Johannesburg
CNN
 — 

The most wanted fugitive in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has been arrested in Paarl, South Africa after decades on the run.

Fulgence Kayishema is accused of orchestrating the killing of more than 2,000 Tutsi refugees – women, men, children and the elderly – at Nyange Catholic Church during the genocide. He has been on the run since 2001.

He was captured Wednesday in a joint operation between the South African authorities and UN investigators.

When he was arrested, Kayishema initially denied his identity, according to a statement from the UN team. But by the end of the evening he told them: “I have been waiting a long time to be arrested.”

Investigators said he used multiple identities and forged documents to evade detection.

“The arrest was the culmination of an intense, thorough and rigorous investigation,” a senior official at the prosecutor’s office involved in the case told CNN.

“Family members and known associates were exhaustively investigated. That ultimately led to identifying the right location to search and finding the critical intelligence that was needed.”

“Fulgence Kayishema was a fugitive for more than 20 years. His arrest ensures that he will finally face justice for his alleged crimes,” said Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz of the United Nations’ International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).

“Genocide is the most serious crime known to humankind. The international community has committed to ensure that its perpetrators will be prosecuted and punished. This arrest is a tangible demonstration that this commitment does not fade and that justice will be done, no matter how long it takes,” Brammertz said.

At the end of the genocide in July 1994, Kayishema fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with his wife, children and brother-in-law. After relocating to other African countries, he moved to South Africa in 1999 and claimed asylum in Cape Town, using a false name.

According to prosecutors, since his arrival in South Africa he was able to rely on a tight support network including former Rwandan military members which went to extreme lengths to conceal his activities and whereabouts.

In recent years, the IRMCT prosecutor has complained about the lack of cooperation from South African authorities and there have been a series of near misses capturing Kayishema. A report describes a failure to arrest Kayishema three years ago.

But on Thursday, Brammertz lauded the cooperation and support of the South African government.

The events in Nyanga, Rwanda, were one of the most brutal of the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed over the period of 90 days.

The tribunal alleges that Kayishema directly participated in the “planning and execution of this massacre.” The indictment says he bought and distributed petrol to burn down the church while refugees were inside. Kayishema and others are also accused of using a bulldozer to collapse the church following the fire, while refugees were still inside.

The former priest at the church, Athanase Seromba, was convicted over the massacre in 2006 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was later increased to a life sentence on appeal.

Kayishema is due to be arraigned on Friday in a Cape Town court.

A reward of up to $5,000,000 was offered by the US War Crimes Rewards Program for information on Kayishema and the other fugitives wanted for perpetrating the Rwandan genocide.

With the arrest of Kayishema, the UN is still seeking three more prominent suspects.

In 2020, another fugitive was captured in a Paris suburb after more than 20 years on the run.

Félicien Kabuga, “one of the world’s most wanted fugitives,” who is alleged to have been a leading figure in the genocide, was arrested in a joint operation with French authorities.

The Rwandan genocide saw Hutu militias and civilians alike murder vast numbers of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority: men, women and children, many of whom had been their neighbors before the conflict began.

The killings finally came to an end 100 days later, when Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops, led by Paul Kagame, defeated the Hutu rebels and took control of the country.

“The fact that I am single was another reason for the bullying with many saying that it was the reason I got the position,” insinuating that she had used sex to get ahead, Nyanjura tells CNN. People will say “I am not responsible because I am not married,” she says. And if they ever saw her with a man, even just standing next to one, “they would want to make it an issue.”

The 33-year-old politician, who was a student activist at Makerere University in Kampala before entering into politics in 2016 and joining the Forum for Democratic change (FDC), one of Uganda’s main opposition parties, says that the harassment she gets on social media and messaging platforms is worse when she advocates for gender equality.

“Many feel advocating for equity and equality is an abuse of culture and religious beliefs. For all my posts advocating for gender equity, I receive abuse or insults,” Nyanjura explains, adding that her advocacy posts on social media usually get lifted and shared across several WhatsApp groups, followed by abuse on all platforms.

Nyanjura goes on: threats of “physical attacks happen when I am planning a demonstration and posting about them on social media … I get threats of being arrested or being carried in a ‘drone’ (a nickname given to the vans that have reportedly been used in arrests of political activists in Uganda). So, I stay away from my home at such times and ask my family members to do the same,” she told CNN.

At first, the abuse made her feel awful, she says, but aware that her abusers want to silence her Nyanjura tells CNN that she’s decided to stand her ground and be a positive example for other women in public life.

“There are so many women who are not on any of these media platforms (but) if I am to go off social media because I have been bullied, what example am I creating for other women that are following me, my posts, my videos and pick encouragement from me?”

One in two Ugandan women in public life targeted

Recent surveys in Uganda have revealed stark numbers highlighting how common it is for women to be targeted online.

“Many of them stopped using the apps and stopped organizing online,” says Irene Mwendwa, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Pollicy.

The report, the second by the IPU, following one in 2018 on European parliaments, found that in comparison “online attacks are also common but lower than in Europe,” attributing the difference to “greater disparities in women’s access to the internet between the two regions.”

When Olive Namazzi decided to go into politics, she believed she would have a rewarding public life. But Namazzi, who, like Nyanjura, is 34 and in the FDC, says she hadn’t realized that stepping into the political arena as a woman — and one with a disability — would kick off a campaign of cyberbullying that would last for more than a decade. 

As part of its commitments, the FDC prioritizes women’s empowerment. In her role overseeing health, education, environment and sports for the Kampala City Council, Namazzi says social media is a vital tool to help make her work in the community visible and to build voter support. But it is also a space she says she must defend herself against a torrent of abuse.

Speaking on why women politicians and public figures experience more cyberbullying than their male colleagues, Namazzi tells CNN: “People find us easy targets. Once you are a woman who is known, you are a likely candidate for bullying.”

An accident in 2013 left her with a limp, for which she wears specially made shoes. For her detractors, this is something to mock. She described an exchange in a WhatsApp group she’s in: “I was trying to reason somebody out intellectually and then somebody (else) came and started abusing me that I put on shoes that are not balancing. He started telling me about how I can’t balance when I am walking,” Namazzi says. “It was below the belt.”

In another WhatsApp group, this time a private group chat with other politicians, Namazzi says remarks were made about the age at which she got married and started a family. “What I find interesting is that sometimes these abuses are from our very colleagues who are educated and whom we expect to understand us,” she says, adding: “This is on a platform of leaders. It was very bad.”

Namazzi and Nyanjura’s experiences are supported by the IPU and APU’s 2021 research, which found that the majority of abuse women parliamentarians face, comes from their male peers, especially those from rival parties. The report also found that women parliamentarians who live with disabilities as well as those who are unmarried, under 40, and from minority groups, suffer more violence. As Nyanjura’s account shows, women MPs who promote women’s rights and gender equality are also targeted, the report found.

Systems Error

A law in place for over a decade

This online abuse of women politicians is happening in a country that has had a cybersecurity law in place for more than a decade.

Uganda’s Computer Misuse Act initially prohibited offensive communication and cyber harassment and was amended in 2022 to add hate speech to the list. The offensive communication part was ruled unconstitutional earlier this year, but cyber harassment is punishable by a fine of “up to seven hundred and fifty currency points” or imprisonment up to seven years, or both.

This “undermines the ability and efficacy (of laws) as tools against cybercrime,” says Eron Kiiza, a human rights lawyer and member of the Uganda Law Society Rule of Law Committee. Kiiza adds that cyber laws are typically “vaguely drafted and prone to legal challenges,” which “brings problems when cases are taken to court.”

Multiple legal and women’s right’s experts told CNN that the challenges with using the law to successfully prosecute online harassment results in women deciding not to report abuses to the relevant authorities.

For Namazzi, the police are of no help, she says. “Authorities do not consider online bullying to be as serious as physical bullying and therefore do not treat it with the severity that it needs,” she tells CNN.

CNN reached out the Uganda Police Force and the Justice Ministry for comment, but they did not respond.

Experts and activists in the country say that better-targeted protections are needed to ensure women stay vocal and visible in Ugandan politics and feel confident sharing their work and views as much as men in the same positions of power.

“We really need the women’s voice to change the way that economies and politics and social policies are made,” says Brigitte Filion, gender equality programme officer for the Inter-Parliamentary Union. “When there are women in parliaments, there is also more laws and policies on issues like violence against women and gender-related issues… It will be a very big loss for society in general if women are not involved equally in politics,” she says.

Learning how to respond to abuse

With laws failing to protect women, civil society organizations like Pollicy have spent years creating national and regional programs to help women protect themselves online.

“Less than a quarter of African national parliamentarians and local government are women,” explains Pollicy’s Mwendwa. “Digital upskilling will enable women politicians to scale up their work, their careers (and) their communities.”

People “weave through the maze of threats which are presented with lessons on how to navigate such threats in real life,” Mwendwa explains.

The game helped Namazzi learn how to respond to her bullies. “It taught me when to ignore and how to block bullies. It guided me on how to report bullying to the platforms where it was happening,” she tells CNN.

Pollicy also runs training events for women policymakers. In February, Mwendwa says 90 women from Uganda, Tanzania and Senegal came together as part of the Vote: Women program. Here, participants were able to share personal experiences as well as get training in digital resilience, combatting online violence and harassment, and engaging safely in public debate. Both Nyanjura and Namazzi attended the event.

“Rather than cower to the bullies, I have chosen to stay on”

Multiple organizations are working with Uganda’s beleaguered women politicians to achieve what they say the laws in place are failing to accomplish, including the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), an NGO that promotes the use of technology among women, girls and women’s rights organizations, formerly run by Peace Oliver Amuge as Executive Director.

WOUGNET, now active for more than 20 years, works with women leaders to not just address their own experiences of abuse but also to better legislate on these issues. Amuge points out that while the hate speech amendment does mention gender, Uganda’s Computer Misuse Act does not specifically cover online gender-based violence, which they are advocating for.

She agrees that online engagement can be an effective tool in politics, but warns that many women are avoiding online platforms for fear of abuse. But Nyanjura and Namazzi are determined to stay engaged and to stay in politics, despite the costs.

“I almost ran mad engaging a bully for two days nonstop,” says Namazzi. “But I was determined to be a politician against the odds of any kind of intimidation…Rather than cower to the bullying, I have chosen to stay on and attack them right back.”

“I want to tell (other women) when you stand up, (harassers) will eventually leave you alone,” says Nyanjura before adding: “If women do not embrace the digital world, they are definitely going to be left behind.”

The Ugandan Ministry of Information and Communication Technology did not respond to any of CNN’s multiple requests for comment.

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Credits

Reporting: Adie Vanessa Offiong

Editors: Meera Senthilingam, Eliza Anyangwe

Photography: Esther Ruth Mbabazi

Photo Editor: Will Lanzoni

CNN
 — 

A fashion show that features elderly people as models is a rarity. One with elderly Black African models is even rarer.

Perhaps that’s why Nigerian visual artist Malik Afegbua got so much attention from around the world when he posted images on social media last month showing seniors on a fashion runway, draped in stylish, colorful clothes.

Titled “The Elders Series,” the images challenge stereotypes around how older people are perceived, as well as foregrounding African faces and bodies, which have often been at the periphery of the fashion world.

“The inspiration behind (this series) was my mum,” explained Afegbua, 38. “She had a stroke, and I am very close to my mum. I just needed an outlet to find a way to express myself and not think about her on a life-support machine. I wanted to think about her in a happy place.”

But what’s truly remarkable about the images is that the ground-breaking fashion show never actually took place. While the images look like photographs of a genuine event, they were entirely generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Twelve years ago, Afegbua was an amateur photographer and visual artist when he received a Canon camera as a gift. He says it gave him the opportunity to start producing videos, and as a self-taught filmmaker he has gone on to create numerous movies and corporate videos. He produced series two and three of Netflix show “Made By Design,” as well as a biopic docudrama on Nigerian designer Nike Davies-Okundaye.

“The Elders Series” is an extension of other projects that Afegbua has created through AI. He uses the AI platform Midjourney, which generates images in response to text prompts. Afegbua says he experiments with different phrases, refining his search terms until he gets an image he likes, and then edits it in Photoshop – repeating the process until he achieves the effect he’s looking for.

“When it comes to AI, you put in a text prompt, it gives you something random – you keep going to different depths until you find what you want,” he said.

There has been much controversy over racial and gender bias in AI. Facial recognition technology can be less accurate for Black skin than White, and AI systems to spot skin cancer have been found to be trained predominantly on White skin. It’s also been noted that AI art platforms can produce pictures that reflect the cultural biases of images found on the internet.

Afegbua said that until his mother’s stroke, he had only worked experimentally with images of Black people on AI platforms, but he found that the images they produced were “mangled up and not very good.”

He noticed that the images produced of Black Americans were different than those of Black Africans. “When you put ‘African’ they look less dapper and in a less nice environment,” Afegbua explained.

Through repeated searches using variations of his text prompts, he says he was able to train the AI and improve the images it produced of Black people. “Now anyone can go into the AI and put ‘a Black man in a fashion show’ and you are going to get something like what I did, because it’s now in the system,” he said. “Because I’ve done it, the system now has that data.”

Afegbua believes AI can be a powerful tool for the arts – film and television in particular. “It’s here to stay … it’s going to evolve and it’s going to get better,” he said. But he says the role of a human creator is still key. “AI is not All. It can’t think by itself, there is always a human being behind it regardless – to put things in motion,” he added.

His other AI projects include creating a virtual futuristic city called “Ngochola,” populated by people who are heroic, beautiful and African. Afegbua says he wanted the city to reflect ancient African civilizations, and “the power that technology would play in that society” if it weren’t for colonialism. But it is “The Elders Series” that has got him the most attention.

Afegbua says that since he shared the images he has been invited to exhibit his work at galleries in the US, France and Brazil, and has signed a deal to work on a Hollywood movie. But perhaps more rewarding is the recognition he’s received for presenting older people in a positive light.

“I’ve had many associations that have to do with the elderly contact me asking how we can collaborate,” he said, adding that the World Health Organization had been in touch to tell him that it views his work as “a major, positive contributor in the global effort by the WHO/UN’s Decade of Healthy Ageing in combatting ageism.”

“I didn’t think it was going to resonate with the world like that,” Afegbua said. “I am glad that people are starting to have that conversation.”

CNN
 — 

Although Nigeria has vast energy reserves, more than 92 million people in the country live without access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Those who are connected to the electricity grid have to contend with frequent power cuts, which cost the country $28 billion a year – almost 2% of its GDP.

As a result, many Nigerians rely on petrol and diesel to fuel the generators that power their homes and businesses.

But generators are noisy, expensive, and pollute the air. Fuel shortages were a key issue in Nigeria’s recent presidential election and have made it increasingly difficult to run generators.

Entrepreneur Olugbenga Olubanjo is offering an alternative. His company Reeddi rents out small, lightweight solar-powered batteries called “Reeddi Capsules” that can power devices including TVs, laptops and refrigerators.

Reeddi was one of the finalists for Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, which recognizes ambitious efforts to fix environmental problems. In a podcast, the Prince of Wales said that “the capsule will have a huge influence on communities where energy poverty is a big deal.”

Olubanjo grew up in Nigeria and says that during his time studying engineering at the University of Ibadan, he often had to work on his assignments while contending with power cuts. As a postgraduate, he studied at the University of Toronto, in Canada. “For the first time in my life, I had access to electricity, and I saw my own productivity quadruple,” Olubanjo said.

Often, when calling family and friends back home, their power would go off, highlighting the energy inequality. “As I had a deep understanding of the community, I felt obliged to do something,” he said.

Reeddi Capsules can be bought along with a solar panel for 199,000 Nigerian Naira (around $430) or rented from “mom-and-pop shops” for 24 hours for around 50 cents, charged using solar panels operated by Reeddi. Olubanjo says one battery can power a TV for around five hours, or a 15-watt fan for 15 hours.

That makes it considerably more expensive than using mains electricity, but it’s often cheaper than running a generator.

Joel Jewell, a trader in Ogun State, says he uses the capsule most days to charge his laptop and phone. Without it, he is forced to rely on his generator during the regular power cuts. “We sometimes don’t (even) get two hours of power supply,” he said. “And Reeddi coming is a kind of an answer to prayer.”

Currently, the batteries are only available in Nigeria, where Olubanjo says they are used by more than 1,600 people, mainly in Lagos and Ogun State. But across the continent, more than 600 million people lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Olubanjo says organizations in countries including Uganda, Ghana and South Africa have expressed an interest in the Reeddi Capsule. “We’re going to try our best to optimize what we have in Nigeria before we scale it to that broader part of Africa,” he said.

Reeddi is not the only company offering battery packs as an alternative to generators. UK-based Mobile Power rents out batteries in countries including Nigeria, Zambia and Ghana.

Anita Otubu, a senior director of Sustainable Energy for All – a UN-affiliated organization that works to improve access to energy – says “companies like Reeddi are key contributors to reducing Nigeria’s access deficit.”

But she adds that if Reeddi is to scale up its business, it will need to make the battery rentals cheaper “or increase the capacity of each system, to enable Nigerians to have value for money when they purchase such systems.”

For Olubanjo, the company’s biggest challenge is keeping up with demand, with each batch of batteries taking three to four months to produce. But he is confident Reeddi can have a wider impact.

“The goal is to make the future (brighter) for a lot of Nigerians and Africans,” he said.