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Rwanda’s gleaming facade masks a darker reality for government critics

Rwanda’s gleaming facade masks a darker reality for government critics

TO the outside world, Rwanda is a marvel. Kigali's skyline rises clean and orderly against the Virunga hills. The country hosts world-class cycling races, football tournaments, and has aggressively courted NBA partnerships and Premier League sponsorships. President Paul Kagame presents his nation as proof that post-genocide Africa can leapfrog the West - a tech-forward, corruption-free democracy rising from the ashes of one of history's worst atrocities. But for citizens who dare to question that narrative, Rwanda can look like something else entirely. According to a report published this week by Human Rights Watch, blogger and commentator Aimable Karasira -  detained…
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Africa’s war rescue mission: Race to retrieve citizens duped into Russia-Ukraine frontlines

Africa’s war rescue mission: Race to retrieve citizens duped into Russia-Ukraine frontlines

ON the second anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, African governments are engaged in a desperate diplomatic scramble to retrieve hundreds of their citizens who were lured  -  under false pretences -  into one of the world's most brutal war zones. South Africa has secured the return of 17 men. Kenya is still counting its dead. The scale of the crisis is only now coming into sharp relief, and what is emerging is a continent-wide pattern of organised deception, exploitation, and tragedy. South Africa: A Presidential Rescue, But the Investigation Deepens President Cyril Ramaphosa marked the milestone with relief…
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Jailed for loving football: The AFCON final that became a diplomatic crisis

Jailed for loving football: The AFCON final that became a diplomatic crisis

THEY crossed borders, braved long journeys, and poured their hearts into supporting the Lions of Teranga on the grandest stage African football has to offer. They came to celebrate. Instead, 18 Senegalese football supporters now stare at the walls of a Moroccan prison -  casualties not just of a chaotic night of football, but of the raw, uncontrollable passion that the beautiful game ignites across the continent. This is what love for football looks like when it collides with the cold machinery of the law. The setting was the Total Energies Africa Cup of Nations final in January -  Morocco…
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Pope Africa tour: Why the continent’s 300 million Catholics are at the centre of his 2026 agenda

Pope Africa tour: Why the continent’s 300 million Catholics are at the centre of his 2026 agenda

POPE Leo XIV will make Africa the centrepiece of his first major overseas tour of 2026, visiting four countries across the continent from April 13-23 in a trip that underscores a fundamental shift in global Catholicism's centre of gravity. The Vatican announced on Wednesday that the pontiff will travel to Algeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, and Cameroon - a sweep across North and sub-Saharan Africa that Church officials say is no diplomatic accident. With roughly 20% of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics now living on the African continent, and with those numbers growing faster than anywhere else on earth, the visit…
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Blood, fire in Zamfara: Nigeria’s jihadist crisis deepens as villages bear the brunt

Blood, fire in Zamfara: Nigeria’s jihadist crisis deepens as villages bear the brunt

AT least 50 civilians are dead and an unknown number of women and children abducted after armed militants swept through a remote northwestern Nigerian village -  the latest atrocity in a grinding insurgency that has defied both government crackdowns and growing international intervention. The assault, which began around 5 p.m. and did not end until 3:30 a.m. Friday, followed a pattern that has become grimly familiar across northern Nigeria's vast rural hinterland -  a fast-moving column of motorcycle-borne militants, overwhelming a community with little means to defend itself, before disappearing back into the bush. What made this attack particularly damning…
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When the state silenced the altar: Museveni’s long arm stops prayer

When the state silenced the altar: Museveni’s long arm stops prayer

IT was supposed to be a prayer. Instead, it became a portrait of power. On Monday evening, Ugandans who had gathered at Lubaga Cathedral -  one of the most storied Catholic churches in East Africa, perched on one of Kampala's seven hills -  found themselves frozen in the threshold of something that many said they had never witnessed in their lifetimes: a sitting president personally calling an archbishop to stop a mass. Not a political rally. Not a protest march. A prayer service for a sick man behind bars. The reverberations have not stopped since. The sequence of events, as…
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South Sudan’s Finance Ministry: where careers go to die (briefly)

South Sudan’s Finance Ministry: where careers go to die (briefly)

IN a country that has elevated cabinet reshuffling to something approaching a national sport, South Sudan President Salva Kiir has once again demonstrated his singular talent for making finance ministers disappear faster than the country's oil revenues. Monday evening's announcement on state television -  the preferred theatre for such dramatic personnel decisions - confirmed what Juba's political watchers had quietly been wagering on: Bak Barnaba Chol, barely three months into what he might have naively imagined was a career appointment, has been shown the door. His predecessor, Athian Diing Athian, lasted a similarly spectacular two months before him. At this…
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Nigerian anti-graft agency charges state finance official with $39,600 money laundering scheme

Nigerian anti-graft agency charges state finance official with $39,600 money laundering scheme

A staff member of the Ebonyi State Accountant-General's office appeared in a Nigerian federal court Thursday on money laundering charges, accused of structuring more than $39,600 in government funds across a series of cash transactions designed to evade mandatory financial reporting requirements. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) arraigned Obasi Nicholas Sunday before Justice H.I.O. Oshomah of Federal High Court 1 in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital, on two counts filed under the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act of 2022. Prosecutors allege that Obasi, who served as a signatory to the Ebonyi State Government Shopping…
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SA’s R181m Home Affairs bazaar: Officials “Selling South Africa one permit at a time”

SA’s R181m Home Affairs bazaar: Officials “Selling South Africa one permit at a time”

SOUTH Africa's Department of Home Affairs was systematically transformed into a corrupt marketplace where visas, permits, and ultimately citizenship were sold to the highest bidder, a landmark investigation by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has revealed -  exposing a scandal that has hollowed out the international credibility of the South African passport and left the country's borders dangerously exposed. The findings, announced at a press conference on Monday by the SIU's Acting Head, are nothing short of devastating. Authorised by President Cyril Ramaphosa under Proclamation 154 of 2024, the investigation has uncovered financial gains exceeding R181 million linked to fraudulent…
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Last-ditch diplomacy: Uganda races to save maid from Syrian execution

Last-ditch diplomacy: Uganda races to save maid from Syrian execution

WITH fewer than five days before a scheduled execution, Ugandan officials, NGOs, and international rights groups are mounting a frantic, largely unanswered appeal to Syrian authorities to spare the life of Vicky Ajok, a 28-year-old domestic worker condemned to death for the killing of her elderly employer in Damascus. The clock is running out. Syria has set February 28 as the date Ajok will face capital punishment -  and so far, Damascus has said nothing publicly in response to the growing chorus of pleas. The speed of Ajok's journey from arrest to death row has itself become a focal point…
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