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Thirty-two years on: South Africa’s freedom remains a work in progress

Thirty-two years on: South Africa’s freedom remains a work in progress

ON 27 April 1994, more than 20 million South Africans stood in queues that stretched beyond the horizon, weathering rain and scorching sun, to cast a vote that would end the long nightmare of apartheid. Thirty-two years later, South Africa gathered again - this time at the Dr Rantlai Molemela Stadium in Bloemfontein - to mark Freedom Day under the symbolic weight of a democracy that has delivered much, but still owes its people more. President Cyril Ramaphosa used the occasion to deliver what was simultaneously a celebration of democratic endurance and a frank acknowledgement that the liberation dividend remains…
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BLOOD IN THE PLACE OF PRAYER: The massacre at Kati’s mosque lays bare the human cost of Mali’s unravelling

BLOOD IN THE PLACE OF PRAYER: The massacre at Kati’s mosque lays bare the human cost of Mali’s unravelling

THEY had come, as the faithful do, in the deep quiet before sunrise. Men and women, stepping softly through the dark streets of Kati, drawn not by politics or power but by prayer - by the simple, ancient rite of standing before God at the hour when the world is still. The mosque near the residence of General Sadio Camara, Mali's Minister of Defence, was a place of worship, not a theatre of war. By 05:20 on the morning of Saturday, 25 April 2026, it had become both. The worshippers were seated in the hush of pre-dawn waiting, the Fajr…
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Uganda’s sovereignty bill: dressed as patriotism, built for repression

Uganda’s sovereignty bill: dressed as patriotism, built for repression

WHEN governments reach for the language of sovereignty to justify restricting their own citizens, history counsels alarm. Uganda's Protection of Sovereignty Bill of 2026 is precisely such a moment - and Africa must be watching. Introduced before parliament on April 15 by Internal Affairs State Minister David Muhoozi, the bill proposes criminalising vaguely defined activities that promote the "interests of a foreigner against the interests of Uganda." The phrase sounds reasonable enough until you read the fine print. Clause 5 prohibits any act that promotes the interests of a foreigner against the interests of Uganda, yet nowhere defines what that…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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