NEWS - The African Mirror

Jul

11

2026

Kinshasa’s third-term gambit turns violent – and exposes a familiar African script

NEWS

ON 12 June, the streets around Kinshasa's Palace of the People became the latest testing ground for a question that keeps recurring across Africa's fragile democracies: how far will an incumbent go to hold on to power, and how much of that effort can be outsourced to deniable hands? The answer, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation released this week, is that the Democratic Republic of Congo's security forces did not merely fail to protect demonstrators opposing a proposed law that could extend President Félix Tshisekedi's tenure beyond two terms — they joined, and at times enabled, an assault…

Jul

11

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Uganda blows open continent’s largest cyber-fraud bust: over 1,000 foreigners held over telecom and utility hacking

NEWS

UGANDAN security agencies have detained more than 1,000 foreign nationals, the overwhelming majority of them Chinese, in what officials privately describe as the country's largest ever operation against an alleged transnational cybercrime syndicate. The scale of the sweep and the political tremors it has already triggered inside President Yoweri Museveni's inner circle mark it as a defining test of Uganda's capacity to police the digital underworld quietly metastasising across East Africa. The joint operation, led by Uganda's Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) working with immigration and other security agencies, targeted multiple sites in Kampala and neighbouring Wakiso District. Security sources familiar…

Jul

11

2026

By REBAONA MODUTWANE, BIRD STORY AGENCY

African scientists build Ebola defences

NEWS

AS dusk settles over Bunia, the bustling capital of Ituri Province in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, near the borders of Uganda and South Sudan, workers in protective boots move between newly erected structures beside one of the city's largest treatment facilities. Under floodlights and with the sound of hammering, teams continue building additional wards and support areas, expanding the capacity of a hospital that can accommodate around 80 Ebola patients. Plastic-screened corridors and carefully marked doffing zones for personal protective equipment stand as visible reminders of the discipline required to contain one of the world's deadliest diseases. The scene…

Jul

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Tunisia’s vanishing republic: Saied’s courts bury rights defenders, journalists, opposition alike

NEWS

TUNISIA’S courts have, in the space of a single week, sentenced two of the country's most prominent human rights defenders to prison terms that human rights lawyers describe as effectively a life sentence by attrition. On June 26, a Tunis Court of First Instance sentenced Sihem Bensedrine, the former president of Tunisia's Truth and Dignity Commission, to 25 years in prison and ordered her and several co-defendants to pay a joint fine of roughly 1.8 billion Tunisian dinars — about US$600 million. Three days earlier, an appeals court in Tunis sentenced Saadia Mosbah, the president of the anti-racism association Mnemty,…

Jul

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Egypt’s bureaucracy is leaving refugees to pay the price

NEWS

FOR refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt, a delayed appointment can now mean detention, deportation or disappearance into legal limbo. Human Rights Watch says many Sudanese and South Sudanese families are being arrested even when they hold UNHCR documents, because residency renewals have been pushed so far into the future that their legal status expires before the state acts. That has turned paperwork into a form of danger. Egypt hosted more than 1.1 million refugees and asylum seekers registered with UNHCR as of May 2026, a sharp rise since the war erupted in Sudan in April 2023, but the system…

Jul

09

2026

By PHILIP KLEINFELD

Burkina Faso’s army accused of preventing civilians from leaving jihadist-besieged towns

NEWS

CIVILIANS in Burkina Faso have accused the national army of preventing them from leaving government-held towns blockaded by jihadist rebels, forcing them to remain in life-threatening conditions where there is a lack of food and other basic essentials. For years, insurgent groups linked to al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have surrounded towns across the West African country, particularly those with military bases or hosting pro-government volunteer groups, cutting off most supplies. Yet more than a dozen civilians and aid workers told The New Humanitarian that, in some of these places, soldiers are also preventing people from leaving, hoping to…

Jul

09

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Brotherhood under strain: SA’s immigration crackdown tests the limits of African solidarity

NEWS

EIGHT days after a self-appointed deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa quietly expired without government intervention, Pretoria is discovering that the price of its silence is being paid not on the streets of Durban or Johannesburg, but in the chancelleries of Abuja, Accra and beyond. What began as a domestic anti-migrant mobilisation, driven by vigilante formations operating under banners such as the "March and March" movement, has hardened into a continental diplomatic crisis that is straining South Africa's relationships with the very nations whose solidarity underwrote its liberation. The clearest measure of how far the rupture has travelled…

Jul

09

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Cocaine, cabinets, cover-ups: SA’s Madlanga Commission hears most devastating evidence yet

NEWS

IN more than eighteen months of hearings that have already dismantled the myth of a clean South African policing establishment, the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry has this week produced testimony that may eclipse everything that came before it. A witness known only as Witness M - his identity concealed, his testimony heard entirely in camera - has told the commission that his evidence implicates heads of state, drug syndicates, crime families, terrorist organisations, politically connected individuals and law-enforcement officers in a single, interlocking network. That is not hyperbole. It is the witness's own characterisation of the evidence he was subpoenaed…

Jul

08

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Africa’s trillion-dollar paradox: “Continent must stop waiting to be rescued”

NEWS

STRIPPED of its diplomatic courtesies, the address Sidi Ould Tah delivered to the IMF/World Bank Group African Caucus in Banjul on 6 July carried a blunt message for a continent accustomed to appealing for help: Africa's problem is no longer only a shortage of money. It is a shortage of the institutions, instruments and political will needed to deploy the money that is already sitting in African accounts. That framing matters because it lands at a moment when the old assumptions of African development finance are under strain. Aid budgets in Washington, London and Brussels are shrinking. Borrowing costs remain…

Jul

08

2026

By The African Mirror

Uganda Parliament officials remanded as probe deepens, Anita Among name looms

NEWS

SEVEN senior officials of the Parliament of Uganda have been remanded to Luzira Prison after appearing in the Anti-Corruption Court on charges of embezzlement, money laundering and causing financial loss, in a case that is now widening pressure on the institution’s leadership and sharpening speculation that former Speaker Anita Among could be drawn in next. The officials, including Parliament’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs, Chris Obore Ariko (pictured), were arrested after reporting to the Inspectorate of Government to record statements, then arraigned before the court in Kampala. The court remanded them as investigations continue into alleged misuse of public…