African press review 6 September 2013

 The African papers today headlined with Kenyan MPs walking out of the House; Boko Haram blamed for Thursday's massacre in Nigeria; and visions of by-gone clerics appear in a mosque in Lagos. 

The Kenyan papers scrutinize a motion by lawmakers to repeal the International Crimes act and withdraw Kenya from the Rome statute.

Daily Nation reports that the House turned into chaos on Thursday after MPs from the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) stormed out of the chamber. The paper quotes them as saying that they didn’t want to be part of a process that could end in Kenya becoming a pariah state and jeopardize its cases at the International Criminal Court.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, his deputy William Ruto and a journalist Joshua Sang are facing charges of crimes against humanity at the Internatinal Criminal court (ICC) in a trial due to open at The Hague on Tuesday. They are accused of plotting, financing and executing the 2008 post-election violence in which more than one thousand Kenyans were killed and over 600,000 people displaced from their homes.

Standard Digital also headlines on the CORD walkout as MPs voted for Kenya “to ditch the ICC” according to the papers own words. The paper says the majority of the party has justified its decision by claiming that the cases of the ICC were politically motivated and infringed upon the sovereignty of Kenya.

Kenya Today reports that the CORD coalition led by former Prime Minister Raila Odinga has reminded Kenyans that it was ironically the same members of the ruling Jubilee alliance now backing Kenyatta who pushed so hard for the cases to be tried at The Hague and who thwarted all efforts to form a local tribunal in Kenya.

In Nigeria, Punch blames the Islamist sect Boko Haram for Thursday’s massacre in Borno state that killed 20 people. The paper claims that the terrorists first opened fire at a market in Gajiran local government area killing 15 people, then moved on to shoot five more during a raid in the nearby village in Konduga.

Vanguard reports pandemonium in Lagos as thousands of Moslems stormed a local Mosque where strange images of late clerics allegedly appeared on the walls of the holy place. The paper claims that the images which weren’t very clear when its reporters rushed to the Dawiz Central Mosque in Ikorodu neighbourhood were identified as those of the late Sheikh Ahmada Tijani of Algeria, Sheikh Ibraheem Niass of Senegal and Sheikh Jamiu Bulala of Nigeria.

The claims come after allegations last year that a Nigerian baby had been born in Lagos holding the holy Quran in his hands and that a woman in the Ogun town of Saguma had given birth to a boy who emerged from his mother’s womb holding the Islamic rosary, the Tesbah in his hands.

And in South Africa The Sowetan reports that residents of a small Eastern Cape village where a child was killed by a car, dug up large portions of the road to vent their anger. In a reaction to the story, one of the newspaper’s readers remarks that getting into such fitts of anger is “what the people of Mdantsane do best, when they are not knifing the hell out of their drunkenness”.