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Tinubu honours journalists, lawyers and activists who bled for Nigeria’s democracy

Tinubu honours journalists, lawyers and activists who bled for Nigeria’s democracy

PRESIDENT Bola Ahmed Tinubu has announced national honours for more than three dozen Nigerians whose courage, sacrifice, and suffering laid the foundations of the democratic republic the country now celebrates - figures who faced prison cells, forced exile, solitary confinement, and state violence in the struggle to restore the mandate stolen from Chief M.K.O. Abiola on June 12, 1993. The announcement, made during Thursday's Democracy Day address at Eagle Square in Abuja, represents one of the most comprehensive acts of official recognition for the civil society actors, journalists, lawyers, and political activists who sustained the pro-democracy movement through years of…
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Referee Omar Artan: Rejected by the US, FIFA, welcomed as a hero at home in Somalia

Referee Omar Artan: Rejected by the US, FIFA, welcomed as a hero at home in Somalia

HE missed the 2026 World Cup not because of form or fitness but because a visa line in Washington stood between him and football’s biggest stage. Instead of starting under stadium lights, Omar Abdulkadir Artan stepped off a plane at Aden Adde International this morning into a different kind of spotlight - one of national celebration, waving flags, and the kind of hero’s welcome that turns absence into symbolism. Artan’s appointment by FIFA was more than a personal milestone. For a country still wrestling with instability, displacement and chronic underinvestment in sport, his presence on the World Cup roster would…
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Business as usual: How Europe’s most wanted drug lord runs his empire from a West African hideout

Business as usual: How Europe’s most wanted drug lord runs his empire from a West African hideout

IT is, by now, a familiar story - and that is precisely what makes it so alarming. One of Europe's most wanted criminals, convicted in absentia to 24 years in a Dutch prison, goes about his alleged business in West Africa with the apparent ease of a man who has nothing to fear from the law. According to OCCRP, Dutch drug trafficker Joseph "Jos" Leijdekkers - who sits on the European Union's most wanted fugitives list - is the prime suspect behind last month's record-breaking cocaine seizure on the high seas off the West African coast. Spanish authorities told OCCRP…
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SA: Cleveland massacre exposes policing failures where migration, zama-zamas and informal settlements collide

SA: Cleveland massacre exposes policing failures where migration, zama-zamas and informal settlements collide

AT least 12 people were killed and 10 wounded in a pre-dawn attack on the Cleveland informal settlement in Gauteng, a massacre that local residents and media say was carried out by armed men linked to illegal mining networks. Witnesses told reporters that some suspects are Lesotho nationals who once worked in a zama-zama gang, broke away from the group and returned at night to execute former associates. A manhunt is underway; police have yet to announce arrests. The provincial government condemned the killings as “barbaric,” pledged support to investigators and urged residents with information to come forward. Yet the…
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Hostile at the gate: how the world’s greatest football tournament turned its back on Africa

Hostile at the gate: how the world’s greatest football tournament turned its back on Africa

When FIFA awarded the 2026 World Cup to a tri-nation consortium of the United States, Canada and Mexico, the governing body spoke rapturously of a tournament that would be the biggest, most inclusive and most spectacular in football's history. A record 48 teams. One hundred and four matches. The world united. Football without borders. That promise is now in ruins for Africa. Across the full breadth of the African continent - from the Maghreb to the Horn, from West Africa to the Cape - the 2026 FIFA World Cup has delivered not inclusion but humiliation, not welcome but a wall.…
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“FAIR TRIAL IMPOSSIBLE”: Uganda’s prominent detainee fights to stop trial and gain freedom

“FAIR TRIAL IMPOSSIBLE”: Uganda’s prominent detainee fights to stop trial and gain freedom

THERE is a particular cruelty in what has happened to Dr Kizza Besigye. He served Yoweri Museveni as physician, as soldier, as political ally, and as a trusted architect of the movement that brought the current president to power in 1986. He knows where the bodies are buried - some of them literally. And for precisely that reason, the Ugandan state has never been able to treat him as an ordinary opponent. It has had to treat him as an existential threat. That dynamic - the intimacy of the original bond and the ferocity of the subsequent rupture - has…
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Five years on the run, one morning at Kotoka: the long arm of the law finally reaches Sedina Tamakloe-Attionu

Five years on the run, one morning at Kotoka: the long arm of the law finally reaches Sedina Tamakloe-Attionu

SHE came in on United Airlines flight UA 996, wheels down at Kotoka International Airport at approximately 9:01 a.m. on Tuesday. For Sedina Tamakloe-Attionu, former Chief Executive of Ghana’s Microfinance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC), the landing ended five years of freedom — and began what ought to be a decade behind bars. Officers of the Ghana Police Service and the Ghana Prisons Service were waiting. The woman who had used a court-sanctioned medical trip to the United States in 2021 as a one-way exit from Ghanaian justice was received, debriefed, and subjected to medical examination before being taken into…
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Ex-Kenya’s chief justice emerges as the green conscience in the battle for Nairobi’s last wild heart

Ex-Kenya’s chief justice emerges as the green conscience in the battle for Nairobi’s last wild heart

THE scene at the edge of Nairobi National Park on Monday morning was one of those that writes its own history. A man in a green T-shirt - the same shade worn by the activists around him - stood his ground as police moved in. He was not just any protester. He was David Maraga: former Chief Justice of the Republic of Kenya, constitutional champion of judicial independence, and the man who nullified a presidential election and survived the fury that followed. And now, at the park boundary on Lang'ata Road, he was being bundled into a police lorry alongside…
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Ruto casts Africa as the century’s prize, with Kenya selling itself as the gateway

Ruto casts Africa as the century’s prize, with Kenya selling itself as the gateway

AFRICA is “the opportunity of this century,” President William Ruto declared in Brussels, sharpening Kenya’s attempt to position itself as the continent’s commercial doorway. His message is clear: Africa should no longer be approached as a problem to be managed, but as a market, a production base and a source of future global growth. Ruto’s argument rests on three pillars: Africa’s scale, Kenya’s geography and the promise of new partnerships. “Kenya is your gateway to that opportunity,” he said, linking the country’s strategic location and growing economy to access for investors seeking entry into Africa’s fast-expanding market. That framing fits…
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SCANDAL: Africa’s top ref turned away from the 2026 FIFA World Cup

SCANDAL: Africa’s top ref turned away from the 2026 FIFA World Cup

THE whistle that Omar Abdulkadir Artan will never blow echoes louder than the ones he was appointed to blow. On Monday morning - with 48 hours remaining before the opening ceremony of the 2026 FIFA World Cup - the 34-year-old Somali referee, Africa's finest, arrived at Miami International Airport clutching a diplomatic passport and a FIFA appointment. He left carrying nothing but a boarding pass back to Istanbul. The United States sent him home. His story is the most powerful metaphor yet for what this World Cup has become: a tournament hosted by a country that does not want the…
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