African press review 4 October 2018

Kenya's house speaker plans high profile visit to a toilet bribery scene as sugar vote scandal hots up.

We begin in Kenya where a parliamentry committee investigating bribery claims in a sugar report had announced plans to inspect the toilets where money allegedly changed hands.

Standard Digital says that Speaker Justin Muturi, who chairs the Powers and Privileges Committee, is scheduled to go see the toilets next Tuesday.

The plan following claims by Kiambu Woman Rep Gathoni wa Muchomba that female MPs shared out bribes inside.

According to the paper, the committee is investigating the happenings of August 9, when MPs shot down the report in a chaotic afternoon session.

Nyeri County Woman Rep Rahab Mukami reportedly told the team that she made remarks on the alleged bribery after she monitored a suspicious trend of MPs walking into a new restaurant and emerging minutes later to the vote.

In South Africa, the papers lead with President Cyril Ramaphosa's launch of his no nonsense operation to return land expropriated from blacks during the apartheid era to their rightful owners.

The Sowetan reports that Ramaphosa travelled to KwaZulu-Natal’s South Coast township of Franklin on Wednesday, where he personally distributed 450 title deeds to the beneficiaries of low-cost government houses there.

According to the newspaper, Ramaphosa invited hundreds of Franklin residents who braved chilly weather to attend the ceremony, that they can now live and work on their land , adding that the problem of encountered by blacks to get their title deeds since the dawn of democracy in 1994 was over.

The Sowetan reports that the houses worth R37-million (2.2 million euros) were intended to benefit people who live on farms but diverted by the apartheid regime's history of dispossession.

And in Nigeria, Sahara Reporters has an update about the search of army General Idris Alkali who went missing a month ago as he travelled from Abuja to Plateau State.

The paper reports that the army arrested 30 people suspected of having abducted Major General.

The paper reports that the suspects were picked up near a pond in Lafendeg Du, in southern Plateau State where General Alkali's car was found last Saturday.

Vanguard says locals had tried to disrupt the efforts by the Task Force and a Chinese company to drain the pond where the general's car was discovered.

The publication reports that Nigeria's army chief Lt Gen TY Buratai is now treating the case as a kidnapping. This was after military investigators discovered guns, knives, a sword, assorted phones, and strangely South Korean currency notes in the group's possession.