CONTENTS: 1. Features, 2. Advocacy & campaigns 3. Jobs & announcements

Features

Raila or Uhuru, Kenyans will lose again in 2017

Citizens must now rise up and start building the people’s revolution

Henry Makori

Kenyan elections have become increasingly delinked from the quest to meet the needs and aspirations of the people. They are almost entirely an elite circus providing the self-absorbed, politically impotent urban middle classes with something to Tweet about - or to pontificate on from the comfort of the bar stool - and the peasants perhaps a few coins or a branded T-shirt and free entertainment every five years.

We should be only Nigerians

Sam Amadi

The problem with Nigeria is that the basic logic and structure of its governance is neo-feudal and aristocratic and its salvation requires a radical reinvention and institutionalization as a modern democratic state based on an enriched and lived concept of citizenship.

Are we all Biafrans?

Abdul Mahmud

Insofar the Nigerian state continues to trample on the rights of citizens, abandons its constitutional responsibility of securing lives and property, ensures unequal distribution of social and economic wealth and guarantees the greatest happiness for the smallest number, we are all Biafrans.

Pan-Africanism, feminism and finding missing pan-Africanist women

Ajamu Nangwaya

There are numerous women in the African Diaspora who have worked for the liberation of Africans under the banner of Pan-Africanism. They must be rescued from political obscurity. Pan-Africanism as a revolutionary ideology must firmly embrace feminism.
 

A tribute to Franklyn Harvey (Feb. 14, 1943 to May 16, 2016)

Mathew Quest

A native of Grenada but with influence throughout the Caribbean, Franklyn Harvey, a civil engineer, made his mark in radical history by coordinating and facilitating the empowerment of everyday people through promoting their direct self-government.

Malcolm X at 91: A foremost revolutionary Pan-Africanist

Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali

Malcolm X is widely credited with spreading Black nationalism and revolutionary Pan-Africanism in the Western Hemisphere. On a visit to Nigeria, he was given the name Omowale, which means in the Yoruba language, “the son who has come home.”

Africa’s rising middle class: Time to sort out fact from fiction

Henning Melber

It takes quite some fantasy to imagine how, based on the living costs in Africa’s urban centres, a $2-a-day threshold catapults someone from the $1.99 margin as criteria for poor into a middle-class existence. And then into playing a pioneering role in the continent’s future transformation.
 

A child’s eye view of corruption

Daniel Agbiboa

The author refreshingly re-engages with the public discourse, rumours, gossips and local idioms of corruption in her native Liberia in a way that strips it of its taken-for-grantedness in popular discourse, and subjects it to a much more rigorous analysis. The book expands the focus of corruption to interrogate its embeddedness in social life and routine forms.
 

The Worried Mother: What is ahead?

Lemlem Tsegaw

Millions of Ethiopians are facing famine again, which is attributed to drought but in reality has its roots in the country’s failed governance. In this poem, an Ethiopian in the diaspora turns

Drums of war in Venezuela

Atilio A. Boron

Empire has mobilized all its devices to end, at any price, the Bolivarian Revolution even at the cost of plunging Venezuela into a bloodbath. But the people will offer fierce resistance to any invasion and volunteers throughout Latin America will come to their aid. Solidarity with the people and the Bolivarian government is now more urgent than ever to prevent the execution of yet another sinister interventionist maneuver in the Global South.

Without adequate reflection, new refugee solutions risk failing

Chris Dolan

Women’s rights were not won by men, LGBTI rights were not won by straight people, and refugee rights will not be won by non-refugees.

African American museum to open in Washington

Abayomi Azikiwe

Despite the continuing oppression of 45 million Blacks, the United States will open one of the largest of such institutions in the country.

The moral complexities of eating 'Nyama Choma'

Ronald Elly Wanda

The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat offers an appetizing sociological account of food politics, contemporary patterns of cultural identity, and the effect of meat-eating as an informal hypothesis of unity that can be useful in a country such as Kenya, whose metaphoric ‘man eat man’ greasy politics are well documented.
 

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Salutes Africa

Venezuela celebrates Africa Day

Jhonny Balza Arismendi

In Venezuela since 2005, we reindivicate every 10th of May the Afro -Venezuelan day. We reindivicate the uprising of Jose Leonardo Chirinos (1795), an afrodescendant rebel against slavery and in favour of equality. Another month of May that stimulates us and invites us to devote our words of encouragement to the African continent. is May 25th, 2016, we celebrate the Day of Africa, we celebrate its resilience, the validity of those pro-independence ideas that forged the birth of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU). e Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and our people are committed to the future of Africa. 
 

Advocacy & campaigns

Pambazuka News is a publication of FAHAMU