Niger's President Mamadou Tandja, 71, is claiming victory in a referendum he called to change the constitution and run for a third term in office. Correspondents in the capital, Niamey, say giant posters have gone up in the city bearing a message of thanks to voters from Mr Tandja.

Justice Emmanuel Fagbenle, sitting at Gambia's High Court, has pronounced heavy fines and imprisonment against six journalists, including executive members of the Gambian Press Union (GPU), who were charged with criminal libel and defamation of President Yahya Jammeh.

This week 23 families living in tin-shanty houses in Motala Heights, Lot 35, were issued with letters, demanding that they pay exorbitant increases in rent - effective immediately - or face eviction. A pensioner, seeking advice about the letters, was told by the Pinetown Legal Aid Board that he would be “in the firing line” if he challenged the so-called landlord. Relatives of the so-called landlord threatened an area coordinator for Abahlali baseMjondolo for assisting the families, warning that they would “come to your home and deal with you.”

Horn Relief is an international African based development and humanitarian organization which focuses on increasing sustainable livelihoods for (agro-) pastoralists and coastal communities in Somalia as well as cross-border areas in neighboring countries. Presently it has programmes focusing on water & sanitation, food security, non-formal education, vocational training, cash based responses, as well as other humanitarian emergency interventions.Horn Relief is looking for a Fundraising and Information Coordinator.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/445/58285_Makuwe_play1_tmb.jpg… Mashiri reviews a recent performance of His Excellency is in Love, a play by New Zealand-based Zimbabwean writer Stanley Makuwe.

Thetha – a Nguni word for debate – bring together a wide range of national, regional and international stakeholders on the expected ICT challenges and opportunities that the Southern African region will face in the next ten years are being organised by APC member SANGONeT. Pre-Thetha reports on Zimbabwe and Mozambique make useful contextual reading.

"Why is it not possible to allocate sufficient money for every aspect of global health, of which AIDS is but a part, and in so doing, meet the Millennium Development Goals - money which is but a fraction, a miniscule fraction of all the public dollars that have found their way, in one short year, into the bottomless pits of greed and avarice?" - Stephen Lewis, speaking at the opening of the International AIDS Society conference in Cape Town. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains, among other things, excerpts from that speech.

Cairo's airport has been unusually busy the past month as Egypt's security apparatus steps up its campaign against online political activists. Several prominent Egyptian bloggers have "disappeared" from the airport's arrivals hall, while others report suspiciously long delays that they claim were cover for state security officers to search their laptops and luggage.

Facebook and Twitter, the latest Web 2.0 tools to captivate Moroccans, are winning new users among everyone from chatty teens to dedicated cyberactivists. The growing popularity of the two tools indicates that Morocco's Web users, who now number 9 million, are moving beyond blogging to share information with each other and the world.

61 families living in the settlement of Tumbleweed, Howick, have been threatened with imminent, unlawful eviction by the municipality and the local Inkosi. Three armed police officers and a representative of the municipality told the community that they had 24 hours to vacate the area, or an eviction team would return tomorrow and on Friday with bulldozers to demolish their homes. All will be left homeless.

Large parts of West Africa are struggling to get back online following damage to an undersea cable. The fault has caused severe problems in Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. The blackout is thought to have been caused by damage to the SAT-3 cable which runs from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa.

Zimbabwean journalists on 28 July 2009 launched the Zimbabwe Journalists for Human Rights (ZJHR) as part of efforts to curb violations of media freedom and the abuse of journalists’ professional rights with impunity. Speaking at the launch ceremony at the Harare press club, The Quill, ZJHR spokesperson Dumisani Muleya, said the organisation was moulded along the lines of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The British Broadcasting Corp. has resumed broadcasting from Zimbabwe for the first time since it was banned in 2001 and the five-month-old coalition government said it also was considering allowing CNN back. Despite the signs that the government is serious about media reforms, former opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's party continues to complain about ill-treatment and harassment by followers of President Robert Mugabe

Thousands of people in Harare face mass eviction from their market stalls and homes. Most of the targeted people were victims of the 2005 mass forced evictions that left about 700,000 people without homes or livelihood or both. Four years on, the authorities now want to forcibly re-evict some of these people.

In this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, Sokari Ekine looks at what people from Nigeria to Nairobi are writing about art, literature – and local cuisine.

In the last four days approximately three thousand houses have been demolished and the same estimated number of Angolan families has been forcibly evicted in the (commonly called) Bagdad neighbourhood, in the Sector 5 of M’Bonde Chapéu, in the Kilamba Kiaxi municipality of Luanda.

A criminal charge of "disturbing public peace and spreading false news" brought against Madiambal Diagne, managing editor of the Quotidien newspaper in 2004 was on July 20, 2009 dismissed by an Appeal court in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

Although they need each other, the relationship between the media and civil society has not been at its best in post-apartheid South Africa, and both parties would do well to cultivate a more professional and respectful relationship. This was the assertion of Theo Coggin, chief executive of Quo Vadis Communications, during ‘Breakfast on the second floor’, a function held by The South African Institute for Advancement (Inyathelo) in Cape Town. Coggin, who worked as a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, has extensive experience in both the corporate and NGO sector.

Pambazuka News (http://www.pambazuka.org) is the award winning pan African platform for social justice. We seek to establish Pan African social networking platform as the hub of social activism across the continent – an independent, self-financing Pan African social network and community of members comprising social justice activists, engaged intellectuals and institutions that have similar missions to those of Pambazuka News.

We are seeking an experienced Web 2.0 technologist to project manage the implementation of the platform which is to be developed externally. We see this position as someone who can turn our overall vision of PZ2.0 into reality by providing us the optimum yet futuristic technological platform and functionalities. Closing date for applications: August 15, 2009.

Pambazuka News (http://www.pambazuka.org) is the award winning pan African platform for social justice. We seek to establish Pan African social networking platform as the hub of social activism across the continent – an independent, self-financing Pan African social network and community of members comprising social justice activists, engaged intellectuals and institutions that have similar missions to those of Pambazuka News.

We are seeking an experienced Web 2.0 technologist to project manage the implementation of the platform which is to be developed externally. We see this position as someone who can turn our overall vision of PZ2.0 into reality by providing us the optimum yet futuristic technological platform and functionalities. Closing date for applications: August 15, 2009.