This week, the people of Southern Sudan will cast their votes in a historic referendum to determine whether to secede from the North, likely becoming Africa’s newest independent nation, writes Nisrin Elamin. The referendum represents not only a failure by the Sudanese government ‘to make unity a viable option’, but also the complicity and silence of the people of northern Sudan ‘around policies that, if left unchallenged, could ultimately lead to the further fracturing' of the nation, argues Elamin.

The UN is capable of saving Côte d’Ivoire from collapse but it cannot do so as long as it plays ‘second fiddle’ to the western powers that ‘pay the piper’, argues Akyaaba Addai-Sebo.

Pambazuka Press is pleased to announce the release of its new titles for 2011, available at www.pambazukapress.org.

The US remains the world’s biggest market for diamond jewellery, but it is China that has secured access to Zimbabwe’s controversial diamond fields. Khadija Sharife investigates.

Post-election Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan’s referendum, public demonstrations in Tunisia and the nature of poverty in Haiti feature in this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, by Dibussi Tande.

Pambazuka News is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the first annual Pambazuka Samir Amin Award. This award, launched to mark Samir Amin’s 80th birthday in 2011, pays tribute to the extraordinary contribution Samir Amin has made to our understanding of the exploitation of the peoples of Africa and the global South.

Pierre Sané

Olympe Bhêly-Quenum

Pathé Mbodje

South Africa's local government elections are widely expected to take place in May, but since the five-year term ends in March the polls could even be held sooner. Less than 55 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote in the last round of local government elections in 2006 - and many have since been disappointed by their ward councillors. Rhodes University political science lecturer Richard Pithouse says there will be high levels of repression in the months leading up to the local government elections.

Author Adam Jones asks John Pilger to retract his endorsement of a controversial recent book on the Rwandan genocide.

Uche Igwe travels to Rivers State in Nigeria and reports on progressive reforms by the state governor in the areas of healthcare, education and food security.

South Sudan votes in the referendum.

The international community should accept Somaliland into the family of nations, writes Abdirahman Mohamed Dirye.

Mohamed Ahmed Noor was under no illusions when he agreed to take on the job of mayor of Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. He was living in the relative safety of London when the offer was recently made. He sat his family down and told them he may not be coming back. 'I explained the dangers of the job, that I may be killed and that one day they may hear on the news that the mayor of Mogadishu has been assassinated, or killed in an explosion.'

Opposition political parties and groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have denounced a bill passed by the ruling party to revise the Constitution as a mandate of 'mass cheating'. In a declaration made available to PANA on Monday, the opposition said the revision of the Constitution to have only one round of voting in the presidential election 'is a dangerous step backward', which would reduce the legitimacy of the president, increase challenges to his power and create instability.

As South Sudan votes for its right to exist, H. Nanjala Nyabola draws on the 2007 Kenyan elections for comparison and calls for expectations to be moderated.

Demands for reparations around the transatlantic slave trade have been absent from United Nations conferences on racism. Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua discusses the history and context behind them.

TrustAfrica is an established African foundation set up to work on the continental level ‘explicitly on issues with regional and continental dimensions’. Bhekinkosi Moyo discusses the organisation’s background and strategy.

Sometimes… I suspect
I have not played this ‘African’ card
well enough…

Kenya Anticorruption Commission (KACC) is currently investigating another minister over graft, in addition to the four ministers earlier mentioned, reports the Daily Nation. According to KACC director Dr PLO Lumumba, the latest case relates to allegations of misuse of Constituency Development Fund (CDF) money.

Khartoum has denied it will take on Sudan's entire debt to free an independent south of any liabilities, after former US president Jimmy Carter said he received assurances the north would do so. The Daily Nation reports that Sudan's foreign ministry 'categorically refuted the statements of the former US president Jimmy Carter to CNN... that the president of the republic told him Sudan's entire indebtedness would be carried by north Sudan,' the official SUNA news agency reported late on Monday.