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African press review 13 November 2017

Rural South Africa is gripped by a severe water crisis caused by drought, theft and graft. Nigeria launches a massive recruitment operation to beef up the anti-graft agency. And a poor Kenyan family calls for help, after a surprise arrival of quintuplets.

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We begin in South Africa where the Times headlines on a great thirst and water crisis paralysing rural towns across the country.

The paper reports that residents of the Western Cape town of Beaufort West are all too familiar with the crisis, with up to 50,000 residents relying on boreholes to quench their thirsts.

According to Times Live, at this point 20 percent of drinking water in some municipalities comes from recycled sewage.

The Times also raises an alarm about the situation in places like the north-west town of Lichtenburg, the Limpopo township of Dopeni, and areas of Mpumalanga which it claims are badly hit by the "great thirst", attributing the collapse of water infrastructure to theft and corruption.

The Times says South Africa is now experiencing a water deficit of 38 billion cubic metres annually, and will need an additional R30-billion -- about 1.7 million euros a year to bridge the gap in water services infrastructure, sounding warnings by the Department of Water and Sanitation and the Water Research Council.

In Nigeria, the Nation leads with news that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the recruitment of more than 2,000 additional experts to beef up the workforce of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, as he intensifies the war against corruption.

The anti-graft EFCC agency aims to hire 750 new employees per annum over three years, according to the newspaper.

According to the Nation, the agency has decided to hand the hiring process to its zonal offices around the country, which will work with the Federal Character Commission in order to create a level-playing ground for candidates.

And in Kenya, a conman is at the center of judicial drama after he was charged eight times under different names in different parts of the country. Dennis Muigai Ngengi rose to fame three weeks ago when he appeared at the scene of a helicopter crash in Lake Nakuru in which five people were killed, claiming he was a colleague of the pilot in the crash.

The Daily Nation reports that Ngengi was arrested in Kiambu County on Friday after forensic analysis of his fingerprints showed that since 1998, he had been charged in seven different towns across Kenya for stealing, giving false information, impersonation, assault, obtaining money by false pretense and for malicious damage to property.

Meanwhile, the Kenyan Standard takes up the saga of a Homa Bay County mother who gave birth to quintuplets on Sunday, two of the children passing away due to complications. The 30-year-old Jacinta Akinyi told The Standard she was seven months pregnant and only knew about the status of her pregnancy after being rushed to hospital.

According to the publication, Akinyi and her husband were already parents of four other children aged 12, 11, 10 and 8, a family burden that forced them to launch an appeal for assistance from the government or well-wishers.

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