The blog features a selection of photographs from South African photographer Lizane Louw, who has spent three years chronicling the lives of the people of Blikkiesdorp (translation: Tin Town), a temporary relocation camp in Delft, located about 30 km from Cape Town's city centre. 'I don’t think it is ethically and morally acceptable that people that are poor must live in such challenging and substandard living conditions. Something needs to be done and we need to seriously reflect on ourselves as a society, when these things happen in your backyard without us attempting to do anything about it,' she is quoted as saying.

DR Congo's National Independent Electoral Commission has registered 31.4 million voters for the November elections. The announcement was made by the commission chairman, the Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunga, following the completion of the first phase of the updating of the electoral roll. DRC’s population is estimated to be 65 million people. With 48 per cent of these already enrolled to vote, this will be a big increase compared to the last election in 2006.

The United Nations is set to declare famine in parts of southern Somalia, signalling to donors the need for more aid and to insurgents that the population's suffering is being taken seriously. Mark Bowden, humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, was expected to make the announcement in Nairobi, based on fresh data from the food security and nutrition analysis unit for the violent Horn of Africa country, aid officials told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday. 'It will declare famine in several areas of southern Somalia,' a Geneva-based aid worker said. The world body has described the Horn of Africa drought as an emergency, one level short of a famine, citing dire levels of acute malnutrition among Somali children reaching camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Beji Caid Essebsi, the Tunisian prime minister, has said that a new outbreak of deadly violence in Tunisia is designed to prevent the country holding its first post-revolution elections. 'There were disturbances aimed at preventing elections,' said Essebsi during an address to the nation on Monday. 'These elections will be held on 23 October as scheduled.' Voters will choose a constituent assembly that will write a new constitution that will pave the way for legislative and presidential polls.

President Mwai Kibaki has assured that the Government is committed to undertaking far-reaching reforms in the management of public affairs and entrenchment in constitutionality. Speaking when he met and held discussions with members of the African Peer Review Mechanism, Kibaki noted that new and vibrant structures of governance were being put in place under the new constitution.

A senior United Nations humanitarian official says the world body is 'extremely worried' about the situation in Sudan's South Kordofan region after a leaked report said war crimes may have been committed there. The leaked UN report, which emerged on Monday, documents witness accounts of suspected atrocities and called for an inquiry into the allegations. Oil-rich South Kordofan borders the newly created nation of South Sudan. It has seen intense fighting in recent months between the Sudan's army and local armed groups.

Regional and international bodies such as the SADC, AU and UN should make the implementation of anti-corruption instruments by all signatories mandatory. These bodies should specify time frames within which the implementation should be done and sanctions for failing to do so. Such sanctions can include but not be limited to automatic cancellation of the signature and ratification thereof. This is one of the recommendations of a survey report on barriers towards combating corruption in Africa, conducted by Anti-Corruption Trust of Southern Africa (ACT-Southern Africa).

With support unravelling from within NATO itself, the organisation’s intervention in Libya is looking increasingly humiliated, writes Alexander Cockburn.

The trial of six Zimbabwean activists charged with treason for attending a lecture in February about the Egyptian uprising opened in Harare on 18 July. The activists had their charges altered to a lesser charge as the magistrate who was supposed to hear the matter recused himself. The activists are now being charged with conspiracy to commit public violence.

Police have been asked to investigate a second complaint of corruption against Willie Hofmeyr, the head of both the Asset Forfeiture Unit and the Special Investigating Unit, the National Prosecuting Authority confirmed on Sunday. NPA spokesman Mthunzi Mahaga said the national director of public prosecutions (Menzi Simelane) called in the police after billionaire Dave King levelled the allegations against Hofmeyr. The Sunday Times portrayed the two charges as part of a campaign by Simelane to undermine Hofmeyr and the AFU. The newspaper said an investigation against the KwaZulu-Natal head of the AFU, Knorx Molelle, was linked to the fight for control of the unit.

The refusal of the minister of public works to answer questions on her role in clinching dodgy police lease deals amounts to a criminal offence. This is one of several damning findings in public protector Thuli Madonsela's final report on the police lease saga, which concludes Madonsela's investigation into dodgy police leases, worth R1.8-billion, in Pretoria and Durban with businessman Roux Shabangu, which was exposed by the Sunday Times last year. Shabangu is an associate of President Jacob Zuma's.

SA's top prosecutors are in a fight to the death over the future of corruption-buster Willie Hofmeyr, who heads the Asset Forfeiture Unit and the Special Investigating Unit. The Sunday Times reports that new corruption claims have been levelled at Hofmeyr and top NPA officials thought to be close to him. NPA officials in various provinces claim the charges were stage-managed by NPA boss Menzi Simelane.

Both supporters and opponents of constitutional changes offered by Morocco's king have protested in their thousands, indicating debate over the country's future sparked by the "Arab Spring" uprisings has not ended. Sunday’s opposition protests organised by the youth-based February 20 Movement took place in three cities and passed off without any clashes. The movement is a loose national network that was inspired by uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Insecurity and malnutrition among Ivorian refugees in Liberia have forced the UN's refugee agency to relocate hundreds to inland camps. A UNHCR statement this week quoted refugees expressing fear for their lives due to fighting among armed rival gangs and which is affecting the distribution of relief aid. An estimated 2,000 refugees are affected by the relocation from transit centres and villages along the Liberian border with Cote d’Ivoire.

Egypt's new cabinet will be sworn in on Monday after a reshuffle that protesters say have partially satisfied their demands for deeper political and economic reforms. Protesters, who have camped out in Cairo's Tahrir Square since 8 July, say they want further measures, including a quicker trial of Hosni Mubarak. Thousands of Egyptians have returned to Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt's uprising, complaining that change has come too slow under the military council that took over power.

ECOWAS Ministers in charge of humanitarian affairs have resolved to set up a Task Force of Government Ministries, relevant partners and civil society to coordinate the implementation of the African Union (AU) Convention on humanitarian assistance and internal displacement in Africa, also known as the Kampala Convention. At the end of their first Ministerial Conference on Humanitarian Assistance and Internal Displacement in West Africa, held 7 July 2011 at the ECOWAS Commission headquarters in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, the ministers also agreed to formulate coherent national IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) policies, legal and institutional frameworks that will fully reflect the content and the spirit of the Kampala Convention.

'The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) notes with concern the continued disregard of the voice of the people of Zimbabwe as witnessed by the lack of commitment to consult the people in the whole negotiation process. ZESN is of the view that the timelines that have been set are unrealistic and fail to address a number of pertinent concerns that are essential before the country can hold a new election.'

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's party has renewed its calls for new elections this year, rejecting a timeline that his own negotiators hammered out last week, a state daily reported. 'The politburo is unanimous that elections should be held this year,' Zanu-PF spokesperson Rugare Gumbo told the Herald newspaper after the party's top decision-making body met in the capital. On 6 July, negotiators from Mugabe's party and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) agreed on a timeline for election preparations which would put the polls in 2012.

At the time of a bid for a majority stake in BSkyB, the revelations of phone hacking and subsequent closure of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World have rocked the British body politic, writes Cameron Duodu.

‘The new tasks of building a society to meet the needs of the people in the South Sudan must be conducted in a manner that puts the interests and wellbeing of the ordinary people above everything else,’ says Horace Campbell.