Sudan’s state security prosecutor has charged the country’s main opposition leader, Sadiq al-Mahdi, with collaborating with rebel groups to overthrow the regime of President Omar al-Bashir, a media network reported Tuesday. Bashir, backed by Islamists, toppled Mahdi’s civilian government in a 1989 coup after which the former prime minister’s Umma Party, Sudan’s main opposition group, has regularly campaigned against the policies of Bashir’s government. “Sudan state security prosecutor has filed a criminal case against Sadiq al-Mahdi for collaborating with rebel groups for overthrowing the regime” of Bashir, said a report published by Sudan Media Centre, a network close to Sudan’s powerful National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS).

It’s a common scene along Nigeria’s main roads – barriers stopping cars, machine-gunners poised behind sandbags and stern-looking soldiers checking vehicle trunks and scrutinizing the faces of passengers. While soldiers held power for 29 years and have always played an internal security role in Nigeria, their deployment has surged since former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari won the presidency in 2015. Operating in all 36 states, they’re dealing with a range of crises: Islamist militant attacks in the northeast, simmering unrest in the oil-producing Niger River delta, conflict between crop farmers and herders and widespread robberies and kidnapping. “The increasing deployment of military forces for internal security operations across the country underscores the profoundly dysfunctional state of Nigeria’s public safety institutions, particularly the ineffectiveness of the police force,” said Nnamdi Obasi, West Africa analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

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.