A meeting this week between the farmers in the region and Chinese developers backed by the Limpopo provincial authority was cancelled.

The environmental impact assessment for what is South Africa’s largest special economic zone has been thrown back to the would-be developers as incomplete.

They will not be able to complete this within the legally required 103 days from declaration of their plan.

This involves 20 industrial steel and ferrochrome components and a 3 300 megawatt coal-fire power station.

Any future decision on this development will involve Environment Minister Barbara Creecy and Trade Minister Ebrahim Patel.

There might appear some conflict of interest between one minister determined to protect a hot spot of water stress, climate change and biodiversity; and another set on creating jobs and boosting the economy in the nation’s second-poorest province.

The project has been fraught with such contradictions.

Limpopo’s environment department has had to objectively assess the plans. Indeed it is this department that rejected the environmental impact assessment and incomplete.

The study was conducted among English-speaking respondents, thereby omitting those reliant on the local languages.

Meetings with respondents were conducted at short notice and were severely limited by the COVID lockdown.

Against this, the Limpopo Development Agency is championing the zone.

Chief executive of the project Lehlogonolo Masoga is on record saying it is too big to fail and anyone standing in its way will be replaced by an enthusiast.

The impact study contains contradictory findings. The project will have very dire economic consequences, it says on the one hand. 

On the other it asserts that the project is sustainable.

Environmental and conservation groups opposed to the project maintain the near pristine and water-scarce character of the environment will be fundamentally altered by the proposed development.

One of the projects includes a dam across the dry Sand River.

It is hoped to pump water from underground aquifers in the Limpopo.

A R300-million feasibility study for this project has been put on hold.

Civil engineers who have had an initially look at say the international waterway cannot be tapped without permission of users and countries downstream.

Even if this were obtained, the pumped water would be three times as expensive and water ordinarily sourced from rivers.

Environmental lawyer Christo Reeders says Limpopo unarguably requires an economic boost.

But it has to be an agricultural development in that part of the country that provides 80% of South Africa’s fresh produce.

Apart from the irredeemable damage it would do to the local environment, an industrial project in Musina -Mukhado is impracticable and prohibitively expensive.

He says the provincial agency should urgently begin looking at an agricultural development for Musina-Mukhado.

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The hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets protesting against the military coup in Myanmar.

The railway workers who are ensuring the trains don’t run-on time, the bank employees who are watching the the ATM dispensers run out of cash. The footballers who won’t play for their country while the soldiers try to run it. The engineers whose protests stop the cogs of progress turning.

Many have been out risking death, beatings and lengthy jail terms for opposing the February 1 coup.

But the soldiers’ repression cannot stop them.

There are fears of a massive crackdown.

United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Tom Andrew says he’s terrified of this happening.

Western members of the UN Security Council warn that the army leaders will be held accountable for any violence or repression.

China has not yet condemned the coup.

The military, who overturned the landslide electoral win by the National League for Democracy led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate  Aung San Suu Kyi last November have not produced evidence to support their allegations of electoral fraud.

They say 40 million of the 53 million Burmese support their action.

The mass demonstration today was designed exactly to fly in the face of this.

The NLD leader appeared in a virtual court hearing today on tripod up charges of importing communications equipment and violating Myanmar’s natural disaster legislation.

She has been detained since the coup.

Her international fortunes have waned since she supported the military by denying that they were responsible for ethnic cleansing against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

This woman, who spent 15 years under house arrest during the nearly six decades that the military have held powerMyanmar in  remains the undisputed leader of the overwhelming mass of Burmese.

Until the military coup is reversed, she deserves international support.Note

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Social distancing was enforced as the envoys made short speeches expressing wishes of broadening and deepening bilateral relations with South Africa before presenting the president with the letters from their heads of state.

Some of the ambassadors managed to make powerful use of the two minutes allotted to them.

Sweden’s Håkan Joholt recalled how he’d become an anti-apartheid activist at age 25 before serving 23 years as a member of parliament.

“I have come here to build bridges and to forge people-to-people ties between Swedes and South Africans,” he said. “What we can do together is fight for democracy, human rights, peace and a sustainable environment,” he said.

Entering his second term as ambassador of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Mohammed Beissat said Polisario and the ANC forged ties as liberation movements at the most difficult times for their countries.

He recalled how Oliver Tambo visited the Western Sahara and returned to South Africa with apartheid-built tanks captured by the Saharawi from the Moroccan.

“Now Mr President the Western Sahara faces fresh aggression from Morocco,” he said referring to the kingdom breaking the 30 year old truce signed under UN auspices that ended the war that followed Morocco’s 1975 invasion of the former Spanish colony.

“We are confident we can overcome yet another challenge from the illegal occupier, especially since we are assured of your support and the solidarity of your government and people,” said the ambassador.

Braving a heatwave that took the mercury into the thirties, the ambassadors were greeted by a guard-of-honour before entering the guest house to have their exchange with the President.

In addition to the Western Sahara and Sweden, Ramaphosa received credentials from the ambassadors of 

Vietnam, North Korea, Iran, Botswana, Cote’Ivoire, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Egypt, China, Sweden, Mauritius, Pakistan, Sudan and South Sudan, Slovenia, Finland.

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Happily Tik Tok is providing mine.

Yes, yes, I know it is designed for younger consumers.

But it is not the content that provides my chortle.

It is the belief by the orange-tinted US Presidential candidate DonaldTrump that he can force ByteDance, the owner to sell Tik Tok to an American buyer.

Not only that, but that he can slice a percentage off the top of the transaction and claim it is for the public purse.

What is funny about that, you ask?

Well the premise is ridiculous.

Trump’s submission thatTtik Tok poses a danger to US security is reportedly based on intelligence from the US military and security establishment.

Get it?

Those are the very people warning that Russia is interfering in the US election to secure Trump’s re-election.

They are also the people whose information that Russia has paid bonuses to Afghan militia to kill US soldiers has been pooh poohed by the President.

If this potentially disastrous double standard doesn’t exactly have you rolling in the aisles, how about the President’s misreading of the international game.

He tells reporters last week that they are talking too much about Russia and that he’s like to hear more about China from them.

If the media can help him understand that China is much more than a target for cheap shots at his unhealthy election rallies , it would be doing the U.S. a great service.

Trump plainly does not understand the strength of China nor does he grasp its penchant for playing the long game.

When President Richard Nixon made his ice-breaking visit to Beijing he asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai of his assessment of the French Revolution.

“Too early to say,” was Zhou famous reply, illustrating the depth of Chinese patience.

It is subsequently emerged that Zhou may have thought Nixon was talking about the 1968 worker/student uprising in Paris rather than the 1787 storming of the Bastille.

But it’s all part of the fun.

 If you don’t believe me, ask Microsoft, Oracle and Walmart whose shares took an upward trajectory when they became part of the Tik Tok acquisition game.

The cold reality for those chasing the Chinese social network for user generated videos the world over is that the forced sale simply is not going to happen.

Chinese is not going to allow this asset to get lost because of a temper tantrum thrown by a man who realizing he is not going to be around much longer. 

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There should 47 Presidents involved in the virtual fest. But Mali’s Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta who was deposed in a military coup last week, remains in detention.

The WHO’s Africa region doesn’t include North Africa. However, there has not been a case of wild polio there  since  2004 so WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti correctly declares the entire continent free of the disease that used to paralyze 75 000 children a year.

That leaves only Afghanistan and Pakistan as the only countries on the the planet still reporting polio cases.

Vaccines are very much front and centre of public consciousness with the race to find one against COVID 19.

The politicians are taking the lead in this battle with Donald Trump maintaining a COVID 19 vaccine could still arrive in time for the November 3 U.S. Presidential election he is desperate to win.

Both China and Russia maintain they have actually produced a vaccine but there is no rush by the public to avail themselves of such poorly tested measures.

The scientists  maintain that COVID 19 will be with us for some time, even after a reliable vaccine is produced.

So far in medical history, smallpox is the only infectious disease to have been eradicated by vaccine. That was 40 years ago.

Rinderpest, spread among animals, is the other.

The World Health Organization lists 17 vaccines against dangerous and deadly diseases.

The polio eradication efforts led by Gates and Dangote began almost three decades ago and failed to meet its millennium target.

A 2003 boycott of the vaccination programme in Nigeria led to the disease spreading to 20 other countries in the next five years.

The eradication programme looked like it had succeeded in 2015 but four new cases were reported in 2016.

The Nigerian problem was focused on Borno State where the Islamist terror group Boko Haram prevented medical access to the population.

The authorities used the army to back up vaccination teams that used guerrilla tactics to get their job done.

They moved into areas made safe, even for a few days, and vaccinated children accompanying their parents to markets.

The children immunized in this way passed this on to their peers through drinking water.

Unfortunately some of the vaccine viruses muted and spread to villages where immunization was not total.

That strain is much less virulent – one in 200 cases results in paralysis.

In 2018, 68 children were infected. This number increased to 320 last year.

The WHO fears that this number may increase because of the COVID 19 lockdown preventing access by polio vaccination teams.

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Hopes of become an international energy player have been delayed at least five years as Exxon Mobil put the hold on investing in the vast resource beneath Cabo Delgado.

Exxon Mobil made an intermediate decision last year to invest in the exploitation of liquid petroleum gas in Mozambique.

According to Mozambique analyst Jo Hanlon that was for the benefit of President Felipe Nysui’s election campaign.

Now the real ink on the dotted line has been delayed five years, meaning production cannot start until 2030.

The depression caused by the COVID 19 pandemic has stalled investment everywhere.

Gas prices, which follow oil prices, halved between 2018 and 2019 and then halved again this year as Saudi Arabia and Russia boosted production to push U.S. shale out of the market.

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It arrived as President Donald Trump suspended U.S. funding of the UN health body pending investigation of how it has handled the COVID 19 pandemic.

The arrival in Ethiopia of a million facemasks, goggles, gloves, gowns and other equipment shows the World Health Organisation is getting on with fighting coronavirus while President Donald Trump plays politics and tries to re-write history.

In January Trump  praised China’s efforts, particularly its transparency, in fighting COVID 19.

Now, in seeking to deflect mounting criticism of his inactivity for weeks after being warned about the pandemic, he has resorted to blaming China and the WHO for their handling of it.

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The groupings foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell says there’s no new money involved.

Development Ministers say the programme entitled Global EU Response to COVID 19 is designed to combat the worst international crisis in decades.

It involves direct budget support, loans and guarantees from the European Investment Bank and the European Bank For Reconstruction And Development.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell says the programme involves reorienting existing funds.

It is hoped it will be increased to R400-billion with contributions from member countries.

African countries have so far avoided the high infection rates in China, the US and Europe but they are lamentably under resourced to deal with the full force of a pandemic.

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He says Africa has to learn from the experience in China and Europe.

Briefing the media, French Ambassador Aurelien Lechevallier says the lockdown imposed by President Cyril Ramaphosa and other African leaders will hopefully flatten the curve of infections and prevent the numbers from being as high as expected.

(Take in the ambassador clip here)

Lechevallier says he’s not a scientist. and there are a number of factors at stake. 

But the measures and policies such as those taken in South Africa can-play a significant role Fighting COVID 19 requires a strong international response.

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The U.S. has recorded 2 489 COVID19 death and passed both China and Italy with the number of infections.

US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci says the US could have between 100 and 200 000 coronavirus deaths.

This as the world wide death toll exceeds 30 000.

Spain had a record 838 deaths in the past 24 house and Italy  registered 756 new deaths in a day.

Britain, where infected Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that things would get worse before they got better, recorded 209 deaths.

Australia has added restrictions to movement to stop the spread of the pandemic.

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