Climate change is emerging as a major threat to health and adding pressure on public health systems, especially in Africa, a senior UN official has said. "It causes a rise in sea levels, accelerates erosion of coastal zones, increases the intensity and frequency of natural disasters and accelerates the extinction of species," Luis Gomes Sambo, World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Africa, said. "The impact on human health is even greater."

Three years after adopting the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) approach, Tanzania will be taking another step, embarking on the second phase with a nationwide framework putting poverty reduction high on the country’s development agenda. The National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP) or Mkukuta as it is known in its Swahili acronym builds on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) of 2000, which was linked to debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC).

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/359/47203msg.jpgPaul T Zeleza looks at the long road that might yet see Mugabe's downfall and calls for a democracy that ultimately serves the Zimbabwean people through political and economic enfranchisement

As of now, results for the presidential elections in Zimbabwe have not yet been declared, five days after the elections were held last Saturday, March 29. In the meantime, the results of the parliamentary elections, which had been announced at snail's pace by the Electoral Commission over the past few days are now complete. They show that President Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, has lost its parliamentary majority. The opposition party, MDC, has won 99 to ZANU-PF's 97 out of 210 parliamentary seats. Eleven other seats were won by an MDC splinter group, and one by an independent candidate. Thus the opposition has won 110; three seats remain to be contested in by-elections because they were postponed following the death of opposition candidates. The ruling party's loss of its parliamentary majority represents a shockwave in Zimbabwe's post-independence political history.

But the real earthquake would be President Mugabe's downfall. Thus, as crucial as the parliamentary elections are, it is the results of the presidential elections that everyone is waiting for with mounting anxiety. The Electoral Commission is appealing for patience and blames logistical problems in releasing the results. But all the evidence including the very delay in the announcement of the results indicates that the irascible octogenarian dictator, President Mugabe, is, at the very least, trailing the veteran opposition leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai. In previous presidential elections (which were held separately from parliamentary elections) the predictable (the opposition would say predictably rigged) outcome was announced with a lot more alacrity and fanfare. Even more likely is the probability that President Mugabe has lost and his regime is trying to rig the elections. Outright rigging of the results will be difficult, but not impossible, because of a pre-election agreement among the parties that results should be posted outside each polling station: the opposition insisted on this to avoid blatant rigging that it suspected robbed it of victory in previous elections.

In the immediate ecstasy of the elections, the MDC claimed outright victory, that Mr. Tsvangirai had decisively beaten President Mugabe by 60% to 30%. Perusal and sampling of 435 of the 9,400 polling stations by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of civic groups, projected a more modest victory by the MDC leader. It indicated that Mr. Tsvangirai would receive between 47-51.8 percent to President Mugabe's 39.2-44.4 percent. In its latest announcement the MDC claims its leader has won 50.3 percent of the vote to President Mugabe's 43.8 percent. This is crucial figure: to avoid a runoff, the winner has to garner more than 50 percent of the popular vote. While conceding that the President failed to win 50 percent of the vote, for the first time in his twenty eight year reign, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, insists neither did Mr. Tsvangirai, thus making a runoff election later this month inevitable (according to the law, a runoff election has to be held in 21 days).

Zimbabwe and the wider southern African region, not to mention the rest of the continent and the so-called international community, are watching this unfolding political drama with intense interest and growing trepidation. In the absence of the presidential results, rumors are rife: about the shock and tensions within the ruling party with some of his lieutenants reportedly ready to ditch him, that there are negotiations between the opposition and the embattled president's advisors to ease him into resignation and retirement, and about the unpredictable machinations and loyalties of the security chiefs.

Expectations that the despised autocrat was too humiliated to stay are now giving way to fears that he will hang on and fight in the runoff election. Many political commentators believe that he will be trounced in a new election that is free and fair. That is the big question: will the mortally wounded tyrant be allowed by his security forces and political cronies who are running scared of losing their ill-gotten wealth built on the carcasses of deepening poverty of millions of workers and peasants, not to mention the immiseration of significant sections of the middle classes, to unleash the wrath of state power to terrorize the opposition into defeat?

Whatever happens next, it is not hard to explain the defeat of ZANU-PF and President Mugabe in the recent elections. A government that has impoverished its population as spectacularly as President Mugabe's inept dictatorship has done cannot maintain popular support. Zimbabwe's descent into the economic abyss has been staggering for a country not at war: inflation has apparently risen to a mindboggling rate of 164,900 percent, life expectancy has nearly been halved, and between a quarter and a third of the population has fled to neighboring countries and overseas. In this election Zimbabweans have shown that they have had enough of the Mugabe government's bankrupt stewardship of their well-being.

Predictable as it may seem from afar and in hindsight, what explains the opposition's victory is that support for President Mugabe's government finally collapsed in the rural areas, its political backbone since the liberation war from settler colonialism. It was in the enduring interests of repossessing land stolen by the European settlers under colonial rule and in the endearing name of the peasantry that the liberation war was fought and the violent land seizures embarked upon from the late 1990s after the British government reneged on the Lancaster House agreement and as the Mugabe government lost became increasingly unpopular thanks to its embrace of structural adjustment and abandonment of radical development policies including land reform. Yet, the peasantry benefited little from either, whose principal beneficiaries were functionaries of the political class. The urban working classes had long grown disenchanted with the tired socialist rhetoric of ZANU-PF which promised broad-based development but delivered unfettered neo-liberalism that benefited the elite that fragrantly flaunted its affluence as the country has sunken deeper into economic decline.

The rural peasantry did not simply catch up, as it were, with the urban working classes. Rural discontent has been growing. Indeed, the rural areas bore the brunt of economic decline and political terror as the regime sought to shore up its dwindling legitimacy and tattered revolutionary credentials by tightening its grip on the peasantry, its symbolic and substantive basis of power. The costs of the economic crisis, as manifested in food shortages and the politicization of food relief efforts, finally broke the proverbial patient backs of the peasantry.

Connecting the two, the peasantry and the working classes, the rural and the urban areas, and the country's other spatial and social divides, including the ethnicized divisions between the old Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which the Mugabe regime had manipulated to weaken the opposition and maintain its iron grip on power, was the draconian "Operation Murambatsvina", officially translated as "Operation Clean Up", but literally translated as "getting rid of the filth", through which the government sought to drain the cities including Harare, the capital, of political opposition. The operation was launched in 2005 and affected more than two million people. The bulk of the MDC's parliamentary seats from previous elections were located in the cities. This criminal evacuation program, which was widely condemned within Zimbabwe and internationally including by the United Nations, led to the destruction of the informal sector in the cities and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people many of whom flocked to the increasingly destitute rural areas. This not only exacerbated rural poverty, but also helped dissolve some of the social and political boundaries, both real and imagined, between the rural and urban areas and dwellers, which raised national consciousness and reinforced opposition to the former liberation heroes turned into predators in power.

If we are indeed witnessing the death throes of the Mugabe dictatorship, the full credit for this goes to the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, not the so-called international community, neither feeble regional organizations like SADC nor imperious western powers such as Britain or the United States who have little moral credibility in Africa's protracted struggles for democracy. It is also a testimony to the transformative power of the ballot box.

But as we have seen across Africa and elsewhere where dictatorship have fallen, the electoral process offers, at best, minimal conditions for democracy; full democracy, which is still a work in progress globally notwithstanding the conceit of the so-called mature democracies, must entail political and economic enfranchisement for all that goes beyond ritualized certifications of fractions of the political class every four or five years. And that requires eternal vigilance by civil society, continuous struggles against the self-serving political class. This is to suggest that sustaining and expanding democracy in Zimbabwe will be as hard as getting rid of the Mugabe dictatorship.

Given its social composition and the present regional and global conjunctures, the MDC will not, if and when it takes power, magically turn Zimbabwe around into a developmental democratic state and society: that will require building and sustaining cultures and communities of accountability.

* Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post. This article was first published at

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

The World Bank is considering financing a hydroelectric dam between Burundi and Tanzania that would boost mining production in East Africa. But in an area prone to drought, particularly with the onset of climate change, questions remain about the project's sustainability and whether it will be worth the projected $190 million cost.

While the number of people killed by anti-personnel landmines had dropped to an all-time low this year, there was a need for continued vigilance as a closer look at the statistics revealed that nearly half a million people injured by the deadly devices worldwide may require life-long medical care, a senior United Nations humanitarian official has said.

Convergence has been creeping up on the telecoms and Internet sectors in Africa. Orange has been quietly promoting its Livebox product in a widening range of countries and Telkom will shortly launch IP-TV services through Telkom Media. Gateway Communications set up GTV to compete with DStv in the satellite Pay TV market

Survival International hasreleased a summary report which shows how tribal peoples are having their basic right to water denied. The document was released to coincide with World Water Day (March 22). Taking examples from nine different tribes, it explains how industry and governments are destroying tribal peoples’ water sources.

IDASA has conducted a study of four oil-rich African countries: Chad, Angola, Gabon, and Sao Tome é Principe (STP), to gain understanding of the relationship between the presence of oil and development, and also, importantly, to look for opportunities to change the negative aspects of this relationship. This study analyses the political context within which decisions are made about resource revenue.

As we seek answers on how the dispute over the 2007 presidential results could have triggered such wanton killings, we might ask ourselves how we got trapped in a dilemma of our own making. Most of us have been happy to live as if the total disinheritance of entire communities did not matter, and to pay and receive bribes as we sought parcels of land that we did not have rights to.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/370/46930rift.jpgSince the outbreak of post-election violence in the Rift Valley, there have been numerous reports in the local dailies claiming that the root cause of this conflict is ‘the land question’. Without exception, these reports fail to inform or educate us precisely because of their misrepresentation of history. Horace Njuguna Gisemba seeks to rectify this.

Given the scale and the urgency of the current crisis and its repeated association with the so-called ‘land question’ it is time for a complete unpacking of the history behind colonial and post-colonial settlement in the White Highlands. Only then will we determine with certainty whether land is at the centre of the ongoing systematic evictions in the Rift Valley.

The first argument that is normally presented is that the North Rift region (Uasin Gishu, Trans Nzoia, Nandi and West Pokot Districts) exclusively constitutes the ancestral land of the supra-ethnic group we have come to term ‘the Kalenjin’, i.e. the Nandi, Keiyo, Pokot, Tugen, Marakwet and Kipsigis. A quick etymology of geographical names in the North Rift region such as Uasin Gishu, Eldoret, Sirikwa, and Kipkaren confirms that the Maasai long lived in and named these places. Indeed, it is the Maasai who were displaced from these lands by the colonialists and therefore, any question of restitution to ancestral owners – if at all it can be achieved - must of necessity be resolved with the full inclusion of the Maasai.

In the early 1900s colonial settlement in Central Kenya displaced many Gikuyu families. In their search for productive agricultural land, many of these families gradually moved west through Kijabe and into the Rift Valley. At the same time, white settlers moving into the Rift Valley aggressively recruited Gikuyu farmhands from Central Kenya who became their tenants at will. Between 1904 and 1920, 70,000 Gikuyus had migrated to the Rift Valley. By the end of the 1930s that community had grown to more than 150,000, many of whom were second and third generation Rift Valley Gikuyus. As the tension between these increasingly successful squatter farmers and their white landlords heightened the white settlers in some districts decided to do away with squatters altogether. In 1941 the first Government re-settlement scheme for Africans was established in Olenguruone north of Nakuru and it absorbed many of the Gikuyu squatters who were being driven out by their white landlords. But the larger majority of the Gikuyu, numbering over 100,000, were forcefully repatriated to Central Kenya between 1946 and 1952. This cyclical pattern of Gikuyu removals from Central Kenya, then settlement in the Rift Valley, followed by forceful evictions and painful repatriation back to Central Kenya, should be the subject of real concern. For each time they have occurred (1952, 1991/92, 1997 and 2007/2008) these returns have generated bitterness and inflamed the Gikuyu in Central Kenya. As a barrage of Kenyan historians agree (David Throup, Tabitha Kanogo, David Anderson, Frank Furedi, Rosberg & Nottingham) these reactions ignited the 1952 Mau Mau Uprising, and in 2008 they have been the reason for the vicious revenge attacks of the past two weeks.

The eviction of the Gikuyu from Olenguruone in the late 1940s and early 1950s made room for a new government-initiated settlement of Africans in the White Highlands. This 1955 settlement was conceived for the purposes of benefiting loyal African farmhands. Given that this re-settlement was taking place at the height of the Mau Mau uprising, the colonial authorities were quick to exclude the Gikuyu people from this scheme. The question of loyalty was to determine another pattern of settlement in the run-up to Independence and soon thereafter - some departing white farmers chose to gift their parcels to trusted farmhands. This is the history behind the ownership of farms running to hundreds and even thousands of acres by some people of Teso origin in Trans Nzoia District.

The third wave of African settlement in the White Highlands was the Million Acre Scheme which begun in 1963. On the eve of Independence the departing colonisers negotiated a scheme by which white settlers were bought out of their farms by the in-coming Kenya government. The money for this purchase was made available as a loan by the British government, hence the acrimonious dispute that pitted Jomo Kenyatta on the one hand and Bildad Kaggia and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga on the other. The argument of the latter nationalists was that there was no justification for a people to buy that which had been forcefully wrenched from them. The vehicle that the independent Kenya government used to facilitate the acquisition and subsequent distribution of these lands was the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT). SFT was a separate legal entity whose trustees were government ministers. It is important to note that the SFT exists to this day and the records of all their transactions from 1963 to date, including those allocations that were made in the Moi era, are available for perusal at the Ministry of Lands.

Through the 1960s and 1970s the SFT would, through the local dailies and village barazas, advertise and invite applications for allocation of land in recently created settlement schemes. These schemes were constituted from the farms that the SFT had acquired from the white farmers. The conscious process of designing these schemes involved several steps. First was the amalgamation of parcels and sub-division by use of aerial surveys into economically viable units, including the provision of access roads. This was followed by conversion of the land registration system from the complex Registration of Titles Act (RTA) to the simpler Registered Land Act (RLA) which was borrowed from Australia. Along with that, the government made loans available not only for the purchase of land, but also for the acquisition of livestock, farm inputs and other developments. These loans, which were part of a revolving fund, were administered by the SFT.

As individuals responded to the advertisements and applied for allocation of land, grassroots leadership and enterprise were ultimately critical to the ways in which communities organised to make the best of the emergent SFT opportunities. For instance, it was the power of what John Lonsdale defines as positive ethnicity that saw the Maragoli community congregate to purchase SFT land in Lugari District which, though it lies in Western Province, was part of the White Highlands. Matunda Scheme, which straddles Rift Valley and Western Province, attracted the Abanyore people. Likewise the close-knit Abagusii people drew each other into significant purchase of the Sinyerere Settlement Scheme in Trans Nzoia District. There was no political patronage in this manner of settlement. Rather, it was solely the desire for productive land that drove these traditionally agricultural communities to participate in these schemes.

It is worth noting that even in the 1980s, under former President Moi’s regime, the SFT continued to acquire land. In Kipkabus, Uasin Gishu District, SFT took over a large parcel from East African Tanning Extract Co. Ltd (EATEC), a Lonrho subsidiary. Through sponsored economic mobility and political patronage it was allocated to members of the Kalenjin community.

Because of the publicity surrounding it, the fourth pattern of resettlement in the Rift Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s overshadows all of the above. Perhaps on account of the elaborate organisational infrastructure attending to it and the entrepreneurial genius required to enable its proper realisation, references to this pattern of resettlement invariably carry grave misrepresentations. The venture capitalists who conceived this scheme saw an opportunity in the mobilisation of low income earners for the purchase of large-scale white-owned farms. They therefore set up public companies and in some instances cooperative societies. These became the vehicles through which they raised capital from the masses and then acquired farms that were being offered for sale on a willing buyer-willing seller basis. Examples of this abound, and records of the companies and their transactions should be readily available from the advocates who oversaw these processes. In Kitale, the Abagusii acquired a parcel that they renamed North Kisii while the Maragoli mobilised to purchase what was later to be known as Bidii Farm. Another group from the same community bought Vihiga Farm in Soy Divison. In Uasin Gishu, a group of Kalenjins set up Kapkures Farm Ltd and bought land in Moiben Division. Others bought land in Lessos through Barkeiwo Farm Ltd while Kaplogoi Estates Ltd and Sessia Farm Ltd made good of other opportunities within the district. The populous Gikuyu formed several land-buying companies, the most famous of which were Gema (Gikuyu, Embu Meru Association), Ngwataniro, and Nyakinyua and all of which bought land in the Rift Valley as well as in Central Province.

Farms such as Kiambaa, Kimuri, Yamumbi and Kondoo in Uasin Gishu District which are at the heart of the on-going violent post-election evictions were purchased by land-buying companies of this nature. In the initial years, the farms that were acquired in this manner remained as large-scale parcels and were only sub-divided through presidential edict in 1981. This edict by former President Moi was aimed at undercutting the growing influence of the venture capitalists who had used land-buying companies as a springboard for electoral politics. The names that immediately come to mind are Kihika Kimani, Njenga Karume and Stephen Kairo. The result of the sub-division was the creation of tiny parcels of land that were then transferred to the low-income shareholders who had formed the original land-buying companies.

Alongside land-buying companies in the willing buyer-willing seller resettlement model were transactions between departing white settlers and individual members of the emergent African elite. This class had access to funding from the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) and was drawn from across the ethnic divide. Thus one finds large-scale farms in excess of 1,000 acres in the hands of Kalenjins, Gikuyus, Luos, Luhyas, Kisiis and Masaais in the Rift Valley.

The wrath of the Kalenjin peoples over what they consider the appropriation of their ancestral lands is not a new phenomenon, neither does it have its roots in the 1991/1992 ‘land clashes’. As far back as 1969, the Hon. Jean Marie Seroney (MP for Tinderet) had drawn controversy when he authored ‘The Nandi Declaration’ that demanded all non-Nandi vacate the ancestral land of this sub-tribe. The Kenyatta government reacted by imprisoning Seroney for sedition but his ideas did not die. Ironically, in 1991/1992 Moi and his foot soldiers were to adopt Seroney’s template for ethnic exclusivity (expanded to encompass the larger Kalenjin community) by evicting Gikuyus, Luos, Luhyas and Kisiis in their bid to secure political victory in the Rift Valley.

Borrowing from Kenyatta’s example of using land to reward cronies and in some cases emergent national heroes such as athletes and popular musicians, Moi expanded this other form of settlement in the Rift Valley. In the best practice of political patronage, Moi used state forests, demonstration and research land owned by parastatals such as the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to reward loyalists largely drawn from his community. This is how a select new elite acquired, at well below the market price, sizeable parcels of prime land in Trans Nzoia, Nandi and Uasin Gishu Districts. Apart from this latter settlement by political protégées all other forms of post-independence settlement in the Rift Valley were essentially valid commercial transactions. They were, in fact, no different from the commercial transactions by which the coffee farms bordering Kiambu District came to be transformed into the residential areas that we now know as Runda, Gigiri, Loresho, Kitisuru, Nyari and Rosslyn.

Towards the end of Moi’s tenure, EATEC decided to divest and sold off 49,000 acres on a willing buyer-wiling seller basis. Even so, these 2001 transactions caught Moi’s eye and he demanded that most of this land be sold to Kalenjins. The top EATEC management that had been summoned to State Lodge in Eldoret provided Moi with a list to prove that they had indeed taken cognisance of this concern.

Contrary to what has so often been posited as an irrefutable fact, there are several reasons why the eviction of non-indigenous communities from the Rift Valley has had nothing to do with the so-called ‘land question’. Indeed this systematic on-going violence is not about remedying of past injustices, land scarcity, growing impoverishment of the Kalenjin or protests against the outcome of the flawed December 2007 General Election. To keep repeating that the Gikuyu got to the Rift Valley through presidential favour fails to explain how the Kambas, Luhyas and Kisiis, who have never produced a president, became land owners and flourished in the Rift Valley. And if indeed it is the declaration of Mwai Kibaki as president that is the offending spark, then why are non-Gikuyus under attack?

Further, if this violence is about the pressure or scarcity of land, these issues would not wait to crop up in every election year. Does it take one five years to realize that they have a neighbour whose presence prevents them from tilling a larger piece of land or using that land to pursue some other profitable business? Given the vast state machinery that former President Moi had at his disposal from the end of 1978 he would long have righted purported land injustices against the Kalenjin. That he only picked up ‘the land question’ at the onset of multi-party politics in 1991 proves that his motivation was never simply the restitution of land to the Kalenjin. Rather, the clashes were instigated for political expediency.

The third reason why these aggressions are not about the scarcity of land is that the huge tracts of highly productive agricultural land in the hands of elite Kalenjins, a select caucus of the political class across the ethnic divide, non-Kenyan multinationals and Kenyan white and Indian farmers have never been the target of land invasion and redistribution. Genuine pressure for land would not be so selective in choosing the enemy. Indeed, pressure for land would not lead a Kalenjin man to drive out his Gikuyu wife as has happened in the current crisis.

Fourthly, in the on-going crisis the Gikuyus, Kisiis and Luhyas (on the Kapsabet-Vihiga border) who have been targeted for eviction have been given no notice to vacate. Were it simply about land, one would have expected the matter to stop upon their expulsion. That the Kalenjin warriors have designed an elaborate mechanism for vetting and exterminating fleeing residents at roadblocks signals that their goal is not the simple take-over of land. Further, the aggressors have gone so far as to follow victims who have already deserted the land and taken refuge in churches. The burning of these sacred sites and the inhuman killing of those who had taken refuge therein raises urgent questions about the moral ethos driving the Kalenjin community.

Claims such as Kipchumba Some’s in the Daily Nation of 9 February 2008 that the Kalenjin have reacted to their neighbours with so much aggression because they have been impoverished after selling their land to these ‘outsiders’ are ludicrous. For in the sale transactions that have taken place over the years, the Kalenjin were never robbed of their land, they always got market value for it. In 2001 EATEC was prevailed upon by Moi to reduce the sale prices and they did. Many Kalenjins who later sold what they had acquired from EATEC made profits of well over 600% within a space of six years. If their investments from these profits have not paid off, they can not now forcefully reacquire what they freely and voluntarily sold. It is akin to the original owners of Runda, Gigiri, Loresho, Nyari, Kitisuru and Rosslyn citing growing poverty and therefore coming to reclaim their ‘lost’ lands by burning the residences that diverse people have invested in.

It is clear that the passions and goals that have repeatedly driven the Kalenjin community in these intermittent spates of violence emanate from somewhere else. In each instance, they have targeted as the enemy communities whose industry has transformed the landscape of the Rift Valley economy. What drives them to attack these peoples and the means by which they have been galvanized for the onslaughts ought to be the subject of thorough investigation. A solution that looks to the restitution of ‘Kalenjin land’ will not be sufficient to address their imagined exclusion from profitable enterprise. The much-needed process of unearthing the driving impetus of the pre-planned evictions and murders, of finding lasting solutions and restoring harmony, is the rightful work of a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.

*Horace N. Gisemba is a former resident of Uasin Gishu District.

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

Africa is vulnerable to present, foreseen and unforeseen, natural and man-made calamities. Of great concern currently is the impact that climatic change due to global warming will have on the richly endowed continent, which, ironically, is the poorest.

The fourth and latest round of United Nations-led talks, bringing together representatives from Morocco and the Frente Polisario, have wrapped up on the outskirts of New York City, with both sides once again pledging to continue negotiations. Also participating at the two-day talks – facilitated by Peter van Walsum, the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General – at the Greentree Estate in Manhasset on Long Island were representatives of neighbouring States, Algeria and Mauritania.

South Africa has called on rich nations to spell out whether cash for a climate change technology fund was new money, and said it was unhelpful of them to label big developing countries "major emitters". Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of G20 energy and environment ministers near Tokyo, also called for greater clarity on the management of World Bank-administered climate funds.

More than a week after the launch of an army operation to flush out the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF) in Mount Elgon, a district along the border with Uganda, the fugitive chief of the outlawed militia has reportedly urged an end to the campaign, but remained defiant towards government.

This article , was a bit of a paradox, comprehensive in some ways but highly selective in others. The insinuation that the post-liberation Zimbabwean government whimsically turned down the opportunity to buy back land 'legitimately' purchased by White farmers conveniently glosses over certain factors i.e. the Lancaster agreement masterminded by the Thatcher government that effectively shafted the post-liberation Zimbabwean government and restricted how much money they could put forward to resettle those white farmers if they did choose to buy them out.

Funds that were pledged by the previous UK administration were withdrawn so that Zimbabwean authorities would have had to cough up a substantial amount of money in foreign currency to buy out the white settlements and continue with effective redistribution. The post-liberation government capitulated to this unsatisfactory agreement due to various pressures& were lumbered with its terms for a decade. The article was also too harsh on Mbeki and unrealistic about what he could actually achieve in such a short time as a result of the talks held last year. The man is being pragmatic. Instead of merely pandering to Mugabe as the article suggested, he knows there's no point excluding him from negotiations.

Like it or not, right or wrong, Mugabe is a key player. After all, the West's approach of sanctions etc, with all its double-standards& heavy-handedness has thus far proved mostly ineffective.

Hundreds of Kenyans have fallen ill after a chemical consignment was dumped on the roadside near the port city of Mombasa, officials said on Thursday. According to a local official, up to 1 500 people have sought treatment at local hospitals, complaining mainly of chest pains and respiratory problems they believe were caused by the leaking container.

A powerful cyclone has hit parts of Mozambique, killing at least seven people and forcing thousands families from their homes. The state-controlled national broadcaster said on Monday that four districts in the northern Nampula province were being battered by heavy downpours and strong winds of up to 200km per hour.

GroundWork has released its 6th GroundWork Report, Peak Poison: The Elite Energy Crisis and Environmental Justice. The groundWork Report explores the social and environmental justice impacts of energy crises. It also asks questions about the politics of energy. When government talks about a solution and Eskom about their response, it is a response aimed at the global and national energy elites in service of capital.

Early one morning in 1993, Wilson Turinawe woke up to the crack of gunfire in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Paramilitary park rangers were attacking his village. His thatched hut was set on fire. His wife grabbed their infant child and ran. Turinawe was slashed with a machete. He still has the scars. “They came with guns,” he recalls, with a disbelief in his voice that suggests the episode might have taken place just yesterday instead of fifteen years ago.

Uganda’s Batwa communities have been marginalised for decades. Now they are struggling to cope with extreme weather conditions, and want better homes to protect them from storms and landslides. Among the posh office premises of the Red Cross Society and the court of adjudicature on Muchingo hill, in Uganda's western district of Kisoro, are ramshackle houses in which a community of Batwa people live.