Month: May 2023

South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced on Tuesday that six African leaders are planning to travel to Ukraine and Russia to help find a solution to the war.

Ramaphosa added that Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy had agreed to receive the African peace mission in their respective capitals.

“The two leaders that I had occasion to speak to, that is President Putin and President Zelenskyy, agreed that they would be willing to receive a mission of the African heads of states in both Moscow and Kyiv. I agreed with both of them that we would commence with the preparations for the engagements with these African heads of state. The Secretary General of the United Nations was also briefed and so is the African Union office also briefed”, said the South African president.

The initiative was drawn up by Zambia, Senegal, the Republic of Congo, Uganda, Egypt and South Africa.

The announcement came a day after Ramaphosa said South Africa had been under “extraordinary pressure” to pick sides in the conflict, following accusations from the United States that Pretoria supplied weapons to Moscow, a move that would break with its professed neutrality.

A Ghanaian social media influencer has been extradited from the United Kingdom to the US for allegedly swindling over $2 million from older, single American men and women in a twisted lonely hearts scam, federal prosecutors said Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in a statement indicated she had been charged with several counts, including conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Montrage, in one case, allegedly duped a victim into sending her $89,000 through 82 wire transfers on the pretext of helping her father’s farm in Ghana, the court documents claim.

She tricked the person into believing the pair were married by sending them a tribal marriage certificate after a series of phone conversations using her real identity, the filing alleges.

Montrage also received money from several others who were swindled by scammers in her network, prosecutors allege.

In total, Montrage netted $2 million in funds the group ripped off from victims to bank accounts she had in the Bronx and elsewhere, including one opened in the name of 4Reall Designs, a supposed clothing company.

She then allegedly laundered the stolen money to other members of the enterprise, the indictment charges.

She could receive a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail for each count if found guilty, according to some legal practitioners.

The 30-year-old was arrested on 10 November last year in the UK and then extradited to the US on Friday.

She pleaded not guilty to all charges when she appeared before a judge on Monday.

US authorities have expressed concern about romance scams targeting older people and expressed the need to hold perpetrators to account.

The Nigerian musician Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeat legend Fela, was placed under arrest on Monday for physically assaulting a police officer, police in Nigeria’s Lagos state said.

The police had ordered his arrest on Saturday after a video showing him on a road shouting, pushing and slapping a policeman went viral on social networks.

On Monday morning, Seun Kuti went on his own “to the Lagos State Police Headquarters in Ikeja, accompanied by his lawyer and a representative of his family,” police spokesman Benjamin Hundeyin said on his Twitter account.

“He has been placed under arrest in accordance with the law,” he said, adding that “the ongoing investigation will be thorough, transparent and professionally conducted.

Seun Kuti is one of the sons of Fela, the king of Afrobeat and a musician of genius who has spent his life denouncing elite corruption, dictatorship and the power of multinationals, using music as a weapon.

Seun started playing in the Fela Kuti Egypt 80 band at the age of nine and took over its leadership when his father died in 1997 when he was just 14.

In 2019, he and his band are nominated for a Grammy Award, the US music awards, in the category of Best World Music Album, with “Black Times”.

The commander of the South African army’s ground forces is on an official visit to Moscow, Russian news agencies said on Monday, after US accusations that Pretoria blamed arms deliveries to Russia.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, quoted by the TASS and Interfax agencies, Lieutenant General Lawrence Mbatha and his delegation discussed with their Russian colleagues “issues of military cooperation” aimed at “increasing the combat readiness of the armed forces of the two countries”.

“During the meeting of military leaders, agreements were reached on strengthening cooperation between ground forces in various fields,” the source added.

“During the visit, the delegation will visit military educational establishments of the Russian ground forces and enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex,” the ministry said.

This visit comes in the midst of tensions between South Africa and the United States , which accuses Pretoria of having delivered arms to Russia, a country which has been leading a military offensive against Ukraine for more than a year.

After these accusations, which were made by the American ambassador in Pretoria, the South African government promised to carry out an investigation into these alleged deliveries. Contacted by Africanewsguru.com, the South African army did not respond immediately.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa assured him on Monday that his country would not be drawn into “a competition between world powers” over Ukraine and that it had been subject to “extraordinary pressure” to choose a side.

“We do not accept that our non-aligned position favors Russia over other countries. We also do not accept that it jeopardizes our relations with other countries,” he said in a statement. the weekly presidential bulletin.

Mr. Ramaphosa spoke on the phone last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two leaders having shown their desire to “increase” their cooperation, according to the Kremlin.

The attack on a village by armed men in southern Chad, near the border with the Central African Republic, left 17 people dead on Monday, the Gore prosecutor’s office said on Thursday, opening an investigation.

The “mass killing” was perpetrated Monday at 5:00 am (4:00 am GMT) when “unidentified armed individuals” attacked the village of Don, located in the province of Logone-Oriental, bordering the Central African Republic, about 500 km south of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, said Nerambaye Ndoubamian, the prosecutor of Chad in Gore in a statement.

The assailants, armed with “firearms” and “bladed weapons”, arrived on the scene on “motorbikes” and “horses”, and “murdered more than a dozen villagers, set fire to huts, kidnapped oxen, and left several wounded”, who were evacuated to the hospital in Goré, the Prosecutor’s Office explained.

In total, 17 people died in the attack, including 11 “formally identified” in the village of Don, three others 3km from the village, and three wounded – including “an infant” – who succumbed to their injuries. Other injured people were treated in “hospitals”, the same source said.

The prosecutor’s office also announced that it had opened an investigation into the murder, criminal conspiracy, arson and aggravated robbery, and issued an appeal for witnesses to identify the perpetrators.

The inhabitants of the village are mainly from the Kabba community, an ethnic group that has settled in Chad and the neighbouring Central African Republic, and whose members are mostly Christian and live from agriculture.

The head of this community in N’Djamena condemned in a statement on Monday “cowardly, barbaric and despicable acts” perpetrated “under the helpless and complicit gaze of the administrative and military authorities”, and urged the resignation of several local officials.

On the same day, the Episcopal Conference of Chad said it was “shocked by the recurrence of inter-community conflicts” in the south of the country.

Clashes, often very deadly, between nomadic Muslim herders and indigenous sedentary farmers, mostly Christians or animists, are very frequent in this region but also in these fertile areas on the borders of Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.

The latter accuse the former of ransacking their fields by grazing their animals, or even of settling on what they consider to be their land.