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African press review 27 March 2012

Pride of place goes to Senegal this morning, where the daily newspapers are still struggling to deal with the reality of life after Abdoulaye Wade.

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The main headline on the front page of the privately-owned Le Quotidien reads "Well done my people, my beautiful people!"

The article says that Wade's defeat is a victory for Senegal and for democracy. The departing president is praised for having taken his beating like a man, thus associating his name with that of his honoured predecessor, Abdou Diouf.

But why, laments Le Quotidien, couldn't Wade have decided to leave without a fight? Why did he refuse to listen to the angry howls of the Senegalese people as he twisted the constitution to give himself a shot at a third mandate?

Perhaps, says Le Quotidien it was asking too much to expect a man who took himself for God to simply fade into the background of history.

Macky Sall's victory is "brilliant" for the privately-owned Dakar daily, but the real winners are the "fabulous, magical and sublime" Senegalese voters who have, once again, shown their capacity to knock, shock and rock the establishment.

Abdoulaye Wade, according to Sud Quotidien, is going to finish building his house in the inland city of Touba and retire there following a trip to Saudia Arabia, Morocco, Qatar and Kuwait.

In South Africa, BusinessDay gives the front page honours to a report which says that the head of the National Prosecuting Authority’s Priority Crimes Litigation Unit has come out in support of a legal bid to compel South Africa to prosecute high-level Zimbabwean officials accused of crimes against humanity.

Saying he had been threatened and intimidated by his colleagues, the head of the Priority Crimes Unit, Anton Ackermann, switched sides and has now come out in support of the bid to bring top Zimbabwean officials to justice.

The North Gauteng High Court yesterday postponed the case brought by the Southern African Litigation Centre and the Zimbabwean Exiles Forum until today, after the centre asked for time to reply to Ackermann.

In what BusinessDay calls a "stunning reversal", Ackermann yesterday broke ranks and filed an affidavit indicating that he had recommended an investigation of the Zimbabwean officials, had disagreed with the police’s reasons for not pursuing the case, and had been manipulated and misled by both his colleagues in the National Prosecuting Authority and the state advocate’s office.

The Priority Crimes Litigation Unit is a specialist legal team that, among other duties, tackles cases that relate to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The case brought by the Southern African Litigation Centre and the Zimbabwe Exiles Forum seeks to review and set aside the decision of the National Prosecuting Authority and the South African Police Service not to probe Zimbabwean officials linked to acts of state-sanctioned torture after a police raid on the offices of the Movement for Democratic Change in Harare in 2007.

Ackermann first recommended a South African investigation of the allegations in July, 2008.

The case resumes today.

BusinessDay also reports that South African Airways has agreed to pay nearly two million euros in fines after admitting fixing prices on flights between Johannesburg and Hong Kong.

The national carrier has already paid fines of more than five million euros for contraventions of the Competition Act and settled out of court in a civil claim that followed the Competition Tribunal’s finding that SAA's incentive schemes induced travel agents not to deal with its rivals.

The Standard, Kenya's oldest newspaper, is having mixed feelings about the news that there's oil under the Turkana desert.

The article, headlined "Joy as Kenya strikes oil", begins: "Beneath Turkana County, the land of burning sand, blistering heat, so many hungers, and untold human misery, lie oil deposits that could forever change Kenya's economic fortunes."

Crucial questions remain to be answered. How much oil is there? How much is it likely to be worth? How long before it will start making an impact on the national energy expenditure, 25 per cent of which currently goes on importing oil?

The Big Question, according to The Standard - triggered by bittersweet memories of how oil has harmed many African states, whose leaders used the revenue as a tool to enrich themselves, and to buy, subdue and impoverish their people - is whether it will end up as a curse disguised as a promise of untold wealth and living happily ever after.

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