The president of Mauritania's Independent National Electoral Committee (INEC), Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Dey, has resigned his position. Dey is a member of the opposition Rally of Democratic Forces (RFD). No reason has been given for the resignation which comes 5 days after the holding of the presidential poll won in the first round by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of the Union for the Republic (UPR), Several opposition figures have criticised the result saying there was "fraud a nd manipulation" of the voters' register.

Coup leader-turned-politician General Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz has been declared winner of Saturday's presidential elections by Mauritania’s Interior Ministry. His main rivals, former parliamentary speaker Messaoud Ould Boulkheir and veteran opposition figure Ahmed Ould Daddah have rejected the results as "prefabricated, meant to legitimise the coup that brought General Aziz to power."

The Secretariat for the International Conference on African Culture and Development (ICACD) invites you to submit abstracts / presentation ideas for ICACD 2009 – . Academics, artists, cultural and development workers, Government agencies and policy makers and all people committed to working to see Culture included on all development agendas are encouraged to submit their abstracts or ideas. ICACD 2009 will be held in Accra, Ghana November 15th to 18th 2009.

The handover of the names of the suspects behind Kenya’s post-elections violence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an uncertain chapter in the country’s history of political violence. This development has generated a vibrant debate among Kenyans: What should accountable politics look like? Oxford Transitional Justice Research is working in partnership with Moi University and Pambazuka News to offer a space in which concerned Kenyans can come together with a range of experts, scholars, practitioners, and commentators to discuss fundamental questions about how we got here, and the strategies necessary to move the country forward.

At a recent prayer breakfast in Kenya, religious matters were pushed aside and instead gluttony was the order of the day. President Mwai Kibaki struggled to eat a whole chapatti in one go, Prime Minister Raila Odinga spilt tea down his suit and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka struggled after getting a sausage stuck in his mouth. Luckily, these were just puppets being filmed in the cramped dining room of a Nairobi home for the latest of 13 episodes of the XYZ show.

The activities of Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI), a civil society organization (CSO) based in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrate the significant role budget transparency plays in improving accountability. MUHURI’s work also shows how public engagement in the budget process can strengthen oversight and lead to improved public service delivery. At the same time, MUHURI’s impact has been restricted by the lack of a Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Kenya, along with other broad transparency challenges in the country.

Two scarcely noticed events occurred in Nigeria and Botswana at the end of last week that signal the growing speed and strength of a new "scramble for Africa" among the world's big powers, who are tapping into the continent for its oil, iron ore, timber, gold, diamonds and other natural resources. At Nigeria's Defence Intelligence School in Karu, near the capital Abuja, 30 military officers from seven African countries graduated from a training course designed to meet the "rapidly changing security complexities" of their nations "and the continent at large".

I certainly do not agree with as something Obama should have given. Obama's speech in Ghana was well thought out and very apt. After 40 years plus of independence in most African countries we cannot continue to blame the west and western corporations for our failures.

Thank you Firoze for during the recent visit by President Obama to Ghana.

The global financial crisis is taking its toll on Africa, writes Moreblessings Chidaushe, despite initial attempts to downplay the continent’s interdependence with the world economy. As commodity prices tumble and cuts in resources delay and stall major development projects, Chidaushe calls for African leaders to engage their citizens in building internal solutions to the challenges they face, rather than looking to a diminishing pool of external sources of aid.

In the wake of studies that suggest that by age 14, a quarter of black American children born in 1990 had a father in jail, Dan Moshenberg calls for the US to take action to prevent the incarceration of primary caregivers. New research suggests that having a parent in prison ‘doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behaviour, social isolation, depression and problems in school’, underscoring the need, argues Moshenberg, for ‘a distinctly human – and African – solution to a distinctly American risk for the children descended from Africa.'

Lucy Simiyu worries about where Kenya is headed as a nation, as she discovers that it is ‘not just the local mama by the roadside’ that is caught up in the ‘falsehoods and stereotypes’ that feed the enmity between the country’s ethnic groups, ‘but also highly educated professionals’ who should be ‘the voice of reason’. Critical of politicians who increase this polarisation between people for their own ends, Simiyu calls for Kenyans to take a stand against intolerance and recognise that ‘no one ethnic group can take this nation to its great heights without the support of the others’.

It’s no wonder President Robert Mugabe is keen to use the Kariba Draft as the basis for Zimbabwe’s new constitution, writes Tapera Kapuya in this week’s Pambazuka News. Negotiated in secret in 2007 by a representative from each of the three ruling parties, the document would give him ‘unchecked and exclusive authority, placing him above all citizens and the law’. Pessimistic about the MDC’s ability to gather ‘enough strength and conviction to fight off the possible imposition’ of the draft, Kapuya highlights the need for an independent body to lead the process of making a people-driven constitution, based on the views of all citizens.

High CourtVeterans of Kenya’s Mau Mau independence struggle came to Britain in June demanding compensation for atrocities committed by the British. Ken Olende tells their story.

Tee Ngugi shares with Pambazuka News why he believes the Malawi Supreme Court has made the right decision in allowing Madonna to proceed with her adoption of orphan Mercy Chifundo, despite vehement opposition from the continent’s beard-stroking 'cultural nationalists'.

Vincent Nuwagaba tells Pambazuka readers of his inhumane treatment at the hands of staff at Uganda's Butabika Hospital and criticises the extent to which state institutions have been reduced to the whims of President Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM).

Reflecting on the US president's Accra speech in this week's Pambazuka News, Ama Biney finds Obama's dismissal of neocolonial explanations for Africa's difficulties worrying. Though apologetic towards his Arab audience for past US meddling while in Cairo earlier this year, Obama showed no inclination to acknowledge his country's support of African dictators such as the former Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Kenya's Daniel arap Moi. If Obama is not simply to be the new George W. Bush, albeit under a more humanitarian guise, he will need to advance a foreign policy genuinely grounded in economic and political equality, Biney writes. Echoing the words of the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Biney stresses however that Africans should in reality prioritise pan-African solutions to their continent's challenges, rather than merely competing to be the US's 'brown-eyed ally'.

Gerald Caplan reviews , edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman. Commending a multi-author work able to bring together a stimulating variety of often competing viewpoints, Caplan strongly recommends the title and its contribution to Rwanda's post-genocide reconstruction.

In this week's review of the African blogosphere, Dibussi Tande looks at, among other topics, a call for corruption to be declared 'patrimonicide', the apparent complacency of the UK government in dealing with piracy off the coast of Somalia, and the politics of language in Cameroonian literature.

John Otim discusses Okello Oculi’s 1968 work 'Prostitute' – 'a fast-moving early post-colonial piece of writing published by a young Makerere University student' – which he tells Pambazuka News readers makes for impassioned reading.