NEWS - The African Mirror

Mar

11

2026

China’s $1.4 billion gift to Africa: zero tariffs on all African imports from May 1

NEWS

AFRICA woke up to a new trade reality this week. In the most sweeping unilateral trade concession ever granted to the continent by any major global economy, China has confirmed it will implement zero tariffs on 100 percent of all imports from 53 African nations starting May 1, 2026 - a move economists estimate will save the continent approximately $1.4 billion in annual tariff costs and unlock unprecedented access to a consumer market of 1.4 billion people. The policy, confirmed by President Xi Jinping during the 39th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, marks the most expansive trade concession Beijing…

Mar

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENTS

Nairobi: 42 dead, 50,000 displaced as Kenya’s floods expose a city’s broken promises

NEWS

THEY came without warning to the people who needed it most. On the night of Friday 6 March 2026, walls of brown water poured through Nairobi's most densely packed neighbourhoods - Mukuru, Kibra, Mathare, Huruma, South B and C, Pipeline, Githurai, Kahawa West - sweeping cars off roads, tearing through informal settlements, and dragging people into drainage channels that double as open sewers. By Sunday, 9 March, 42 deaths had been confirmed across Kenya, nearly double the 23 recorded just 48 hours earlier. At least nine people remain missing. Over 50,000 Kenyans have been displaced. The Kenya Red Cross Secretary…

Mar

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

SA: Five killed on the N6 as Polo vanishes under Zimbabwe-bound bus

NEWS

IT was, witnesses say, a collision so violent that the white VW Polo simply ceased to exist as a motor car — swallowed whole beneath the underbelly of a cross-border bus in a single, catastrophic instant. Five people were inside that sedan on Sunday night. None survived. They were crushed together in twisted metal on the N6 between KuGompo (formerly East London) and Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape, as 60 Zimbabwean nationals bound for home looked on in horror. The images that flooded South African social media in the hours after the crash were spine-chilling in their silence - a…

Mar

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONENT

How West Africa’s coup leaders became the tyrants they promised to replace

NEWS

WEST Africa over the past five years. A military officer steps before television cameras, dressed in fatigues, flanked by colleagues with weapons. He speaks solemnly of suffering, of a corrupt civilian government that has failed the people, of a new dawn that only the armed forces can deliver. The crowds - frustrated, impoverished, often genuinely aggrieved - cheer. And then, methodically and without apology, the soldier does exactly what the man he overthrew did: he reaches for permanent power. The dissolution of 40 political parties in Guinea - announced in a late-night decree, fewer than two months after former junta…

Mar

11

2026

By The African Mirror

Kenyan masters student’s dream cut short in the cold waters of Wraysbury, England

NEWS

THE phone calls were the heartbeat of the Ombakho family's life across continents. From Kitale in Trans Nzoia County, Kenya, to London, England - a distance of nearly 7,000 kilometres - Edna Mmbali Ombakho kept the rhythm steady and reassuring. She called her parents. She messaged her siblings. She was, by all accounts of those who loved her, a young woman who understood the weight of distance and worked, faithfully, to close it. So when the calls stopped on 1 February 2026, her family knew. "She contacted the mother, who is in the US on the Saturday before she disappeared,"…

Mar

09

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

How Ghana has been drawn into a war it never chose

NEWS

WHEN two Ghanaian soldiers were critically injured, and a third left traumatised after missile strikes tore through their UN peacekeeping headquarters in southern Lebanon on Friday, 6 March, it crystallised a deepening and uncomfortable truth: Ghana, for all its studied neutrality, is no longer merely watching the US-Israel war on Iran from a safe distance. It is already in it. The Ghanaian Battalion Headquarters serving under the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was struck twice by missiles during ongoing clashes between the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah -- the Iran-backed militia that Israel has been simultaneously hammering as…

Mar

09

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Nigeria vows crushing response after Boko Haram kills soldiers, abducts civilians in Borno

NEWS

BOKO Haram fighters swept into the Ngoshe community in Borno State's Gwoza Local Government Area last week, killing civilians and military personnel, abducting an unspecified number of residents, and mounting simultaneous assaults on Nigerian Army formations at Konduga, Marte, Jakana, and Mainok — a coordinated multi-front offensive that has shaken a region long scarred by insurgent violence and forced a swift, high-level response from the federal government. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu extended condolences to the government and people of Borno State and described the attacks as a "heartless assault on hapless citizens." He directed the Armed Forces to intensify civilian…

Mar

09

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENTS

Jesse Jackson: Africa crosses an ocean to bury one of its own

NEWS

WHEN South African President Cyril Ramaphosa stepped to the podium at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters in the USA, he had not come to console a foreign nation. He had come to claim a man. To tell a grieving American congregation that Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. did not only belong to them. He belonged, also, to Africa. It was an extraordinary gesture - but for those who understand the arc of Jackson’s six-decade life, it was the only possible ending. A man who spent his life insisting that the Atlantic Ocean was not a divide but a bridge could not…

Mar

07

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Africa built the Anglican Church’s future – now it is breaking it

NEWS

FOR years, the story told about African Christianity was one of triumphant growth - pews overflowing, congregations multiplying, bishops dispatching missionaries back to a spiritually depleted West. Nowhere was this more vivid than in the Anglican Communion, where Africa had quietly become the demographic engine of an 85-million-member global church. Nigeria alone claimed 18 million Anglicans. Uganda was sending evangelists to Britain. Rwanda's bishops were rebuking Canterbury. Africa was not a footnote to Anglicanism - it was Anglicanism. That power is now being wielded. And the institution it built may not survive the wielding. On Thursday, in Abuja, the Global…

Mar

07

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

PURSUIT OF JUSTICE: Nigeria suspends doctors after Adichie son’s death

NEWS

THE wheels of justice have begun to turn, slowly but unmistakably, in one of Nigeria's most high-profile medical negligence cases. Nigeria's Medical and Dental Council (MDCN) has provisionally suspended three doctors linked to the death of Nkanu Adichie-Esege, the 21-month-old son of internationally acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as formal investigations gather momentum and a coroner's inquest looms. The MDCN has announced that the medical director of Euracare Hospital in Lagos, alongside two other physicians, has been barred from practising medicine pending a full hearing before a professional disciplinary tribunal. The regulator's investigative panel concluded there is sufficient preliminary evidence…