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African press review 12 November 2014

Lawyers fight for the victims of the Marikana massacre. SA receives fewer asylum seekers. More money may be spent on Zuma's home. Nigeria's Jonathan opens his bid for reelection. Zambia prepares to pick its new leader. And the Catholic church claims there's a conspiracy to sterilise Kenyan women.

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Every worker killed by the police during the strike at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in August 2012 was killed unlawfully, the counsel for the families of the dead told the Farlam Commission in South Africa yesterday, BusinessDay reports.

Forty-four people lost their lives, 34 of them in a single day of violence.

The names of the dead were read out in court, so that the world will not forget the individuals behind the statistics.

The lawyer for the dead men’s families said the crucial question for his clients was, did this tragedy have to happen? Was there no other way, he asked.

He went on to remind the inquiry of the suspicious circumstances surrounding some of the deaths.

Phumzile Sokanyile, for example, was "clearly shot execution-style" by the police. He died 620m from the scene of the confrontation and was shot in the back of the head.

Bongani Mdze bled to death while members of the police were milling around. His life could have been saved by a simple tourniquet around his wounded arm.

The lawyer ended his submission by showing police photographs of the dead, some of them so badly injured as to be unrecognisable.

His final question was, can this be justified, on any basis, in a constitutional state?

South Africa has the third-highest number of asylum seekers in the world, after Germany and the United States, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees told a parliamentary committee yesterday.

However, the numbers have substantially decreased from a high of nearly a quarter of a million in 2009 to just 70,000 last year. Most of South Africa’s asylum seekers are from Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Also in South Africa, news that even more state money could be spent on President Jacob Zuma’s private home in Nkandla. This follows a ruling by a parliamentary committee that security experts must reassess the adequacy of the upgrades already done for the rand equivalent of 18 million euros.

The ad-hoc committee on Nkandla announced on Tuesday that the security reassessment must be done in terms of current policy and that the findings of the State Security Agency and the South African Police Service must be reported to parliament.

All of the government money spent so far, on a swimming pool, auditorium and private clinic, was justified as being necessary for security reasons.

South Africa’s ombudsman, Thuli Madonsela, says  Zuma benefitted unfairly from the publicly funded work and should repay some of the money.

Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan announced yesterday that he will seek a second term in next February’s election and vowed to defeat the five-year-old northern Islamist insurgency that has blighted his leadership of Africa’s biggest economy.

The news gets coverage in all the region's papers.

Jonathan, a southern Christian president in Africa’s top oil producer, is seen as a strong incumbent despite a raft of multibillion-dollar oil scandals and his government’s inability to end the insurgency waged by Islamist group Boko Haram, mostly in the Muslim north-east.

His bid will arouse anger among Nigeria’s Muslim north as it defies an unwritten arrangement that political power is passed between the north and the mainly Christian south each term.

The African Union yesterday called for a stable electoral transition in Zambia as the country buried late president Michael Sata.

Sata, who died in a London hospital from an undisclosed illness two weeks ago at the age of 77, was interred at Embassy Park, Zambia’s presidential burial site.

Vice-President Guy Scott became the continent’s first white leader since the 1994 end of South African apartheid when he was named interim president. Zambia, Africa’s second biggest copper producer, is expected to hold elections by January.

And in Kenya the Daily Nation reports that a parliamentary committee yesterday ordered an investigation into a vaccine that the Catholic church claims is being used to sterilise women.

Dr Robert Pukose, the chairman of the House Committee on Health, asked for the investigation after observing that the Ministry of Health and the church appeared to get different results from samples tested.

The ruling came after the church on Tuesday presented to parliament the results of tests it said proved that there was a conspiracy to secretly sterilise Kenyan women.

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