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African press review 11 September 2014

More on the Marikana Inquiry in South Africa, new figures on Ebola, and the failure to rescue the 150 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria - all in today's papers ...

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South Africa's national police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, told the Marikana Inquiry yesterday that she could not recall if anyone raised the risk of bloodshed at the police meeting that gave the go-ahead for the security operation in which 34 mine workers were shot dead by police officers during a 2012 strike.

General Phiyega described the question as a "pedantic detail", according to the front page of this morning's financial paper, BusinessDay.

The commission is anxious to establish what happened at the meeting which "endorsed" the decision to disperse and disarm the strikers, and also what political pressure was brought to bear on senior police officers.

In response to questions from a lawyer for the injured mine workers, General Phiyega said she "did not agree" that political considerations had influenced her decision to move against the strikers on a Thursday, despite advice that there would be far fewer protestors on the Friday as many would have started home for the weekend. It has been suggested that these considerations included preventing Julius Malema - then recently expelled from the African National Congress - from defusing the protest as he had previously done at Impala Platinum.

The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak in history jumped by almost 200 in a single day to at least 2,296 and is already likely to be higher than that, the World Health Organisation said yesterday.

The UN organisation said it had recorded 4,293 cases in five West African countries as of September 6, the last date for which official statistics are available.

But it still did not have new figures for Liberia, the worst-affected country, suggesting the true toll is already much higher. The world health body says it expects thousands of new cases in Liberia over the next three weeks.

The South African papers report that the political rivals in Lesotho yesterday promised to give South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma a date for the reopening of the Maseru parliament tomorrow.

Parliament was suspended in June by the prime minister, Thomas Thabane, who has since had to flee an attempted coup.

Yesterday's meeting gave no indication how the authorities intend to tackle former Lesotho military commander Lt-Gen Tlali Kamoli, who is accused of triggering the crisis on August 30, one day after he was fired by Thabane.

Zuma has refused Thabane’s request to deploy troops from the 15-member Southern African Development Community.

A statement from the party of former prime minister Pakalitha Mosisili, a Kamoli ally, ratcheted up tension, warning of "atrocities and bloodshed" should the general be arrested.

In Nigeria, the Lagos-based daily paperPunch reminds us that it is now exactly 150 days since Boko Haram militants abducted more than 200 pupils from the Government Girls’ Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. While a small number of girls have managed to escape, the whereabouts of the majority remain unknown.

According to an editorial in the Washington Post newspaper, the social media campaign aimed at bringing back the girls expressed “the larger frustrations of a society that has little faith in its political leadership.”

The Washington paper notes that President Jonathan’s seeming indifference to the whereabouts of the missing Chibok girls had not helped their situation.

The Post goes on to say that the recently launched presidential re-election slogan seems singularly inappropriate: "Jonathan has not brought back the girls, yet his campaign expects Nigeria to bring him back to power."

The Daily Monitor reports that Ugandan Ministry of Defence officials yesterday failed to explain how they calculated Shs20 billion - about six million euros - in pending payments to the national power distributor after the Auditor General warned that the figure was not supported by documentary evidence.

Defence officials were appearing before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to respond to queries about their 2013 spending.

The Auditor General’s report also cast doubt over several procurement deals by the Defence ministry, including the purchase of vehicles for defence attachés which the report says was inflated by more than Shs57 million.

MPs' attention was drawn to the revelation that the ministry recorded the shilling equivalent of ten million euros in outstanding commitments, claiming the arrears were for electricity and food bills. That's a lot of food!

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