The African Union (AU) has called for minor const itutional amendments in Guinea, a review of the voting rules and the extension of the voters' registration exercise, to accommodate thousands of other Guineans in exile across West Africa.

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Nigeria, Professor Maurice Iwu, announced here Thursday that the commission would release the comprehensive time-table for the conduct of the 201 1 general elections on Tuesday.

Former Debswana Managing Director, Louis Nchindo, and seven other De Beers executives, among them Gary Ralfe and Nicky Oppenheimer, pocketed millions of Pulas in bonus schemes that ripped the government of Botswana off – a confidential report has revealed.

The chairperson of the ANC's biggest and most influential region in KwaZulu-Natal, John Mchunu, has been awarded tenders worth at least R40-million by the eThekwini municipality. Mchunu recently made headlines for allegedly vetoing the completion of a R1.5m elephant sculpture project for the new Warwick Avenue interchange, apparently because it was the symbol of the IFP.

Budget support donors are on strike. No budget support money has been released to government since mid-December. Donors are demanding promises from government for action this year on electoral reform, corruption and conflict of interest, and on the growing role of the Frelimo party inside the state apparatus.

Mbariza Ntore” (Kirundi for “inform us so that we can vote”) is a media support project of the Dutch NGO, La Benevolencija, set up with a total of 18 different media houses (radio, print press, TV, Internet and news agency) in Burundi. The project enhances the capacity of citizens to better understand the conditions in which they are being invited to fulfill their political rights.

Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) is deeply concerned at the continued restrictions and threats to opposition parties in the run-up to Rwanda’s presidential elections on 9 August 2010 and urges the Rwandan government to take immediate steps to ensure respect for the basic, universal rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association and peaceful assembly of opposition parties. The absence of these rights is tantamount to breaches of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political principles that insist on free and fair elections (Harare Declaration 1991).

Rumours about Nigerian president Yar’Adua, violence in Jos, controversy over what happened to aid money during Ethiopia’s famine in the 1980s and International Women’s Day all feature in Sokari Ekine’s round-up of the African blogosphere. There’s also good news for Zimbabwe, as a documentary about the remarkable singer Prudence Mabhena and her band Liyana scoops an Oscar, with its inspiring story about overcoming the stereotypes around disability.

While South Africa's apartheid may represent the closest historical precedent to Israel–Palestine, writes Saree Makdisi, the Israeli state's treatment of Palestinian people in many respects eclipses the suffering imposed by the South African apartheid government on 'non-white' people. Though its supporters worldwide refuse to countenance that any form of systematic racism is perpetrated by Israel, Makdisi stresses, the country's racism is one 'practised in practice rather than in language' and is rooted in treating Palestinians as not merely inferior, but subhuman.

When times are tough it’s easier to pick on people than to fix the economy, says solomonsydelle.

we belong to a beat generation
not the american one between
the earthy 50s & heady 60s,
but our identity inspiration
in their own is seen,
we kenyans born
after the 60s,
after a-levels
after apollo
arty 8-4-4s,
but before
beat
it

we came of age via a rite of passage
familiar from town to town to village
when you will be caught out at night
in intoxication singing sedition
by cops of an earlier age
cops with a Kanu accent
beasting their beat
on lawless lanes
past midnight
pass without:
"minus pass?"
plus
pa!
pe!
pi!
po!
pu!

howling to the moon never helped
as one crouched in growing groups
at times naked under a starless sky
waiting for the black santa maria
to come and haul you to cells
filled with bed and jail bugs
because you were not fit
to join the parrot patrols
in their parody beats
each saturday night
across evil streets
full of an age-set
breaking the law
or remaking it
or beating it.

Nelson Mandela’s 1990 statement on nationalisation sparked uproar from big business, but there’s little sign of private sector anxiety following ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s recent call for the formation of state-owned mines. There’s only one explanation for the ‘relatively muted response’, says Mphutlane wa Bofelo – that ‘after 15 years of ANC government, the owners of capital now know that the radical leftist terminology that the ANC uses is just a rhetorical spin to sell rightwing programmes'.

Two former leaders of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front have alleged in a BBC radio programme that the TPLF leadership – which included Meles Zenawi – used millions of dollars earmarked for famine relief in the 1980s to buy weapons and enrich themselves. ‘The facts are plain to see,’ writes Alemayehu G. Mariam, ‘We know now that these thieves did not stand for the people of Tigrai at the critical hour in 1984. They sure as hell do not stand for the people of Ethiopia today.’

ARTICLE 19 welcomes the recent bold move by the Uganda Parliament to pass the Whistleblowers Bill, a critical milestone in the country's efforts to stem corruption and embrace transparency and accountability. The Bill, approved by Parliament on 3 March 2010 in Kampala aims to create an enabling environment for citizens to freely disclose information on corrupt or improper conduct, both in the public and private sectors. In enacting the law, Uganda is the third country in Africa to adopt such a comprehensive law.

Gado's cartoons this week feature a trouser-dropping Jacob Zuma appealing for sanctions on Zimbabwe to be dropped, and the Kenyan parliament's offer to pass President Obama's healthcare bill – at a cost.

Al-Shabab, the Somali Islamist opposition group, has announced it will stop World Food Programme (WFP) operations in Somalia. The armed group said on Sunday that food distributed by the UN agency had disadvantaged local farmers and accused the WFP of being politically motivated.

Maghreb countries should abandon protectionism in order to boost lagging regional trade, according to participants in a recent conference on economic integration organised by Tunisia's Foreign Ministry. The conference on Maghreb Economic Integration, which was held on February 17th to mark the 21st anniversary of the establishment of the Maghreb Union, was attended by high-ranking Tunisian officials, businessmen and professors.

Africa's economic growth could be held back for another generation unless global investors help the world's poorest continent to improve its unreliable energy networks, a British minister has said.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has insisted that Zimbabwe’s unity government needs to make more progress before targeted sanctions against the Mugabe regime are lifted, resisting pressure from South African President Jacob Zuma.

Africans are getting wealthier more quickly than previously believed, according to a new study that also suggests the poorest continent's riches are spreading beyond the narrow confines of its elite. "Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought," the study by U.S.-based economists Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy said.