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African press review 25 July 2017

Nigeria's opposition PDP party denounces Buhari visit by ruling party chieftains as a conspiracy while a Kenyan NGO rescues 30 girls taken out of school by tribal leaders and married off to elderly men.

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We begin in Nigeria where several papers lead with a gathering political storm over the so-called "hope-lifting" picture of ailing President Muhammadu Buhari dining with chieftains of the ruling All Progressives Congress, in London on Sunday.

According to Vanguard, officials of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, denounced the photo op on Monday describing it a collective insult on Nigerians.

Former Aviation Minister, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, reportedly even described the picture as fake, alleging it was an arrangement to sustain the cabal in power as he blasted the media and the National Assembly for remaining docile in the face of what he called a conspiracy.

Meanwhile Nasarawa State Governor Umar Tanko Al-Makura who was on the ruling party's delegation to meet President Buhari in London also denounced the opposition's reaction as comical. 

Al-Makura told the Nation newspaper that the President was “agile, mentally alert” and brainstormed on state matters for about an hour with the delegation during the meeting at the Nigerian House in London. 

According to the paper Nasarawa State governor also told its correspondent that Buhari was not confined to any chair or any place and looked very healthy adding that  the President was fit enough to return to Nigeria any time.

 

Kenya's Daily Nation headlines on a shocking story from Zimbabwe: news that President Robert Mugabe lavished his sister-in-law with 49,500 euros on her 60th birthday.

The publication which cites Zimbabwe’s state-owned Herald newspaper as the source of the story, says that lucky recipient of the present was Junior Gumbochuma, Mrs. Grace Mugabe’s elder sister who is a pastor.

The Nation observes that Mugabe was able to afford the extravagant present, at a time when the country is running critically short of cash.

The Kenyan publication says Zimbabwe’s economy has been on a downturn for over a decade with many banks running out of cash, forcing people to queue for hours to make withdrawals often limited to only $20 a day.

 In Kenya, The Star leads with the happy rescue of more than 30 school girls from the Samburu ethnic group, who had been forcefully circumcised and married off to older men.

The paper says it heard from a 15 year-old pupil how she was forcefully taken out of school by her parents and married off to a 40 year-old man separated from his two wives.

“I stayed with him for two months before he died" the girl told the Star, adding that the head teacher of her school who learned of her husband’s death, came to the funeral and took her back to school the same day.

The publication says World Vision Kenya now operates three rescue centres which accommodate girls rescued from Female Genital Mutilation and early marriages around the country.

 

And in South Africa, the ugly face of black/white racism burst into the open on Monday after a radio tweet to a Johannesburg FM radio comparing black babies to dogs.

Times Live reports that Radio 702 was being pelted with queries about the alleged white author of the tweet for hours, before it merged that the person responsible was a young black woman.

According to the paper, the show's host had earlier taken his bosses to task over the tweet posted on the station’s social media account.

The Times reports that the FM radio owned by Primedia‚ had issued an apology‚ which the program's host dismissed as completely inadequate‚ and annoying to him and his black colleagues.

 

 

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