The Transparency International Zimbabwe is greatly disturbed by the reports of massive corruption rocking Harare City Council. Consequently, we urgently call for a forensic audit to determine the magnitude of the rot that has dogged the Town House to date. This includes the periods of the illegal and legal commissions. The issue of the cattle is just a tip of the iceberg and we believe that the forensic audit will lay the cards bare for public scrutiny.

The African Union suspended Madagascar on Friday, the strongest condemnation yet by the international community after opposition leader Andry Rajoelina took power with the support of the army. The AU decision echoed criticism by southern African bloc SADC, the European Union and United States. Weeks of political unrest in Madagascar have killed at least 135 people, devastated the economy and worried foreign investors.

The inclusive government’s new ‘Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme’ (STERP), was officially launched on Thursday. It commits the administration to upholding the rule of law, as well as stopping any further farm invasions. STERP is aimed at trying to rejuvenate the beleaguered economy, and the launch in Harare was in response to the severe economic challenges facing the country - at the centre of which is hyperinflation, deteriorating public service delivery and corruption.

Northern Ugandans uprooted during two decades of fighting between the Government and a notorious rebel group are continuing to return home, the United Nations humanitarian arm has announced. The clashes between the Government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) drove nearly two million people from their homes, devastating infrastructure and services.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for $244 million to scale up its operation in Kenya, where high food prices and drought have left 3.5 million people in need of aid. The Kenyan Government declared a national disaster in January following the failure of rains in some parts of the country. Subsistence farmers in south-eastern and coastal areas were hardest hit and have experienced almost total crop loss.

In order to end the sexual violence plaguing the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it is necessary to stop the activity of armed groups but also to ensure security forces have strong discipline, the top United Nations envoy there has said. Responding to a group of women victims of such violence as he continued to assess the humanitarian situation in North Kivu province, Alan Doss, Special Representative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for the DRC, voiced the need to “put an end to the presence of armed groups, but also to put discipline into the heart of security forces.”

Throughout her farming career, Jane Owino she has planted recycled seeds from the previous year’s harvest. However, for as long as she can remember, the 47 year old farmer in Western Kenya has never posted any profits from her labours. Year in and year out, she prepares her farm diligently and plants the seeds on time but she knows that she is at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable seasons and when the rains fail her harvest is in jeopardy.

Zimbabwe's power sharing government has "a long way to go" before the United States lifts sanctions, an official said Thursday despite an appeal for their removal. "We have not yet seen sufficient evidence from the government of Zimbabwe that they are firmly and irrevocably on a path to inclusive and effective governance, and as well as respect for human rights and the rule of law," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.

The chairman of the African Union (AU), Libyan leader Mouammar Gaddafi, has called for a referendum in Madagascar as soon as possible under the auspices of the country's constitutional institutions and AU organs to find a solution to the political events presently prevailing in the country.

The programme drawn up by Guinea Bissau's Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior has been approved by the country's parliament. The approval, on Wednesday, paves the way for the government to implement the programme.

Growing interest from Asia and Middle East countries to lease agricultural land in Africa "is not a bad thing" but must be handled properly and in a transparent way, a top World Bank official said on Thursday. Speaking at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director at the World Bank, said it matters how those foreign investments are made.

A meeting held in Swakopmund, Namibia last week between the European Commission (EC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) group failed to break an impasse over concerns raised by South Africa over the economic partnership agreement (EPA), despite significant further concessions by the European Union (EU) to sweeten the deal.

African and other developing nations joined several European powers at the United Nations to denounce the veto rights of the five official nuclear powers on the U.N. Security Council, diplomats said. The chorus of criticism began on Monday and continued on Tuesday at a closed-door session of the General Assembly on reforming and expanding the most powerful U.N. body.

The financial crisis and global recession will see African economies lose up to to $49bn by the end of this year, research by ActionAid suggests. About $27bn of this was a fall in aid, export earnings and income from richer recession-hit nations said the charity. The lost income is equivalent to a 10% pay cut for the continent, it added.

Finance ministers from the G20 grouping of nations issued a communique after a meeting in Britain Saturday, saying they would help emerging and developing countries to cope with the reversal in capital flows and would mobilise international financial resources to help these countries. !n an apparent response to a meeting arranged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Tanzanian government in Dar es Salaam this week, the finance ministers said there was a need to boost IMF resources "very substantially."

The Brown Summer Institute on Development and Inequality will bring together a group of young scholars, mainly from the Global South, for a two-week workshop. The workshop will focus on sharing knowledge about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on inequality in developing countries and about methodologies for studying inequality. Emphasis will be placed on the differences in the definitions of inequality (and therefore need for distinct methods and approaches) across regions of the Global South.

Following the assassinations on 1 March of Guinea-Bissau’s President João ‘Nino’ Vieira and military chief General Batista Tagmé Na Wai, the Goree Institute’s Waly Ndiaye analyses some of the underlying causes of the country’s troubled history since its independence in 1974, and asks whether the deaths of these two men – whose personal rivalry helped tear apart political life – have created an opportunity to build Guinea-Bissau into a modern state.

sure faces up to the position in Zimbabwe and makes it clear that the MDC needs the support of the world and particularly the neighbouring SADC Governments. South Africa has been the creator of this "mule" and should be the country now supporting the MDC and a proper legal system. Currently S Africa refuses aid to Zimbabwe because it knows ZANU PF corruption and power is still overwhelming and aid money will dissapear. If S Africa is unwilling to commit funds how can you expect the rest of the world to do so. Currently thousands of Zim refugees are treated like criminals in S Africa. (However),

I agree with the author, we know the and we know that women can make a difference. We have know this for a long time, but somehow our organising has not been succesful. We can not wait to say the same in 2013, we need to fill the gap that has made women not access these positions, we need a woman president come 2012, but more so we need women who are leaders of integrity as being a 'woman' is not enough platform. There are many many qualified women, what we need is a strategy that is different from the past.

cc In an interview with Pambazuka News, CODESRIA researcher Carlos Cardoso analyses events leading up to the assassinations of both Guinea-Bissau’s military chief General Tagme Na Wai and President Nino Vieira within hours of each other on 1 March, and charts out his thoughts on what lies ahead for the country.