Comment & analysis

The fortunes of the Nairobi-based United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) could change drastically in the wake of a damning report by the UK’s Department of International Development (DFID) that suggests that the organisation is riddled with irregularities.

If Muammar Gadaffi’s wicked son Saif al-Islam is to be believed, we will soon be witnessing ‘rivers of blood’ in Benghazi in Libya to shame even the Middle East’s most murderous tyrants, worse even than Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Gaza residents two years ago and its 2006 invasion of Lebanon (alth

Following the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, many bloggers, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, political commentators and the mainstream media as a whole have been debating and forecasting that the revolutionary fervour will undoubtedly spread to sub-Saharan Africa, sooner or la

On 24 February last week a right-wing British mainstream newspaper, The Evening Standard’s business section, had a major piece on the price of oil. All the calculations were based on a scenario in which Algeria would follow Libya.

Some 33 kilometers along the Thika-Garissa highway, a small and sleepy shopping centre sticks out like a sore thumb.

The way migration is discussed in this country one would think it is a problem of the US alone and not a global phenomenon about people’s movement, displacement and mistreatment across national boundaries.

I am enormously honoured by the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD) to be delivering this lecture in honour of Dennis Brutus, in part because the Mandela Metropole was a home in so many material, spiritual and political w

The levels of anger are steadily rising among the poor in direct proportion to the number of empty promises made to them. Their lives are defined by violence; unemployment; poor housing; poor schooling; corruption at municipal level in addition to incompetence; and hunger.

Citizens in Equatorial Guinea trying to take advantage of the government’s pledge to allow greater citizen participation continue to face serious obstacles that hinder their efforts, EG Justice said in Lmb">a report released on 3 March.

Dear Jimmy,

Let us drop titles for the purpose of a necessary exchange. So let us forget for now that I am a cabinet minister and that you are a director-general equivalent, in the same government.

I want to address you simply as a compatriot South African.