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Apr
27
2026
By STAFF REPORTER
SA Cabinet minister shamed, forced to withdraw AI drafted policy document

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

NEWS
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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Apr
27
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENT
Kings, presidents and the uncomfortable questions that gathered at Somhlolo

Kings, presidents and the uncomfortable questions that gathered at Somhlolo

NEWS
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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Apr
25
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENTS
Brothers at breaking point: Ghana summons Pretoria over xenophobic attacks

Brothers at breaking point: Ghana summons Pretoria over xenophobic attacks

NEWS
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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Apr
25
2026
By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
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

NEWS
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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Apr
25
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENT
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

NEWS
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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Apr
24
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENT
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

NEWS
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,…
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Apr
24
2026
By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
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

NEWS
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…
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Apr
24
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENT
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

NEWS
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…
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Apr
23
2026
By BONFACE ORUCHO, BIRD STORY AGENCY
Dangote and the rise of African industrial capital

Dangote and the rise of African industrial capital

NEWS
ALIKO Dangote’s latest industrial investments are beginning to show what African capital, when deployed at scale, can deliver not just in returns but also in building systems the continent has long outsourced. Speaking at the Semafor World Economy Summit 2026, Aliko Dangote framed Africa’s development gap as a question of capital commitment rather than opportunity. “We are waiting for foreign investors to come and develop our own land. It’s not possible,” he said. “If we don’t commit our own funds to develop our continent, nobody will do that for us.” That argument is now being tested against hard numbers. In…
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Apr
23
2026
By OWN CORRESPONDENTS
Fool’s gold on the Nile: How Ugandan investigators unravelled a UGX 13 billion fake-gold conspiracy

Fool’s gold on the Nile: How Ugandan investigators unravelled a UGX 13 billion fake-gold conspiracy

NEWS
THE operation was the kind that intelligence agencies rarely announce until every piece is in place. For weeks, detectives from Uganda's State House Anti-Corruption Unit worked in concert with the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP), quietly closing a net around a network of alleged fraudsters who had brazenly cheated foreign investors out of millions of dollars - all in the name of African gold. On Tuesday, that net closed publicly. Muhammad Ali, a businessman identified as a manager at Duck Hunters Security Company in Kampala, was arraigned before the Makindye Magistrates…
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