A WISE MAN ONCE SAID 1. Don’t call someone more than twice continuously. If they don’t pick up your call, presume they have something important to attend to; 2. Return money that you have borrowed even before the person that borrowed you remember or ask for it. It shows your integrity and character. Same goes with umbrellas, pens and lunch boxes. 3. Never order the expensive dish on the menu when someone is giving you a lunch/dinner. 4. Don’t ask awkward questions like ‘Oh so you aren’t married yet?’ Or ‘Don’t you have kids’ or ‘Why didn’t you buy a house?’ Or why don't you buy a car? For God’s sake it isn’t your problem; 5. Always open the door for the person coming behind you. It doesn’t matter if it is a guy or a girl, senior or junior. You don’t grow small by treating someone well in public; 6. If you take a taxi with a friend and he/she pays now, try paying next time; 7. Respect different shades of opinions. Remember what's 6 to you will appear 9 to someone facing you. Besides, second opinion is good for an alternative; 8. Never interrupt people talking. Allow them to pour it out. As they say, hear them all and filter them all; 9. If you tease someone, and they don’t seem to enjoy it, stop it and never do it again. It encourages one to do more and it shows how appreciative you're; 10. Say “thank you” when someone is helping you. 11. Praise publicly. Criticize privately; 12. There’s almost never a reason to comment on someone’s weight. Just say, “You look fantastic.” If they want to talk about losing weight, they will; 13. When someone shows you a photo on their phone, don’t swipe left or right. You never know what’s next; 14. If a colleague tells you they have a doctors' appointment, don’t ask what it’s for, just say "I hope you’re okay". Don’t put them in the uncomfortable position of having to tell you their personal illness. If they want you to know, they'll do so without your inquisitiveness; 15. Treat the cleaner with the same respect as the CEO. Nobody is impressed at how rude you can treat someone below you but people will notice if you treat them with respect; 16. If a person is speaking directly to you, staring at your phone is rude; 17. Never give advice until you’re asked; 18. When meeting someone after a long time, unless they want to talk about it, don’t ask them their age and salary; 19. Mind your business unless anything involves you directly - just stay out of it; 20. Remove your sunglasses if you are talking to anyone in the street. It is a sign of respect. Moreso, eye contact is as important as your speech; and 21. Never talk about your riches in the midst of the poor. Similarly, don't talk about your children in the midst of the barren. 22.After reading a good message try to say "Thanks for the message". APPRECIATION remains the easiest way of getting what you don't have.... ❤️♥️ Copied!

The first AFRICA / CARICOM Summit is Coming !!! It is now official ! The first Africa/CARICOM Summit will be held on the morning of TUESDAY 7th SEPTEMBER 2021, commencing at 8 AM Eastern Caribbean time. This is truly an historic event, and I hope and trust that it will be telecast LIVE to the people of our Caribbean Community on multiple platforms, inclusive of our national television stations. Just imagine : * Five hundred years after the commencement of the criminal and tragic European transportation of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean ; * Seventy-six years after the seminal 5th Pan-African Congress that was held in Manchester, England in 1945, and that brought together the political activists of Africa and the Caribbean to conceive plans to bring about the decolonization of these two areas of the African world ; * Fifty-eight years since the 1963 establishment of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) ; * Fifty-three years after the founding of CARIFTA ; and * Forty-eight years after the establishment of CARICOM the Heads of Government of Africa and the Caribbean Community will FINALLY be sitting down around a table -- virtual though it may be -- discussing their common origin, history, concerns and objectives, and planning a bright future of collaboration and solidarity ! Participating in the Summit will be such Heads of Government as President Uhuru Kenyatta, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, President Nana Akufo-Addo, Prime Minister Gaston Browne, President Cyril Ramaphosa, Prime Minister Keith Rowley, President Paul Kagame, and Prime Ministers Ralph Gonsalves and John Briceno, among others. The Summit will also benefit from the input of the new Secretary General of CARICOM, Dr Carla Barnett, and the Chair of the African Union Commission, H.E. Mousa Faki Mahamet. And it is anticipated that these deliberations will lead to multiple initiatives of unity, collaboration, institution building, and people-to-people exchanges between AFRICA and the CARIBBEAN. This is truly an historic event that the masses of our Caribbean and African people must fully share in. Let the word therefore go out all across the Caribbean and the wider African Diaspora that the SUMMIT meeting of Tuesday 7th September 2021 promises to be a towering milestone in our long and determined struggle to rebuild our magnificent, autonomous PAN-AFRICAN CIVILIZATION ! Africa and the Caribbean are finally coming back together at the highest levels of government and policy-making ! DAVID COMISSIONG Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM

Death by a thousand cuts: Cameroon struggles in fight against separatists **Despite government claims that the Anglophone conflict is under control, recent developments suggest otherwise. There’s only one way out.** The Anglophone regions’ relatively quiet start to 2021 was shattered in March by an intense series of IED attacks. Marking a new development in the Cameroonian conflict that has simmered for four years, at least one harrowing new video emerged every day. Each showcased the same pattern: the lumbering roll of a military convoy down a muddy forested road; the explosion underneath a lightly armoured Toyota; the immediate covering fire laid down in anticipation of an ambush; and, eventually, a silence punctuated by the cries of the wounded. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been used by separatists in the Anglophone conflict since at least late-2018, but the tactic has now reached maturity. Extensive video evidence reveals increasingly sophisticated use of the explosives, including the deliberate targeting of the army’s least protected vehicles, remote detonations, and the use of multiple IEDs. These attacks have been more frequent, more deadly and, most importantly, have not stopped. This is potentially devastating for the military. Cameroon has only a limited number of mine-protected armoured vehicles and so soldiers are largely left to patrol in Toyota pickup trucks with improvised armour that is entirely ineffective against IEDs. Western forces learned similarly painful lessons in Afghanistan and Iraq, with ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers referred to as “mobile coffins” by troops. These attacks must weigh heavily on the morale of Cameroonian forces, and recent reports suggest that some units have resorted to extreme measures to counteract the threat. It has been alleged that the elite Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) has forced civilians to act as human minesweepers near Kumbo, Northwest region, in what would clearly be an egregious abuse of human rights. The military is known to have defused dozens of IEDs, but the threat remains. It is therefore likely the government will look to acquire new armoured vehicles this year, with Cameroon’s contingent in the UN mission in the Central African Republic receiving several Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles in May. Separatists growing stronger This increase in IED attacks fits into a broader pattern of some separatist groups’ growing combat strength. Larger forces such as the Ambazonian Defence Forces (ADF) and Ambazonia Restoration Forces (ARF) have managed to replace their locally produced hunting rifles with more effective firepower. Over time, they have acquired weaponry from multiple sources such as corrupt or sympathetic local officials and military personnel, dealers and allied groups in neighbouring Nigeria, following attacks and ambushes, and even from the diaspora in the US. Most recently, secessionists have acquired several light machine guns and, for the first time, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs). This has marked a step-change in rebels’ offensive capability and has led to deadlier attacks. In early-May, it was reported that 24 soldiers and civilians had been killed by IEDs in the previous two weeks. In late-June, ten soldiers were killed and a gendarmerie post was attacked in South West region in one day. Two recent raids by ‘General No Pity’, a feared commander of the Bambalang Marine Forces, at Galim in the West region and Bamali in the North-West left several soldiers dead. In July, grisly footage showing members of a separatist group celebrating around beheaded military personnel was released. And an attack in Bali on 19 July left five senior policemen dead. Since March, it seems that around 60 to 80 service personnel have been killed, with many more wounded. This would likely make it the deadliest period for government soldiers since the crisis began. Separatist attacks have been particularly effective in the North West region, where large armed factions are believed, at times, to be working with some degree of cooperation, though not quite in harmony. In the South-West, by contrast, fighting between separatist factions remains common. In late-June, for instance, the Fako Mountain Lions killed ‘General Opopo’, a commander of the rival SOCADEF group. Disunity and distrust among secessionists in most areas, which is exacerbated through online attacks among separatist leaders in the diaspora, remains a yoke around the neck of the campaign for Ambazonian independence. Biya’s legacy The government’s line that the Anglophone crisis is an internal matter that is under control or has even been resolved is miles away from the current reality. There have been widespread losses of personnel and equipment recently, and the military even briefly deployed the Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion (BBR) to the region. This move neither projects strength nor suggests a military nearing victory. That said, the separatists’ recent successes are unlikely to alter the long-term trajectory of the conflict. The kind of turnaround witnessed in Ethiopia’s Tigray region or Afghanistan is not going to be repeated; Cameroon’s separatist groups are not on the verge of capturing Bamenda or Buea. Instead, the conflict risks leaving the Anglophone regions frozen in time for a generation amid a desperate quagmire in which neither side can prevail, and as the international community looks on. Meanwhile, the military continues to recruit heavily, limiting the strategic impact of the increasing losses. As the conflict becomes ever more entrenched and intractable, resolution becomes harder to imagine. The North-West and South -West regions risk becoming to Cameroon what Kivu is to the Democratic Republic of Congo. A common phrase heard about the Cameroonian government is that it feels “time is on its side”. From the perspective of the insular, highly centralised regime, this may seem logical. Yet to other actors, it reads as a potentially fatal miscalculation. Time is not on the side of the 1.1 million children out of school or the 3 million residents of the Anglophone regions caught in the crossfire. Nor is it on the side of the 88-year-old President Paul Biya, whose 38 years in charge make him the longest-ruling non-royal leader in the world. His rule is likely to come to an end in the next election cycle, and a transition of power for such a long-standing regime is fraught with the highest risks imaginable. Cameroon already faces immense challenges with the fight against Boko Haram in the Far North, a tense security situation on the Central African border and thousands of associated refugees, and the immense humanitarian pressures created by all of these separate crises. The strain on the Cameroonian state is enormous, and without a change in strategy, Biya’s forthcoming transition will rightly set alarm bells ringing across the world. After nearly four decades in power, the greatest legacy the president could leave behind would be to bring the full weight of the state to the table in pursuit of a negotiated, sustainable end to the Anglophone crisis. The alternative is more smouldering armoured vehicles, soaring humanitarian need, and an increasing flow of coffins draped in the Cameroonian flag. As always, the power is with President Biya and his government, yet it is those in Anglophone Cameroon that are paying the heaviest price. https://africanarguments.org/2021/08/death-by-a-thousand-cuts-cameroon-struggles-in-fight-against-separatists/

Facts about South Africa that makes it special🇿🇦🇿🇦 1. Table mountain in Capetown is one of the seven wonders of the geographical world. Standing at just over 1000 metres. It dominates the city's skyline. 2. Johannesburg has more trees than any other major city in the world. 3. South Africa is one of only 12 Countries where tap water is safe to drink. 4. Johannesburg stock exchange is ranked as the largest stock exchange in Africa. 4. South Africa is the most advanced country in Africa. 5. The CT scanner was invented by Allan Macleod Cormack, from Capetown for which he won a Nobel physics prize in 1979. 6. The world's first successful heart transplant was performed in South Africa at Groote Shuur. 7. South Africa is the only country in the world which has voluntarily dismantled its nuclear arsenal. 8. It is a multiracial country and the one of the most beautiful country in Africa. #UniqueAfrica🌍

*Blood in the Sand* Jeffrey D. Sachs   |   August 17, 2021   |   Project Syndicate For decades, the American political class has intervened relentlessly and recklessly in countries whose people they hold in contempt. And once again they are being aided by America’s credulous mass media, which is uniformly blaming the Taliban victory on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption. NEW YORK – The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking. It is not a failure of Democrats or Republicans, but an abiding failure of American political culture, reflected in US policymakers’ lack of interest in understanding different societies. And it is all too typical.   Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame. In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades. Think of the Mobutu dictatorship in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961, or of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military junta in Chile after the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.   In the 1980s, the US under Ronald Reagan ravaged Central America in proxy wars to forestall or topple leftist governments. The region still has not healed. Since 1979, the Middle East and Western Asia have felt the brunt of US foreign policy’s foolishness and cruelty. The Afghanistan war started 42 years ago, in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter’s administration covertly supported Islamic jihadists to fight a Soviet-backed regime. Soon, the CIA-backed mujahedeen helped to provoke a Soviet invasion, trapping the Soviet Union in a debilitating conflict, while pushing Afghanistan into what became a forty-year-long downward spiral of violence and bloodshed. Across the region, US foreign policy produced growing mayhem. In response to the 1979 toppling of the Shah of Iran (another US-installed dictator), the Reagan administration armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his war on Iran’s fledgling Islamic Republic. Mass bloodshed and US-backed chemical warfare ensued. This bloody episode was followed by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and then two US-led Gulf Wars, in 1990 and 2003. The latest round of the Afghan tragedy began in 2001. Barely a month after the terror attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush ordered a US-led invasion to overthrow the Islamic jihadists that the US had backed previously. His Democratic successor, President Barack Obama, not only continued the war and added more troops, but also ordered the CIA to work with Saudi Arabia to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leading to a vicious Syrian civil war that continues to this day. As if that was not enough, Obama ordered NATO to oust Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, inciting a decade of instability in that country and its neighbors (including Mali, which has been destabilized by inflows of fighters and weapons from Libya). What these cases have in common is not just policy failure. Underlying all of them is the US foreign-policy establishment’s belief that the solution to every political challenge is military intervention or CIA-backed destabilization.   That belief speaks to the US foreign-policy elite’s utter disregard of other countries’ desire to escape grinding poverty. Most US military and CIA interventions have occurred in countries that are struggling to overcome severe economic deprivation. Yet instead of alleviating suffering and winning public support, the US typically blows up the small amount of infrastructure the country possesses, while causing the educated professionals to flee for their lives. Even a cursory look at America’s spending in Afghanistan reveals the stupidity of its policy there. According to a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US invested roughly $946 billion between 2001 and 2021. Yet almost $1 trillion in outlays won the US few hearts and minds. Here’s why. Of that $946 billion, fully $816 billion, or 86%, went to military outlays for US troops. And the Afghan people saw little of the remaining $130 billion, with $83 billion going to the Afghan Security Forces. Another $10 billion or so was spent on drug interdiction operations, while $15 billion was for US agencies operating in Afghanistan. That left a meager $21 billion in “economic support” funding. Yet even much of this spending left little if any development on the ground, because the programs actually “support counterterrorism; bolster national economies; and assist in the development of effective, accessible, and independent legal systems.” In short, less than 2% of the US spending on Afghanistan, and probably far less than 2%, reached the Afghan people in the form of basic infrastructure or poverty-reducing services. The US could have invested in clean water and sanitation, school buildings, clinics, digital connectivity, agricultural equipment and extension, nutrition programs, and many other programs to lift the country from economic deprivation. Instead, it leaves behind a country with a life expectancy of 63 years, a maternal mortality rate of 638 per 100,000 births, and a child stunting rate of 38%. The US should never have intervened militarily in Afghanistan – not in 1979, nor in 2001, and not for the 20 years since. But once there, the US could and should have fostered a more stable and prosperous Afghanistan by investing in maternal health, schools, safe water, nutrition, and the like. Such humane investments – especially financed together with other countries through institutions such as the Asian Development Bank – would have helped to end the bloodshed in Afghanistan, and in other impoverished regions, forestalling future wars.   Yet American leaders go out of their way to emphasize to the American public that we won’t waste money on such trivialities. The sad truth is that the American political class and mass media hold the people of poorer nations in contempt, even as they intervene relentlessly and recklessly in those countries. Of course, much of America’s elite holds America’s own poor in similar contempt. In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, the US mass media is, predictably, blaming the US failure on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption. The lack of American self-awareness is startling. It’s no surprise that after trillions of dollars spent on wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and beyond, the US has nothing to show for its efforts but blood in the sand.   https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/afghanistan-latest-debacle-of-us-foreign-policy-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2021-08 Copyright ©️ 2021 Sonia Sachs, All rights reserved. You are receiving this because you have expressed interest. My mailing address is: Sonia Sachs 61 Claremont Ave New York, NY 10027 Add us to your address book Did you receive this from a friend and want to sign up?  Sign up for future mailings here. View the last 20 articles here. Visit JeffSachs.org for an archive of articles, chapters, books and videos. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

#FreeMovementInAfrica Acc 2 Article 2 of AU FMP, Objective of Protocol is to facilitate implementation of African Economic Community (AEC) by providing 4 progressive implementation of free movement of persons, right of residence & right of establishment in Africa. @AluochObure https://t.co/m8ZheaCHWY

ROBERT MUGABE returned the Land to the original owners , ZIMBAWEANS should be proud of inspite sanctioning frustration from that came from the west . - MUGABE should be eulogized for he stood his grounds compare to SOUTH AFRICA? -AFRICAN REPORT FILES TUE, AUG 10 , 2021 What are your thoughts?

During the Second World War, (a soldier) obtained a leave allowing him to return to his home, and as soon as he reached the street near his house, he saw a parked military truck loaded with corpses and knew that the enemy had bombed his city. The truck was carrying dozens of dead bodies and was preparing to transport them to a mass grave. The soldier stood in front of the piled-up corpses to take his last look at them and noticed that a shoe on a (woman's) foot looked like a shoe he had previously bought for his wife. He went to his house in a hurry to check on her, but he quickly retreated and went back to the truck again to check the body and found his wife!! After his shock, the soldier did not want his wife to be buried in a mass grave, so he asked to be pulled from the truck in preparation for a proper burial. During the transfer, it was found that she was still breathing slowly and with difficulty, so he carried her to the hospital, where the necessary first aid was given to her and she regained life again!! Years after this incident and the end of the war, the wife who was almost buried alive became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named "Vladimir Putin". He is the current president of Russia! Don't give up hope. Things always change. You can be the person to make Nigeria great again #Victor_Unya