👋 Hello. #AfricaBrief Crew here. Here’s our round-up of news-making headlines in Africa and beyond.

👋 Hello. #AfricaBrief Crew here. Here’s our round-up of news-making headlines in Africa and beyond.

🎧 Bon Kalindo, the man behind recent anti-government protests in Malawi, has touched on a raw nerve when he released a voice note saying he will be mobilizing the masses against the boss of the country’s graft-busting body, Martha Chizuma, for working with the British National Crime Agency in investigating Malawian-born businessman Zuneth Sattar on his alleged corrupt dealings with the Malawi government.

Reacting to Kalindo’s move, a number of Malawians expressed anger on social media.

Here’s how Oscar Lemon reacted to the news on social media influencer Onjezani Kenani’s Facebook wall:

“Sometime back when Kalindo was starting his demos some of us dismissed him as an empty man and trust him at your own risk. Many pro-Kalindo fans were angry. Now, look at the new strange battle he is bringing??”

Meanwhile, Kenani says Kalindo “tells me he was not fully aware of the depth and extent of the corruption and reacted based on inadequate information. He says he was wrong to do so. He says no one sent him, does not know Sattar, and has never seen him since Adam and Eve. He says he hates corruption with a passion and his priority is to see to it that the evil is uprooted from among us. He has assured me that he will soon release his own voice note to clarify to the Malawian people.”

📱 Pan-African entertainment company MultiChoice has further expanded its hyperlocal offering with the launch of two new TV channels – Maningue Magic and Kwenda Magic – for audiences in Mozambique and Angola respectively.The group’s long-established hyperlocal strategy is a multi-pronged, hybrid approach combining local content acquisition, local production, and the development of local content through international production partnerships.

🕵️‍♂️ Residents in Pigi County, on the Jonglei State side of the river border with Upper Nile State in Sudan, need to tread carefully. Floods mean that the recommendation by the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) to relocate cannot be followed.“We hope that the demining team will eventually be able to act quickly and effectively because our people are living in fear, and because of the floods, there is nowhere nearby, close to the important river, where we can move, as was the suggestion made by the experts,” County Commissioner Nyok Maluar told a river patrol team from the United Nations Mission in South Sudan.

🕵️‍♂️ Over $138 million in urgent funding is needed to assist 1.5 million vulnerable people in rural communities in the Horn of Africa whose fields and pastures have been hard hit by the extended drought, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said today, as it released a comprehensive response plan calling for range support for agriculture in the region.In a region already prone to food insecurity associated with weather extremes, natural resource limitations and conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020-21 locust invasion have stretched the coping capacities of rural communities to the limit, undermining agricultural productivity.

☄️ British PM Boris Johnson had reportedly given a speech at his defense adviser’s farewell party in December 2020

The list of social events attended by embattled UK PM Boris Johnson despite the lockdown keeps growing, with The Mirror reporting that he also delivered a speech at his defense adviser’s farewell party before Christmas last year.

The naval base on Guam is the closest US military installation to China located on American territory

A US Navy submarine carrying dozens of nuclear warheads sailed into a Pacific base for a rare visit on Saturday, with the Navy calling it a message to allies in the region.

🎧 Public Universities in Uganda have asked the government to increase funding for the living out allowances for government-sponsored students.In a meeting with the Committee on Education, the Senior Planner for Lira University, Tom Richard Atim said that since the inception of the university in July 2015, the government has been sending allowances for only 100 students yet the numbers had increased over time.

📱 As South Africa continues to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) has noted a new study published in Obstetrics & Gynaecology medical journal, released on 05 January 2022, that has found that vaccines may cause a small change to the menstrual cycle length, but that this change is temporary.

While health experts believe this finding is not clinically significant, the Commission would like to caution businesses and various institutions against forcing employees to vaccinate and imposing harsh sanctions on them if they do not. 

🕵️‍♂️ - Child marriage remains prevalent in Nigeria because the federal and state governments have not adequately enforced laws to prevent it, Human Rights Watch said today.Nigeria’s rates of child marriage are some of the highest on the African continent. Although the federal Child Rights Act (CRA, 2003) prohibits marriage below age 18, the Nigerian constitution contains provisions that appear to conflict with this position. States with Islamic legal systems have also failed to adopt both the federal law and 18 as the age of majority for marriage. Some southern states which have adopted this position have failed to take adequate steps to carry it out.