The under-signed civil society groups welcome the belated official acknowledgement that existing debt relief efforts have manifestly failed to secure the promised “robust” exit from the burden of unsustainable debt. Only US$ 54 billion has been cancelled so far while the 61 low-income countries still owe around US$ 600 billion. Total developing country debt stands at around US$ 2.4 trillion.

So, June 16th is the Day of the African Child ... What does it mean? For most African young people, the Day of the African Child does not mean a whole lot. Many will continue their daily lives -- working in fields and factories, caring for younger siblings or older relatives, begging on the streets of sprawling urban centres, fighting in armed groups and militias, tending sheep and cattle, selling their wares and services in markets and on the streets - without even knowing that June 16th is different from any other.

Those who are aware of the Day of the African Child are likely to be enrolled in some kind of formal education, or 'mobilised' for activities by NGOs, UN agencies and governments. For these young people, the Day of the African Child may be simply that - one day in which they are told something about children's rights that contrasts with the other 364 days of the year during which they are ignored or silenced. Other African young people would not consider themselves to be children. In many traditional African societies, puberty is a biological change that has social implications: after puberty, one is no longer treated as a child, although one may not have full status within social hierarchies based on age and sex.

For many civil society organisations, the Day of the African Child has become a celebration of the entry into force of the African Charter of the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). The ACRWC, together with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), provide a comprehensive framework for protecting and promoting children's social, economic and political rights. Many civil society organisations thus use June 16th as a day to reflect on the progress made towards the institutionalisation of child rights in law and to call for greater implementation of these legal standards.

For many African governments, June 16th provides a platform for self-aggrandizement. Government leaders often highlight the progress they have made towards upholding and implementing their international and domestic commitments towards children and make more promises about what they will do in the future. This means that the Day of the African Child ensures that children's issues are on the political agenda - for at least one day a year.

In other words, the Day of the African Child is primarily a day for adults, in various capacities and with a variety of motivations. Apart from a few tokenistic children's voices (often under the guise of 'participation'), the overwhelming chorus of speeches, television and radio appearances, and written words (including this commentary) will come from adults. The marginalisation of children's voices is particularly ironic and unfortunate since the day was initially introduced to commemorate a 1976 march by black students in Soweto, South Africa to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand the right to be taught in their own language. The Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in 1991 declared June 16th a day to remember the hundreds of students, who were gunned down, killed and wounded, during the march and subsequent protests. The fact that a day ostensibly for commemorating children's political action is dominated by adults reflects a broader marginalisation of children in the struggle for social justice.

Who cares?

Since the Day of the African Child is largely dominated by adults, why should we care about it at all? Responses to this question often refer to the importance of children as the future generations and/or pull on heartstrings by listing a litany of the ways in which children are victimised. These common refrains again reflect an adult-centric approach to children as semi-human beings: only important in terms of their future contribution to societies, or as victims in the present.

This is why the question about who cares becomes so important. The focus here is not on the 'who cares?' throw-away question in response to issues that are deemed unimportant, but rather who cares in terms of who is best placed to understand and articulate children's issues. Viewed in this way, the answer clearly appears to be: "Children, of course!" Once children are recognised as active economic and social members of families, communities and societies, it is much more difficult to justify their current political marginalisation not only from children's issues, but also from broader social justice issues. In other words, we need to refocus our attention on the reason why the Day of the African Child was initiated in the first place - to commemorate political action by African young people in their struggle against oppression.

Young people's roles in the struggle for social justice

Since the entry into force of the ACRWC and CRC, children's rights advocates across Africa and globally have worked tirelessly to introduce the language of rights around children's issues. However, while claims around children's rights are a necessary component in the struggle for social justice, they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Since social justice is broader than human rights, we need to complement the work done on promoting and protecting children's rights by recognising children as citizens and actors in building just societies. While young people have important roles to play in the struggle for social justice - as economic and social actors who directly confront such issues, and as political actors with views on their own situation - civil society organisations rarely address children's issues, concerns and opinions.

* In order to increase the priority of children's issues, Fahamu intends to develop training materials for a distance-learning course highlighting the roles of children in social justice for partner organisations in Africa. This initiative is intended to complement existing child rights courses by approaching children's issues from a different perspective. It will start from the philosophy that children are first and foremost human beings, and thus must be recognised as active members of their communities and societies. Taking social justice as the end goal, it will show how children's roles must be integral in working towards this goal because of children's often unequal positions within hierarchical power relations that tend to marginalise their views and make them more vulnerable to particular abuses. We hope that this initiative will help us to move from generating more adult-centric rhetoric on a 'Day of the African Child' to recognising and promoting young people's daily roles in the struggle for social justice in Africa.

* Christina Clark is Commonwealth Scholar, Oxford University and a volunteer with Fahamu. She is currently coordinating a consultation process on Fahamu's proposed initiative on young people in the struggle for social justice. For more information on the initiative and/or a detailed concept paper, please contact her on: [email protected].

* Please send further comments to [email protected]

Ethiopia remains tense after security forces opened fire on post-election demonstrators, killing up to 40 people. Makeda Tsegaye paints a picture of a brutal regime - whose Prime Minister served on UK Prime Minister's Commission on Africa - that will stop at nothing to retain its grip on power and asks how many more millions of people have to starve in Ethiopia before the world realizes that the root causes of the problem is not lack of rains but failed economic policies that are making people more vulnerable?

After what happened in Ethiopia last week, I would be surprised if anyone had difficulty in understanding the true nature of the ruling party and its leadership.

Is it surprising that the security forces of the Ethiopian Prime Minister, who was appointed to the Commission for Africa by the UK, and is viewed by the US as a key ally in combating terrorism and a stabilizing force in the strategic Horn of Africa, killed over 40 innocent civilians, arrested thousands, instigated violence and hatred in the country? Is it surprising that in spite of these acts, the ruling party perceives itself as not guilty? Is it surprising that the Prime Minister extended the ban on peaceful demonstrations by another month despite protests that this edict was entirely unconstitutional and illegal? Is it surprising that his security forces killed opposition party members outside the capital two days after signing the European Union-brokered peace pact on June 10 to peacefully resolve election-related disputes?

None of these is surprising to Ethiopians who endured 14 long years of similar persecutions, economic hardships and man-made disasters under a deceptive, incompetent and clearly authoritarian leadership.

This was not the first time that the ruling party killed peaceful demonstrators. For instance, in 1992 and 2001, security forces opened fire on Addis Ababa University students who peacefully demonstrated against the ruling party's failed policies, killing more than 35, wounding over 400, and arresting and torturing hundreds of students, while 22 university professors were sacked.

In 2002, security forces shot protestors in Southern Ethiopia, killing over 35 people. While these are examples from urban areas only, it should not be difficult to imagine the situation of dissidents in remote areas where little is known due to lack of communication and the absence of human rights activists.

In spite of all these, the ruling party never admitted its mistakes apart from giving shamefully lame excuses for its irresponsible and barbaric acts. For example, in 1992 its excuse was that its riot police did not have the right equipment to disperse peaceful demonstrators. However shocking such an irresponsible statement seemed to many families who lost their loved ones, the ruling party could simply get away with it without any form of accountability. Just last week, another round of killings claimed the lives of over 40 civilians. Appallingly, the ruling party labeled these civilian victims as 'unemployed hooligans', as if to imply that their lives were worth nothing.

Despite the rhetoric that Ethiopia is 'democratic', persistent abuses of civil and political rights, and lack of an inclusive and responsive political system characterizes the current regime. In fact, the regime is typified by what Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way (2002, pp. 51-65)[1] describe as 'Competitive Authoritarianism', which is a hybrid regime where formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. However, the incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.

Although the Ethiopian regime may have appeared to be an economic and political reformer in the past, a closer review of its policies reveals otherwise. Notwithstanding its rhetoric about liberal economic policies and privatization, the ruling party and its benefactors control key economic sectors. In fact, strategic control of the economy is one of the tactics that the ruling party employed to manipulate the political process in the country.

For instance, state-owned land was viewed as a key instrument to control the political opinions of eighty-five percent of rural Ethiopians who are entirely dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. There were reports from many rural constituencies that prior to the recent elections, cadres of the ruling party were threatening to deny those who voted for the opposition parties access to land. The ruling party's false confidence in winning the elections in most rural areas was thus prompted by this unlawful act. Nevertheless, none of these threats made sense to millions of desperate farmers who hardly benefit from their 'less-than-a-hectare' land and whose lives are largely sustained by relief rosters year in and year out. On the contrary, most people viewed the election as an opportunity for ensuring a productive life whereby responsible citizens could earn a living and lead a dignified life. The ruling party was blind to this reality owing to its gross underestimation of the intellect and pride of the rural people.

Ironically, it is also this grave miscalculation of the ruling party that provided the platform for the participation of opposition parties in the recent elections. However, the fact that opposition parties were able to mobilize millions of supporters within a short period of election campaigning, despite massive harassment and intimidation, sent an important warning signal to the ruling party. Hence, it immediately got busy retracting its seemingly democratic gestures. It did not stop there. Terrified by the stiff resistance from the people who are determined to decide their future, its true nature became self-evident. In effect, it was forced to reveal its real identity to the world that it only managed to appear democratic aided by a situation in which it could control the playing field by selecting its own team, the referees and even the spectators. In the absence of any or all of these, it had to resort to the original tactics of any dictatorship, which is typified by mass killing, arrests, torture and so on. In fact, the ruling party was panic-stricken that it started to take any measure that appeared to support its desire to salvage its greed for power. It was interesting to see how in the course of last week, it even targeted every possible means of effective communication including disrupting cellular phone services. Toward the end of the week, the state-controlled telecom agency announced that due to technical problems it was no longer able to provide SMS (text messaging) services. It is to be noted that, in the absence of other media, Ethiopians were exchanging information of a political nature through text messaging.

It is apparent that the current situation in Ethiopia is extremely tense. Given its repeated records of violent confrontation, the ruling party will not refrain from engaging in more brutal and barbaric acts to suppress dissenting voices and the people's struggle for political and economic freedom. The question remains, how many more killings will it take to make a ruler a dictator? How many more millions of people have to starve in Ethiopia before the world realizes that the root causes of the problem is not lack of rains but failed economic policies that are making people more vulnerable?

Last week we heard that the US is set to pledge US$674 famine funds as part of a joint US/UK initiative to 'get Africa back on its feet', of which a large amount is destined for Ethiopia. During the same period, Ethiopians were raising their voices to tell the world that it is the presence of responsible leadership in the country, and not relief assistance, that could fully mitigate the effects of disaster and poverty. While Ethiopians are immensely grateful for the relief support that the US has provided to the innumerable victims of poor governance and resource mismanagement, it has become apparent that charity will not lead to prosperity. If this were the case, Ethiopia would have been Africa's most prosperous nation in the last 14 years. What is needed in Ethiopia is responsible, competent and committed leadership that can create an enabling environment for citizens to work hard and create a prosperous and peaceful Ethiopia.

Ethiopians have long recognized this need and their recent admirable participation in the legislative elections indicates more than ever their determination to change the image of their country and lead a dignified life, wherein the rule of law, accountability, and transparency provide the platform for development and lasting peace. Simultaneously, people are anxious to harness their ethnic and geographic diversity in order to create a better Ethiopia for all citizens. However, it is shameful that a divisive leadership that is not even capable of fully grasping the values of and strengths in national unity is attempting to suppress these noble objectives.

On Monday June 13, 2005, the Prime Minister was quoted as saying in his televised address to the nation that, "there was no reason for riots in Addis Ababa [where] EPRDF has conceded its defeat". This remark clearly indicates the PM's divisive strategy that has threatened to erode the concept of nationalism from the minds of Ethiopians for the last 14 years. Fortunately, his self-centered and anti-development psychology has long been rejected by Ethiopians who embrace unity not only among themselves but also among their fellow African brothers and sisters. It is important that all peace and freedom-loving Africans individually and collectively stand up with their Ethiopian brothers and sisters who are struggling to end the suffering of their fellow citizens and create a bright future for the coming generation.

Notes:

[1] Levitsky, Steven and Way, Lucan A. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy. (2002) 11:2: 51-65

* Makeda Tsegaye is an Ethiopian woman with a Masters degree in International Peace Studies (with specialization in Economic Development and Peace) currently working for an international development agency in Nairobi, Kenya.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Notwithstanding the global hype associated with reversing aid, debt and trade injustices during the past few days, it hasn't been an easy time for the huge Non-Governmental Organisations at the centre of the action.

A front-page New Statesman article on May 30 revealed that Oxfam's revolving-door relationship with chancellor Gordon Brown has neutered the demands, strategies and tactics of the 450-member NGO campaign, 'Make Poverty History'. The website of the British magazine Red Pepper followed up with a devastating political critique of the campaign, including a refusal to countenance any anti-war message that will embarrass Brown and Tony Blair.

Embarrassment of this sort seems endemic amongst the charity-minded. The Bob Geldof superstar concert series 'Live 8' correctly stood accused of being 'hideously white' (as Black Information Link put it), since only one band from Africa was scheduled amongst dozens at the five major performances. (A hastily arranged additional concert in Johannesburg may lead to a kind of outsourcing for black bands.) In any case, Sir Bob's mid-1980s Live Aid famine relief strategy is widely understood to have flopped because it ignored the countervailing roles of imperial power relations, capital accumulation, unreformable global institutions and venal local elites - problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8.

There was another PR disaster in early June, just a month before the Group of 8 (G8) leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland: white wristbands favoured by Blair as a mark of his commitment to Africa were revealed as products of Chinese forced labour at a Shenzhen firm, Tat Shing. According to the Telegraph newspaper, 'Christian Aid, which bought more than 500,000 wristbands from Tat Shing, claims that Oxfam failed to tell other charities that it had decided to stop ordering from the Shenzhen company. Oxfam said it told its coalition partners of its decision, but "perhaps could have put it in writing".'

Do these gaffes signify something deeper? Merely careless paternalism? Or perhaps a sense that the main outcomes of this campaign are to be celebrated in media buzz, fashion statements, celebrity chasing and the NGOs' proximity to power?

NGOs or organic social movements

The heart of the problem is that the large mainstream NGOs - and here we do not mean War on Want, the World Development Movement and Christian Aid - are not putting serious pressure on the G8. For example, when anti-poverty campaigners call for 'cancellation of poor countries' unpayable debts', this leaves undefined what, exactly, is 'unpayable' (quite a weasel word) and concedes that the vast populations of lower-middle income countries will suffer under indefinite debt peonage. NGO and rock star endorsements of the partial debt relief gimmick announced by Gordon Brown and the G8 finance ministers on June 11 illustrate the confusion.

Semantic wiggling is just one of the problems associated with the best of these initiatives, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), whose International Facilitation Group was established in Johannesburg late last year. Many excellent African organisations have joined the campaign, but have they fully applied their minds, and social-change instincts?

For GCAP, 'A single global title for the mobilisation is needed to provide focus, cohesion and to maximise impact of activity... The aim of "White Band Day" will be to get everyone around the world that wants to end poverty to wear a white band on those days.'

There is a genuine need for focus and cohesion. But if it is addressed in the manner conceived by GCAP's strategists, it could have the reverse effect: organisational demobilisation accompanied by lowest-common-denominator analyses and demands.

To illustrate, GCAP's first newsletter, issued on June 14, is a 3600-word report-back on campaigning across the world. Yet it contains no reference to organic anti-poverty activism in the Global South, such as - in no particular order - labour strikes, popular mobilisations for AIDS-treatment and other health services, reconnections of water/electricity, land and housing occupations, anti-GMO and pro-food security campaigns, women's organising, municipal budget campaigns, student and youth movements, community resistance to displacements caused by dam construction and the like, anti-debt and reparations movements, environmental justice struggles, immigrants' rights campaigns, political movements to take state power, etc etc. No mention of Bolivia, Venezuela, Palestine, Iraq.

GCAP has superb member organisations across the Third World, to be sure, but as a network it just seems to float in the air, disconnected from the reality of anti-poverty protest. It's as if the formidable recent upsurge of unrest - 1980s-90s IMF Riots, high-profile indigenous people's protests since Zapatismo in 1994, global justice activism since Seattle in 1999, the Social Forum movement since 2001, anti-war demos since 2001, autonomist protests and the Latin American left's revival - never happened, don't exist, aren't worthy of acknowledgment much less integration and amplification.

Worse, GCAP's promotion of the already watered-down UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could draw away activist energy and resources in many Third World countries, from organic struggles and organisational imperatives. If GCAP is successful, we foresee a tsunami of distraction, flooding out the diverse local struggles that could instead - if nurtured carefully - support a genuinely bottom-up, internationally-linked, networked fight against injustice.

In contrast to the GCAP rhetoric, albeit sometimes off the beaten path, serious activists are crossing borders, races, classes and political traditions in sector after sector: land (Via Campesino), healthcare (International Peoples Health Council), free schooling (Global Campaign for Education), water (the People's World Water Forum), energy/climate change (the Durban Declaration), debt (Jubilee South), democratic development finance (IFIs-Out! and World Bank Bonds Boycott), trade (Our World is Not for Sale) and so on.

Of course, it is not at all easy to interlock the already overlapping grassroots and shopfloor justice campaigns. South Africans now campaigning for an overall programme of 'decommodification' and socio-economic rights know this, thanks to the various movements' political splits (mainly over the merits of alignment to the corruption-ridden, neoliberal ruling party of Thabo Mbeki).

To be sure, there is broad unity in the South Africans' objectives - free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS; at least 50 litres of free water and 1 kiloWatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day; extensive land reform; prohibitions on service disconnections and evictions; free education; the right to employment; and even a monthly 'Basic Income Grant' - but very hard work lies ahead to connect the concrete struggles.

Globophiles, globophobes

Still, without coherence emerging from organic struggles fought by mass democratic movements across the Global South (including in Northern ghettoes), the construction of a top-down campaign against poverty is both unrealistic and subject to early cooption. According to Catherine Quarmby in the New Statesman last month, 'Some of the most intriguing criticism of the softly-softly approach has come from within the government itself. One senior government source suggests that Oxfam has failed to learn one of the essential techniques of negotiation - if you agree on the basics too early you forfeit real influence.'

Unfortunately this is no aberration, but part of a pattern dating at least to 1995, when Oxfam International broke from the 50 Years is Enough protests against the World Bank, endorsing a large inflow of taxpayer funding at the very peak of the Washington Consensus mentality.

By 2002, Oxfam's leading policy analsyst, quoted in the Washington Post, happily revealed an agenda of divide-and-conquer, between 'globophobes' (the global justice movement protesting the WTO/IMF/World Bank) and 'globophiles' (Oxfam): 'Breaking with some of its anti-globalisation allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the world's poor... "The extreme element of the anti-globalisation movement is wrong," said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. "Trade can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief."'

As then-director of Food First, Anuradha Mittal, complained, 'We are disappointed that Oxfam, one of the NGO leaders on food security, has chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South such as Via Campesina, Movement of Landless Workers (Brazil), Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa Trade Network which have demanded that governments must uphold the rights of all people to food sovereignty and the right to food rather than industry-led export-oriented production... Oxfam undermines the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South.'

Proximity to Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue has unfortunately become a good proxy for political common sense, or lack thereof. For instance, Mohammad Akhter, chief executive officer of Interaction, the 160-member NGO coalition many of whose members are considered de facto subsidiaries of US AID, met Wolfowitz late last month and publicly pronounced: 'The World Bank is in good hands.'

A few days earlier, Interaction and Oxfam had thrown a grateful going-away bash for James Wolfensohn, even though on three high-profile occasions - the World Commission on Dams, Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative and Extractive Industries Review - he seduced NGOs into multi-stakeholder reviews, and then broke their hearts by allying instead with corporate and state suiters.

As a result of these sorts of influences, there appears little benefit - and great risk - for African NGOs to adopt as a high priority top-down Make Poverty History and even GCAP campaigns which endorse MDG end-goals dreamt up in the backrooms of the UN, where Bush administration ideologues breathe down bureaucrats' necks to reduce funding obligations, impose patriarchal and Christian-fundamentalist values, remove the word 'rights' from (already fatuous) official rhetoric, and denude the few progressive UN agencies of any clout. Even Johannesburg-based Civicus International staff have informally relabeled their objective the 'Minimalist Development Goals'.

Why, then, do those white bands grace some African NGO wrists and heads, from Civicus' chief executive officer at the last World Economic Forum in Davos, to a few brave pro-MDG NGOers at the Africa Social Forum? When Civicus staff brought two huge bags of the headbands to Lusaka and made a pitch for the campaign, it was so controversial - alongside a futile appeal to endorse a 'Joint Facilitation Committee' with the hated World Bank - that the bags were left closed.

South Africa's whiteband ('witdoeke') problem

If we flash back 19 years, to mid-1986, we get a better perspective on why wearing white headbands is so distasteful for the South African left. At the time, Cape Town's African township Crossroads had a population of 100 000+ and a high profile in anti-apartheid protest in part because of its location near the airport. Over a fortnight's time, violence erupted, leaving 60 people dead and approximately 60,000 people homeless as a reactionary paramilitary gang swept through, known as the 'witdoeke', whose leader was specifically mandated by the apartheid regime to terrorise anti-apartheid activists.

According to a reliable history of the area, 'The person selected for this in Crossroads was Johnson Ngxobongwana. Ngxobongwana had evolved from being a local warlord to a strong political voice in Crossroads. As chairman of the ward committee he had built up a popular following, and acquired a retinue of local thugs, known as witdoeke (white-cloths) for the white headbands they wore for identification. Unbeknownst to most people he also had "unofficial" sponsorship from South Africa's apartheid government and its security forces. Ngxobongwana was able to use these resources to eliminate rivals in the area, as well as marginalise women's groups and youth groups.'

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Crossroads' fate to be comparable with techniques used in Johannesburg, Durban and other sites where violence emanating from the witdoeke-style Inkatha movement killed tens of thousands of people: 'In the South African context, contra-mobilisation was used to organise and support "moderate blacks" to oppose the revolutionary movements. Of necessity, it was a covert strategy - concealing the hand of the state as provider of logistical, political and financial support - and making use of "surrogate" forces. Hence, the state would not be seen to be involved in the conflict and violence between groupings and the resistance organisations.'

No one is suggesting that putting on a white headband or wristband makes you a collaborator with neoliberalism, dividing-and-conquering the oppressed forces, and supporting 'moderate' NGOs so that they gain bantustan-style rewards from the global apartheid establishment.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the resistance organisations, it is overdue that we collectively consider our fundamental visions, and in particular whether the much welcomed globalisation of people - and of culture, ideas, hospitality, travel and political solidarity - can be accompanied by what we'd argue is just as desperately needed: the deglobalisation of capital.

For or against market tyranny?

After all, the danger of NGO-lubricated ideological alignment with the neoliberal project is serious. At a time men like Jeffrey Sachs are celebrated as saviours of the world's poor - for example, in a Bono song dedication at last month's big New York City concert - a deeper critique of markets and the NGOs which legitimate them is desperately needed.

Bono in particular has been obsequious. At the last New Labour party convention, Bono labeled Blair/Brown the 'Lennon and McCartney of poverty reduction'. According to Quarmby, 'some groups involved in Make Poverty History were horrified. John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy at War on Want, was in the audience. "When Bono said that, many NGO leaders who were there put their heads in their hands and groaned... It's a killer blow for us. To see the smiles on the faces of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair! This is exactly what they want - they want people to believe that this is their crusade, without actually changing their policy."'

Are the Make Poverty History campaign objectives for Gleneagles - greater Third World exposure to market mechanisms, a few crumbs of debt relief and a doubling of (neoliberally-conditioned) aid - actually worth endorsing as a reformist step forward - or should they be condemned as more of the same? In his book Deglobalisation, Bello has convincingly set out the justice movement's case for disempowering and defunding the global-scale institutions that push capitalism down Third World throats.

So when Sachs, Oxfam, Mbeki and others continue to insist that the way to cure poverty is to expand the world market and reverse Africa's alleged 'marginalisation', they elide the reality that Africa's trade/GDP ratio has for many years topped the world charts, and the reality that ever-greater reliance upon exporting cash-crops and minerals - most of which have suffered huge declines in price due to gluts - is a recipe for underdevelopment.

When debt relief comes with more Western neoliberal conditionality, as HIPC shows, the reality is that people often end up in worse shape after relief than before.

And when G8 'phantom aid' continues to foster Northern interests above those of the Third World's people, it should be rethought entirely. In late May, Christian Aid's brilliant Ghanaian researcher/campaigner Charles Abugre declared - personally not organisationally - to a Globalise Resistance conference in London: 'Stop the aid! It's done too much damage!'

What to wear, for fun in the sun?

What, then, should be done in coming weeks, especially on July 2 in Edinburgh? As Naomi Klein suggested at a University of KwaZulu-Natal anti-corporate conference on June 10, 'A million people are going to Edinburgh and joining hands, wearing white, in a circle around the entire city, and it's going to be one big, giant bracelet. Everyone will wear bracelets, and then they'll be a bracelet. Are you excited about this? I always had concerns that some of these big corporate NGOs were less interested in contesting power than acting as accessories to power. But being a giant bracelet for the G8 takes this a little too far.'

Instead, suggested Klein, 'Encircle the G8! But instead of declaring themselves a piece of jewelry, they should say, we are a noose, we are putting pressure and we are squeezing these neoliberal policies that are taking lives around the world. Just like the noose that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa ten years ago this November.'

That is indeed the choice: to be a bauble for - or a noose against - neoliberalism. By joining those active across the Third World in concrete struggles (who in our experience are not wasting time with GCAPs and MDGs), Northern readers can offer real, lasting solidarity.

In making the choice, especially in Britain, consider whether the symbolism of the colour white is appropriate. Are NGOs and their friends painting themselves as virgins at an alter, on the verge of marrying G8 leaders like Bush, Berlusconi, Chirac, Blair? Alternatively, will the NGO-led masses be waving white flags of surrender on July 2 in Edinburgh, with these headbands and wristbands?

It's rather hard to tell. According to Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead, 'It's not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk. It is going to be very much a family affair. The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and to ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries.'

Perhaps Whitehead and Make Poverty History need a change of both attitude and attire. After all, 'white' armies have traditionally fought 'red' armies. Fortunately, unlike Russia in the late 1910s or Crossroads in the mid-1980s, today's armies of NGOs and social movements are not carrying weapons of physical destruction, only ideas, energy and a few material resources.

Still, we can't help but conclude that, in contrast to the red social movement struggles for dignity and justice, those wearing white and adopting the NGOs' weak programme may appear as... well, if not explicit agents of the G8, then at minimum their decorations.

Hence when protesting against Wolfowitz on his mid-June Africa trip, against the Gleneagles meeting of the world's rulers in early July, and against the World Bank and IMF annual meetings during the late September days of anti-war action in Washington, DC, we'll encourage our comrades to wear something more colourful, with politics to match.

***

Bond is based at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban; Brutus is a poet and professor emeritus at University of Pittsburgh, and works with Jubilee South Africa and the Centre for Economic Justice; and Setshedi is a Soweto-based anti-privatisation activist employed at the Freedom of Expression Institute.

* Please send further comments to

Today several thousand children, parents, teachers, civil society organizations and government officials gathered in Shinyanga to celebrate the Day of the African Child through the voices of children. The day started with a march from Jomo primary school in the center of town. Led by a brass band, over a thousand children wearing white headbands with messages asking for more books, teachers, desks and the full $10 per child capitation grant to be paid to schools on time made their way to Kambarage Stadium. Here they were welcomed by the District Commissioner Mrs. Mansweta Sanka and entertained by classmates performing traditional dances, songs, poems, and a drama production. Especially moving was the testimony of two orphans struggling to get an education. The participants sent messages to the Government of Tanzania and members of the G8 joining with others throughout Africa in the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. In doing so, a specific call went out to the Government to meet targets set by the Millennium Development Goals and MKUKUTA. Also on the occasion a press release was issued by a group of national and international organizations calling on the government and donors to improve education.

The African Union Heads of State Summit will hold in Libya from 28th of June to 5th of July 2005. Unlike with previous summits, there will be no AU facilitated civil society meeting preceding the Summit in Libya. As there has been no official and public explanation by the AU, it is best not to speculate on why the expected meeting will not be holding.

The fact that it will not be holding however raises important questions the most obvious of which is - Should African civil society be reliant on the AU to fund its pre summit meetings? A No answer - has its implications, the major question being how then will it be funded. A Yes answer - also has implications in respect of independence and ethical questions, especially given that the state, its agents and agencies in many African countries are the main violators of human, political, economic and social rights on the continent. This is not withstanding the fact that the AU as an institution has surpassed the expectations of many cynics in terms of its engagement with civil society and its vision for Africa. To go further, the leadership and many officials of the AU have been exemplary in their relations with African civil society.

Nevertheless, the fact that the regular AU supported civil society meeting will not be holding will raise a question mark over the relationship of civil society with the AU with regards to summit arrangements. Will this be a one off situation? Will the next one be guaranteed to hold?

The most important question though on the minds of many across Africa will be: how is it that African civil society's major annual meeting will not be holding in the very year when Africa and Africa's problems are the focus of the world? Is it that African civil society is so insignificant in the equation that the governments of Africa, Europe, America and the G8 can decide Africa's future without the input of civil society - even at a time when rock musicians and pop stars across the West can claim to have influence on the future of Africa.

The issues of debt; gender equality; human rights and democracy; conflict, peace and security; HIV/AIDS; agriculture and food security and many more are too crucial to be left to drift for another year without African civil society input.

Of course African civil society is not insignificant. However to actually demonstrate that they are significant, civil society will have to go the extra mile and jump the extra foot to show that to a reasonable extent it has an independent voice and that its voice can be and must be heard at a time when it is most crucial to Africa.

In political and logistical terms this means that gravity must be defied and an African civil society meeting must hold before, parallel to, or immediately after and in response to the AU Heads of State summit. Can such a meeting be organised within two to three weeks? Despite obvious difficulties (the major one being finance) the answer is yes. Can it be organised in Libya without the moral if not financial support of the AU given the strength of Libyan civil society, and the logistics of getting there? It is possible but not guaranteed. If not in Libya, where then? Obvious alternatives could be Lagos, Johannesburg or Nairobi. These are logistically easier to reach, and have strong civil society with the organisational capacity to host African colleagues. Holding such a meeting outside of the venue of the AU summit will be breaking with tradition. However the point should be for the meeting to take place, not where it takes place. This means the meeting may also loose its traditional opportunity to feed into the AU summit process, especially if it holds parallel to or after the Executive Council meeting, or even parallel to or after the Heads of State summit itself. Again, the point is for the meting to take place at a time in history when it is imperative for it to do so. In any case the official AU supported meeting is not going to take place so the opportunity to feed in is already non-existent. However effective use of the media can overcome this shortcoming.

Not holding an African civil society meeting this year will set a precedent that may be too costly for Africa to recover from. The impact on democracy and rights issues in Africa may not be felt immediately but it will be definitely be felt sooner rather than later. Key African civil society actors and organisations must step forward to prevent this. There is no time to waste. Will it be Johannesburg, Lagos or Nairobi? The responses from us all will decide. Act Now!

Rotimi Sankore is Director of Credo, and Chidi Odinkalu is a Nigerian barrister and human rights adviser.

Please send responses to [email protected]

This broad-ranging study was designed to assist DFID in defining a coherent policy position to inform its dealings with and on behalf of refugees and internally displaced persons. Additional expertise was sought through a series of commissioned papers. Consultations were also carried out with representatives of governments, NGOs and international agencies.

The Center for African Family Studies (CAFS), in collaboration with the World Health Organization Secretariat, Women's Health Project of the University of Witwatersrand and the Harvard School of Public Health, is offering a three-week course on gender and rights in reproductive health and HIV and AIDS. This will be held from 24 October to 11 November 2005 in Nairobi, Kenya. The course will highlight regional priorities and current controversies in relation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and Beijing Programmes of Action,
particularly in the context of HIV and AIDS.

Topics to be covered include: the gender concept and reproductive health, gender analysis, gender policy approaches, gender mainstreaming in reproductive health and HIV and AIDS programmes, the social determinants of health, health systems analysis, sexual and reproductive rights, and gender and HIV and AIDS. The course is suitable for senior and middle-level managers, planners and policymakers from both the public and NGO sectors, who are directly responsible for influencing or making policy to implement
the MDGs and the Cairo and Beijing Programmes of Action. For further information, contact Centre for African Family Studies (CAFS), P.O. Box 60054, 00200 Nairobi, Kenya; tel.: 254-20-444 86 18, fax: 254-20-444 86 21 or e-mail: [email protected]

The number of refugees around the world rose by one million in 2004, to 11.5 million, according to the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. People fleeing Sudan's troubled Darfur region to Chad and Iraqis crossing into Syria contributed to the increase, the private aid group said in its annual survey. Last year the committee started a campaign to end the protracted encampment of refugees, a practice it labelled "warehousing."

An estimated 23,000 people have fled their homes in the last week in the western Burundi's Bubanza Province because of fighting between government soldiers and rebels of the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL). "Many of the displaced people have been without food for more than a week," Fidèle Niyongabo, the communal administrator of Mpanda, told IRIN. He said fighting occurred again there on Tuesday.

This study by Giampiero Giacomello explores and compares why and to what extent national governments decide to control the internet and how this impacts on crucial socioeconomic activities and fundamental civil rights. The author provides detailed studies of US, Germany, Italy and further case studies of South Africa, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, India and The Netherlands.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) are to participate in a global research project looking into the adoption of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS, an alternative to often expensive proprietary software, is arguably one of the best examples of open, collaborative, internationally distributed production and development that exists today. The open format encourages development and allows software to be tailored to the needs of users.

Taddy Blecher must be the first person to have founded a university from a fax machine.
Five years ago, from his office in Johannesburg in South Africa, without any university buildings, courses or staff, he began faxing out a letter of invitation to 350 schools. He asked the brightest and poorest students to apply for a new university - and promised them the "best business education in Africa".

The objectives of the workshop are to understand the role of a multidisciplinary team, including the roles of law enforcement, child protective services, and the legal system in the evaluation of abuse cases; address relevant factors in detecting, reporting and managing child physical and sexual abuse; tackle problems facing inter-agency cooperation; highlight the importance of policies and procedures, in the detection and management of child abuse.

African civil society organisations have called on the African Union to be prepared to repudiate Africa's multilateral debts, should the G8 summit scheduled for July fail to agree on a 100 per cent debt cancellation for the continent without conditions. The CSOs said that the continent spends US$15 billion to service debt in a year, and that Africa's debt stock, which currently stands at US$330, had been paid many times over.

"As members of the WTO prepare towards the Ministerial Conference in Hong-Kong, we note that four years since the adoption of the Doha work programme, there is little evidence of progress in tackling the developmental concerns of African and other developing countries which were proclaimed as pivotal to the success of the Doha agenda. On the contrary, as evident from their proposals, the rich and powerful industrialised countries of the WTO continue to pressurise African and other developing countries to undertake further and deeper liberalisation commitments in their industrial and agricultural sectors even while the developed countries remain intent on maintaining their advantages and protection. "

Angola still has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world, says UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Country Representative, Mario Ferrari, and challenges relating to children remain huge. Three years after the end of the country's 27-year long civil war, "the situation is that the long period of war had the effect of dismantling the social services, weakening social services in a radical way in the country. The effect is that ... this country has a child mortality rate of 250 per 1,000 - one of the highest in the world," Ferrari told IRIN.

Ignoring UNHCR pleas for restraint, Burundi and Rwanda pressed ahead Monday with a joint operation to return thousands of Rwandan asylum seekers to their homeland. Authorities denied UNHCR and its NGO partners access to the transit centre from where the return operation was being conducted.

Action by Churches Together (ACT), a global alliance supporting communities in emergencies, has appealed for nearly US $8.6 million to help thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees spontaneously returning to southern Sudan. ACT said the money would be used on health care, education, agriculture, water, transport and poverty alleviation programmes.

Guinea risks becoming West Africa's next failed state, says a new briefing from the International Crisis Group (ICG). "Its economy is faltering, the government has nearly ceased to provide services, and in 2004, there were isolated uprisings in at least eight towns and cities in all regions of the country. Getting it wrong in Guinea now could have disastrous consequences. Getting it right will require a greater engagement by both the Guinean population and the diplomatic and donor communities, including a focus much more on reforming institutions than on the immediate personnel issues involved in the succession to the ailing and dictatorial president, Lansana Conté."

The Coordination Office of the Housing and Land Rights Network of Habitat International Coalition (HIC-HLRN) requests urgent intervention in the following situation in Zimbabwe. HIC-HLRN repeatedly has received alarming information from local civil society sources of massive evictions in throughout Zimbabwe that already have rendered 200,000 people homeless in two weeks. Some 30,000 street vendors and people working informally have been detained and if the eviction drive continues, "the estimates are that 2 to 3 million people could be affected, which is about a quarter of (Zimbabwe's) population," as M. Kothari, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing warned in a press conference on 3 June.

This dissertation is a comparative study of the representations of Black-white heterosexual love in novels, published since the 1940s, by Black, white, male and female authors from the United States of America, Africa, and the Caribbean. It uses African-American feminist theories by bell hooks and the postcolonial theories by Ngugi wa Thiong'o to analyze the images the characters hold of each other and the lacking, ongoing or accomplished process of decolonizing the mind, as defined by Ngugi and hooks.

The injury of three persons, two seriously, in western Cote d'Ivoire last week reflects the deep-seated animosity between some ethnic groups in this West African country. The fighting, in reprisal for the death of four people, occurred in Duekoue, 400 kilometres west of the commercial capital of Abidjan. Recently more than 100 Gueres, who are indigenous to the region, were cut to pieces with machetes and sprayed with bullets. The incidents occurred at Guitrozon and Petit Duekoue, the villages adjacent to the city of Duekoue.

International agencies are pressing Liberia's interim government to crack down on corruption because it is undermining the peace process in the troubled West African nation, the United Nations said on Monday. A plan to improve economic governance in Liberia was drawn up last month in Copenhagen by officials of the United Nations, European Commission, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the West African economic bloc ECOWAS and the United States, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

The Sudanese government resumed face-to-face peace talks with the two main rebel movements in its western Darfur region on Monday after three days of bickering over whether representatives from Chad and Eritrea should be allowed to attend, officials involved in the negotiations said. The latest round of peace talks mediated by the African Union (AU) officially began in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Friday following a six-month break.

Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia, which has been based in Nairobi since formed eight months ago, began relocating to the country on Monday. Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari said the relocation from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, would be completed in a few days.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, is sending a fact-finding team to Togo next week to investigate allegations of rights violations in the wake of the West African country's recent elections. Arbour has appointed human rights expert Doudou Diene to head the mission, which is expected to arrive in Togo on 13 June and stay there for two weeks, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said.

South Africa will next week seek to defeat a Japanese proposal to expand whale hunting as it would threaten a growing industry catering to people who enjoy watching the huge mammals, a senior official said. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is due to vote on Japan's plans at a meeting in South Korea from June 20-24.

Delegates from the Burundian government and the rebel Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) began talks on Friday on how to implement a ceasefire agreement, after almost a week of delays. FNL is Burundi's only rebel group to continue fighting. All other former rebel groups have signed peace agreements with the transitional government and have since joined transitional institutions.

A company involved in the production of artemisinine, an anti-malaria drug, is due to set up extraction plants in Kenya and Tanzania to make the drug easily and cheaply available to patients, an official for the company said on Wednesday. The factories would be established in East Africa because of the potential in the region for cultivating artemisia-annua, the plant from which the anti-malaria drug is extracted, the managing director of African Artemisia Limited, Geoff Burrell, said at a conference convened by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.

President Kibaki would trail Kanu chairman Uhuru Kenyatta and Environment Minister Kalonzo Musyoka were elections to be held this year, an opinion poll released yesterday indicates. The Steadman Group, whose Gallup poll last October placed President Kibaki at the top, has this time put him behind Uhuru and Kalonzo who tied in the first position with a 29 per cent rating. Kibaki scored 15 per cent.

The Main Thread is an inspiring and stimulating tool for anyone wanting to work effectively and with commitment on preventing HIV, STIs (sexually transmitted infections) and unwanted pregnancy among young people.

The North-South Civil Society Conference on Refugee Warehousing will gather advocates from refugee hosting and donor countries to learn from one another and to collaborate on tactics and strategies to win the basic rights of refugees elaborated in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and other human rights instruments to live free, dignified, and productive lives even as they await durable solutions.

The African Mathematics Millennium Science Initiative (AMMSI) is a distributed network of mathematics research, training and promotion throughout sub-SaharanAfrica. It has five Regional Offices located in Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. It is a project established by the Millennium Science Initiative (MSI), that is administered by the Science Initiative Group (SIG). Applications are invited for the 2005 AMMSI Postgraduate Scholarships, by sub-Saharan African nationals, for M.Sc and Ph.Dstudies in mathematics to be undertaken at any university in Africa from 1st September 2005.

The workshop will present the reasons behind the abstention of women in Egypt, especially the abstention of rural women from participating in the political life. The workshop agenda will include identifying the different sides of the political and social participation to deepen the understanding of the political participation issues, especially for women.

Volume 32 Number 103/March 2005 of Review of African Political Economy is now available on the Taylor & Francis web site.
The issue includes:
* Imperialism & African Social Formations by Lionel Cliffe;
* Class & protest in Africa: New waves by David Seddon, Leo Zeilig;
* Reaction & Resistance to Neo-liberalism in Zambia by Miles Larmer; 
* Sudan: a flawed peace process leading to a flawed peace by John Young.

As a change agent I need to be supported by these great tools and resources that you are producing. I hope to get connected and receive regular resources to facilitate my work. I work as a community development/civil society capacity building coordinator. We aim to promote rights in our programming through good governance and participation in decision making which can be attained through community empowerment.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has voiced "revulsion" at a government-orchestrated campaign to smear murdered journalist Deyda Hydara following the release of a report by the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) on its ongoing investigation into his death. The report is full of gratuitous detail about the journalist's private life and absurd theories about the motives for the murder.

Authorities on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian island of Zanzibar have banned political columnist Jabir Idrissa from writing, saying he was working without permission. Idrissa told the Committee to Protect Journalists that he believes he was banned for criticizing the Zanzibar government. The Zanzibar-based Idrissa is a well-known political columnist for the weekly, Swahili language newspaper Rai. The newspaper is based on the Tanzanian mainland, but sells on Zanzibar.

Early HIV testing is an important factor for the successful implementation of HIV/AIDS treatment programs in African countries, Ernest Darkoh, former operations manager of Botswana's public antiretroviral drug program, said last Tuesday at the 2nd South African AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, Reuters AlertNet reports. About 1,000 AIDS advocates and health professionals were expected to attend the three-day conference.

Replacing the discredited United Nations Commission on Human Rights with a standing Human Rights Council would be a major step forward for the protection of human rights worldwide, says Human Rights Watch. On Friday the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Ambassador Jean Ping of Gabon, presented a draft outcome document for the General Assembly Summit in September which included a commitment of support for a Human Rights Council. The proposed Human Rights Council would operate year-round to allow it to act both preventively and during urgent crises.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem expresses concern that UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s focus on Africa is going to be yet another Shakespearean tale, "… told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing." Instead of Blair preaching to the rest of the world about Africa let the British government challenge other Western and richer countries by showing good example through confession and remorse and then tangible concrete action that shows that it has its mouth in tandem with its pocket.

Britain has adopted Africa as a centrepiece of its Foreign Policy this year. In his usual missionary approach the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has re branded himself from being the Secretary of State for America into Prime Minister for Africa. It was in this Africa mode that he went to America, earlier this week, to try to exact some concessions from his bully buddy, Bush. Blair's mission was to persuade Bush to buy into his three-pronged Africa programme: More aid, debt cancellation and international trade reforms. He arrived in Britain on Wednesday with a few million dollars in pledges from the Americans towards drought relief in the horn of Africa. There was also a promise to consider 100% debt cancellation for some 32 countries in Africa.

British NGOs and antipoverty campaigners have already condemned Bush's crumbs to Blair as miserly and far below the multi billion aid begging bowl Blair is expecting the rest of the richer countries to contribute to before their rich men's club meeting in Gleneagles next month. Bush defended himself by drawing attention to the fact that he had trebled aid to Africa already and given 15 billion dollars towards HIV/Aids in Africa. Of course what he did not say is that even more dubious than under the cold war, American aid is now more tied to compliant regimes in Africa no matter how unpopular they are with their peoples. This as long as they are on the side of his war without end in the name of international terrorism. Most of his AIDS money will actually be beneficial to American pharmaceutical companies and their very expensive medicines because the Americans are opposed to cheaper derivative drugs from India, Brazil, China or South Africa. Also the administration believes only in abstinence campaigns and it is prisoner to faith-based (meaning Christian fundamentalist) groups and lobbies. This means that what Bush gives with one hand is immediately taken with the other through his big business and religious sponsors.

As a Bush-Blair cynic I am not really surprised at the games being played by these global con men but unfortunately there are still too many people both in Britain and outside who still believe that Tony means well and somehow he can persuade Bush and the rest of the world to do right by Africa. My position is that instead of Blair preaching to the rest of the world about Africa let the British government challenge other Western and richer countries by showing good example through confession and remorse and then tangible concrete action that shows that it has its mouth in tandem with its pocket.

Even if he has now succeeded in getting Bush to use nearly the same language as him on debt cancellation this is where it stops. The devil as they say is in the details. The Bush people want debt cancellation to be paid for by the lending multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. This may mean that money pledged for relief of poverty will be diverted to debt cancellation. In plain language: No new monies on the table just a recycling of what is already available. In biblical terms it means robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So where does this leave Blair and his big plans for Africa? Nowhere really. While he has put high premiums on persuading his American bosses the truth is that other G8 countries are not really singing their hymns from the same book as him. Germany, France and Japan have their own priorities and would not be lectured to by a British Prime Minister on his way out of No 10 Downing Street. Blair may be seeking his international legacy via Africa but both the German Chancellor and the French President are also seeking their own legacies too, and Africa may not play big in their calculations.

Also this premium on Washington ignores other multilateral creditors to Africa such as the Africa Development Bank which in many cases, is a bigger lender of development loans to many African countries. African countries still hold a majority stake in the bank. Why is Blair not canvassing them for support on his debt right off? It must be his patronising assumption that once Europe and America agrees which African dares oppose? Two weeks ago Blair's people made a big play on the EU countries agreeing to double aid to Africa as yet another major breakthrough. This will be done by 2008. But the same EU was already committed to making AID 0.7% of GNP for thirty years and renewed this pledge 5 years ago through the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. Are we to celebrate their promising to reach 0.50% when they promised 0.70% 30 years ago?

My concern is that this Blair focus on Africa is going to be yet another Shakespearean tale, "… told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing."

Africans must stop looking outside for our progress. Our salvation is within us. We are our own liberators.

Does that mean there is nothing outsiders can do to help us? No, there is a role for others but we cannot adequately take advantage of other peoples' help if we have not decided what we want to do for ourselves and how we want to go about it.

When Bob Geldof was challenged about why he is organising a concert for Africa 21 years after his first one and there are no African musicians apart from Yousof N'dour, the pathetic response from one of his spokespersons was that he did not have African musicians in his address book. This from a man who is regarded as Mr Africa globally merely shows how Westerners regard Africans as objects of their sympathy rather than agents of changing their own situation.

We have to summon the courage to stand up to these new missionaries in Africa represented by western humanitarian NGOs and politicians like Blair and ‘Globatricians’ like Bob Geldof. Their 'good' intentions must match our aspirations. We should do it together where possible, do it alone where necessary but at every stage we should have the veto, not them. We cannot outsource our progress and development. To borrow a phrase recently used by my Good Ndugu, Firoze Manji, Editor of Pambazuka News: Nothing About Us without Us.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa. ([email protected] or [email][email protected])

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In the week in which anti-poverty campaigners launched Live8 (*) and ahead of next week's crucial G8 Finance Ministers meeting in London, a series of open letters from global celebrities to the G8 Finance Ministers are being published in some of the most influential newspapers in the world, calling for decisive action by world leaders to tackle poverty once and for all. With only 9 days to go until the Ministers meet in London, and under 4 weeks to go until the world focuses its attention on the G8 summit in Scotland, campaigners, religious leaders, musicians, film stars and the general public alike are backing the demands of the Global Call to Action against Poverty for more and better aid, trade justice and debt cancellation.

At least 1,700 people have fled villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Katanga Province following attacks by Mayi-Mayi militiamen, a UN official told IRIN on Tuesday. "The Mayi-Mayi raped seven women, eight under 18-year-olds and burnt eleven houses," Rachel Scott, the spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the killing, on Sunday, of a radio journalist who was covering a protest by bus and truck drivers near the Somali capital, Mogadishu. "We mourn the loss of our colleague Duniya Muhyadin," Ann Cooper, the CPJ executive director, said on Monday from New York. "Somalia must find a way to end the climate of impunity and violence responsible for this tragic crime."

At least 20 people were killed, 50 wounded and hundreds more displaced during inter-clan fighting that began on Monday in the town of Beletweyne in south-central Somalia. The fighting broke out on Monday at around 5:00 p.m. [02:00 GMT] when militias from the Galje'el and Jajele sub-clans clashed on the west side of the town, local journalist Abdullahi Muhammad told IRIN on Tuesday.

The directive by the ANC-led government that the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) investigate the possibility of a third force being involved in recent protests, while the ANC itself acknowledges that the issues raised by protesters are genuine, is very mischievous and a waste of resources. This seems to be a tactic to split the forces protesting for change and also to divert attention from the issues leading to protests.