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/ 25 February 2007
Once hailed as a ”City in the Sun”, the Kenyan capital is increasingly depicted as reeling under violent crime where crooks with weapons — some only toys but frighteningly realistic — roam with impunity. Police statements in early February said at least 50 civilians and security officials were killed in the space of a month.
Margaret Waigumo cuddles her baby in a squalid house in the teeming "Soweto" slum, east of Nairobi, joining a growing number on the list of Kenya’s teen parents, victims of taboos that inhibit sex education. Waigumo became pregnant two years ago after being forced into prostitution to help her family when they were evicted from their hovel for non-payment of the monthly rent.
Islamist candidate Ahmed Abdalla Sambi won a landslide victory in weekend presidential elections in the coup-plagued Comoro islands, according to provisional results announced on Tuesday. The national election board said Sambi took 58,27% of the vote in Sunday’s polls, which it is hoped will bring stability to the volatile Indian Ocean archipelago.
On the banks of Africa’s largest lake, a deadly cocktail of poverty, prostitution and tribal widow inheritance practices is fuelling a surge in HIV/Aids even as progress is made in other areas. Here in Western Kenya where the water and fish from Lake Victoria are lifelines, communities are struggling against an alarming new rise in HIV/Aids cases that has plunged residents into despair.
With a huge amount of detergent, a young man washes a bus on the shores of Lake Victoria while a woman nearby cleans dishes seemingly oblivious to the chemical contamination. It’s an ordinary day here in Western Kenya where Africa’s largest lake is under siege, its life-sustaining waters and fish increasingly polluted by sewage, industrial waste and chemicals.
A once bountiful lake in Kenya’s parched north-west has turned into a nightmare for local fishermen, forced into deeper waters and hostile zones in search of fish migrating from receding southern shores. Weapons, mainly AK-47 assault rifles, have been added to their usual gear alongside the poles and nets.
Hundreds of thousands of people lured back to southern Sudan have high hopes of peace after a 21-year civil war, but there are warnings of chronic food shortage, poor infrastructure and desolate homelands peppered with landmines. To date, at least 200 000 people have returned to south Sudan in the wake of a peace accord.
Burundi’s new President, Pierre Nkurunziza, was sworn in Bujumbura on Friday as the country’s first elected leader after 12 years of war at a ceremony attended by several other African heads of state. The swearing-in also marked the end of an extended four-year transitional period that ushered in democratic rule in Burundi.