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.

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.

Ndodana Mkhanyisi Tshuma has pleaded guilty in a Johannesburg court to illegally possessing a firearm and ammunition, and to an immigration offence — a step that clears the way for South Africa to extradite him to Britain.

Tshuma, described by the Associated Press as a British citizen of Zimbabwean heritage, is wanted by police in the United Kingdom over the deaths of his wife and their two daughters at the family home in Bedfordshire in July. Prosecutors in Britain say he will face three counts of murder.

The Associated Press reports that the guilty pleas formed part of a plea deal with South African prosecutors, and that South African authorities have said they will move to extradite him once his local court case is concluded. Eyewitness News, whose report was carried by NewZimbabwe.com, said a plea and sentence agreement between Tshuma and the State was before the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court.

He was arrested in Johannesburg in July after fleeing the UK, and was found in possession of a firearm and ammunition.

It is worth being precise about what Tshuma has and has not admitted. His guilty pleas relate only to the South African firearms and immigration charges. He has not entered a plea to the murder charges, and his lawyer, Chrispen Machingura, has indicated it is unlikely to become public soon how his client intends to plead in Britain, according to Eyewitness News.

The case has been followed closely by Zimbabwean communities in Britain and South Africa since the summer. AllInZimbabwe reported last month that the extradition matter had been rolled over to September in Johannesburg.

Sources: Associated Press, via ZimLive; Eyewitness News, via NewZimbabwe.com.