Within the backdrop of Nigeria's post-colonial history, Richard Ali remembers Dr Bala Mohammed Bauchi, assassinated on 10 July 1981 and a man who 'in the 16 years before his murder … had established himself first on the radio waves and then in academe as the most lucid of the Nigerian leftist theorists'.

The eighth wonder of the world boasts its banality

Tame wildebeest clogging the clean concrete of Mbagathi

Which arrows smartly past low and high rise tenement

It coerces the zooming traffic to slow down and look

At humanity swarming from Kibera’s troubled slumberland

To uncertain industry in Industrial Area

And the motorist’s camera has long-since seen this jaded parade

Far too often for it to remain a juicy titbit

At tonight’s bush dinner table or on Face book

Or to goad righteous anger when State functionaries

In their pubescent dalliance with 2030 Vision

Seek to herd this wildlife into Nairobi National Park

Faraway from the gaze of well-heeled elites …

The sort of innovative strategic thinking, you

Explain to your inquisitive daughter

Which may compete with the Mara’s majestic beauty

And so your imaginative chic daughter twits

Amazed at this constitutional moment’s flaunted profundity

Perplexed by the nightmare of human wildebeest migrating at sundown –

As they trudge on safari from hungry toil at a Processing Zone

To far-off scenic home that’ll assuage their entitlement to shelter

With monkey and hyena lining the dirt route

To their wretched idyll in the Park.

After decades of failing to address the root causes of poverty and inequality, the aid industry is bigger than ever. Is it time for some serious soul-searching on the value of ‘development’? Anna White reviews Rasna Warah's 'Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits'.

African nations must pool resources to promote local pharmaceutical innovation, say Ibrahim Assane Mayaki and Carel IJsselmuiden. Africa bears a quarter of the world's disease burden, yet accounts for less than one per cent of global expenditure on health. About half of the continent's population lacks access to essential medicines and the few drugs that are available often come from outside — Sub-Saharan Africa imports nearly 90 per cent of its medicines.

Africa’s large dams (more than 1,270 at last count) have consistently been built at the expense of rural communities, who have been forced to sacrifice their lands and livelihoods to them yet have reaped few benefits. Large hydro dams in Sudan, Senegal, Kenya, Zambia/Zimbabwe and Ghana have brought considerable social, environmental and economic damage to Africa, and have left a trail of "development–induced poverty" in their wake.

Thousands of Zimbabweans have been left stranded at the Beitbridge border post after South African immigration officials refused to recognize a newly introduced Temporary Travel Document. According to reports from the state owned Herald newspaper ‘South African port officials allegedly fired their guns to frighten the affected travellers into crossing back to the Zimbabwean side of the border

Backing a call for greater action from the United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria, the World Bank has committed $200 million to provide people in sub-Saharan Africa with treated bed nets to protect them from a disease that kills nearly 1 million people every year.

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project will move into its second phase in 2010. The first phase has been praised as a shining example of transboundary water sharing in Africa, but community dissatisfaction may mean a rough ride for its extension. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is the largest on the continent, transferring water from the Malimatso, Mtsoku and Senqunyane rivers to South Africa’s industrial heartland in Gauteng province.

A Rwandan opposition leader has been conditionally released after being arrested on Wednesday. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was accused of collaborating with a terrorist group and denying the genocide.

A video showing election fraud during Sudan's election is being circulated online. Sudan's National Elections Commission has dismissed it as fake. The video show election officials stuffing ballot boxes. Oppoition groups claim that the video proves their claims of rigging by by the ruling National Congress Party (NCP).

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has lamented the failure of the unity government to fully implement all the terms of the Global Political Agreement by partners in the inclusive government saying this was holding back economic revival progress. The Prime Minister said this in his opening address of a business conference held at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) in Bulawayo Wednesday.

President Robert Mugabe welcomed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Zimbabwe Thursday, a meeting of two leaders united in fierce opposition to the West. Mugabe met Ahmadinejad at the Harare airport Thursday afternoon.

The protagonists in Madagascar's political crisis have agreed to attend talks in South Africa on April 28. President Andry Rajoelina ousted Marc Ravalomanana with the help of dissident soldiers in March last year after weeks of popular protests. The two have been at loggerheads ever since as international mediators work to install a unity government.

Sudan’s poll results, due on Thursday, will be delayed – and a full picture is unlikely to emerge until next week – says the National Elections Commission. The delay has been occasioned by the counting that is taking longer than anticipated and other logistical problems.

African Union (AU) Commission Chair Jean Ping is in the US for a series of meetings, including the first annual US-AU High Level Bilateral Meeting at the State Department here. During his trip, Ping, who is leading an AU delegation, will discuss issues of mutual concern with some of the most senior US officials, including the Attorney General, USAID Administrator Raj Shah and the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Volcanic ash crisis - Though flights have resumed across Europe after clouds of ash from the Iceland volcano disrupted flights for days, Kenya's flower and vegetable industry has been cou nting its losses from the crisis, amid reports that the industry was losing US$3 million per day at the peak of the flight-an situation.

La Via Campesina, FIAN, Land Research Action Network and GRAIN, together with over 100 allies, are issuing a loud appeal to stop the current wave of land grabbing that is taking millions of hectares of farmland away from rural communities across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their appeal coincides with the release of a new World Bank report that confirms the massive extent of of the current land grab assault and puts forward seven "principles" to make these land deals socially acceptable.

Former regional diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders and British trade expert and journalist David Jessop regularly take their time to write in the press on matters pertaining to relations between the Caribbean and the European Union, particularly in the field of trade. I am not sure how many of us who do read really consider the implications of what they have to say.

Sweet sixteen and already showing signs of strain: that is the mood that hangs over South Africa as the 27 April celebration of the first democratic elections approaches, writes Colleen Lowe Morna. The political shenanigans of the far right who still dream of a separate homeland for white people and far left who insist on singing the song “kill the Boer” even after the High Court ruled that this is hate speech have led the Mail and Guardian to coin the term “idiotocracy” to describe our national politics.

Just how dangerous is the World Bank and its neo-conservative president Robert Zoellick to South Africa and the global climate? Notwithstanding South Africa's existing US$75 billion foreign debt, on April 8 the bank added a $3.75 billion loan to South Africa's electricty utility Eskom for the primary purpose of building the world's fourth-largest coal-fired power plant, at Medupi. It will spew 25 million tons of the climate pollutant carbon dioxide into the air each year.