PAMBAZUKA NEWS 85
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 85
Apocalyptic assumptions about the impact of high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates may be unhelpful, as they obscure the complex nature of the development problems facing affected populations. In the area of education, new evidence from Uganda and Tanzania suggests that the impact of HIV/AIDS may not be as simple or direct as has been assumed.
What does it mean to be a young orphan? Why and how are numbers burgeoning? Why are orphans socially excluded and how might education support their inclusion? This study investigates the lives of orphans in an area of Malawi, suggests why the numbers of orphans are exploding and indicates how the social unrest that may follow could be avoided.
It is widely believed that children who are directly affected by AIDS are greatly disadvantaged at school and that teachers are a high risk group for HIV infection. Research in Botswana, Malawi and Uganda suggests that the situation is much more complex.
Barely seven days to Togo's disputed legislative elections, President Gnassingbe Eyadema has provoked a political and constitutional row with the country's opposition parties by promulgating two controversial decrees.
West African heads of state, and the leader of the African Union (AU), have begun preliminary talks, Wednesday, aimed at ending a five week rebellion, which has left hundreds of people dead and tens of thousands displaced. The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) has been spearheading mediation efforts and brokered a ceasefire last week.
Refugees from Kakuma and Daadab refuge camps are being registered as voters contrary to the law, Parliament has been told.
Kenya's estimated 240,000 public school teachers at the weekend called off their nationwide strike, much to the relief of the country’s education sector, which had been plunged into crisis for four weeks.
At least 10 patients have been admitted to the cholera ward at the Mavalane General Hospital in Maputo over the last few days, and the health authorities blame the early outbreak of the disease, before the onset of the rainy season, on deteriorating sanitation conditions in the town, reports Wednesday's issue of the daily paper "Noticias".
As warlords, faction leaders, members of the Transitional National Government and others gather in the western Kenyan town of Eldoret for "make-or-break" peace talks, a small group of "alternative" invitees is slowly making its voice heard.
A cholera epidemic that erupted several weeks ago in Kasai Oriental Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has so far resulted in 89 deaths of a total of 324 reported cases in the region, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Monday.
Five thousand refugees from Meheba refugee camp in Solwezi have gone back to Angola following the signing of the peace accord in that country in September.
GAIA, an international NGO alliance with over 320 members in more than 60 countries, has called on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to improve its medical waste management practices and policies which currently threaten public health and the environment.
The Zambian government on Wednesday said a final decision on whether it would accept genetically modified (GM) food aid was "imminent". Officials, however, could not confirm an exact date when the announcement would be made.
Women lawyers in Swaziland have embarked on a campaign to alert both genders to the need for women's rights in a proposed new national constitution.
Thousands of drought-stricken people have migrated into one of Ethiopia’s most important national parks, threatening its ecosystem, the UN Emergencies Unit for Ethiopia (EUE) has warned.
The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) has welcomed most of the changes made by the South African Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications to the controversial Broadcasting Amendment Bill. This followed public hearings where numerous organisations criticised the Bill for attempting to transform the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) from a public broadcaster to a state broadcaster by increasing its accountability to the Minister of Communications.
Two police officers from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) stormed the newsroom of "The Chronicle" newspaper in Lilongwe, Malawi's capital, on 22 October 2002. They demanded to see reporter Levison Mwase, who was not in the newsroom at the time.
"Passport to Dignity," a human rights workbook, provides a comprehensive framework of the Beijing Platform for Action and recounts particular examples of women's initiatives throughout the world. It also has exercises that guide readers through a path of personal and group reflection on how to use human rights as a tool for systemic analysis, and social and economic transformation.
The International Women's Tribune Centre (IWTC), working in partnership with the International Development Research/Eastern and Southern Africa Office (IDRC/Nairobi), has developed a new information tool that offers direct access to information for women who are among the most marginalized in development --poor women with little or no reading ability. The starting place for this initiative is Africa and the starting point is a CD-ROM Rural Women in Africa: Ideas for Earning Money.
Women and children are generally most affected during times of conflict. During wartime, women and children are at particular risk of human rights abuses because of their lack of status in most societies. Such abuses include sexual and gender based violence, sexual exploitation and recruitment as soldiers, says a fact sheet prepared and circulated at the United Nations on October 23 by the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security.
Internews Network and Journalists Against AIDS (JAAIDS) Nigeria are currently accepting applications for the Project Manager position of the Local Voices program.
A journalist from Eritrea is one of the awardees of the International Press Freedom Awards 2002. Fesshaye Yohannes is a writer and co-founder of Setit, a popular Eritrean newspaper. He was imprisoned last September with nine other journalists after authorities banned all of Eritrea's independent newspapers for "jeopardizing national unity." He is being held incommunicado without charges.
Walden Bello believes the world requires a radical shift towards a decentralised, pluralistic system of economic governance allowing countries to follow development strategies appropriate to their needs and circumstances. This 'deglobalization' means radically reducing the powers and roles of the existing TNC-driven WTO and Bretton Woods institutions. And requires the formation of new institutions helping to devolve the greater part of production, trade and economic decisionmaking to national and local level.
Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signalled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anti-colonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the centre of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life.
Sudan has reacted angrily to a US resolution that threatens sanctions if the Khartoum government does not negotiate in good faith to end the country's 19-year-old civil war.
Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe say their supporters are being harassed by backers of the ruling party ahead of a local election in Matabeleland province in the southwestern part of the country. Opposition spokesman Paul Nyathi said 11 members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were arrested on Sunday in the Insiza district of Matabeleland and are now in police custody.
Three South African universities received R220 million from the United States National Institute for Health to be used in HIV-Aids research projects, officials said.
A number of organisations are challenging governments to fulfill promises made for funds to fight HIV/AIDS. To date, only around $1.8 billion of the $10 billion yearly target has been donated to the Global Fund by rich country governments. Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children and ICASO are all calling for a massive increase in funding from governments and the private sector.
Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who made history as Africa's first Nobel Laureate in Literature, last week became the first African writer to win the coveted Italian Vita di Poeta prize.
A recent meeting held in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss the uptake of the female condom reported success in its promotion, notably in Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. There was reported enthusiasm among women and men in certain communities who have preferred the female condom over the male condom.
US President George Bush plans to make his first visit to Africa at the end of January. He will not go empty handed, but a fear is that Bush will propose only a modest new Aids initiative without new funding.
Despite the withdrawal of foreign forces from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), "elite criminal networks" have become so deeply entrenched that continued illegal exploitation of the country's natural resources is assured, independent of the physical presence of foreign armies, said the latest report from the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC.
While the number of affected children is potentially large, very little is known about the welfare consequences of being an orphan in developing countries, where poverty is widespread and human capital is low.
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We, the Ministers of Finance and Planning and Economic Development—after meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, on October 2002, under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa—have reached consensus on many issues of critical importance in accelerating Africa’s progress and development.
New settlers have occupied only about half of the farmland confiscated by the government, in one of the country’s formerly most productive agricultural areas. This is close to a month after the expiry of the first deadline for them to move on.
The ICT and youth employment debate should have been stressing that a focus on access to digital technology distorts the reality of the problem. Instead, the debate should focus on the knowledge divide. The lack of access to low cost, relevant and reliable information is the real issue, as opposed to the actual form of technology used to deliver such information.
* Creating regional co-operation, stability, security and peace in the Horn of Africa involves re-appropriating and re-defining the state, civil society and market nexus of the region in order to create enduring institutional arrangements capable of self-correction, learning, self-reliance and innovation, argues this paper, presented at a conference entitled 'Horn of Africa: Cooperation instead of Wars and Destruction', held in Lund, Sweden between May 11-12 2002 and organised by the Somalia International Rehabilitation Centre. *
Civil society is neither good and peaceful nor violent and bad. It is neither all democratic nor all despotic. The concept is a generic term for containing and including every variety of association: grassroots organisations, civility expressing organisations, independent organisations, associational organisations, private organisations, private voluntary organisations, community based organisations and non-governmental and quasi- non governmental organisations. All those associations that are neither wholly market guided nor all state guided fall in the civil society sphere. Civil society is an old idea made newer by so- called third wave democratisation and the contemporary realities of a post cold war world. Its revival owes to the emergence of a globalising agenda driven largely by donor finance that dominates the world's intellectual, political and moral space and vision.
Civil society became popular after globalisation had fully discredited the planning state (e.g. former Soviet Union states) and the interventionist state (e.g. the Keynesian welfare state in the western states) in favour of a minimalist role of the state in the economy (the liberal state). It appears that globalisation and democratisation have changed world politics and economics in favour of the rich, markets, corporations, private finance or speculative capital, and against the poor, the state, trade unions and even non-financial capital. If state action cannot deliver better possibilities, it is said civil society, and non-profit making voluntary sectors, and community based organisations and other social networks and NGOs may step in. The role of NGOs is also related to helping reduce the most unacceptable side of the mainly economic driven globalising logic. It is this international context of globalisation that explains the emergence of the current interest and development on civil society. There is thus much value in identifying the ideological contamination of this concept from the current go-go globalisation and the rhetoric of democratisation in order to distil and rescue the role of civil society in development, peace- making, and in fostering security and long-term co-operation.
There are some important indicators that are necessary but not sufficient to measure the contribution of civil society in fostering co-operation, stability, security and peace building in the Horn of Africa area:
- Spreading a culture of civility as a counter weight to war and violence;
- Institutionalising a culture of service by community based self-organisations to counter rampant poverty and inequalities;
- Spreading ethics and moral sense as a civic culture and virtue in order to overcome prevailing social interchanges marred by violence, deception, force and blackmail;
- Creating a new standard for cultivating self-aware citizens at all levels to foster long-term co-operation, security, stability and peace in the region.
The question is whether the current array or constellation of civil society associations, communities and organisations as they are evolving and persisting to exist in the region contribute to civility and civilisation or war, poverty and discord. There is an assumption that creating and spreading these associational forms will strengthen civility, co-operation and peace. There is an equal assumption that market and state failures make the latter the least attractive candidates as agencies for civilised co-operation and peace. This benign approach to civil society and uncharitable approach to markets and the state should not be taken at face value. For example, in Somalia with the disintegration of the state, civil society has become the source for the perpetuation of unending horizontal violence. Armed civilians in the context of conflict can be as lethal as militaries. The civil action that is violent should not be criminalized if the objective is to end all violence and transform chaos and incoherence with social transformation underpinned by notions of justice and equity.
Thus taken by themselves, none of the institutional actors representing markets, civil society and the state are, a priori, innocent or guilty. The context of their existence and persistence matters in identifying the social content of their occurrences in time and space co-ordinates. They are all complex organisms. They all have their own specific functions and problems. They can do different things differently. As a heterogeneous and complex sphere, civil society too can be a factor of discord and violence. There is in fact military civil society operating as a transitional network at present that has alarmed the hyper power of our time to declare the world disposition of political forces into those with the hyper power or the rest. Civil society has to be scrutinized and re-conceptualised first before we admit that it can be a factor for peace and co-operation in the region.
Malawi has sacked the head of an anti-corruption team which was investigating allegations of government corruption on the grounds he was not familiar enough with the law, officials said on Wednesday.
Two former ministers have been arrested in connection with the disappearance of 2-billion kwacha in government money. An investigative tribunal last year found Peter Machungwa, then home affairs minister, and his counterpart in the works and supply ministry, Godden Mandandi, guilty of illegally diverting the money allocated to the parliament.
Nearly one million Ugandans have died of AIDS-related causes since the disease was first reported in the country in 1983, according to a report issued by the Ugandan Health Ministry.
Mass unemployment in Ethiopia is leading to an alarming rise in the illegal trafficking of women, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.
An independent commission has called for the return to their homes of thousands of people displaced by violent clashes around the time of Kenya's last two general elections, in 1992 and 1997.
War, fire, logging and agriculture are taking a heavy toll on Africa's mountain regions, says the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 84
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 84
Malawian farmers have been accused of removing posts that mark the Mozambique/Malawi border, in the western province of Tete, in order to extend their farms into Mozambican territory, reports "Noticias" on 27 September.
The South African government, in a statement on HIV/AIDS, has urged the country to "join hands so that we can together build on the progress that has been made in the fight against the epidemic, to intensify the campaign of hope."
Armed men of Mozambique's former rebel movement Renamo are accused by local residents of creating a climate of insecurity in the district of Maringue, in the central province of Sofala, according to Maringue administrator Augusto Matique, cited in Wednesday's issue of the Maputo daily paper "Noticias".
Zimbabwe's Minister of Information and Publicity, Professor Jonathan Moyo has called on readers and advertisers to boycott the private owned paper, The Daily News, for allegedly writing falsehoods and "undermining" "national" and "regional interests".
The victims of Nazism are continuing to receive reparations to this day, more than 50 years after the crime was committed. Morality apart, by parity of reasoning, the victims of apartheid MUST be compensated for the crime they suffered. The government of South Africa is itself, a victim of the crime of apartheid. It cannot conceivably be made to affect the reparations. It is the world corporations and the western governments that egged them on and benefitted from the loot, who should be made to pay reparations. Blow the trumpet loud until the deaf hear! (In response to Pambazuka News 83 - Calling Apartheid's Profiteers to Account)
Sibanze Simuchoba, Lusaka, Zambia
The government of the vast, poverty-stricken west African state of Mali resigned without public explanation on Saturday after only four months in office, but President Amadou Toumani Toure asked his prime minister to remain in office.
Nigerian leaders have appealed for calm as they urge their countrymen to accept a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handing sovereignty of the disputed oil-rich Bakassi peninsula to its neighbour Cameroon.
This book is a biography of Josiah Tshangana Gumede, the ANC leader most credited with cementing the ANC's longstanding relationship to the Soviet Union. The "dustheap of South African historiography" has claimed a number of casualties, one being JT Gumede. He is more well-known to a later generation as the father of Archie Gumede, one of the past presidents of the now-defunct United Democratic Front. The book surveys his controversial career as an African political leader in the early 20th century, as a civil rights leader and leading opponent of racial injustice and points to his historical importance.
Richard Feachem, director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that the fund will run out of money by the middle of next year unless it receives new donations, the Boston Globe reports. The fund has received $2.1 billion in pledges but has collected only $500 million.
Chimurenga is an advertising-free self-funded journal of arts, culture, politics and the bedroom relations that these enjoy around Africa. Chimurenga appears 4 times a year, including one special edition.
“Giving and Sharing - A national awareness campaign to highlight, honour and strengthen volunteerism and philanthropy in South Africa" will take place between 8-15 November 2002. The campaign is to encourage and challenge all NGO's to develop relationships with the media and to share their good news stories; and all Non-Profit organisations to find creative ways of showing appreciation to their supporters.
In a submission to the ILO Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalisation, which holds its third meeting in Geneva on 12 - 16 October, the ICFTU has called for social governance and regulation to be put at the centre of globalisation. The ICFTU submission points to the tremendous imbalance between economic and social interests in the world economy, with financial crises hitting a succession of countries over recent years, major companies collapsing due to dishonesty, mismanagement and corruption, and increasing violations of workers' rights around the world.
The conflict prevention organ of the African Union has expressed its “serious concern” about the crisis in Ivory Coast and its implications for peace, security, stability and development in the region, condemning the attempt to take power by force and stressing the need for an immediate ceasefire.
The Child Protection Officer leads, manages and supervises the child protection component of Save the Children's Children in Emergencies and Crises Project in Guinea. He/she will provide technical support and leadership to field staff in this area.
An experienced medical coordinator within the NGO sector is required to manage medical activities on our primary health care programme in Maniema. Current project activites focus on improving the quality of basic curative services including limited support to secondary referral level care, intensifying maternal and child health services through the introduction of IMCI and SMI strategies, piloting community based malaria control activities, introducing cost-recovery systems and strengthening the health service management capacity of Bureaux Centraux des Zônes de Santé (BCZS).
Handicap International started a programme in 1992 when Somaliland self-proclaimed independence from the South of Somalia. After several years of conflict, the political situation is now steady and allows development of 3 projects and 1 in Djibouti.
This is an exciting opportunity to play a lead role in SC-UK's innovative programme in Angola. Angola is currently undergoing significant change as a result of the recent cease-fire and peace process, and as Deputy Programme Director, you would have a key role to play in developing and implementing SC-UK's response to the changing context. In Angola since 1989, SC-UK's Angola programme currently has an annual budget of approximately £3million and 250 staff.
The failure of the short belg rains, coupled with the late onset of the long meher rains, are pushing as many as 10.2 million Ethiopians to the edge of hunger. A multi-agency nutrition study, released last week, classified many midland and lowland parts of West Hararghe, Ethiopia, as "critical", with 15.1 percent of children under 5 suffering from global acute and severe acute (3.6 percent) malnutrition.
Until a couple of weeks ago the Welcome to Sierra Leone sign at the airport said: "If you cannot help us please do not corrupt us." Now it has been removed, perhaps because it was deemed inappropriate to suggest that all visitors were either useless or evil. If they were, they would find plenty of soulmates in Freetown, where corruption is rife. Visiting businessmen say they are constantly asked for "dash" - the local word for bribes - when dealing with officials. "If you complain about a junior official, his boss reprimands him then asks for twice as much for himself. The higher up the system you go, the more they ask for," said one company executive.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has dispatched an assessment team to Liberia to review the situation of the internally displaced persons (IDPs), the IOM reported on Friday.
Benin has intensified a national campaign against child labour which has attracted at least 600,000 children in a population of 6.7 million people, the InterPress Agency reported last Thursday.
"Art is usually designed for places that exclude the folks from dwellings like Bessengue. If some artists sometimes think about them it is usually done in their name, without really involving the populations. The idea that art could be instrumental in shaping what they would call development, is brought by the populations of Bessengue themselves through their development committee. Art does not pretend here to solve problems. It simply works to shape visions."
South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma announced last week that the government has undertaken steps to distribute nevirapine universally to state hospitals in an attempt to reduce the nation's mother-to-child HIV transmission rate, Reuters reports.
Thisday (Pty) Ltd has announced it will focus its energies on launching a new national weekly newspaper in South Africa, the company said on Thursday.
Civil war created Mozambique's first orphan crisis. A decade on, the country is threatened by a new emergency which is much more devastating and much harder to solve. In 16-years of civil war, 200,000 children were torn from their homes. After the signing of the 1992 General Peace Accord, most of them were reunited with their families or foster parents. Today, HIV/AIDS has already left an estimated 418,000 children orphaned, according to UNAIDS figures.
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said last week that shareholders were failing to call companies to account for poor corporate governance. Speaking at a conference on shareholder activism, Manuel said that while shareholders had a right to oversee the affairs of a company, this right was "tragically too often ignored".
Teodato Hunguana, a leading parliamentary deputy from Mozambique's ruling Frelimo Party, last Wednesday called for a return to the practice of "political and organisational offensives" to deal with corruption.
The Africa project is part of the IFP/SEED Women's Entrepreneurship Development and Gender Equality (WEDGE) unit. Participants in the Africa conferences will include ILO constituents, associations of women entrepreneurs, government departments, other support agencies and non governmental organizations.
After several months of negotiations Angola's former rebel group UNITA was unified this week, paving the way for national reconciliation and the implementation of outstanding aspects of the 1994 Lusaka peace agreement.
The Nigerian government's recent action to crack down on the vigilante group known as the Bakassi Boys is welcome but more fundamental reforms are needed, Human Rights Watch says.
Related Link:
http://irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=30358
The Ugandan independent 'Monitor' daily newspaper, whose operations have been suspended over a controversial story, is now facing court action on charges of "publishing false information" regarding sensitive state security matters, a senior army official said on Monday.
The Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network looks at the challenges women face trying to access e-mail and Internet and innovative projects that provide ways for women to engage with and help develop ICT's and how they are used for development.
The USAID HIV/AIDS E-Newsletter provides monthly updates on USAID and partner activities to prevent and mitigate HIV/AIDS worldwide.
The Strengthening Gender & Women's Studies for Africa's Transformation (GWS Africa) project web site is the first ever site, wholly dedicated to the promotion and development of Gender and Women's Studies on the African continent. The African Gender Institute has established www.gwsafrica.org in collaboration with the community of scholars currently engaged in gender studies all over the continent, and we invite ongoing dialogue and networking.
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has accused some non-governmental organisations (NGO's) of meddling in the country's internal affairs and said his government will regulate them, a newspaper said on Saturday.
While the fight against female genital mutilation (FGM) could be assumed to be making some headway in Africa, a unique case of the practice in Mauritania is of great concern. A study carried out recently on this female rite in that country reveals stunning facts about the communities' interpretation of the practice. Even more alarming is that the majority population, composed of four ethnic groups, undergo this practise.
A few months after the mysterious death in June 1998 of General Sani Abacha, his finance minister, Chief Anthony Ani, then no longer a minister, called a press conference in Lagos during which he said that his boss had repeatedly ignored his advice against the withdrawal of huge sums of money in local and foreign currency from the Central Bank of Nigeria, by Abacha's National Security Adviser, Alhaji Ismaila Gwarzo. All told, said Ani, Gwarzo had, among other things, withdrawn over 1.3 billion dollars over a period of nearly two years before Abacha's death.
The Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Marc Destannes de Bernis, says preservation of the environment should not be seen as contradictory to economic growth and social development.
Almost daily a steady stream of young girls queue at the check in of Addis Ababa international airport - destined for the Middle East. Smartly dressed, wearing makeup they laugh and joke with each other. All long for a new life abroad with promises of high wages and a good job. Yet for most that dream becomes a nightmare as they are forced into prostitution or a slave-like existence as housemaids working 20 hours a day without pay.
In order to transport half a million dollars in unlaundered cash safely from one country to another there are two basic requirements. First, you must possess a business class ticket, because the weight of half a million dollars exceeds the hand luggage limit on Economy. Second, you must disembark at an airport where customs officials may be relied upon not to ask questions. Harare International Airport has provided precisely such facilities in recent years; foreign associates of the Zimbabwean government have provided the business class tickets and the millions in cash.
Angolan refugees arriving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are staying in "very poor conditions" in the eastern town of Luau, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.
Congolese tribal fighters backed by the government seized control of a strategic eastern Congolese port from rebels Sunday after two days of heavy fighting, a rebel official said.
Uhuru Kenyatta's name is on everyone's lips now that he has been nominated as the ruling party's presidential candidate to succeed Daniel arap Moi. He is, of course, known as the son of Kenya's founding president, the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, but he is only just beginning to emerge from his father's shadow.
Related Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/africa/2324965.stm
The Swaziland Royal Police, acting on a court order, raided Channel S, the only privately-owned television station in the country, and confiscated a video tape containing a sermon that has been termed by the Swazi government as "threatening the foundations of the kingdom."
Zambia National Students Union (ZANASU) president Godfrey Kumwenda, who represented Zambia at a congress in Windhoek, Namibia, said students wanted governments in the SADC region to abandon policies that pleased western capitalists, especially with regards to the privatisation of the education sector.
An expanding body of evidence challenges the conventional hypothesis that sexual transmission is responsible for more than 90% of adult HIV infections in Africa. Differences in epidemic trajectories across Africa do not correspond to differences in sexual behavior. Studies among African couples find low rates of heterosexual transmission, as in developed countries.
The public media’s coverage of the fuel shortages and the just ended local government elections further illustrated the undesirability of government’s control of the media. The public media confined its coverage of the two issues to defending government’s handling the fuel crisis without explaining what was really happening, while simply ignoring the violent intimidation of the opposition in the recent polls.
The Combined Harare Residents Association has launched a petition to dispute the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing in imposing another commission in Harare, Zimbabwe.
The ruling MPLA party in Angola has slammed a report from Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian non-governmental organisation. MPLA information secretary Noberto dos Santos deplored the attitude of the report and said its authors were "meddling in internal issues of the Angolan State". The report detailed how both the government and UNITA had used civilians as weapons of war.
“I don't want to be buried under the new deal government's new dirty carpet,” Heritage Party president Brigadier General Godfrey Miyanda has said. In a complaint letter to Law Association of Zambia (LAZ) chairman Michael Musonda against Solicitor General Sunday Nkonde's request for the court to declare him a vexatious litigant, Brig. Gen. Miyanda stated that the country was currently being threatened by hoodlums.
Angola needs an extensive and urgent demining programme to kick-start development and reconstruction after 30 years of war, national demining coordinator Balbina Silva says.
Easing a total ban on ivory trading could lead to the devastation of elephant populations in Asia and Africa, conservationist Richard Leakey said Monday. Leakey, who is also a leading paleontologist, said moves by five African countries to reinstate a legal ivory trade at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting next month will lead to an increase in illegal trade.
Recent news reports indicate some positive signs in the fight against the AIDS pandemic - the Global Fund expects to release its first grant funds by the end of the year; the South African government has issued a Cabinet statement affirming its intention to use anti-retrovirals in the public health sector; and Coca-Cola has announcing a limited expansion of its treatment programs for workers. But the overall picture is that the funds being provided are a trickle compared to what is needed, says Africa Action, who have compiled a variety of documents and links on the latest in the fight against AIDS.
African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development are due to meet in South Africa from 19 - 21 October to discuss what it will take to effectively implement the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has donated $5 million to provide "community support for the care and development" of AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, the Harare Herald/AllAfrica.com reports.
Poor developing countries have so far contributed relatively little to the causes of global warming yet many of these countries will bear the brunt of climate change through loss of food production. The burden will undoubtedly fall disproportionately on the poorest and most vulnerable, says the International Institute for Applied Systems in a report dealing with climate change and agricultural vulnerability.
If the bribery and cronyism that have so incensed anti-corruption crusaders are to be exposed and opposed, so too must corporate profiteering and monopolistic practices which heap misery upon people and plunder natural resources the world over. Above all, stresses Aziz Choudry, a clear position must be taken to confront the corrupt worldview which underpins the neoliberal agenda of shaping the world in the interests of big business.