Former president of Zimbabwe
Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid South Africa is hurtling this weekend towards a huge political train smash as its corrupt and beleaguered head of state, Jacob Zuma, manoeuvres to undermine the state’s two most respected officials whose exposés threaten to end his Presidency.
A bloody conflict has erupted in the little-known central Africa state of Burundi, with African Union (AU) officials warning that without international intervention there is a danger of another ethnic genocide on the scale of that in neighbouring Rwanda which took nearly a million lives in just 100 days in 1994.
On 9 July 2011, at the stroke of midnight, the world’s newest state – the 193rd member of the United Nations – was born amid jubilation and a wave of optimism after five decades of titanic, catastrophic struggle had left two million or more people dead.
