NEWS - The African Mirror

Apr

10

2026

$130,000 to wipe tears: Zim tycoon Wicknell Chivayo and the art of the grand gesture

NEWS

THERE are condolence messages. Then there are Wicknell Chivayo condolence messages. When Zimbabwe's most theatrically wealthy businessman sat down - presumably aboard a private jet somewhere over the continent, because he was, naturally, "out of the Country" - to compose his Easter weekend tribute to Ronald Mujuru, he did not reach for a simple bunch of flowers and a sympathy card. He reached for his cheque book. And his car dealership contact. And, evidently, the Caps Lock key on his keyboard. The result was a social media post so magnificently, breathtakingly over-the-top that it has left Zimbabwe - and, frankly,…

Apr

09

2026

By The African Mirror

Criminal case opened against SA cabinet minister as pressure mounts on Ramaphosa to act

NEWS

OPPOSITION parties have opened a criminal corruption case and filed multiple formal ethics complaints against Social Development Minister Sisisi Tolashe, calling on President Cyril Ramaphosa to fire her immediately after evidence emerged that she misled Parliament about the fate of two luxury SUVs received from Chinese officials. ActionSA MP Dereleen James announced on Wednesday that the party had opened the corruption case at a South African Police Service station, lodged a complaint with the Public Protector alleging breaches of the Executive Members' Ethics Act, and submitted a formal complaint to Parliament's Ethics Committee for violations of the Code of Conduct…

Apr

09

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

#KWIBUKA32: Rwanda’s youth march into a future forged from the ashes

NEWS

THEY came in their thousands, the young and the living, marching through the hills of Rwanda alongside their president and first lady, their feet tracing a path that their parents and grandparents nearly never survived to walk. On April 7, 2026, Rwanda marked Kwibuka 32 - the 32nd commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi — and the country did not bow in silence. It stood up and roared. The Flame of Remembrance was lit. The testimonies were given. The tears fell. But woven through the grief was something harder and more enduring - a collective vow, spoken by…

Apr

09

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

SOUTH SUDAN: President Kiir fires parliament’s speaker in the latest salvo of an anti-corruption purge

NEWS

SOUTH Sudan's President Salva Kiir is fighting on two fronts simultaneously - and neither war is straightforward. On the battlefield, the fragile peace architecture brokered since the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) continues to buckle under fresh outbreaks of militia violence and persistent intercommunal conflict. In the corridors of government, Kiir is deploying a different arsenal: dismissal decrees, corruption charges, and a revolving door of senior appointments that have left the country's institutional skeleton barely standing. The latest casualty is Speaker Jemma Nunu Kumba, removed from the Transitional National Legislative Assembly on…

Apr

10

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

“She left behind a standard”: A tribute to Ambassador Konjit Sinegiorgis – diplomat, Pan-Africanist, and keeper of a fading flame

NEWS

THERE are deaths that grieve a family. And there are deaths that grieve a continent. The passing of Ambassador Konjit Sinegiorgis belongs to the second kind. Nardos Bekele-Thomas, CEO of AUDA-NEPAD, spoke for the entire African Union family when she said simply: "I am deeply saddened by the loss of the long-serving Ambassador Konjit." In that sentence - understated, sorrowful, personal - lies the measure of a woman whose career defied easy summary. You do not mourn a diplomat this way unless she was something more than a diplomat. You do not use the word long-serving unless you mean to…

Apr

08

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Ghana leads Africa’s charge to challenge global health order

NEWS

IN a move that signals Africa's most structured institutional challenge yet to the architecture of global health governance, Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama has unveiled an 18-member high-level panel under the Accra Reset Initiative - a body charged not with producing another declaration, but with delivering concrete proposals to restructure a system the initiative's own framers describe as fundamentally broken. The announcement represents the initiative's most institutionally concrete step yet, moving from the summit declarations of its founding moment to a structured body with an explicit reform mandate and a timeline tied to major UN and World Health Assembly proceedings.…

Apr

08

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Sold into war: Cameroon’s shocking death toll exposes Africa’s deepening crisis on Russia’s frontlines

NEWS

THE names were read on national radio on a Monday morning - sixteen Cameroonian citizens, confirmed dead on the frozen killing fields of eastern Ukraine, fighting a war that was never theirs. The disclosure by Cameroon's Ministry of External Relations this week marks the first time Yaoundé has officially confirmed the deaths of its nationals serving alongside Russian forces in what Moscow calls its "special military operation" - a clinical euphemism for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has, since February 2022, drawn in hundreds of Africans as expendable foot soldiers. The list of 16 names, obtained through a verbal…

Apr

08

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

Africa’s refinery moment: Dangote fuels the dream of a self-sufficient continent

NEWS

HISTORY does not always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives in the form of an oil tanker departing the Lagos coastline, bound not for Houston or Rotterdam, but for Accra, Dar es Salaam, or Douala. When Aliko Dangote stood before cameras at his sprawling Ibeju-Lekki refinery and declared that he could supply "West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa," he was not merely making a business statement. He was articulating, perhaps without quite intending to, the most compelling pan-African argument of our era: that this continent, so long defined by what it exports raw and imports processed, is beginning - haltingly,…

Apr

07

2026

By JACSON OKATA

Angola’s Lourenço slams superpower wars over oil, minerals

NEWS

AS the US and Israel-led war against Iran persists, the President of the Republic of Angola, João Lourenço, has warned that the same motives behind colonialism in the past are what drive any superpower today to carry out military interventions, as happened in the US invasion of Iraq. Speaking during the 11th Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS), Lourenço argued that in today’s world, using a wide range of arguments but with the same objective to control the planet’s main energy sources, oil, gas, and critical and strategic minerals…

Apr

07

2026

By The African Mirror

Papa knows best: at 93, Biya turns Cameroon into a family business

NEWS

PAUL Biya has never been a man in a hurry. He has, after all, had 44 years to get things done. So when Africa's longest-serving non-royal president finally decided to settle the small matter of what happens when he is no longer around - or, more accurately, when he is no longer even more conspicuously absent than usual - he did not leave it to chance, the electorate, or, heaven forbid, the Senate. He left it to his son. In a presidential decree dated 4 April 2026, the 93-year-old patriarch of Cameroonian politics appointed Franck Emmanuel Biya - his adopted…