Ten years ago, in May 1998, I had the pleasure of meeting Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady of the US, for a few minutes in Geneva during the World Health Organisation's 50th Anniversary Assembly. She was one of the VIPs invited to celebrate this event at the WHO which had just passed under the leadership of its first woman Director-General, Dr. Gro Haarlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway.

Mrs. Clinton's presence was in recognition of her unsuccessful, but commendable attempt, during her husband's first presidential term, to convince her country's legislators to introduce some form of medical insurance for American citizens, some 40% of whom had no medical cover then, and still do not, to this day.

Statement of the Communist Party of Sudan

The inclusion of the name of the President of the Republic of the Sudan among those wanted for justice by the International Criminal Court, increases the complications engulfing the crisis prevailing in the Sudan. Despite the fact that such procedures were already in place and expected since the establishment of the Court, and this last step of naming the President of the Sudan was preceded by a similar step indating two prominent figures in the Government in February 2007, the Government of the Sudan was ill- prepared both legally and politically to react to either attempts.

It is well-known, generally accepted and cannot be hidden that what is going on in Darfur is a real tragedy and the human catasrophy. We, the Sudanese Communist Party, reiterate what we have already declared that the Sudanese Government bears full responsibility for it is happening in Darfur, since its own policies have led to the aggraviation of the tragedy. We continue to demand together with others the investigation to the crimes committed in Darfur, and to bring those responsible to justice regardless of their position in the state hierarchy. The Government did not heed two reasons.

I was on a flight from Entebbe to Nairobi on June 30 when I read The New Vision's front page story titled "Mother cuts off defiler's penis."By the time I finished the story, my spirits were up and I have been in a great mood ever since.

According to the article, Angelina Kyomugisha was weeding her banana farm in Mbarara when she heard her 10-year old daughter cry out. She went over to have a look, only to find 40-year-old Geoffrey Mugarura defiling her little girl. Kyomugisha did what every mother ought to do in such situation - she pounced on Mugarura and cut off his penis. Then she flung it into the bush.

Neighbours helped search for Mugarura's severed penis till they noticed a dog running off with something in its mouth. They threw a stick at the dog till it dropped what was left of his snack. At this point in the story I had to control my laughter for fear being thrown off the flight. At hospital, a doctor confirmed that they would refashion what was left of Mugarura's penis so that he could at least urinate with it. As for any other business, the dog had taken care of that.

1. AU MEMBER STATES MUST STRENGTHEN CAPACITY OF THE AU COMMISSION AND ASSEMBLY OF HEADS OF STATES TO COPE SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT GOALS, AND ‘EMERGENCY’ ISSUES SUCH AS ZIMBABWE:

The dominance of Zimbabwe’s governance and human rights challenges at the recently concluded 2008 African Union midyear summit in Egypt highlights that AU member states urgently need to strengthen their capacity to follow through on details of, and implementation of commitments to key African development issues – alongside other equally important issues that are not summit themes.

Specifically the Commission of the African Union needs to be provided with more resources and capacity to ensure AU ability to maintain 100% focus on long-term key development goals while simultaneously coping with emergencies on governance, human security, and peace and security issues. In addition, the Assembly of Heads of State themselves need to build their own capacity to cope with these ‘emergencies’ at summit level, alongside producing clear decisions and outcomes on summit themes. Issues like Zimbabwe, Darfur or the food crisis could hardly be described as a surprise to any of our Heads of State. They also need to provide the crucial resources for in country summit preparation, and implementation of outcomes between summits by a strengthened AU Commission, the AU Executive Council, relevant line Ministers and the Ambassadors on the Permanent Representatives Council.

When I was young and impressionable I had this grand vision of saving the world. It was so easy to dream up a free and fair world where sanity, justice and good health prevailed. It was even easier to engage in activities that could quicken the coming into being of those dreams. Now that I am older, I’ve since learnt that many of us go through such phases until we arrive at a waking place. I have now known the toughest place to be; the here and now. Forget the interval for a moment. And don’t get me wrong, I am not against dreaming. That’s where we all have to start anyway. I cannot imagine how best to survive and change harsh realities without a map of radiant dreams. But we must not stamp our eyes on the map, on the canvas. We are only to look at it for direction, not dwelling. Imagine if we were to focus all our attention on the compass without moving, what would we achieve? And yet it seems to me many of us and a big number of organizational realists are trapped between the dreaming and the coming true, avoiding the here and now. I am writing about all the Millennium Development Goals setters and implementers. They haven’t stirred from the map, the deep sleep and soft dream. Here’s my analysis.

In the area of HIV/AIDS prevention, the United States government has been criticised for increasing funding for abstinence-only strategies, while religious establishments like the Catholic Church continue to question condom use. The current HIV/AIDS prevention campaign urges women especially, to abstain, be faithful, or use condoms (ABC). This is because women and girls comprise the majority of those found to be HIV positive. UNAIDS 2006 report estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, 57% of adults with HIV are women, and young women aged 15 to 24 are more than three times likely to be infected than young men of the same age group. Based upon these statistics is the short-sighted conclusion that women should be the main target in combating HIV/AIDS. Truthfully, they are the majority that turn up to be tested and their results are easily available. In many countries in Africa, the HIV/AIDS statistics for men are hard to find, if they exist at all. Do we then conclude that the HIV/AIDS campaign should focus largely on urging the women to be more vigilant and careful when it comes to prevention or it should all the more be about empowering the men to be loving, respectful and protective towards the women?

Wole Soyinka was addressing a conference on the issue of the ‘brain drain’ from African countries. He remarked on how many of the speakers before him had lamented the flight of millions of Africans to the West and how apparently desperate were these speakers, who included African heads of state, to reverse the trend so that the bright young minds and their skills could be retained on the continent. ‘Lucky drainees!’ Soyinka enthused, with a whiff of sarcasm. While they went abroad exploring new frontiers, ‘the brains of their stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures’ (Olaniyan, 2003).

You will understand then why, at a conference of writers in exile held in Vienna in December 1987, the award-winning Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah, spoke ‘In Praise of Exile.’ He was not disparaging his home country: he was seeking to challenge the perspectives of its leaders. Basically agreeing with Soyinka's opposition of lucky exiles to dead stay-at-homes, Farah said he himself could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a prisoner. Not for him the common idea that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity: ‘For me,’ he wrote, ‘distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing’.

Removed from Zimbabwe, many of us have now become, in positive terms, more critical analysts of the situation in our homeland; in negative terms, soppy armchair critics. But the fact is that, we have the liberty of doing so! This armchair critic, for I am one, has become pre-occupied with the segmentation of Zimbabwean transnational website communities. Racially-charged politics, a high rate of HIV-AIDS infection, the complexity of gender relations derived from a country context that mostly is culturally conservative, and settlement in Britain by Zimbabweans and the various sensitivities that surround it, in both countries, are some of the issues that are raised in these website discourses. But difference is an opportunity to negotiate identities and is not inimical to the historical particularities that have shaped a definitive and distinctive ethnic presence in the demographics of Zimbabwe and in its diaspora.

For Diaspora and Communication studies, Zimbabwean electronic fora – the ‘new media’ - and their associations in Britain represent an important interface - a ‘social embedding’ (Aarsaether and Baerenholdt, 2001:49) of Diaspora communities in the homeland agenda that has created of the websites ‘specific communal refuges’ based on networks of family and friends and ethnic associations. In a generation of émigrés witnessing their homeland’s political and economic ruin but possessed of enhanced media technologies, the facility to not just track, but respond to events has led to the emergence first of social networks, and later the source of Internet activism that irked Robert Mugabe (2003) who said it represented ‘the same platforms and technologies through which virulent propaganda and misinformation are peddled to de legitimise our just struggles against vestigial colonialism, indeed to weaken national cohesion and efforts at forging a broad Third World front against what patently is a dangerous imperial world order led by warrior states and kingdoms’.

Compatriots wanting to assuage anxieties and nostalgia created and contributed to a web of electronic activism that contributed meaningfully – and varyingly - to Zimbabwean communities as the discourses and their associations grew vivid, provocative, and productive. Creatively using new technologies to define themselves, the Zimbabwean Diasporic websites raise social and anthropological media properties bound to attract scholarly attention.

Secondly, the fora are a microcosm of Zimbabwean diversity which deconstructs the authoritarian nationalism that has been a signature of Mugabe’s 28-year rule. This study characterizes the Diaspora websites’ ‘production of difference within common, shared and connected spaces’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997:45). It fills a research void acknowledged by Mwangola (2007) regarding smaller Diaspora communities ‘considered by both their host countries and the African world to be insignificant because of their small numbers and lack of political and/or economic capital’. Diverse Zimbabwean identities and their expressions which convey not only data and meaning, but community building through communication, form a transnational public sphere of website communities and associations representing a vibrancy absent from the ‘intolerant’ and ‘dull…intellectual ghetto’ Zimbabwe had become (Nyamfukudza 2005:21, 23) .

Thirdly, there is a general lack of authoritative source material of a qualitative nature on which UK agencies can rely for assessment of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, in the UK and at home. Over a two-year period I have provided assessments for law firms pursuing asylum cases and was given access to not just the claims, but the material on which government agencies drew to make their determinations. The source material nearly always lacked comprehensive detail. In particular, the expectation that all hardship in Zimbabwe must have had a party political dispensation to be worthy of an asylum claim betrayed an insensitivity to other tensions existing in that strangled environment, which UK-based agencies in particular seemed to be uninterested in. My research has the potential to expand the value and the knowledge base of interested parties.

It makes diversity a factor of social research with its emphasis on ‘undigested minorities’ (Nyamnjoh 2006:94; Nyamfukudza, 2005:18). Despite the significance of ethnic and cultural difference to Zimbabwe’s distant and recent history, this has not been a priority area in the research there has been into Zimbabwean transnationalism. The odd scholarly observation in this direction has remarked on the ‘fragmentation’ (Pasura, 2006a), although to view the diverse representations of a country’s multi-ethnic make-up solely in that light is to potentially omit positive aspects which the diverse populations and their plural expressions might bring to the discourse, something the electronic media may have enhanced. Conceptualizing this multi-polar engagement, I use Appadurai (1996), Werbner (1997a), Wise (2006), Moyo (2007) and Habermas’ descriptions of the public sphere as the ‘epistemic dimension’ (2006:411) to the procedures of democratic discourse. The research hopes to demonstrate not only the extension of democratic space, but also the production and reaffirmation of marginalized cultures in the electronic fora. Zaffiro (2002), Raftopolous (2004), Ranger (2005; 2002) and Nyamfukudza (2005), among others, have tracked the Mugabe government’s attempts to forge a corporate Zimbabwean identity and history that either excluded or assimilated minorities, or distorted their historical roles and the entitlements of their Zimbabwean citizenship. The social and economic upheaval which ensued, notwithstanding political arguments in mitigation, were accompanied by a re-ordering of Zimbabwean historiography that replaced even-handed analysis with unbalanced and at times rabidly racist literature (Nyamfukudza, 2005; Ranger, 2005; Raftopolous, 2004). By contrast, the transnational websites may inform an alternative narrative that acknowledges Zimbabwe’s demographics in deconstructing history and re-defining the nation.

As it expands its functions and its properties become progressively more accessible to households and other non-institutional users in Britain (OfCom, 2004), Internet communication is being appropriated by various echelons of the society to serve diverse interests: to ‘encompass the cultural forms of marginal constituencies’ (Ebo, 1998:x) as well as ‘emphasize hierarchical political associations’ (1998:2); to ‘encourage broad participation and emphasize merit over status’ (1998:3) as well as create private media spaces for individual, group and culture aggregations (Burnett and Marshall, 2003:67-68). There is a sense of virtual spaces being freed up to ventilate the previously unventilated: the minorities and the marginalised, their aspirations, their political and social will all being articulated in the relative freedom of a media-savvy Western liberal democracy.

In Ebo’s words, internet technology allows groups ‘traditionally dislocated from mainstream social linkages …to develop communal bonding’ (1998:4) through virtual and real-life associations that ‘fulfil the same traditional essence of associations and bonding, and invariably promote social relationships that are orchestrated by inherent inegalitarian tendencies in society’ (1998:5). He concludes that the stratification in the online associations will continue, for ‘as long as communities on the Internet allow participants to engage freely in the creation of social realities, economic and social classifications rooted in race, class and gender…will invariably influence relationships in virtual communities’ (ibid., p6). Ebo refers to this property of online engagement as the ‘cyberghetto perspective’ (ibid., p5), betraying a fear of negation and inequality being extended to cyberspace. But the facilitation of self-propelled diverse interest groups which use Internet communication to gain leverage in a world of inequalities is the rather more positive intuition behind this research.

CONCLUSION

To foregrounds a plurality of ethnic, political and professional continuities to introduce a study that addresses the democratic deficit and counter-authoritarian discourses that co-exist in an extended public sphere which this thesis seeks to describe. It has introduced plurality as a key element in website production and usage and the real-life associations that are formed based on shared affinities to the respective websites.

*Clayton Peel is the Vice-Chairman, Britain Zimbabwe Society. This paper was presented at the Britain Zimbabwe Society Research Day, 2008.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Bibliography:

Sokari Ekine review blogs from:

Intern Africa
Ghana Web
Gathara’s World
Dipesh Pabari of Sukuma Kenya
Kenya Environmental and Political News Blog
Black Looks

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni already looks set to win re-election in 2011, ensuring stability for the fast-growing economy despite concerns about democracy under one of Africa's longest-serving rulers. News that the 64-year-old former rebel will stand again has found favour with investors hungry for opportunities in emerging markets, but confounded opponents who have criticised his increasingly autocratic leadership style.

The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Tuesday denounced the alleged embezzlement of $1,3-billion by public companies and finance officials. The embezzlement was revealed following a public audit.

According to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Congo has continued to feel the effects of a decade-long brutal civil war that ended in 2003, displaced millions of people and ravaged the economy. The war left in its wake thousands of children without birth certificates, young girls with babies from unknown fathers, and child soldiers needing demobilisation and reintegration into civil society.

TI-France and the SHERPA Association have reported that a law suit was filed at the Court of Paris on Wednesday 9 July, relating to the circumstances under which huge real estate and financial capital was acquired in France by Denis Sassou Nguesso, Omar Bongo, Téodoro Obiang, Blaise Compaoré, Eduardo Dos Santos and their close associates or families.

The fight against corruption in Southern Africa needs tougher laws against bribery and fraud, more transparent political financing, cleaner public procurement and a stronger judiciary, according to seven studies just conducted across the region in the second half of 2007.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's ruling party will not accept a power-sharing deal that fails to recognise his re-election or seeks to reverse his land reform programme, a state-owned newspaper said on Friday. The conditions, which the Herald newspaper said were agreed at a ZANU-PF politburo meeting earlier this week, could dim prospects for a deal at negotiations between Mugabe's party and two factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Human rights officials with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have expressed serious concern about the living conditions in the Mbuji Mayi central prison, where at least 26 prisoners have died from severe and acute malnutrition since February. In the latest incident at the prison, located in Kasaï Oriental province, four prisoners died of hunger last week, bringing the total number of deaths in one month to 10.

The World Bank overstated its commitment to environmental projects since 1990, possibly by billions of dollars, an internal watchdog group reported on Tuesday. The bank's official estimate for commitments to programs specifically aimed at helping the environment is US$59 billion from fiscal 1990 to 2007, according to the Independent Evaluation Group.

In line with the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA)’s information blitz activities programme, we will now be sending you a weekly update on the service delivery situation and other related issues in Harare. This alert will be titled ‘Harare Last Week’ and will be sent to you every week. This is the first issue of the ‘Harare Last Week; 13-19 July 2008’.

The Development Worker will work as a Child Welfare Programme Development Adviser with the organisation to help build its capacity in organisational development (OD), effective programme design, planning and management, fundraising, networking, and marketing the organisation. S/he will also support the building of capacity in ZNCWC’s membership, including through the development of trainings / training materials so that the membership become more effective in responding to the needs of children

This report aims to shed light on how innovative solutions have arisen at the local level to address sustainable development challenges in Africa. The case studies in the volume identify the determinants of success, ongoing problems and unfinished business, and the scope for replication. The report is a contribution to the background documentation for the 16th and 17th sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development, which has Africa as one thematic focus. Its preparation is the result of a fruitful dialogue and interaction between the UN Secretariat and practitioners in the field in Africa.

Here is the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding signed today by the ruling Zanu PF party and the two formations of the Movement for Democratic Change, one led by Morgan Tsvangirai and the other by Professor Arthur Mutambara. The historic signing was on Monday 21 July, 2008.

EU foreign ministers have stepped up their pressure against Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean president for almost three decades, by adopting additional sanctions against his regime. The fresh sanctions will see travel restrictions and a financial embargo imposed on 37 people and four companies connected to Robert Mugabe. Similar measures against 131 Zimbabwean officials have already been in place for some time.