AFRICA

Harare, Zimbabwe | AFP | President Robert Mugabe’s grip on power has faced little recent threat from Zimbabwe’s splintered opposition, but efforts to forge a unified alliance in next year’s election could test his supremacy. Any opposition bloc would first have to overcome fierce rivalries within their various camps, and …

African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina has spoken confidently about Africa’s enormous potential, and the bank’s ambitious development agenda, which he said was well underway. He said this, in an impassioned speech, delivered at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, April 19.   The High 5s …

Lagos, Nigeria | AFP |  At least seven football fans were killed and 11 injured when an electric cable fell on a building where they were watching a Europa League match, Nigerian police said Friday. The incident happened in the southern port city of Calabar on Thursday during a quarter-final …

Kigali, Rwanda | AFP |  Former Hutu militia leader Bernard Munyagishari was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Kigali Thursday for his role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The high court of Kigali judged Munyagishari guilty of “crimes of murder and genocide” but acquitted him of rape. He …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP |  Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta warned Thursday against violence as election season gets into full swing, with chaotic party primaries already leading to bloody scuffles. East Africa’s largest economy holds a general election on August 8, a decade after disputed poll results fuelled violence that left …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP |  Six Kenyans urged a court Wednesday to suspend a controversial decision by election officials to scrap a tender process and directly procure an electronic voting system for the August polls. The petition is the umpteenth disruption to already chaotic election preparations, a sensitive process in …

Yumbe, Uganda | AFP | Michael O’Hagan Ugandan motorbike taxi driver Sadiq Agotre grumbles as he waits for a rare client among thousands of South Sudanese refugees hoping to receive food rations in the outskirts of his town. “Business is not good. These people don’t have money,” he says, gazing out …

Kigali, Rwanda | AFP |  Rwanda’s government announced on Wednesday it had discovered fall armyworm on its crops, making it the third east African country afflicted by the plant-eating pest also recently spotted in Kenya. Uganda confirmed last month that fall armyworm had entered its borders after devastating crops in …

Ugandan army says LRA ‘neutralised’, begins withdrawal Kampala, Uganda | AFP |  The Ugandan army said Wednesday it has neutralised the Lord’s Resistance Army, as troops began withdrawing from the Central African Republic where they had been hunting the group’s feared leader Joseph Kony. “The decision to withdraw was premised …

United Nations, United States | AFP |  South Sudanese former rebels on Tuesday released 16 UN staff after holding them hostage for several hours in a camp in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a UN official said. About 530 former rebels from South Sudan are living in the Munigi camp, …