German vaccine maker gets $145 million funding from global coalition for African vaccine plants
BioNTech said in December it aimed to start production at the modular mRNA vaccine factory site in Rwanda in 2025, the first foreign company mRNA vaccine manufacturing site on the continent. It said at the time it had fully funded the facility, committing a total of $150 million.
Long wait for president: Fingers crossed as vote tallyng starts in South Africa and ANC risks ceding majority
The president is elected in Parliament after the national vote’s results are announced. South Africa’s Parliament has two houses and it’s the lower house, or National Assembly, that chooses the president. There, the 400 lawmakers vote for one of them to be the head of state and it needs a simple majority of 201. Because the ANC has always had a parliamentary majority since 1994, every president since then has been from the ANC, starting with Nelson Mandela.
New poll finds South Africa’s ANC support around 42 per cent hours before voting starts
In a Tuesday update of the tracking poll by South African think tank the Social Research Foundation, the ANC’s support was estimated at 42.2 per cent on May 27, the latest day for which data is available, under a scenario modelled for the 66 per cent turnout seen at the last national election in 2019.
History to judge Ramaphosa leader who ruined or remade ANC as South Africa’s political force
If the party loses its majority for the first time in 30 years, as opinion polls predict, some political analysts say 71-year-old Ramaphosa will be unlikely to see out a second term. Ramaphosa was the ANC’s lead negotiator during talks that led to a peaceful end to apartheid, which enabled Nelson Mandela to become South Africa’s first Black president after 1994s historic all-race vote.
South Africa: ANC’s surprise election challenger evokes past anti-apartheid struggle and is drawing in numbers
That MK party, named after the ANC’s old armed wing, shows how the 82-year-old Zuma is leveraging the past to rally South Africans’ support against the ANC, which he himself once claimed would rule until “Jesus comes back.”
South Africa’s assassinations epidemic: ANC, like Kanu in Kenya, leaves a trail of political killings
Political demagoguery, explain Prof Oniang’o and Salat, is the source of disenchantment with ANC and Kanu, leading to splits. Similar situations obtain in Zimbabwe, where independence parties Zapu-PF and Zanu-PF are sliding into insignificance. They are accused of the same mistakes Kanu made in Kenya, and which are currently being replayed in South Africa as the country holds its seventh general election.
Hours to South Africa’s elections, opposition parties ramp up attacks on ruling ANC, leftist EFF
Steenhuisen has repeatedly accused the ruling ANC and the leftist opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters of planning to go into coalition after the elections. Speaking ahead of its final rally in the city of Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal on Sunday, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Velenkosini Hlabisa said their main objective was to see the current government removed.
Chinese creepers exploit lax Nigerian law enforcement and terrorism to illegally mine, export tonnesas of lithium
Nigeria has long neglected the solid minerals sector, which allows some communities like the northern-central town of Jos, which is tin-abundant, to depend on subsistence mining for their livelihood.
Zimbabwe fights citizenry resistance to world’s newest currency as demand for US dollar peaks
Senior officials from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the ruling ZANU-PF party embarked on a flurry of public rallies and meetings to encourage the sceptical population to now embrace the ZiG ahead of the US dollar, which is also legal tender in the southern African nation. Commercial jingles heralding the currency flooded the airwaves along with Caleb’s single.
South Africa’s Ramaphosa walks tightrope as he promises to ‘do better’ if re-elected president
In comments broadcast on national television, he said the ANC would focus on getting more South Africans into work, tackle the high cost of living, maintain existing social grants and progressively implement a basic income support grant for the unemployed.
