Image source, AFP

Guinea's former President Alpha Condé could face corruption charges after the junta that overthrew him last year told prosecutors to begin legal proceedings, the AFP news agency reports.

More than 180 others could also be charged.

"You are enjoined... to initiate legal proceedings" for alleged acts of "corruption, illicit enrichment, money laundering, forgery and use of forgeries in public writing, embezzlement of public funds and complicity" against "the legal entities and individuals whose names follow", AFP quotes a letter by the justice minister as saying.

The military seized power in September last year accusing Mr Condé of rampant corruption and human rights abuses.

He is already facing charges of murder and torture.

Officers say that civilian rule will resume in three years.

A UK subsidiary of mining giant Glencore has been ordered to pay more than £275m for bribing officials in African countries to get access to oil.

The company paid $26m (£23m) through agents and employees to officials of crude oil firms in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ivory Coast between 2011 and 2016.

Prosecutors said Glencore Energy UK employees and agents used private jets to transfer cash to pay the bribes.

Glencore Energy UK pleaded guilty to seven corruption offences in June.

It was ordered to pay a fine of £182.9m by Judge Peter Fraser at Southwark Crown Court, who also approved £93.5m to be confiscated from the company.

Along with five charges of bribery, the subsidiary admitted charges of failing to prevent agents from using bribes to secure oil contracts in Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.

Judge Fraser said the offences Glencore had pleaded guilty to represented "corporate corruption on a widespread scale, deploying very substantial sums of money in bribes".

"The corruption is of extended duration, and took place across five separate countries in West Africa, but had its origins in the West Africa oil trading desk of the defendant in London. It was endemic amongst traders on that particular desk," he added.

Read more on this story.

Charles Gitonga
BBC Africa business reporter, Nairobi

Image source, Getty Images

A strike called by Kenya Airways pilots has failed to materialise.

A spot-check by the BBC at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport showed that it was business as usual.

The pilots, through the Kenya Association of Pilots, had issued a 14-day strike notice which expired on Wednesday.

But an airline official told the BBC that “things are very normal” at the airline and no pilots had downed their tools.

A Nairobi-based travel agency confirmed that no Kenya Airways flights had been cancelled or delayed across the country’s major airports.

Pilots' union officials remained silent on Thursday and are yet to respond to queries on the status of the planned strike.

The pilots are demanding that the national airline reinstates contributions to their retirement fund, and further accuse airline management of breaching the collective-bargaining agreement.

A senior pilot who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity said the management of Kenya Airways had failed to engage them meaningfully over the last two years.

Kenya Airways chairperson Michael Joseph in a statement on Wednesday said all bargaining agreements "must align with the need to restructure the airline operations towards profitability”.

The airline had suspended pension contributions in 2020 due to Covid.

The loss-making carrier also reduced salaries of staff, among them pilots, but has since reinstated full salaries and says it is in the process of paying the arrears.

The management maintains that the airline cannot afford to meet the demands of the pilots until mid-2023.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says a journalist covering the fighting between government forces and Islamist militants in northern Mozambique has gone missing after police took him into custody over the weekend.

Arlindo Chissale has been held incommunicado and without access to lawyers since Saturday, the rights group quotes a family member as saying.

Chissale is a freelancer and editor of an online publication. He was taken into custody while working in the mining town of Balama, HRW said.

"The Mozambican government should immediately take steps to locate Chissale, inform his family of his whereabouts, and ensure his safe return home," the organisation added.

Detention and forced disappearance of local journalists covering the conflict in Cabo Delgado province is common. The last known disappearance was in April 2020 and the journalist has not been heard from since.

AS FAR book a semi-final spot in the Women's African Champions League after they come from behind to beat Green Buffaloes.

Image source, Getty Images

The United States intends to exclude Burkina Faso from a trade deal that gives exporters in Africa tariff-free access to the American market.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday cited Burkina Faso’s lack of progress towards "protecting of the rule of law and political pluralism" for terminating the country as a beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).

“Accordingly, I intend to terminate the designation of Burkina Faso as a beneficiary sub-Saharan African country under the Agoa, effective January 1, 2023,” he said.

US trade representative Katherine Tai said in a statement, external that the US was “deeply concerned by the unconstitutional changes in government in Burkina Faso”.

She asked the government to take necessary actions to meet Agoa’s criteria “and return to elective democracy”.

Burkina Faso has had two military coups this year with the leaders of both promising to end a seven-year insurgency by Islamist militants.

Last year, the US said it was dropping Ethiopia, alongside coup-hit Guinea and Mali as beneficiaries of the Agoa scheme.

French-Senegalese yoga instructor Ngone Mbaye says New York allows her to express herself freely

Newsday
BBC World Service

Image source, Fasika Amdeslasie

An Ethiopian doctor who has witnessed first hand the impact of the country’s two-year civil war has welcomed the ceasefire agreed on Wednesday but has called on leaders to “give their all for peace to materialise”.

The conflict has created a humanitarian crisis in its wake. One of the issues thrown up by the virtual blockade of Tigray has been a lack of vital medicines.

Dr Fasika Amdeslasie, who works at the main referral hospital in the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, told the BBC last month how patients were needlessly dying because they did not have the right drugs to treat them.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsday radio programme after the deal was signed he said that he was now “so glad there is some light down the tunnel that this may end now”.

But he underlined the urgency of getting medicines back into Tigray.

“First we have to save lives.

“We need insulin, dialysis equipment very soon. We have a dialysis patient awaiting his death in our hospital right now. We have a diabetic patient with complications awaiting his death right now.”

Dr Fasika appealed for the leaders to show goodwill.

“Peace means: food for our people, medicines for our patients, vaccines for our children, education for our children. So I hope and pray for our leaders to give their chance, their all for peace to materialise.”

Image source, Getty Images

The disappearance of Africa's last glaciers is bound to have manifold impact on indigenous people living in mountainous areas, according to a scholar who has been researching Kilimanjaro's glacier for more than 20 years.

It follows a UN report that says glaciers in Kilimanjaro national park, Mount Kenya national park, Rwenzori mountains national park and Virunga national park will melt by 2050 due to climate change.

The glaciers will disappear regardless of the world's actions to combat climate change, the authors of the report say.

"We can already see declining of crop yields, longer drought periods - which would impact hydropower generation and the risk of tropical diseases like malaria in mountainous areas," said Prof Douglas Hardy from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"These glaciers have an extremely important cultural and spiritual significance and this means the way local communities live will be impacted in the near future."

Read more on this story:

• Climate change: No glaciers on Kilimanjaro by 2050

BBC Monitoring
The world through its media

Image source, Reuters

World leaders have hailed the deal signed by the two sides in Ethiopia’s civil war ending hostilities in the two-year conflict.

It was concluded on Wednesday in South Africa and brokered by the African Union.

Senegalese President and the current AU chairperson Macky Sall described the announcement as "excellent news".

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has welcomed the truce and has urged all Ethiopians and the international community to support the "bold step" taken by the two warring parties.

"The agreement is a critical first step towards ending the devastating two-year old conflict in which the lives and livelihoods of so many Ethiopians have been lost," Mr Guterres said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the momentous step, and noted that his country would remain closely engaged to support the continued AU-led efforts in the weeks ahead.

Kenya President William Ruto, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and the EU, all applauded the efforts by the two parties towards restoring peace in Ethiopia.

But the mediators have warned that there is still work to do.

"The lasting solution can only be through political engagement and being able to accommodate our differences, our diversity, while still remaining a united Ethiopia,” Kenya’s ex-president Uhuru Kenyatta, who helped broker the deal, said.

One of the daughters of Ghanaian President Akufo-Addo has denied receiving a government contract of $25m (£22m) to paint murals in parts of the capital, Accra.

Gyankroma Akufo-Addo said such allegations were a "complete fabrication being propagated by some shameless persons".

She said the three sites painted by her Creative Arts Agency company were conceived, managed and financed privately.

"This project was not embarked upon to make profit, and there have been no lucrative contracts awarded for it," she said in a statement.

She said she would seek redress in court against people and media houses that published falsehoods on the project.

Ishaq Khalid
BBC News, Abuja

Nigerian police say they have found the bodies of 10 young men abandoned "along a bush path" in the southern state of Edo.

In a statement, police spokesperson Chidi Nwabuzor said the bodies had "no noticeable mark of violence" and nearby communities could not identify them.

They were found at a location off the Lagos-Abuja expressway on Tuesday by police officers and local hunters.

The circumstances of their deaths were unclear.

The authorities have called for calm with the police commissioner in Edo state saying they have set up a "powerful team" to "fish out the perpetrators of this carnage".

Police say all of the men are believed to have been in their 20s.

The corpses have now been taken to a mortuary for forensic investigation.

Nigeria is grappling with various security problems with armed groups unleashing violence including killings and kidnappings for ransom.

Communal clashes and inter-gang violence are also common in some parts of the country.

South African police say they have discovered 19 bodies suspected to be of illegal miners in the mining town of Krugersdorp west of Johannesburg.

The police said in a statement, external on Wednesday that they were "responding to a call following the discovery" of the bodies in one of the active mines in the area.

They said initial investigations suggested “the deceased were moved and placed where they were discovered”.

It is unclear how the alleged illegal miners died, although the police said they did not suspect any foul play.

They said post-mortem examinations would be done to determine the cause of death.

Thousands of unregistered miners operate in the country in search of minerals in disused mines.

Image source, Getty Images

Turkey's president has said a deal to free up grain exports from Ukraine will consider African countries struggling with supplies.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had discussed sending grain to African countries.

"The situation in Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan is not good at all. If there is a problem in any other less developed countries, we will carry out shipments to these countries," Mr Erdogan said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster ATV.

The grain deal was brokered by the UN and Turkey in July, bringing to an end a five-month Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports that trapped millions of tonnes of grain and sunflower oil and sent food prices soaring.

The deal ends on 19 November and those involved still have to agree on extending it.

Russia had suspended support for grain exports but agreed this week to restart its participation in the agreement.

More on this topic:

• How much grain has been shipped from Ukraine?

BBC World Service

Image source, Getty Images

A court in Paris has sentenced a former Liberian rebel commander to life in jail for complicity in crimes against humanity during Liberia's civil war.

Kunti Kamara was a senior officer in the Ulimo armed militia, which oversaw a reign of terror in north-west Liberia in the 1990s.

Eyewitnesses gave harrowing testimonies during the three-week trial.

The accusations against him included publicly murdering a school teacher, whose heart he then ate, and allowing soldiers under his command to repeatedly rape two teenage girls.

Kamara's lawyers had argued that the evidence against him was unreliable.

He was tried in France because he was arrested there, and French law permits prosecution for the most serious crimes, even if they were committed abroad.

Around a quarter of a million people were killed in civil unrest in Liberia in the 10 years from 1993.

No-one in Liberia itself has been tried for war crimes in the country's courts - this is despite a truth commission calling for the establishment of a special tribunal.

Read more on this story:

• Thousands dead but no prosecutions - why Liberia has not acted

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Many iconic glaciers will melt regardless of the world's actions to combat climate change, the UN says.

Some unlikely fighters are strengthening Somalia's arsenal in its war against al-Shabab.

Both sides agree to stop their conflict which has led to a humanitarian crisis and warnings of a famine.

That's all from the BBC Africa Live team for now. We'll leave you with an automated service until our team returns on Thursday morning.

Until then you can find the latest updates on the BBC News website, or listen to our podcasts Africa Today and The Comb.

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And we leave you with this photo of a skydiver over the pyramids of Giza in Egypt:

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