NEWS - The African Mirror

Apr

01

2026

Nigeria bets $3.5trn on digital payments to crack AfCFTA

NEWS

NIGERIA has moved to position itself as the continental leader in African digital trade, launching a high-level government report that frames seamless cross-border payments as the decisive variable in whether MSMEs can access the $3.5 trillion market promised by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The "Cross-Border Digital Payments and Identity in Nigeria under the AfCFTA" report, unveiled Monday by Deputy Chief of Staff to the President Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia at a high-level event hosted by the Office of the Vice President in Abuja, names two Nigerian fintechs — PalmPay and Moniepoint — as critical drivers of adoption for…

Apr

01

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

SA Presidency blacklists 12,000 civil servants in corruption crackdown

NEWS

THEIR names are on a list. More than 12,000 of them - former civil servants dismissed for fraud, corruption and misconduct, or who resigned in a hurry when disciplinary charges closed in. For years, that list existed only in fragments: buried in departmental files, locked in HR silos, invisible to the next employer. The revolving door spun freely. It is spinning no more. South Africa's Presidency has established the Central Register for Dismissals and Resignations with Disciplinary Cases Pending - a live, searchable database that allows any government department, at any level, to instantly check whether a job applicant carries…

Mar

31

2026

By STAFF REPORTERS

Flames in KuGompo: Peaceful march over Nigerian ‘king’ erupts into arson, shootings, chaos

NEWS

WHAT began as an organised, constitutionally protected march degenerated into running street battles, arson and general lawlessness in KuGompo City - formerly known as East London - on Monday, 30 March 2026, leaving the Eastern Cape metropolis reeling and re-igniting a national debate about immigration, sovereignty and the limits of cultural expression on South African soil. The immediate trigger was a march convened by the anti-illegal immigration movement March and March, supported by ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), and an array of traditional leaders, to protest the installation two weeks earlier of Chief Solomon Ogbonna Eziko as "Igwe Ndigbo Na…

Mar

31

2026

By The African Mirror

A war Africa didn’t start – a crisis Africa cannot escape

NEWS

IT started with the thunder of US and Israeli bombers over Tehran. Within days, it had reached the fuel pumps of Lagos, the minibus ranks of Harare, and the farm supply stores of rural Kenya. The US-Israeli war on Iran - launched with precision strikes on 28 February 2026 - has delivered Africa's most devastating energy shock in half a century, and the continent did not fire a single shot. Iran's response to the joint US-Israeli assault was swift and strategically devastating. Tehran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz - the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which…

Mar

31

2026

By The African Mirror

HRW demands Ghana scrap bill that would jail people for who they are

NEWS

HUMAN Rights Watch has issued a sweeping indictment of Ghana's Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, 2025, warning the country's parliament that the legislation represents one of the most expansive assaults on individual rights ever to come before a Ghanaian legislature - and demanding that it be killed before it reaches a second reading. In a formal written memorandum submitted Monday to the Parliament's Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee, the global rights body warned that the bill does not merely regulate conduct - it criminalises identity, mandates citizen surveillance, destroys civil society, and threatens to land journalists, doctors, lawyers,…

Mar

30

2026

By The African Mirror

They came, they showed, they refused to surrender

NEWS

THERE is a language that exists beyond lawyers, beyond boardrooms, beyond the self-serving edicts of governing bodies drunk on their own authority. It is the language of the body - sovereign, unapologetic, magnificent. On Saturday afternoon at the Stade de France, the Lions of Teranga spoke it with devastating fluency. No speeches. No placards. No choreographed outrage. Just supreme athletes, draped in the green, gold and red of the Republic of Senegal, walking onto hallowed turf with the Africa Cup of Nations trophy nestled between their hands - the very trophy that the Confederation of African Football has ordered them…

Mar

30

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

The Ugandan general who supports Israel, wants to join them in the war on Iran

NEWS

ON a continent where solidarity with Palestine is not merely a foreign policy position but a lived moral inheritance rooted in anti-colonial struggle, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba has chosen to stake out the most contrarian posture imaginable. In a barrage of posts on X this week that generated more than 1.3 million engagements globally, the son of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and commander of the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) declared that any attempt to destroy Israel would bring Uganda into the war - on Israel's side. The declaration arrived as Israeli warplanes continued to pound what remains of Gaza and…

Mar

30

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

A diktat, a disowned candidate, and a continent’s embarrassment

NEWS

BY the close of business on Friday, 27 March 2026, the African Union had delivered one of its most unambiguous institutional verdicts in recent memory. Twenty of its 55 member states formally broke the silence to block a draft decision that would have expressed the continent's "firm support" for Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye - not for Macky Sall himself, but for Ndayishimiye's audacious, unilateral act of nominating the former Senegalese president for the post of UN Secretary-General. The message from the continent was blunt: procedure matters, and no single chair rules Africa by decree. In less than three weeks, what…

Mar

30

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Three farmers jailed for life for the racist murder of farm worker

NEWS

IT was a Saturday afternoon in September 2023. Dumisani Phakathi was walking past the gate of a chicken farm in Mamokgalieskraal, in the North West, heading to a nearby furrow to collect water — as members of the surrounding community had always done. He never came home. Three farmers were having a braai on that farm. When they saw Phakathi pass, they approached him. They assaulted him, dragged him into a storage facility inside the farm, and continued beating him until he died. Then they placed his body in black refuse bags and loaded it onto a bakkie, apparently headed…

Mar

28

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS

Ghana hunts Russian predator who filmed dozens of women in secret — and monetised their violation

NEWS

THE government of Ghanaian has moved with rare speed and diplomatic muscle against a Russian national accused of secretly recording intimate encounters with dozens of women across West Africa before monetising the footage on international adult websites — and the case is fast becoming a continent-wide reckoning with predatory technology, the silence of big-tech platforms, and the willingness of African governments to defend their citizens against foreign sexual exploitation. The suspect at the centre of the scandal has been officially identified as Vladislav Aleksandrovich Liulkov, a 36-year-old Russian citizen born in the former Uzbek SSR. His identification ended weeks of…