Governance

January 17, 2013 is a memorable day for the entire people of Somalia. It will be marked as a day for jubilation.

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.

When Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States for the second time on January 21, 2013 in the 57th presidential inauguration, the forces that mobilized to reelect Barack Obama temporarily celebrated.

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.

On 12 October 2012, the UN Security Council voted unanimously in favour of a French-drafted resolution asking Mali’s government to draw up plans for a military mission to re-establish control over the northern part of Mali, an area of the Sahara bigger than France.

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.

The three year anniversary of the 12 January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was marked yet again by a flood gate of new reports, opinions, fact and figures.

If there is one core factor underpinning systemic power imbalances between women and men in the food system, it is the overriding influence of the ‘market place’ on society. Societal power and earning capacity make up the two sides of the same coin – one feeds the other.

It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts.’ -- Charlie Marlow from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The vision that Conrad's character Marlow describes is of a French frigate firing broadsides into a vast African jungle, in essence, bombarding a continent.