Sierra Leone’s anti-corruption commissioner has a simple message for foreign investors coming to his country for its mines and oil — offer bribes and you could find yourself in prison.

At the age of 42 years, Isabirye Kakaire Mutwalibi of Bulugodha village, Iganga district, one of the poverty-stricken districts in Eastern Uganda, boasts of seven grand children. He will be recording his eighth in the next five months, giving him a small edge of three grandchildren ahead of his age mates, all under 45 years.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has called on Kenyans to rise above individual and partisan interests and approach the constitution - making exercise with a sense of sobriety in order to deliver the much-awaited new constitution to Kenyans.

‘The idea behind “Beijing” was not to get together every five years and count the victims of gender discrimination and violence’, Morissanda Kouyaté writes in Pambazuka News. ‘It was intended to be – and remains – a campaign to end these problems. A lack of will remains a key obstacle to achieving this – not just political will, but at all levels, to consider women as equal members of society, enjoying all inalienable rights accorded to men.’

Addressing gender inequality remains central to the drive to improve livelihoods and engender development for all, writes Marren Akatsa-Bukachi. While progress has been made, the key challenge will be to revitalise the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) and ensure genuine momentum is sustained around achieving gender equality in all areas of life, the author argues.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been feeding people in Lesotho since 1965, yet the tiny mountain kingdom is still not much closer to achieving food self-sufficiency. Time to overhaul the approach, aid agencies say. WFP generally only ships and provides food in crisis situations like civil conflicts and natural disasters. Programmes sometimes linger on after the emergency has passed, when food aid used is to help communities rebuild, but the goal is usually to move out.

The incumbent, President Armando Guebuza, has won the Mozambican 2009 elections in a landslide, obtaining three quarters of the votes, according to official results. Leopoldo da Costa, the chairman of Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE), announced that Frelimo’s Guebuza has been re-elected for second five-year term, winning 75.4 percent of the votes.

Botswana's president accused Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday of failing to honour a power-sharing deal with his foes and called for new elections to resolve the political deadlock. In a state of the nation address after his re-election last month, Botswana's leader Ian Khama made clear he believed the blame for the political paralysis in neighbouring Zimbabwe lay at the hands of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.

There is rising tension in the Zimbabwe National Army after a number of senior officers allegedly died from torture whilst in military detention. The Herald reported on Wednesday that Major Maxwell Samudzi, a 48 year-old deputy officer commanding One Engineers Support Regiment at Pomona barracks was found dead in his detention cell. The paper said Major Samudzi committed suicide, but army insiders contend he was tortured to death.

Despite good global cereal harvests this year, millions of people in dozens of poor countries are in desperate need of emergency humanitarian aid due to stubbornly high food prices, the United Nations agricultural agency warned in a new report.

The United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) has begun transporting the provisional voters’ list to polling stations around the country as part of the latest phase of preparations for the upcoming presidential elections.

The top priority for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the protection of civilians from abuse, be it from the Government forces that it is mandated to support or armed rebel groups, a senior official has said.

Without adequate security or resources for education, young women and men in refugee camps would turn to prostitution or violence, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Chad said at a Headquarters press conference.Michele Falavigna, reporting on the humanitarian situation in Chad after his first three months, said the country had been at war for 40 years and had virtually "never known peace and development".

Does clientelism play a major role in the voting decisions of African elections? Which factors are most important to African voters when choosing a candidate to vote for? This Afrobarometer working paper argues that clientelism is not a major factor in voting decisions. Instead, voters focus on issues relating to the provision of local public goods and the frequency of an MP's visits to the constituency.

A crony of the newly-elected Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba, has been forced to resign from the government due to a magazine report that links him to a financial scandal. Mr Jean Pierra Oyiba who is President Ali Bongo Ondimba’s Chief of Protocol, resigned but has denied links with the scandal that was reported this week by the Paris-based Jeune Afrique magazine.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) unreservedly condemns the unlawful arrest and detention in Victoria Falls on Sunday 8 November 2009 of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) President, Lovemore Matombo, together with four other union officials.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation and its sister charities are pleased with the United Nations General Assembly’s declaration of July 18, Nelson Mandela’s birthday, as “Nelson Mandela International Day”, an international day of activism.

October has been a month characterised by violence, lawlessness, corruption and the complete abuse of power for partisan and personal objectives. Despite Robert Mugabe’s outrageous claim to the contrary, Sokwanele has logged an incredible 3850 breaches of the GPA by Zanu PF since the start of the ZIG Watch project, making this party responsible for 88.8% of all breaches logged up until the end of October.

Morissanda Kouyaté

Babacar Diouf

Following a five and a half year scholarly meditation to tackle explicitly the prejudices ‘still deeply embedded’ in the Western academy, Wendy C. Hamblet challenges the ‘popular assumption that violence is an essential quality of certain populations’, and offers ‘an alternative, more sympathetic, but also more realistic, account of some of the world’s current violences’.