There is a growing danger of a coup by military hardliners in Zimbabwe to prevent opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from toppling President Robert Mugabe, a leading think tank said on Wednesday. The International Crisis Group called for African mediation leading to a national unity government led by Tsvangirai as the best way to resolve the crisis.
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/ 17 February 2008
United States President George Bush on Sunday met Tanzania’s leader to discuss Africa’s political crises before signing a nearly -million grant to help stimulate economic growth. On the second stop of a five-nation trip where he has received a warm welcome, Bush will spend the day discussing projects to fight HIV/Aids and malaria.
Up to 1 000 people may have died in more than a week of riots and post-election violence in Kenya, opposition leader Raila Odinga said on Monday. The head of the African Union, Ghanaian President John Kufuor, is due to land in Nairobi on Tuesday. Odinga said Kufuor could begin chairing talks on Wednesday.
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/ 15 December 2007
Crops rot in the fields, farms and schools are abandoned, the black hulks of burned houses dot the landscape. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and many women raped. On a dirt road climbing up through green countryside, a heavily armed patrol of police troops stares nervously into the thick bush, wary of a militia ambush.
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/ 23 November 2007
The 53-nation Commonwealth suspended Pakistan’s membership on Thursday, after President Pervez Musharraf failed to meet a deadline to lift emergency rule and resign as army chief. The Commonwealth had given Musharraf until Thursday to lift the state of emergency he imposed on November 3.
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/ 24 September 2007
Once known as East Africa’s green ”City in the Sun”, Nairobi is so choked with traffic that Kenya’s architects suggest moving to a new capital and angry business leaders say the booming economy is under threat. A combination of bad drivers, ramshackle vehicles, overloaded trucks, potholed roads and corrupt traffic police make one of Africa’s biggest cities resemble the dodgems on a good day.
Entering Nairobi’s fetid slums the senses are first assaulted by a gagging stench and the sight of rubbish everywhere, some even hanging from trees or smouldering in acrid fires. The city government does not recognise the ”informal settlements” where more than 60% of the population live, so no services are provided and no garbage collected.
An African summit overran on Tuesday as the leaders struggled to avoid a damaging public split over moves to unite the continent under one federal government. The three-day meeting was one day longer than other recent summits and had only one agenda item, the campaign for a United States of Africa.
African leaders argued fiercely on Monday over whether to rapidly create a single state stretching from the Cape to Cairo, with one small group threatening to break away. Delegates said the atmosphere in an African Union summit was charged as a group of states led by Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade argued with a more gradualist majority led by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.
Nigeria’s election was a failure and must be rerun, local observers said on Sunday, but the government said coup plotters were trying to discredit the poll. The vote on Saturday in Africa’s most populous nation was marred by violence, fraud and intimidation. First results on Sunday indicated continued dominance by the ruling People’s Democratic Party.