Mercy Juma
BBC Africa, Nairobi

The Kenya Red Cross says that at least 100 people have been killed and 242,000 displaced by four weeks of floods, landslides and heavy rains.

The relief organisation called it a humanitarian disaster which needs emergency funding.

Most of those affected had their homes either swept away or submerged by flood waters.

Most victims have had to be resettled in schools and the organisation says they have been overstretched by the crisis.

Its Secretary General, Abbas Gullet, said they are greatly concerned about outbreaks of cholera and other waterborne diseases.

Much of the country has been affected although the meteorological department says some parts of north-eastern Kenya have seen the heaviest records of rainfall in two decades.

A new school term is due to begin on Wednesday but hundreds of schools will remain closed in this region.

In neighbouring Somalia, more than 250,000 people are displaced after two of the largest rivers in the central region, the Shebelle and the Juba, burst their banks, flooding nearby towns and villages including Beledweyne and Baidoa towns.

This is the rainy season in both Kenya and Somalia but regions recovering from recent drought are struggling to cope with the unusually heavy downpour.

Emmanuel Igunza
BBC Africa, Addis Ababa

Image source, AFP

Many areas in Ethiopia are still without electricity despite authorities saying they had restored power supply after a nationwide cut on Monday.

Authorities said a fault at Gibe III hydroelectric dam in the southern region had caused the blackout.

The dam, which has a capacity of 1,800 megawatts of hydroelectric power, is a crucial part of the national grid.

Power outages in the country are common despite Ethiopia having invested massively in hydroelectric power dams.

It is currently constructing what will be Africa’s largest dam - the Grand Renaissance Dam along the river Nile.

The dam aims to produce 6,000 megawatts of hydro-electric power - the equivalent of six nuclear-powered plants.

The project, which will cost $4bn (£3bn), is however opposed by Egypt which says the dam threatens the water supply to countries downstream.

Talks to resolve the dispute between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan have currently stalled.

Image source, AFP

Gabon's constitutional court has called on the prime minister to resign and dissolve the lower house of parliament because they failed to meet an election deadline.

According to the court, the government should have organised twice-delayed legislative elections by 30 April at the latest.

"It is clear that the government has not been able to fulfill the tasks assigned to it," AFP news agency quotes the court's head Madeleine Mborantsuo as saying in a statement on Monday.

"The decisions of the constitutional court are not to be commented on. They are to be applied," Prime Minister Franck Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet is quoted as saying on national television after the ruling.

The court announced that President Ali Bongo Ondimba would nominate a new team of ministers answerable directly to him.

The upper house of parliament, the Senate, will remain in place under the court's order and will carry out the powers of the lower house until new ministers until elections are held. No date for the polls has yet been set.

President Ali Bongo's re-election in 2016, in which he narrowly beat his former brother-in-law Jean Ping, led to opposition accusations of electoral fraud.

He can now run for an unlimited number of terms, after the constitution was amended in January to remove presidential terms limits. The opposition criticised that change as a "power grab".

A former aide to Donald Trump has tweeted that the US president did indeed use the slur "shithole" to refer to African countries when discussing an immigration policy in January.

President Trump has denied using the word, saying at the time "this was not the language used".

Omarosa Manigault - who held a communication role at the White House before leaving the administration later that month - has now tweeted:

She was reacting to Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari's comments that he was "not sure about the veracity of the allegations" of Mr Trump using the word.

Mr Buhari, who is in the US on an official visit, was asked asked about the alleged slur during a press conference. Watch his reaction in full here:

Image source, AFP

Sudan must cut its business ties with North Korea if it wants to initiate talks about being removed from the US' list of "state sponsors of terrorism", AFP quotes a top US official as saying.

Despite the US lifting economic sanctions in October, Sudan has remained on the terror list which includes North Korea, Syria and Iran.

Sudanese officials say their presence on the list makes international banks wary of doing business with Sudanese banks.

They also deny that the country has ties with North Korea.

"Sudan confirms it has no relations with Democratic People's Republic of Korea at any level," the Sudanese foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Sudan has been grappling with rising inflation, high debt and loss of oil revenue, all of which have sparked protests.

The US is also pushing Sudan to improve its record on human rights, religious freedom and other rights issues to take its negotiations with Khartoum to the next phase.

Sudan and North Korea have had no diplomatic relations for years, but some rights and campaign groups allege that the two have military ties, AFP reports.

Today's African proverb:

Image source, AFP

Click here and scroll to the bottom to send us your African proverbs.

Welcome to BBC Africa Live where we will bring you the latest news from around the continent.

That's all from BBC Africa Live today. Keep up-to-date with what's happening across the continent by listening to the Africa Today podcast or check the BBC News website.

A reminder of today's wise words:

Click here and scroll to the bottom to send us your African proverbs.

And we leave you with one of the first pictures taken by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari's official photographer of his meeting with Donald Trump in the White House:

Image source, Getty Images

A marine salvage expert wants to tug icebergs from Antarctica to South Africa to help solve Cape Town's drought.

The plan is to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water.

A single iceberg "could produce about 150 million litres per day for about a year", around 30% of the city's needs, Nick Sloane, a director at the US marine salvage firm Resolve Marine, told Reuters news agency.

After three years of low rainfall Cape Town has been warned that it may have to turn off water supplies, but seasonal rains averted the crisis.

Mr Sloane is looking for investors for the scheme that he has said would cost $130m (£95m) and experts will gather in mid-May to discuss whether his plan is possible, reports News 24, external.

Uche Akolisa
BBC Igbo, Lagos

Image source, AFP

As Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari is about to meet his US counterpart Donald Trump, BBC Igbo has been looking at four things the men have in common.

1) Assumed office in their 70s

Mr Buharị was 73 when he assumed office in 2015 and Mr Trump was 70 when he came to power last year.

2) Their elections came as a surprise

Mr Buhari was Nigera’s first oppostion leader to win an election - never before had a sitting president been defeated at the polls. In the US, Hillary Clinton was tipped to win the 2016 election, but the US billionaire and Republican candidate claimed victory after a string of formerly Democratic states swung his way.

3) Troubled relationship with the media

President Trump does not hide his disdain for journalists and the press in general. Mr Buhari, a former military ruler, is equally as wary and only makes policy statement when he is outside the country, tending to shun local media interviews.

4) Known for their gaffes

Mr Trump's blunt language on Twitter is infamous and he is alleged to have used the word "shithole" to describe African nations – though he denies being racist. Mr Buhari has had equally embarrassing moments. He once responded to criticism from his wife by saying she belonged in his kitchen and earlier this year upset Nigerians by suggesting young people were not hard working.

Jose Tembe
BBC Africa, Maputo

Image source, Getty Images

Former officers expelled from Mozambique's police force are training Islamist militants in Cabo Delgado province, a report by Mozambique's Institute of Economic and Social Studies and the Civil Society Support Mechanism says.

The study, published in Media Fax, says the group staged its first attacks against police stations on 5 October, in the northern port of Mocimboa da Praia.

The study said that the group also brought in militia commanders from al-Shabab in Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia to train recruits in northern Cabo Delgado province.

Local people call the militants al-Shabab - supposedly not because of any connections with the Somali terror group of that name, but because “al-Shabab” means “the youth” in Arabic.

Alex Duval Smith
BBC Africa, Dakar

Image source, Getty Images

Niger's government is getting tough with striking students in order to get them to go back to their desks by closing down university canteens.

The West African nation's 23,000 university students have had their studies disrupted for two years because of strikes in response to the non-payment of their grants.

The tension has worsened this year.

Five students were expelled from the University of Niamey after a teacher was assaulted in February.

Now government spokesman Assoumana Malam Issa has told the BBC the authorities will not continue to feed and lodge students who are disrupting the education system:

Temidayo Olofinsawo
BBC Yoruba editor, Lagos

Nigerians on social media have been giving President Muhammadu Buhari advice on what not to say to US President Donald Trump when he meets him later at the White House.

It comes after he suggested whilst on a trip to the UK that young Nigerians were lazy.

Commentators on the BBC Yoruba Facebook page, external said Mr Buhari should stop demeaning young people, thereby destroying Nigerian's reputation abroad.

Critics of the president on Twitter also have had advice for Mr Trump, urging the US president to press his Nigerian counterpart to do more to end the conflict between nomadic herdsmen and farming communities.

Somalia's former Defence Minister Mohamed Mursal Abdirahman has just been elected speaker of the country's parliament.

It is the second-most powerful position in the country, after the president.

A former BBC journalist has tweeted photos of Mr Abdirahman's campaign posters.

Mohamed Osman Jawari resigned as speaker in April after falling out with the prime minister and president.

The cabinet and parliament appeared to back opposite sides in a dispute that erupted last year between Qatar and Turkey against Saudi Arabia and its ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Both Turkey and the UAE have given aid to Somalia.

Things boiled over earlier this month when Somalia cut ties with the UAE after it entered into a deal with the self-declared republic of Somaliland to develop the port of Berbera.

Zimbabwe's government will charge as much as $50,000 (£36,000) for licences to grow cannabis, a journalist has tweeted:

The government announced this weekend that that individuals and businesses would be able to apply for licences to cultivate cannabis for medicinal or scientific use.

Lesotho issued Africa's first licence for medical cannabis production last year, making Zimbabwe the second African country to legalise growing cannabis.

Exiled former spin doctor for Robert Mugabe, Jonathan Moyo, has said the Zimbabwean decision was made before Mr Mugabe was forced to resign:

Image source, Getty Images

Comoros' President Azali Assoumani has announced the country will hold a referendum in July on changing presidential term limits, Reuters news agency reports.

The referendum is over changing from rotating power every five years between the archipelago's islands to allowing a president to be re-elected for two five-year terms.

The rotating system was intended to promote stability and power-sharing in the coup-prone country. Comoros has had more than 20 coups or coup attempts since it declared independence from France in 1975.

If people vote for the constitution to change, the next presidential election will also be brought forward from 2021 to 2019.

Ibrahim Aydid
BBC Monitoring

Somalia’s President Mohamed Abdullahi "Farmajo" Mohamed is visiting flood victims in central town of Beledweyne in Hiran region.

Thousands of people have been displaced from Beledweyne following floods that resulted from Shabelle River bursting its banks.

A radio station has tweeted some photos of the flooding:

Local media has reported a rise in the number of people who have died as a result of the floods and regional leaders are appealing for urgent humanitarian aid.

Image source, Getty Images

Three-quarters of fish endemic to East Africa's Lake Victoria face the threat of extinction, according to a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The report, external assessed 204 species of fish.

It picked out the fate of the African lungfish, a long eel-like fish, which it said had seen its numbers dwindle due largely to overfishing, poor fishing practices and environmental degradation as wetlands have been converted to agricultural land.

Industrial and agricultural pollution, over-harvesting and land clearance are among the main threats to biodiversity in the region, the report added.

It also highlighted the impact of climate change, noting that freshwater fish have "high sensitivity [and] seemingly poor adaptive capacity" to climatic shifts.

The International Committee of the Red Cross say it has rescued 10 aid workers who were kidnapped last week in South Sudan by a rebel group.

We reported on Thursday that the staff from the UN and other organisations had gone missing near the town of Yei.

The Red Cross picked the 10 up in Yei in a plane and flew them to the capital Juba, said François Stamm, the head of delegation for the ICRC in South Sudan.

The organisation said it was not involved in the negotiations for their release nor were their staff kidnapped.

“The ICRC has a long-standing record as a neutral intermediary in these kinds of situations," Mr Stamm added in a statement.

A statement from the rebel group SPLA-IO says it took the aid workers because they had strayed “without clearance” into an area it controlled.

Fighting between government forces and rebel factions has continued in the area despite several peace agreements.

This is the second incident of its kind in the country involving aid workers this month.

Olubayode Alebiosu
BBC Yoruba, Lagos

Image source, BBC Yoruba

Very few Nigerians trust the police, but one man has been singled out as the “most incorruptible officer” in the country.

Adekunle Rufus Adedeji, a superintendent in charge of the Criminal Investigative Bureau in Ekiti state, is said to have never taken a bribe - according to a survey conducted by the human rights group Constitutional Rights Awareness and Liberty Initiative.

He recently received the "Most Dedicated Police Officer in Nigeria" award from the US embassy here.

He told BBC Yoruba at the ceremony that he feels awkward when Nigerians continually denigrate the police and that the force was not necessarily to blame for poor performance:

He said the government was also to blame for what the police force had become.

However, he said this was not a reason for officers to ask for bribes or to abuse people’s rights.

His wife, Omolola Adedeji, said her husband had made it clear to her not to expect “resources he never worked for at home”: