At five-feet tall, former Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, known as Titus Jacob , is on the way to becoming more noticeable than when he lorded over Zambians with impunity. That's because he has quite a tall order: sixty-six counts of corruption and a pursuit of his jugular by President Levy Mwanawasa, who once served as Mr Chiluba's number two.

A public hearing in the Nigerian Senate will begin next week into the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), widely regarded in Nigeria as under-performing and heavily criticised for alleged corrupt practices.

The fraud trial of Nelson Mandela's ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, has resumed in South Africa after months of delays and postponements. The well-known and controversial character, known as "the mother of the nation" in South Africa, is facing 85 charges of theft and fraud relating to a bank loan scam.

A Nigerian non-governmental organisation has concluded that ethical concerns loom high in HIV drug trials in the country. The Centre for the Right to Health (CRH), based in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria, made this assertion in a recent report on the experiences of People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) during recently conducted drug trials.

Slightly over 30,000 people have been displaced since late 2002 by attacks and counterattacks by Mayi-Mayi militias and the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-Goma (RCD-Goma) rebel movement along the western bank of the River Lomami, between Katako Kombe and Lubefu, in Kasai Oriental Province, central Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official relief and development agency of the US Catholic community.

When the leaders of the Boeremag were tracked down and arrested last year, investigators came across a document describing how the organisation planned to take over SA. Among the institutions the plotters wanted to seize in the first stage of the coup were television and radio channels, power stations and abattoirs. Why abattoirs?The plotters wanted to trick blacks into abandoning the interior of the country for the east coast. So they planned to line all eastbound highways with raw meat. The blacks would follow the trail, the plotters believed, and once they were all in KwaZuluNatal, the borders of the province would be closed. Trapped in the eastern lowlands, they would be herded northwards, at gunpoint, into Mozambique. Think about it. And once you have gotten over how staggeringly stupid the plotters were, think about it again. How on earth did a group of men, most of whom grew up in rural SA, cheek-byjowl with black communities, learn so little about their fellow human beings during the course of their lives?

The millions of dollars pumped into the training of teachers and the construction of schools could be rendered null and void by HIV-AIDS. Education authorities have released a report which predicts that around 3 360 people, or 20 per cent of Namibia's total teaching staff of 18 000 countrywide, could be lost due to AIDS-related illnesses in the next seven years.

While issues of access and the relative merits of satellites or solar power are being discussed internationally, a project in South Africa and Egypt is exploring what actually happens at the classroom level when ICTs are introduced. How do ICTs change the way teachers teach? How do pupils respond to ICTs-enhanced teaching?

Tourism's economic input is often significant in developing countries, but the relationship remains inherently inequitable, with the rich visiting the poor and prescribing the conditions which they expect to find. Economic benefits tend not to reach the poorest, leaking out to Western based tour operators and national governments. So, to date, the poorest have been most impacted and least rewarded. Visit this Eldis page for their feature on tourism and poverty; policy and research.

As a young Nigerian girl, Pearl Nwashili saw women come crying to her grandmother, bleeding and bruised from beatings at their husbands' hands. "I wanted to clean them, sew up their clothes, I wanted to heal the kids with sores, I just wanted to see people happy again as fast as possible," she says. As an adult in Lagos, she studied microbiology and earned degrees in public health as a way to help her people. With a grant from the Ford Foundation and facilities donated by Nigeria's government, Nwashili set up walk-in health centers at eight major Nigerian "motor parks," where hundreds of truck drivers, taxis and buses wait for loads and seek entertainment, food and rest in the meantime.

Zimbabwe's opposition has obtained evidence that President Robert Mugabe won re-election in March last year with the help of as many as 1.8m "ghost" voters who were added to the electoral roll. Tobaiwa Mudede, the registrar-general and a Mugabe loyalist, has repeatedly refused requests by the Movement for Democratic Change for a copy of the roll to be used in a court action challenging the result - even though the roll is a public document.

At the conclusion of a week-long visit to Sierra Leone Under-Secretary-General Olara A. Otunnu, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, has called upon the international community to continue to support the country in the peace-building period so that the impressive gains made so far in the rehabilitation and protection of war-affected children can be strengthened and sustained.

Confronted with sophisticated fraudsters and increasing levels of corruption, experts are now seeking systems that can empower leaders to spearhead the fight against the two vices. A major effort is already going on, particularly within the local corporate sector, to adopt an anti-corruption and anti-fraud culture, to encourage employees to " blow the whistle" on such activities.

Women in Kenya are vulnerable to poverty, HIV infection and violence because of discriminatory property inheritance practices, says a report from the New York-based Human Rights Watch. The United States based NGO says that after the death of their husbands, women are often evicted or made penniless, or forced to engage in traditional sexual cleansing rituals risking HIV infection, in order to stay in the property.

Fewer than 1,000 Rwandan refugees remain in Tanzania - roughly 700 in Ngara and 300 in Kibondo - with returns continuing, according to Ivana Unluova, the spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Hundreds of families are fleeing their homes in Mogadishu's southwestern Medina district after fierce clashes broke out in the Somali capital last week. Many families had lost relatives "to indiscriminate shelling by both sides", a local journalist told IRIN. Residents began fleeing Medina after fighting between rival factions broke out on 26 February. "They are basically leaving so as to keep what is left of their families alive," he said.

In response to a health crisis caused by months of fighting in the Central African Republic the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) will begin distributing drugs to hospitals and health centres in three eastern provinces, an official said on Thursday.

Saving the lives of millions of African women who die from complications related to unsafe abortions will come center stage Wednesday at the first ever consultation held in Africa on providing access to safe abortion for women. The landmark consultation - 'Action to Reduce Maternal Mortality in Africa: A Regional Consultation on Unsafe Abortion' - brings together, medical professionals, legal experts, researchers, ministers of health, youth leaders, parliamentarians, women's health activists and journalists from 15 African countries.

Dozens of bulldozers and excavators belonging to five multinational mining companies operating in Ghana are poised to tear apart thousands of hectares of forest reserves in the Ashanti, Western and Eastern Regions of the country, if the government gives them approval to haul out what they describe as rich deposits of gold beneath the forests.

When the world marked the 50th anniversary of the London Agreement, which dealt with the debts of the then West Germany, Western leaders and the major international bankers hung their heads in unmitigated shame.

For if the terms of that agreement had been applied to today's indebted countries, we could have avoided the deaths, sufferings and humiliations of hundreds of millions of people.

The London Agreement dealt not only with the debts of the defeated enemy of World War II, but of an enemy that in the annals of world history stands out as having been particularly evil. Germany, of course, was not only the enemy in World War II, but the defeated enemy in World War I, too. It had not repaid the debts incurred on the money borrowed to pay the reparations arising from the previous war. The London Agreement therefore dealt, additionally, with Germany's outstanding World War I debts.

In other words, the creditors and the creditor governments that met in London in 1953 did so to consider the debts of a country perceived to have been responsible for two world wars and the deaths of countless millions, along with the repeated destruction of huge parts of Europe and elsewhere. No less relevant, when viewed against Third World debt, the German people were seen as having been overwhelmingly enthusiastic supporters of their government's war efforts during most of both world wars.

The contrast between the guilt behind the German debts and the innocence of most of the Third World debt could therefore not be greater.

The origin of much of the Third World debt lies in the recklessness of Western bankers who, in the early 1970s, deliberately unloaded surplus capital on the Third World in the form of loans. What is more, much of these aggressively marketed loans were “odious” in terms of international law and therefore not covered by the obligations of sovereign debt. The Doctrine of Odious Debt removes any duty to repay the debt if the loan was contracted by dictatorships primarily for the benefit of the dictatorships and the creditors were aware of the nature of the regime to which they were lending.

It is clear that most people suffering from Third World debts today have had nothing to do with either creditor recklessness or the odious debts contracted by their unpopular rulers.

Notwithstanding their innocence, the First World has insisted on its full pound of flesh. Full debt repayment has been required regardless of all other considerations, including even the right to life itself. An exceedingly limited rethink did take place in 1996, but then only because the unpayability of the debt could no longer be avoided. The awful suffering caused by the debt had little if anything to do with this rethink. Similarly absent from consideration were questions of morality or international law. The debt was regarded as unpayable only because it was palpably unpayble in strictly financial terms: debtor countries were becoming increasingly indebted because of having to take out new loans in order to repay previous loans granted to repay original debt.

The outcome of this slowly developing rethink was the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative. HIPC, presented with much fanfare as an example of unparalleled Western generosity, laid down very strict economic criteria for inclusion under the scheme. To be poor was not sufficient; neither was being heavily indebted. To qualify for consideration as a HIPC country and therefore potentially benefit from its partial debt “forgiveness”, a country had to be both extremely poor and very heavily indebted. In the event, only 41 countries qualified for consideration under the HIPC. This initial qualification, however, did not in itself result in real debt reduction.

The Germany of 1953 would have come no way close to being considered a HIPC candidate, notwithstanding the destruction of its economy during the war or the poverty of its immediate post-war inhabitants. In terms of today's criteria, the Germany of 1953 was positively well off and would be ranked a middle-income country. This did not matter in the slightest to the London negotiators. Neither did Germany's culpability in two world wars have any bearing on the terms of the London Agreement. The agreement was designed to assist Germany, not punish it, regardless of the enormity of Germany's perceived guilt.

Not one of the main arguments nowadays put forward by the G7, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other international bankers as to why they simply cannot do more to help ease the burden of the HIPC debt is to be found in the London Agreement. Politicians and bankers tell us how tied their hands are by economic imperatives way beyond their control. To a person, they assure us as to the nobility of their intentions, were it not for their powerlessness in the face of cold economic realities. They claim to have stretched the integrity of the world economic and financial system to its limits, in their desire to be as helpful as possible in ameliorating the problems of Third World debt.

The contrast between the terms of the London Agreement and the HIPC initiative gives the lie to their arguments and exposes the hypocrisy of their proclaimed intentions. Consider the following:

Germany was required to pay a maximum of 3,06% of its annual export income on repaying its debt. For the poorest countries on Earth, the HIPC initiative required them to use between 20% and 25% of their export income on debt servicing.

To qualify for consideration under the HIPC initiative, a country's total external debt had to be 160% of its gross domestic product. Mainstream economists see “debt ratio” as being problematic if it is anything between 80% and 100%, that is, if the debt is equivalent to between 80% and 100% of what a country generates a year in its own currency from all economic activities. Germany's debt ratio in 1953 was a mere 21,2%.

To qualify for consideration under the HIPC initiative a country's foreign debt had to be at least 250% larger than its national budget. Germany's “fiscal debt ratio” in 1953 was 4,9%.

The contrast between the London Agreement and the HIPC initiative is even starker when measured against the additional HIPC conditions that have to be met before debt relief is rewarded. Stringent public expenditure cuts in health, education, housing and social security schemes, along with policies and practices to promote and protect a “market economy” free of import restrictions and attractive to foreign investors, are core HIPC conditionalities. A candidate country has three years in which to introduce these requirements. It has a further three years in which to demonstrate the consolidation of its good behaviour before receiving very limited debt relief. The London Agreement placed no similar conditionalities on Germany.

What the London Agreement did was to place conditionalities on the creditors. The HIPC initiative ignored such demands on the creditors. The London Agreement required three major benefits from creditors. First, creditors had to promote German exports because the debt payments were made entirely from trade surpluses. No trade surplus meant no debt payments. Second, Germany had the option of imposing import restrictions if the balance of trade with any of the debtor countries failed to produce a surplus. Finally, creditors were given no resort to sanctions against Germany, in the event of any German infringement of the agreement. The most that the creditors could expect was the convening of direct negotiations with the option of seeking advice from an appropriate international organisation.

The extraordinarily generous terms of the London Agreement are no more difficult to understand than the extraordinary punitiveness of the HIPC initiative. Their differences lie in their political purposes. The London Agreement seems to be generous only when compared to what our governments, financiers and economists now say about what can be done to ameliorate the enormous debt burden of the Third World. The London Agreement was not designed as an instrument of control, as is the HIPC initiative. Rather, the London Agreement was designed politically to promote Germany's reconstruction, but without having to cancel Germany's debts.

What is clear is that in spite of First World claims that everything that can possibly be done to ease the current burden is being done, Third World debt is a very effective killer and continues to destroy innocent lives by keeping hundreds of millions of people trapped in poverty, ignorance and disease.

What the London Agreement exposes clearly is that the Third World debt trap is an instrument of deliberate policy. At the stroke of a First World pen, things could be very different. A contemporary London Agreement would go a long way towards freeing the Third World from its debt bondage.

* Mpumelele Giyose is the chairperson of Jubilee South Africa
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* NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: Please note that Pambazuka News will not be released next week due to staff leave. The next edition of the newsletter will be on 20 March 2003.

The coveted mountain gorillas at the Bwindi National Park are facing new pressures, this time from the very people supposed to protect them. The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is allowing more tourists to track the primates than they (primates) can tolerate.

The Southern Africa Institute of Fundraising (SAIF) was established in 1986. It is a non-profit voluntary organisation which exists to promote and encourage high standards of ethics, practice and public service among people involved in fundraising in Southern Africa. Visit their web site to find out more.

This handbook provides NPO volunteer leaders and staff managers with all the information they need to achieve financial security and sustainability. Subjects covered include the role of the NPO in civil society, keys to sustainable funding today, funding sources in Southern Africa, planning for income and developing a funding plan.

It is evident that a strong case can be made that militia in Zimbabwe are a significant threat to peace and security and furthermore that a strong prima facie case can be made for the militia's deployment being state-condoned and state-controlled, according to a new report, 'The role of militia groups in maintaining ZanuPF's political power'.

Financial Gazette sub-editor Taungana Ndoro was last Sunday victimised by soldiers guarding the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation’s Mbare studios, who forced him to roll on the tarmac and in a pool of mud. Ndoro said he was waiting near the broadcasting station for his wife when a group of about six armed soldiers seized him and led him to their post at the studios.

Race, after all, has always been a “political” issue - not only in South Africa. The political, economic and cultural effects of race as a classification, and their meaning in social practice, are bound to both history and location. In other words, the challenge might be to understand the particular ways in which race, both as a concept and as an experience, changes historically across time and space.

Moroccan director Ayouch Nabil has lashed out at the organisers of Africa's biggest film festival, Fespaco, on the eve of its opening. Speaking from Paris, Nabil told the BBC World Service's Artbeat programme that Fespaco was "disorganised" and "lacks respect for the film makers."

The Malawian Government has been defending its decision to sell off 20% of its grain reserves. Chief Technical Advisor at Malawi's Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Allard Malindi, said Malawi is being responsible in seeking to sell off the grain because they were expecting a good harvest in three months' time.

A member of President Robert Mugabe's family, several high-ranking Zimbabwean officials and a senior company executive have grabbed farms and forcibly evicted peasants under a controversial land reform programme, according to a report ordered by the Zimbabwean president.

Amnesty International issued a press release last week detailing the abuses of the regime of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, as that leader landed in Paris for an African-Franco summit. The press release detailed recent violations of human rights and urged world leaders to come out strongly against the abuses.

This handbook for advocacy in the African human rights system was prepared by legal scholars under the auspices of the International Programme on Reproductive and Sexual Health Law at the University of Toronto. The 193-page manual aims to facilitate use of Africa's human rights system to promote and protect reproductive and sexual health.

As the four-month-long Somali Peace and Reconciliation Conference resumes at a new Kenyan venue and with a new chairperson, Somali human rights activists have issued an important declaration founded on their many years of mostly unacknowledged and risk-fraught human rights defence work. Somali human rights defenders from 23 organizations, meeting in Hargeisa from 10 to 18 February 2002, declared that they will "increase the struggle against human rights abuses, such as arbitrary killings, torture, arbitrary detention and kidnapping, and work for the equal rights of all, with full protection for vulnerable groups such as women and minorities".

The scale of the slave trade is staggering, says UNICEF. According to the Centre for International Crime Prevention, 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to the New World over a period of three hundred years, between the 16th and the 19th centuries.

Developments over the last two months, including ceasefire agreements that have brought all but one rebel group into political negotiations and the anticipated deployment within weeks of an African Union military observer mission, have created more momentum for peace in Burundi than at any time since the civil war began ten years ago. But donor reluctance to resume major aid has become counter-productive and peace dividends are needed to give rebels an incentive to accept disarmament and reintegration into society and to provide the international community leverage with which to press the transitional government to carry out its commitments under the Arusha peace accord, says the International Crisis Group.

Over 130 tonnes of donated maize impounded by Beitbridge customs officials last year from the Feed Zimbabwe Trust, an MDC-aligned relief organisation, has been sold by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) in controversial circumstances, it has emerged.

Aids-Africa brings together a multisectoral community of Africans and other countries to raise and jointly address health-related issues, particularly HIV/AIDS in Africa. Through discussion forums, Aids-Africa fosters independent, informed and constructive debate guided by principles of tolerance and respect.

The second Preparatory Committee meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society, scheduled for Geneva from 10 to 12 December 2003, and Tunisia in 2005, opened with an appeal for all of the stakeholders to work quickly and constructively to develop the declaration of principles and first draft of the plan of action that will ensure the benefits and rights of the information society are extended to all of humanity.

The Ethiopian government has identified a new camp for Sudanese refugees in the country after over 100 Sudanese were killed in violent ethnic attacks over the last five months.

Faction leaders attending the Somali peace talks in Kenya have condemned the slow pace of the conference and accused Somalia's neighbours - the so-called frontline states - of working for their own interests. A statement, signed by 11 faction leaders, blamed "continuous contradictions, differences and misunderstandings" between the three frontline states - Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia - for the "very slow progress of the process".

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from Bozoum (384 km northwest of the capital, Bangui) have started going home after government and allied forces recaptured the town on 13 February, government-owned Radio Centrafrique reported on 22 February.

Meningitis has killed 401 people out of 2433 cases in Burkina Faso since the beginning of the 2002-2003 meningitis season in late October, Souleymane Sanou, head of meningitis control in the health ministry said last week.

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will on Saturday launch a campaign to provide supplemental Vitamin A to some 12 million children aged six to 59 months nationwide.

The biggest wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa, producing clean power from the force of the wind, is up and running at Klipheuwel in the Cape. The farm, funded by Eskom at the cost of R42 million, consists of three huge wind turbine towers.

Representatives from a group of major African countries have adopted what one participant described as a “roadmap” for the development of science and technology on the continent, as well as a strategy for pushing science and technology higher up the agenda of national governments.

Uncompromising words and body language from US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, and other participants spell trouble for the ongoing World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations on agriculture. The draft negotiating document prepared by WTO farm negotiations chairman Stuart Harbinson zoomed to the top of the agenda at a recent Tokyo meeting when, even before the meeting began, Japanese Minister of Agriculture Tadamori Oshima rejected the paper's proposals for minimum cuts of between 25 and 45 per cent and average reductions of 40 to 60 per cent on all farm tariffs over five years. The European Union (EU) also attacked the Harbinson proposal as "unbalanced" for proposing that "trade-distorting" subsidies be cut by 60 per cent over five years and that export subsidies be phased out entirely over nine years. Both Japan and the EU denounced the paper as ensuring that the US would be the only victor in the negotiations. In the fight between the agro-export giants, the concerns of developing countries were conveniently lost, writes WTO-watcher Walden Bello.

This posting from Africa Action contains a media statement and additional background from the Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign of Jubilee 2000 South Africa, on a new suit filed in New York Eastern District Court against international corporations and banks for reparations for their complicity in aiding and abetting apartheid. This builds on the original suit filed last November, with the same defendants but adding additional plaintiffs.

This paper approaches questions concerning human rights and discrimination against women from a perspective that differs from the dominant view within the human rights literature. The author argues that the existence and defense of national, regional, and international rights of Nigerian women against discrimination must necessarily be located within Nigeria's particular historical experience. The identification of instances of discrimination and the struggle to defend and extend women's rights has to be critically examined in light of the power relations that structure the regime of human rights worldwide.

Has there been any progress in determining what policies are pro-poor? This article reviews the various tools presently available to evaluate the impact of economic policies in general on poverty reduction, or on the distribution of living standards. It also explores directions for improvement.

The government has made a late appeal to the World Food Programme to continue food aid support for another year as there is no end in sight to the country's severe shortages and famine, say diplomatic sources. World Food Programme food assistance is set to close at the end of March, raising fears that malnutrition will increase; especially in the hardest hit provinces, Masvingo and Matabeleland North and South.