Businessman Patrice Talon won the second round of Benin’s presidential election, his adversary and incumbent Prime Minister Lionel Zinsou told AFP before the release of official results.
“The provisional results point to a decisive victory for Patrice Talon,” Zinsou told AFP by telephone. “The difference is significant, (Talon’s) electorial victory is certain.
“I have called Patrice Talon this evening to congratulate him on his victory, wish him good luck and put myself at his disposal to prepare for the handover.”
Some 4.7 million people were eligible to cast their ballots in the vote to elect a successor to Benin’s outgoing President Thomas Boni Yayi.
He is bowing out after serving a maximum two five-year terms, marking him out from many African leaders who have tried to change their country’s constitution to stay in power.
Benin’s electoral commission is expected to announce provisional results at some time on Monday, Zinsou said.
The 61-year-old came out top in the first round of elections held on March 6 with 27.1 percent of the vote, compared to 23.5 percent for Talon.
The prime minister, who was a candidate for Boni Yayi’s Cowry Forces for an Emerging Benin (FCBE), was seen as the frontrunner with the support of most lawmakers in parliament.
But Talon, a 57-year-old entrepreneur who made his money in cotton and running Cotonou’s port, billed himself as the authentic Beninese candidate and repeatedly attacked his opponent’s dual French nationality.
Zinsou, who attended an elite French university and was a speechwriter for the former prime minister Laurent Fabius, has been called a “yovo” or “the white man” during the campaign.
He also took a knock when 24 of the 32 other candidates who stood in the first round came out in support of the businessman, including third-placed Sebastien Ajavon, who won 22 percent of votes.
– ‘World’s laughing stock’ –
On Thursday, the two candidates took part in Benin’s first-ever presidential debate in which Zinsou ran through his key manifesto pledges to cut poverty, and improve power supplies and healthcare.
But Talon harped on the record of Boni Yayi, whom he said had created “a banana republic” that had become “the laughing stock of the world”, as well as questioning Zinsou’s knowledge of Benin.
He also launched a string of personal attacks against Zinsou, accusing him of acting like “a governor in a land of savages”.
Talon had portrayed himself as a big-spender and a self-made man in his campaign, turning up for the first-round vote in a Porsche, white open-necked shirt, a fitted suit and sun-glasses.
From humble beginnings in the coastal town of Ouidah, he rose to become one of the most powerful men in Beninese business and bankrolled Boni Yayi’s successful 2006 and 2011 presidential campaigns.
But he fled to exile in France after being accused of masterminding an alleged plot to poison the president in 2012, and only returned last October after receiving a presidential pardon.
His success and taste for luxury have attracted support from many young Beninese, who hope he can create jobs and wealth on a national scale.
His major challenges will be tackling high youth unemployment, corruption and improving health and education in the country of 10.6 million people.
Diversifying an economy that largely relies on agriculture, trade and exports with its neighbour to the east, Nigeria, will also be high on the agenda.
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Troops Kill Ameer Of Dalore, 18 Other Terrorists
The Nigerian Army said its troops have killed the Ameer of Dalore and 18 other Boko Haram Terrorists in fresh raid, adding that 67 hostages were rescued from the terrorists.
A statement by Colonel Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Sani Kukasheka Usman reads; “Elements of 22 Brigade Garrison carried out clearing operation at Dalore camp on Sunday in which they killed 19 Boko Haram terrorists among whom was Ameer of Dalore. The troops also captured 2 AK-47 Rifles, 1 Small Machine Gun and 1 Hand Grenade and recovered 4 pickup vehicles.
“The troops also rescued 67 hostages from the terrorists. The freed hostages are undergoing screening at Internally Displaced Persons in Dikwa.
“Unfortunately, during the operation the troops Mine Resistant Anti-Personnel (MRAP) vehicle ran into an Improvised Explosive Device and had a damaged tyre, Usman said.
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Congo politician guilty in first ICC trial to focus on rape as a war crime
The former Congolese vice-president, Jean-Pierre Bemba, has been found guilty in the first trial at the international criminal court to focus on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
The 53-year-old warlord commanded a militia that committed mass murder, rape and pillage in the neighbouring Central African Republic, the court ruled at the end of his trial in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
More than 5,000 victims were granted the right to participate in the hearings – the highest number in any of the cases before the court.
The verdicts mark the first time the ICC has convicted defendants of rape or command responsibility for the actions of their troops, a legal principle established by other UN tribunals that makes a commander responsible for failing to take action to stop crimes he knows are being committed by subordinates.
Prosecutors told the court that Bemba, who led the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), “knew that the troops were committing crimes and did not take all necessary and reasonable measures within his power to prevent or repress their commission”.
Bemba was convicted of two counts of crimes against humanity, involving murder and rape, as well as three counts of war crimes – murder, rape and pillaging – all connected to attacks in CAR between 2002 and 2003. His troops had entered the country to prop up the country’s president, Ange-Félix Patassé, who was eventually ousted.
The presiding Brazilian judge, Sylvia Steiner, said that MLC soldiers had opened fire on civilians without regard to age or gender. “The civilian population was the primary rather than the incidental target of the attack,” she said in her judgment.
In a graphic description of the attacks, Steiner said: “MLC soldiers by force knowingly and intentionally invaded the bodies of the victims by penetrating the victims’ anuses, vaginas or other bodily openings with their penises.” On occasions family members were forced, at gunpoint, to watch.
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Bemba, who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after losing a presidential poll, was arrested in Belgium in 2008 and transferred to the ICC’s detention centre in The Hague. His trial started in November 2010 and lasted four years. It heard from 77 witnesses.
His defence lawyers insisted he had no control over his 1,500 troops. “There is not a single documentary piece of evidence that shows any orders passing from Bemba and going to his troops in the Central African Republic,” Kate Gibson, representing him, said in her closing argument.
Bemba, dressed in a suit and burgundy-coloured tie, sat at the back of the court, occasionally shaking his head, as Steiner detailed the atrocities for which he was responsible. He will be sentenced at a later hearing.
Amnesty International said the guilty verdict against Bemba was an “historic moment in the battle for justice” for victims of sexual violence in the CAR and around the world.
“It sends a clear message that impunity for sexual violence as a tool of war will not be tolerated,” said the group’s west and central Africa director, Samira Daoud. “It also makes clear that military commanders and political superiors must take all necessary steps to prevent their subordinates from committing such heinous acts and will be held accountable if they fail to do so.”
Angelina Jolie Pitt, co-founder of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, said in a statement issued through the UK Foreign Office: “My thoughts and my admiration go out to the survivors and witnesses who bravely testified in this case and contributed to this landmark conviction. I can only imagine the reaction of victims who in their hearts probably never thought that this day would come.
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“It is shocking that this conviction is the first of its kind. It is a reminder of how long it has taken us to reach this point, and how many victims have never seen justice.”
Karine Bonneau, international justice director at the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), which supported victims from the Central African Republic at the trial, welcomed the decision.
“There were more than 1,000 rapes,” she said. “This is the first time that the ICC has convicted anyone of command responsibility. It’s very important that the people who gave the orders should be held responsible.
“It will now be up to the court to determine reparations and restitution. They may be more medical and psychological support for the victims as well as compensation.” Bonneau was critical, however, of the two years it had taken the court to deliver its verdict. “Two years is too long,” she added.
The convictions will be a boost for the court’s prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, who has made the fight against sexual assault in conflict one of her priorities.
Descartes Mponge, secretary general of Congolese rights group ACADHOSHA, said the judgment “strengthens the ICC’s credibility in Africa where it is accused of bias and politicisation”.
James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York, said: “The guilty verdict marks another important milestone for the ICC, both in dealing head-on with the issue of sexual violence in war, and in making clear the responsibility of military commanders for the actions of those under their command.”
Bemba and four others are also on trial in a second case in which they are accused of bribing witnesses in his main trial. He will be sentenced after a separate hearing.
Black Americans and encryption: the stakes are higher than Apple v FBI
When the FBI branded Martin Luther King Jr a “dangerous” threat to national security and began tapping his phones, it was part of a long history of spying on black activists in the United States. But the government surveillance of black bodies has never been limited to activists – in fact, according to the FBI; you only had to be black.
In the current fight between Apple and the FBI, black perspectives are largely invisible, yet black communities stand to lose big if the FBI wins. A federal judge in California is set to rule on Tuesday whether the FBI will be granted a request compelling Apple to unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter.
While seemingly about protecting national security – the same rationale used to justify 20th century surveillance of MLK, the Black Panther Party and others – this case is about much more. It could establish a legal precedent used to suppress the growing movement for black lives that is deposing public officials and disrupting the daily assault on black people in cities across the country.
Building off the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s, a 21st century movement for black lives is coming of age, mobilizing the same courageous methods of non-violent direct action, using the same local-to-local strategy, and making many of the same demands. An intersectional approach is replacing old identity politics, and a newfound digital landscape is making communication possible in more directions and at previously unimaginable speeds. The movement for black lives is attracting the brightest minds and bravest bodies. Black activists are developing new ways of grassroots organizing in an information economy.
Like its predecessors, the democratic movement for black lives has been met by anti-democratic state surveillance and anti-black police violence. New “smart” policing methods are being used by modern-day gumshoes who, fueled by the false rhetoric of black criminality, experiment with high-tech tools to the detriment of black democratic engagement.
In the 20th century, the FBI admitted to overreaching and violating the constitution when it used its counter intelligence program, COINTELPRO, for domestic surveillance that spied on black activists. Last year, FBI director James Comey admitted in a congressional committee hearing to flying spy planes that monitored protests in the wake of police killings of black people in Ferguson and Baltimore with the agency working in tandem with local police. In Chicago, home of the infamous “red squad”, police collected “First Amendment Worksheets” on black organizations such as We Charge Genocide, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition.
There are reports from activists on the front lines of protests about police employing “kill switch” technology to cut off live-streaming, using Stingrays to intercept phone calls, or flying drones overhead for crowd control, but such claims are unconfirmed as police refuse to reveal their techniques and are not compelled by law to do so.
Twentieth century surveillance is alive and well in the 21st century, and is one powerful reason why, in a digital age and era of big data, the fight for racial justice must also include a fight for the equal and fair application of first and fourth amendment rights.
A letter was sent by some of us in the Black Lives Matter movement to California federal magistrate judge Sheri Pym, who is overseeing the Apple case, warning of the dangerous implications of siding with the FBI. It was signed by Beats, Rhymes & Relief, the Gathering for Justice, Justice League NYC, writer Shaun King, Black Lives Matter co-founder and Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi, as well as the organization I work for, the Center for Media Justice.
I signed because, as the child of a Black Panther, I grew up with the persistent threat of police spying. The police “watched” my family in the name of “safety” and “national security”, but I knew that we became targets of government surveillance because my mother advocated for black bodies abandoned and abused by state violence.
That is why the FBI case is not only against Apple, but is also against communities of color and communities of resistance. It is against democracy. It is against the black immigrant worker who has fled political persecution, the black and Latino youth putting themselves on the line to catalyze deep change, the gender non-conforming bodies subjected to daily assaults, the Muslim communities regularly targeted by bias and hate crimes. We don’t have the same protections others take for granted, we are instead treated as perpetually guilty.
Reports have surfaced that the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the movement for black lives since the initial uprisings in Ferguson. We know that police are watching the tweets we write, the Facebook event pages we set up, and the demonstrations we organize in the streets. If we are arrested, our phones will be confiscated. Whether or not police can look into our phones, whether or not they need a warrant, is being tested in court. This is not a vision of some distant dystopic future, this is happening right now. This is why the FBI case against Apple, is also against us.
For black communities and others pushed to the margins of political and economic power – democratic engagement and the exercise of our human and civil rights in a digital age demands the ability to encrypt our communications.
It isn’t just Black activists either – Latino activists are raising a similar rallying cry. Consider the prospect of a President Trump, who has notoriously expressed his anti-immigrant views, and sided with the FBI in its fight against Apple. With record numbers of deportations already at hand – could undocumented immigrants be rounded up using the information transmitted from their cellphones?
A newly developed open source app for iPhones called Signal, which encrypts phone calls and text messages, has become a favorite among organizers as well as Edward Snowden. It allows for free and instant encryption of messages that cannot be cracked by anybody wanting to eavesdrop. Activists across the world have adopted the app as one way to protect their right to organize.
Yet encryption technology is for more than just activists. Whether protecting from identity theft or government surveillance – all communities need to protect their data in the digital age. We cannot have a healthy democracy without everyone’s voice.
Black voices, and other voices of color, have long been missing from the debates on government surveillance – but not anymore. We’re here, and we are calling on companies to protect the rights of consumers, and on legislators to protect the rights of residents. One way to do both is to pass the Encrypt Act 2016, which would, if passed, prevent the government, or a contracted company, from altering the security functions of computers and cellphones, or decoding encrypted information, in order to conduct a search. Even now, members of congress are bizarrely moving to ban encryption at the state level using the rhetoric of terrorism and black criminality.
Encryption is necessary for black civil and human rights to prosper, but isn’t enough. While it protects our democratic right to organize for change, we must fight for a world in which those rights are not under persistent threat. The Apple v the FBI case is a test case for democracy. It will determine, for this and the next generation, who has the right to communicate, and therefore the power to define reality.
In the encryption debate, the stakes are high for black people. Indeed, we are in a fight for our lives. I believe that we will win. Thanks for reading.
Beyond surveillance: what could happen if Apple loses to the FBI
This is how a former White House technologist envisions a future in which Apple loses its privacy battle with the US government. The year is 2026. You get in your new Tesla for a milk run. You place your fingertip on the door handle, the door unlocks, and the car knows it’s you as you step inside because it read your fingerprint. The car, on its own, pulls out of the garage while you scroll through live streams broadcast by your friends on whatever app has succeeded Instagram. The doors lock. The car passes the convenience store and its dairy aisle. Instead, it makes two lefts then a right before pulling up to the local police station. The cops are waiting outside. They got a judge to make Tesla update your car’s self-driving software to lock the doors and deliver you to the local precinct. You looked like a guy caught on surveillance camera and the police had a few questions. According to Ashkan Soltani, an engineer by trade who spent the past year working on privacy policy for the US government, this world might not be the realm of science fiction. If Apple loses its brawl with the US government over whether it must write code to defeat the security system of an iPhone linked to the San Bernardino shootings, Soltani sees that kind of scenario as a terrifying possibility. That fight officially begins on Tuesday when Apple and government lawyers meet for the first time in a southern California federal court. Soltani has some grounding here. He won a Pulitzer prize for helping the Washington Post sort through documents leaked by Edward Snowden and has published papers on privacy technology through Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard. He isn’t just a guy who watched too many dystopian films. He and others make a compelling case that the Apple fight isn’t really about surveillance, or encryption, or who else may have known about the horrific killing of 14 people in a southern California office complex on 2 December. It’s about who can manipulate the 1s and 0s that control our ever-increasing number of devices that track how we drive, when we’re home and if the door is locked. “We already have a hard enough time trusting our technology and understanding what it’s doing,” says Soltani, who worked on regulation for the Federal Trade Commission with a brief stint at the White House. “What the government is asking Apple to do in some way is to further undermine that.” Consumers rationally enough gave up this agency when they allowed Microsoft to push automatic Windows updates or Apple to upload a U2 album on to every iPhone. The Apple case will decide if that power stops with a digital product’s maker, or if it can extend to the federal government. Washington, though it would never say it this way, effectively wants Apple to make its programmers agents of the state in its San Bernardino investigation. If the FBI wins, Apple would fool gunman Syed Farook’s work iPhone into accepting a benign-seeming software update, the kind Apple regularly ships out to the nearly 1bn iPhones it has sold since 2007. But in this case, the software sent by Apple would disable certain iPhone security measures to make it easier for the government to guess the phone’s four-digit passcode. Because of Apple’s security features, only Apple can push such a system tweak to one of the phones. As the government acknowledges, courts operate on precedent. So if the FBI wins this time, it means it is more likely to win the next. This year, a favorable ruling could decide whether laptop cameras can be conscripted as spies or smartphones become permanent homing beacons. In a year or two, the same ruling may have laid the groundwork for whether your car becomes your police van or your home becomes your holding cell. Obviously, predicting the ripple effects of a court case that hasn’t started is perilous. The courts, for instance, could rule against Apple in this extraordinary case but decide to be silent on the broader questions about control of technology. Or Congress could find a middle ground with an update to woefully outdated wiretap law written for a pre-smartphone era. Apple could very well win in a sweeping supreme court decision that puts computer code outside the reach of law enforcement officials. Or it could persuade Congress to craft new law protecting tech companies from law enforcement. That of course would raise its own issues about the power of private corporations. One current federal prosecutor predicted a lot of “bad guys are better off and we only get the dumb ones”. Stewart Baker, a former attorney for the National Security Agency, took Soltani’s Tesla warning to the opposite extreme. Baker, now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson, asked: “Would you rather live in a world where the Tesla could be packed full of explosives, programmed to drive through the fence and into the White House” and the secret service unable to get Tesla to remotely stop the vehicle? Either way, Americans will have to decide if they are OK with technology creating walled-off spaces. That can be now, or it can be the next time Silicon Valley gets in the way of a criminal investigation. This is something both Apple and the government agree on. As Apple lawyers recently wrote, the case pits “what law enforcement officials want against the widespread repercussions and serious risks their demands would create”. Or as James Comey, director of the FBI, told Congress in March, the case is about “this collision between public safety and privacy”. Public opinion polls commissioned by Pew and the Wall Street Journal/NBC News show that Americans narrowly back the FBI over the iPhone maker. The problem for Apple and its backers is that consumers tend to put perceived near-term risks, such as mass shootings, over theoretical ones – like Big Brother. Science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, who coined the term “cyberpunk” in 1983, doesn’t think like a typical consumer. “Does your water meter report you to the local public utilities commission if you’re illegally watering your lawn on a Tuesday? It will. Does your cellphone call your health insurance provider if its GPS coordinates indicate you’ve just entered a tobacco shop? It will,” he wrote in an email. “Does your toilet report you to your doctor when you’re not getting enough fiber in your diet? It will.” Americans are connecting more and more of their devices – their refrigerators, their thermostats, their cars, their door locks – to the internet. Nick Harkaway, the British author of The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World and currently writing a novel based on a surveillance state, said that if Apple loses, “Everything connected in your life now belongs to law enforcement: your phone, your satnav, your DVR,” or digital video recorders for TV reruns. Such views aren’t just fantasies created by authors. At a recent security conference in San Francisco, several leading cryptographers – the programmers and mathematicians who use complicated algorithms to make encryption work – pondered the deeper meanings of the Apple case. Moxie Marlinspike, the developer behind the secure messaging app Signal and the encryption protocol used by Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger, worried that if Apple loses, the government could compel the company to alter programs downloaded from the App Store, such as his own, to be more surveillance friendly. “The thing about the world where the FBI doesn’t miss anything, that’s a world where the FBI knows everything,” he said. He for instance noted that now accepted social movements – such as gay rights and the movement to end slavery – began as illegal forms of civil disobedience. If keeping a secret isn’t possible, these movements can’t start, he reasoned. “I think it should be possible to break the law,” he said. On stage, Whitfield Diffie, the godfather of modern encryption donning a suit and long, groomed white hair, chimed in sternly. “In a tyranny you build mechanisms to deny people opportunities to take control of their actions,” he said. Barack Obama and other Washington officials obviously aren’t proclaiming they want to create a surveillance state. The world they describe is one of balance. Consumers generally maintain digital privacy, but in times of duress, criminal suspects might lose theirs. But where they draw that line becomes less clear as Americans connect more and more of their devices – their refrigerators, their thermostats, their cars, their door locks – to the internet. James Clapper, America’s top spy, told the US Senate in February that all of these things become inviting targets for intelligence agencies for “identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment”. What may be a far-out spy trick today, has a history of becoming a tool for police departments five years later. Even if Americans decide that’s a future they want, an Apple loss nevertheless could create a world in which consumers may no longer be able to trust the gadgets they buy are working for them. “That’s something we’re going to have to get right as we embed these systems into our lives,” Soltani, the former tech regulator, said. “Otherwise we go back to this world where we keeping going, ‘What the hell is this thing doing?’” Soltani, who left the White House in February, is taking some time off from government and plans to travel the untamed west coast in a camping van he alone controls. He will bring his smartphone. Thanks for reading.
Ese Oruru: Court Grants Yunusa N3m Bail
Yunusa Dahiru, alias Yellow, accused of abducting and forcefully marrying a 14-year-old Ese Oruru from Bayelsa State, was on Monday granted bail by the Federal High Court sitting in Yenagoa.
Yunusa, Kano State indigene, is standing trial on five-count of abduction, illicit sex and unlawful canal knowledge of Ese.
The court presided over by Justice H.A Ngajiwa ruled that the felonies committed by Yunusa were bailable and asked the suspect to provide N3million, two sureties resident within the court’s jurisdiction and write an undertaking that he would not jump bail.
As part of the conditions for the bail, one of the sureties must be a renowned title holder and a public servant on grade level 12 who must provide first appointment and promotion letters.
The judge further ordered that the sureties must provide their tax clearance certificates. Thanks for reading.
Again, ASUU Lambast Oshiomole Over Demolition Of UNIBEN Staff Quarters
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has unanimously condemned the recent demolition of properties of its members at the University of Benin, Edo State at the instance of the state governor, Adams Oshiomhole.
This was made known in an emergency regional meeting hosted by the Benue State University chapter chairman of the union, Dr. David Ikoni.
Dr. Ikoni, speaking to journalist at the weekend after the zonal meeting comprising of ASUU-BSU, ASUU-ESUT, ASUU-FUAM, ASUU-KSU, ASUU-UNN and ASUU-FUWUK frowned at “the brazen violation of their colleagues rights with impunity, an action carried out by Edo State Government on our members towards infringing on their human rights”, saying “it is not acceptable to us.”
Reports gathered that the meeting was sequel to the earlier decision taken by the ASUU-NEC meeting held at Usmanu Danfodio University, Sokoto, which discussed the affected properties belonging to the ASUU members in the University of Benin and the consequent pledge by Governor Adams Oshiomhole to compensate the affected victims, but has reneged.
Dr. Ikoni further lamented that a governor, whose duty was to ensure protection and guidance of the citizenry could suddenly refrain from a commitment, which he had from the onset entered into. The body, however, urged public-spirited individuals as well as corporate bodies to intervene in the on-going crisis.
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