Christian militias stormed a U.N. base in southern Central Africa Republic early on Monday, killing one peacekeeper and wounding 11, the United Nations said. At around 5 a.m. (0400 GMT), armed anti-balaka militants attacked the base in Tagbara, about 300 km (190 miles) northeast of the capital Bangui, a U.N. statement said. The ensuing gunfight lasted hours, and 22 anti-balaka were also killed, the statement said. Later in the morning, peacekeepers discovered 21 dead civilians, including four children, near a church in Tagbara. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for those deaths.

The Democratic Republic of Congo wants the UN mission to leave the country in 2020, Foreign Minister Leonard She Okitundu said Tuesday, following a UN Security Council vote last week extending the peacekeepers’ mandate for another year. “We have let the Security Council know that the current mandate is considered to be the penultimate one, before the force leaves our county definitively after 20 years,” She Okitundu told a press conference in the capital Kinshasa. The United Nations has warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis in the DR Congo, with at least 13.1 million Congolese in need of aid, including 7.7 million who are severely food insecure. The Security Council on Tuesday tasked its huge peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo with helping to prepare elections meant to end President Joseph Kabila’s rule.

Dozens of Ugandan soldiers are thought to have been killed when Islamist extremists attacked their base on Sunday in the latest of a series of bloody strikes against peacekeepers in Somalia. Local officials told the Guardian that as many as 46 Ugandan troops, part of the 22,000-strong regional force in Somalia, died in the attack by the al-Qaida affiliated al-Shabaab movement in the town of Bulamarer, 80 miles south-west of the capital, Mogadishu, at around 9am local time. Ugandan officials have said only four soldiers were killed in the attack, which was repulsed with heavy casualties among the extremists. Such attacks are designed to hasten the departure of Amisom, the military and policing coalition under the authority of the African Union, which has been fighting al-Shabaab for more than a decade.

The Angolan government has cautioned Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) not to use a lack of funding as an excuse for further delay in the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections now due to be held on December 23. Angolan foreign minister Manuel Augusto in an interview with Daily Maverick in Pretoria on March 28 expressed the views of the Southern African region as a new poll showed that 69% of Congolese people do not trust the country’s electoral authority to organise free and fair elections and 80% disapprove of President Joseph Kabila. The poll by the Bureau d’Études, de Recherches, et de Consulting International (BERCI) and the Congo Research Group (CRG) at New York University also found that 74% of Congolese believe that Kabila should step down before the elections are held and 69% believe he should now declare explicitly that he will not be a candidate in this year’s elections.