Experts from five emerging world economic powers have told how a two-day think tanks forum this week reached consensus on creating a BRICS development bank designed to complement existing global financial institutions such as the World Bank. Liu Youfa, deputy director of the China Institute of International Studies, said, 'At the previous forum before the BRICS summit meeting in March, we were still discussing whether to create this bank, but now we are talking about how to create this bank.'

The Islamist ‘terrorist’ groups that have taken over control of northern Mali are not only the creations of Algeria’s secret police, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), but they are being supplied, supported and orchestrated by the DRS.

As another day of Nigeria’s independence anniversary draws near, it is obvious that all is not well with the country’s educational sector. The portrait of independent Nigeria, after 52 years of its existence, is disquieting.

A carbon tax could be one policy instrument to tackle climate change, poverty and unemployment if it is designed and used correctly.

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A Zimbabwean independent monitoring group says it will be impossible to hold free and fair elections in March when President Robert Mugabe wants the polls. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network said the call by Mugabe for full elections in the last week of March doesn't allow enough time to establish conditions for a free vote.

The United Nations described South Sudan’s refugee crisis as 'critical'. Unless the political tension in Sudan is resolved, experts warn the outlook will sharply deteriorate.

Women are pioneering Mauritania’s fledgling dairy industry and trying to get Mauritanians to support local small producers, but they face steep competition from the heavily subsidized European milk sector. The Mauritanian market is flooded with cheap milk products imported from Europe. Sixty per cent of the population depends on the livestock sector in some form for income, and the sector contributes almost eight per cent to the country's GDP, yet the country imports 65 per cent of its milk requirements, a joint report produced by the NGOs Intermon Oxfam , ACORD and AMAD noted.

An attack on a political rally by uniformed soldiers is stoking fears of a reprise of state-sponsored violence against NGOs, human rights activists and parties opposed to President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the lead-up to a referendum on a draft constitution and scheduled parliamentary and presidential elections in 2013. Welshman Ncube, the leader of the smaller Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), addressed a gathering of about 1,000 people at the 21 September rally in Mutoka, in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East Province, before the assault occurred.

Tanzania has encouraged Morocco to rejoin the AU so that together they can find a durable solution to the conflict of Western Sahara, calling on the UN Security Council to continue mediation efforts in the Territory. Addressing 67th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Republic of Tanzania, Mr. Bernard Kamillius Membe, said that his delegation 'encourages Morocco to rejoin the AU.

A civil society group, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urged President Goodluck Jonathan’s government to mark the country’s 52nd independence anniversary by 'urgently committing itself to socio-economic rights reform and end systemic poverty that has remained the bane of millions of Nigerians for decades'. The organization in a public statement dated 30 September 2012 and signed by its Executive Director, Adetokunbo Mumuni stated that, 'The struggle for political freedom and independence from colonization was widely applauded by our people but over five decades after Nigeria gained independence the country’s enormous natural resources and wealth have not been utilized for the prosperity of the country and its peoples. Rather, socio-economic conditions in post-independent Nigeria have remained precarious, and consequently millions of our citizens embarrassingly remain in poverty and misery. For such people, the promises of independence remain unfulfilled.'

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda has called on the United Nations General Assembly to ensure that an ambitious programme adopted last year to spur development and economic growth in the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) be fully and speedily implemented. 'In particular, duty-free quota-free market access and supply side capacity must be ensured to the least developed countries,' President Banda told the Assembly on the second day of its annual General Debate, adding that implementation must be 'in its entirety and in an effective and timely manner'.

The European Union is hoping to wrap up free-trade agreements across most of sub-Saharan Africa next year but has yet to assuage African fears that their budding industries will not be able to cope with the new competition. The European Union launched talks with more than 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries 10 years ago on Thursday - on September 27, 2002 - aiming to help them trade their way out of poverty and to give EU businesses access to nascent markets.

Sudan has told the United Nations General Assembly that its debts must be cancelled and its economy supported as it struggles to recover from losing three-quarters of its critical oil revenue to South Sudan when it seceded a year ago. 'Sudan requires assistance to go through this very sensitive stage towards better horizons. For that we believe that debts must be cancelled and its economy supported,' Ali Ahmed Karti, the Sudanese foreign minister, said on Saturday. The International Monetary Fund this week urged Sudan to meet donors to discuss debt relief and some IMF board members called for exceptional efforts from the IMF and the global community to help Sudan reduce its debt of about $40bn.

The Board of Fahamu Trust Ltd, publisher of Pambazuka News, is delighted to announce two new appointments:

1. Zo Randriamaro, former Board member and Malagasy feminist sociologist, researcher and activist, has been appointed interim Executive Director of Fahamu Trust Ltd. Zo can be reached at [email][email protected]

2. Rebecca Williams has returned to the Trust as Acting Finance Director.

We look forward to working with them to ensure Fahamu's full transition to being a pan-African organization.

He was willing to pay the price that always comes with the courage to confront oppression. That is the meaning of standing with the poor.

It is regrettable that in the past decade, the so-called international community appears to have made a sport of blaming Rwanda, a tiny country of less than twelve million people, for every unrest experienced in Africa’s largest country - in terms of land mass - the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation of over 70 million inhabitants.

How do you holler
And not be heard
A fury of injustice
That has numbed us stern

Fury killed a dream
Killed the kid
Who dreams football on streets
Caught in the axis
Tragedy and injustice

To the world
Ain’t nothin’ but a thing
Call it an –ism
Euphemism has a name for it
Collateral damage
Isn’t that what they call it?

An explicit offense
Made inoffensive
Tragic called the kid
Dream gunned on the street
Football
His dream
His defense
For street dreams

For the explicit offender
The dream
Dealt on a kid
Dealt on misdeed
Unnamed coffin
That was the end of the kid

The world should be
On bended knees
Crying out life
How hollow is the prize
Dealt on a kid
Living on
Dreams…
Football…
Streets…

© afrodisiatic expression

‘Racial quotas are hateful’. So says Sunday Times columnist Stephen Mulholland. I don’t agree. It is an undeniable truth that race and political affiliation rank above ability in the current dispensation. However, Mulholland cunningly equates Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Affirmative Action with Nazism and apartheid. It is devoid of any facts. Woolworths is driving a programme adhering to the country’s labour legislations. It is geared towards addressing the inherent socio-economic inequalities of the past. BEE is not a law that was designated for oppression. Rather, one for balancing the scale. Apartheid had its affirmative action for whites. This one is to redress such imbalances. It could lend itself to abuse by our political demagogues. In some instances it has degenerated to an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) by some public representatives and the ruling party elites.

Comrade Umshini Wam infamously declared most recently to the DA speaker: ‘..you have more rights because you’re a majority. That’s how democracy works.’ The remark questioned his understanding of constitutional democracy. Again, attempting to bring in another notorious spokesperson in the form of Jimmy Manyi, Mulholland fraudulently attempts to equate the plight of the Coloured people to the economic hegemony of the Jews the world over. Since history has always been written by the victors, there has always been a conspicuous effort to erase Africa in the discourse on civilization. As if it is only the preserve of Europe. Therefore we also owe it to ourselves to change his/herstory to be ourstory.

In the post-1994 dispensation, it is easy for privileged Mulhollands to point fingers at our broken education system, festering hospitals, rape of the defence budget, corrupt tenders and so on, as they remember their formerly legalized racial superiority, despite having lost nothing under the democratically elected regime. It is worth reminding such people that none from the down-trodden South African approves of cronyism, corruption and other shortcomings of the government. The question that begs an answer should be how to review these legislations to benefit all of us equally. Racial quotas, according to his own definition, were not meant to perpetrate crimes against humanity or for genocidal purposes.

As seen in Palestinians at the hands of the Jewish settlers who arrived a couple of decades ago. In contrast, the indigenous South Africans demonstrated their humane side by not chasing Mulholland and such melamin neither challenged nor orchestrated any mass killings against them. This is despite them having colonized us for more than three centuries. Yet you have people like him having the audacity to judge our country against Hitler’s Nazi regime.

*MP Khwezi ka Ceza is a freelance journalist and an independent political economist

The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday 26 September began to debate a plan to deploy West African peacekeeping troops to tackle the six-month Islamist insurgency in northern Mali. At the Security Council, both the United States and France forcefully backed the call for greater international involvement, as did several African leaders. But while France, the former colonial power in Mali, has for months spearheaded the push for foreign military involvement, the United States has been reluctant to formally back such an operation.