African press review 23 July 2012

Fighting HIV/Aids, golf success for Ernie Els of South Africa, and aid to Somalia, are among the stories covered in today's African newspapers...

The main headline in South African financial paper, BusinessDay, reads "US to reduce support for HIV/Aids fight".

According to the article, the Obama administration in Washington, under political and economic pressure, is planning to scale back US support for global HIV/Aids programmes and is pushing to unload some of the burden onto other countries.

The shift comes at exactly the wrong time in the 30-year fight against the virus, activists say.

There are 34 million people worldwide living with HIV/Aids and the virus killed more than 4000 people a day last year, according to the World Health Organisation. In South Africa alone, 18% of those aged between 15 and 49 are infected.

The biennial International Aids Conference is currently taking place in, of all places, Washington.

According to The Sowetan, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's decision to continue to support expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema has been described as "dangerous to the organisation".

This according to ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantanshe, who has taken a dim view of the decision by one of the organisation's key figures to support Malema.

Julius Malema was expelled by the ANC national executive committee earlier this year for bringing the party into disrepute.

Mantashe says he regards Madikizela-Mandela's decision to support Malema as ill-disciplined.

And on the sports pages, South African Ernie Els won the British Open golf championship by one stroke from Australian Adam Scott on Sunday, after Scott suffered a late collapse.

Scott started the last round with a four-shot lead and seemed to be cruising to victory as he maintained that cushion with six holes to play.

But a late attack of the jitters caused him to drop strokes at each of the last four holes, allowing Els to win with a two-under-par 68 and a seven-under total of 273.

Cricket's Hashim Amla is also making sports headlines. He hits the highest Test score by a South African with an unbeaten 311 to put his side within sight of a crushing victory over England on the fourth day of the first Test at the Oval in London on Sunday.

According to the main story in regional newspaper The East African, two-thirds of donor aid to Somalia has been either stolen or diverted.

Successive Somali governments have failed to account for more that 200 million euros.

An audit claims that various Somali administrations misappropriated and mismanaged millions of dollars in donor assistance and domestic revenue by under-reporting the amounts received and by utilising funds on personal and non-government expenses.

President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed claims that the money may have never reached Somalia.

The East African also reports that a meeting of defence ministers from the Great Lakes Region will be held in Khartoum, Sudan, on 2 August to discuss the situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The meeting will also discuss details of the neutral international force that the region’s heads of state agreed to establish at the African Union Summit last month.

Nairobi is the fourth most visited city in Africa, according to new research, underlining the city’s rating as the economic hub of the wider East and Central African region.

The data released by MasterCard estimates Kenya’s capital will play host to 1.8 million international visitors in 2012, ranking third behind Cairo, Johannesburg and Casablanca.

The setting up of regional headquarters in Nairobi by global multinationals and aid agencies has also contributed to the growing number of visitors.