Comment & analysis

Earlier this month, French troops were sent to Mali, an African country once colonized by an expansionist French state. Unlike the 1980s when Paris periodically sent troops to protect its neocolonial interests in Africa, France’s military objectives in Mali in 2013 are perceptibly different.

Last year, as part of the annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, one of President Obama’s top advisors paid a visit to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. King’s former church.

I am admittedly a Francophobe.

The tiny kingdom of Swaziland in southern Africa is getting ready for a national parliamentary election this year, amid expectations that the outcome will be a fraud on democracy.

The terror group Boko Haram would have been history by now had its bandits been operating in Niger or Chad. This is for the simple reason that security agents in those countries are abreast with terror groups and their antics and could have easily routed them.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections many were those, including this writer, who expressed grave concern over a seemingly looming catastrophe (see for example, Is Ghana at the brink of election after-shocks? .

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was martyred on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee when a gunman killed him at the Lorraine Motel. The motel today has become an important civil rights museum as well as a depository for some of the civil rights movement’s historical artifacts.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s write-up titled “We Remember Differently: Tribute to Chinua Achebe @ 82” posted in Saharareporters on 24 November 2012 and published in The Guardian of Sunday, November 25, 2012 on pages 34- 35 was a good effort.

The recent decision by the Namibian Ministry of Education to scrap school fees at primary schools can only be applauded. This expresses the reality that education is a social right and a necessity for all.

Oil, diamonds, religious extremism and political violence. Despite her persistent and sometimes open violent conflicts, Africa is looking forward to a relatively peaceful and prosperous 2013.