BBC Afrique

A thief in Guinea has warmly congratulated police for catching him in a video that is going viral on social media.

Boubacar Diallo, a student at a technical college in Mamou, and his accomplice freely admitted having stolen 50m Guinean francs ($5,600; £4,160) from a phone shop in the northwestern city.

In front of the cameras, Diallo called for more resources to be given to the police.

"The national police head office should be congratulated. I also want to say that the police needs equipment because it has well-trained officers. Seriously," said Diallo.

He added that he never imagined that he would be caught so quickly and said he regretted his crime and would not steal again.

The video of his address is on YouTube, external.

Stephanie Hegarty
BBC Africa, Lagos

We are continuing to cover the Kenyan Supreme Court's election hearing, but will now also bring you some other stories from the rest of Africa - including this from Nigeria, where a leopard has been spotted for the first time in decades.

The elusive spotty wildcat was seen in the Yankari reserve in eastern Nigeria, where people believed it had died out, the WCS conservation organisation says.

It was photographed by a hidden camera while roaming the park at night. And it has taken conservationists by surprise. There’s been no sign of a leopard in this part of the country since the 1980s.

Though it’s not clear yet whether it’s male or female, the animal looks healthy and well-fed. Park managers say the likelihood there are more is very near.

This encouraging discovery is part of an ongoing effort by the state government in Bauchi to protect the park from poachers.

The leopard is not necessarily an endangered species and is thought to exist in other parks in Nigeria but little research has been done into just what type of leopard this is.

The Financial Times East Africa correspondent John Aglionby is wondering why the IEBC declared the official election result without having received all results from polling stations when it could legally have waited four more days.

Some Kenyans have been joking about the bee attack earlier on people outside the Supreme Court (see earlier post) by punning on the name of the forms at the centre of the court's decision to cancel the election.

In Kenya, form 34A is the first form used to tabulate results of the presidential election and is filled in by the presiding officer after votes are counted at a polling station, the Daily Nation, external newspaper says.

Form 34B is filled in by the constituency returning officer using the information on form 34A, the newspaper says.

Image source, Twitter

One tweeter has noted criticism by Kenya's deputy chief justice of international election observers - who endorsed the now-annulled election result.

Gabriel Oguda accuses former US secretary of state John Kerry - who was with the Carter Center's election observer mission - of coming to Kenya "on holiday".

Some international election observers gave Kenya's election a clean bill of health by declaring they were were credible, free, and fair.

However, Mr Kerry later tweeted a statement by the Carter Center, external, which said the center's earlier statements had noted irregularities in the electronic vote transmission process and stressed that the electoral process was not yet complete.

Mr Kerry then urged Kenyans to resolve the election dispute in court:

Reuters' East Africa bureau chief has chosen her favourite word coming out of today's explanation by Kenya's Supreme Court why it annulled last month's election.

This tweeter is equally enamoured of the word, which he noticed Kenyan Chief Justice David Maraga used about the electoral commission:

The live page writers have to admit we had not heard of this word before.

So we double-checked on Oxford English Dictionary, which defines contumacious as:

This just led to another question - what is contemning?

Here's the dictionary definition of the verb to contemn:

Video footage is being shared of the moment angry bees attacked police and protesters outside Kenya's Supreme Court.

The footage shows bystanders pulling one person to safety - reportedly a disabled beggar left unconscious after the swarm attacked. They then pour water on him and he is reported to have been taken to hospital.

The bees were said to have emerged after their hive was disturbed by protesters.

Journalists observing the Kenyan Supreme Court hearing on the election have been offering their own summaries.

Correspondents for the Reuters news agency and the UK Daily Telegraph say the court has not ruled that the election was rigged, but merely that the results were unverifiable.

This however could have given Kenyans the impression that fraud had taken place.

Image source, NTV

Justice Jackton Ojwang has started to outline his arguments for dissent.

When the Kenyan Supreme Court annulled the presidential election on 1 September, the decision was made by a majority vote and not all judges agreed. Two of the six dissented.

Judge Ojwang explained his reasoning at the time:

Lady Justice Njoki Ndung'u also dissented because she said that the irregularities in the election were not deliberate.

Kenyan chief justice David Maraga has been summing up the court's judgement.

"The election system in Kenya was designed to be simple and verifiable. Between 8 and 11 August it cannot be said to have been so," he said.

"The petition before us was simple and to the point. It is obvious to us that the IEBC misunderstood it."

The IEBC must "go back to the drawing board", Judge Maraga added.

Another court would come to the same conclusion if the anomalies seen in this election were repeated, he added.

Alastair Leithead
BBC Africa correspondent

Kenya's Supreme Court has said it annulled the result of the presidential election because the process was "neither transparent or verifiable and so it had no choice but to nullify" the result.

It squarely blamed the country's electoral commission and its chairman for failing to have received all the results before announcing the result.

It criticised the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, or IEBC, for ignoring a court order to open up its computer servers to scrutiny - and therefore had to accept claims by the opposition that the system had been infiltrated and compromised.

The deputy chief justice Philomena Mwilu said the lack of phone signal in some areas was not an acceptable explanation.

Image source, EPA

Image source, Getty Images

Kenya has a “stillborn democracy”, Kenyan chief justice David Maraga has said.

He was giving his explanation of why the Supreme Court annulled last month's election.

He said that elections were not annulled just because there were irregularities.

"If that were so there would hardly ever be an election in this country," he said.

Instead he has been looking at whether these irregularities negatively affected the result.

We reported earlier that we would be looking out for answers during the Kenyan Supreme Court judges' explanation as to why last month's election was annulled.

Specifically, we wanted to know:

- Will we get clarity on any alleged wrongdoing in the election?

- What does this judgment mean for the electoral commission (IEBC)?

The first question has been answered - the court blames the electoral commission.

Kenya's Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu said the voting system had either been hacked, tampering with the vote, or the IEBC had not admitted they "bungled" the vote.

So that leaves the big question - if the IEBC have failed to run the election in accordance with the constitution, who will run the next election?

The proposed date of 17 October is looking less and less feasible.

Image source, Getty Images

Kenyan Chief Justice David Maraga is talking about discrepancies in the forms used during the election process.

He says that examinations of sample groups of forms showed that some did not bear official stamps, others had not been duly signed and yet more did not bear serial numbers or official watermarks.

"The discrepancies were widespread. These discrepancies affected the integrity of the elections," he says.

Kenyan Chief Justice David Maraga says the opposition did not prove that the presidential campaign used public funds to pay for their electoral campaign.

As Reuters' deputy bureau chief in East Africa tweets:

Alastair Leithead
BBC Africa correspondent

The Supreme Court in Kenya has blamed the country's electoral commission for its decision to annul the presidential election.

Announcing its full judgement that the election was "neither transparent or verifiable and so it had no choice but to nullify" the result.

The court said the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, or IEBC, did not verify the results of the election before it announced the results and it refused to obey a court order to allow proper scrutiny of the electronic voting system.

The deputy chief justice said the IEBC could not explain why the results from more than 11,000 polling stations had not been received at tallying stations as required by law.

She added that that because the commission refused to allow full access to its computer system, the court had no choice but to "accept claims by the opposition that the computer system had been infiltrated and compromised and the data interfered with, or that the IEBC officials interfered with the system themselves".

Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu has said that the electoral commission relied on the reports by election observers to argue for the results' credibility.

The observers were widely criticised after the election was annulled for their rushed assessment that the election was free, fair and a credible.

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry who led the mission for the Carter Center International Observation Mission, was singled out for his effusive praise of the conduct of the poll.

His comments were used in court.

One of the main exchanges during the previous hearing was Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu asking IEBC lawyers what happened to extra ballot papers given to voters who only cast votes for the president.

Voters were given six ballot papers for the six positions, including that of president.

The opposition petition had alleged that the alleged disparity proved that fraud had taken place.

Ms Mwilu has revisited the issue on her judgement today, saying that the issue of "extra votes in the presidential election compared to other posts did not receive a satisfying response".

Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu says that the court has upheld the opposition claim that the election result was declared before all results from Kenya's more than 40,000 polling stations had been received.

The election was "neither transparent nor verifiable" and "we have no choice but to nullify it," she said.

The poll had not been "conducted in accordance with the constitution", she added.

However the court had not seen any evidence that there was anything wrong with voter registration and identification, manual voting or vote-counting itself, she said.

One tweeter is running a very colourful timeline of the Supreme Court ruling using GIFs.

Enjoy.