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African press review 7 February 2014

Nigerian police question a Niger Delta militia leader. Not everybody wants Goodluck Jonathan to serve a second term. SA media accused of being mischief and sensationalist. The DA loses 200 pastors. And a Ugandan woman claims her uterus has been removed without her knowledge.

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We start in Nigeria where the Vanguard takes up the interrogation and release of Alhaji Mujahid Asari-Dokubo the leader of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force by the Department of State Services, following alleged inflammatory remarks credited to him about 2015 general elections.

Vanguard quotes Asari-Dokubo as warning in a television interview that “if it is war the north wants, they are ready for them”. The paper says the former Niger Delta warlord was reiterating the wish of his militant group to see President Goodluck Jonathan complete the constitutionally allowable two terms of eight years.

According to Vanguard, Asari warned that they had regrouped and put the Ijaw people on alert adding that he arrived for the interrogation accompanied by a large delegation of Ijaw kinsmen and ready for the worst.

This Day says that Asari was quizzed for over six hours, noting that he brought along his prayer mat and his Koran, as well as a toilet bag containing a tooth brush and toothpaste, fully prepared and ready to stay if the SSS decided to arrest him.

The Sun runs angry reactions from the opposition All Progressive Party that the DSS allowed Asari to walk free when their own chieftain Mallam Nasir was arrested after making similar remarks about the 2015 elections.

The Nation claims there are divisions in the north over Jonathan’s 2015 presidential bid. It followed the announcement that a new splinter group of Muslim elders had been created in Kaduna to push the yet-to-be announced second term bid.

Slideshow Mandela

They are up against the Arewa Consultative Forum, which is seen as the voice of the north clamouring for the return of the presidency to the north in 2015.

Punch highlights a challenge of the north’s presidential plans by Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau the still very powerful former governor of Kano state.

According to the paper, Shekarau, who recently defected to the ruling PDP party, described the call as rubbish as he emerged from a meeting with Nigerian Vice-President Namadi Sambo in Abuja on Thursday.

In South Africa theStar takes up the continuing controversy of Winnie Mazikizela Mandela being left out of Nelson Mandela’s will. This is after Zindzi Mandela took to Twitter to denounce “mischief and sensationalist media”.

In another tweet ,quoted by the Johannesburg newspaper, Zindzi wrote that she never attended the reading of the will as she and her mother didn’t regard themselves as beneficiaries. Mandela’s will was read out to his relatives and the media in Johannesburg on Monday.

According to the Star, Mandela’s children, with both Evelyn Mase and Winnie, had three million rand (200,000 euros) bequeathed to each of them but had already been given that money in advance and therefore received nothing.

Business Day has been monitoring the reactions of the Democratic Alliance in the wake of the defection of some 200 pastors from predominantly coloured communities in the Western Cape to join the ANC.

According to the paper, the DA insists that  Thursday’s mass exodus from the main opposition movement will not change the fact that the ANC has lost the moral compass. The Alliance’s provincial leader reportedly said that the pastors joining the ANC would lose members of their congregations as "most people in the Western Cape have higher moral values and ethics than the current corrupt ANC leaders".

In Uganda New Vision reports on the intervention of the country’s Health Minister  Ruhakana Rugunda to get to the bottom of a bizarre case - charges by a Ugandan woman that a doctor who operated on her at a Medical Centre in Hoima removed her uterus without her knowledge.

The Kampala newspaper says Winfred Nabwami, aged 36, allegedly sought medical help from the doctor to correct an intestinal malfunction. She went through four hours of surgery and now, she says, her periods have disappeared. The doctor denies the allegations, according to the paper.

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