Sudan says it is hosting about 400,000 refugees, who fled the civil war in South Sudan that erupted in late 2013. Sudan’s Interior Minister Babiker Digna told reporters in the capital Khartoum on Wednesday that more refugees continued to pour into the country.

“The number of South Sudanese refugees registered by Sudanese authorities is 400,000,” Digna said, adding, “The influx of South Sudanese continues until now… and the process of registering them is also ongoing.” The United Nations earlier said that as of August 31, the total number of South Sudanese refugees in Sudan had exceeded 247,000.

Responding to a discrepancy between the two figures, Digna said “many times” there was disagreement with the UN on the numbers. On September 16, the United Nations refugee agency said in a statement that fighting in South Sudan had forced more than one million people to flee the war-stricken country. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said another 1.61 million people had been displaced inside the country.

On the same day, Noriko Yoshida, the UN refugee agency’s representative for Sudan, appealed for more global aid to help address South Sudan’s refugee crisis, adding, “If we don’t have sufficient resources, it is also difficult to protect and assist these refugees.”

The Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda are also hosting thousands of refugees from South Sudan.

The country gained independence in July 2011, but descended into war in December 2013, after President Salva Kiir accused the former vice president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup to usurp power.

Numerous international attempts to reach a truce between the warring sides have failed. South Sudan has experienced a new wave of conflict since July 8, when gunfire erupted near the state house in Juba as President Kiir and Machar were holding a meeting.

Presstv

It has been revealed that dozens of heavily armed Boko Haram jihadists were seen and among them men with white skin “mestizo, Tuareg, Arab and Western. This new intelligence information released by both the Cameroonian and the Nigerian military comes out at a time when Boko Haram has recently committed umpteenth abuses.

Yaounde and Abuja have ordered their armies to be on high alert since last Friday around Dabanga. The Nigerian military under operation Lafiya Dolle and their Cameroonian counterparts in the Joint Multinational Force including the 41^st Mechanised Infantry Battalion code named Alpha have all been strengthened.

The presence of men with white skin in the ranks of the Boko Haram sect is being treated seriously by both the Buhari and the Biya administrations. Troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger have been battling the terrorists in recent months. The group has pledged allegiance to the Daesh Takfiri terrorists operating mainly in Syria and Iraq.

By Rita Akana

Gabonese citizens resident in France have held a massive demo in support of the president elect, Ali Bongo. The rally that took place at the Place du Trocadero Square of Human Rights, Paris on Sunday, September 18, 2016, called on foreign powers to respect the decision of the Gabonese people including their sovereignty.

The demonstrators started the event with a minute of silence in tribute to victims of post-election violence that rocked the Gabonese nation. All speakers at the rally upheld that Ali Bongo Ondimba was rightfully declared the winner on August 31, 2016, by the CENAP (Autonomous National Electoral Commission) with 49.80% of votes against 48.23% for Jean Ping.

The organizers sounded a note of caution to the French media and some French politicians not to meddle in Gabon’s internal affairs. They noted that the strategy of Jean Ping, throughout the campaign was based on denigration, insults, violence and falsehood. The demonstrators also revealed that they were calm and confident that the Constitutional Court will validate Ali Bongo as winner.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Cameroon announced to the world that she was indeed “Africa in miniature” at the draw for the 2016 Africa Women Cup of Nations on the 18th of September 2016. During the ceremony at the Multipurpose Sports Complex in Yaounde, the rich heritage was displayed through traditional dances from the four cultural zones of Cameroon: the Fang Beti, Sahel, Sawa and Grassfield. Each individual in the hall cited with one of the cultural zones.

The climax of the event came when the representatives from other African countries were able to identify a Cameroonian dance similar to theirs. Apart from representing Cameroon, the dance groups went the extra mile to present the traditional dances of the seven other countries participating in 2016 AFCON.

It was a total blend of colour and culture as flags were waved during the performances as an expression of joy, communicating Cameroon’s readiness to host the 2016 AFCON. A projection of some remarkable parts of Cameroon was made available to help the visitors catch a glimpse of what Cameroon is like while saying a warm Cameroonian, “Welcome/Bienvenue”!

CRTV

A militant raid on a village in the Central African Republic (CAR) has left 26 villagers dead in the worst instance of bloodshed in recent months, an official says. Militants from the Seleka group attacked the village of Ndomete, near the town of Kaga-Bandoro, about 350 km (220 miles) north of the capital, Bangui, on Friday. Reports of the attack, however, emerged on Saturday.

“There were 26 victims… the village chief was among the victims,” Albert Mokpeme, a spokesman for the presidency, said on Saturday. “It was a massacre,” he emphasized. Officials are concerned that the incident could revitalize the dormant acts of vendetta between the mainly Muslim Seleka militants and rival Christian anti-Balaka militias. In early 2013, Seleka toppled the then-President Francois Bozize, who was replaced by Michel Am-Nondokro Djotodia, the first Muslim to hold the presidency in the CAR.

Christian militias reacted by engaging in large-scale attacks against the minority Muslims. A fifth of the population was forced to flee to safer regions as the impoverished nation was plunged into violence along ethnic and religious fault lines. Thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in the resource-rich country, as it suffered its biggest crisis in its half-century of independence during the period of violence in 2013 and 2014.

In 2014, some 11,000 peacekeepers were deployed by the United Nations (UN) to the country as part of the established United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA).

“MINUSCA regrets the loss of human life and the wounded that were recorded and also denounces attacks against the humanitarian community and United Nations personnel,” the UN said following the Friday bloodshed.

On July 23, 2014, Seleka and anti-Balaka representatives signed a ceasefire agreement in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, but the country has not yet emerged from its bloody past.

Presstv

Former Burkinabe Prime Minister, Luc-Adolphe Tiao was arrested on Friday and detained at a prison in Ouagadougou.  Luc-Adolphe Tiao who served as the last Prime Minister to ousted dictator, Blaise Compaore is accused of having signed a requisition order, authorizing the use of weapons during the repression of the popular uprising of the 30th and 31^st of October 2014.

Mr. Tiao returned to Burkina Faso after more than a year in exile in the Ivory Coast and was arrested after a very intensive interrogation by the gendarmerie in Ouagadougou. He is accused, along with all the 32 ministers of the last Compaore government of assault, murder and complicity following attempts by the Cabinet via a bill to amend the Constitution which would have allowed Blaise Compaore, to stay in power.

Ten other former cabinet ministers of the ancien regime have already been questioned by the police, but all went Scot-free after their hearings.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Nigeria-based Boko Haram Takfiri militants have attacked soldiers in neighboring Niger, with reports saying more than two dozen people have been killed in the fighting.

Niger’s Defense Ministry said late Tuesday that the attack on its soldiers had been carried out a day earlier near the village of Toumour, about 65 kilometers northeast of the town of Diffa.

Nigerien armed forces spokesman Colonel Moustapha Michel Ledru said five soldiers had been killed and six others injured as a result of the fighting, which also saw at least 30 militants killed.

The official, who was delivering a statement on Niger’s national television, said two Boko Haram militants had been arrested and the army confiscated a large quantity of arms and ammunition.

The clashes came less than a week after two Nigerien soldiers were declared dead after their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device during a patrol near Barwa locality in Diffa.

Presstv

A plane crash has left one Polish national dead and five others injured in Kenya’s Rift Valley.  A light aircraft belonging to Sanctuary Farm in the town of Naivasha was flying on a tour over Lake Naivasha when it crashed and burst into flames near the airstrip shortly after takeoff on Thursday, area police chief Titus Munyoki said.

The dead person was a Polish woman. The other occupants were the Kenyan pilot and four British passengers. The injured were rushed to Naivasha District Hospital.  The police official said it was not clear what had caused the plane crash.

Presstv

Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has fired Defence Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly after suspected Islamist militants briefly seized the village of Boni in the centre of the country on Friday, state television said.

Coulibaly is being replaced by Abdoulaye Idrissa Maiga, a former minister for territorial administration, who was also the president’s campaign director at the 2013 election. The attackers, who are suspected of belonging to the Ansar Dine group, burned public buildings and took an elected local official hostage before withdrawing after a few hours. No one was killed and the army is back in control, witnesses said.

The raid was the latest in a series this year in Mali, reflecting a rise in the power of Islamist groups which have spread a campaign of violence from the north to the centre of the country only a few hundred miles from the capital Bamako. Armed groups have proliferated since Islamists took advantage of an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to seize the north of the desert country.

A French-led intervention drove Islamists back in 2013 but instability has continued and undermines a fragile UN-backed peace process. Islamist militants killed 17 Malian soldiers and wounded 35 when they attacked an army base in the central Malian town of Nampala in July. Ansar Dine and a Peul ethnic militia both claimed responsibility for that attack.

Reuters