The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has postponed the governorship and state assembly elections till 18 March 2023. The exercise was previously scheduled to hold on Saturday 11 March, but INEC, citing a logistic crisis stemming from the configuration and transportation of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), said the election could not hold again as scheduled following a meeting of its executives on Wednesday evening. Earlier in the day, the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) gave the commission the nod to reconfigure BVAS it used for the presidential election. The Court, in a unanimous decision by a three-member panel of justices, held that stopping the body from reconfiguring the BVAS would adversely affect the state elections.
Some bandits were reported to have killed six vigilante members at the Awaro checkpoint in the western Birnin-Gwari, Birnin-Gwari Local Government Area of Kaduna State. It was gathered that the incident took place at about 4 pm on Wednesday. A vigilante member, Usman Babangida, who was mourning the death of his colleagues, told newsmen on Wednesday that the bandits attacked the checkpoint in huge numbers. He added that the hoodlums shot sporadically on sighting the vigilante members, killing no fewer than six. According to him, those killed have been buried in accordance with Muslim rites. Babangida said the incident occurred just as the hoodlums clashed with other bandits at a nearby community named Bugai.
Ghana’s Deputy Defence Minister, Kofi Amankwa-Manu, has apologised for military excesses after soldiers were deployed in Ashaiman, a suburb of the capital Accra. Soldiers unleashed mayhem on some residents of Ashaiman on Tuesday with helicopters flying over the area because of a young military officer, Trooper Imoro Sheriff, who was alleged to have been stabbed in the town on 4 March. The Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) had disclosed that “the military operation, which was sanctioned by the Military High Command, was NOT to avenge the killing of the soldier but rather to fish out the perpetrators of the heinous crime.” In an interview with local media, Mr. Amankwa-Manu said, “If decent, innocent residents of Ashaiman were caught up in these operations, I, in my capacity as deputy defence minister, apologise for that.” In a statement, GAF said following the operations at Ashaiman-Taifa and Tulaku, the military personnel picked up 184 suspects and handed them over to the military police.
South Sudan President Salva Kiir sacked the foreign minister, the president’s spokesperson said, less than a week after the dismissal of the ministers of defence and interior, and he did not provide an explanation. It wasn’t immediately clear if Ayii’s termination was linked to those of defence and interior, which have threatened to destroy a fragile peace deal with opposition leader First Vice President Riek Machar. Kiir and Machar’s forces signed a peace agreement in 2018 that ended five years of civil war that killed 400,000 people and caused Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Implementation of the deal has been slow, and the opposing forces have clashed frequently over disagreements about how to share power.