Kenya Airways has lost contact with a commercial airliner carrying more than 100 passengers that took off from Cameroon early on Saturday, the airline said. ”The last message was received in Douala after take-off and thereafter the tower was unable to contact the plane,” Kenya Airways CEO Titus Naikuni said on Saturday.
A senior United States diplomat arrived in Chad’s capital on Monday to meet with officials about a dispute between the government and the World Bank over how the country uses oil royalties — a dispute that has the government threatening to shut off oil supplies by the week’s end.
African Union officials travelled to Chad on Friday to study the situation eight days after a rebel attack on the capital was repulsed. The AU civilian and military officers will stay in Chad for a week to gather information for a report to the AU’s Peace and Security Council ”for the appropriate follow-up”, according to a statement released late on Thursday.
In just under 30 months, Chad has become a typical oil-producing, African country, with allegations of rampant corruption, an ongoing fight with the World Bank and a burgeoning rebellion along the eastern border while the population remains dirt poor. Chad was praised by many as having a model oil programme when the Central African country began exporting oil in October 2003.
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/ 17 November 2005
The pirates audacious enough to raid an oil tanker off Iraq — where the United States military patrols — were anything but the stuff of romance and legend. The three boarded armed with machine guns and knives, according to a recent report by a shipping industry agency that tracks piracy.
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/ 8 November 2005
Science institutions in Africa must do more to ensure their research is put to practical use against agricultural, health and other problems, and governments must invest more in research if they want to develop, officials said. Mohamed Hassan, president of the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences, said such institutions too often do little more than bestow honours on their members.
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/ 14 October 2005
Kenya and Uganda will hand over the management of their railway companies to a private investor when a winning bid for the 25-year contract is announced on Friday, a Kenya Railways spokesperson said. A consortium led by an Indian company, Rail India Technical and Economical Services, is competing for the bid against a consortium led by a South African company, Sheltam Trade Close Corporation.
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/ 16 September 2005
A lion calls to others in booming, short moans during a night’s downpour. Just after dawn, a group of rhinos forages for the day’s first meal. Meru National Park, has only recently begun seeing such scenes again after decades of poaching obliterated its rhino population and scared away most other animals.
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/ 12 September 2005
Everyone wants a piece of Kenya’s national parks: the Somali herdsman in search of pasture for his cattle; the villager hunting antelope; the Tanzanian entrepreneur seeking a rare plant. And, of course, ivory poachers. Park managers say they can’t deal effectively with these problems because of insufficient funding, staff and equipment.
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/ 9 September 2005
A new strain of a wheat fungal disease that has emerged in East Africa may spread if steps are not taken to develop resistant wheat, researchers said on Thursday. As much as 10% of the world’s wheat crops, with an estimated value of -billion, could fail if the disease is not tackled, said Masa Iwanaga, the director general of
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre.