NIGERIA’S President Olusegun Obasanjo has mediated in a spat between the country’s two main bourses over which has the right to call itself the country’s leading exchange. Officials of Nigeria’s first bourse, established in Lagos in 1961, were suspended in May by the regulatory agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), over their refusal to […]
ANOTHER endangered mountain gorilla died in a crossfire in the forested Virunga volcanoes which straddle the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and eastern DRC, a statement from the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) said. AWF quoted the director of the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP), Annette Lanjouw, as saying that Rugendo [the dead gorilla], was shot dead […]
A YOUNG male lion that escaped from the Kruger National Park two weeks ago is still on the prowl in forests surrounding the small holiday town of White River in Mpumalanga. Mpumalanga Parks Board spokesman Gary Sutter said on Monday the renegade lion had dodged baited traps and ranger patrols but was believed to still […]
ALGERIANS who served with the French army during the Algerian civil war are planning to charge France with crimes against humanity for allegedly abandoning them after Algerian independence, their lawyer said on Monday. The ex-soldiers will file a suit before French courts at the end of next month, said Philippe Reulet, representing the National Liaison […]
Pretoria | Tuesday WOUTER BASSON, the mastermind behind apartheid South Africa’s chemical warfare programme, on Monday denied having supplied potions to kill liberation fighters from the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo). Basson (51) was contradicting testimony by a former fellow soldier in the Pretoria High Court that Basson had given him deadly muscle relaxants […]
ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe this week added three new seats to the Supreme Court by appointing three judges seen as stalwarts of Zanu-PF. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the additional judges are needed to handle litigation by white farmers “who are contesting and indeed frustrating the government’s land reform programme”, according to the report. White […]
BASILDON Peta, the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists (ZUJ), yesterday said the suspension of the accreditation of British Broadcasting Corporation correspondents in Zimbabwe should be condemned by the international community. Peta said it was unfortunate that Professor Jonathan Moyo, the Minister of State for Information and Publicity in the Presidents Office was behaving […]
LIBERIAN President Charles Taylor announced a general amnesty on Thursday for all treason suspects abroad and anti-government dissidents in the northern county of Lofa, news media reported. “On this day I announce …(I) wish to grant general amnesty to all Liberians outside of the country that have been charged with treason — from Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf […]
Cairo | Monday A COURT here on Monday rejected a lawsuit aimed at annulling the marriage of a leading Egyptian feminist on grounds she had abandoned her Muslim faith. The Cairo Family Affairs Tribunal rejected the complaint against novelist Nawal al-Saadawi, saying the lawyer who lodged it had failed to follow proper legal avenues. The […]
WAR veterans on occupied commercial farms have turned in fellow invaders to the police after discovering they are bogus ex-combatants receiving monthly gratuities for the past four years. Last week, two suspected phonies, Paul Mugwagwa and Nathaniel Sibanda, were arrested by the fraud squad after they were exposed by their colleagues in Marondera. In 1997, […]
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 […]
NINETEEN Zanu PF farm invaders at Chishaku Farm in Mvuma were last Friday convicted of armed robbery, housebreaking and theft and sentenced to effective jail terms ranging from one to three years. Shadreck Thomas, who led the invasions on Andrea Scheepers’ farm in November last year, was convicted of five counts involving public violence and […]
Johannesburg | Monday THE United States risked appearing indifferent about racism if it were to boycott the upcoming United Nations conference on the subject, South Africa’s director general of foreign affairs said on Sunday. “If they don’t come, people will read into it that they don’t see the issues as important. It will send a […]
NIGERIA is to get an early warning body by the end of the year to avert ethnic and other civil unrest The Guardian reported on Monday. The Lagos daily quoted the director of Conflict Prevention in the Presidency, Udenta O. Udenta as saying that government and the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution were thinking […]
THE United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) appealed on Wednesday for donor support for a $5-mllion emergency operation to help 200_000 people affected by malnutrition in Niger, where insufficient rains have led to poor harvests. Over 4_000 of the country’s 10_094 villages have food deficits of over 50%, WFP reported. More than one-third of Niger’s […]
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 […]
A NORTHERN Province man dubbed the “lover’s lane” serial killer was handed seven life sentences and an additional 45 years in a packed Thohoyandou High Court on Thursday. David Mmbengwa(37) was jailed for killing seven people – including an agricultural department official and two policemen – between May 1996 and January 1998 in the Thohoyandou […]
A PLAM to prevent and end conflicts within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was brought a step closer on Friday with the adoption of a draft mutual defence pact. Defence ministers from 10 of 14 SADC countries approved the draft at the end of a two-day meeting in Maseru, Lesotho, said South African Defence […]
VOTING in a hotly contested parliamentary by-election began quietly on Saturday in the rural Zimbabwean constituency of Bindura, after months of campaigning marred by widespread violence. The election is the latest test for President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party, pitted against the two-year-old Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). MDC candidate Elliot Pfebve is again trying […]
THE blind Egyptian cleric jailed in the United States in connection with the World Trade Centre bombing in New York, could have a foot amputated because his diabetes has been neglected, his son claimed on Friday. “American prison authorities have neglected the treatment of my diabetic father, which interrupted the flow of blood to his […]
THE decline in Africa’s economic growth rate was hampering South Africa’s ability to deliver basic services, said Northern Province local government MEC, Joe Maswanganyi, on Thursday. Addressing an Inter-Governmental Forum in Pietersburg, he said indicators for the continent showed that growth had declined from 4,9% in 1996 to 3,2% in 2000. “In fact, it is […]
A YOUNG male lion has been on the loose in White River, Mpumalanga, for the past week and is believed to be responsible for killing a cow on a nearby farm. The lion may have escaped from the Kruger National Park, north of the Mthethomusha Game Reserve, said Mpumalanga Parks Board spokesman Gary Sutter on […]
THE European Union will provide some $7-million dollars this year to Ghana to fund approximately 700 projects, the UN information agency IRIN said Thursday. Kwaku Osafo, the local director of an EU-funded project, said the projects basically covered the infrastructure sector, education and health. “The local communities tell us the projects they would like to […]
AN Angolan government HIV/Aids awareness campaign in Angola is drawing criticism from women’s rights activists, church leaders and politicians who say its message is too blunt, Channel Africa reported on Tuesday. The campaign includes TV spots featuring sex scenes and interviews of young women who are asked if they have ever used a condom. “This […]
SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday appointed Willie Hofmeyr, the deputy national director of public prosecutions, as the nation’s chief corruption buster, heading the Special Investigating Unit. He takes over from former Judge Willem Heath, who was excluded from a probe into alleged corruption surrounding a $5,5-million arms acquisition deal and who resigned from […]
THE Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said in its latest country outlook for Zimbabwe on Tuesday that it expected state-sponsored violence to continue as President Robert Mugabe gears up for presidential elections, probably in April 2002. In spite of violent intimidation of the opposition, and possible vote rigging by Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF, “we believe […]
LUNGA MASUKU, Mbabane | Saturday SWAZILAND parliamentarians are calling for the sacking of Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini and Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Chief Maweni Simelane, for plunging the tiny kingdom into a political crisis. They’ve signed a petition, saying they had lost confidence in the two politicians after they approved the controversial Decree […]
A STRIKE by government doctors and nurses crippled state hospital services in the country’s main cities on Wednesday, AP reported. Quoting the Hospital Doctors Association, the agency said about 350 doctors stopped work on Tuesday in the cities of Harare, the capital, and Bulawayo, the second city, demanding better salaries and allowances. Some senior doctors […]
TANGENI AMUPADHI, Windhoek | Saturday AT least two Namibian soldiers have been killed and several more wounded in clashes with Unita in southern Angola over the past eight months but the army has kept the information secret, according to troops stationed in Angola. This information emerged as the Portuguese news agency Lusa reported yesterday that […]