News — africa

Finding an attorney to represent you in court can sometimes be hectic and costly, particularly among small business owners, where many cannot afford legal services. An estimated 80 percent of small businesses in Africa cannot afford a lawyer.

To break the barrier, a group of Zimbabwean entrepreneurs have created online legal services that allow you to get instant legal assistance from dozens of lawyers at a reduced rate through low cost add-on legal protection insurance products which are delivered and marketed through established insurance companies. LawBasket provides a new way of financing and delivering legal value to small businesses in Africa.

LawBasket also works with co-working spaces, tech accelerators and hubs across Africa to deliver free in-person and online law clinics using a network of lawyers who deliver practical legal content to help startups grow, it says on its website. Through its lawyer-on-demand platform, LawBasket also enables small businesses and startups to hire lawyers at a predictable price when they need them.

The company was founded in December 2018 by a group of entrepreneurs who had previously run Lexware Inc, a local tech company. The founding team has two lawyers, each with four years of experience in top Zimbabwean law firms, a finance person and a software engineer.

“LawBasket presents a credible alternative to traditional law firms, providing solutions to getting legal help for the ever-increasing crusade of small businesses and start-ups in Africa,” co-founder Nyasha Makamba told NewsDay. “Through LawBasket payments, the company also declutters the process of creating and managing bills for lawyers, as well as provide a simple portal to process multi-jurisdictional payments for legal services.”

Although LawBasket originally started in Zimbabwe, it is also available in 15 other African countries. In fact, the majority of the lawyers on the platform are from Nigeria, a development Makamba finds exciting. On its websites, LawBasket says its lawyers have expertise in areas like intellectual property, motor vehicle accidents and real estate.

“What we are doing is to create a virtual law firm which anyone can access from anywhere in the world through one platform,” the founders told Tech In Africa. “It’s a business that is exciting to scale, and our journey so far has shown that we can scale the business.”

The growth of the company has been organic, Makamba said in a 2019 interview, adding that they were exploring the option of further expanding their footprint though they would need some funding. “We have been talking to organizations across Africa and in the US, and we are confident that we will raise the funding we need to this on a larger and profitable scale,” Makamba told Tech In Africa.

Headquartered in Accra, Ghana, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is now officially the largest free trade area by the number of participating countries since the founding of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

The AfCFTA is based on an agreement among 54 African countries. Negotiations began as far back as 2012 but it was in 2018 at the 10th Extraordinary Session of the African Union (AU) in Kigali, Rwanda that three separate agreements were adopted to establish the free trade area.

Despite teething problems including the initial refusal of Africa’s biggest single market, Nigeria, to join the AfCFTA, the agreement came into fruition on Friday, January 1, 2021. Some 30 of the 54 countries have ratified the agreement which means that as of now, Africans and other global stakeholders can look forward to a new era of doing business in Africa.

But it is also important to see the January launch of the AfCFTA as a largely symbolic gesture. It will take a few years, even for the most optimistic, to see Africans overcoming the challenges to a free trade agreement including protectionism, national red-tapes as well as poor infrastructure across the continent.

The new AfCFTA era brings to the fore certain structural changes as well as establishes new rules that one must know. Here are three things to note under the new dispensation:

African Trade Observatory

The African Trade Observatory (ATO) is an online mechanism brought about by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The way the ATO is meant to function is that it provides a dashboard to give real-time trade statistics to African users.

The ATO dashboard gives intra-continental trade flows (traded values, traded quantities, the use of tariff preferences, taxes and fees paid at the border), and information on market conditions, enabling stakeholders to make evidence-based decisions and quickly.

Rules of origin

Rules of origin in the legal documents that established the AfCFTA touches on among other things, the “Certificate of Origin” which means the documentary proof of origin; “Chapter” which refers the two-digit Chapters code used in the nomenclature; “CIF Value” which is the price paid by the importer as well as “Classified” which speaks to the classification of a Product or Material under a particular Heading or Sub-heading.

Rules of origin in the AfCFTA is supposed to standardize ambitions of intellectual property as well as ambition. These rules preempt a significant globalization process in Africa.

Freedom Of The Movement Of Persons

The ambition to have people move across Africa as freely as goods have not seen the light of day although it has been debated for well over two decades. Within the framework of the AfCFTA, the plan to allow people free movement comes with the establishment of a visa-free zone within the trade agreement area.

This obviously seems like a plan that would come to pass if there are enough willing African countries. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has strived to employ a similar strategy for citizens of the sub-region.

Turkey has helped its African partners to better combat the coronavirus since the early days of the pandemic, whether supplying ventilators to Somalia, sending fabric and sewing machines for mask-making to Mozambique and Eswatini, or solving transportation problems for Ugandan health workers in remote areas.

Despite battling the COVID-19 outbreak at home, Turkey did not forget its partners and sent fleets of planes carrying medical supplies, masks, respirators and more across the African continent to stem the spread of the virus, according to Anadolu Agency (AA).

In April, a military plane carrying medical supplies took off to help South Africa, which was emerging as the worst-hit country on the continent.

"This is a gesture of the Turkish government to South Africa," Turkish Ambassador Elif Çomoğlu Ülgen said when the supplies landed at Cape Town International Airport.

Besides medical equipment, the supplies included personal protective gear, surgical masks, medical-grade N95 masks, protective suits, face shields, medical safety goggles, hand sanitizers and a disinfection tunnel made specifically for South Africa.

The state-run Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) also sent over 10,000 N95 face masks to Kalafong Hospital in South Africa's executive capital, Pretoria, to help health workers fighting the virus.

TIKA also provided protective gear to Lesotho, a landlocked country encircled by South Africa. The items included sanitizers, gloves and masks, and were handed over to the country's disaster management team which later distributed the supplies to three hospitals and 20 clinics in the poorest and most remote parts of the country.

Turkey also dispatched a shipment of medical supplies, including new Turkish-made ventilators, to Somalia to help the Horn of Africa country combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Twitter that the locally manufactured ventilators, created using recent technological advances, "will breathe new life into Somalia, which suffers from a severe shortage of ventilators."

Namibia also received Turkish medical supplies, including 30,000 N95 masks, 60,000 three-layered masks and 20,000 protective coveralls. Officials said the Turkish donation to Namibia was a gesture of friendship and goodwill.

Turkish Ambassador to Botswana Meltem Büyükkarakaş said that TIKA donated 27 tons worth of food to 1,000 families in Botswana to help them deal with difficulties posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The donation was delivered to the vice president of Botswana, Slumber Tsogwane, in May 2020, as Turkey's contribution to Botswana's COVID-19 Relief Fund.

In Mozambique, Ambassador Zeynep Kızıltan said TIKA donated sewing machines and traditional fabrics for the production of 26,000 masks in a vocational training center and also renovated two workshops in collaboration with the municipality of Maputo in the country's capital. Turkey also distributed food parcels to hundreds of vulnerable families affected by COVID-19 during Ramadan.

In June, Ankara, donated 50,000 masks to Rwanda, while a private company in Turkey sent another 40,000 masks to help the East African nation tackle the virus outbreak, according to Burcu Çevik, Turkey's ambassador to Rwanda.

Turkey also sent medical equipment to Uganda, Zambia, Angola, Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, and South Sudan.

Turkey sent medical aid to over 150 countries and six international organizations in 2020 to help combat the pandemic, Erdoğan said last month.

For decades, Turkey had a one-dimensional foreign policy that was shaped by its relations with the West but now the country has changed course, adopting its most diverse, multidimensional and independent foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

Turkey's engagement with Africa dates back to the adoption of an action plan in 1998, but relations really took shape in 2005 which Ankara declared the "Year of Africa." Turkey was accorded observer status by the African Union (AU) the same year. In a reciprocal move, the AU declared Turkey its strategic partner in 2008, with relations between the continent and Turkey gaining momentum when the first Turkey-Africa Cooperation Summit was held in the commercial capital Istanbul with the participation of representatives from 50 African countries that year.

In 2009, there were only 12 Turkish embassies in Africa, of which five were in North Africa. Now, there are 42. Turkish Airlines flies to 60 different destinations in 39 countries on the continent, while TIKA has nearly 30 coordination centers and the Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK) has joint business councils with more than half of the African countries.

General elections in Ghana took place on December 7 as the West African nation held its eighth uninterrupted polls in 28 years to choose a president and lawmakers. Election officials say results may be known by the middle of the week although there was an earlier promise to declare the winner of the presidential race in 24 hours.

The electoral process was described by local and foreign observers as free and fair even though minor pockets of violence, including the gunning down of a ballot box snatcher, occurred in a few places.

In spite of Ghana reveling in the envy and praise showed to the country by others in Africa and the rest of the world, not everyone in the capital city Accra and beyond felt proud about Monday’s feat. The people of the small rural town of Bimbagu South in the region of North East were not even in the least inspired to take part in the election.

According to local reports that emerged during Monday’s polls, residents of Bimbagu South, a largely agrarian community, refused to vote after complaining that their local and national government had turned deaf ears to pleas for infrastructural development. The elections of 2020 were therefore boycotted in other to attract attention for the plight of the people.

Nationally-syndicated radio station Joy FM reported that on Monday morning, election officials were pictured sitting idly with no resident bothering to pass by to vote. Empty ballot boxes remained as they had been set up between 7 am and 5 pm local time.

The news of this boycott managed to arrest the attention of a considerable number of Ghanaians in bigger and better-developed cities. This was in spite of the omnipresence of information about key legislative races in more vibrant parts of Ghana.

Bimbagu South’s rebellion was praised by many including an Accra-based social activist who tweeted: “Yes, a vote strike. One of the boldest political statements in the last decade. They are expanding our political imagination. Now watch out for the bourgeois condescension that’s going to emanate from Accra.”

Ghana runs a mixed presidential and parliamentary system of government where elections are held every four years. Members of Parliament (MPs), who represent what Ghanaians call constituencies, are not legally responsible for infrastructural development although they have to lobby the executive for this.

However, the promise and expectation of such infrastructural development on the part of MPs, have come to be part of the country’s political culture. The people of Bimbagu South would have cried over the last several years to the MP who represents that electoral area to attend to the bad roads and the lack of potable water and the lack of infrastructure for education and healthcare.

According to Joy FM, the residents of the area made their intentions to boycott December’s elections known in October. But this was largely dismissed as Ghana’s politicians have become used to what they see as attempts at blackmailing them into providing for their constituents.

On the analyses of how Bimbagu South was able to maintain strictly zero turnouts, it was revealed that the northern town holds barely 2,000 people with only a little more than 400 registered to vote. In the scheme of the overall constituency, this was not much, however, that did not seem to bother the principled poor folks.

Motheo Koitsiwe developed his passion for indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) research, particularly indigenous astronomy, at a tender age after consuming a lot of stories about the moon and stars.

“This passion was ignited by my late grandmother, Mmamodiagane Tladinyane, when she narrated stories, poems, riddles, songs of African night skies and cosmologies around the fireplace,” he said.

After many years, these oral traditions of storytelling inspired by the cosmos would motivate him to investigate African indigenous astronomy of the Batswana in Botswana and South Africa.

Koitsiwe has so far received Africa’s first PhD in African indigenous astronomy from the North-West University (NWU), South Africa.

He received his degree on October 17 at the campus in Mahikeng, the university announced.

In centuries past, Africans had to rely on the natural world around them to keep track of the time, seasons and directions as there were no timekeeping devices like clocks and mobile phones.

Africans largely made use of astronomy to structure their lives and keep themselves going.

In rural South Africa where people depended on hunting, farming, and harvesting, celestial bodies basically told them when to “till the soil and when the growing season was about to end.”

Koitsiwe’s work, which followed a case study approach in investigating the Batswana, revealed that they “use their indigenous knowledge of celestial bodies for agriculture, reproductive health, navigation, time calculation, calendar making, rainmaking and thanksgiving ceremonies, and for natural disaster management.”

“Traditional songs, poems and indigenous games are also used as vehicles to transmit knowledge of celestial bodies to younger members of the community to preserve it for posterity,” the university wrote.

Prof Mogomme Masoga, who co-supervised Koitsiwe’s doctoral studies, said his student’s thesis has originality and novelty, in other words, it is unique in astronomy.

Koitsiwe, who also holds a BA degree in social sciences, as well as an honor’s and a master’s degree in IKS from the NWU, said he is honored to have completed his Ph.D. at the same university.

At the moment, he plans to translate his thesis into Setswana “so that it not only reflects the aspirations of academia, but the Bakgatla-Ba-Kgafela and Batswana in general.”

Since 2001, the NWU’s campus in Mahikeng has been the pioneer of IKS in South Africa after starting teaching, learning, and research in IKS that year.

“It is the first higher institution of learning in the country to have a registered teaching, learning and research program in IKS, accredited by the South African Qualification Authority (SAQA),” said Koitsiwe.

South Africa's president has announced a raft of new restrictions in a major city as the nation stares down a possible coronavirus resurgence. 

This has been a tough year for the nation with Africa’s highest coronavirus burden, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged in a Thursday night speech.

But now, as many South Africans plan to embark on a monthlong summer holiday, now is not the time for South Africa to let down its guard, he warned. 

“As we want to relax, this virus does not relax.  And this virus does not take a holiday,” he said.  “This 2020 has been a difficult year for us as a nation and as a country. It has severely tested our resolve and demanded great sacrifices of each and every one of us. But even as the holidays approach, we cannot let our guard down. Unless we take personal responsibility for our health and the health of others, more people are going to become infected. More people are going to die.”

Nearly 22,000 South Africans have already died, he noted.  

To that end, he announced restrictions for one of the country’s major metropoles, Nelson Mandela Bay. The coastal city, also known as Port Elizabeth, has recently seen a jump in confirmed cases. 

The city’s one million residents now must observe a nighttime curfew and are restricted in both buying and consuming alcohol in public. Gatherings are now limited to 250 people for outdoor events and 100 for indoor events. 

He also said that countrywide, post-funeral gatherings -- which Ramaphosa referred to as “after-tears parties” -- are prohibited.

Johannesburg, the nation’s economic hub, is known for drawing people from around the country. During the end-of-year holidays, the city empties out as many residents return to their families. Security guard Eric Kabelo plans to return to Carletonville, a small town southwest of Johannesburg, for the season. Kabelo, who is 27, says he has no quibble with the restrictions. 

“I think it’s fine,” he said. “Because of alcohol, it gives us a problem. You can check -- a lot of people, they get into accidents, a lot of things are happening. I think the restriction is better.”

Office manager Thando Zondi is also hoping to travel this holiday season, to her home in KwaZulu-Natal province. No restrictions have been announced for that area, she said. 

“His speech yesterday was mostly for (Port Elizabeth), and I’m in Gauteng so I’m not really affected,” she said. “We’re still on level 1, so it didn’t change anything for us, so I’m not affected, I’m fine.” 

However, in his half-hour televised “family meeting,” President Ramaphosa reminded all South Africans that they have a role to play in keeping the resurgence contained.

“By far the greatest contributing cause of infections is that many people are not wearing masks and are not observing proper hygiene and social distancing,” the South African leader said. “As I said during our last family meeting, at alert level one, we have the measures we need to control the virus, all the tools in place, but our main problem is that there are parts of our country where people are not complying with the current restrictions and the basic prevention measures are not being followed.

“Fellow South Africans, we must change our behavior now to prevent a resurgence of the virus and manage outbreaks wherever they occur,” he added. “If we think of this pandemic like a bushfire, we need to quickly extinguish the flare-ups, the flames, before they turn into a big wildfire like an inferno.”

President-elect Joe Biden's incoming economic team unveiled Tuesday pledged to take urgent action as soon as they are sworn in to correct an economy struggling from the global coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking in Wilmington alongside Biden, Treasury Secretary Nominee Janet Yellen described the economic crisis brought on by the COVID pandemic as an "American tragedy" and warned that without quick action to address it, the damage will get worse.

Yellen spoke about the "historic crises" of the pandemic and the economic fallout resulting from it, as well as the "disproportionate impact" it's had on "the most vulnerable among us."

Talking about the pandemic that has cost 268,000 American lives, Yellen referenced the "lost lives, lost jobs" and struggles Americans face "to put food on the table and pay bills and rent."

She went on to say that "it's essential that we move with urgency" because "inaction will produce a self-reinforcing downturn causing yet more devastation." She pledged to Americans that the Treasury would be "an institution that wakes up every morning thinking about you."

In Biden’s team is Nigerian-born Adewale Adeyemo, who would serve as the new Deputy Treasury Secretary. Adeyemo will work with Janet Yellen, the nominee for Treasury Secretary. He'd be the first Black person to serve in the role.

"The challenges before us today are unlike anything we have ever faced", Adewale, better known as Wally Adeyemo told the audience.

"... I know that what the President-elect so often reminds us of is true. The American people can do anything when given a chance. And I'm honored to be a part of this talented team and to work with them and all the American people to build an economy that gives everyone that chance and turns our nation once again from crisis to hope. " he added.

Moments after, Biden's choice to run the White House budget office said social programs helped her family when she was a young girl being raised by a single mother in a Boston suburb and she pledged to promote those same programs when she's in office.

Neera Tanden said her mother faced hard choices after divorce left her to raise two young children. She said her family survived on food stamps and federal housing vouchers until her mother got a job and eventually bought a house.

Tanden said she wants to give people the same chance at a fair shot.

Tanden would help prepare Biden's federal budgets as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Word of her expected nomination has encountered early disapproval from some Republican senators who will vote on whether she becomes the first woman of Indian descent to lead the office.

The new administration would be sworn in on 20 January 2021.

A Black resident in a Jacksonville neighborhood in Florida has filed a federal lawsuit against his local homeowners’ association after he was told to remove a Black Lives Matter flag he hung from his house.

But Antoine Mickle claims his neighbors also displayed paraphernalia with politically-charged themes including some in support of President Donald Trump as well as Blue Lives Matter flags, the Florida Times-Union reported.

In a press conference on November 24, Mickle, who has been a resident in the Kernan and Atlantic boulevards neighborhood for almost 19 years, detailed how the association as well his neighbors, have subjected him to harassment during his stay.

“I felt lonely and just all by myself that I couldn’t do anything against this powerful force, an HOA that has attempted to take my home away from me before,” Mickle said. “I have been threatened by the HOA. I have been threatened by particular neighbors who stand in front of my yard and gawk until I would leave. I’ve had harassment for the last 20 years or so from things like I don’t have red mulch in my yard when others [also] don’t have it.”

Responding to the allegations, the River Point Community Association board released a statement claiming that “unfortunately, the homeowner took offense to a letter sent to him that would have been sent to any other homeowners not following Association guidelines that have been in place for some time.”

The association claimed the disagreement did not stem from the Black Lives Matter flag in question, but rather had to with Mickle mounting it on his house instead of on a flagpole below the American flag, the Florida Times-Union reported.

In the letter to Mickle to take down the flag, the board said his flying of the Black Lives Matter flag was in contravention of a “nuisance clause” which prohibited “noxious or offensive activities.” They also claimed flags and other signs that are displayed on properties should be “seasonal in nature”, adding that “flags flying underneath the American flag on a flagpole are subject to enforcement under the state statutes, and not subject to enforcement by the Association.”

Meanwhile, Mickle’s lawsuit reportedly provided several photos of residents hanging flags – including a Blue Lives Matter flag, a Thin Blue Line flag and a host of other Trump flags – the same way he hung his, which is on his house instead of a flagpole.

In their statement, the board announced they weren’t going to pursue the case any further, claiming they were just doing their job.

“Unfortunately, this is a politically charged time and the timing was ill-advised. We were obviously not thinking about that and just simply doing our job as we would have with any other type or flag or sign outside of the guideline,” the statement said.

A representative from the HOPE Fair Housing Center in Miami, Keenya Robertson, however, told the Florida Times-Union Mickle’s lawsuit was justified as his case was a “modern-day version of discrimination and tactics that are meant to harass and intimidate someone who lives in their community.”

Lawyers for the plaintiff also told the news outlet they want the association to amend its policies and partake in training.

“Homeowners associations have a lot of power,” attorney David Cronin said. “They have a lot of power in Jacksonville. They can, as we saw in the housing crisis, take your home away from you.”

Another attorney, Matt Dietz, added: “These folks need to understand and know that this is wrong and by doing this you’re not only harming Mr. Mickle, you’re harming everybody’s right to live in an integrated community.”

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA) will begin operations in January 2021, although trading was originally planned for July 1, 2020, but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the BBC, negotiations resumed this week between countries to deal with final sticking points around rules of origin and market access.

The Agreement establishing the AfCFTA was signed in March 2018 in Kigali Rwanda, following the conclusion of the main legal texts. 54 Member States of the African Union have signed, and 30 countries have deposited their instruments of ratification with the Chairperson of the African Union Commission.

The main objectives of the AfCFTA are to create a single market for goods and services, facilitate the movement of persons, promote industrial development and sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth, and resolve the issue of multiple memberships, under agenda 2063. It lays a foundation for the establishment, in the future, of a Continental Common Market.

The implementation of the agreement suffered an initial setback when the continent’s biggest economy, Nigeria, delayed signing the agreement. Analysts were of the view that had Nigeria failed to rectify the deal, the Pan African free trade zone would have been stillborn.

Regional integration in Africa has been hampered by the lack of political will exhibited by member states, political instability, the multiplicity of memberships to Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and inadequate funding among others.

According to the African Union (AU), intra-African trade is estimated to increase by 52.3 percent (US$34.6 billion) under the AfCFTA, compared to the current arrangement without AfCFTA. The free trade area will cover a market of 1.2 billion people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$2.5 trillion, across 54 member states. The continental trading bloc is expected to be the world’s largest free trade area since the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in terms of the number of participating states.

In August, Ghana handed over the Secretariat of AfCFTA to the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, at a ceremony in Accra. President Nana Akufo-Addo, who supervised the handing over ceremony, also announced at the event the provision of a residential accommodation to serve as the official residence of the Secretary-General of the AfCFTA.

In a statement, he said Africa’s prosperity depends largely on intra-African trade. “Increase in trade is the surest way to deepen regional integration in Africa. “We are now the world’s largest free trade area since the formation of the World Trade Organization, and we must make it count.”

From next year, officials in Nigeria and the British Museum will take part in an archaeological dig to look for royal treasures in the former African kingdom of Benin. The excavation, described as the “most extensive ever undertaken” in Benin City, will begin at a site adjacent to the palace of the Oba, Benin’s traditional ruler, AFP reported.
Nigeria has said it will build a new museum at that site to exhibit looted Benin Bronzes currently displayed in American and European museums. The 10,000-square-foot museum — the Edo Museum of West African Art –is being designed by the trailblazing Ghanaian-British architect, David Adjaye and is due to open in Benin City in four years.

Benin City was the capital of Benin Kingdom, one of the most highly developed states in Africa, when it was ransacked and burnt down in 1897 by British forces. Its destruction in what became known as the Benin Expedition of 1897 led to the fall of the once successful and well-recognized Benin Kingdom located in what is now southern Nigeria.

The city of Cape Coast in Ghana’s Central Region is widely known as the nation’s tourism hub and the ‘Makah’ for African Americans. Every year, hundreds of Black people across the world visit the city and other historic slave sites to learn about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The region was the hotbed of the slave trade that saw millions of Africans uprooted to the New World. The coastal region has a number of castles and dungeons that were used to keep enslaved men and women for days before they were transported to the Americas to work on various plantations. 

Since the end of slavery with Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) attaining nationhood, Cape Coast has seen the return of many African Americans and Caribbeans to have firsthand information about the inhumane treatment their ancestors endured.

In 2019, Ghana organized ‘the Year of Return’ to commemorate the landing of slaves from Africa in America. The event was highly patronized by members of the diaspora. Beyond the Year of Return, there has been an effort to consolidate the gains made.

In this regard, the city of Cape Coast has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Africa Diaspora Development Institute (ADDI) and two local companies to create an ultramodern city. The city will be called the “Wakanda City of Return.” The proposed name of the city is inspired by the popular Hollywood movie, “Black Panther.”

The project seeks to leverage the heritage and cultural tourist assets in Ghana. The partners want to create a place of pilgrimage for the people of African descent to learn about their history, culture, the civilization of Africa, and its role in the creation of the new world economy.

The project, which is a private sector-led initiative, will develop the coastline and new areas in Cape Coast by creating a heritage experience with the provision of 5-Star hotels, retreat/ health resort, conference centers, and an ultra-modern continental corporate headquarters for ADDI.

The organizers say the timing of the project is apt since the country is still benefitting from the “Year of Return” and the “Beyond the Return” initiative organized by the government.

The project is expected to create about three thousand (3,000) jobs in Cape Coast.

President Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede defeat in the US presidential election even though major independent media outlets have called the race for Democratic presidential nominee and former vice-president Joe Biden.

Instead, Trump has ranted and raved, in a somewhat predictable fashion, and at one time thrown aspersions on the culture of the American public trusting the media’s tabulations after elections. Mind you, the Associated Press (AP) has been calling elections before the Civil War.

Since it became clear his victory speech a day after November 3 was both severely premature and prophetically-challenged, the president has been raging on about electoral fraud, a charge that is constantly challenged on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and trashed in America’s courts. So far, Republican attorneys have failed to persuade state justices to treat with seriousness any of the innumerable Hail Mary suits filed to injure the integrity of the election.

At the moment, American institutional democracy is being challenged. But whether or not the system is fortified against a coup d’état is a pronouncement we can make with more confidence after December 14 when all states have ratified their results. For now, we need to caution against alarmism and on the other hand, fight against the good poisoning Trump and his Republican enablers are undertaking.

However, what has become an unfortunate casualty in this political drama is the lack of headlines on how once again, America’s Black people have forced the nation to retake the path to a more perfect union. In the news right now, the dark clouds of a president’s tantrums have overshadowed the meaning of his defeat and the valor of his defeaters.

More than any other racial group, Black people voted overwhelmingly for Biden, a rate that currently stands at more than 87%. From Atlanta to Detroit, historic victories were sealed thanks to mass Black support for the Democratic candidate.

When the dust settles, 2020 will be the biggest utilitarian exercise in American democracy by the number of votes that were cast and by volume of the electorate that participated in the process. We have the president to thank for causing the biggest referendum on an American politician in 120 years. Even though he lost, Trump will have more votes than have ever been cast for an American politician except for Biden.

Across the racial spectrum, there were upticks among all groups as we have never seen before. Soon, we will make a better sense of how things turned out among the racial demographics but we already know that there was a surge in the number from 2016 among Hispanics, who make up 32 million of the US electorate.

The story was no different among Asian-Americans as well as among other minorities including African-Americans. Among white people, the numbers in the south were prominent and as Vox notes, there was an increment from 2016 of white voters in the Rust Belt.

We assume Trump – and we are according to many indications, right – was the reason for the boost in all these demographics. Nevertheless, in analyzing trends, it is better to err on the side of scientific caution. For instance, we are not expected to conflate the value-laden concept of identity and the science of demography.

Identity carries the burdens of values, aspirations, and fears while demographics is the statistical distribution of a given population. A change there does not necessarily cause a change here, nor the other way round. Therefore Trump or better still, the facts of his person and presidency, may have driven people to the polls but these voters were voting in their own self-interest.

Hence, the question is necessary: what was on the ballot for these demographics? In the lead up to the election, various surveys proved quite resourceful in this vein but for me, Pew Research’s partisan breakdown of what and how much matters to Americans stands incomparable as a definer of the times Americans live in.

More than the economy, gender politics, climate change, and the macabre headache of the coronavirus, opinions on race divided Red and Blue voters than anything else in 2020. To reiterate, while one-in-ten among Trump supporters said Black people have it a “lot more difficult” than whites, about 74% of Biden voters believed that was the case.

We were more likely than in 2016, to predict correctly who an American was voting for if we knew how that American felt on race. All the noise about polarization happens to be true, sadly.

The tendency to pretend that race does not animate political sensibilities has paid off majorly for Republicans and in part for a Democratic establishment that is not interested in muddying the waters. This is not even entirely about tipping hats to overt racism among the white electorate. Democratic Majority Whip and the South Carolina congressman, Jim Clyburn, the man credited with winning the southern Black vote for Biden during the primaries, blamed Democratic losses in Congress on calls to defund the police even though those calls come from a Black Lives Matter movement Clyburn would on any day support.

Clyburn even told CBS News that the late John Lewis had reservations about calls to defund the police because of what it’d cost the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Far be it from anyone to challenge the commitments of Lewis and Clyburn to social justice but the two men’s position represents a strategy with the feelings of white conservative voters in mind. Somehow, calling for the demilitarization and the de-escalation of overbearing police authority and reinvesting funds into other social goods necessary to racial minorities is a line too far.

The entire plot of American politics is an unfolding Hegelian history of white people’s sentiments on how much economic and political control they are willing to cede to racial minorities. Embedded in every issue and their deliberations are the facts of racial identity. If there is an end to this Hegelian unfolding, people of goodwill can only believe it is the destination of the constitutional ideal of a more perfect union.

The fullness of the American promise is the perfect union. It is a collective must, a goal meaningful for its own sake. Certainly, one’s race should not stand in the way of their participation.

But race matters in the sacred democratic practice of elections. Between the election of 1932 and that of 1980, three elections stood out for their exceptionally high rates of turnout – 1960, 1964, and 1968. It is certainly not coincidental that the 60s was a watershed decade for African-American civil rights amidst wider counterculture politics.

The only other time Americans trooped to the polls in mammoth volumes were the decades following the Civil War fought over the south’s determination to keep slaves. There too, we can theorize a reaction to whatever racial progress had perceivably been made.

The democratic ambition of a more perfect union has always been on the ballot since Black men could vote. Detractors of this ambition have equally been around, planting impediments anywhere they can.

What we witness with Trump is certainly not an American aberration yet he is unique in what Bernie Sanders calls “the most dangerous American president in our lifetime”. Since the turn of the 20th century, no president has given more fodder to the detractors of the perfect union.

Thankfully, he can now only unleash two months’ worth of loser’s wrath from the highest office. But it is important to remember that in the last four years, Trump has tested America’s democratic resoluteness with every rally, most tweets, and many executive decisions.

When the election came this year, the American president had come to represent a verifiable antithesis of the perfect union. A lifeline was necessary. Something positively different was non-negotiable.

For those who were watching and listening, not because they wanted to “piss off the libs” or hold a middle finger to polite America, Trump left the electorate with no doubt about who he was and no grey patches in his field of black.

It has seemed a trick question for me whenever people have asked if all Trump voters are racists. It is as if one is being dared to see others in the worst light possible. But as journalist Paola Ramos told Christiane Amanpour in the aftermath of the election, 2020 was simply a question of what America chose to be in light of changing demographics.

Biden and Trump, separated only by three years in age, are both white men of when white was unchallenged. But the former was the candidate open to the incoming multicolored American future. He bet on a better for all who do not look like the America in which he grew up.

The US Census Bureau believes in 25 years, non-Hispanic white people will be in the minority in America. This country cannot continue to rely on lifelines and cannot phone a friend.

Whenever Black people have committed to the path of the more perfect union, which is a lifeline for America. But there is no good reason to keep counting on these lifelines. To do so would be out of ingratitude.

In Detroit, Trump’s supporters, mainly white people, descended on ballot-counting centers in the city chanting “Stop the count!” for the very specific reason that the candidate of their choice was on his way out of the White House. Throughout this year, armed militias of white men have brazenly provoked hostilities in support of the man they believe is their savior.

Those are two ways to waste a lifeline but America has been at this in various ways for decades. But could someone remind this beloved country that lifelines are not eternal?