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Superhero has become an internet sensation after turning up heat on electricity companies following spate of power cuts

Ghana’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) says it is presenting the Supreme Court evidence of polling fraud and irregularities to challenge results of this month’s presidential contest, which election officials called in favor of incumbent President John Dramani Mahama by three percent of ballots cast.
 
Gabby Asare Okyere Darko, adviser to NPP candidate Akufo-Addo, says elections were rigged in favor of the incumbent.
 
“The results that were declared on December 9 are not the true reflection of the wishes of the majority of Ghanaians who voted on December 7 and December 8,” said Darko, explaining that the official petition challenging the results draws on data gathered from more than 26,000 polling stations across the country. “We have discovered the scale of errors, irregularities and fraud — places voting without verification when the law was very clear that without the machine, don’t allow voting to take place.”
 
Election officials allowed some polling stations to reopen for a second day of voting after technical problems with new biometric voting machines caused long delays.
 
Ghana’s National Electoral Commission and international observers said that the elections were free and fair despite logistical issues.
 
According to the official results, Akufo-Addo earned 47.7 percent of the votes compared with Mahama’s 50.7 percent.
 
Ghanaian law says authorities have 21 days to respond to the NPP’s petition.

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Source: VOA 

Here we go. 

Lagos, Nigeria (CNN) — If North Korea is the crying capital of the world, Nigeria holds the aces when it comes to smiling and laughing. It’s not simply anecdotal evidence.

Nigeria has been adjudged a happiness-ridden country at least twice in recent years. In 2003, the UK’s New Scientist magazine conducted a survey that found that Nigeria had the highest percentage of happy people in the world. Seven years later, another survey, a Gallup poll this time, found that Nigeria had the world’s highest rates of optimism.

Now don’t ask me about the methodology of measuring Gross Domestic Happiness, or assembling an Optimism Index. What is not in doubt is this: the appearance of Nigeria — an oil-rich, natural-disaster-starved, fertile-land-suffused country where 70% of the population survives on less than $2 per day — at the top of these surveys, seven years apart, must mean something.

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Source: CNN 

James Ibori, formerly one of Nigeria’s wealthiest and most influential politicians, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud, paving the way for British police to confiscate assets he stole and return them to Nigeria.

On Monday, with his trial at London’s Southwark crown court about to begin, Ibori, 49, changed his original plea and admitted stealing money from Delta state and laundering it in London through a number of offshore companies. Ibori admitted to fraud totalling more than $79m (£50m), said to be part of total embezzlement that could exceed $250m (£157m).

Prosecutor Sasha Wass told the court Ibori had accepted he was involved in “wide-scale theft, fraud and corruption when he was governor of Delta state”.

When he ran for the governorship of Delta state, Ibori allegedly used a false date of birth to conceal previous convictions because a criminal record would have excluded him from taking part in the election.

“Mr Ibori tricked his way into public office. He had tricked the Nigerian authorities and the Nigerian voters. He was thus never the legitimate governor of Delta state,” said Wass.

“We are pleased with today’s guilty pleas which mark the culmination of a seven-year inquiry into James Ibori’s corrupt activities,” said Detective Inspector Paul Whatmore of the Metropolitan police. “We will now be actively seeking the confiscation of all of his stolen assets so they can be repatriated for the benefit of the people of Delta state.”

Ibori, whose address in England was given as Primrose Hill in north London, was working as a cashier in a branch of a DIY store in Ruislip, Middlesex, when he moved to Nigeria and worked his way up through the political ranks to become a state governor in 1999.

As governor of Delta state, Ibori racked up credit card bills of $200,000 a month and owned a fleet of armoured Range Rovers, said the prosecution. He was trying to buy a plane for £20m at the time he was arrested. Once seen as one of Nigeria’s wealthiest and most influential politicians, Ibori was seized in 2010 in Dubai at the requestion of the Metropolitan police and extradited to London last year.

His wife, Theresa Ibori, sister, Christine Ibori-Idie, mistress, Udoamaka Okoronkwo, and London-based solicitor Bhadresh Gohil have all already been convicted of money-laundering. Their convictions could only be revealed after reporting restrictions were lifted.

Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) funds the Metropolitan police’s proceeds of corruption unit (POCU), which investigated the case, at a cost of approximately £750,000 a year. The unit began investigating Ibori in 2005, working alongside Nigeria’s anti-corruption unit, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

“We are committed to rooting out corruption wherever it is undermining development, and will help bring its perpetrators like Ibori to justice and return stolen funds to help the world’s poorest,” said Andrew Mitchell, Britain’s international development secretary.

“Funding investigations such as these helps to recover valuable stolen funds which can be returned to Nigeria to be used for development. Doing this is making a major contribution to Nigeria’s development, on a scale far in excess of the cost of the investigation itself. It is good value for Nigeria and for the British taxpayer.”

DfID said Ibori systematically stole funds from the public purse, depositing them in bank accounts across the world. A major breakthrough came when officers from Scotland Yard found two computer hard drives that revealed the extent of his crimes.

Ibori will be sentenced at Southwark crown court on 16 and 17 April.

Source: Al Jazeera 

b-sama:

THE conference room resembles an old “Star Trek” set, with swivel chairs, laptops on desks and headsets that switch between Kinyarwanda and other tongues. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, sits in the captain’s chair. His technocratic ministers sit nearby. When the talk turns to business, Mr Kagame becomes animated. It is his passion—he says he reads business case studies in bed. He wants to turn Rwanda into the Singapore of central Africa. He is nothing if not ambitious.

Rwanda is best known for the genocide that claimed at least 500,000 lives in 1994. It has been peaceful since then, but lacks nearly all of Singapore’s advantages. Singapore has the world’s busiest port; Rwanda is landlocked. Singapore has one of the world’s best-educated populations; Rwanda’s middle class was butchered in 1994. Singapore is a gateway to China; Rwanda’s neighbours are “less than ideal”, as a recent report from the Legatum Institute, a British think-tank, put it. Uganda is corrupt; Burundi a basket-case; Congo worse.Yet Rwanda has one huge advantage: the rule of law. No African country has done more to curb corruption. Ministers have been jailed for it. Transparency International, a watchdog, reckons Rwanda is less graft-ridden than Greece or Italy (though companies owned by the ruling party play an outsized role in the economy). “I have never paid a bribe and I don’t know anyone who has had to pay a bribe,” says Josh Ruxin, one of the owners of Heaven, a restaurant in Kigali, the capital.

NAIROBI — Everyone in Kenya knows the phrase “kitu kidogo.”

It means “something small” in Swahili, and it refers to the bribes Kenyans pay minor bureaucrats, such as policemen and utility company employees, to make life easier. For decades, Kenyans had only their relatives and friends to complain to. Until now, that is.

A new Web site — I Paid a Bribe – is allowing Kenyans to share their experiences with bribery. Activists say the site could become a potent weapon in the fight against graft in one of the world’s most corrupt nations.

“It brings a human face to corruption,” said Samuel Kimeu, executive director ofTransparency International-Kenya, an anti-corruption watchdog group. “When people tell their stories the way they do on the Web site, it has the potential to catalyze action.”

Drawing some inspiration from the Arab Spring uprisings, activism appears to be on the rise here and in many other corners of sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, protests erupted in Uganda and Malawi over bad governance and other issues. More recently, Nigerians have demonstrated against corruption and rising fuel prices, and activists in Senegal have rallied against President Abdoulaye Wade’s bid for a third term.

“I’m calling what’s happening in Kenya the ‘Bribe Spring,’ ” said Antony Ragui, the Web site’s 36-year-old founder. “People are fed up with corruption and the government. The real goal of I Paid a Bribe is to harness the collective energy of Kenyans. I am trying to create a network of Kenyans who are anti-corruption-minded.”

Ragui, a financial services consultant with an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, said he returned to Kenya in 2007 to find a society that revolved around corruption. Out of 182 nations, only 28 are more corrupt than Kenya, according to Transparency International.

“I was tired of people whining about corruption. I wanted to do something about it,” Ragui said.

One day, Ragui read a magazine article about an Indian Web site — Ipaidabribe.com – that was fighting corruption. He contacted the site, which agreed to provide the software to start a similar effort in Kenya, its first spinoff.

Launched last month, Ragui’s site is divided into three sections. One part collects stories about bribes paid, listing the amount as well as where and when the incident occurred. Another section collects details about people who refused to pay bribes. And the third provides a forum for instances of honesty, when a bribe was not required.

More than 400 bribes have been reported; the total amount paid is nearly 9 million Kenyan shillings – or about $110,000.

Read on here 

Source: Washington Post 

Money taken illegally from the developing world is worth 10 times annual global aid budgets, according to a recent study by a Swedish agency, Forum Syd.

Tax evasions by multinational companies in Africa is so vast that one tax analyst believes that if the money were paid, most of the continent would be “developed” by now.

But, lacking a sophisticated tax code, or the people qualified to enforce tax laws, many African countries continue to lose money that could solve most of its financial problems.

Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste reports from Nairobi.

b-sama:

Filmmaker exposes murky double dealings in African diplomacy

A Danish documentary exposing the sale of diplomatic passports in Africa in order to purchase blood diamonds and conduct other murky dealings has opened the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam.

In the film, “The Ambassador”, documentary maker Mads Brügger reveals how easy it is for wealthy Western businessmen to obtain diplomatic credentials from poor African countries, such as Liberia. Brügger used his diplomatic status to try to export blood diamonds from the Central African Republic.

The documentary has caused controversy in the Netherlands because the middleman who helped Brugger obtain his Liberian diplomatic passport was a Dutchman, Willem Tijssen. Tijssen was furious that he had been secretly filmed and tried unsuccessfully to prevent the screening of the documentary.

“This film is also about how the white man as such “the western man” is treated as a descending star in Africa…” (documentary maker )Mads Brügger

(Source: rnw.nl, via )