Morocco this week stormed out of the Africa-Arab Summit in Equatorial Guinea to protest the presence of Western Sahara, which it has forcefully and illegally occupied for over 40 years. This incident yet again demonstrates Morocco’s hidden agenda in seeking re-admission to the African Union: to use the continental body to deny the Saharawi people their universally recognized right to self-determination.

Despite his thoroughly professorial lifestyle, Sam was a lively figure who always made time for his family and a broad range of people. His immense contribution to scholarship, particularly on the thorny land question in Zimbabwe, remains outstanding. His tragic death following a road crash last year points to the fragility of life and to the need for Africa to celebrate its scholars while alive.

The water towers project is being implemented without free, prior and informed consent of the community, the leaders say. The forest community, whose rights have been repeatedly violated by the Kenya Government in brutal evictions, fear there will be more violations under the current project.

Africa barely got a mention in the US presidential election. This is good. If Trump succeeds in purging the factions that advocate war, interventionism and imperialism from the US government he will have done all that he needs to do for Africa. We can ask no more than to be left alone by the world hegemon.

It is deeply disheartening that a country that fought so hard and long to win independence for its people has plunged into a civil war with no end in sight. South Sudanese are suffering again, this time in the hands of the same generals who led them to victory. Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, if they have a heart in their breast, must put aside their own pride and do whatever it takes to end this senseless war.

People who murder others allegedly for blasphemy in Nigeria - a secular, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country - are never brought to justice. Yet without justice there can never be peace. And the absence of peace means there is no unity. For how long will this situation last?

The paralysis in South African universities following protests by students demanding free, decolonized education persists. In an impressive show of solid defiance reminiscent of the nationalist struggle against apartheid, students at Wits University have issued a raft of demands to administration, even as there are no signs that a solution to the crisis is within sight.

From championing impunity for suspected masterminds of crimes against humanity, to frustrating total African liberation and unity by working in cahoots with Empire; from publicly supporting Israel's desire to join the African Union, to being a major conduit for illicit financial flows from Africa; Kenya is fundamentally unfit to lead the AU. Its candidate for Chair of AU Commission in the January election, Amina Mohamed, is part of a deeply entrenched kleptocracy that has ruined Kenya and actively undermined African interests for over half a century.

A protest march organised in Nairobi last week by civil society organisations demanding action against runaway corruption in government was brutally repressed by the police. Besides a series of multi-million-dollar scandals recently unearthed in Kenya, the Auditor General’s report for 2015 says only 1% of the national budget was properly accounted for.

For the first time ever, a Moroccan king delivers a nationalist expansionist speech from a foreign country without any obvious reason that would explain this choice. The king is not a victim of a coup nor is his country threatened by any peril that may have explained such a choice.

Multinational corporations that are directly responsible for the destruction of food systems in Africa and globally are now purporting to provide innovative approaches to addressing the crisis – the so-called “green revolution.” Absent from these discussions are the voices of smallholder farmers who in reality feed the world. But these farmers are fighting back by establishing resistance networks to restore the power over food into their own hands.

Ghana goes into a hotly contested presidential election next month. The voters expect nothing less than a free and fair poll. Key institutions such as the electoral commission, judiciary and security organs must ensure this happens. But the people themselves must also be vigilant.

The Clintons seem to believe in Haitian reconstruction and Haitian investment as long as the projects match their own private economic interests. They have steered the rebuilding of Haiti in a way that provides maximum benefit to themselves. 

Climate justice campaigners think the election of Donald Trump as US president is a disaster for climate and especially for the African continent. This is a moment where the rest of the world must not waver and must redouble commitments to tackle dangerous climate change.

In order to maintain any semblance of what is perceived as economic stability and growth, Trump’s administration must continue the existing capitalist relations of production and international relations. The failure of this phase of imperialist domination could provide renewed opportunities for world solidarity of the working class and oppressed.

Many universities have been shut down due to student protests demanding free higher education. This is the latest expression of the deep inequalities that affect the majority Black population in South Africa. The promise of a better future that underpinned the anti-Apartheid struggle remains unfulfilled. The nation’s unjust economy must be discussed.

Some critics who have analyzed the circumstances surrounding the well-publicized capture of Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 have concluded that it was an elaborate political web of deceit weaved by the Islamic north to wrest power from a southern Christian president.

The people in Calais are not just some unfortunate exception to the rule that the world is OK. Their desperate presence tells the truth about an unacceptable world dominated by a handful of countries that have prospered at the expense of the vast majority of the planet's people, through plunder and war. That there are 63.5 million refugees and displaced people in the world is an irrefutable proof – only one of too many – that the capitalist-imperialist system does not work for humanity and the planet. 

President Zuma has suffered two major legal defeats: a fumbled state attack on Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan which was humiliatingly withdrawn by an incompetent prosecutor following a national outcry, and the release of the Public Protector’s report on the Zuma family’s corrupt relationships. Will enough pressures from below be mobilised to generate non-violent regime change in South Africa?

The first person to openly demand independence in Kenya was the Asian trade unionist Makhan Sigh. For that he was detained for 11 years. The firebrand Leftist political strategist Pio Gama Pinto and many other members of the Asian community made tremendous contributions to Kenya. And how many people might know that the University of Nairobi, Kenya’s premier institution of higher learning, was intended to be a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi and that the initial funding for it came from the Asian community?

At a time when human well-being is measured not only in terms of economic development, but also on the resilience of the environment and the society we live in, it is important to question the nature of livelihood opportunities that young people are being encouraged to pursue and their implications for the future.

Britain’s Labour leader has challenged the neoliberal dogma that has ruled the world ever since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in America in 1981.  This has been disastrous for Africa, where it has come in the form of the so-called "Economic Structural Adjustment Programs"  aimed at restructuring African economies to conform to the demands of the imperialist countries, and not the development needs of Africa.

Media organisations, like most of South Africa’s formal institutions, were infused with institutional racism during the apartheid-era. In many cases this is still unchanged. There has to be a greater acknowledgement of institutional racism in organisations.

Many young people from Africa are risking their lives making perilous journeys to the West in search of greener pastures. The cause of this is to be found in the failure of African governments to offer opportunities to young people to realize their dreams. Africa is not poor; its children do not need to die in international waters looking for a better life.

People of goodwill throughout the world should support the Congolese people to demand that President Kabila ceases attacks against the people and respects the Congolese constitution. The world has watched the Kabila regime jail innocent youth, drive others into exile, violently repress dissent and undertake a military build up to go to war against the unarmed population as he clings to power.

For South Africa to dismantle its colonial economic structures it will have to urgently address the knowledge and resources impasse. Through equitable distribution of wealth and resources, free decolonial education should be implemented to cater for the financially excluded Black majority now.

Buhari’s outrageous outburst on his wife in Berlin at the end of his Germany visit completely overshadowed the import of whatever was the original reason for this trip. Quite clearly if ever there was an incontrovertible link between congenital misogyny and genocidist depravity, psychologists and geneticists would have at last found a case study here.

In an angry reaction to public criticism of his government by his wife, the Nigerian leader retorted that she “belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room”. The president’s reaction has drawn fire from civil society.

Walter Rodney has demonstrated through thought and action that it is not inevitable for intellectuals to join the systems of oppression and use their knowledge and skills to perpetuate exploitation. They have the option of committing “class suicide.” Rodney called on the intelligentsia to use their knowledge and skills to challenge and undermine oppression.

Although the presidential commission of inquiry completed its task and published its report, the work of justice for Walter Rodney is not yet over. His family needs justice. The political context in which Rodney was murdered remains largely intact in Guyana. And the lessons of his killing should be the basis of international solidarity against the abuse of state power to silence dissent.

The frustrations of the First Lady of Nigeria and other Nigerians about the leadership of President Buhari and his many failed promises are understandable. But while her open criticism of him was ill-advised, what is more damaging to President Buhari than that is his old-fashioned and sexist response.

Ouattara is trying to achieve in the constitution what he and his rebel allies refused when the change was proposed way back in 2004. There is no sincerity in the current push for constitutional reform. What Ouattara wants is to consolidate state power and make it difficult for anyone else wishing to be president.

Uncertainty hangs over the date of presidential and legislative elections, yet President Joseph Kabila’s term expires on 19 December 2016 and he is not eligible for re-election. The opposition rejects the possibility of Kabila continuing in office as elections are organized. But there is an alternative. The Congolese can forget about elections and instead imagine a different way of organizing their society away from liberal democracy.

As the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa meet this weekend for a summit in India, one consistency is observable from all the BRICS elites: A stream of anti-imperialist chatter even when the intent is to assimilate into imperialism. The BRICS’ real agenda is sub-imperialism: five countries’ feet joining those of the US and EU, firmly astride the throats of the world’s poorest people.

Europe is in crisis, and yet countries in East Africa are ready to sign on a poorly understood trade agreement with the EU whose overall impact will be disastrous for years to come. EPA will favour trade in the direction of Europe and stunt African progress. Tanzania has hesitated and called for public debate. Tanzania should provide the bold leadership required in the region to reject the EPA.