Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi announced on Friday in Nairobi the names of 47 ministers who will form his new Cabinet, nearly a month after the country’s Parliament sacked his first team. The ministers and 42 assistant ministers were immediately sworn into office before President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
AU to send peace force to Somalia
The African Union is seeking to act as mediator in the conflict pitting Ugandan government troops and rebels in the north, a spokesperson said on Thursday. President Yoweri Museveni at the weekend ordered the army to resume attacks against the insurgents, after last-minute hitches scuppered a December 31 ceasefire deal.
A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant, male, century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombasa, officials said on Thursday. The hippo, nicknamed Owen, was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean and then forced back to shore when the tsunami struck.
The United Nations is appealing for $13,1-million (about R76-million) to provide urgent relief to 54Â 000 Somalis who lost their homes and livelihoods after last week’s deadly tsunami slammed African shores, a UN spokesperson said on Wednesday. Somalia’s civil war has devastated the country’s physical infrastructure.
As Kenya goes into the new year, the country’s political landscape remains unchanged in at least one key respect: a new Constitution is as elusive as ever. While President Mwai Kibaki came to power in December 2002 promising that a new Constitution would be in place within 100 days, nothing of the sort happened.
A permanent ceasefire agreement signed between the Sudanese government and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) on Friday spells out how a final peace accord between the two parties will be implemented, officials said. SPLM/A spokesperson Yasser Arman said: ”The mood is joyful. It is a historical moment.”
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/ 23 December 2004
The Somali Parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly approved Mohammed Ali Gedi as Prime Minister of the war-shattered Horn of Africa nation, 12 days after it fired him and his government for being in office illegally. ”I thank all MPs for approving me as prime minister,” Gedi said. ”Now, I will form the government after wide consultations with each of you.”
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/ 21 December 2004
With Christmas just a few days away, and news of an extended ceasefire between the government and rebels, the inhabitants of northern Uganda might be expected to be getting into the swing of the festive season. Instead, there is concern that starving fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army will emerge from the bush in a combative mood.
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/ 18 December 2004
A controversial new Kenyan law, passed this month to allow sport hunting and killing of wildlife straying on to private land, has triggered complaints from conservationists, activists and local communities. ”Just a few words of legislation could spell doom for wildlife conservation,” Maasai wildlife activist Godfrey ole Ndopaiya said.
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/ 17 December 2004
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) on Friday appealed for -million to feed about 224 000 refugees who face food shortages in Kenya. ”Less and less food has been reaching refugee families. It will get continually worse unless contributions come forward urgently,” said Tesema Negash, the WFP’s country director in Kenya.
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/ 12 December 2004
Life is anything but easy in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum, which has been labelled one of the biggest and worst on the African continent, with HIV/Aids and unemployment hitting dwellers hard and indiscriminately. But when walking through the slum a little before Christmas, hardly anyone encountered complains.
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/ 9 December 2004
The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice to give this year’s peace prize to an environmentalist was not entirely uncontroversial. The Economist newspaper wrote after the announcement in October that ”Ms Maathai’s work, though admirable, is only distantly related to the prevention of war. There is little evidence that environmental factors cause full-scale wars”.
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/ 2 December 2004
A project to clear landmines along paths used by elephants in a wildlife sanctuary in Angola was launched at a conference on landmines in Nairobi on Thursday. If the mines are cleared, an estimated 120 000 elephants in Botswana, whose numbers are growing at 5% annually, would be able to move north to Angola and Zambia during migratory periods.
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/ 1 December 2004
Among the champions of an international landmine ban attending a major conference in Nairobi this week was a group of former generals from several countries who said on Wednesday that the deadly devices offered a false sense of security and were of little military value. Currently, Russia, Nepal, Georgia and Myanmar are the only governments known to have used landmines since May 2003.
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/ 1 December 2004
Kenya’s high court has blocked a decision by a Kenyan minister to cancel a licence given last month to Econet Wireless International of South Africa to provide the third mobile phone services in the country, a court official said on Wednesday. Justice Mohamed Ibrahim on Tuesday suspended the minister’s order and gave Econet 21 days to file an updated application.
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/ 30 November 2004
A marathon public inquiry into Kenya’s biggest financial scandal was adjourned indefinitely on Tuesday following last week’s high court order to have several people, including retired president Daniel arap Moi, testify before it wraps up business. The chairman of the inquiry, Justice Samuel Bosire, said the inquiry did not have the resources to meet the order of the court,
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/ 25 November 2004
An Irish Catholic priest was found murdered on Thursday at his parish in Ngong, southwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, police and church sources said. ”Last night around midnight, a group of 10 to 20 gangsters armed with crude weapons invaded the residence of Father John Francis Hannon at Upper Matasia in Ngong and murdered him,” a police statement said.
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/ 25 November 2004
A ”summit for a mine-free world” opens this weekend in Nairobi to take stock of progress since the signing five years ago of an international treaty banning the deadly devices, and to chart the road ahead. One-hundred-forty-three countries have ratified the 1997 Ottawa Convention on antipersonnel mines, which bans their use, production, stockpiling and transfer and calls for mined areas to be cleared within 10 years.
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/ 25 November 2004
Climate change is a development issue for Africa, experts warned at a United Nations workshop in Nairobi this week. The developed countries might have created the problem of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but all countries, and especially African countries, were going to have to deal with the consequences, politicians and scientists agreed.
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/ 20 November 2004
United Nations Secretary General Koffi Annan admitted on Friday there is clear evidence that civilian staff and a small number of troops in its peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) committed sexual abuse, saying he is outraged by the incidents. ”This is a shameful thing for the UN to have to say,” Annan said.
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/ 19 November 2004
United Nations Security Council President John Danforth on Friday urged Sudan and its warring rebels to shoulder the responsibility for ending their civil war and bringing peace and prosperity to Africa’s largest country. "We came here not for a ceremony, not for a photo op, but for results," he insisted.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-Africa&ao=125788">Sudan peace pledge at rare UN meeting</a>
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/ 19 November 2004
Human Rights Watch has called on the United Nations Security Council to take action against what it claims are ongoing rights violations in the western Sudanese region of Darfur. The NGO made the appeal in Nairobi this week during the launch of a report on the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur, entitled If We Return, We Will Be Killed.
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/ 18 November 2004
United Nations leaders attending a rare Security Council session in Nairobi, Kenya, won a pledge on Thursday that Sudan’s government and main southern rebel group will reach a deal to end their two-decade war this year. The agreement came after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned the meeting: ”There is no time to waste.”
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/ 17 November 2004
Kenyan police and unknown attackers exchanged gunfire overnight at the Nairobi residence of Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, witnesses inside his house said on Wednesday. ”I don’t know the motive of the attack, no one was hurt and that is all what I can tell you,” said a resident who asked to remain unnamed.
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/ 16 November 2004
Amnesty International on Tuesday urged the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Sudan to try to end a 20-month conflict in the country’s western Darfur region, where the UN estimates about 70Â 000 people have been killed. The Security Council is due to hold a special session on Sudan in Nairobi this week.
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/ 12 November 2004
A Rwandan rebel force based in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday affirmed its readiness to cooperate in any inquiry into alleged rapes in the region. The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda is a mainly Hutu group of fighters, including remnants of those who carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda
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/ 8 November 2004
The trial of three Kenyans charged with plotting the bombing of the United States embassy in Kenya in August 1998, which killed more than 200 people, resumed in the Kenyan capital on Monday after a three-month break. The US embassy in Dar es Salaam, in neighbouring Tanzania, was bombed at nearly the same time, killing 11 people.
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/ 4 November 2004
The president of Somalia’s transitional federal government, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, on Wednesday named Professor Ali Muhammad Gedi as his new prime minister. The appointment was made 10 days ahead of a deadline set by the country’s interim Constitution for the president to name a prime minister.
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/ 1 November 2004
Conflicting reports from the disputed region of Sool, northern Somalia, indicate that at least 100 people were killed on Friday when forces from the self-declared republic of Somaliland clashed with those of the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland. Both sides are accusing the other of initiating the hostilities.
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/ 28 October 2004
A Kenyan street boy emerged 000 richer this week after stumbling across a local radio station’s top treasure-hunt prize while relieving himself in a Nairobi park. Evans Kamande’s first thoughts were for his mother, who works as a house cleaner in Nairobi.
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/ 26 October 2004
A marathon public inquiry into Kenya’s biggest financial scandal was suspended on Tuesday amid a legal row over the ejection of two lawyers representing the state. The suspension was announced on the 282nd day of hearings by Peter le Pelley, one of three judges presiding over the Goldenberg inquiry.
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/ 25 October 2004
A Kenyan man who has married 130 women in 65 years says that ”dictatorship and hard work” is required to make a polygamous family happy and productive. Eighty-five-year-old Ancentus Akuku, also known as ”Danger”, lives in Homa Bay on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya.