African press review 4 June 2015

The woes of Sepp Blatter and world football's governing body, Fifa, get front-page prominence in South Africa again. Timber from the DRC is being sold illegally. And they've already started arguing about the next general election in Kenya.

The trials and tribulations of football's world administrator, Fifa, are back at the top of the news pages in South Africa.

Yesterday, it was Sepp Blatter's surprise resignation from the post he clinched only last Friday.

Today the key name is that of Chuck Blazer, a former Fifa official, who has admitted that he took bribes in connection with the awarding of the 2010 World Cup to South Africa.

According to the main story in the Johannesburg-based financial paper BusinessDay, Blazer's admission was made public just hours after Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula denied that South Africa bribed Fifa officials to secure the 2010 competition.

Mbalula said on Wednesday that a 10-million-dollar payment from South Africa, which is central to the US investigation into corruption at Fifa, was to be allocated to the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football and it was to support a development project for young players.

It emerged on Wednesday that Blazer, a US citizen who spent two decades working for Fifa, secretly pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in federal court in New York in 2013 as part of an agreement with US prosecutors.

Court documents quote him as saying, "I and others on the Fifa executive committee agreed to accept bribes in connection with the selection of South Africa as the host nation for the 2010 World Cup."

Blazer's testimony is said to have led to the recent arrests of top Fifa figures and helped prompt the resignation on Tuesday of long-time president Blatter.

On a very different note, BusinessDay reports that snow is forecast across various parts of South Africa today‚ with heavier falls expected in Lesotho.

The weathermen are predicting heavy snow across the Eastern Cape and Lesotho and a few flurries in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

European and US companies are participating in the multimillion-dollar trade of illegally logged timber from the Democratic Republic of Congo, breaking not just Congolese but also European and US laws.

This, says The Wall Street Journal, was revealed in a report published yesterday by the advocacy group Global Witness.

The group says its researchers visited 28 of the 57 industrial-scale timber operations in the DRC over the last four years and found that all 28 were breaking several laws, including underpayment or nonpayment of taxes, lack of necessary licences, logging outside the licensed area, logging protected timber species and not adhering to agreements to protect local populations from the impact of their operations.

The business is estimated to be worth over 80 million euros annually, with China the biggest importer.

The lads at the Kenyan Electoral and Boundaries Commission are getting a bit ahead of themselves.

According to this morning's Daily Nation, the electoral commission says it will stick to 8 August 2017 date stipulated in the constitution for the next general election.

The problem is that, if the polls are held in August, President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, will not have completed their full five-year terms.

Governors, senators and MPs would also be affected.

Questions have been raised about the date because of the constitutional requirement that all elected leaders should serve for five years. Given that the last election was on 4 March 2013, a five-year term will end some three months before the corresponding date in 2018.

Kenya's last election was delayed by a dispute over dates between then President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

The main story in The Egypt Independent reports a call on the Cairo government to end military trials for civilians and other critical changes at the Justice Ministry. These include ending the death penalty and increasing transparency.

The report by the Egyptian Intiative for Personal Rights says military trials, which are normally reserved for times of war or civil unrest, have now become commonplace with the Egyptian government using military courts to try journalists, students and demonstrators.