Somalia’s influential parliamentary speaker said on Wednesday he is working to resolve a crisis over the seat of the lawless country’s transitional government and expressed confidence it will not be permanent. Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden said the disagreement is only ”political” and perhaps to be expected.
A boat carrying 102 people capsized in northeastern Nigeria with all passengers feared dead, national media reported on Tuesday. Recent heavy rains have caused flooding and swollen rivers in most parts of the populous West African nation.
The United Nations warned on Tuesday of an explosion of HIV/Aids in lawless Somalia unless steps are taken quickly to stop the spread of the disease and reduce risk factors. The UN’s monthly report said infection rates were relatively low in areas where testing has been done compared to other parts of Africa, but could rise dramatically.
The United States and 11 African nations on Monday formally opened a regional emergency response center in Nairobi, Kenya, to improve East and Central Africa’s capacity to deal with natural disasters and terrorist attacks. It is part of a US-funded series of symposia aimed at helping African countries better respond to crises.
Kenya’s justice minister has admitted his government is losing the fight against corruption and vowed a ”ruthless” anti-graft war in a stark admission of long-standing donor complaints, in remarks published on Wednesday that were a rare acknowledgement of rampant official malfeasance and failing efforts to curb such abuses.
At least three of the four suspects in the July 21 attempted bombings on the London subway and a bus were born in East Africa, where al-Qaeda-linked groups still operate and may be growing in strength, according to a new assessment by counterterrorism experts.
Following a day of deadly riots in the streets of Khartoum sparked by the death in a helicopter crash of former rebel leader John Garang, Sudan on Tuesday was plunged back into uncertainty.
Armed robbers killed a British hotelier and a Kenyan truck driver in a popular tourist area in central Kenya, police said on Wednesday. One of the robbers was also shot and killed. The gang took a watchman hostage late on Tuesday at the luxury Crater Lake Lodge, 90km northeast of Nairobi, and then shot and killed owner John Gordon.
Clan elders in southern Ethiopia have agreed to hand over suspects believed to have taken part in a village massacre in northern Kenya early this month, sparking reprisal attacks that left at least 82 people dead, Kenyan police said on Wednesday. They said Kenyan officials had been negotiating with Ethiopian authorities in a bid to arrest bandits from the Borana clan.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Tuesday launched a countrywide programme to combat malaria, the top killer of pregnant women and children under the age of five in the East African nation. The National Malaria Programme includes distribution of free insecticide-treated nets, treatment and developing strategies to combat the disease.
Civil society groups in Kenya have set their sights on an upcoming referendum in a bid to prevent the government from pushing through an altered version of the country’s draft Constitution. This comes after Parliament approved the amended draft at midnight last Thursday, by a vote of 102 to 61.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Friday insisted a draft Constitution pushed through Parliament by his ruling coalition will improve Kenya, though protesters who clashed with police as lawmakers debated the charter complain it gives him too much power. Lawmakers voted 102 to 61 to approve the draft Constitution.
Condoms are inventions by mzungus (whites) and should therefore be banned, a Kenyan MP said on Thursday. Ramadhan Kajembe, MP for the Changamwe district, said in Parliament that not only are condoms ”mzungu things” but they are also painful to put on.
Kenyan security forces shot and killed 18 cattle raiders from neighbouring Uganda after the rustlers raided a village in northern Kenya, slaying one person, police said on Thursday. Raiders from the Karamojong tribe of Uganda attacked cattle herders from the Turkana of Kenya on Wednesday in the village of Lokiriama, about 735km north of Nairobi.
Kenya has its fair share of South Africans and when one has a craving for boerewors, koeksisters and melktert, one can head straight for Gail’s Kitchen on the outskirts of Nairobi. South African-born Gail Unsworth says she has trained a team of Kenyans to make food ”the South African way”.
At least 23 people were killed and 20 injured when a bus and tractor-trailer collided near Kenya’s southern port of Mombasa, police and hospital officials said on Tuesday. The vehicles, which were travelling in the same direction along the main road from Nairobi to Mombasa, crashed at around 4am.
Rwandan Hutu rebels operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Tuesday denied reports from the United Nations that UN peacekeepers destroyed six of their bases in the eastern DRC last week. ”We are still controlling our positions,” said a spokesperson for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.
At least 22 people were killed and 21 injured when a bus and tractor-trailer collided near Kenya’s southern port of Mombasa, police and hospital officials said on Tuesday. The vehicles, which were travelling in the same direction along the main road from Nairobi to Mombasa, crashed at about 4am local time near the Wangala trading post.
Kenya has launched a massive security operation in the northern region, where a massacre and reprisal attacks have left at least 77 people dead this week, officials said on Friday, as the Red Cross appealed for humanitarian aid for displaced people.
A leading international agricultural policy group on Thursday urged African nations to drop opposition to biotechnology crop research and genetically modified foods, saying such a step could dramatically improve food security on the impoverished continent.
Thousands of villagers in northern Kenya fled their homes in fear on Thursday as new interclan violence wracked parts of the remote region after a brutal massacre and a reprisal attack killed at least 76 people this week, officials and residents of the area said.
New interclan violence wracked parts of remote northern Kenya overnight after a brutal village massacre and reprisal attack killed at least 76 people this week, officials and residents of the region said on Thursday. Members of the rival Borana and Gabra clans continued to clash following Tuesday’s attack, they said.
Kenya’s largest supermarket chain said on Wednesday it has begun using new biodegradable bags in response to growing environmental concerns about pollution by discarded flimsy plastic shopping containers. The chain uses more than 30-million bags every year at a cost of more than R3,4-billion.
Sixty-six people, at least 22 of them children, were killed in a brutal raid on a remote village in northeastern Kenya in what is believed to be the country’s worst single episode of inter-clan violence to date. ”The situation is very sad on the ground, everybody is mourning the dead,” said Bonaya Godana, a former Kenyan foreign minister.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) demanded on Tuesday that the pirates who commandeered a commercial vessel chartered to transport food aid to 28 000 tsunami survivors in Somalia release the ship, its cargo and crew within 48 hours. The <i>MV Semlow</i> was hijacked on June 27.
At least 21 people, many of them children, were killed on Tuesday when armed raiders attacked a rival clan’s village in a long-running dispute over water and pasture in eastern Kenya, residents said. Members of the Borana clan invaded the remote village of Turbi, about 580km north-east of Nairobi, early on Tuesday.
Thousands of Kenyan families have been left homeless following a government decision to evict them, without compensation, from farms allegedly carved out of the Mau forest in Narok district, south-western Kenya. According to the Kenya Red Cross Society, between 20 000 and 30 000 people lost their homes.
Alarmed by the increasingly bitter dispute over the relocation of the Somali transitional government, United Nations chief Kofi Annan is urging a ”serious dialogue” between rival factions to resolve the row that threatens peace hopes for the lawless nation.
Twelve French troops were convicted in a Paris military court of stealing cash last year from an Côte d’Ivoire bank they supposedly were protecting, the Ivorian daily Fraternite reported on Wednesday. The troops stole about 000 dollars from the bank in the rebel- held town of Man in the country’s northwest.
Kenya is evicting thousands of families who illegally occupy a vast swathe of forest in the country’s Rift Valley region, government spokesperson Alfred Mutua said on Friday. ”These forest areas are water catchment areas and the waters from these areas not only feed our country but [also] … trickle through the Maasai Mara to our neighbours”.
Kenyan police on Thursday re-arrested a Muslim man suspected of terrorism links just hours after he was acquitted on murder charges in connection with the 2002 al-Qaeda-linked bombing of an Israeli hotel near the southern port city of Mombasa, his lawyer said. He was arrested as he was about to leave prison.
At least 30 people have died since interclan fighting broke out on Monday in the town of Beletweyne, south-central Somalia. More than 70 people have been wounded and hundreds more displaced in the violence, now in its fourth day, local sources said on Thursday.