Africa Daily

Police in South Africa are examining how 21 teenagers died at a drinking tavern in the city of East London. The youngest to have died on Saturday night was just 13 years old. The minimum drinking age in South Africa is 18, so they should not have been in the spot. There were no visible injuries on the bodies of the victims, so police have said that a crush is unlikely. There have been reports that the victims may have been poisoned. Whatever happened in the early hours of Sunday morning, people in South Africa are keen to make sure it can not happen again. #AfricaDaily

An investigation by BBC Africa Eye has found young people living with disabilities being trafficked from Tanzania to Nairobi. They found that they are then being forced to beg on the streets to bring in cash for the traffickers. Njeri Mwangi travelled to Tanzania and met parents who were tricked into letting their children move away, with the promise of a better life. And she joined Kenyan police as the information from her investigation led to arrests of alleged traffickers in the capital. She joins Alan Kasujja to talk about how her reporting unfolded. Host: Alan Kasujja (@kasujja) Reporting: Njeri Mwangi (@njerikan) #AfricaDaily

This week you may have been hearing about a big meeting in Rwanda, as the heads of the 54 Commonwealth nations gather in Kigali. But for many, the Commonwealth, with its roots in the British Empire, feels like an outdated organisation – despite representing 2.5 billion people. The last member to join it was Rwanda, this year’s host. So what are the main issues arising? For Africa Daily, Alan Kasujja talks to two friends and former colleagues about their experiences of the meeting so far.

There’s been a noticeable change in the images of Africa we are now seeing on our screens. These pictures are so different from the ones the media has often shown of the continent. Gone are the children looking desolate and hungry with extended bellies, surrounded by flies, now it’s the images of rich, beautiful and increasingly famous people, living their best lives for the world to see. This is the new opulent and glitzy reality world of African celebrities who are unapologetic about their wealth and riches. It’s a world of reality TV shows where we are given a front seat to the fights and dramas from the private lives of African stars, just as we’ve seen over the years with American reality programmes. Reality shows in Africa aren’t anything new. The Big Brother franchise, one of the first reality TV programmes in the world, has been on-going on the continent for decades. So with shows like The Real Housewives of Lagos, Durban, Cape Town and the recent Netflix hit, Young, Famous and African, showing the opulent lives of rich Africans, is this the golden age of glitzy and glamourous African reality shows? Host: Alan Kasujja Guests: Peace Hyde, Young, Famous and African co-creator and Tosin Ajibade, founder of media house Olori Super Gal

In much of the world, social media platforms are the number one source of information for young people. So it’s disturbing that several reports have been released showing that Kenya’s social media space is being flooded with misinformation, fake reports and distorted truths – all aimed at misleading voters ahead of the general elections this August. The latest includes findings by the Mozilla Foundation which discovered manipulated TikTok videos spreading political lies and ethnic hatred - viewed over four million times before the platform took them down. In the previous 2017 campaign, Cambridge Analytica did the same through Facebook, curating content in favour of the political party which eventually won the election. For Africa Daily, Alan Kasujja hears from the fact-checkers and crusaders fighting to keep the online space honest… as well as from a young social media user trying to sort truth from fictionPresenter: Alan Kasujja (@kasujja)

"I ask: where are my father's bones? My brother's bones?"In April 1972, Hutu rebels in the south of Burundi launched an assault on the Tutsi led government. Their aim was to overthrow the administration of then president Michel Micombero. In the ensuing chaos, at least a thousand people, including government officials, were brutally murdered. But the country’s army quickly contained the insurgency and attempted coup. This was followed by more than three months of revenge killings against the Hutu ethnic population. By the time the carnage came to an end, a reported 200 000 people had lost their lives. This year marks exactly 50 years since the massacre in Burundi, and the nation continues to seek answers. It set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2018, to shed light on ethnic tensions since the country’s independence in the early 1960s. The TRC says it has, so far, uncovered more than 4 000 mass graves, with tens of thousands of victims identified. Presenter: Alan Kasujja Guests: Jeanine Ntihirageza and Pierre-Claver Ndayicariye

“Here in our culture when you don’t see the body of someone, for the woman you can’t go back to sleep on the bed. You have to stay on the floor all the time. So this is what the family has gone through. For them that tooth is the body of their father”. Patrice Lumumba is a national hero in his native Democratic Republic of Congo. He became the country’s first prime minister at the age of just 35, after it won independence from Belgian rule in June of 1960. But less than a year later, he was overthrown, jailed and killed by factions reportedly supported by Belgium and the US. Now a tooth, believed to have been stolen as a trophy by a Gendarme when his body was destroyed, is being returned to his family and the DRC. Last week the Belgium monarch, King Philippe, expressed his ‘deepest regret’ for colonial era abuses – but stopped short of formally apologising or offering reparations. Presenter: Alan Kasujja (@kasujja)

For several decades, the Maasai community in Loliondo in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro district have been involved in a land dispute with the government. Thousands of Maasai have lived for years on the fertile 1,500 square km piece of land – using its abundant water sources for their livestock. But the authorities no longer want the Maasai living there, as they say land and wildlife is being put at risk because of the rapidly expanding human population. The situation came to a head recently when authorities started marking out the protected land - sparking protests from the Maasai. The police have been accused of using bullets and teargas against the protesters. One police officer has been killed in the clashes. For Africa Daily, Alan Kasujja asks if a peaceful resolution can be found to Tanzania’s land disputes?Presenter: Alan Kasujja (@kasujja)

Budget airline Ryanair recently introduced a policy that forced South African travellers to the UK to do a test in the Afrikaans language. This, it said, was aimed at proving the passengers’ nationality, in an effort to weed out those using counterfeit passports. The quiz contained questions such as ‘what is South Africa's international dialling code?’, ‘what is its capital city?’ and ‘who is the current president?’. Anyone who failed this test was refused travel and refunded the cost of their ticket. This policy caused a furore, with many non-Afrikaans speaking South Africans saying they were being discriminated against. The low-cost airline has now abandoned the policy. Afrikaans is a language associated with a long and painful history of racial segregation in South Africa. On June 16, South Africa marks Youth Day and remembers the 1976 Soweto Uprising that saw students take to the streets, in a protest many say changed the socio-political landscape in the country and paved the way that led to the end of the white minority rule. One of the things the students were demonstrating against was the directive from authorities to make Afrikaans, alongside English, compulsory as a medium of instruction in schools. Today Africa Daily is looking into why Afrikaans, as a language, can be seen as divisive to some. Host: Alan Kasujja Guest: Oupa Ngwenya, senior South African journalist and former student activist

Fans say it’s the future of virtual money; experts say it's tamper-proof; billionaires have been made. But cryptocurrency has also led millionaires to lose everything – while Kenya’s ICT minister says last year Kenyans lost more than $120 million to crypto scams. When Bitcoin was first launched in 2009, one bitcoin was worth 0. By mid-April last year, the value of one bitcoin peaked at $60,000 US. But In the last seven months, the highly volatile online currency has lost more than 60% of its value, leaving the value of a coin at less than $25,000. So are African governments right in warning people off? Or should they just regulate the trade better? For Africa Daily, Alan Kasujja takes a breath and deep dives into the murky and often confusing world of crypto with the help of Kabenda Belete, a cryptocurrency consultant and trader based in Tanzania.Presenter: Alan Kasujja (@kasujja) Guest: Kabenda Belete (@lukaskabenda)