Madagascar's vice Prime Minister Ny Hasina Andriamanjato has resigned in a sign of growing divisions within the government over how to end the Indian Ocean island's year long political crisis.

African leaders must cast aside a tendency to "manage poverty" and instead pursue basic economic growth if they want to improve the lives of their people, a leading regional development expert has said.

A refugee rights group in South Africa has accused the United Nations refugee agency of ‘xenophobia,’ for not affording Zimbabwean refugees the same treatment as other refugees in South Africa. The group PASSOP has this week said that Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa are victims of a form of ‘selective assistance’ by organisations meant to help them.

Saviour Kasukuwere, the Minister of Indigenisation, in charge of the new regulation that requires businesses to hand over at least 51 per cent ownership to indigenous Zimbabweans, has said the regulation will not be reversed.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has voiced concern about events in Côte d’Ivoire, where the Government has suspended voter registration ahead of this year’s already delayed presidential election because of rising tensions.

Opposition party members are facing increasing threats, attacks, and harassment in advance of Rwanda's August 2010 presidential election, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch urged the government to investigate all such incidents and to ensure that opposition activists are able to go about their legitimate activities without fear.

This new report from the International Crisis Group, examines the rise in tensions before communal, presidential, legislative and additional local elections that are to be conducted separately between May and September. Such an escalation could lead to new violence that would ruin the credibility of the electoral process and endanger a fragile democracy.

Just over a month ago the legendary Dennis Brutus passed away. He became a legend for so many across South Africa and indeed the whole world not simply because of his exquisitely crafted poetry of passion and his never-ending activist commitment to justice and equality for all but precisely because he lived a life of principled consistency. The content of his public legend was umbilically linked to the character of his personal example. Simply put, Dennis practiced what he preached, writhes Dale McKinley.

The international peasant's movement La Via Campesina welcomes the preliminary UN recognition of the role and rights of peasants and small farmers in the world. The Fourth Session of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council, who met in Geneva on 25-29 January 2010, adopted the report of the Advisory Committee titled “Discrimination in the Context of Right to Food” (A/HRC/AC/4/2).

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's party has called for fresh elections if the current logjam in talks between rival factions of the frayed power-sharing government persisted.

Nigeria's Vice President Goodluck Jonathan has assumed office as the country's Acting President, after the two chambers of the National Assembly (parliament) passed separate res olutions that ended 78 days without anyone being in charge of Africa's most populous nation,.

The Ivorian government has announced the suspension, "until further notice," of the review of voters' list, due to the tension surrounding the process of validating the provisional list. The decision was made at the end of a working session between President Laurent Gbagbo and Prime Minister Guillaume Soro Wednesday evening.

In the coming weeks Pambazuka News will reproduce a series of oral testimonies given by the people of the Anosy region in southern Madagascar. Individuals describe the difficulties that they are experiencing due to climate change, mining and the rapid changes that come with it, food insecurity and no political voice.

In March 2009, Madagascar underwent a political coup in which Marc Ravolamanana’s government was unseated. Until the planned general elections in October 2010 Madagascar is being ‘managed’ by Haute Autorite de Transition (HAT). Since 2005, the mining of ilmenite has become the central drive of the Anosy region’s development strategy, a World Bank programme. This has led to rapid changes in the area on both the environment and the people. More than three-quarters of the population of Madagascar are reliant on agriculture to sustain their livelihoods. As a result, they are especially vulnerable to environmental shocks and the rapid development that has come with the mining. There are stories being told, but these have so far gone by unnoticed.

This week Pambazuka listens to Zababoatsy, a 58 year old, Antanosy man. ‘He feels strongly that the impact of mining activity on the environment has robbed him of any opportunity to “provide a better future for my family”.’ His account tells how mining in the area has had a profound, negative effect on the forest – the community’s ‘source of life’ – on the rivers and he tells how climate change is affecting food resources.**

Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo may be welcome among the world’s most powerful people, who work for his favour behind the scenes in return for lucrative trade deals, but he is less favourably viewed by human rights defenders, development agencies and the citizens of his country. Agustín Velloso looks at Obiang’s controversial effort to obtain wider global respect and appreciation through the creation of an international prize in partnership with UNESCO.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum has issued a statement in response to the first anniversary of Zimbabwe’s Government of National Unity (GNU).
The statement highlights the increasing concern in Zimbabwe over the GNU’s ‘failure to abide by the provisions of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) and its apparent inability to address the social, political and economic crisis still facing the country.’ The statement also criticises the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) inability to influence the GNU to deliver on its promises and commitments.

If people are to overcome the systemic challenges that threaten the future of life on planet earth, we need to overhaul the way in which we manage society, argue Carlos Lopes, Ignacy Sachs, Ladislau Dowbor. In a paper prepared for the World Social Forum in Bahia, Brazil in January, Lopes, Sachs and Dowbor attempt to set out the ‘minimum necessary measures to avoid catastrophes and to guarantee a sustainable and dignified life’.

Jacob Zuma may have been the only candidate who could unseat Thabo Mbeki from the leadership of the ANC, writes William Gumede, but the inherent danger in electing someone with such 'a colourful private life' to lead the party and the country is that is that ‘sooner or later, the excesses of his private life will so dominate public life’ that they paralyse the government itself.

At an MPLA meeting in November 2009, Angola’s president José Eduardo dos Santos defined the challenges facing his party in terms of three issues: Keeping watch on government, the irresponsibility of government leaders, and fighting corruption with a policy of zero tolerance. Rafael Marques de Morais reveals the gap between dos Santos’ words and its deeds, through an investigation of the MPLA’s extensive business interests. The ‘concept of social solidarity and equal opportunity,’ writes de Morais, ‘applies only to select members of the ruling elite who have been given the task of looting the country.'

Deeply unimpressed with embassies' inclination towards silence, Alemayehu G. Mariam implores foreign officials to speak out in the face of the Ethiopian government's human rights abuses. Suspicious of the 'veil of diplomatic anonymity', Mariam argues that remaining silent while activists like Birtukan Midekssa are kept locked up simply amounts to complicity.

With Porto Alegre hosting an evaluation of the 10 years of the World Social Forum (WSF) in January, Boaventura de Sousa Santos wonders why the mainstream media chose to focus on the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos instead. This is strange, writes de Sousa Santos, 'since the analyses and previsions of the WSF during the last decade turned out to be much more precise than those advanced by the WEF'.