Ivory Coast's electoral commission (CEI) has apologised for errors made in drawing up a voter list, saying thousands of names disputed by President Laurent Gbagbo were never intended to be on it.

Guinea's military rulers have chosen opposition leader Jean-Marie Dore to be prime minister, overseeing a return to civilian rule, officials say. Junta spokesman Idrissa Cherif said 70-year-old Mr Dore had "experience and understanding of Guinean politics".

Sudan would accept the south's secession if southerners were to vote for independence in a referendum next year, President Omar al-Bashir said. Speaking at a ceremony marking five years since the end of the north-south war, he said his Northern Congress Party did not want the south to secede

Angola's parliament has approved a new constitution which abolishes direct presidential elections. The head of state will now automatically be the leader of the party with the parliamentary majority.

The US embassy in Zimbabwe has confirmed a report in the state-run Herald newspaper that the US would not oppose the restoration of Zimbabwe's voting rights in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Zimbabwe has suspended its constitution making process following sharp differences within President Robert Mugabe’s unity government over a consultation process that is already behind schedule by several months.

Because of the world economic and financial crisis, the African Development Bank (AfDB) last year more than doubled its financial commitments to Africa to US$11 as against US$5.0 billion, the chairman of the financial institution, Donald Kaberuka, has said.

A group of 41 prominent Nigerians, led by former Senate President, Anyim Pius Anyim, were at the National Assembly in Abuja, the Nigerian Federal capital, urging lawmakers to take immediate steps to resolve the current political and constitutional crisis created by the 59 days of absence of President Umar Musa Yar'Adua from the country on account of ill health.

When David Magang sat down to write his memoirs, he certainly could not complain that his career had left him short of material. The former Minister of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs, who has waged a protracted battle for diamond beneficiation against De Beers, had a front row seat at some of the most questionable goings on between the diamond mining giant and the Botswana government.

Thailand, the World’s largest exporter of rice, is to support the Irrigation Company of Upper Region (ICOUR), to expand local rice production under the Tono and Vea Irrigation Schemes in the Region.

On 11 January 2010, the third anniversary of Eritrean journalist Fessehaye "Joshua" Yohannes' death in detention, Reporters Without Borders wrote to Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, asking him to do everything possible to obtain an improvement in the conditions of journalists imprisoned in Eritrea.

ICTJ is pleased to announce the publication of a new policy report, Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies (attached). This report is the fruit of a multi-year, global research project on the ways that identity shapes transitional justice efforts.

The Institute for Security Studies through its Addis Ababa-based African Conflict Prevention Programme invites policy-makers, academics, practitioners, policy researchers to submit abstracts, and subsequently papers, which will assess a broad range of issues relating to the AU Peace and Security Council, with specific reference to its first five years of operation. Abstracts should be submitted by Friday 29th January and the papers will be due on 19th March 2010.

It has taken an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude, causing momentous loss of life, to get the world talking about Haiti and its past. As the world digests the tragedy, it begins to remember and to criticise too. Rebecca Zausmer does a round-up of the commentary and analysis that is flowing fast about Haiti and the actors in its history.

It does not take a political scientist to infer that it was foolhardy of the Angolan government to agree to host a tournament of this magnitude in a country that has been at war for more than three decades, writes Sonia Maria, a lawyer and civil rights activist from Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Nigeria's failure to make the progress commensurate with 50 years of nation-building is not just a failure of leadership. It is first and most catastrophically, a failure of followership.

While the achievement of universal ontological rights in South Africa has been a marvellous step forward, writes Jason Hickel, the paradigm of a rights-based revolution is seriously and fundamentally flawed, and cannot serve the ends that South Africa intends it to. Cautioning that the state can grant people discursively constituted rights with one hand and strip them of the conditions for sustainable life with the other without ever having to confront the contradiction, Hickel says it’s time to reclaim the heritage of the commons.

The lack of honesty in South Africa’s political, economic and social debates is now becoming so severe it is undermining effective delivery of public services, the country’s economic prosperity and the consolidation of the democracy itself, says William Gumede.

‘There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster,’ writes Greg Palast, ‘200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.’ Palast takes a look both at international community’s response to the Haiti earthquake and at its role in impoverishing a nation that was once the wealthiest in the western hemisphere.

Ethiopian politics needs to reinvent itself if it is to offer the country a coherent and convincing alternative to the current culture of oppression and corruption, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. ‘Reinvention’, argues Mariam, is ‘a multi-step process whose ultimate aim is to cultivate a true democratic civic culture shared by all Ethiopians.’