The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Tuesday urged the political stakeholders in Guinea to act expeditiously to agree on a new date for the country's presidential re-run, after another postponement was announced Friday. A spokesman for the 15-member regional bloc, Sunny Ugoh, told PANA here that agreeing on a new date would make it possible for the long-delayed election to hold and for the West African nation of Guinea to return to constitutional rule.

Mozambique has scored poorly in this year's edition of the Open Budget Index (OBI) - but when the report was presented at a Maputo seminar on Thursday, dissenting voices wondered whether the scores mean anything, since the questionnaires used seemed to be tailored round American experience. The scores range from zero to 100. The US-based International Budget Partnership (IBP) assessed 94 countries - and found that 74 of them did not meet what it considered 'the minimum standards of transparency and responsibility in public budgets'.

Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel will help President Jacob Zuma with his work in a New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) sub-committee on infrastructure, the presidency said on Monday. In a statement, the presidency said Manuel - who is responsible for the National Planning Commission - would assist Zuma in his role as the African Union champion of the north-south infrastructure development corridor.

Cheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician famous for his theory that the Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans. Okello Oculi remembers a series of meetings he had with Anta Diop in the 1980s.

Jason Hickel attends a speech delivered by US ambassador to the AU Michael Battle and discovers a disturbing new rhetoric about Africa.

Opposition politician Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza, who was banned to contest in the recent presidential elections in Rwanda, has urged the country’s development partners to build institutional capacity, not President Kagame’s political capacity for continued stay in power. In a wide-ranging policy paper titled: 'Development partners need to support lasting solution', dated 20 September 2010 and accessed by the Newsline, the fiery politician notes that whereas aid and political conditions attached to it had obliged some dictatorships to open up the political space and level the playing field, in the case of Rwanda, it has allowed the regime in power to put in place a controlled ‘democratisation’ process with no opposition or elections with no competitors.

Nairobi Mayor Geophrey Majiwa was on Monday arrested by anti-corruption agents over the controversial purchase of a piece of land for use as a cemetery. Officials from the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (Kacc) went to the mayor's residence in Nairobi's South 'C' at 7am while accompanied by police officers and took him away to the their headquarters where he is currently being held.

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was nominated today to run for presidential elections that may extend his rule for over 30 years. Mr Museveni is a flag bearer of the National Resistance Movement, the ruling party. Museveni, in power since 1986, is being challenged by Forum for Democratic Change’s Dr Kizza Besigye, his former physician and long time rival.

Tanzania is facing a new debt crisis as budget crunches in rich countries are bringing cuts in aid spending, forcing the government to seek loans to meet budget deficits. During the year ending July 2010, the national debt stock soared by more than $1.185 billion to a staggering $10.1 billion, according to Bank of Tanzania figures.

An international Monetary Fund team arrives in Zimbabwe today to assess the state of the economy under its Article IV consultation mission, ahead of the country's national budget next month. The IMF's visit is, however, likely to cause serious political tensions in the divided inclusive government as Mugabe and his ministers remain at least sceptical, and at most hostile, and opposed to the international fund's involvement in the Zimbabwean economy.

Civil society groups have warned that the proposed new constitution could turn out to be damp squib, reflecting the short-term interests of political parties instead of a truly democratic charter that Zimbabweans have long hoped could safeguard basic rights and ensure accountability from the government. According to the report on the constitution outreach programme jointly published by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, Zimbabwe Peace Project and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, the process to draft Zimbabwe’s new governance charter was 'remained entirely a de facto contest between ZANU PF and MDC-T, a scenario that appear to have sidelined the views of other stakeholders'.

Zimbabwe’s civil society has urged Southern African leaders to ensure the country’s next elections comply with regional benchmarks for democratic polls requiring an independent body to run polls and that the military not to interfere with voting. In submissions to South African President Jacob Zuma - the regional SADC bloc’s official mediator in Zimbabwe - the groups said President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s coalition government has failed to end tensions in Zimbabwe and that the country’s political environment remains 'poisoned with violence, intimidation and fear'.

World leaders must admit that their efforts to solve world hunger have failed and that they are ‘not in a position to find effective solutions’, writes Sarath Fernando. This situation can be changed only by taking ‘the task of feeding the hungry’ into ‘the hands of those who are genuinely interested in solving hunger’ – the hungry themselves.

Following the passing of Benoit Mandelbrot this week, Horace Campbell writes of the mathematician’s groundbreaking academic work on fractals and the concept’s historical centrality in African knowledge systems.

Tanzanians preparing to go to the polls on 31 October are ‘keenly aware that the country’s political future is at stake’, says Salma Maoulidi. Their votes, writes Maoulidi, could redefine the direction of a country ‘jeopardised by the dominance of economic interests and buddy patronage pursued by the government of the incumbent candidate and ruling party.’

Regional integration is an economic project with superimposed political structures, while federation is a political project as part of a strategy for political and economic emancipation, writes Dani W. Nabudere, in an examination of why the two ideas, as currently conceived, are incompatible. So what is the way forward for East Africa?

Zimbabwe’s constitutional reform process is failing to represent the views of young people, who make up more than half the country’s population, writes the Youth Alliance for Democracy.

In a speech marking the 33rd anniversary of Steve Biko’s death in detention, Veli Mbele, president of the Azanian Youth Organisation, looks at the lessons young black people can learn from Biko’s life and ideas.

Far from being a panacea for fighting rural poverty, microcredit can impose additional burdens on the rural poor, without markedly improving their socio-economic condition, write Patrick Bond and Khorshed Alam.

The African Union (AU) is developing a map, detailing the rail, air, sea and navigable river systems in Africa to ease the future deployment of the African Standby Force in dealing with insecurity and armed conflicts, an AU official said Wednesday.