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Democratic Republic of Congo’s prime minister on Monday proposed government spending of 20.73 trillion Congolese francs ($9.94 billion dollars) in 2022, a 41.8% increase over this year’s budget.

Prime Minister Sama Lukonde Kyenge told parliament the increase would be made possible by strong economic growth, improved revenue collection and higher donor funding.

Despite the continuing impact of COVID-19, Congo’s public finances have improved significantly this year due to high production of chief exports copper and cobalt, lending from donors and government efforts to boost tax collection.

By the end of August, foreign exchange reserves reached $3.3billion, or 13.5 weeks of imports, up from $710.3 million when Lukonde’s government was sworn in in April. By the end of October Congo had already exceeded forecast revenues for the whole of 2021.

“This performance allows us to hope that with greater effort mobilizing revenues… the country can reach even higher budgets, fulfilling its potential,” Lukonde said.

He said the government would further increase tax revenues by digitising customs and other tax reporting, identifying mining companies no longer entitled to certain tax breaks, and expanding the tax base from telecommunications services.

Previous Congolese governments have struggled to live up to promises to meaningfully expand public revenues and typically end up spending only about half of what their budgets call for.

The current government has benefited from extensive donor assistance, including from the International Monetary Fund, which resumed lending to Congo in 2019 seven years after the IMF suspended its last lending programme.

In July, the IMF agreed a three-year, $1.52 billion extended credit facility with President Felix Tshisekedi’s government to support economic reforms and pandemic recovery.

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Nigeria will start a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign later this week, aiming to inoculate half of its targeted population by the end of January, government officials said.

Africa’s most-populous country has a goal to vaccinate 111 million people to reach herd immunity.

Under the initiative to start on Friday, 55 million doses or more than a million a day will be administered.

The country has to date vaccinated only 2.9% of those eligible to get vaccines.

The plan will see vaccine sites set up at private health facilities, universities, colleges, stadiums, motor parks and shopping malls among other venues.

Boss Mustapha, head of the presidential steering committee on COVID-19, said the government “has enough vaccines in the pipeline to vaccinate about 50% of the target population by the end of January 2022.”

He also said the government was making efforts to secure booster shots “so as to build a healthy level of antibodies.”

He did not provide details.

Faisal Shuaib, executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, said Nigeria received about 5 million AstraZeneca shots last month from the COVAX global-sharing facility, both purchases and donations.

Nigeria also had commitments for 11.99 million and 12.2 million doses of Pfizer Inc/BioNTech and Moderna Inc COVID-19 vaccines, respectively, he said.

The government has purchased nearly 40 million Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses, which would be coming in batches, said Shuaib.

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An attack by insurgents killed 19 Burkina Faso military police and a civilian on Sunday in the tri-border northern region where the West African nation is battling militants, Security Minister Maxime Kone said.

Kone said the toll was provisional. “This morning a detachment of the gendarmerie suffered a cowardly and barbaric attack. They held their position,” Kone said on national television, adding that 22 survivors had been found.

The attack on a military police outpost near a gold mine in Inata came two days after another attack in which seven police were killed in the area near Niger and Mali.

Militant groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State are active in the tri-border area where several nations including France, Chad, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have deployed hundreds of troops.

Two Burkina Faso security sources and a diplomatic source told Reuters earlier on Sunday that at least 30 military police were killed in the attack and the toll could be higher, making it one of the deadliest attacks on Burkina Faso troops.

Burkina Faso’s armed forces confirmed the Sunday attack in a statement saying “a gendarmerie detachment was the subject of a terrorist attack”. It did not provide further details.

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