October 2005 in Africa

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Deaths 23 October: Stella Obasanjo 10 October: Milton Obote Events ECOWAS summit Malawi food crisis Niger food crisis Zimbabwe home demolitions Holidays 4: Ramadan begins Armed conflicts Second Congo War Darfur conflict in Sudan Civil war in Côte d'Ivoire Conflict in northern Uganda Elections October 11: Liberian presidential & parliamentary

This page deals with events that took place in October 2005 in or of interest to the Continent of Africa.

31 October 2005 (Monday)

• Liberian elections, 2005: Campaigning in the run-off election has begun. (allAfrica)
• Guinea-Bissau's new president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, announces the dissolution of the government headed by his rival Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior. (allAfrica)
• Côte d'Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo begins a sixth year in office defying opposition calls that he stand down now his elected mandate is up. The elections scheduled on Sunday were cancelled due to instability. Meanwhile, rebels controlling the northern half of the country declare their leader, 33-year-old Guillaume Soro, as the new prime minister. (allAfrica)
• An official from the Mozambique's Technical Secretariat for Food Security and Nutrition (SETSAN) says that the number of people in need of food aid has almost doubled in the past six months to more than 800,000 in Mozambique due to escalating maize prices and other factors. (allAfrica)
• The African Union (AU) renews its backing for the continent's plan to enlarge the UN Security Council. (Reuters)
• The UN Environment Programme warns that most lakes in Africa are under unprecedented strain from rising populations and must be managed better if demand for fresh water is not to stir instability. (Reuters)

24 October 2005 (Monday)

• : A World Bank project, estimated to cost between US$30 million and $40 million, will be launched in 2006 in the Republic of Congo to rehabilitate and modernize agriculture in rural area, aiming to boost food security. (Reuters)
• President of the Royal Society Robert May warned that the extra aid to help lift Africa out of poverty agreed in July by G8 leaders could be eaten up by global warming unless urgent action is taken. (Reuters)

23 October 2005 (Sunday)

• A Nigerian airliner Bellview Airlines Flight 210, a Boeing 737 aircraft, with 117 people on board crashed shortly after taking off from Lagos en route to the capital Abuja. No survivors were found. (Reuters) (The Star)

21 October 2005 (Friday)

• AIDS activists groups, Act Up-Paris lobby group and the African Essential Drug Network (RAME), call on drugs manufacturing company Roche Holding AG to allow generic companies to make the antiviral drug Tamiflu for Africans, as concerns mount over how countries would deal with a potential flu pandemic stemming from bird flu virus H5N1. (Reuters)

20 October 2005 (Thursday)

• Guinea's government announces that municipal elections will be held on 18 December. (Reuters)

18 October 2005 (Tuesday)

• The Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) and Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) have launched a joint operation against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, after the LRA ambushed a convoy of UPDF soldiers on October 14. (allAfrica)
• Malawi food crisis: United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has increased its appeal for Malawi to USD13 million, as the humanitarian crisis worsen with an estimated 46,000 severely malnourished children. (allAfrica)

17 October 2005 (Monday)

• A United Nations food agency expert said that East Africa as well as the rest of the continent are more vulnerable to bird flu than Europe as the region's lack of preparedness causes concern. Meanwhile, researchers in South Africa said that even though no bird flu of any kind has been detected in Africa, controlling the virus should it occur in the continent's rural hinterlands could prove a difficult task. (Reuters)

15 October 2005 (Saturday)

• UDUB, Somaliland's ruling party, won the most seats in the first multiparty parliamentary elections held in the breakaway country. [1]
• 2005 Malawi food crisis: President Bingu wa Mutharika declared a national disaster due to the worsening food shortages. [2]

14 October 2005 (Friday)

• The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader, Joseph Kony, has been indicted on 33 charges before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. (allAfrica)

13 October 2005 (Thursday)

• The United Nations is to evacuate some staff from Sudan's West Darfur state because of an increase in violence. U.N. officials said that the violence had hindered aid access to 650,000 refugees in the region. (Reuters)

12 October 2005 (Wednesday)

• Six armed Somali pirates hijack the MV Miltzow, a freighter that is carrying United Nations food aid. After its cargo of 850 tonnes of food aid is being offloaded in the port of Merka, ship is being forced to sail down the coast to Barawa before being released two days later. (Reuters)

11 October 2005 (Tuesday)

• 2005 Malawi food crisis: SOS Children launches emergency food program around Lilongwe and Mzuzu (Malawi Crisis)
• Liberian elections, 2005: Liberians head for the poll today to select a new president, 30 senators and 64 representatives for the lower house of parliament. (allAfrica)

10 October 2005 (Monday)

• The former President of Uganda, Milton Obote, has died of kidney failure at the age of 80. Obote led the East African country from 1962-1971 and again from 1980-1985. (BBC)
• The city of Brikama in Gambia is plunged into a housing crisis when over two thousand people remained homeless following the demolition of their residential compounds. (allAfrica)

8 October 2005 (Saturday)

• Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Tunisia qualify for the Football World Cup 2006.
• Uganda Human Rights Commission, in its 2004 report, states that at least 4,000 children who were among the tens of thousands abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army rebels cannot be traced. It accuses the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) of torturing civilians in the north by using brutal methods to extract information or to instill discipline in suspects. (allAfrica)
• The United States Department of State says that it will send a high-level delegation to Liberia to monitor the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections. (VOA)
• A group of Al Qaeda-aligned Islamic militants, belonging to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) shoot dead three civilians and wounded two others in Jijel province, Algeria, a week after Algerian voters backed an amnesty for rebels aimed to end 13 years of Algerian Civil War that cost over 100,000 lives. (Reuters)

7 October 2005 (Friday)

• Namibia Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in its report states that the high HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate in Namibia of 21 percent is affecting the subsistence farmers' ability to grow enough food. (allAfrica)
• The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies sign contracts to distribute 2,265,000 mosquito nets in Niger in December 2005 to help protect 3.5 million children. This distribution is to be funded by USD11.3 million from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and USD2 million from the Canadian International Development Agency through the Canadian Red Cross. (ReliefWeb)

6 October 2005 (Thursday)

• Five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group begun in Uganda, are targeted by the first arrest warrants to be issued by the International Criminal Court. (BBC)
• Gabon announces that the presidential election is to be held on 27 November with security forces voting two days earlier, but opposition denounces the move as a ruse for ballot rigging. (allAfrica)
• A USD$35 million HIV/AIDS treatment centre opens at Tanzania's Muhimbili National Hospital, the country main referral hospital. The centre has the capacity to process up to 1,000 tests per hour. (allAfrica)
• Zimbabwe is facing increasing threat of military revolt, as soldiers are increasingly dissatisfied by the government's failure to increase their salaries and by chronic food shortages at their barracks. (allAfrica)

4 October 2005 (Tuesday)

• Four Ugandan civilians have been killed in a rare afternoon ambush on a pickup truck in north east Uganda by Lord's Resistance Army rebels. The insurgents are suspected of shooting the driver and two passengers and killing a fourth with an axe. (BBC News)
• The Malawi government says that 650,000 people in the country have died due to AIDS in the past two decades. There are now 850,000 orphan children, 50% of these are a result of AIDS. (allAfrica)
• Template:Country data Congo Kinshasa 1997 The United Nations Security Council demands that Rwandan rebels, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), to disarm and leave Democratic Republic of the Congo immediately. (Reuters)
• Two Congolese soldiers died and eleven others injured in a plane crash as the United Nations and Democratic Republic of the Congo's army airlifted local troops to the northeastern frontier to confront Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels. (Reuters)

3 October 2005 (Monday)

• West African leaders call for the strengthening of United Nations peacekeeping force to ensure efforts to end the three year civil war in Côte d'Ivoire pay off. A total 6,640 peacekeepers are currently serving in the UN force, which is under Senegalese command, monitoring the buffer zone between the north and south with the help of 4,000 French troops.(allAfrica)
• South Africa announces a R140 million (USD $22 million) donation to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to alleviate food shortages in Southern Africa. (allAfrica)

2 October 2005 (Sunday)

• Liberian elections, 2005: the Supreme Court of Liberia rules that the National Elections Commission (NEC) had erred by rejecting three candidates on grounds that their registration documents were incomplete. The court says that NEC must provide the disqualified contenders with sufficient time to correct the deficiencies that barred them from being on the ballot. (allAfrica)
• Uganda Army is deploying troops to West Nile in readiness for an imminent military combat against the Lord's Resistance Army at the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. (allAfrica)
• African Development Bank (ADB) is funding the Kimira-Oluch Irrigation project in Homa Bay and Rachuonyo District in Kenya at a cost of Sh3 billion, in a move to control flooding and increase food production in the region. (allAfrica)

1 October 2005 (Saturday)

• João Bernardo Vieira becomes the new President of Guinea-Bissau; he faces a massive cholera epidemic and fears of continuing political instability in the country. [3]

30 September 2005 (Friday)

• United Nations World Food Programme warns that a sharp increase in malnutrition rates and rapidly rising maize prices in Malawi could push the number of vulnerable people in need of food aid up to five million. (Reuters)
• Egypt is deciding to take precautionary measures against any possible attack by swarms of locusts. (Reuters)
• United Nations calls on Uganda to ban the practices of child sacrifice and female genital mutilation in the country. The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child also urges the Kampala government to step up efforts in preventing youth abduction by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). (Reuters)

26 May 2005

• In South Africa, Geographical Names Council approved changing the name of South Africa's capital to Tshwane from Pretoria, in spite of protests.(Reuters)

News collections and sources

• Wikipedia:News collections and sources.
• Wikipedia:News sources - This has much of the same material organised in a hierarchical manner to help encourage NPOV in our news reporting.
• allAfrica.com
• Reuters, Africa
• [4]