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Ethiopia is hailing the country’s invitation to join the Brics club of nations as a major diplomatic victory.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was attending the Brics summit in South Africa, called the decision “a great moment for Ethiopia”.

It is one of two African countries (Egypt is the other) that will become a member come January. In total six nations were invited, the other four were Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Argentina and Iran.

It is not clear whether any deals were made in order for them to join the bloc, which is currently made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and aims to challenge perceived Western dominance in world affairs.

“History is made,” Redwan Hussien, Mr Abiy’s security adviser, wrote on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

There is hope among some commentators that the move could improve investor perceptions about Ethiopia.

Its image has been tarnished by the brutal two-year civil war in its northern Tigray region. It ended last November, but there are also recurrent conflicts in other areas.

Previously a strong US ally in the war on terror across the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia’s relations with the West have deteriorated as accusations of grave rights abuses emerged during the Tigray conflict.

Aid and economic support from the West, on which Addis Ababa depended heavily, has decreased as a consequence.

It appears there is hope that Brics membership will strengthen Ethiopia’s position, meaning the West might downplay such accusations in future.

Joining the club, some say, might also give Ethiopia a better footing when it comes to negotiating loans and financial aid as the West might fear the country’s increasingly alignment with China.

Addis Ababa has been one of the largest recipients of economic support from China in the past decade as it was one of Africa’s fastest growing economies. The civil war however has slowed the growth and left the country’s economy in difficulties.

Mozambican doctors and other health workers have suspended a strike that has been going on for more than a month and paralysed public health services.

It comes hours after President Filipe Nyusi appealed to the health professionals to resume work to safeguard the health of Mozambicans.

He said the strike had caused a lot of suffering and contributed to a reduction in productivity.

The chairman of the country’s medical association, Milton Tatia, said the creation of a new negotiations team, led by Prime Minister Adriano Maleiane, had made them decide to return to work.

However, he said they would resume the strike in October if there is no progress in the negotiations.

The health workers have been demanding better wages and working conditions.

They have also raised concerns about inadequate food for patients, lack of medicine and equipment in some hospitals.

The strike, which began on 10 July, involved more than 2,000 health professionals from across the country.

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Rescue efforts are ongoing in the Nigerian capital after a two-storey building collapsed overnight.

Emergency services say they have pulled 35 people alive out of the rubble in the Garki part of Abuja.

Two others were found dead.

Abba Idris, the head of the Abuja Emergency Relief Agency, told the BBC that those rescued had been taken to hospital.

The building was used for residential and commercial purposes, local media report, and it was not immediately clear what caused the collapse.

There were heavy rains overnight, accompanied by strong winds, which continued till dawn on Thursday.

Garki is in the heart of Abuja and many of its buildings were part of those first constructed in the new city, which began being built in the early 1980s.

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Police in Zimbabwe have confirmed the arrest of 39 election monitors for allegedly trying to disrupt the voting process.

Officers carried out a series of raids across the capital, Harare, including at a hotel and at offices of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network and the Elections Support Centre.

The civil society groups were co-ordinating an independent count of election results.

The police spokesman Paul Nyathi told state TV that computers and phones had been seized.

Earlier lawyers said they had received disturbing distress calls from those being detained.

They said they initially did not know where the police had taken their clients and that they were being denied access to them.

Opposition parties have disputed past election results.

This year various civil society groups have tried to organise their own vote count in order to compare results with the official tally.

Counting has begun after Wednesday's vote although polling is still taking place in wards in three provinces because of delays.

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TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew has held a virtual meeting with Kenya’s president and agreed the popular video-sharing app will monitor content in the East African nation.

The deal comes a week after Kenyan MPs discussed a proposal to ban TikTok because of its explicit sexual content and clips promoting violence and hate speech.

It was also agreed that TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, would set up an office in Kenya.

Kenyan President William Ruto said TikTok's operations in the region would be co-ordinated from there.

He said the moderation agreement would be a step to ensuring TikTok’s content adhered to Kenyan guidelines and standards like other platforms such as YouTube and Twitter, now known as X, did.

The president said the government wanted to reduce the negative side of social media while enabling Kenya to benefit from money that can be made on various platforms.

The country generated between 300m Kenyan shillings ($2m, £1.6m) and 500m Kenyan shillings monthly from social media, he said - without specifying if these were figures for total earnings or tax revenue.

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The death of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, if confirmed, will test the resilience of operations by thousands of mercenaries active in Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Libya.

Wagner has a decentralised command on the continent where it provides security for some African leaders in exchange for mineral and other strategic economic and military concessions.

The group has also been instrumental in spreading Russian influence through media campaigns that primarily discredit the West.

In the CAR, where Wagner forces were invited by President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in 2018, the mercenaries have expanded into the media, timber and even vodka to consolidate economic interests in the mineral-rich country.

Earlier this week, the Russia House, a cultural centre affiliated with Wagner based in CAR’s capital, Bangui, announced a three-month trade fair for Russian businesses interested in expanding operations in the region.

This could ostensibly enable companies linked to Wagner to operate in the CAR and circumvent Western sanctions.

However, the mercenaries operating in CAR have been accused of atrocities while fighting rebels behind the country’s chronic instability.

Mali’s military-led government has also become heavily dependent on Wagner after ending security agreements with France and the UN peacekeeping force.

At least 1,000 mercenaries were deployed there in late 2021, though officials deny their presence.

In May, the US sanctioned Wagner's de facto leader there, Ivan Maslov, for using Mali to obtain weapons for Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine.

The range of operations underscore Africa’s importance to Russia’s foreign policy.

However, the loyalty of Wagner operatives on the continent will be crucial in consolidating Moscow’s future influence.

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Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has praised his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa for his handling of the Brics summit that is ending with a decision to expand the bloc by six countries.

The group is currently made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which has been hosting the annual gathering, and there had been some disagreement about the move to increase its membership.

Mr Putin did not attend the Johannesburg summit in person because he is subject to an international arrest warrant, but he addressed the leaders by videolink.

“I must note that, as it turned out, this work was not easy, and President Ramaphosa showed amazing diplomatic skills in agreeing on all positions, including those related to the expansion of the Brics,” the Reuters news agency quotes him as saying.

“Our Brazilian colleague, President Lula da Silva, has just mentioned some of the most important points for all of us, among which I would, of course, single out the issues of a single accounting currency."

He also expressed Russia’s wish to deepen ties with Africa, though he made no mention of the reported death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner mercenary group that has a presence in several countries on the continent.

To nations joining next year - Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - he said: “We will continue the work that we have started today - to expand the influence of Brics in the world."

In Putin's second video contribution to the Brics summit, his big focus was on Africa, going back to his mantra that Russia helps Africa's neediest countries, while the West merely pumps resources out of them in some kind of modern form of revamped colonialism.

He reminded his audience of Russia's offer of 25-50,000 tonnes of free grain supplies to six African nations, including Mali, Zimbabwe and Central African Republic.

It's all part of a bid to prop up Russian ambitions on the continent, when the war in Ukraine is pushing African leaders away. Only 17 African heads of state took part in last month's Russia-Africa summit, down from 43 only four years before.

But another key element of Putin's Africa policy is the thousands of Wagner mercenaries embedded in a number of African states. Wagner is widely accused of plundering those countries for their mineral wealth, so it is a bit rich to complain of Western colonialism.

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The UN's migration agency says that more than four million Ethiopians are now displaced within the country, largely because of conflict or drought.

The National Displacement Report, which covers the period between last November and June 2023, says two-thirds of them were forced from their homes by conflicts.

For the first time since 2021 the report includes the war-hit region of Tigray, which has Ethiopia's biggest population uprooted by war - more than a million people.

The Somali region in eastern Ethiopia hosts the highest number displaced primarily by drought.

Earlier the UN said more than 20 million Ethiopians were in need of food assistance and $4bn (£3.14bn) was required to meet their needs.

Two senior jihadist leaders have been killed in joint operations with regional forces in Mozambique's northern Cabo Delgado province, the army says.

One of them was Abu Kital who "held the position of deputy commander of the operations of the group Ahlu-Sunnah wal Jama`a (ASWJ)", the army statement said.

The other was Ali Mahando, who also held a senior position in the group.

Mozambique's army and allied forces, including Rwandan troops and a military mission from southern Africa's regional bloc Sadc, have been conducting operations in the jihadist-hit province.

Mozambique has been battling an Islamic State group-linked insurgency since October 2017.

More than a million people have been forced to flee their homes with more than 4,000 others killed over the period.

Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has tweeted of his delight that his country is one of the six countries invited to join the Brics bloc from January next year.

"A great moment for #Ethiopia," he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"Ethiopia stands ready to cooperate with all for an inclusive and prosperous global order."

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Smiles, hugs, and waves. If there was an unintentional theme to day two of the Brics summit it was friendship. Making new friends, and keeping old ones.

It started off with a red-carpet entrance and a family photo-op for the group leaders before they headed into closed-door meetings for their main topic of discussion: bloc expansion.

While Brics members have all come out in support of growing membership, there are still divisions about how many countries should be allowed to join and how quickly.

Against the backdrop of the Ukraine war, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Brics membership as a way of showing the West he still has friends.

He did not travel to South Africa because he is wanted under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, but used a video address to attack Western powers.

"I want to note that it was the desire to maintain their hegemony in the world, the desire of some countries to maintain this hegemony that led to the severe crisis in Ukraine," he said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping agrees. He called for the acceleration of the expansion of the Brics group: “We should let more countries join the Brics family and pool wisdom to make global governance more fair and reasonable.”

But the more the merrier is not necessarily a good stance for the other three countries to take.

India is in a territorial dispute with China, so it will not want to admit new members that will consistently side with China. At the same time, it wants to maintain ties with the US and Australia so they need to be careful about who they align with.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to be friends with everyone. He thinks Brics should be more economic focused rather than a geopolitical force against the West, and spent his public time speaking about a common currency that could be used by Brics countries when trading.

Then last, but not least is South Africa. The newest country to join the friend group. It does not want to rock the boat too much, and wants to stay in the good books of both Western powers and Russia.

More than 20 countries have formally asked to be admitted to the bloc, but they will have to pass the criteria set out to join this friend group.

Let us see who makes the cut on the final day of the summit.

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Voting in Zimbabwe's presidential and parliamentary elections is continuing in some parts of the country, after delays prompted a second day of voting amid complaints of ballot rigging.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa gave notice that polling would be extended in 40 wards, in three of the 10 provinces. It includes parts of the capital, Harare - which is considered an opposition stronghold.

Only a quarter of polling stations there opened on time because of problems with ballot papers. In some areas, ballot papers ran out, forcing voters to wait late into the night.

The elections body blamed last-minute court challenges for the late arrival of council election ballot papers

Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) opposition leader Nelson Chamisa accused the governing Zanu-PF of voter suppression.

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Meanwhile the police are reported to have raided the offices of two local independent election monitors - the Zimbabwe Election Support Network and the Election Support Centre - a day after polling.

A rights group, the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, reported that a large number of people were detained and computers seized.

There is no confirmation yet from the police.

The electoral body has five days within which to declare the results of the presidential election.