AN Islamic court in Kebbi State, northern Nigeria, has sentenced a teenager to the amputation of one of his hands for stealing 32_000 naira (about $286) from a businessman, media organisations reported. Should the sentence be carried out, 15-year-old Abubakar Aliyu would become the first person in Kebbi to suffer amputation for theft since the […]

FIRST results from Sunday’s presidential elections on the African islands of Sao Tome and Principe pointed to a likely run-off between the two top candidates, electoral officials said. Businessman Fradique de Menezes, a former foreign minister, appeared to have an edge over Manuel Pinto da Costa, who ruled the former Portuguese colony as a Marxist […]

FIFTY-FIVE Guineans who had been abducted by Sierra Leonean rebels have arrived home with accounts of death, rape and forced labour, state television in the West African country said on Sunday. The television showed pictures of the 55 dishevelled civilians, more than a third of them children, who had been released by the Revolutionary United […]

D’ARCY DORAN, Lagos | Monday MTN will launch its GSM network in Nigeria for billed subscribers on August 8, while pre-paid subscribers will be able to join the network around August 25, company executives said on Friday. ”We really do mean business and we are ready to launch,” Brian Gouldie, chief operating officer of MTN, […]

GRIFFIN SHEA, Harare | Sunday ZIMBABWEAN police on Sunday detained for more than two hours the opposition candidate in a fiercely contested by-election, marred by widespread violence during months of campaigning. The vote to replace the late MP and minister Border Gezi, who was a close aide of President Robert Mugabe, is widely considered a […]

THE Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said in its latest country outlook for Zimbabwe on Tuesday that the country’s GDP was estimated to have contracted by 6% in 2000 and was forecast to contract by 5,6% in 2001. Initially the main factor behind the slowdown was the overvalued exchange rate, which caused foreign currency shortages, made […]

THREE women have been raped and hacked to death with an axe in their house in Walmer township near Port Elizabeth in South Africa, reports said on Saturday. Their bodies were found early Saturday after a woman who lives nearby noticed blood on their doorstep and called for help, SABC public television news reported. “I […]

DAVID LE PAGE, Johannesburg | Sunday ACCORDING to the Sunday Times, the Pan Africanist Congress and the police are trying to find out what Daniel Ngwenya did with the R25 a head contributions he took from landless people, precipitating the recent Bredell land invasion. The invasion hammered both the rand and PAC credibility. The Scorpions […]