Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has had an operation at a hospital in Paris this week as part of treatment for a benign tumour on his neck, Reuters news agency quotes a statement from the presidency as saying. “The after effects are generally simple… The recovery is progressing normally,” the statement said. The 71-year-old won elections in 2013 several months after former colonial power France intervened in Mali to oust Islamist rebels who had overrun the north of the country.