DAKAR, 5 October 2007 (IRIN) - CONTENTS:

BURKINA FASO: Local leaders say flood-hit residents will need food aid for months CHAD: Government, rebels reach peace deal GUINEA-BISSAU: Low cashew prices could spell hunger, UN warns GUINEA-BISSAU: UN report implicates government in drug trafficking LIBERIA-COTE D'IVOIRE: Refugee children taught wrong curriculum MALI: After the deluge the real struggle begins MALI: Bad planning to blame for flood damage NIGERIA: Polio vaccine back in the headlines NIGERIA: President halts privatisation of Unity Schools SIERRA LEONE: Cholera deaths surge

BURKINA FASO: Local leaders say flood-hit residents will need food aid for months Thousands of people in western Burkina Faso will need food aid for months to come, after floods wiped out homes and farms and now a lack of rain threatens whatever crops survived the deluge.

"Some displaced persons need to be assisted till June because the farms are flooded and the terrible drought we are having now will make things worse," Alain Galbone, the prefect in Bama, told IRIN.

The town, 20km west of Burkina's second largest city Bobo-Dioulasso, was one of the worst hit by flooding, when 165 millimetres of rain fell in 24 hours on 28 and 29 July.

Of the 6,000 people initially displaced by the floods in Bama, about 2,000 people depend on meals provided by the government at eight sites set up for flood victims, according to Galbone. Bama has received cereals from the government emergency foodstocks as well as from a number of private entities and non-governmental organisations.

Galbone said for the moment there is not enough food aid to allow for distributions to all of the affected families, so the local authorities provide meals three times a day, targeting primarily women and children.

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CHAD: Government, rebels reach peace deal NDJAMENA, 4 October 2007 (IRIN) - Libya-mediated peace talks in Tripoli have yielded a provisional deal between the Chadian government and several armed rebel groups, senior officials in the Chadian capital said.

"The contents have not yet been sent to us," a Chadian government official in N'djamena told IRIN. "An official signing ceremony will be organised in the presence of a number of heads of state to make the document public."

The largest rebel group to have signed up is the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), led by a regional power-broker Mahamat Nouri, the official said.

A separate peace deal signed between another smaller rebel group and the government on 1 September called for a total ceasefire and an amnesty for rebel fighters.

The talks in Libya are the latest in a series of attempts to mediate a lasting truce between Chad's President Idriss Deby and rebel factions in eastern Chad who started fighting in 2005 when the president changed the country's constitution to allow himself to run for a third term in office.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74647 GUINEA-BISSAU: Low cashew prices could spell hunger, UN warns The price cashew farmers are getting for their produce is so low this year that they might not be able to buy enough food for their families, the UN warns.

"Cashew is important for food security as it is commonly bartered for [the country's staple] rice," the UN Secretary-General said in a report on Guinean Bissau.

"The potential social impact of the current cashew season is not encouraging." Cashew prices are depressed with farmers selling cashews at between 75 CFA francs (US$0.16) and 50 CFA francs ($0.11) per kilogram, the report said.

The government's recommended price this year was 200 CFA francs ($0.43) per kilogram.

The cashew harvest this year was good with an estimated 94,000 tonnes of cashew nuts exported to date, which already exceeds last year's exports of 73,400 tonnes. Not only is the international price of cashews down, but the dollar is down against the euro which has further decreased the amount Guinea Bissau's farmers get for their product. The former Portuguese colony's currency is fixed to the euro while the price of cashews is set in dollars.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74671 GUINEA-BISSAU: UN report implicates government in drug trafficking DAKAR, 4 October 2007 (IRIN) - The government and the army in Guinea Bissau are implicated in drug trafficking according to the latest report on Guinea Bissau by the UN Secretary-General.

"Drug trafficking threatens to subvert the nascent democratisation process of Guinea-Bissau, entrench organised crime and undermine respect for the rule of law," the report, issued on 28 September, concluded.

The report cited specific examples of possible government involvement in drug trafficking including, "the alleged involvement of several high-level officials of the Government of the former Prime Minister, Aristides Gomes, in the disappearance of 670 kilograms of cocaine seized by the authorities," it said.

The UN Secretary-General also cited numerous complaints of the government intimidating journalists and human rights workers investigating drug trafficking.

The report said the UN Peacebuilding Support Office in Guinea Bissau provided protection to a local human rights activist Mário Sá Gomes "after he expressed his views on the alleged involvement of military personnel in drug trafficking in the country."

"Gomes left the United Nations premises on 23 August, after my Representative obtained assurances from the Minister of the Interior, on behalf of the Government, that he would not be harmed or arrested and would be offered protection by the Government," the Secretary-General said in the report.

The West and Central African regional UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has documented dozens of cases of drugs being intercepted in Guinea Bissau but few people have been charged, UNODC regional representative Antonio Mazzitelli told IRIN.

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LIBERIA-COTE D'IVOIRE: Refugee children taught wrong curriculum SACLEPEA, 1 October 2007 (IRIN) - Ivorian children in a Liberia refugee camp have been deprived of an education based on their home country curriculum in a school that opened there over three years ago.

"This is really paining our hearts," said Aisha Berete, mother of five of the 387 children attending the Saclepea Refugee Primary School in eastern Nimba County. "[The children] are losing their Ivorian identity and how will they fit in to the Ivorian school system once we return home?"

"I am afraid that our children will be considered strangers in their homeland," she told IRIN.

The children, who fled the war in French-speaking Côte d'Ivoire, are learning a Liberian curriculum with mostly Liberian textbooks in English, the official language in the country.

The policy of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is for refugee children to receive schooling based on their home country curriculum. But UNHCR officials in Liberia say they have been unable to obtain the necessary materials from the Ivorian Education Ministry, mainly because of "civil disturbances" and "bureaucracy".

"The ideal is that we offer the curriculum of the country of origin," UNHCR external relations officer Oscar Nkulu told IRIN. "Nevertheless the country of asylum and the country of origin have to [cooperate on this]."

"[The proper curriculum] is something we can get only from the Education Ministry," he said.

In a written statement to IRIN, UNHCR said it had made efforts to obtain the curriculum and textbooks but that "it was difficult to access the ministry". The statement also said the Ministry of Education was concerned that the school had not been accredited.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74583 MALI: After the deluge the real struggle begins BLA, 1 October 2007 (IRIN) - It took Souleymane Diallo 55 years to build the 10 mud-walled rooms that made up his family's house, and almost all his money to fill the small dome-shaped granary that was meant to feed them for the next few months. But it took just three hours of torrential rain to destroy nearly every shred of their existence.

Diallo, the victim of flash floods on 26 July that devastated this remote town in western Mali, stands surveying the piles of mud that he says were once his house. Red shoes strewn about and pieces of broken furniture sticking out of the ground are the only real evidence that this was once inhabited by Diallo and his 29 family members.

"We lost everything that night," he said with a shrug. "What the floods didn't take, the looters did."

Diallo's family moved first to the town's school, then -- when officials told them to vacate the building for the start of the school year -- to a squat in some abandoned buildings once used to house teachers. "If I spend the money on rebuilding the house, what are we going to live on?" Diallo said. "I don't even have the money to pay for rent for somewhere for us to live."

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MALI: Bad planning to blame for flood damage BLA, 1 October 2007 (IRIN) - In principle, the 81mm of rain that drenched the mud walled houses and bone dry fields in this town on 26 July should not have posed a major problem.

"Eighty-one millimetres isn't really that much," said local Mali Red Cross volunteer Bacari Keita. "With good drainage it should not cause major flooding."

Instead a wall of water flooded the town's rutted muddy streets, carrying away mud houses, domestic animals and belongings.

Around 12,600 people were made homeless.

Some simple plans for preparedness and prevention had been drawn up. If only they had been implemented the tragedy could have been avoided, local officials said.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74573 NIGERIA: Polio vaccine back in the headlines LAGOS, 3 October 2007 (IRIN) - A report in an American medical journal that children in northern Nigeria have been infected with polio by the vaccine designed to prevent it have raised fears that Nigeria's already lagging polio prevention efforts could be further delayed.

Such vaccine-derived outbreaks have occurred previously in other parts of the world, usually in regions where there is low polio immunisation coverage, but the 69 cases recorded in Nigeria are the largest on record, the scientists said in the study.

The finding could be a "serious setback" for the global polio eradication campaign, because it is occurring in a region where rumours about vaccine safety "derailed vaccination efforts" several years ago, scientists warned in the study, released on 28 September by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in its publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly.

Nigeria accounts for at least 70 percent of all new polio cases worldwide, while almost all other countries in the world have successfully eradicated the disease.

The CDC's results have been reported in the leading scientific journal Science Magazine and confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO). But a spokeswoman for the WHO's Polio Eradication Imitative pointed out that around 2,000 cases of polio were reported in the same area at the same time and they were not caused by the vaccine.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74624 NIGERIA: President halts privatisation of Unity Schools LAGOS, 2 October 2007 (IRIN) - President Umaru Yar'Adua's administration has halted an initiative of his predecessor to privatise 102 elite public secondary schools across Nigeria.

See IRIN NIGERIA: Privatising schools and national unity

"The manner and rush in which the pubic-private partnership arrangement was put in place did not give room for consideration of wider views and ideas on how best the schools could be effectively and efficiently managed," said Education Minister Igwe Aja-Nwachukwu in a 27 September statement.

He said the Yar'Adua administration's move reversed a reform policy that "threatened public interest".

The 102 schools, known as Unity Schools, were established in 1970 following the end of the country's civil war, with the aim of fostering greater unity among future leaders from different parts of the country.

But the regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo introduced a public-private partnership that would see the private sector manage the schools for profit, enabling the government to end its subsidy of the schools.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74602 SIERRA LEONE: Cholera deaths surge FREETOWN, 3 October 2007 (IRIN) - A deadly cholera epidemic has broken out in several regions of Sierra Leone.

Since the first week of September at least 523 people have been infected in Kambia district in northern Sierra Leone close to the border with Guinea, and in the eastern town of Kenema, and Newton on the outskirts of the capital Freetown, according to the Ministry of Health.

Cholera can be easily treated with a course of dehydration and local government authorities have been using FM radio to appeal to people to report cases of diarrhoea and vomiting to the nearest health centre.

"We have the personnel and enough drugs to quickly and professionally intervene," The Kambia District medical officer Joseph Kandeh told IRIN.

Nonetheless, 30 people died from the disease in September, the Ministry said.

The district medical officer for Kenema, Yankuba Bah, said that people are reluctant to seek treatment when they get sick as they do not have confidence in public hospitals. "Most patients only visit government hospitals when they are in a precarious condition," he said.

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