Governance

The 2013 election was pivotal in many respects. It was the first election under the new constitution promulgated in August 2010.

Born in 1942 in the Transkei, he was politicised by the sheer poverty that he saw around him in his early life. He joined the ANC’s Youth League at the age of 15, and quickly went on to become a dedicated organiser.

This issue of Pambazuka News focuses on Hugo Chavez, the fallen socialist revolutionary leader of Venezuela whom, no doubt, the capitalist West and their toadies in the rest of the world would like to forget in a hurry.

‘All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.’ - C. Wright Mills

Some commentators, such as Jim O’Neill, the now retired Goldman Sachs executive, who first coined the term BRICS to refer to the fast-growing emerging markets, question whether South Africa should be a member of BRICS.

INTRODUCTION

On 5 March 2013, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and one of the outstanding leaders of Latin America, lost a two-year battle with cancer and passed away.

The Pan-Afrikan Community Movement (PACM) is a newly formed grassroots Pan-Africanist community-based movement of youths, students, women and employed and unemployed workers in Sierra Leone.

The President of the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA), Egyptian economist Samir Amin, today paid tribute to the late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, whose death he called a ‘great tragedy.’

Whilst Latin America underwent what was dubbed a ‘pink’ revolution in the 1990s and the decade of the noughties, Africa continued with its spineless neo-colonial leaders despite the crop of seeming charismatic and young leaders such as Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, Eritrea’s Isaias Afewerki, Rwanda’s