February 19, 2014
From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Pimani Baloyi.
Making headlines:

Opposition parties blast President Jacob Zuma’s leadership record.

Uganda dismisses US President Barack Obama’s pressure on the anti-gay law.

And, a British suspect planned the attacks on US, UK and French targets, a Kenyan court hears.
 

Opposition MPs on Tuesday told President Jacob Zuma he had failed to match up to his predecessors, Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.

Democratic Alliance Parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko was the first opposition party leader to tell the National Assembly that Zuma's "poor leadership" had reversed much of the progress South Africa had made up to 2009.

Mazibuko vowed to table a motion to impeach Zuma if the public protector's report on Nkandla found him guilty of wrongdoing. Although she couldn’t guarantee opposition parties would win such an impeachment vote, she said millions of South Africans would be calling on MPs to do the right thing.

Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's report on Nkandla is set to be released on March 1.

Uganda on Tuesday dismissed US president Barack Obama's call to its leader Yoweri Museveni not to sign an anti-homosexuality law, saying the US was trying to blackmail the east African country.

Two days after President Museveni said he would sign the law widely criticised abroad as harsh and unjust, Obama warned that would complicate US relations with Uganda and be a "step backward for all Ugandans."

A senior Obama administration official said Washington – a major aid donor sending more than $400-million a year – would review US relations with Uganda, a key regional ally in the fight against Islamic extremism in Somalia. However, Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo said aid shouldn’t be tied to Uganda's stand on homosexuality.

Homosexuality is taboo in many African countries. It is illegal in 37 nations on the continent and activists say that few African gays dare to live their sexuality openly, fearing imprisonment, violence and loss of their jobs.
 

British national Jermaine Grant, on trial in Kenya and accused of planning an attack there, was targeting British, French and US interests, a London detective told the court on Tuesday.

Kenyan police suspect Grant, from east London, has ties to the Somali al Shabaab rebel group blamed by the authorities for a string of attacks in the port city of Mombasa, the capital Nairobi and in the remote hinterlands bordering Somalia.

Steve Ball, a London police forensic examiner, said officers had retrieved files gathered from several websites, including instructions on making chemical bombs and literature related to jihad, from a memory device belonging to Grant. He said the documents they found didn’t specify where the targets were.

Grant denies the charge against him of planning an attack after being found with bomb-making material that included batteries, wire, ammonium nitrate, lead nitrate, acetone and hydrogen-peroxide when he was arrested in 2012 in Mombasa.

Also making headlines:

Sanral says the e-toll system is working, although with some challenges.

The World Energy Council says South Africa will have to weigh a number of complex factors when assessing how best to proceed in exploiting its shale-gas resources.

And, legal practice Norton Rose Fulbright says it is improbable that Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan will announce any changes to the tax rates during the delivery of the National Budget next week.

That's a roundup of news making headlines today.