Food aid to feed millions at risk of rotting in Yemen: UN

FOOD aid in a warehouse on the front lines of Yemen’s war is at risk of rotting, leaving millions of Yemenis without access to life-saving sustenance, the UN said yesterday.

The Red Sea Mills silos, located in the western port city of Hodeidah, are believed to contain enough grain to feed several million people. But the granary has remained off-limits to aid organisations for months.

“The World Food Programme grain stored in the mills — enough to feed 3.7 million people for a month — has been inaccessible for over five months and is at risk of rotting,” said a joint statement by the UN aid chief and special envoy for Yemen.

“We emphasise that ensuring access to the mills is a shared responsibility among the parties to the conflict in Yemen.”

Hodeidah, and its food silos, have been in the hands of Yemen’s Houthi rebels since 2014, when the armed group staged a takeover of large swaths of Yemen’s territory.

The move prompted the military intervention of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and allies the following year on behalf of the embattled government, triggering what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

More than 10 million Yemenis are on the brink of starvation.

UN Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths, who in December secured a ceasefire agreement for Hodeidah, and UN aid chief Mark Lowcock on Monday said the rebels had made “efforts to re-open the road leading to the mills”.

Lowcock issued a public plea to the Houthis last week to allow relief groups to cross the front lines to reach the Red Sea Mills, warning the remaining grain could spoil.

The Yemen war that began in 2014 has killed about 10 000 people since 2015, according to the World Health Organisation. Other monitor groups estimate the death toll is significantly higher.

As many as 85 000 children in Yemen may have starved to death over the past three years, the charity Save the Children estimated.

The war has been at a stalemate for years, with the Saudi-UAE coalition and Yemeni forces unable to dislodge the Houthi movement that controls the capital city Sanaa and most urban centres.—Al Jazeera. LAGOS, NIGERIA — Two Nigerian electoral commission offices housing voting materials were burned down within the space of a week — just a few days before the country’s presidential election, the nation’s electoral body said Sunday.

Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Electoral Commission said more than 10 000 permanent voters’ cards and 755 ballot boxes were destroyed in two fire incidents in Abia and Plateau states last week.

The INEC did not say who was responsible for the fires, but it said it had notified the Acting Inspector General of Police on the “emerging trend of burning the electoral commissions’ offices” days before the February 16 vote.

Elections will go as ahead as scheduled in the affected states, the commission said, adding that it had made arrangements to print new voter cards to replace those destroyed in the fire.

“The Commission wishes to assure Nigerians that it will not succumb to the antics of an arsonist whose motive might create fear in the minds of voters and sabotage the conduct of the 2019 general elections,” said INEC spokesman Festus Okoye.

Nigeria is in the middle of a major campaign season leading up to the presidential polls on Saturday and general elections later this month.

The lead-up to the elections has been marked by violence, prompting warnings from the UK and US governments to say they would deny visas and likely prosecute those found inciting violence during the February 16 vote.

On Sunday, President Muhammadu Buhari alleged that corrupt politicians planned to use laundered funds to buy voters during the elections.

“The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has raised concerns over laundered money being funnelled into vote buying,” Buhari said in a post on Facebook.

Buhari, 76, is standing for re-election, and will be running against 71 other presidential candidates for the country’s highest office. His main challenger is Atiku Abubakar, 72, a business tycoon and former vice president.

Meanwhile, the suspension of Nigeria’s most senior judge by President Muhammadu Buhari broke international human rights standards on independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers, a UN expert said on Monday.

Buhari, who was a military ruler in the 1980s and was voted into office in 2015, is hoping to win a new term in a presidential election scheduled to take place on Saturday.

The chief justice could preside over any dispute over the election result. Nigeria’s judiciary has helped resolve electoral disputes in past votes, some of which have been marred by violence and vote rigging.

“International human rights standards provide that judges may be dismissed only on serious grounds of misconduct or incompetence,” said Diego GarciaSayan, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.

“Any decision to suspend or remove a judge from office should be fair and should be taken by an independent authority such as a judicial council or a court,” he said in a statement.—CNN/Reuters.