that the rebel alliance would sign soon.

“Their presence here means that they accept the agreement,” the spokesperson said, adding that the “negotiations are at an end.”

A spokesperson for the armed groups that did sign hailed the agreement as “an essential document for restoring peace and reconciliation”.

“We have undertaken to respect the spirit and the letter of it,” Harouna Toureh said.

“We will do all we can so that the agreement comes to life and allows all the peoples of the region to rediscover one and another and live together, as they did in the past, in brotherhood and solidarity.”

Militants linked to Al-Qaeda seized control of northern Mali for more than nine months until a French-led military intervention in 2013 that partly drove them from the region.

Jihadist groups were not invited to the Algiers talks.

Row in SA over bodies of Nigeria church victims

(Pic: emmanuel.tv)
(Pic: emmanuel.tv)

A row has erupted in South Africa over the identity of one of the bodies of dozens of South Africans who were killed in the collapse of a Nigerian church building last year.

One family suspects they were given the wrong body and has commissioned private DNA tests and warned they would want the “right” corpse exhumed if their suspicions were correct.

Phumzile Mkhulisi (47) died when a guesthouse attached to tele-evangelist TB Joshua’s church collapsed on September 12 last year, killing 116 people, 81 of them South Africans.

Her body was among the last batch of  11 repatriated to South Africa on February 5 after months of delays attributed partly to waiting for DNA tests.

“I told the other families not to go ahead with their burials because none of us were sure we had the right bodies,” her brother Lwandle Mkhulisi told AFP Monday.

The Mkhulisi family ignored a warning not to open the body bag they were given because the corpse could be in a deteriorated state.

Lwandle Mkhulisi said the body inside did not have a gap in the teeth like his sister did and had no skin from which they could identify birth marks or scars.

“They (the government) told us that the bodies may be infected with Ebola because Nigeria is close to Sierre Leone,” Mkhulisi said.

“Sierre Leone is very far from Nigeria…. They are lying to us.”

Dr Munro Marx, who handled the DNA verification process on behalf of the Nigerian authorities, said he was “100 percent satisfied” that the DNA profiles of Mkhulisi’s two children matched the numbered sample belonging to her.

Marx, head of Stellenbosch University’s Unistel Medical Laboratories in South Africa, said the lab had nothing to do with handling the body bags but it was “highly unlikely” that any bodies were swapped.

The Mkhulusi family’s private DNA test results are due in two weeks.

An inquest into the building collapse is under way in Lagos.

Officials who have testified blamed the collapse on structural failure and said building plans for the guesthouse were never approved.

Anger in Zimbabwe over ‘obscene’ Mugabe birthday bash

President Robert Mugabe cuts his birthday cake with his children and his wife Grace Mugabe during a 21st February Movement celebrations rally held in honor of his 89th birthday at Chipadze stadium in Bindura on March 2 2013. (Pic: AFP)
President Robert Mugabe cuts his birthday cake with his wife Grace Mugabe and his children during a 21st February Movement celebrations rally held in honour of his 89th birthday at Chipadze stadium in Bindura on March 2 2013. (Pic: AFP)

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Wednesday denounced as “obscene” a planned bash to celebrate President Robert Mugabe’s 91st birthday at a time the economy is on a downturn.

Mugabe turns 91 on Saturday and each year his Zanu-PF party lays on a lavish party using funds raised through public donations.

This year a belated feast is set for February 28 at a hotel in the prime resort town of Victoria Falls where guests will be served with game meat donated by a local farmer.

But the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the country’s main opposition, wants the funds raised for the party to be used instead to fix infrastructure such as hospitals.

“All the money that has been collected to bankroll this obscene jamboree should be immediately channeled towards rehabilitating the collapsed public hospitals, clinics and rural schools in Matabeleland North province,” Obert Gutu, spokesperson for the MDC party said in a statement.

Victoria Falls is in Matabeleland North province where public facilities such as clinics and roads are in a state of disrepair for lack of funds – as elsewhere in rural Zimbabwe.

The town is home to one of the world’s largest waterfalls, the Victoria Falls.

Gutu also suggested that food donated for the birthday be “handed over” to charities for the disabled and to orphanages.

A businessman in Victoria Falls last week reportedly offered two elephants, two buffalos, two sable antelopes and five impala to be slaughtered for Mugabe’s birthday party.

He also promised Mugabe a lion trophy.

The businessman was reported by the state-owned Chronicle daily newspaper as saying the donation was “our way of supporting the function and to ensure a celebratory mood in our community as well.”

An all-night music concert in Harare this Friday will preface the celebrations which in the past have included a fashion show and a football match.

Africa’s oldest ruler Mugabe has been in power since 1980.