Burkina Faso installed Monday 1 August a new election commission after the previous one was dismissed amid criticism over November elections that handed President Blaise Compaore a large victory. The newly composed Independent National Electoral Commission will have to organise next year's municipal and legislative elections amid unprecedented tensions which have seen military mutinies and other unrest this year.

The blog Rantings of a Sand Monkey reflects on what it means to be an activist in Tahrir Square. '...what intrigued me and got me moving around, doing things and staying there,' he writes, 'was the fascinating social experiment that the sit-in was creating. In essence, Tahrir was very quickly becoming a miniature-size Egypt, with all of its problems, but without a centralized government. And the parallels are uncanny.'

Zambia's President Rupiah Banda launched his re-election campaign on 1 August with scathing attacks on his main challenger Michael Sata, describing him as a 'crook' that 'behaves like a punch-drunk boxer'. The president also pledged to sustain the country's economic growth if given another chance to lead the southern Africa country.

The ANC Youth league and its leader, Julius Malema, have been publicly rebuked by the ANC for calling for 'regime change' in Botswana and describing its president as 'a puppet'. In a harsh statement issued by ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu, the ANC said: 'This insult and disrespect to the President [Ian Khama], the government and the people of Botswana, and a threat to destabilise and effect regime change in Botswana, is a clear demonstration that the ANCYL's ill-discipline has clearly crossed the political line.'

The April 6 Youth Movement said that the movement, alongside 25 political powers, decided to suspend its sit-in in Tahrir Square until the end of Ramadan. 'We want to facilitate the traffic flow during Ramadan and put into consideration the special circumstances related to this holy month,' Amr Aly, member of the group's political bureau said.The movement said that it would continue exerting pressure on the government to execute the rest of their demands including ending the military prosecution of civilians, sacking the Prosecutor General, cleansing the interior ministry and setting a reasonable minimum and maximum wage.

A massive shortfall in funding for African infrastructure projects is costing the continent up to three per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) a year, a senior African Development Bank official said. 'The gap right now is something like $45 billion a year and that gap is dragging down economic growth in Africa by as much as 3 percent of GDP,' Mthuli Ncube, chief economist for the lender, said at a launch event for its annual economic outlook. 'The most critical area is energy - power. Any power outages are bound to cause massive problems for growth.'

Early last month, pharmaceutical titan Merck became the latest multinational to pledge allegiance to the CEO Water Mandate, the United Nations' public-private initiative 'designed to assist companies in the development, implementation and disclosure of water sustainability policies and practices'. But there's darker data beneath that sunny marketing: The CEO Water Mandate has been heavily hammered by the Sierra Club, the Polaris Institute and more for exerting undemocratic corporate control over water resources (PDF) under the banner of the United Nations.

Civil society organisations want East African governments to scrap tax incentives as a stimulus for investment inflows and development accelerator. Speaking during a roundtable discussion in Nairobi, Kenya on Wednesday, activists said incentives hinder the entry of revenue and have no empirical results to prove their efficacy and impact to investment. The meeting - organised by the Tax Justice Network-Africa and ActionAid International Kenya - attracted policy makers, academics, tax administrators and business leaders in the EAC.

President Goodluck Jonathan walked into the National Executive Committee (NEC) hall at the Peoples Democratic Party national secretariat in Abuja (PDP) recently to meet a tribe of anxious party faithfuls. They had gathered in the hall for the 56th meeting of the NEC, the first since the end of April general elections, to discuss the various issues confronting the ruling party. But prior to Mr Jonathan’s arrival, party members were overheard discussing the proposed amendment to the constitution to bring about a single term for the country’s president and state governors, which the incumbent, through his media aide, Reuben Abati, had offered explanations on, but which has raised the country’s political temperature.

The Tanzanian Government has come under pressure to make public the revised version of the Constitutional Review Act 2011. Participants at a weekend meeting accused the government of being reluctant to issue the document and vowed that they would not relent in their quest to have it released. The chairman of the Constitutional Debate Forum, Mr Deus Kibamba, said the government appeared not to be ready for change, and was trying to delay the process. The country might experience chaos should the process of writing the new constitution not be transparent, he said.

Unless Malawi’s government does something to find solutions to its economic and governance problems, the country will see more nationwide protests like the ones last week where 18 people were killed and 275 arrested, analysts say. Mustapha Hussein, a political analyst at the University of Malawi, told IPS that Mutharika should start taking the concerns of Malawians seriously before things get out of hand. 'The president seems to not be ready to accept blame for the economic and governance problems facing the country. There will be bigger protests in the country than what we just saw should the government not move fast in addressing the issues that are being raised,' said Hussein.

In 2005, countries in the wider East African region launched a master plan that would finally sort out the region’s perennial power woes. The East African Power Pool (EAPP) was to exploit the enormous hydropower potential in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda, the geothermal potential in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, natural gas in Tanzania and Rwanda and coal in Tanzania and the DR Congo. Six years later, the region’s power troubles seem to be going from bad to worse - Kenya this week joined Tanzania and Uganda in the growing list of East African Community countries rationing power to domestic and industrial consumers.

Concerned with a low rate of voter registration, Tunisia's Independent High Electoral Commission (ISIE) is in the midst of a major push to encourage citizens to register for the country's historic 23 October elections. Tunisians have until Tuesday (2 August) to register to vote for the Constituent Assembly elections.

In April of this year, Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika delivered his state of the nation address, entitled ‘A Promise Delivered’. Well, from what is currently happening in the country (which some observers liken to the ongoing uprising in the Arab world), nothing there remotely resembles a promise delivered. As far as I can make out, things in Malawi look more like a promise undelivered to me. Now 19 people have reportedly been killed by the police in an attempt to squash the anti-government protests.

Here is the deal: unleashing soldiers and police on a peaceful citizens’ demonstration protesting against economic mismanagement is not delivering a promise. Signing a bill into law that bans any publication deemed not to be in the public interest (including a law that makes it impossible for individuals to obtain a court injunction and seek judicial redress against the government) cannot be termed as a promise delivered. Nor can postponing the local government elections mean a promise delivered.

Stifling academic freedom as with the detention of Dr. Blessings Chinsinga because he discussed the Arab uprising during a political science lecture is not a promise delivered. Currently four Chancellor College lecturers, including Dr Chinsinga and Dr Jessie Kabwila-Kapasula, have been fired under mysterious circumstances. And neither is lavish spending to promote your own book (as the president did in January) a promise delivered.

Expelling the British High Commissioner from Malawi for a leaked embassy cable that referred to you as ‘autocratic and intolerant of criticism’ is not delivering a promise. In response, the UK (the largest aid donor to Malawi) decided to go on the offensive by expelling the Malawian representative, and froze all new aid, the country’s main life support as 40 per cent of Malawi’s budget comes from international aid. The outcomes: fuel and energy shortages, severe foreign exchange (forex) shortages, and depreciation of Malawi’s local currency, the kwacha.

But the big picture is that wa Mutharika’s behaviour and his response to citizens’ demands for more democracy are similar to how dictators behave when their reign is threatened. They try by any means to stifle criticism through state violence, using the soldiers and police at their disposal.

But also the behavior also tells the true but sad story of this relatively peaceful southern African country. For decades Malawi has seen leaders/rulers who treated the country as a private company for personal gains. The first postcolonial president, Dr Kamuzu Banda (Ngwazi, the great lion, or Mkango wapfuko laMalaw, the lion of Malawi, as he preferred to be called) turned Malawian citizens into subjects, and the country into Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi, Inc. Kamuzu’s successor, Professor Bakili Muluzi was accused of dictatorial tendencies, including imposing Mutharika on the people. There is no love left between Bakili and Mutharika now, but if there is anything Mutharika learned from his predecessor it is how to impose his will on the Malawian people. Apparently, he is also now plotting to pave a political path for his own brother, Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika (yes another professor!) to be Malawi’s next president.

The bottom line: despite the presidential rhetoric, promises of economic and social development, reduction of poverty, and promotion of peace have not been delivered to the citizens of Malawi.

The debate on the United States public debt ceiling is ‘really another gambit to step up class warfare against the majority of American citizens and the planet by the growing political power of the top one per cent of US society,’ argues Horace Campbell.

Eritrea was behind a plot to attack an African Union summit in Ethiopia in January and is bankrolling al Qaeda-linked Somali rebels through its embassy in Kenya, according to a UN report. A UN Monitoring Group report on Somalia and Eritrea said the Red Sea state's intelligence personnel were active in Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya and Somalia, and that the country's actions posed a threat to security and peace in the region.

The appointment of Dr Willy Mutunga as chief justice in Kenya is a welcome development, writes Katto K. Wambua, but the wider public’s optimism needs to be tempered with pragmatism to avoid unrealistic expectations and subsequent frustration.

Thirteen activists from Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe (ROHR) were arrested by the police outside the High Court on Wednesday (27 July), for protesting against ongoing human rights abuses in the country. ROHR said their activists were protesting against the continued incarceration of eight MDC-T activists who have remained behind bars since they were arrested on 29 May.

The top United Nations peacekeeping official has reported that more than 500 troops with the new UN mission in the disputed Abyei area of Sudan have been deployed and both of the contesting sides appear committed to avoiding combat and willing to withdraw in favour of the blue helmets. But Alain Le Roy, the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, told a meeting of the Security Council that 'deployment difficulties' in working with the Sudanese government have left some of the troops facing a 'critical food shortage'.

Zambia's President Rupiah Banda has put this year's general vote on Tuesday, 20 September. Incumbent Zambian President and top contender under the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) stable, Rupiah Banda announced the election day during a live broadcast to the nation.