Dominicano Mulenga, national coordinator of Zambia's Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit, goes through his to-do list as the rainy season sets in: Industrial pumps to suck water out of the roads serviced. Tick. Enough stocks of tents and mosquito nets. Tick. Mobile phones delivered to communities living along the upper catchment areas of the River Zambezi. Check. 'We do not want a repeat of the situation from last year, when 1,000 people were displaced in Lusaka [the Zambian capital] alone because of poor drainage,' said Mulenga. Mulenga is one of several officials in Southern Africa gearing up for the rainy season which normally goes on until the end of March 2011.

Gunmen have attacked an off shore oil rig operated by exploration firm, Afren, kidnapping five crew members including foreigners and injuring two others, the company said on Monday. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) made no immediate claim of responsibility but threatened to carry out new attacks on oil infrastructure in the country. A resurgence of violence in the Niger Delta would be an embarrassment for President Goodluck Jonathan, who is the first Nigerian President from the region.

The police have reportedly issued a warrant of arrest against Wilf Mbanga the London-based editor of The Zimbabwean newspaper following publication of a story linked to the death of a senior official with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) in 2008. Mbanga is accused of publishing a story after the 2008 elections 'which undermined President Robert Mugabe'. According to The Zimbabwean, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) reported that the police want to question Mbanga over an article published in The Zimbabwean following the death of ZEC director for polling, Ignatius Mushangwe.

Delegates drawn from African governments, international organisations, parliaments and civil society agreed on Friday, 5 November 2010 in Tunis that the time had come for African countries to rely more on their internal resources, such as taxation, the capital markets and better prices for their valuable commodities, and less on international aid for development. The second Regional Meeting on Aid Effectiveness, jointly organised by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Union and NEPAD, convened on 4 and 5 February 2010, in preparation for the fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, to be held in Busan, Korea, in November 2011.