South Africa's 2009 elections are engaging voters as the country's political landscape is changing and the ruling ANC for the first time may experience a serious challenge. Over 21.6 million South Africans have already registered to vote next year.During the weekend, 19,000 voter registration stations first opened their doors throughout the country to allow for new voters to enrol.

Mozambique has seen political stability and economic recovery since the end of its devastating civil war, yet it remains one of the world's poorest countries (168th of the 177 nations on UNDP's 2007 human development index). Average life expectancy is 39 years. Less than half of adults can read and write, and the infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world.

A breakaway faction of South Africa's governing African National Congress has vowed to win next year's general election. Senior politicians in the faction are moving to launch a new party to challenge the ANC, which has dominated South Africa's political landscape since the first post-apartheid elections in 1994.

African governments came under fire for "blindly" negotiating the controversial economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and not making an effort to educate "ordinary people" on what they were negotiating. The politicians, who gather in Geneva for World Trade Organisation (WTO) meetings and in Brussels for EPA talks, should know that they are there on behalf of their citizens and not themselves, said Rangarirai Machemedze, director of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI). SEATINI helps to build African capacity in world trade talks.

Zambia's main opposition leader Michael Sata launched on Friday a court challenge to demand a recount of the vote in the October 30 presidential election, his party's lawyer said. "I know that (my colleagues) are currently in court filing a petition. I am now working on some more documents which we will submit to the court next week," Winter Kabimba, lawyer for Sata's Patriotic Front, told Reuters.

All is set for Friday’s national executive and national council meeting of the MDC in Harare, in what has been described as ‘the most important and crucial’ gathering of the party’s top bodies since its formation nine years ago. Analysts predict it is almost certain that the two bodies will endorse the position expressed by the negotiating team and party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, after the SADC summit in Johannesburg on Sunday.

A Kitwe based Roman Catholic Church priest Father Frank Bwalya has been arrested and detained on Wednesday for airing what is being deemed as biased post election analysis. He was charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of peace amid violent protests in the mining town of Zambia

The World Bank has offered Nigeria $3 billion facility to enable the President Umaru Yar’Adua improve education, health, roads, and agriculture with a view to reducing the nation’s poverty rate and living standards of the people. If accepted by the president, the loan would be provided under the International Development Assistance (IDA) and would be in three tranches of $ 1 billion, annually, between 2009 and 2011.

The World Bank said last night it was gearing up to lend $100bn (£63bn) over the next three years to protect developing nations from the economic contagion spreading from richer western countries. Dashing hopes that the world's emerging economies might escape relatively unscathed from the downturn, the Bank said it expected almost 40 million people to fall into poverty as a result of the turmoil caused by the global credit crunch.

In response to an invitation extended by the Government of Zambia, the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) deployed a short term Observer Mission to the Presidential and Mwansabombwe and Ndola Central Parliamentary By Elections in Zambia of 30th October 2008. Under the leadership of Mr Leshele Thoahlane, Chairperson of the EISA Board of Directors and Former Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission of Lesotho, the EISA Election Observer Mission consisted of 20 members from different African countries.

Alarmed with Barack Obama’s choosing of one of most conservative Democratic figures as his chief of staff in the shape of Rahm Emanuel, Stephen Zunes asks whether the new president-elect will see the influence of his progressive base blocked from the White House. While the author underlines that the appointment will scarcely lead to a Clinton-esque centre-right agenda, the promise of change to have featured so prominently throughout Obama’s campaign will only be realised through revitalised efforts on the part of civil society to stem any potential conservative co-opting of the new administration.

cc. Tonight, after Barack Obama was confirmed as the nation's president-elect, I looked in on my children, as they lay sleeping. Though they are about as politically astute as kids can be, having reached only the ages of seven and five, and there is no way they will be able to truly appreciate what has just happened in the land they call home. They do not possess the sense of history, or indeed, even a clear understanding of what history means, so as to adequately process what happened this evening, as they slumbered. Even as our oldest cast her first grade vote for Obama in school today, and even as our youngest has become somewhat notorious for pointing to pictures of Sarah Palin on magazines and saying ‘There's that crazy lady who hates polar bears’, they remain, still, naive as to the nation they have inherited. They do not really understand the tortured history of this place, especially as regards race. Oh they know more than most – to live as my children makes it hard not to – but still, the magnitude of this occasion will likely not catch up to them until Barack Obama is finishing at least his first, if not his second term as president.

But that's okay. Because I know what it means, and will make sure to tell them.

And before detailing what I perceive that meaning to be (both its expansiveness and limitations) let me say this, to some of those on the Left – some of my friends and long-time compatriots in the struggle for social justice – who insist that there is no difference between Obama and McCain, between Democrats and Republicans, between Biden and Palin: Screw you.

If you are incapable of mustering pride in this moment, and if you cannot appreciate how meaningful this day is for millions of black folks who stood in lines for up to seven hours to vote, then your cynicism has become such an encumbrance as to render you all but useless to the liberation movement. Indeed, those who cannot appreciate what has just transpired are so eaten up with nihilistic rage and hopelessness that I cannot but think that they are a waste of carbon, and actively thieving oxygen that could be put to better use by others.

This election does indeed matter. No, it is not the same as victory against the forces of injustice, and yes, Obama is a heavily compromised candidate, and yes, we will have to work hard to hold him accountable. But it matters nonetheless that he, and not the bloodthirsty bomber McCain, or the Christo-fascist, Palin, managed to emerge victorious.

Those who say it doesn't matter weren't with me on the south side of Chicago this past week, surrounded by a collection of amazing community organisers who go out and do the hard work every day of trying to help create a way out of no way for the marginalised. All of them know that an election is but a part of the solution, a tactic really, in a larger struggle of which they are a daily part, and none of them are so naive as to think that their jobs are now to become a cakewalk because of the election of Barack Obama. But all of them were looking forward to this moment. They haven't the luxury of believing in the quixotic campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, or waiting around for the Green Party to get its act together and become something other than a pathetic caricature, symbolised by the utterly irrelevant and increasingly narcissistic presence of Ralph Nader on the electoral scene. And while Cynthia McKinney remains a pivotal figure in the struggle, the party to which she was tethered this year shows no more ability to sustain movement activity than it did eight years ago, and most everyone working in oppressed communities in this nation knows it.

It's like this y'all: Jesse Jackson was weeping openly on national television. This is a man who was with Dr King when he was murdered and he was bawling like a baby. So don't tell me this doesn't matter.

John Lewis – who had his head cracked open, has been arrested more times, and has probably spilled far more blood for the cause of justice than all the white, dreadlocked, self-proclaimed anarchists in this country combined – couldn't be more thrilled at what has happened. If he can see it, then frankly, who the hell are we not to?

Those who say this election means nothing, who insist that Obama, because he cozied up to Wall Street, or big business, is just another kind of evil no different than any other, are in serious risk of political self-immolation, and it is a burning they will richly deserve. That the victorious presidential candidate is actually a capitalist (contrary to the fevered imaginations of the right) is no more newsworthy than the fact that rain falls down and grass grows skyward. It is to be properly placed in the ‘no shit Sherlock’ file. That anyone would think it possible for someone who didn't raise hundreds of millions of dollars to win – at this time in our history at least – only suggests that some on the Left would prefer to engage in politics from a place of aspirational innocence, rather than in the real world, where battles are won or lost.

So let us be clear as to what tonight meant: It was a defeat for the right-wing echo chamber and its rhetorical storm troopers, foremost among them Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

It was a defeat for the crazed mobs ever-present at McCain-Palin rallies, what with their venomous libels against Obama, their hate-addled brains spewing forth one after another racist and religiously chauvinistic calumny upon his head and those of his supporters.

It was a defeat for the Internet rumour-pimps who insisted to all they could reach with a functioning email address that Obama was not really a citizen. Or perhaps he was, but he was a Muslim, or perhaps not a Muslim, but probably a black supremacist, or maybe not that either, but surely the anti-Christ, and most definitely a baby-killer.

It was a defeat for those who believed McCain and Palin would be delivered the victory by the hand of almighty God, because their theological and eschatological vacuity so regularly gets in the way of their ability to think. As such, it was a setback for the religious fascists in the far-Right Christian community whose belief that God is on their side has always made them especially dangerous. Now, having lost, perhaps at least some of these will be forced to ponder what went wrong. If we're lucky, perhaps some will suffer the kind of crisis of faith that often prefaces a complete nervous breakdown. Either way, it's nice just to ruin their young-earth-creationist-I-have-an-angel-on-my-shoulder day.

It was a defeat for the demagogues who tried in so many ways to push the buttons of white racism – the old-fashioned kind, or what I call Racism 1.0 – by using thinly-veiled racialised language throughout the campaign. Appeals to Joe Six-Pack, ‘values voters’, blue-collar voters, or hockey moms, though never explicitly racialised, were transparent to all but the most obtuse, as were terms like ‘terrorist’ when used to describe Obama. Likewise, the attempt to race-bait the economic crisis by blaming it on loans to poor folks of colour through the Community Reinvestment Act, or community activists like the folks at ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), failed, and this matters. No, it doesn't mean that white America has rejected racism. Indeed, I have been quite deliberate for months about pointing out the way that Racism 1.0 may be traded in, only to be replaced by Racism 2.0 (which allows whites to still view most folks of colour negatively but carve out exceptions for those few who make us feel comfortable and who we see as ‘different’). And yet, that tonight was a drubbing for that 1.0 version of racism still matters.

And tonight was a victory for a few things too.

It was a victory for youth, and their social and political sensibilities. It was the young, casting away the politics of their parents and even grandparents, and turning the corner to a new day, perhaps naively, and too optimistic about the road from here, but nonetheless in a way that has historically almost always been good for the country. Much as youth were inspired by a relatively moderate John F. Kennedy (who was, on balance, far less progressive than Obama in many ways), and much as they then formed the frontline troops for so much of the social justice activism of the following fifteen years, so too can such a thing be foreseen now. That Kennedy may have been quite restrained in his social justice sensibilities did not matter; the young people whose energy he helped unleash took things in their own direction and outgrew him rather quickly in their progression to the Left.

Tonight was also a victory for the possibility of greater cross-racial alliance building. Although Obama failed to win most white votes, and although it is no doubt true that many of the whites who did vote for him nonetheless hold onto any number of negative and racist stereotypes about the larger black and brown communities of this nation, it is still the case that black, brown and white worked together in this effort as they have rarely done before. And many whites who worked for Obama, precisely because they got to see, and hear, and feel the racist vitriol still animating far too many of our nation's people, will now be wiser for the experience when it comes to understanding how much more work remains to be done on the racial justice front. Let us build on that newfound knowledge, and that newfound energy, and create real white ally-ship with community-based leaders of colour as we move forward in the years to come.

But now for the other side of things.

First and foremost, please know that none of these victories will amount to much unless we do that which needs to be done so as to turn a singular event about one man, into a true social movement (which, despite what some claim, it is not yet and has never been).

And so it is back to work. Oh yes, we can savour the moment for a while, for a few days, perhaps a week. But well before inauguration day we will need to be back on the job, in the community, in the streets, where democracy is made, demanding equity and justice in places where it hasn't been seen in decades, if ever. Because for all the talk of hope and change, there is nothing – absolutely, positively nothing – about real change that is inevitable. And hope, absent real pressure and forward motion to actualise one's dreams, is sterile and even dangerous. Hope, absent commitment is the enemy of change, capable of translating to a giving away of one's agency, to a relinquishing of the need to do more than just show up every few years and push a button or pull a lever.

This means hooking up now with the grass roots organisations in the communities where we live, prioritising their struggles, joining and serving with their constituents, following leaders grounded in the community who are accountable not to Barack Obama, but the people who helped elect him. Let Obama follow, while the people lead, in other words.

For we who are white it means going back into our white spaces and challenging our brothers and sisters, parents, neighbours, colleagues and friends – and ourselves – on the racial biases that still too often permeate their and our lives, and making sure they know that the success of one man of colour does not equate to the eradication of systemic racial inequity.

So are we ready for the heavy lifting? This was, after all, merely the warm-up exercise, somewhat akin to stretching before a really long run. Or perhaps it was the first lap, but either way, now the baton has been handed to you, to us. We must not, cannot, afford to drop it. There is too much at stake.

The worst thing that could happen now would be for us to go back to sleep, to allow the cool poise of Obama's prose to lull us into slumber like the cool on the underside of the pillow. For in the light of day, when fully awake, it becomes impossible not to see the incompleteness of the task so far.

So let us begin.

* Tim Wise is the 2008 Oliver L. Brown Distinguished Visiting Scholar for Diversity Issues at Washburn University, in Topeka, Kansas. He is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White. This article originally appeared at www.racialicious.com and can be found here.

My cousin, Project Censored Award Winner Bob Nichols here is teasing me about my "legendary" scholarship and understanding of Congo. He means legendary among our circle of friends who are also Friends of the Congo -

However, this week, after studying U.S. uses of the geostrategic minerals so densely concentrated in Congo, especially the cobalt in Congo's Katanga Province and in neighboring Zambia, I finally feel confident enough to speak more publicly about Congo, especially here in America and the rest of the English-speaking West, where we must start speaking out, not only about Rwanda, but about the U.S. role in Congo, where General Laurent Nkunda and the Rwandan Army fight proxy wars for U.S. corporate, military industrial, and military interests, whose infinite hunger for government contracts and subsidies crushes the hopes of Americans as well as those of the Congolese. Ordinary Americans are in pain not only because of our reckless financial sector but also because of our huge, wasteful, and lethal, military budget.

Drawing on examples such as Thabo Mbeki’s role in damaging HIV/AIDS policies in the early 2000s and a current case in a San Franciso court against Chevron for 1998 murders in the Niger Delta, Patrick Bond argues that a similar process of critical treatment is appropriate for Barack Obama’s new leading economic advisor, Paul Volcker. Citing the opinions of a number of prominent political commentators, Bond reviews Volcker’s disastrous economic policy at the end of the 1970s, highlighting the deleterious effect of high US interest rates on developing countries’ debt repayments and economic development. But with Obama set to ‘accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy’ under Volcker’s influence, the author argues that it is crucial the new president-elect seek alternative economic viewpoints to dominant neoliberal policy less rooted in brutal US national self-interest.

In a broad discussion of the political circumstances behind Barack Obama’s election victory, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza argues that the US has finally grown up. This is maturing both in the sense of witnessing the election of an individual of African descent and in ending the forty-year Republican neoliberal hegemony, and is a development reflective in no small part of the Democrats’ ability to articulate a campaign true to contemporary socio-political conditions in the US. For while many challenges will face the administration-in-waiting, Obama’s ability to appeal to a diverse range of voters, Zeleza contends, represents an invaluable means of satisfying cosmopolitan Americans’ desire for renewed global respect.

It feels like it did all those years ago:
close your eyes and picture the quiff and smile.
Promise of Camelot, no hint of guile,
until that day in November, a blow
to baby boomers’ hopes for the future.
Now barrack for Obama, a new dawn,
a surgeon for the brave new world is born
fixing gaping wounds with a suture.
Country like a patient anaesthetised:
a trusting smile on a slumbering face
surrendering itself to healing hands;
but what lurks on that table disguised
waiting to ride on a needle stick trace?
A virus we hope Obama withstands.

* An Australian expression for supporting or rooting for.

* Derek Fenton was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and now lives in Australia where he teaches Mathematics and English as a Second Language. His poetry is informed by the experience of being a migrant and the difficulties of adjustment to a new country and alienation from the old. Fenton has had poems published by Les Murray in Quadrant magazine and a poem short-listed for publication in the Westerly.

Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF asked President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday to form a new government with immediate effect, a fresh sign that a power-sharing agreement with political rivals is collapsing. Zimbabweans, faced with the world's worst inflation and acute food shortages, hoped that a September 15 deal would end the southern African country's ruinous political and economic crisis.

The official launch of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) General Assembly of the African Union (AU) took place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 9 September 2008. Subsequently, the Permanent General Assembly at its orientation meeting in Nairobi, Kenya from 15 to 18 October 2008 decided to resume the ECOSOCC electoral process in countries and regions where elections have not yet been held.

Some rural folk in Zimbabwe are now relying on wild fruits which are quickly running out. Quite a number of them have died from hunger and starvation. If only the goevernment had not banned the NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) who were donating food to the poor the number of deaths would not be that much.

National and foreign election observers have been given increased access in new observer regulations published last month. A wide range of formerly secret election commission documents are now public, and observers are now allowed to watch the previously secret summation process by election commissions. But the new regulations also impose new restrictions on observers.