Thousands of elephants in Central Africa are killed each year to cater to world consumer demand for ivory, much of which passes through the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, wildlife trade expert Edmond Martin said on Monday in Nairobi. Martin said Khartoum now holds one of the world’s largest markets for illegal ivory.
At least 20 magistrates on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast went on strike on Monday to demand a 1 000% pay hike as the Kenyan justice ministry warned that court officers not reporting for duty will be fired. ”The strike is historic,” said Justus Munyithya, chairperson of the coastal branch of the Law Society of Kenya.
Action by Churches Together appealed this week for more than ,2-million to fund projects aimed at alleviating food and water shortages in Eritrea, caused by four years of drought. Scarce rainfall has resulted in another poor harvest, and food reserves have been depleted and the coping mechanisms of the population are stretched to the limit, said a statement.
As the citizens of the Central African Republic go to the polls to choose a new president and parliament this weekend, experts differ on whether it is a step toward true democracy. The landlocked nation has had a violent and troubled past. Since independence from colonial master France in 1960, it has been continuously rocked by political instability.
Somalia’s new environment minister asked the United Nations on Wednesday to investigate possible hazardous waste that was washed ashore by last year’s tsunami. The waste may be causing illnesses among local people. The minister said strange objects washed ashore all along his country’s coastline when the tsunami struck on December 26 last year.
Talks to boost chances for the conclusion of a global trade pact in 2006 turned to the thorny issue of agriculture in Ukunda, Kenya, on Friday with a landmark World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling against United States cotton subsidies weighing heavily in discussions.
Toxic waste washed on to Somalia’s coastline by last December’s tsumani have spawned diseases bearing symptoms of radioactive exposure in villagers along the shorelines of the shattered African nation, the United Nations Environment Programme said on Friday.
Togo’s electoral commission has set April 24 as the date for presidential elections, news reports said on Friday. The way for elections was cleared when Faure Gnassingbe stepped down as president last weekend after heavy international pressure.
Trade ministers from 33 countries on Thursday began crafting a ”rough” plan to conclude talks to liberalise global commerce further by 2006, paying particular attention to the interests of poorer countries, officials said. ”We want the Doha round [of trade talks] to be completed successfully next year,” Kenyan Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi said.
Police in Kenya arrested 53 anti-globalisation demonstrators on Thursday, keeping them from reaching the venue of a meeting of trade ministers from 30 countries discussing further efforts to liberalise global commerce, officials said on Thursday. The meeting will discuss a framework accord on future trade rules.
An Australian tourist has been killed by a hippopotamus at a popular resort in central Kenya, police said on Tuesday. Simon Kiragu, the regional police chief, identified the victim as 50-year-old Vicky Elizabeth Bartlett. She was with a group of 12 tourists at Lake Naivasha on Monday night when the hippo attacked, Kiragu said.
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/ 26 February 2005
Plans by Kenyan MPs to award themselves a R111 000 bonus have outraged a country already reeling from a string of corruption allegations. A parliamentary committee has recommended that each of the 222 MPs should receive 1,5-million Kenyan shillings when the Parliament ends in 2007. The committee has also recommended new constituency offices.
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/ 25 February 2005
Concern is mounting over Ethiopia’s flagship ”safety net” policy set up to end dependency on aid for five million people, the United Nations said. Paul Herbert, head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the needy have still not received any food or cash under the scheme.
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/ 24 February 2005
The African Union’s Peace and Security Council is to meet to consider further sanctions against the government of Togo, where the military installed Faure Gnassingbe as president to replace his late father. His accession has been deemed a power grab by much of the international community, further isolating the West African state.
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/ 24 February 2005
Somalia’s exiled president and prime minister left Kenya on Thursday on their first visits home since taking the helm of the country’s transitional government last year, officials said. President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Gedi left the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in separate planes.
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/ 23 February 2005
Somali Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Gedi has postponed a planned fact-finding trip to Somalia this week due to transport hitches, the lawless country’s exiled transitional government said on Wednesday. Gedi had been due to embark on Wednesday on his first trip to Somalia since becoming premier last year.
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/ 23 February 2005
Toxic waste has washed up on Somalia’s shores almost two months after the devastating tsunami that struck countries bordering the Indian Ocean, according to a study by the United Nations Environment Programme presented on Tuesday in Nairobi.
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/ 18 February 2005
”Well, he’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t,” says leading Kenyan lawyer Albert Mumma of the dilemma that may shortly face President Mwai Kibaki: whether to prosecute former head of state Daniel arap Moi in connection with the Goldenberg scandal. For the past two years, a commission has probed the dealings of the company at the heart of this corruption scam.
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/ 18 February 2005
Somalia’s government-in-exile has begun its return to its volatile country by sending teams to the southern part of the country, the prime minister said on Thursday. Government officials had said they would start relocating on Monday — but such promises have been made and broken before.
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/ 16 February 2005
Kenyan police on Wednesday fired tear gas to break up a crowd of several hundred protesting market vendors who had blockaded a government building in central Nairobi, witnesses said. At least two dozen police in riot gear launched tear gas into the demonstrators.
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/ 16 February 2005
At least 40 members of Somalia’s interim government left Kenya on Wednesday for various regions of Somalia to explain the new government’s policies to the public, an official in Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi’s office said. The trip is the latest indicator that momentum is building up for the Kenya-based Somali government to return home.
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/ 16 February 2005
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, faced with blistering criticism for not doing enough to fight rampant government corruption, on Wednesday renewed pledges to battle graft vigorously and in a transparent manner. ”We want everything known because there should be nothing secretive in the way we manage government affairs,” Kibaki said.
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/ 15 February 2005
If Kenya is to reach the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters in the next decade, officials may have to call a halt to the work of traditional birth attendants. The risks of allowing them to ply their trade unhindered, says Kenya’s Department of Health, are simply too great.
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/ 15 February 2005
The Cabinet reshuffle by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki in response to a recent outcry over corruption is ”completely unsatisfactory”, the countrys leading anti-graft watchdog said on Tuesday. ”It makes a mockery of Kenyans concerns [over corruption],” said Gladwell Otieno, head of the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International.
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/ 14 February 2005
African Union officials will fly into Somalia on Monday to assess security ahead of the deployment of African troops to help restore an administration after 14 years of chaos. The trip had been scheduled to leave on Friday, but was delayed amid security fears after the slaying of a BBC journalist in Mogadishu last Wednesday.
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/ 11 February 2005
Stung by intense criticism over new corruption allegations, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Thursday ordered anti-graft officials to examine a cancelled suspect passport deal with a French firm. Faced with mounting concerns over his government’s commitment to fighting corruption, Kibaki has forwarded the contract to an anti-graft panel.
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/ 10 February 2005
An inquiry into Kenya’s biggest financial scandal to date ended in Nairobi on Thursday after nearly 300 days of hearings into how the country was defrauded of hundreds, or even thousands, of millions of dollars. The hearings ended amid a firestorm of international criticism lobbed at the Kenyan government.
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/ 9 February 2005
Kenya is taking seriously the political message behind the United States move to suspend ,5-million in funding for anti-corruption work in the country, Minister of Justice Kiraitu Murungi said on Wednesday. The suspension came one day after Kenyan presidential anti-corruption adviser John Githongo resigned.
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/ 7 February 2005
Kenyan anti-graft chief John Githongo on Monday resigned amid complaints from donors that the government is not doing enough to stamp out corruption. His resignation comes less than a week after the British High Commissioner to Kenya, Edward Clay, mounted a renewed attack on what he called major corruption in Kenya.
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/ 5 February 2005
She is proud of being African, though she prefers to wear her hair straight. She is just as interested in having a career as a Western woman, though perhaps more coy about sex. That, at least, is how the first Kenyan edition of Cosmopolitan sees its target audience. What is absent from the magazine says as much as its content.
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/ 4 February 2005
Margaret Ashira, sitting in a tin-roofed shack in Africa’s largest slum, owes her survival to private charity groups who donate treatment. She believes her own government could do more to help her and other people living with Aids if it weren’t haemorrhaging money to pay the interest on its huge foreign debt.
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/ 28 January 2005
Hundreds of Kenyans fled their homes and farms in the western district of Trans Nzoia on Friday, one day after Pokot herdsmen attacked a farm owned by a Luhya tribesman in a simmering two-month-old tribal dispute over scarce pasture and water. Police and army reinforcements arrived in the area on Friday to prevent further attacks.