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African press review 20 November 2014

Uganda's anti-gay bill, vasectomies in Kenya and a voice expressing concern about dependency culture in South Africa ... some of the issues in newspapers around Africa today.

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The new anti-gay bill is close to being finished in Uganda according to the Daily Monitor. The new bill is expected to replace the Anti-Homosexuality Act that was rejected by Uganda's Constitutional Court earlier this year.

According to a source who spoke to the Kampala-based daily, the drafting of the bill is in its advanced stages.

There are two new things about the bill:

Firstly, it will now include a paragraph that bans the promotion of homosexuality. I am sure the authors of the proposed law were inspired by Russia on this one. And as Frank Mugisha, the founder of Sexual Minorities Uganda, explains, this is where it gets absurd. Under the new legislation, even newspapers could face charges if they were to publish an article about homosexuality.

And there is more, housing or transporting homosexuals will also result in imprisonment of up to 10 years.

The second thing is the use of certain words. According to Latif Ssebalgala, one of the MPs behind the future legislation, the bill was completely re-written to avoid any explicit references to homosexuality. That is why the bill was barred by the constitutional council last time.

The final draft should be presented to the public before Christmas, and this is not the last time you'll hear about it.

Ebola has put nearly half of Liberians out of work. You’ll find that story in Front Page Africa. According to a recent survey by the World Bank Group, the spread of the virus has impacted all sectors of employment of the Liberian economy, in both affected and non-affected counties.

As of early November 2014, nearly half of those who where working when the Ebola outbreak struck the country were out of job. People who are self-employed are the hardest hit by the crisis. That is in large part due to the closure of markets in which they operate.

There is one piece of good news though, writes the paper. After an initial downturn, the agricultural sector is showing resilience in the face of Ebola.

In Kenya, women are apparently opposed to vasectomies for their husbands. That’s in this morning's Standard. According to this year's National Survey on Male Involvement in Family Planning, a majority of Kenyan wives are opposed to their husbands getting a vasectomy.

And the men are rejecting the procedure too. The Kenyan daily says that some of them found “the permanence of vasectomy unpleasant and intolerable and equated it to castration”.

This survey has  implications for family planning - the Nairobi-based paper also explains that most women are against their husbands using condoms because they are associated with infidelity.

Finally, there is an interesting opinion piece in South Africa's Business Day.

Thami Mazwi, a CEO, is calling for black citizens to stop relying on the state. In his piece, he gives an example of someone who told him that "the South African government has an obligation to provide to blacks as apartheid destroyed our lives".

But for the business owner, "this dependence/entitlement syndrome is self-defeating." Mazwi writes that the black community must overcome this or they are doomed to continue as second-class citizens.

And that is largely, according to Mazwi, due to the current crop of young black leaders that is not in the mould of Nelson Mandela or Oliver Tambo. "The make-up of these greats was not centred on entitlement but on self-actualisation in taking their people to higher levels of existence", he writes.

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