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African press review 24 June 2015

Did Cairo and Khartoum conspire to assassinate South Sudan's president? At least one Saudi diplomat believes they did and WikiLeaks has a letter to prove it. Is it wise for the West to go on supporting Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi? And is Kenya's National Youth Service a political tool?

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"Sudan denies plot to kill Salva Kiir." That's the main headline in regional paper, The East African.

According to the report, Sudan has dismissed the WikiLeaks report accusing Khartoum and Cairo of plotting to kill Southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir.

WikiLeaks published what it claimed to be an official letter by a former Saudi Arabian foreign affairs minister telling the royal palace in Riyad about the plot by Sudanese and Egyptian intelligence to assassinate  Kiir.

Yesterday the Sudanese Foreign Affairs ministry simply said the claims were untrue.

The South Sudanese government confirmed obtaining the document but expressed reservations about it.

The West should put more pressure on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to the front page of the Cairo-based Egypt Independent.

Western nations should not support the Egyptian leader as long as he continues his policy of repressing political opposition and radicalising Islamists, says the Cairo daily, quoting an editorial in London newspaper The Financial Times.

By accepting Sisi's claim to be a bulwark of stability in the Middle East, Western countries are supporting a campaign to wipe out all political opposition, filling Egypt's jails with Muslim Brotherhood members and liberal activists whose only crime has been to voice their opinion against the president.

South African electricity supplier Eskom got unexpected support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) yesterday. According to the top story in this morning's edition of BusinessDay, the IMF says that Eskom's request for an increase in the price of electricity is necessary to make the utility financially sustainable.

The global lender warned that power cuts and shortages are the biggest obstacle to South Africa’s economic growth.

The National Energy Regulator yesterday held public hearings into whether or not Eskom should be granted an additional 9.6 per cent increase in tariffs next month after a 12.7 per cent hike in April.

The request has been widely opposed.

The South African Reserve Bank has warned that steep electricity tariff increases could see inflation remain outside the 3.0-6.0 per cent target band for longer than currently forecast.

Also in BusinessDay, a report that all parties in the South African parliament’s special committee to deal with the 20 million euros spent on President Jacob Zuma’s private home in Nkandla agreed yesterday that proceedings would begin with a briefing by Police Minister Nathi Nhleko.

The committee was mandated by the National Assembly to examine Nhleko’s report, which found that Zuma had no debt to pay for upgrades to his Nkandla property.

This was in sharp contrast to Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s finding that Zuma had benefited unduly from public spending on his home and recommended that he repay some of the money.

While the opposition parties agreed to begin with an interrogation of Nhleko and then to undertake a site visit to the president’s home, all indications are that a fractious debate is yet to come as the African National Congress (ANC) is insisting that no further witnesses should be called.

The opposition says that further witnesses will need to be heard.

The main story in Kenya's Standard reports that investigations into the attempted fraud at the National Youth Service (NYS) moved up a gear with detectives said to have identified the Internet Protocol address of the computer used in the transaction.

The Banking Fraud Investigations Unit has traced the processing of tenders for road construction and supply of building materials to the principal secretary in the devolution ministry and says the accounts are correct. Detectives are now focusing on a second transaction involving the shilling equivalent of about six million euros.

Over at The Daily Nation it is reported that opposition Orange Democratic Movement leaders have accused the Jubilee administration of using the National Youth Service to create a youth militia with the intention of propagating violence in the run-up, during and after the 2017 General Election.

The opposition party has demanded that the outfit be audited to verify the content of its curriculum, expenditure and ethnic composition.

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