The Zimbabwe students’ union on Thursday made war not love over a new code of conduct banning students from kissing on campus at the country’s top university.
In a circular displayed at halls of residence, authorities at the University of Zimbabwe said students “caught in any intimate position such as kissing or having sex in public places” would be punished.
The university also barred resident students from bringing members of the opposite sex to their hostels and “loitering in dark places outside the sports pavilion or lecture venues”.
Student leader Gilbert Mutubuki said students would resist the rules introduced two weeks ago.
“We are against these rules which we view as archaic, repressive and evil,” Mutubuki, president of the Zimbabwe National Students Union (Zinassu) told AFP.
“We are urging students to resist the rules. These rules reduce the university to a primary school. The authorities need to be reminded that this is an institute for adults who are mature.”
He said the rules, which also bar students from accommodating non-resident colleagues, were meant to curtail students’ right to associate.
“We believe these are security measures meant to limit students from associating.”
Until Zimbabwe introduced tough security laws, university students often staged anti-government protests, sometimes joining forces with trade unions and rights groups.
Oscar Pistorius in the Pretoria High Court on October 21 2014. (Gallo)
A South African judge on Tuesday sentenced Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius to five years in prison for the negligent killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year.
At the culmination of one of the most watched murder trials in recent history, the 27-year-old disabled sprinter was led away by police officers to holding cells beneath the courtroom in Pretoria.
Pistorius wiped his eyes as Judge Thokozile Masipa handed down the prison sentence for culpable homicide.
Masipa – only the second black woman to rise to South Africa’s bench – said the sentence had to be “fair and just to society and to the accused”.
There was no immediate reaction from members of the athlete’s family, or from relatives of Steenkamp, a 29-year-old law graduate and model.
“Justice was served,” said Dup De Bruyn, the lawyer for the Steenkamp family. He told reporters the judge had given “the right sentence”.
Pistorius’ defence lawyer Barry Roux said he expected the jailed athlete to serve only 10 months of the five-year sentence behind bars, and the remainder under house arrest.
However, South Africa’s state prosecuting authority disputed this opinion, saying Pistorius was likely to serve at least a third of his sentence in prison – effectively 20 months.
On a separate firearms charge for which Pistorius was also found guilty, Masipa gave him a three-year suspended sentence.
Steenkamp was killed almost instantly when Pistorius fired four shots through a bathroom door at his luxury Pretoria home on Valentine’s Day last year, having mistaken her for an intruder.
The athlete, known as ‘Blade Runner’ because of his carbon-fibre prosthetics, became one of the biggest names in world athletics at the London 2012 Olympics when he reached the semifinals of the 400m against able-bodied athletes.
A picture taken on October 2004 shows a northern white rhinoceros named Fatu (C) at the Dvur Kralove zoo, east Bohemia. (Pic: AFP)
One of the last northern white rhinos on the planet has died in a reserve in Kenya, leaving the sub-species on the verge of extinction, experts said on Saturday.
The male, called Suni, “was probably the last male capable of breeding”, according to Dvur Kralove zoo in the Czech Republic, where the rhino was born in 1980.
There are only six of the very rare rhinos left, having been hunted by poachers in central and east Africa for their horns, which are highly prized for traditional Chinese medicine.
The Czech zoo is the only one in the world to have succeeded in breeding the sub-species in captivity.
Suni – who is thought to have died from natural causes in the Ol Pejeta reserve – was one of two males and two females from Dvur Kralove zoo reintroduced into the wild in Kenya in 2009, in an operation dubbed “the last chance of survival”.
It was hoped that the females’ hormones would normalise in the wild, but even attempts at assisted conception failed.
“One can always believe in miracles but everything leads us to believe that hope they would reproduce naturally has gone,” the zoo’s spokesperson Jana Mysliveckova told AFP.
Sperm from the males born at Dvur Kralove has been conserved at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin.
Another pair of the rhinos, too old to reproduce, live at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego in the United States, with another aged female remaining at Dvur Kralove, close to the border with Poland.
“The number of rhinos killed by poachers has increased incredibly in the past few years,” Mysliveckova said. “According to some scenarios, there will be no rhinos left in the wild in Africa in 10 years or so.”
Mozambicans queue outside a polling station in Maputo to vote in presidential and legislative elections on October 15 2014. (Pic: AFP)
Voters in neat lines started casting their ballots in the capital Maputo shortly after 7 am, with Frelimo facing growing discontent amid an apparent popular swing towards the opposition.
“We want change. We want to choose a new, young leader,” said student Erisma Invasse, who was queueing at the Polana secondary school in an upmarket suburb.
“We want someone with new ideas,” agreed her friend, Raina Muaria. Both are voting for the first time in presidential elections.
The presidential race pits Frelimo’s Filipe Nyusi (55), the former defence minister, against the veteran leader of former rebel group Renamo, Afonso Dhlakama (61).
Also in the running is Daviz Simango (50), founder of the Mozambique Democratic Party (MDM).
“I am convinced of a victory,” Nyusi told reporters after casting his ballot. “We have worked for a long time, very hard to prepare for this election.”
Dhlakama, who voted at the same polling station, has cried foul each time he lost in previous elections but expressed hope that this vote will be free and fair.
“Results will be accepted when they are clean. As you know on the African continent, results are often not clean,” he said.
“We hope for the first time in Mozambique results will be acceptable, proper and with credibility. I believe this.”
The government amended election laws earlier this year as part of peace negotiations with Renamo, which demanded that the opposition be given greater control over the electoral process in bid to improve transparency.
The third presidential aspirant, Simango, voted in the second biggest city Beira, where he is mayor.
Voter surveys cannot be published in Mozambique, but judging from the turnout at some campaign rallies, Frelimo could be in for a shock.
The party’s glitzy final rally in its southern fiefdom of Maputo failed to attract a capacity crowd.
Frelimo presidential candidate Filipe Nyusi supporters cheer during the party’s final campaign rally on October 12 on the outskirts of Maputo. (Pic: AFP)
Twenty-seven parties and two coalitions are competing for the favour of 10.9 million registered voters in the presidential race, plus polls for national and provincial assemblies.
Desire for change Analysts say that while Frelimo is expected to win the election, the opposition is likely to make significant inroads, reducing the ruling party’s overwhelming majority of 75 percent garnered in the last vote.
The desire for change has been driven by a wealth gap that persists despite huge mineral resources, with fast economic growth sidestepping the bulk of a population that is among the world’s poorest.
Renamo, which has lost all elections since the end of the country’s 16-year civil war in 1992, has made a comeback, trying to spruce up its image after emerging from a low-level insurgency waged in the centre of the country just weeks ahead of the election.
“The recent (September 5) peace agreement is an opportunity for Renamo,” said Nelson Alusala, a researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies.
“Mozambicans may be attracted to Renamo for the simple reason of wanting change,” he said.
At the same time the fledgling MDM, led by the mayor of the second largest city of Beira, is gaining popularity.
Formed five years ago, the MDM gained around 40 percent of the vote in Maputo in last December’s municipal elections.
If none of the three garners more than 50 percent of the vote, a run-off will be held within 30 days after official final results.
Official results are expected 15 days after polling.
Campaigners for the release of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls hold candles at a vigil for them on October 12 2014 in Abuja. (Pic: AFP)
Protesters calling for the release of 219 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants are set to mark the six-month anniversary of their abduction with a march on the presidency on Tuesday.
Members of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign are planning to walk to President Goodluck Jonathan’s official residence in Abuja to keep up the pressure on the government to bring the missing teenagers home.
The march is the culmination of a series of events in the past week, including a candlelit vigil, to keep the fate of the girls in the public eye, as media coverage and on-line interest wanes.
The daughter and niece of Enoch Mark, an elder in Chibok from where the girls were abducted, are among those missing.
“At one point we contemplated holding funeral rites for the girls as our tradition provides,” he told AFP.
Parents have run the gamut of emotions in the last six months, from initial hope to despair and back again, he added.
“But the discovery of a girl last month… who was kidnapped by Boko Haram in January gave us renewed hope that our girls would be found.
“If this girl could regain freedom after nine months in captivity all hope is not lost that our daughters would one day be free.
“This has rekindled our hope and strengthened our patience. We are ready to wait six years on hoping to have our daughters back with us.”
Some 276 girls were seized from their dormitories at the Government Girls Secondary School in the remote town of Chibok in Borno state, northeastern Nigeria, on the night of April 14.
Fifty-seven managed to escape and Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau later threatened to sell the remainder as slave brides, vowing they would not be released until militant prisoners were freed from jail.
In late May, Nigeria’s most senior military officer, Chief of Defence Staff Alex Badeh, said the girls had been located but ruled out a rescue because of the danger to the girls’ lives.
Since then, nothing has been seen or heard from the girls while back channel talks with militant leaders have stalled.
The girls’ initial weeks in captivity sparked a frenzy of media coverage and interest online, where the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls trended on Twitter and was retweeted the world over.
Worldwide efforts Nigerian Bring Back Our Girls campaigners have since held regular marches in Abuja, even as global attention shifted elsewhere and foreign missions involved in the search grew frustrated at the lack of progress.
“Globally, the movement has definitely slowed down,” acknowledged Molade Alawode, of the Washington-based non-profit organisation Act4Accountability, which spearheaded protests in the US capital to highlight the girls’ plight.
But she said efforts were continuing, including providing relief supplies for the tens of thousands of people displaced by the conflict in Nigeria’s far northeast.
An online petition on change.org launched earlier this year by Ify Elueze, a Nigerian student in Germany, has drawn more than one million signatures, with more names being added every day, many of them from the United States.
In Los Angeles, documentary filmmaker Ramaa Mosley keeps a running total of the number of days the girls have been held on her social media accounts, taking inspiration from the Nigerian protesters still on the streets.
“Of course, since there is less information to print, there is less of a focus in the news but my experience is that individuals that first came forwarded to organise events and rallies have held strong and continued to support the cause,” she said.
“Our followers on Facebook want to help and continue to take actions both big and small to keep the girl’s plight in the minds and hearts of their community.
“My feeling is, the pain of this travesty is so big and there are so much other painful world news but there are many, many who have not stopped working daily on behalf of the Chibok girls.
