Our website use cookies to improve and personalize your experience and to display advertisements (if any). Our website may also include cookies from third parties like Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and Youtube. By using the website, you consent to the use of cookies.

Africa conquers the impossible: Sawe shatters the two-hour wall

Africa conquers the impossible: Sawe shatters the two-hour wall

THERE are moments in sport that do not merely rewrite record books - they reorder the universe of what human beings believe is possible. Sunday on the Mall in London was such a moment. Sabastian Sawe of Kenya crossed the finish line of the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, becoming the first person in history to break the two-hour barrier in an official, competitive marathon race. He did not sneak under it. He smashed it by 65 seconds. The crowd lining the route through one of the world's great capitals did not merely witness a…
Read More
Mali’s defence minister killed as junta’s grip on security narrative collapses

Mali’s defence minister killed as junta’s grip on security narrative collapses

MALI’S Defence Minister Sadio Camara has been killed in a car bomb attack on his home in Kita, near Bamako - a assassination that strikes at the very heart of the military junta and shatters any remaining pretence that the country's worst security crisis in years is under control. Family members confirmed that Camara, his wife and two grandchildren died in the blast, elevating Saturday's coordinated insurgent assault from a spectacular operational strike to something far more politically devastating: the decapitation of the junta's security leadership on its own soil, in its own backyard. The killing lands like a thunderclap…
Read More
SA Cabinet minister shamed, forced to withdraw AI drafted policy document

SA Cabinet minister shamed, forced to withdraw AI drafted policy document

THE document was meant to chart South Africa's course through the age of artificial intelligence. It went to the Cabinet. It was gazetted for public comment. Deputy President Paul Mashatile stood at a podium in Mpumalanga and spoke of it with ambition. Then someone read the footnotes. What they found unravelled one of the most embarrassing episodes in South African policymaking in recent memory: the country's Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy - the document tasked with governing AI - had itself been written by AI, complete with a reference list populated by sources that do not exist. By Sunday, Communications…
Read More
Kings, presidents and the uncomfortable questions that gathered at Somhlolo

Kings, presidents and the uncomfortable questions that gathered at Somhlolo

THE cold came down hard from the Lebombo Mountains. Temperatures dropped to thirteen degrees in some parts of the Kingdom, and rain was falling over Mbabane. None of it mattered. Long before dawn, the emaSwati were already queuing outside Somhlolo National Stadium - named for the founding king who dreamed of a great serpent devouring its own tail and saw, in that vision, the white man coming. On a day that will be remembered in the annals of southern African history, they came instead in motorcades and military escorts: the presidents, the kings, the former strongmen, and the deposed. They…
Read More
Brothers at breaking point: Ghana summons Pretoria over xenophobic attacks

Brothers at breaking point: Ghana summons Pretoria over xenophobic attacks

IN a dramatic escalation of diplomatic tensions, the Government of Ghana formally summoned South Africa’s Acting High Commissioner in Accra, Thando Dalamba, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a face-to-face confrontation over violent xenophobic attacks targeting Ghanaian nationals in KwaZulu-Natal - marking one of the most serious bilateral ruptures between the two West and Southern African powers in recent memory. The summons, confirmed in a ministerial press release, came just twenty-four hours after Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, had held a telephone conversation with his South African counterpart, International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola, in what…
Read More
Court voids R84m SA-Moz border wall tender as army keeps recovering stolen cars

Court voids R84m SA-Moz border wall tender as army keeps recovering stolen cars

A Special Tribunal has set aside an R84-million government tender for a concrete border wall along the KwaZulu-Natal–Mozambique boundary, after an investigation by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) established that the contractor submitted fraudulent documents, failed to meet mandatory procurement requirements, and walked away from the project without completing it. The ruling, delivered on Thursday, confirms what security agencies on the ground have long known: the wall - commissioned to stem a relentless tide of stolen and hijacked vehicles being trafficked across the porous KZN border into Mozambique - was never built to specification, leaving a critical gap in South…
Read More
Lungu family hits back: Zambian govt accused of desecrating ex-president’s remains

Lungu family hits back: Zambian govt accused of desecrating ex-president’s remains

NEARLY eleven months after Edgar Chagwa Lungu, Zambia's sixth republican president, drew his last breath at a private clinic in Pretoria, his remains are still unburied - seized, disputed, autopsied without family consent, and held in a state facility by the South African Police Service (SAPS). It is a spectacle without modern African precedent: a government using every instrument of the state - the courts, the police, the diplomatic corps - to wrest control of a dead man's body from his widow and children. On Wednesday, 22 April 2026, the Lungu family's spokesperson and lawyer, Makebi Zulu, confirmed what had…
Read More
No peace, no rest: The undignified tug-of-war over Lungu’s body that has shamed Zambia before Africa

No peace, no rest: The undignified tug-of-war over Lungu’s body that has shamed Zambia before Africa

HE died far from home, in a hospital in Pretoria, on the fifth day of June 2025. He was sixty-eight years old. He had served his country as president. And yet, almost a full year later, Edgar Chagwa Lungu - Zambia's sixth Republican President - remains unburied, his mortal remains shuttled between funeral parlours and government facilities, between court orders and counter-orders, between the competing claims of a grieving family and a government that many Zambians believe is settling political scores from beyond the grave. The latest episode in this grim saga played out in the early hours of Wednesday,…
Read More
How suspected Nigerian cocaine baron ran Bangkok’s nightlife underworld for 17 years

How suspected Nigerian cocaine baron ran Bangkok’s nightlife underworld for 17 years

FOR seventeen years, Nwaiwu Ifeanyi Placid moved through Bangkok with a confidence that borders on audacity. He had a Thai wife - or what passed for one - a residence visa, a mobile phone loaded with encrypted group chats, and an alias, Patrick, that kept his real name off the lips of the street-level distributors who kept his empire humming. On the night of Saturday, 19 April 2026, near Silom Soi 1 - the crackling nerve centre of Bangkok's expatriate nightlife - that empire came undone in the blue flash of Metropolitan Police Bureau torches. The 46-year-old Nigerian national was…
Read More
SA top cop suspended: Ramaphosa bets on financial watchdog to hold the line

SA top cop suspended: Ramaphosa bets on financial watchdog to hold the line

IN a carefully calibrated address from the Union Buildings in Tshwane on Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced what many South Africans had come to regard as inevitable: the precautionary suspension of National Police Commissioner General Fannie Masemola, who appeared in the Pretoria Magistrate's Court earlier this week facing four counts of contravening the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA). The charges relate to his approval of payments under a R360-million health tender awarded to a company linked to alleged organised crime figure Vusimuzi "Cat" Matlala - a contract that was subsequently found to be irregular and cancelled. Ramaphosa was at pains…
Read More