Sierra Leone woman barred from becoming chief

Members of a Sierra Leone traditional group have besieged a woman's house and stopped her from going home after she launched a legal bid to become a chief.

Elizabeth Simbiwa Sogbo-Tortu was barred from an election to the chiefdom because she was a woman.

She lost an initial appeal against the ban - a ruling condemned by women's rights groups who are vowing to take her case to the Supreme Court.

A BBC correspondent says politicians are afraid of angering traditionalists.

The BBC's Umaru Fofana in Freetown says the politicians also do not want to antagonise women - making them afraid of the whole issue.

Women are barred from becoming chiefs in the Northern Province and most of the east but they are allowed in southern Sierra Leone

No 2nd Term for YarÁdua – Billionaire-Debtors Vow

With almost all the names of bigwigs in Nigeria’s corporate and political circles published in the list of Bad debtors in the country, the re-election of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2011 is in jeopardy due to massive mobilisation and underground gang up to ensure that he does not return to power after the first tenure. The list of biggest debtors in Nigeria includes top politicians, powerful retired military general, influential industrialists and public functionaries. While the central bank has bailed out nine of the country’s 24 banks to the sum of $4bn, nearly N600 billion the worth of the non-performing loans of the affected bank was N1.6 trillion. So far only about N150bn has been recovered while the banking stocks lost almost 50% of their monetary values. In the forefront of mobilisation against the re-election, Economic Confidential an online economic magazine gathered, are some powerful members of the Corporate Nigeria, a mafia-kind of an organisation that had funded the re-election of former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003 with billions of Naira and made generous donation to Yar’adua’s election in 2007. There are also former elected and appointed public officers who have not been in the good book of the administration and ambitious politicians even within the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) strategising for relevant in 2011’s election. The gang-up will see to a boycott of any campaign funding rally for Yar’Adua’s election. The aggrieved individuals have marshalled plans to teem up with opposition groups, especially the anti-government forces by funding their programmes and also working on some media to discredit the reform agenda on the economic front. They are also planning to host websites to play ethno- regional cards through different fronts.