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Aid agencies report that a fourth consecutive rainy season has failed in the Horn of Africa country, and meteorologists are warning of another below-average rainy season later this year as the world’s climate becomes more erratic.

Gabriella Waaijman, global humanitarian director at Save the Children, followed up: “It is deeply alarming and frankly shameful that the number of people going hungry is on the rise.

“Make no mistake,” she declared. “Children and their families are facing the worst global hunger crisis in decades. If we fail to act now, many lives will be lost and years of development gains will go down the drain due to a deadly combination of conflict, the climate crisis, and the economic crisis fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.”

“Families at the sharp end have told our staff they are eating putrid meat, drinking dirty water from cattle troughs, and fighting off wild animals for whatever they can get their hands on to eat.

“Nobody should have to live like this,” she continued. “Save the Children is allocating US$28.5 million to communities in 19 of the worst-hit countries. But this is only a fraction of what is required.

“What is crucial for children and their families who are going to bed hungry is an international, comprehensive package of support that does two things simultaneously: the first— providing immediate assistance to severely malnourished children today; the second— preventative measures to protect children from this crisis tomorrow.

“This includes building local community resilience and making long-term investments in sustainable agriculture and energy as well as robust health, nutrition, and social protection systems.”

The U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP) is the world’s largest humanitarian organization.

In a world of plenty, enough food is produced to feed everyone on the planet, so hunger should be a thing of the past. However, conflict, climate change, disasters, inequality and––most recently––the COVID-19 pandemic mean one in nine people globally is still going to bed hungry and famine looms for millions.

A month into the current rainy season and rains have so far failed to materialize; if they don’t, this will be the fourth consecutive failed season as the region reels from food and fuel prices rising to unprecedented levels because of the war in Ukraine.

“We know from past experience that acting early to avert a humanitarian catastrophe is vital, yet our ability to launch the response has been limited due to a lack of funding to date,” said Michael Dunford, WFP’s regional director for Eastern Africa.

“WFP and other humanitarian agencies have been warning the international community since last year that this drought could be disastrous if we didn’t act immediately, but funding has failed to materialize at the scale required.”

NIGERIAN POP STAR TAKES DOWN AIR POLLUTION IN LATEST HIT

(GIN)—Grammy-award winner Damini Ogulu, popularly known as Burna Boy, has picked a smoking topic for his latest record dubbed “Whiskey.”

“Port Harcourt residents dem no dey breathe fresh air, my people! When you wake up in the morning, you cough black soot,” the song opens.

Burna Boy’s Afro-pop record strikes out at air pollution, which has long bedeviled the residents of his hometown in Port Harcourt and other parts of Rivers state.

“Because of oil and gas/ My city so dark/ Pollution make the air turn black/ Every man has to stay on guard.”

The soot pollution crisis has lingered in the ‘Garden City’ for over seven years, as illegal crude oil refinement continues to make the skies choke with soot. Despite several law enforcement efforts by the Rivers State government to tackle the crisis, the illegal refinement continues to thrive in plain sight.

In a series of posts on his Instagram stories, the “Ye” crooner shared photos of dark clouds caused by soot pollution in the state.

He also called on relevant authorities to address the situation using the hashtag #StopthesootinPortHarcourt.

This comes a few days after Gov. Nyesom Wike ordered the shutdown of illegal refineries and called for the arrest of those involved in the illegal bunkering.

In spite of government promise, a petition has been started on the world’s leading platform for petitions, change.org, aimed at getting the government to investigate and put an end to the deadly black soot.

According to a report, in Rivers state, 22,077 people received care for soot related conditions in five years, while many children were hospitalized for difficulties in breathing.

For further information on oil pollution in Nigeria, visit the news site Sahara Reporters.

FACEBOOK BLASTED FOR PUBLISHING AMHARIC HATE SPEECH

(GIN)—A proliferation of incendiary hate speech has turned up in social media’s Facebook for Ethiopia in ads that call for people to be killed, starved or ‘cleansed’ from an area, that compare people to animals and call for genocide.

Phrases used are highly offensive and dehumanizing. Several posts amounted to a call for genocide. None of the sentences were dog-whistles or in any way difficult to interpret or mistake.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen, an advocate for accountability and transparency in social media, was among the first to show how Facebook exacerbates hostilities by “literally fanning ethnic violence.”

A new investigation by Global Witness, done in partnership with legal non-profit Foxglove and independent researcher Dagim Afework Mekonnen, has exposed how Facebook failed to detect hate speech in the main language of Ethiopia. It follows from a previous investigation which showed the same in Myanmar.

In its defense, Facebook called Ethiopia “one of our highest priorities for country-specific interventions to keep people safe.” For more than two years, they alleged, they have invested in safety and security measures “including building our capacity to catch hateful and inflammatory content in the languages that are spoken most widely in the country.”

Specifically, they claimed that they had employed more staff who speak Amharic, and that they have technology to automatically identify hate speech in Amharic. Their efforts are “industry-leading,” they said.

Facebook’s ‘industry-leading’ hate speech detection was put to the test to see if their alleged safety and security measures could really prevent ads that fuel violence.

“We picked out the worst cases we could think of,” said Rosie Sharpe, an activist with Global Witness and director of Foxglove, a London-based legal nonprofit. “The ones that ought to be the easiest for Facebook to detect. They weren’t coded language. They weren’t dog whistles. They were explicit statements saying that this type of person is not a human or these types of people should be starved to death.”

All of the hate speech examples had previously been reported to Facebook as violating their community standards and the majority had been removed from Facebook. Equal numbers of hate speech examples targeted the three main ethnic groups of the country, the Amhara, Oromo and Tigrayans.

None of the ads were ultimately published but were deleted once Facebook had determined whether the ads had been approved for publication or not.

All 12 of the ads had been accepted by Facebook for publication.

In November, Meta, the owner of Facebook and other social media platforms, said it removed a post by Ethiopia’s prime minister that urged citizens to rise up and “bury” rival Tigray forces who threatened the country’s capital.

In the since-deleted post, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had said the “obligation to die for Ethiopia belongs to all of us.” He called on citizens to mobilize “by holding any weapon or capacity.”

Abiy has continued to post on the platform, though, where he has 4.1 million followers. The U.S. and others have warned Ethiopia about “dehumanizing rhetoric” after the prime minister described the Tigray forces as “cancer” and “weeds” in comments made in July 2021.

“When ads calling for genocide in Ethiopia repeatedly get through Facebook’s net—even after the issue is flagged with Facebook— there’s only one possible conclusion: there’s nobody home,” said Curling.

All the ads would have breached the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination had they been published.

Rather than helping to unify the country, Facebook has simply amplified existing tensions on a massive scale, wrote David Gilbert of VICE News.

Berhan Taye, Africa policy lead at digital rights group Access Now, told VICE News: “Facebook’s inaction helps propagate hate and polarization in a country and has a devastating impact on the narrative and extent of the violence.”

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