Pambazuka News 460: Kenya's constitution: Some progress towards democracy and justice?
Pambazuka News 460: Kenya's constitution: Some progress towards democracy and justice?
'The proof of the pudding is in the eating'. Meaning that for Kenyans to fully test something they need to experience it themselves. We have seen Parliament boycott the debating chamber whenever the Special Tribunal Bill came up for debate. Now Kenyans are experiencing the bitter taste of Impunity.
Construction is cleared to begin on the SIDAREC-Mukuru Kwa Njenga Center, giving the expectant community a powerful tool to end the cycle of poverty. The community center, designed for Slums Information Development Resource Center (SIDAREC) and the needs of Nairobi youth, will give Mukuru residents access to the Internet, computer and technology training, health clinic services, early childhood development programs, and a community theater.
Burundi's government should immediately reverse a new policy of deporting Rwandan asylum seekers without considering their cases, Human Rights Watch has said.
On Saturday 5 December the Abahlali Solidarity Campaign will be holding an info stall and leafletting at Trafalgar Square by the South African embassy in London to raise awareness of the state repression and violence that the movement is currently facing. This is a joint action with the Landless Peoples Movement, AntiPrivatisation Forum, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front solidarity march in Joburg at the same time. As it also coincides with the COP demo, we anticipate a lot of people there. Come down on the day. .
Once perceived as an icon of progress in Africa thanks to wealth from its copper mines, today over 75 per cent of Zambia's population lives below the poverty line. In this week’s Pambazuka News Khadija Sharife recounts the country’s ‘riches to rags’ story – a story that is being repeated in former resource colonies across the continent, which although ‘politically liberated’ have ‘remained economically chained’.
On 18 November 2009 Jan Egeland gave the tenth annual Harrell-Bond lecture. Mr Egeland is the former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and currently director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. The lecture was entitled 'Beyond Blankets: in search of political deals and durable solutions for the displaced.'
As global awareness grows around conflict in Congo, a myriad of Western-based prescriptions are being proffered, Kambale Musavuli writes in this week’s Pambuzuka News, including the ‘conflict minerals’ approach. But this approach, devoid of social, political, economic and historical context, argues Musavuli, will simply perpetuate the root causes of the region’s challenges rather than resolve them.
The academic and administrative staff of the University of the Witwatersrand have organised a to express their disgust and opposition to the retrenchment of cleaning staff from the University in its aim to cut spending.
The effects of climate change are likely to lead to increased levels of conflict across Africa, a new study has suggested. Cyril Mychalejko takes a closer look at responses to the report’s conclusions.
War on Want is a dynamic organisation working in partnership with people across the developing world. War on Want’s International Programmes Department works to change people’s lives in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. We are seeking two programme officers with extensive practical experience in international development programmes, one to lead our Informal Economy programme and the other our Conflict Zones programme.
Over 5 million people, mostly civilians, have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since its conflict began in 1996. In this week’s Pambazuka News Phumlani Majavu looks at why peace is so elusive, with reference to a recent report from human rights group Global Witness on the role the illegal trade in minerals plays in fuelling violence in the DRC.
Conversations with Writers speaks to Ulysses Chuka Kibuuka about religion, writing and the state of publishing in Uganda.
Claire Ceruti reviews 'Neoliberalism and globalisation in Africa: Contestations from the embattled continent', a collection of essays edited by Joseph Mensah.
The rich are swindling the poor in the DRC and Zimbabwe, and no one seems to be in charge of a rudderless Nigeria, writes Sokari Ekine in this week’s roundup of the African blogosphere.
CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) has cut funds to , ‘with no transition funds and no explanation’. KAIROS, a church based non-governmental organisation that represents seven of Canada’s largest denominations, works on a range of social justice issues, including human rights in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
KAIROS and partners call on the networks and supporters of KAIROS to meet with their MPs to discuss this critical matter. Please, respectfully and politely:
- Speak about your own positive involvement with KAIROS
- Express grave concern about this decision
- State KAIROS’ desire to restore our long standing relationship with CIDA
- Emphasise the impacts of this decision on global partners and our work in Canada
- Ask them to call on the Government of Canada to reverse this decision.
Please also write to , Minister of International Cooperation, and KAIROS.
In his Kenya diary, Guardian journalist Xan Rice reports on how a decision by the prosecutor of the international criminal court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to investigate the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya threatens the corrupt elite.
COPA will for the period 15th to 25th February 2010 hold 10 day peace building training in Nairobi for peace and development practitioners from from Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. The training is ideal for persons wishing to build their skills in different thematic areas related to peace matters.
As African countries attract foreign investors looking to rent agricultural land, a group of civil societies who met in Addis Ababa has called on African leaders to reject what they call the “corporate takeover of African land for food production”.
As the Oromo Liberation Front has repeatedly stressed, the current Ethiopian regime has, since it came to power in 1991, dispossessed, displaced, and disenfranchised tens of thousands of the Oromo people. TPLF’s policies of dispossession and marginalization of the Oromo nation have remained at the root of today’s underdevelopment and the spectacle of mass starvation that has been witnessed throughout Oromia in recent years.
The IIE Scholar Rescue Fund is pleased to announce a call for applications for the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF). Fellowships support temporary academic positions at safe universities and colleges anywhere in the world for threatened academics whose lives and work are in danger in their home countries. Applications are due January 15 2009.
The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy is announcing a call for paper proposals for its upcoming conference, U.S. Engagement with the Muslim World: One year after Cairo. The deadline for submitting paper proposals is December 10, 2009.
A24MEDIA has scaled the heights in its pursuit to give voice to Africa by letting Africans tell their own stories, their own way. In this end-year roundup, A24MEDIA presents East and Horn of Africa’s most viewed stories in the A24 Media’s online portal. The list however casts an apparently real but unfortunate situation that; even Africans prefer the so-called negative stories.
In this week's emerging powers news roundup, South Korea pledged to double aid to African nations over the next three years, China and the World Bank plan to set up low-cost factories in new industrial zones in Africa, China turns to Egypt for production of ready-made garments.
People in the West throw away millions of old computers every year. Hundreds of thousands of them end up in Africa, where children try to eke out a living by selling the scrap. But the toxic elements in the waste are slowly poisoning them.
With less than a year to go to Tanzania's parliamentary and presidential elections, the people have started to give vent to their frustration with the performance of the present government in tackling rampant corruption, local newspapers reported this week.
Representatives of several humanitarian NGOs have called on the international community to raise FCFA 160 billion (US$ 368 million) in a bid to help impoverished people in the 15 ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) member countries and Mauritania.
The first round of the Ivorian presidential election will take place between the end of February and the beginning of March 2010, the Permanent Consultation Framework (CPC) on the Ivorian crisis announced here Thursday evening.
The Ethiopian government has re-opened the trial of four major newspaper publishers in connection with the 2005 post-election violence in the East African nation. The ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Front (EPRDF) has successfully lodged an appeal against the Ethiopian Supreme Court's decision to pardon the four publishers, Siday, Zekarias, Fasil and Serkalem, in connection with the 2005 elections.
Gambia women rights group, The Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (GAMCOTRAP) will honour ex-circumcisers and their communities at the Basse Stadium in the Upper River Region.
Guinea’s capital is on edge following a botched assassination attempt on the head of the ruling junta, with residents bracing for further violence between out-of-control army factions. Pickup trucks carrying heavily armed soldiers moved through the quiet streets of the normally bustling city searching for suspects in the attack, with shops open only part-time and most residents staying indoors.
Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba has been re-elected for a second term after winning 76.4% of the vote in last week's poll, official results show. Mr Pohamba's governing Swapo party got 74% of the parliamentary vote, maintaining its two-thirds majority.
A group of Nigerian farmers is suing Royal Dutch Shell, claiming that the oil firm polluted their land in the Niger Delta region. The four farmers allege that oil spilt from the supply lines of a subsidiary of Shell contaminated fish ponds and farms, ruining villagers' livelihoods.
South African agricultural policy is obsessed with market driven agricultural models while disproportionately high numbers of our people remain hungry. This is a hangover from our historical legacy, which continues in the form of internal and external neo-liberal pressures on government to conform to the tyranny of the market.
Uganda's government should reform the country's election laws to improve accountability for election-related crimes and reduce the risk of violence in the upcoming 2011 elections, Human Rights Watch has said in a report.
Guinea's military government should immediately release or bring specific charges against the human rights defender Mouctar Diallo, Human Rights Watch has said.
HIV/AIDS is an major issue in our times that is having diverse effects on the lives of women the world over and most especially in Africa. In 2007, an estimated 3.3 million people were living with HIV, 2.7 million people infected with the virus, and AIDS deaths also estimated at 2.3 million (UNAIDS, July 2008).
Kenyan farmers are concerned about climate change as they see crop production decrease because of rising temperatures, unreliable rainfall, soil erosion and drought.
The discovery of oil in Chad was supposed to allieviate poverty and human suffering, but it's only enriched Western Oil companies and the local dictators.
The major IFIs have appealed to the governments meeting at Copenhagen to come to a comprehensive agreement on climate change mitigation, pledging to use their own resources to contribute. Some are critical, however, of how ready these institutions are to tackle the issues involved.
The International Federation of the Journalists (IFJ) has strongly condemned the murders of Somali journalist Mohamed Amin Adan Abdulle, a reporter with Radio Shabelle and Hassan Zubeyr Haji Hassan, a cameraman working with Al-Arabia TV who were killed this morning in a bomb attack on a hotel in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
The United Nations refugee chief has appealed to Spain and Morocco to consider any measure to pave the way for the movement of a Saharawi activist who started a hunger strike last month and whose condition is rapidly deteriorating.
Three Rwandan peacekeepers from the joint African Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) were killed and others wounded in an attack by unidentified gunmen while collecting water in the north of the strife-torn Sudanese region.
Although tobacco use is not as prevalent in Africa as it is in other regions, that will change unless immediate action is taken, the United Nations health agency has warned as it announced a new tobacco control effort for the continent.
Five Ugandan television stations are switching from analogue to digital broadcasting with 200 viewers receiving the signal in the capital Kampala. They are Kenyan-owned Nation Television (NTV), WBS, East Africa Television and Nile Broadcasting Service.
Talks to resolve outstanding issues in the Global Political Agreement will continue over the weekend, amid reports the government will make an ‘important announcement’ next week. Speculation is rife in Harare that the principals might have agreed on the final composition of candidates to sit on the various commissions meant to reshape and democratize the country’s political arena.
Twelve students from Fort Hare University in South Africa have expressed fears about returning home to Zimbabwe, saying they will be sent to prison for supporting the MDC.
South Africa’s top scientists and researchers have come out in support of health minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi after the furore over Home Affairs supplied AIDS death statistics he quoted recently - which may have been incorrect.
President Jacob Zuma has announced the most significant government-led interventions to stem the AIDS epidemic since its emergence more than 20 years ago, stating that extraordinary measures are needed.
Africa faces two linked problems that are holding back the extension of mobile services into a wider range of rural areas: diesel supplies are sometimes unpredictable and prices are high. For the first time mobile operators in Uganda this week sought to address the power problem by forming a consortium.
The growth of cellphone use, particularly in the developing world, is providing health experts with a new channel of communication to provide family planning information.
A generation of children free from AIDS is possible, according to the Children and AIDS, Fourth Stocktaking Report released by UNICEF in partnership with the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Population Fund ( UNFPA). However, the authors note the world is not yet on track to meet targets for prevention, treatment, care and support.
Many Moroccan women's rights groups and political parties, eager to change the country's blanket ban on abortion, are lobbying Parliament for changes to the law in cases of incest or rape.
Blind women, long marginalised in Arab society, should be allowed to rise from the role of mere workers to become dynamic leaders, according to local and international activists who convened in Tunis this week.
Twenty-two developing countries have agreed to cut tariffs on manufactured goods in a bid to boost South-South trade in the absence of progress in the Doha Round.
Mauritian experts are helping set up cogeneration systems to feed the hunger for electricity in Tanzania, Zambia and elsewhere. An example of how appropriate technology can be applied to problems common to countries in the global South.
On the Comoran island of Moheli, with a population of 36,000, malaria has been eliminated with the aid of a comprehensive Chinese-assisted treatment campaign. And at the 5th Pan-African malaria conference, held in Nairobi in early November, Kenya's minister of public health, Beth Mugo, announced that her country had set the goal of eliminating the disease by 2017.
Following this year’s theme for Worlds Aids day which calls for Universal Access and Human Rights, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) has demanded non discriminatory HIVand Aids approaches to health care for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) people in Uganda.
Cameroonian gay rights groups are optimistic that human rights of gays and lesbians could see a positive light, should President Paul Biya consider about 10 000 signatures inked in a petition calling for decriminalisation of homosexuality in that country.
In its endeavor to bring to the fore, health needs of lesbians and gays, as a group that is also affected by HIV and AIDS, Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) organized a march on World Aids Day, themed Universal Access and Human Rights.
Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, has stirred controversy by stating that one of the reasons he received the Assisi Pax Prize, awarded each year to people who are promoting peace in the world, was because of his success in fighting homosexuality in the country.
In the year since the start of the first trial at the international war crimes court involving an alleged Congolese warlord, rape on a mass scale has continued unabated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A US$4 million grant will help Sierra Leone to introduce major reform in its mining sector and revamp the industry. This follows the approval by the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank of a $4 million IDA grant for the Mining Technical Assistance Project (MTAP) in Sierra Leone.
Nigeria’s External Affairs ministry has uncovered $15.3 million of school fees racket allegedly perpetrated by some Nigerian diplomats. Minister Ojo Maduekwe said investigations were on, to determine the perpetrators, but vowed that those found culpable of defrauding the government would be dragged before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for prosecution.
Despite consolidating his vice-like grip on power, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali continues to imprison journalists critical of his regime, say members of the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group in a joint action this week.
The UN has warned that the recent kidnapping of two aid workers in the northeastern town of Birao in Central African Republic will have a highly damaging impact on humanitarian activities in the remote, impoverished Vakaga region.
Pambazuka News 459: Land grabs, food security and Africa's resource curse
Pambazuka News 459: Land grabs, food security and Africa's resource curse
With a mere 30 days remaining until Kenya's Harmonised Draft Constitution makes its way to Parliament, L. Muthoni Wanyeki stresses that throwing out the idea of proportional representation altogether would ignore the efforts of the report's Committee of Experts to address potential concerns with the system.
Following the completion of the Democratic Governance Civil Society Week (DG–CSW) in Kisumu, Western Province, Kenya, Zaya Yeebo rounds up the discussions and highlights the increasingly recognised need for civil society to demand the same accountability of itself that it does of the country's government.
Lamenting the apparently greater importance accorded the recent Algeria–Egypt World Cup qualifying match than Palestinians' ongoing difficulties, Haidar Eid wonders why the prayers muttered by football supporters have far surpassed those for families in Gaza suffering 'till the last day of Israel's last and continuing genocidal war'.
Hussein M. Adam reviews Iqbal D. Jhazbhay's 'Somaliland: an African Struggle for Nationhood and International Recognition', a book he finds to be 'highly original, relevant, valid and timely'.
Caroline Mose reviews Mwenda Ntarangwi's 'East African Hip Hop – Youth Culture and Globalization', a book she regards as a 'welcome addition to the scanty but growing academic work on popular music and popular culture in East Africa'.
Trevor Wells writes of his problems with AfricaBio's opposition to consumers knowing what they are eating and its attempts to manipulate farmers' views.
Stockholm's International Poetry Festival in October had a special focus on Kenyan women poets. and Shailja Patel shared poems and reflections on 'Literature and independence in Kenya' at the festival's headline seminar. The audience represented a sizeable contingent of Africans based in Stockholm, including Okoth Osewe, whose Kenya Stockholm Blog is the go-to resource for all things Kenyan in Sweden. Osewe videotaped portions of the seminar, and has generously made them available to the public.
Looking back on the historical and political significance of the Ethiopian flag, Etyopian Simbiro considers the role and use of the 'tri-colour' in developments in the country. The flag has proven a double-edged sword in its ability to both divide and unify, Simbiro contends, but should ultimately prove the inspiration for a new Ethiopia based on tolerance, trust and respect for the rule of law.
Commenting on events at a Brussels conference for the promotion of peace and human rights in Eritrea, Nikolaj Nielsen reports on a country which Reporters Without Borders ranks lower on press freedom than North Korea. 'Eritrea', Nielsen writes, 'was the promise that never evolved' and a country 'unable to come to terms with lasting peace'.
In the wake of the May 2005 Ethiopian parliamentary elections, paramilitary forces under the command of Meles Zenawi orchestrated the massacre of 193 innocent men, women and children and wounded a further 763 people involved in civil protest, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. Ignoring the efforts of the country's regime to besmirch their memory, Ethiopians must honour these victims of oppression as patriots, Mariam stresses, and recognise their sacrifices as profound inspiration for future generations.
With Namibia's parliamentary and presidential elections fast approaching on 27–28 November, Henning Melber discusses the paranoia currently gripping many within the ruling SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organisation) party. Many in the party seem to regard any form of political dissent as unpatriotic at best and as the act of an agent of outside imperialism at worst Melber notes, an all-consuming sentiment that is severely jeopardising the very liberation the party ostensibly once sought.
In this week's blogging roundup by Dibussi Tande, Nairobi's power outages call for innovative local solutions, Adidas launches a new Kente-theme line of footwear, but gets the history wrong, and the recent stoning of a young Somali woman calls into question the justness of Sharia law and its application.
Chris Alden reviews the recent Forum for China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC) ministerial held in Sharm El Sheik in early November this year, highlighting China's plans for greater economic ties with the continent and efforts to defend itself against what it considers unfair criticism.