Zimbabwe’s transition to a new democratic government remains a difficult challenge, given the current regime’s culture of corruption and military intransigence.

‘It is not too long ago that being African was ignorantly believed to be an aberration, an abnormality, in much the same way that some Africans are choosing to label African homosexuality an aberration today.’

Tunisia's ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has been sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in absentia for inciting violence and murder. The charges relate to an incident in the town of Ouardanine last January, when four men were shot trying to stop the president's nephew fleeing Tunisia.

The parliament in Burkina Faso has granted amnesty to President Blaise Compaore and all of the country's previous heads of state. The immunity from prosecution will cover all presidents since independence from France in 1960. President Compaore came to power in a 1987 coup in which popular leader Thomas Sankara was killed.

The Ethiopian government has passed new legislation that criminalises the use of Internet-based voice communications such as Skype and other forms of Internet phone calling. Authorities have also installed a new filtering system that monitors the use of the Internet in the tightly-controlled Horn of Africa country in a move seen as targeting dissidents.

The president's address to the Makana Local Football Association, Zondani Townhall, Grahamstown, Saturday 9 June 2012.

Media freedom in South Africa has been receiving bad press recently, although most of the attention has focussed on threats to print and broadcasting freedom. Little attention has been paid to creeping censorship of the supposedly most democratic medium of all, namely the Internet.

This article from the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration explores the ways in which Eritrean asylum-seekers in Israel narrate their experiences of suffering. These narrators were held hostage in the borderlands of the Northern Sinai desert by human traffickers for indefinite periods of time en route to Israel. Numerous Eritrean asylum-seekers experience and bear witness to torture, kidnapping, extortion, rape, and organ removal during the journey.

Tunisia's government has condemned as 'terrorism' a spate of overnight attacks on courts and other state buildings by gangs including Islamist hardliners and vowed to punish them. The ultra-conservative Salafists denied involvement in the rampage in several areas of the capital Tunis and in the country's northwest, and instead called a protest after this week's Friday prayers.

In the southwest region of Cameroon, within a beautiful rainforest, several Indigenous communities are working hard to make their voices heard. Their struggle began in 2011 when the government of Cameroon granted a vast land concession to SG Sustainable Oils, a subsidiary of the New York-based Herakles Farms. What the government overlooked, was that this concession occurred on the homelands of the Oroko, Bakossi, and Upper Bayang peoples in the Ndian, Koupé-Manengouba, and Manyu divisions of Cameroon.

MPs have said they are being restricted from accessing details of the Oil Sharing Agreements (PSAs) as the Parliamentary Natural Resources Committee proposed stringent clauses that will, among others, see government officials who negotiate bad oil contracts face jail. Kitgum Woman MP Beatrice Anywar said they are subjected to tough guidelines. 'To look at a copy of the PSAs you must first write to the speaker notifying her about the date, hour and which pages you want to look at to enable them assign you a library staff to supervise you when you are reading that particular page,' Ms Anywar said.

The long-running spat between the African Union (AU) and International Criminal Court (ICC) over perceived bias has prompted the AU to push ahead with plans to form its own Africa-wide criminal court, but analysts believe the move could complicate, rather than enhance, international justice. 'Africa wants regional ownership of its crimes and its leaders,' Alan Wallis, an international justice lawyer at the Johannesburg-based Southern African Litigation Centre (SALC), told IRIN, but pointed out: 'There is a misbelief [by the AU] that Africa is being targeted, as all cases before the ICC concern African situations, but this ignores the fact that of those six [cases], three were referred to the ICC by the countries concerned.'

The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Ms. Gulnara Shahinian, has said more than half of the 215 million children working throughout the world are subjected to the worst forms of child labour, including sexual and labour exploitation. In a statement she issued in New York to mark the World Day Against Child Labour, Ms. Shahinian said one of the most abhorrent forms of child slavery is found in mining and quarrying, where children start work from the age of three.

Togolese security forces on Tuesday 12 June used teargas to disperse a huge demonstration staged by civil society organizations and some opposition political parties in the capital, Lomé. Tens of thousands of people led by opposition and civil society figures defied a heavy downpour to heed the call by the umbrella 'Let's Save Togo' to denounce actions by the government they claimed were intended to manipulate the electoral process.

The green economy is nothing more than capitalism of nature, states this article from 'The 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which is promoting a green economy, is the next step in the evolution of capitalism. The goal is to implement an alternative to global regimes cashing in on creation by privatizing, commodifying and selling off all forms of life - including air, water and genes, plants, traditional seeds, trees, biological and cultural diversity, ecosystems and even indigenous traditional knowledge.'

Armed militants hostile to the Ivorian government have recruited Liberian children and carried out deadly cross-border raids on Ivorian villages in recent months, Human Rights Watch says. Liberian authorities have failed to investigate and prosecute dozens of Liberian and Ivorian nationals who crossed into Liberia after committing war crimes during Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010-2011 post-election crisis, some of whom have been implicated in the recent attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

This book is a compilation of feature stories and news articles by journalists who participated in the media trainings on environmental reporting organised in six states across the Nigerian federation by the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN). The book is an attempt to assess the quality of reports from journalists and to contribute to enhancing the capacity of members of the network and media users to further broaden the environmental discourse by opening new vistas for investigation. It can be downloaded through the link provided.

The EU and the US have been asked to help the African Union force in Somalia (Amisom) to wrest the port of Kismayo from Somalia's Shabaab Islamists, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga said on Tuesday 12 May. 'Our aim is to get to Kismayo by August,' Odinga said, saying that taking the Shabaab’s last bastion would entail an 'operation by land, sea and air'. 'We have asked the EU to help us with the Atalanta forces that they have there; they are reluctant,' Odinga told a meeting with international media.

Malawi, one of Africa's poorest nations, has made significant progress in improving the survival of newborns and is on track to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal number four - to reduce the deaths of children up to the age of five by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. This is according to a new report released by Save the Children, which identifies how newborn infants have been overlooked by global efforts intent on improving child and maternal health. While newborns make up 40 percent of child deaths annually, they receive just six percent of development aid. According to the report, Malawi has the highest rate of pre-term births in the world (18 per cent). Roughly a third of all newborn deaths are due to complications that arise from such births.

Opposition to next year’s national election in Swaziland is growing. Elections are held every five years and the next is due in 2013. But prodemocracy activists in Swaziland have been calling for a boycott. All political parties are banned and many opposition voices are silenced in the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch. The latest call came from participants at a ‘People’s Parliament’ organised by the Swaziland Coalition of Concerned Civic Organisations held in Manzini at the weekend.

Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy program, touted for improving food security for the past six years, has been allocated a whopping K40.6 billion in the 2012/13 budget which represents about 60 per cent of the Ministry of Agriculture allocation. 'The major allocation is for the Farm Inputs Subsidy Program (FISP) which has been allocated a total of K40.6 billion for the purchase of 150,000 metric tonnes of fertilizers comprising 75,000 metric tonnes of Urea and 75,000 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizers which will be distributed to 1.5 million farm families at a price of K500 per bag,' said Lipenga when he presented the financial plan.

As the number of African children adopted by people outside the continent reaches record levels, experts, activists, government officials and academics have called for the practice to be stemmed, warning that adoption was too often motivated by financial gain rather than the best interests of the children involved. Between 2003 and 2011, for example, at least 41,000 African children were sent abroad for adoption from Africa, according to a study entitled 'Africa: The New Frontier' for Inter-country Adoption by the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF).

A growing cholera outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed nearly 400 lives and affected more than 19,100 people since January, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 'The total number of cholera cases in 2012 is around 90 percent of cases reported last year. Since January 2011, 983 people have died from the outbreak affecting eight of 11 provinces of the country,' Yvon Edoumou, OCHA spokesman, told a news conference.

The continued arrival of refugees fleeing post-election violence and militia activities in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in western Uganda, and the government’s efforts to resettle them, have created a land row that has already cost the life of a government official. Alphonse Nteziryayo, commander of Rwamwanja settlement, in Kamwenge district, had accompanied humanitarian aid workers to assess the land the government had set aside for the settlement of Congolese refugees in Uganda when he was attacked and killed by squatters, who had settled there.

The United States said last week it is 'concerned' about a troop mutiny in the Democratic Republic of Congo and by 'recent reports of outside support' for mutineers operating under the name M23. But the US statement refrained from identifying Rwanda as the reported outside supporter of the M23 rebellion led by Gen Bosco Ntaganda. While expressing support for the DRC’s recent move to arrest Ntaganda, the US did not explicitly call on Rwanda to aid those efforts, even though Rwandan military officials are said to be supplying the M23 leader with weapons and recruits.

Under mounting pressure, Liberia on Saturday announced it was closing its border with neighbouring Ivory Coast following a fatal attack on UN peacekeepers. Seven Nigerien UN peacekeepers died in the attack on Friday which also claimed the lives of eight civilians and an Ivorian soldier. Both the UN and the Ivorian government believe the attackers came from Liberia.

Two rebel groups that seized northern Mali two months ago have clashed following protests in the town of Kidal, witnesses say. A source told the BBC that fighting broke out between Tuareg MNLA rebels and the Ansar Dine Islamist group on the third day of protests in the town. Last month, the two groups agreed to merge and turn their vast northern territory into an Islamist state.

Recently, Egypt's 30-year-old emergency law expired and former President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison for failing to stop the killing of protesters during Egypt's uprising. Yet the future for free expression in Egypt remains in doubt, say the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and other IFEX members.

A study has cast doubt on the innovative role that some claim Twitter, the 'microblogging' social media tool, can play in generating new information during disasters, although it did find that 'tweets' speed up the exchange of existing information. An analysis of tweets sent by people in the United States following the emergency at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant found that most linked to traditional news outlets, such as the New York Times and CNN, for updates.

Sudan and South Sudan have broken off security talks after failing to agree on a demilitarised zone along their disputed border. After 10 days of talks, the two sides were unable to agree on Friday where to draw a demilitarised buffer zone along the 1,800km-long border. Khartoum's delegation accused South Sudan of making new land claims, most importantly to the Heglig oilfield whose output is vital to Sudan's battered economy. The southern army had temporarily occupied Heglig during the recent fighting.

The Kimberly Process intersessional in Washington, with Human Rights Watch (HRW) urging the diamond monitor to tackle what it calls continuing human rights violations in Zimbabwe's Marange fields. The meeting, which ran from 4-7 June 2012, will take up a range of topics related to the mining and trading of conflict-free rough diamonds. Human Rights Watch Africa director, Daniel Bekele urged the Kimberley Process, under the chairpersonship of the United States, to address the ongoing rights abuses in Zimbabwe’s Marange fields and the lack of transparency by mining companies operating there.

Gay rights activists in Uganda have launched a new documentary tracing gay love in pre-colonial Ugandan society. Kabaka Mwanga II, widely believed to have been gay, ruled Buganda from 1884 to 1897. The documentary, 'Gay Love in Pre-colonial Africa: The Untold Story of Ugandan Martyrs' was premiered in Kampala last week ahead of the 3 June public holiday to commemorate the burning to death of Ugandan martyrs.

AIDS activists and researchers are at loggerheads over the planned South African trial of a lower dose version of the controversial antiretroviral stavudine, which has in the past been responsible for debilitating side-effects in HIV patients. In the one camp, the Treatment Action Campaign, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders) and the Treatment Action Group have serious concerns about the proposed trial.

Journalists from across Africa announced the creation of the first continent-wide professional association of health journalists. The new organization, the African Health Journalists Association, aims to improve the quality and quantity of reporting on health issues so that people across the continent can make healthy choices for their lives. The group’s media coverage will encourage the best possible public health programs and policies throughout the continent.

ARTICLE 19 has recently highlighted the critical issue of the right to information for internally displaced persons (IDPs). The international NGO delivered practical training sessions on the Right to Information for internally displaced persons to regional leaders and representatives of local community based organisations. Over 20 participants from the Coast province attended the training sessions held in the Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza regions of the country. The program aims to build the capacity of IDP leaders and civil society organisations to request and utilise government held information.

A brigade will deploy to Africa next year in a pilot program that assigns brigades on a rotational basis to regions around the globe, the US Army announced in May. Roughly 3,000 soldiers - and likely more - are expected to serve tours across the continent in 2013, training foreign militaries and aiding locals.

Walter Rodney's classic study, 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' has just been republished by Pambazuka Press. You are invited to a Panel Discussion on the book at the Cipriani Labour College, CLR James Auditorium, on Wednesday June 13 at 6 PM. Click on the link for more information.

In this podcast, Africa Today speaks with Dr. Isaac Saney on Latin American Studies, Race in Cuba, and Cuba's role in Southern Africa. Dr. Saney is the author of 'Cuba a Revolution in Motion'.

This is to invite you to Kilombo 2012, which is an event on Africa, Africans and Social Justice. This is going to be an annual event and the first which is Kilombo 2012 will lay the foundation for launching the Kilombo Centre for Civil Society and African Self-Determination.

Food cannot be grown without water. In Africa, one in three people endure water scarcity and climate change will make things worse. Building on Africa’s highly sophisticated indigenous water management systems could help resolve this growing crisis, but these very systems are being destroyed by large-scale land grabs amidst claims that Africa's water is abundant, under-utilised and ready to be harnessed for export-oriented agriculture. In this report, GRAIN looks behind the current scramble for land in Africa to reveal a global struggle for what is increasingly seen as a commodity more precious than gold or oil - water.

Angola is bankrolling a concerted campaign to secure SA's efforts to win support for Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to lead the African Union (AU) with a $200,000 pledge to finance lobbying ahead of the AU summit. Oil-rich Angola, signalling its foreign policy ambitions on the continent, has combined in the campaign with SA, which is chartering aircraft to take teams of cabinet ministers to lobby around the continent.

Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture’s relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. This UNU-WIDER Working Paper argues against an ‘agro-fundamentalist’ approach to African development, but says the short-term imperative of reducing poverty necessitates further agricultural investment.

Kenya has been plunged into mourning after Internal Security minister George Saitoti and his assistant Joshua Orwa Ojodeh were killed in a helicopter crash in Ngong Forest. The accident occurred on Sunday minutes after they had taken off from Wilson Airport in a new police helicopter, heading for a fundraiser in Mr Ojodeh’s Ndiwa constituency. The cause of the crash was yet to be established.

The Egyptian revolution is important for all struggles against militarized power, exploitation, class stratification, and police violence. Join the resistance to the counter-revolution.

If you want a vision of Africa under AFRICOM tutelage, look no further than Libya, NATO’s model of an African state: condemned to decades of violence and trauma through military colonialism.

Five million Brazilian farmers are locked in a lawsuit with US-based biotech giant Monsanto, suing for as much as 6.2 billion euros. They say that the genetic-engineering company has been collecting royalties on crops it unfairly claims as its own. The farmers claim that Monsanto unfairly collects exorbitant profits every year worldwide on royalties from 'renewal' seed harvests.

Are you that concrete jungle
Crumbling under the weight of
Maneuvering, manipulative matatus
Where passengers are shuka’d at whim

Are you where darkness whispers sweet lullabies
Or where lights play dirty tricks

Where money is mobile
And glass ceilings tower as high as KICC

Where freedom is plastered on bus stops
And injustice deeply rooted
Into territorial boundaries

Where few attest their tribe is indeed Kenyan

Where tusker runs like maji

Where unga is revolutionized
And revolutions are most definitely not televised

Where radios relentlessly relay well kept secrets

Where the rain commands the city
And payday drives traffic

Where the likes of Kibera & Sinai make way
For the likes of Karen & Spring Valley

Are you the capital of thieves and robbers
Or a mega polis of IT geeks, business gurus and self made men

Where every pocket is packed with dreams
But not every dream packs pockets

Tell me, Nairobi, are you that place?

© Nebila Abdulmelik, February 2012
[email][email protected]
http://aliben86.wordpress.com

The puzzling question remains: Why would the two political activists be kidnapped when the protest they had planned had already been aborted?