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African press review 11 December 2013

Kenya's economy looks set to disappoint. Zimbabwean diamonds go under a Belgian hammer. Should they have booed Zuma? Why have Kenyan healthworkers downed tools? Did all the Westgate massacre perpetrators get away?

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Two foreign stories are on the African pages of this morning's South African financial paper, BusinessDay.

The World Bank has cut its growth forecast for Kenya for 2013 and 2014 to about  five per cent, citing low levels of government spending and the high interest rates charged by commercial banks.

The cuts suggest growth rates in east Africa’s biggest economy will lag behind those of its neighbours.

Slideshow Mandela

The other report concerns Zimbabwe which will, this week, auction its first ever diamonds in Belgium, nearly three months after the European Union lifted sanctions on the country’s state mining operation, the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation.

Three hundred thousand carats of diamonds from the Marangé Fields are to go on auction later today.

Diamond sector analysts says the lifting of EU sanctions on the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation will increase Zimbabwe’s annual tax revenue by 400 million euros.

Just one brief word from the day's other story, which takes up most of the space in BusinessDay.

On the paper's opinion pages, staff writer Sipho Hlongwané says Nelson Mandela himself would surely have taken umbrage at yesterday's undignified booing of South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma. The negative reaction by some sections of the crowd, says Hlongwané, showed a brazen disregard for the dignity and sobriety of the event, which he elsewhere describes as "a sombre affair with stodgy speeches and silence".

The article has so far provoked just one reaction, which includes this comment on yesterday's inappropriate and disrespectful behaviour:

". . . it is Zuma himself whose behaviour has disrespected the office of the presidency and the heritage of Mandela," the writer says. "What is inappropriate is that Zuma should be president of South Africa and that he should represent the nation to deliver an address at Mandela's memorial."

The main headline in the daily Standard, published in Nairobi, reads "Patients suffer as Kenya health workers down tools over devolution dispute".

The report says striking healthworkers paralysed operations countrywide as the government maintained that the crisis was beyond it.

The doctors, pharmacists and dentists in Kenyan public hospitals say the strike will continue until their demands, which centre on the administration of Kenyan health services, are met.

The government wants the counties to take responsibility for the payment of health workers; the doctors say the counties are not competent. They want their salaries to come from Nairobi.

The strikers also want a health service commission established to centrally address human resource functions and involve the unions in the development of policies and laws.

A spot check by The Standard at Mbagathi and Pumwani hospitals found that patients were left unattended. At the Nyeri General Hospital, all doctors and nurses stopped work, paralysing operations at the region’s biggest referral facility.

The main story in the Kenyan Daily Nation concerns the Westgate shopping centre attack in Nairobi in September.

According to the Nation, a report issued on Tuesday by the New York 's police department gives a different account of the Westgate attack than that presented by Kenyan authorities.

Only four men appear to have carried out the massacre - not 15, as Kenyan officials speculated - and all of them may have got away, suggests the report, which was released to private security personnel in New York.

Contrary to Kenyan officials' statements during and following the attack, the New York police report says the terrorists did not hold hostages inside the mall, nor did they create a smokescreen by setting fire to mattresses.

The report depicts a chaotic response on the part of Kenyan authorities.

Law enforcement personnel were slow to arrive at the scene with the first tactical team reaching the shopping centre about 90 minutes after the start of the attack. The first set of police officers inside Westgate did not have official markings, and were fired on by Kenyan soldiers, the report states. The officers also lacked basic equipment such as bulletproof vests, radios and handguns.

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