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African press review 23 March 2018

Release of Dapchi girls lifts Nigerian hearts, but trauma of still missing Chibok children continues. South Africa prepares for court battles over State payment of Jacob Zuma's court fees. And Kenyan jobless figures shatter the 40 percent myth.

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Dapchi girls

We begin in Nigeria where the papers are monitoring the mood in the Yobe State town of Dapchi after the freeing on Wednesday of 105 of the 110 girls abducted at a government high school last month by Boko Haram insurgents.

The Sun reports that shops and businesses have re-opened as residents filled the homes of the freed schoolgirls on solidarity visits.

The insurgents, in a fleet of 4-wheel drive vehicles, arrived at about 8am and headed to the town center, where they dropped the girls off.

However, Punch says the huge relief felt in Dapchi will not mask the embarrassment felt by the government and its security agencies over the serious security breach that resulted in the mass abduction of the innocent schoolgirls.

According to the paper, it is still baffling how the Dapchi debacle was allowed to happen in a place where Boko Haram still wields enormous influence. The paper says there should be no reason to celebrate as 100 of the 276 Chibok girls abducted by the Islamist insurgents close to 4 years ago in the nearby Borno State have still not been released.

Zuma court fees

In South Africa, the controversy over the state bankrolling of ex-President Jacob Zuma's legal fees continues to increase as he prepares to face trial for corruption.

Times Live says that a whopping 15.3 million rand of public funds were spent fighting graft cases brought up against Zuma during his time in office. The paper reports that on Thursday his successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, defended the decision, saying he was bound by a deal struck between Zuma and former president Thabo Mbeki inked in 2006 on the basis of the parliamentary duties he held at the time.

Times Live says that the opposition democratic Alliance which was handed a copy of the accord, has made it clear that it will lodge an urgent court challenge of the deal before Jacob Zuma faces prosecution on charges of corruption, fraud and money laundering for allegedly taking bribes over a multi-billion rand arms deal signed in the 1990s.

Opposition parties are quoted by the newspaper as having noisily opposed Ramaphosa’s agreement to bankroll Zuma’s defence, accusing the former head of state of being a “thief” and a “criminal".

Kenya jobless report

In Kenya, the Standard newspaper published a bombshell survey that shatters the myth of a 40 percent unemployment rate. According to the survey, up to seven million Kenyans are unemployed in the nation, which has an active population of 19.5 million.

The Standard found out that 1.4 million have been desperately looking for work, while over a million more are at risk of losing their jobs to machines. Nine in every ten unemployed Kenyans are 35 years and below, according to the study released on Thursday.

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