..Kufuor's trip cancelled
The African Union (AU) and Ghana failed to consult Kenya before announcing that AU Chairman, Ghana's President John Kufuor would head to Nairobi to mediate between Kenya's violently opposed political factions, a Ghanaian official said Friday.

The foreign ministry official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that Kufuor's trip, which had been planned as part of a joint AU-Commonwealth mediation attempt, had been cancelled.

"Government and the AU didn't first consult the Kenyan authorities before announcing the president's trip, so now if they say it's an internal matter, what else can we do?" but cancel, he said.

"We are closely monitoring the situation and at the right time an AU delegation will go there," he added.

He declined to elaborate on what would constitute the "right time" and said Kufuor might or might not be part of this later AU delegation.

The Ghanaian government's official explanation for the cancellation of Kufuor's trip was that he is staying at home to deal with inter-ethnic strife in northern Ghana which left four people dead at New Year.

A Commonwealth spokesman said Thursday that Kufuor's trip was off.

Kufuor had been proposed as a mediator by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown together with Sierra Leone's former president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah.

The two were to have led mediation efforts between freshly re-elected Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his opposition challenger Raila Odinga, who alleges rigging in the tally. Serious political and tribal violence erupted and has claimed 355 lives since the December 27 poll.

Kabbah, who was already in the Kenyan capital heading the Commonwealth's election observation mission, left on Thursday, spelling the doom of the AU-Commonwealth mediation.

Kibaki and his aides gave the mediation proposal a less than warm welcome, arguing that they remained open to dialogue but stressing that Kenya was not at war and needed no mediators, though US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer arrived Friday and South African Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu undertook a private initiative.

Kibaki's camp took umbrage at the fact that the AU and Commonwealth mediators appeared to be chosen by London, whose relations with the former colony have recently been frosty.