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African press review 6 August 2015

The Nigerian press feeds fat on President Muhammadu Buhari’s declared war against corruption. A Pretoria resident recovers a car stolen 22 years ago, and South African opposition leader Mmusi Maimane publishes a damning tribune about President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla scandal.

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Vanguard reports that 24 hours after he sacked the head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Buhari placed all the consortium’s eight operation directors on retirement.

According to the paper, its correspondent gathered that four new group executive director positions had been created as the president moved to restructure the firm. It claims that Buhari had a week ago pledged to fix the oil sector, rid the industry of rot and recover money stolen by operators in the sector.

In South Africa, the Johannesburg Star publishes a column written by Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance party, on the so-called Nkandla gate scandal. That is the controversial spending of 246 million rand, or about 17.6 million euros, on security upgrades on President Zuma’s private residence in Kwa Zulu Natal home province.

According to the DA leader, while the focus has been on the lavish non-security upgrades such as the swimming pool, entering the residence leaves one with the impression that he is heading to a military compound. The security features at Nkandla are impressive to the point of being stifling, writes Maimane -- a heavily secured entrance, bullet-proof guard houses, an on-site clinic and 21 houses for use by the South African National Defence Forces and SAPS, the police service.

But he points out the security does not seem to match the threat level posed to South African presidents. He holds that as presidents, neither Nelson Mandela nor Thabo Mbeki spent nearly as much on security upgrades to their private residences as Zuma has.

In total, President Zuma’s government spent 7 billion rand (500 million euros) on state security services during this first term in office, compared to the 3 billion rand spent by Mbeki in his second term in office. Suffice to say, concludes the DA leader, that the level of security is unprecedented for a private residence of a president.

Maimane wrote the piece after taking part in a parliamentary fact-finding mission to the private home. He claims that after touring the president’s Nkandla house, he increasingly began to feel that it is not only greed that underlies the gross misappropriation of public funds, but also severe paranoia following an internal African National Congress report in 2012 that found that 38 ANC members had been killed in KwaZulu-Natal alone since the beginning of 2011.

And in South Africa, News 24 breaks the happy story of a Pretoria resident whose stolen car was recovered 22 years later. According to the online publication, Derrick Goosen’s Toyota Corolla 1.6 GL disappeared from a car park one fateful day in February 1993. Goosen received a call that would reunite him with his prized possession.

This was possible through the dedication, hard work and perseverance of Warrant Officer Kwakwa Ntokola from the Seshego vehicle tracking unit in Limpopo. The chassis and engine numbers were scraped off but officers were able to get the scratched numbers and link the car to the case Goosen opened. The 45-year-old Goosen fetched his car on Tuesday and got a chance to meet the man who was handling his case.

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