Governance

A Kenyan visiting Zimbabwe for up to 90 days does not require a visa. I confirmed this from the country’s Nairobi embassy website. However, just to be double sure ahead of my trip, I made additional inquiries from several people in the know, including Zimbabweans.

Today (2nd September 2013) marks exactly one year since journalist Daudi Mwangosi was brutally murdered at the hands of the Tanzania Police. His only crime was being a journalist. As the sole breadwinner, his demise meant a new life of suffering for his dependants.

I have been meaning to do my own reflections of the 20th anniversary of the Insight newspaper, but I kept postponing it, as each time I tried to put my ideas together, so many things raced to the fore, competing for priority.

It is Prof. Ali Mazrui who once observed that ‘Africans consume what they do not produce and produce what they do not consume.’ How true this axiom is with regard to media in Africa!

Legislators in The Gambia recently passed a bill that clamps down on free expression on the internet.

There is not a lot of money in African journalism. As an African journalist, I know this all too well. An illustrative example: I was in South Sudan in November 2012, on a trip I was financing myself.

Strike is an organised work stoppage by a body of workers to enforce compliance with demands made on an employer or a group of employers.

The land dispossession of the African indigenous majority was the primary contradiction of the liberation struggle against colonialism. At the negotiations table with the apartheid regime, land dispossession of the African people vanished like mist and became a taboo.

Zimbabwe had its presidential elections on 31 July 2013. Elections as in rigged. Robert Mugabe, the senile octogenarian and the only president since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, ‘won’ for the seventh time by 61 percent of the vote.

• The Muslim Brotherhood rule lasted just over a year, why did the collapse come so soon?