Africa & World

There was shock and disbelief when the Saudi Arabian Authorities cancelled the visa of all the 264 passengers airlifted to Jeddah from Lagos and Kano on Sunday.

The authorities insisted that the airline should return them back to Nigeria.

The flight took off from the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos via the Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano on Sunday night and landed at King Abdul-Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

But to the consternation of the airline staff, the Saudi Arabian authorities announced that all the passengers’ visas had been cancelled.

This was despite the fact that the passengers went through the Advanced Passengers Information System (APIS) during the check-in formalities in Nigeria which was also monitored by the Saudi authorities.

Leading Reporters reports that Air Peace penultimate week launched a direct flight to Jeddah which has been recording high load factor.

A source who confirmed the development said, “The screening of passengers from the MMIA and Kano Airport was thorough and there was no issue with the visas. These were people who were duly issued the visa and they passed through the advanced passenger information system which is accessible to both authorities in Lagos and Jeddah. We are surprised because this cancellation was announced when the flight already landed.

“We are suspecting this is a strategy to frustrate the Nigerian carrier out of the route, some people are definitely not happy with the option Air Peace is providing, the direct flight to Jeddah as against using another foreign airline which attracts higher fares.”

It was learnt that, it was when the Nigerian embassy waded in that Saudi authorities reduced the number of passengers that would be returned to 177 from 264.

As of the time of filing this report, the Airline was on its way to Nigeria with the 177 passengers that were denied entry; majority of them going to perform lesser Hajj (Umrah).

The development comes at a time when President Bola Tinubu visited the country for a summit.

The Nigerian leader also proceeded for lesser Hajj at the end of the summit, where he met the high and mighty in the Arabic country.

Leading Reporters reports that prior to the commencement of direct flight by Air Peace, Saudia, a Saudi Arabian flag carrier, has been operating directly from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia.

At least 15 people have died in Kenya as floods swept away scores of houses and devastated farmland following torrential rains, the Red Cross said on Monday.

Heavy rainfall has pounded the country, particularly the bone-dry north, in recent days, and sent water gushing into homes and submerging roads, with similar scenes playing out across other parts of East Africa.

“As of yesterday, 15,264 households have been affected, with 15 casualties reported,” the Kenya Red Cross said on X, formerly Twitter.

More than 1,000 livestock have died while at least 240 acres (97 hectares) of agricultural farmland have been destroyed, it added.

The UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, said last month that eastern Africa would likely encounter heavier than normal rains over the October-December period because of the El Nino phenomenon.

Kenya’s Meteorological Department also warned last week that the heavy rains were “likely to be accompanied by gusty winds”.

“The strong winds may blow off roofs, uproot trees and cause structural damages,” it said in an advisory.

Images broadcast on local media have shown flood waters inundating entire villages and sending residents fleeing for higher ground.

Dramatic footage showed a civilian chopper rescuing people from a lorry marooned in Samburu county, some 300 kilometres (190 miles) north of the capital Nairobi.

El Nino is a naturally occurring weather pattern associated with increased heat worldwide, as well as drought in some parts of the world and heavy rains elsewhere.

Since the start of the current rainy season, more than 20 people have died and over 12,000 others have been forced out of their homes in Ethiopia’s Somali region due to flash flooding, the regional government said at the weekend.

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At least 14 people have also been killed in Somalia, OCHA said in a situation report released on Saturday.

“At least 47,100 people have relocated to higher grounds to avoid the risk of flooding,” the agency said, adding that the downpours had cut off access to markets and farmland in some areas.

The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, and extreme weather events are occurring with increased frequency and intensity.

Since late 2020, Somalia as well as parts of Ethiopia and Kenya have been suffering the region’s worst drought in 40 years.

At the end of 2019, at least 265 people died and tens of thousands were displaced during two months of relentless rainfall in several countries in East Africa.

The extreme weather affected close to two million people and washed away tens of thousands of livestock in Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

Mike Johnson has been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, ending weeks of chaos and Republican infighting on Capitol Hill.

The conservative Louisiana lawmaker won with 220 votes in the lower chamber of Congress.

Mr Johnson is the fourth Republican nominated for the position since Kevin McCarthy’s ouster on 3 October.

The previous nominee, Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, abruptly dropped out of the race on Tuesday after about four hours.

Mr Johnson’s success in the hard-fought Speaker battle represents a victory for the ideologically right-wing, Trump-aligned faction of the Republican Party and a loss for its moderates, whose candidates struggled to gain traction among conservative representatives on Capitol Hill.

Mr Johnson, 51, is considered a staunch conservative and close ally of former President Donald Trump.

In 2020, he was a key figure in efforts to legally contest the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging Mr Trump to “keep fighting” and “exhaust every available legal remedy”.

The mild-mannered former lawyer and talk radio host has served in the House since 2016 and is a former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a position that is often seen as a first step toward leadership positions within the party.

He has also taken a hard-line conservative position on a number of policy issues, including abortion rights and same-sex marriage, which he opposes. Mr Johnson is also against further US aid to Ukraine.

When nominating Mr Johnson on the floor of the House, Elise Stefanik, the chair of the Republican conference, called him a “dedicated servant” and “titan” who has dedicated his life to “America’s great principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

But Democrat Pete Aguilar called him “the most important architect of electoral college objections” to the 2020 presidential vote and said he was chosen because he “can appease Donald Trump”.

China will send its youngest-ever crew of astronauts to the Tiangong space station this week, officials said Wednesday, as Beijing pursues plans for a manned mission to the Moon by the end of the decade.

Tiangong is the crown jewel of Beijing’s space programme, which has also landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon and made China the third country to put humans in orbit.

The station is constantly crewed by teams of three astronauts, who are rotated out every six months.

The Shenzhou-17 module carrying the trio to the station is scheduled to blast off at 11:14 am (0314 GMT) Thursday from the Jiuquan launch site in China’s arid northwest.

“It is the crew of astronauts with the youngest average age since the launch of the space station construction mission,” Beijing’s State Council Information Office said in a statement.

The all-male trio will be led by Tang Hongbo, who is on his first return mission to the Tiangong space station.

“Throughout the past two years, I have often dreamt of going back to space,” Tang said at a press conference on Wednesday.

“The space station is our other home that takes us away from Earth and into the universe,” he added.

Accompanying him will be Tang Shengjie and Jiang Xinlin, both in their thirties and each making maiden space voyages.

The crew has an average age of 38, compared to 42 for the crew of Shenzhou-16 when it launched.

“According to the plan, the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft will conduct autonomous rendezvous and docking procedures after entering orbit,” Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for China’s space programme, said during a Wednesday morning press briefing.

It will dock with the station’s core module “about six-and-a-half hours” after first initiating the procedure, he added.

– ‘Space dream’ –

Plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive under President Xi Jinping.

The world’s second-largest economy has pumped billions of dollars into its military-run space programme in an effort to catch up with the United States and Russia.

In June, the return capsule of the Shenzhou-15 spaceship touched down at a landing site in the northern Inner Mongolia region, with state media hailing the mission as a “complete success”.

That month also saw the launch of the Shenzhou-16 capsule, which carried the first Chinese civilian — Beihang University professor Gui Haichao — into orbit.

That crew will return to Earth on October 31 after completing a handover, officials said Wednesday.

Beijing also aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030 and plans to build a base on the lunar surface.

Spokesperson Lin reiterated that aim Wednesday, saying that the “goal of landing Chinese people on the moon by 2030 will be realised as scheduled”.

Finland’s former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari has died in Helsinki at the age of 86 after battling Alzheimer’s disease, the president’s office said Monday.

“It is with deep sadness that we have received the news of the death of President Martti Ahtisaari,” the current president, Sauli Niinisto, said in a statement.

Serving as president from 1994 to 2000, the mediator negotiated an end to conflicts around the globe, from Indonesia to Kosovo and Namibia, earning him worldwide recognition and a Nobel Peace Prize in 2008, as part of a formidable career spanning over 40 years.

The former UN diplomat was credited with overseeing the 2005 reconciliation of the Indonesian government and Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rebels, bringing an end to a three-decade conflict that killed some 15,000 people.

The two sides described Ahtisaari as steely during the talks, but gifted with a sense of humour and warmth on the sidelines.

“I have enormous amounts of patience. I don’t usually get angry, but I can be tough,” he later said, adding that he felt the key to his success was an ability to understand people.

Ahtisaari also helped lead Kosovo down the path toward independence, even though his intense efforts failed to clinch an agreement with Serbia before Pristina unilaterally declared independence in 2008.

Ahtisaari withdrew from public life in September 2021 as he struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.

Car horns in Quito blared in celebration Sunday as banana empire heir Daniel Noboa, 35, became Ecuador’s youngest-ever president-elect, vowing to “restore peace” to a country ravaged by a bloody drug gang war.

After the electoral authority declared him the victor and socialist rival Luisa Gonzalez conceded defeat, Noboa vowed that “tomorrow we begin work to rebuild a country that has been severely hit by violence, corruption and hatred.”

Long a peaceful haven between major cocaine exporters Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has seen violence explode in recent years as enemy gangs with links to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.

The fighting has seen at least 460 inmates massacred in prisons since February 2021 — many beheaded or burned alive in mass riots.

The bloodbath has spilled into the streets, with gangs dangling headless corpses from city bridges and detonating car bombs outside police stations in a show of force.

In August, the violence claimed the life of anti-graft and anti-cartel presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, mowed down in a barrage of submachine-gun fire after a campaign speech.

He had been polling in second place.

A state of emergency was declared after former journalist Villavicencio’s assassination, and Noboa and Gonzalez both campaigned, and voted, in bullet-proof vests and with heavy security details.

On Sunday, Noboa told supporters in his home town of Olon in the southwest his goal was “to restore peace… to bring back education to the youth” and create jobs.

– ‘Destroyed’ country –

Ecuadorans voted for 10 hours Sunday with no reports of violence, watched over by some 100,000 police and soldiers.

“May we elect the best president because (he or she) will govern a country that is destroyed… to address all these problems such as insecurity,” Indigenous voter Ramiro Duchitanga told AFP in Cuenca in Ecuador’s south.

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“It is a critical election,” added Freddy Escobar, a popular 49-year-old singer in Quito, citing crime as his main worry. “I am voting in fear, not knowing what will happen.”

The main concerns of Ecuadorans, according to opinion polls, are crime and violence in a country where the murder rate quadrupled in the four years to 2022.

Noboa, who obtained some 52 percent of the vote according to a near-complete count, was elected to only 16 months in office to complete the term of incumbent Guillermo Lasso, who called a snap vote to avoid possible impeachment for alleged embezzlement.

Under the law, Noboa can run again for the 2025-29 presidential term, and the one after that.

Both runoff candidates were relative unknowns in politics.

Noboa is the son of one of Ecuador’s richest men, who himself has five failed presidential bids to his name.

The president-elect, whose only political experience is two years as a lawmaker, calls himself “center-left” but embraces neoliberal economic thinking.

He ran on the ticket of the brand-new National Democratic Action alliance, which incorporates parties from the center and left of the political spectrum.

Ecuador has a poverty rate of 27 percent, with a quarter of the population unemployed or holding down an informal job.

Opinion polls list unemployment as voters’ second concern.

Noboa reiterated Sunday that he intends to “give progress to a country… that has all the elements to be a global example.”

Gonzalez was the handpicked candidate of socialist ex-president Rafael Correa, who governed from 2007 to 2017 and lives in exile in Belgium to avoid serving an eight-year prison term for graft — another major concern in the country.

From eight candidates, Gonzalez took the most votes in the first round in August with 34 percent, followed by Noboa with 23 percent.

On Sunday, she offered her “profound congratulations” to Noboa, “because this is democracy.”

Addressing supporters in Quito, Gonzales also said she would not be claiming fraud.

With 13 lawmakers in his corner out of 137 in parliament, Noboa will not have an absolute majority backing his legislative projects, and with only 16 months in office, will face an uphill battle to push through any reforms, analysts say.

Voting is compulsory for 13.4 million eligible voters in the country of about 18 million, and the election authority said turnout was above 82 percent.

After images on social media showed a person appearing to fill out multiple ballots in favor of Noboa, the head of the National Electoral Commission, Diana Atamaint, promised an “immediate” investigation

Major airlines have suspended flights to Israel after the nation declared war following a massive attack by Hamas.

American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines suspended service as the US State Department issued travel advisories for the region citing potential for terrorism and civil unrest, Associated Press reports.

A Palestinian group, Hamas, had launched its biggest attack on Israel early on Saturday, firing a barrage of rockets from Gaza and sending fighters across the border.

In response, Israel said it was on a war footing and began its own strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza on Sunday, hitting housing blocks, tunnels, a mosque, and the homes of Hamas officials in Gaza.

The fighting continued in several locations Monday morning. At least 700 people have reportedly been killed in Israel and more than 400 have been killed in Gaza.

Leading Reporters learnt that the European Union, Russia, the United States, and Nigeria, among other nations, have called for a ceasefire and dialogue between Israel and Palestine over the renewed outbreak of hostilities between both countries.