Will Ross
Africa editor, BBC World Service

Image source, AFP

Residents of Buea in south-west Cameroon say one man was shot dead and another is in hospital with bullet wounds after suspected separatist rebels opened fire near the town's central market.

Several football teams taking part in the Africa Cup Of Nations are based in Buea and train there.

Correspondents say the Cameroonian military has a significant presence in the town to counter any security threat.

The separatists who started fighting the government almost five years ago had threatened to disrupt the tournament.

Late on Tuesday, an opposition senator was shot dead in the city of Bamenda, in north-west Cameroon - another English-speaking region which is badly affected by the separatist rebellion.

Watch as Ivory Coast captain Max Gradel scores a stunning goal to give his side a 1-0 win against Equatorial Guinea in their Africa Cup of Nations opener.

Image source, AFP

South Africa's only driving licence printing machine is in Germany for repairs, the transport minister has revealed.

The announcement follows reports of a backlog of more than 300,000 driving licences.

The minister says the country has only one printer to reduce the risk of illegal licences being produced.

South Africans online have been complaining about the delay in licence renewal.

They have been calling for a permanent solution to the matter even as the transport ministry plans to introduce digital licences this year.

BBC World Service

Image source, Getty Images

A Moroccan university professor accused of giving students good grades in return for sexual favours has been jailed for two years.

It's the first verdict in a string of high profile sexual harassment cases at universities in Morocco.

The economics lecturer at Hassan I University, near Casablanca, was found guilty of indecent behaviour among other charges.

Four more academics will appear in court on Thursday as part of the scandal.

The cases were highlighted by Moroccan media last year after journalists picked up messages reported to be between students and lecturers.

Activists say it's rare for sexual harassment cases to go to trial.

The Newsroom
BBC World Service

Image source, AFP

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that despite repeated requests to the Ethiopian government, it still has no access to Tigray - where 14 months of war have created a humanitarian crisis.

A WHO senior official said he'd received letters from doctors in the northern region who had run out of basic treatments for illnesses such as diabetes.

The head of the organisation, Tedros Ghebreyesus - who is from Tigray - said the region's population of seven million had been under siege for more than a year.

He said this had created a "hell" in the region and was an "insult to our humanity to allow a situation like this to continue".

"Nowhere in the world are we witnessing hell like in Tigray," he said.

Our African proverb of the day:

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Works by Nigerian Osinachi have made him one of Africa's leading digital and crypto-artists.

Ivory Coast captain Max Gradel scores a spectacular winner as the Elephants beat Equatorial Guinea 1-0 in a nervy Africa Cup of Nations Group E encounter.

Burkina Faso forward Bertrand Traore is out of his side's Africa Cup of Nations game against Cape Verde after testing positive for Covid-19.

e Gambia enjoy a dream Africa Cup of Nations debut by beating Mauritania 1-0 in Limbe to go joint-top of Group F.

Protesters planted the cannabis in a vegetable garden near the South African president's workplace.

That's all for now from the BBC Africa Live team until Thursday morning.

There will be an automated news feed until then. You can also get the latest news from our website or listen to the Africa Today podcast.

Here's a reminder of Wednesday's wise words:

Click here to send us your Africa proverbs.

And we leave you with a photo taken earlier on Wednesday of a sculpture by the late Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle outside a museum in Morocco's capital, Rabat:

Image source, AFP

Will Ross
Africa editor, BBC World Service

The Ugandan military says a senior rebel leader has been captured in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It says Benjamin Kisokeranio is a commander with a faction of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).

Army officials say he was arrested in DR Congo's South Kivu province when entering the country from Burundi.

This is far from the area where the ADF has been carrying out frequent attacks.

In November the Kinshasa government agreed to let the Ugandan military cross the border to fight the ADF which says it is allied to the Islamic State group.

The Ugandan authorities blame the ADF for several bomb blasts in the capital Kampala.

Nichola Mandil
Juba

Image source, UN Ocha

Thousands of people who were displaced by flash floods in South Sudan find it almost impossible to find safe drinking water, the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said.

The majority of those affected are in the northern oil producing Unity State, MSF's press release said.

Eight months since flooding began, people in Unity State and other surrounding areas are stuck in poor living conditions and are at risk of outbreaks of infectious and waterborne diseases.

"When you walk through the camps, you can see malnourished children, people collecting dirty flood water to drink, cattle collapsing and their carcasses everywhere. Such poor conditions are harming people’s health," MSF's Reza Eshaghian said.

The number of people reported to have been affected by floods since May last year was 835,000.

Image source, Getty Images

South African police have uprooted cannabis plants grown outside the offices of President Cyril Ramaphosa and have arrested their owner - the leader of the Khoisan community.

King Khoisan, wearing a traditional loincloth, held on to a shoulder-height plant as police dragged it across the presidential lawn in the capital Pretoria.

Image source, Getty Images

King Khoisan and a small group of his supporters had been living in tents they had put up at the Union Buildings - the seat of government - since 2018.

They had vowed to remain at the site until President Ramaphosa met them to discuss their demand for the official recognition of their languages.

"I am very cross. We've been here since November 2018 and Ramaphosa has never even taken a minute of his time to address or acknowledge our presence. Yet they now bring in police to torment us," the king's wife, Queen Cynthia, was quoted by the local IOL news site as saying.

Around two dozen officers - some in riot gear, others mounted on horseback and some with sniffer dogs - raided the small group, AFP reports.

Image source, Getty Images

"The king tried by all means to prevent the police from taking out the plants but four policemen dragged him out of the garden to the Nelson Mandela statue," Queen Cynthia was quoted by IOL as saying.

"We've been using dagga for medicinal purposes for a very long time and people come to us when they are sick on a daily basis."

South Africa's highest court decriminalised cannabis for private and personal use in 2018.

The Khoisan are South Africa's oldest inhabitants but they say they have often found themselves marginalised and dispossessed.

You can watch a video about them, by the BBC's Christian Parkinson, here:

Mali and Tunisia's Africa Cup of Nations game ends in chaos after the referee first signals for full-time on 85 minutes, then ends the game when the clock shows 89 minutes and 47 seconds.

Will Ross
Africa editor, BBC World Service

Image source, Getty Images

Southern African countries have agreed to extend the mandate of a troop deployment to Mozambique, where they have been helping the military fight a jihadist group.

Officials attending a regional summit said the troops had made good progress.

Earlier this week it was announced that around 1,000 Rwandan troops would also stay in Mozambique following an agreement between the two countries.

The presence of foreign troops did manage to push the militants out of towns in the north of the country.

But attacks and kidnappings are still common.

Read more: Sex-slave freeing Rwandan soldiers greeted as heroes

Israel Campos
BBC News

Angolan President João Lourenço has condemned as an "act of terror" Monday's demonstration by taxi drivers in the capital, Luanda.

At the opening of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr Lourenço said the protest was a "political pretext" to "create anger" among Angolans ahead of general elections in August.

“What happened on Monday was a true act of terror,” he said.

The taxi drivers protested to demand better roads and the easing of Covid restrictions which limit the number of passengers they can carry.

The police accused them of setting fire to a bus, and vandalising a building belonging to the ruling MPLA party, external.

At least 30 people were arrested, police said.

The main opposition Unita party condemned the violence.

Edmilson Ângelo, from the Institute of Development Studies, told the BBC that the protest could be "a sign of what we can expect" ahead of the elections.

Mr Lourenço said the protests were part of an “ungovernability plan", but he wanted to give an assurance that the elections would take place in a safe environment.

Mr Lourenço is due to run for a second term under the banner of the MPLA - a party that has been in power since independence in 1975.

Alfred Mushi
BBC News, Dar es Salaam

A wildlife official has described as an "act of love" a lioness' decision to escort a young wildebeest to a safe point for its mother to pick it up within the Serengeti National Park.

For a big cat to do this was unusual, and it was a case of the lioness' maternal instincts "over-riding" her predatory instincts, Tanzania National Parks Authority spokesman Pascal Shelutete told the BBC.

A video of the scene, captured on 9 January in the world-famous game reserve, has been posted on Twitter:

Prosecutors say a businessman may have been duped into going to Ivory Coast by an online scammer.