Zimbabwean constitutional lawyer Brian Kagoro was removed from a Nairobi-bound flight in Addis Ababa on Tuesday and prevented from reboarding, despite a Kenyan High Court order protecting his right to enter the country.

The Pan African Lawyers Union said Kagoro, 51, had boarded the flight when security personnel took him off the aircraft and questioned him. He was then barred from reboarding, making it impossible to complete the journey.

“The circumstances under which he was removed from the aircraft, questioned and prevented from continuing his journey are deeply concerning, particularly given the existing court order directing that he be granted entry into Kenya,” PALU said. It added that his legal team was seeking urgent clarification from the authorities and taking steps to enforce the order.

Kagoro, who is Africa Director at the Open Society Foundations and a co-founder of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, was detained for more than ten hours at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on 22 February this year, declared persona non grata and flown back to Johannesburg. Kenyan officials accused him of involvement in a foreign-funded network seeking to coordinate anti-government protests. He denied the allegations, saying he had travelled for a family event and a speaking engagement.

PALU, the East Africa Law Society, the Law Society of Kenya and the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists filed a constitutional petition challenging the deportation on due process and rule-of-law grounds. In June the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court issued conservatory orders protecting Kagoro against further arbitrary denial of entry, pending determination of that petition. Tuesday’s trip was made under that order.

Kenyan civil society organisations had planned to receive him at the airport in a public show of solidarity, with a press briefing to follow. Both were cancelled.

More than 20 civil society organisations, professional associations and business figures have since demanded that the government comply with the order and account publicly for what happened, including whether Kenyan officials asked for or caused his removal in Addis Ababa.

“A court order binds every public officer and state agency. Immigration or national security powers cannot lawfully be used, directly or indirectly, to defeat it,” their statement said. They noted the incident fell on the International Day of Democracy.

Sources: Nairobi News; The Eastleigh Voice; Nehanda Radio; Kenyans.co.ke; statement by the Pan African Lawyers Union.

Zimbabwean Grade 12 pupils who left South Africa during this year’s anti-immigrant upheaval may be helped to return and sit their final school examinations next month — though the two organisations involved have given noticeably different accounts of how settled the arrangement actually is.

The Zimbabwe Exemption Permit Coordinating Committee (ZEPCC), an advocacy group for permit holders and their families, told TimesLIVE on 8 September that it had engaged with 120 matric pupils who failed to register for their examinations because of xenophobia and bullying at school, and that it had made arrangements with education authorities to get them registered. Its national coordinator, Edward Muchatita, said the pupils would be housed at a boarding facility whose location was being withheld for security reasons, with the committee covering accommodation and revision classes.

South Africa’s Department of Basic Education put it more cautiously. Speaking to EWN two days later, Lukhanyo Vangqa, spokesperson for the basic education minister, said the plan remained in draft form and had not been approved. It still has to go before the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Immigration and be discussed with the qualifications council Umalusi before the minister makes a final decision.

Vangqa said ZEPCC’s figure stood at about 149 when the department last checked, and that the number shifts as individual cases surface.

He also sought to correct a widespread misunderstanding: pupils do not need South African identity documents to write the National Senior Certificate. Some form of identification is required, but an affidavit will serve, and teachers at a school a pupil has attended for more than a year can attest to their identity. The checks exist to stop impersonation, he said, not to shut anyone out.

What cannot be bent is geography. The NSC is governed by the South African Schools Act, which applies only inside South Africa, so any pupil hoping to write must physically return and sit the papers at an accredited centre. The first examination is set for 13 October, leaving officials little room.

Sources: EWN; TimesLIVE.

Cassava Technologies, the pan-African digital infrastructure group founded and chaired by Zimbabwean businessman Strive Masiyiwa, has signed two agreements in Cairo that put it at the centre of Egypt’s push to build its own artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The deals were announced on 8 September alongside Vodafone Business and the Egyptian industrial group Elsewedy Electric, in the presence of Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology. Trade publications TechAfrica News and Connecting Africa both reported the partnerships as two separate arrangements rather than a single transaction.

The first establishes Africa Data Centres Egypt, a joint venture bringing together Vodafone Business’s cloud and enterprise services, Elsewedy Electric’s energy and construction capacity, and Cassava’s experience running data centres elsewhere on the continent. The facility is to open with 20 megawatts of capacity over its first three years, with a stated path to 200MW.

The second is a partnership between Vodafone Business and Cassava alone, to build what the two companies describe as Egypt’s first sovereign AI data centre, using Nvidia technology and offering graphics processing unit capacity as a service. The stated aim is to let Egyptian organisations train and run AI systems without sending sensitive data outside the country.

Egypt’s communications minister said the project should draw about US$200 million in foreign direct investment in its first phase, rising to roughly US$1 billion once the targeted capacity is complete, and create up to 200 direct and around 2,000 indirect jobs. Those projections come from the minister rather than from the companies themselves.

For Zimbabwean readers the significance lies less in Egypt than in reach. Cassava, which was spun out of Masiyiwa’s Econet Group, said Egypt was a strategic market for wider plans to build digital infrastructure across Africa and the Middle East — pushing a Zimbabwean-founded company’s footprint well beyond southern Africa.

Sources: TechAfrica News; Connecting Africa; TelcoTitans.