On 6 June 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented his report International Migration and Development to the General Assembly. The report will provide the framework for discussion during the Informal Interactive Civil Society Hearings taking place on 12 July 2006 and the High-Level Dialogue of the General Assembly, being held from 14-15 September 2006. In mid-June, NGLS launched an online call for comments on the NGLS website to create an opportunity for civil society, especially those organizations who were unable to participate in the 12 July Hearings, to provide their views, comments and responses to the Secretary-General's report in order to help support a constructive exchange in the process leading up to the Dialogue.

Mantis Thoughts From a Hot Rock – (http://pearl-island.blogspot.com/2006/07/world-united.html) writing for Reunion Island comments on the passing of the World Cup and the reportage from the local media on the French team. Amidst all the fanfare, Marine Le Pen (the daughter of French National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen) arrived on the Island.

..”Marine Le Pen - she who be the daughter of the father, arrived amidst the blue football fever to encourage the faithful and probably have a bit of a holiday. What is odd, and strikingly so, is that to an outsider "La Réunion" is the melting pot of seventies pop songs and lacks the racism (so I am informed) of other French departments such as Martinique and Guadeloupe. If so, how does one explain the 8.1% of the vote to the FN in 2002? I dunno! Yet Marine was given an hour of air time on Radio Freedom when she found time to escape the Creolia Hotel and avoid the thirty or so demonstrators who had decided that there are more important things in life than the footie!”

An interesting question, who were the 8.1% of the Island that voted for Le Pen? Were they the same group that supported the French football team? Or as in the case of many people of African decent, the support was not for the French team but rather the 17 African players who were part of France’s 22 man squad?

Alb Sayed - Alb Sayed (http://albsayed.org/2006/07/06/yacoubian-parliament) reports on yet more censorship in Egypt. This time it is an MP, Mustafa Bakry who is asking that some of the scenes in the film “The Yacoubian Building” be cut. Interesting though is that one of the scenes he is wanting removed shows a woman being sodomised by officers in a police station. Alb Sayed reminds us:

….”which is nearly identical to what happened to activist Mohamed elSharqawi. And in this case, I do believe that the whole of Egypt needs to see what our beloved Security Forces and police are doing to people in the police stations. Furthermore we need to realize that while these characters are fictional, the acts are very real”.

The government is therefore calling for censorship of the very acts that it’s own security forces are committing on Egyptians citizens today. Freedom of Expression is being curtailed once again and at the same time Freedom to Abuse by the security forces is continuing unabated and unabashed.

AfroMusing - You Missed This (http://kumekucha.blogspot.com/2006/07/kingsway-house-building-in-nairob…) has a post on the secrets of “Kingsway House” in Nairobi – which used to house the Special Branch and was thought to be the place where the plot to assassinate Tom Mboya took place.

“One set of secrets that many Kenyans would have liked Kingsway House to reveal, if buildings would talk, was the planning of details that led to the assassination Of Tom Mboya.......There is plenty of evidence to suggest that whoever planned and executed the murder of Mboya had access to impeccable intelligence information. The day before Mboya was assassinated, he arrived at the then main Embakassi International airport from a conference he had been attending in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. The Standard newspaper on the morning of his assassination carried a photograph of Mboya arriving and waving to somebody who must have been at the waving bay in the airport. However, to have planned and executed this assassination, the person or persons who plotted must have had the information about Mboya's arrival back into the country, the day before.”

Nigeria’s Whats New - Nigeria, Whats New (http://nigeriawhatisnew.blogspot.com/2006/07/another-fail-africa-summit…) comments on the forthcoming “Sullivan Summit scheduled for Abuja from July 17 to 20.” Amongst the participants will be former US President Bill Clinton and Bush hawk now World Bank President, Paul Dr Paul Wolfowitz. What’s New writes:

The same usual suspects are back to milk the Nigerian cow! Have these summits benefited Nigeria or Africa? Poverty, despair and disease is mentioned but not seen. A little bit of effort in stopping and reversing the rot without moving from your opulent mansions is all that is required. Oil, Diamonds, Gold, and many more are plentiful in Africa but in partnership with a rotten few. Africa is still poor and the few are holding a huge number of people prisoner".

The cow is dry – this will end up as another useless, ineffective talking shop that will in no way change Nigeria or Africa in anyway whatsoever.

Trials and Tribulations of a Freshly Arrived Denizen of Ghana - Trials and Tribulations (http://ekbensahinghana.blogspot.com/2006/07/as-week-draws-to-close-in.h…) comments on the possibility of an ECOWAS regional police organisation that would be responsible for drug dealing in the region.

“At the sub-regional level, I maintain that there should be an ECOWAS Convention on Combating Drugs in the same manner there is one on small arms to the degree that the Kimberely Process on Blood Diamonds has eventuated from it”

While it is an excellent idea, if such a force is to be created then it should also take on responsibility for combating other cross regional crimes such as trafficking of women and children and sex tourism.

Black Looks - Black Looks (http://www.blacklooks.org/2006/07/953.html) comments on immigration in Europe and the new forms of “migration management” that are emerging such as the creation of a school in Senegal to train young men and women in the hope that they will stay in their country rather than want to go to Europe. Other management methods are the setting up of camps:

“The EU is planning and funding a series of transit camps across the continent and North Africa (from Ukraine to Libya) as part of a holistic “system of control” along with the Schengen agreement, the closing of the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, that will effectively “barbed wire” Europe. The contradiction is that many European countries such as Britain and Spain are in desperate need of increased migration due to falling birth rates and emigration of their own indigenous citizens”

It is also important to note that many of the “migrant management” policies being implemented are racist. Furthermore you cannot stop people from coming by setting up skills acquisition centres in home countries whilst at the same time refusing to cancel the country's debt; providing subsidies to EU farmers at the expense of African farmers; fixing the price of raw materials so low as to further impoverish local people; using child labour; destroying the local environment and of course where do the jobs come from once the skills are acquired?

The internet and more so blogging has enabled a growth in freedom of speech amongst civil society groups and individual activists and citizens across the continent. In China, Iran and the Middle East the governments have been active in monitoring and restricting access to the internet by it’s citizens. The first African country to ban websites was Tunisia which hosted the second phase of the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) was held in Tunisia last November. The irony was not lost on many of the participants who held their own workshops and seminars promoting freedom of expression despite threats from government employed thugs. Earlier on March 1st Tunisian journalist Muhammad Abou was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for publishing an article on a banned website where he compared the President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The first reports that the Ethiopian government was blocking blogs hosted by blogger.com came on the 18th May as Ethiopian blogger, Ethiopian Life reported that his blog had been blocked along with a number of others. Later Meskel Square asked “Where have all the Ethiopian Blogspot Bloggers gone?. In addition, Free Our Leaders and Ethiopian Review were also unavailable. In total 75% of Ethiopian blogs tracked on Global Voices are no longer accessible from Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian blogosphere has been one of the most vibrant on the continent and highly critical of the government of Meles Zenawi. Though the government is still denying any involvement in the shut down there is really no other explanation. Ethiopian bloggers in the Diaspora continue to relentlessly attack the tyranny of Zenawi’s government and question the US and other Western countries who continue to support his government. Ethiopia is not the only country trying to prevent African citizens an online presence. RSF reports that the Gambian government has hacked into the website of exiled Gambian journalist, Pa Nderry Mbai, who runs the Freedom Newspaper and posted “a false statement of allegiance to an associate of the president together with the names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of all its subscribers, describing them as “informers”(http://www.freedomnewspaper.com/).

The false statement was made worse by the exposure of people’s names and email addresses who had set up user accounts on the site. Mbai’s email and phone number in the US were also published. Those living in Gambia are now at personal risk of arrest and detention by the Gambian government.

The same day, the Gambian police ordered all those “who continually supplied him with information which he used to castigate and vilify the democratically elected government of His Excellency President Alhaji Yahya Jammeh” to report to the nearest police station within 24 hours or face immediate arrest.
The hacking was done from an IP address in Southampton, England.

The implications for activists and dissidents in Africa are obvious. How safe is your personal information? How safe are you? This is especially worrying for those blogging from Ethiopia, Tunisia and Egypt - governments which have arrested and detained bloggers and journalists in recent months. Egypt has been particularly viscious…. in it’s response to bloggers. On May 7th activist and blogger, Alaa Ahmed along with 11 others, was detained in prison by the Egyptian police. They had all been arrested for supporting another group of protestors. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the thousands of police were deployed against protestors proving once again that President Mubarak “is committed to zero tolerance when it comes to peaceful dissent”. Despite the arrests, Egyptian bloggers launched a collaborative campaign against the governments repression and to free the arrested activists and bloggers. Alaa Ahmed was not the first Egyptian blogger to be arrested. Last October, 21 year old activist, journalist and blogger, Abdel Karim Seliman was also arrested and detained for 18 days. His writings were confiscated by the Egyptian state security.

In Zimbabwe where freedom of speech died many years ago, the government is planning to enact legislation that will allow it to monitor the phone calls and mail of anyone suspected of threatening national security or involvement in criminal activities in the country. The Interception of Communications Bill will include the monitoring of email and there is no doubt in my mind that the government will seek ways to block internet usage and particularly blogs from operating within the country. In truth the Bill is simply another tool for the government to continue its repression of the people of Zimbabwe and places Zimbabwean bloggers at an increased risk to their personal safety.

Two African countries that have had relatively free press and freedom of speech, South African and Kenya, are now hinting at curbing free expression. In the case of South Africa the government is proposing legislation that will monitor require mobile phone providers to monitor and intercept phone calls.
The proposed law requires operators Vodacom, MTN and CellC to put in place systems for the interception of cellphone communications, and to keep detailed information of all their clients, as well as phones and SIM cards .

The providers such as Vodocom (http://www.citizen.co.za/index/article.aspx?pDesc=17511,1,22) are angry at the legislation which will increase their administration costs on a scheme they say is unworkable. They will face huge fines for not complying with the proposed legislation - the “Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communications Related Information Bill” (http://www.legalbrief.co.za/filemgmt_data/files/RIC%20Bill.pdf) and of course they will loose millions in revenue as their customer base is reduced by as much as 20 million people (http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=BD4A206373).

However from a user perspective the Bill has implications for both privacy and access or use of mobile phones. As always it is the poor that will mostly be affected by this legislation. If you dont have an address, do not work in the formal economy or are an illegal immigrant then under the Bills regulations you will no longer be able to use a mobile phone. The second hand sale of SIM cards which again is used by mostly poor and rural people will be criminalised as failure to report the sale or exchange will result in a prison sentence of up to 12 months.

The governments cites the high crime rate as the main reason behind the legislation. There is no doubt about the high level of crime in South Africa and that mobile phones are used in carrying out many crimes. However it will be the poor, the migrants, the low paid or those employed in the informal sector who will suffer most and become even more disenfranchised from society and not the criminals who as one report states (http://www.citizen.co.za/index/article.aspx?pDesc=17511,1,22) can afford to buy SIM cards from a neighbouring country, use them and dispose of them with ease.

Last month the Kenyan Internal Security Minister, John Njoroge Michuki place an advert in the Daily Standard where as Kenyan blogger, Thinkers Room wrote “not so subtly dishes out warnings to radio talk shows, newspapers and Internet bloggers……. Bottom line – bloggers are now on the government radar”. He continues….”I won’t be cowed online but I jolly well will keep a very low profile physically.”

Africa’s dictators and paranoid leaders are beginning to discover cyberland where, unlike traditional media (newspapers, radio and TV), freedom of expression is much more difficult to control. Nigeria, has a huge online presence not only from bloggers but from news portals, forums and discussion groups – most of them highly critical of the present government. Two weeks ago, a Nigerian photographer, Jide Adeniyi-Jones, was refused publication of an article by various Nigerian newspapers so he simply sent the article to various bloggers who published it on his behalf. Many dissidents and activists from the Niger Delta and Igboland who are calling for secession already use the internet to publish their writings which would be banned in Nigeria. How long before they find themselves on the governments radar.

* Sokari Ekine is Blogging Africa editor for Pambazuka News

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

Guinea's opposition leader has called on ailing President Lansana Conte to resign. Jean-Marie Dore told the BBC that Mr Conte was no longer medically fit to govern the country. Mr Conte is rarely seen in public. The government insists his poor health does not effect his ability to do his job. The Supreme Court can remove him and call elections, says Mr Dore.

Political parties are indispensable for making democracy work and deliver. Finding the proper conditions for better internal functioning and effective legal regulation of political parties is of key importance anywhere.

This report is a result of world-wide research and dialogue with political parties as part of International IDEA’s Political Parties’ programme, where International IDEA is working with national and regional research partners to improve insight and comparative knowledge. The purpose is to provide for constructive public debate and reform actions helping political parties to develop.

Political parties researched: Alliance for Democracy; All Nigeria Peoples Party; All Progressives Grand Alliance; and Peoples Democratic Party.

Methodology

Nigeria currently has 33 registered political parties. Some 24 of them were registered just before the 2003 elections, while three were registered in February 2006 after the completion of the research. Most of them are very small and have little impact on the political process. The four parties chosen for this report were selected because they won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the 2003 elections. The desk study phase on the country context and external regulation of political parties drew on an analysis of the country’s constitution and laws, as well as published sources. Unpublished materials—such as party documents, newspaper reports and mimeographs—were also consulted.

Interviews were held with paid, full-time party officials at the party secretariats. The interview process on the internal functioning of the political parties was difficult and time-consuming, since all four parties underwent periods of internal crisis during the research period. Indeed, some of the party offices were closed and under police protection, or were occupied by one faction of the party. The situation improved by April 2005, however, and it was then possible to administer the questionnaires with the help of party staff at their secretariats.

Background

Nigeria is a federation of 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. It has a presidential system of government with an executive President, a judiciary and a bicameral National Assembly (Senate and House of Representatives) whose members are elected. Political crisis during the First Republic led to intervention by the armed forces and a civil war between 1967 and 1970. It also led to 30 years of military rule, except for the four-year period between 1979 and 1983. In 1999, the military government organized general elections and President Olusegun Obasanjo thereafter took office.

The last general elections were in April 2003. The next are scheduled for 2007, because those elected at the state and federal levels have a four-year tenure, with a maximum of two terms for the executive. The human rights situation has improved relative to the period of military rule, but there are still several human rights violations. The population lives in profound poverty, largely due to mismanagement of the economy and widespread corruption. In Transparency International’s last report, Nigeria was ranked sixth from last on the organization’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI).

The ruling party is the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), whose winner-takes-all outlook, coupled to the authoritarian tendencies of incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo, pose a threat to the country’s democracy. Stability is also threatened by communal clashes, as well as violent insurgencies in many parts of the country.

Nigeria’s first general elections were held in 1960 when the British colonial authorities were preparing to hand over power to a local political leadership under the parliamentary system of government. The second general elections in 1964 were marked by boycotts in many areas. This led to the end of the First Republic in January 1966 and a military takeover of power. The armed forces ceded power to civilians in 1979 under the leadership of President Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Widespread electoral irregularities and other malpractices, however, were decried by opposition parties, as well as by civil society following the 1983 elections. This led to another military takeover in December 1983.

The military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida organised elections in 1992. The elections were inconclusive, however, because the result of the presidential election was annulled just before the vote-counting was completed. A new election was held by General Sani Abacha in 1997, but these too were inconclusive. General Abdulsami Abubakar, who succeeded Sani Abacha, organised the elections that brought the present incumbent, President Obasanjo, into power. President Obasanjo presided over the last general elections in April 2003. Both elections have been generally acknowledged by the opposition parties, civil society, and local and international observers as beset by large-scale irregularities.

During the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida (1985-1993), an eight-year transition programme began. General Babangida went further than the earlier regime in the regulation of political parties, decreeing that only two political parties would be registered. He instructed politicians to choose one of these parties as the platform for the attainment of their political ambitions. His government also wrote the parties’ constitutions, funded them and built offices for them throughout the country.

General Sani Abacha, who succeeded Babangida, registered five political parties. Remarkably, he induced all five parties to adopt him as their sole presidential candidate, but he died shortly thereafter. He was succeeded by General Abdulsalami, who registered three political parties and organized general elections that led to the election of General Obasanjo in 1999.

On the Freedom House World Country Ratings, Nigeria is classified as partly free in terms of political rights and civil liberties. This rating has been unchanged for the past five years.

Regulatory framework

Sections 221-229 of the 1999 constitution make elaborate provision for the registration, functioning, conduct and finances of political parties setting difficult conditions for the registration of political parties. As a result, only three parties were registered to contest the 1999 elections. This was partly because the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the country’s election management body, imposed conditions for registration that were more stringent than the provisions of the constitution. The Electoral Act was later amended and the procedure for registering parties was liberalised somewhat. Nonetheless, Nigeria retains a very illiberal regulatory regime for the registration and functioning of political parties.

The effect of these conditions is that parties that emerge must be very big, very rich and have the capacity to bring together money-wielding forces from different parts of the country. In effect, the major factor in party formation is not the aggregation of people with similar ideologies or interests but the establishment of ethnic coalitions led by regional barons with strong financial backing.

Internal functioning and structure

Election of leadership

The most important aspect of the parties’ internal functioning is that the regulatory framework outlined above tends to give rise to a situation in which political ‘godfathers’ play a major role in internal party politics. Parties have formal procedures for the election of their leaders but these procedures are often disregarded; when they are adhered to, the godfathers have means of determining the outcomes.

At the party congresses, leaders are elected and candidates are nominated for elective positions. The elections, however, are usually pre-determined and party bosses tend to have the final say in the selection of leaders. This process leads to the continual internal party crisis that the country has experienced. Party bosses or godfathers are unwilling to allow internal party democracy, a circumstance that leads to frequent conflicts and constrains the development of parties as popular organizations. Indeed, over the years these party bosses have developed comprehensive techniques for eliminating popular aspirants from party posts and for preventing them from being nominated for elective positions.

Techniques for the elimination of popular aspirants

Nigerian parties have a wide range of techniques to eliminate people from party primaries, including the use of power by powerful ‘party owners’, party barons, state governors, godfathers and so on; zoning and other forms of administrative fiat; violence by thugs or security personnel; bribing of officials and voters to support particular candidates; and simply disregard for the results declaring the loser as the winner

Policy development

Given this history, policy development tends to be disarticulated from policy implementation. While formal party structures such as the National Conventions and the National Executive Council have responsibility for policy formulation, the policies that get implemented in practice tend to reflect the desires of godfathers rather than formal party organs. Given this context, Nigerian party life is characterised by a very low level of debate on policy options and by members that are only active during election periods. There is urgent need for Nigerian parties to prioritise the issue of policy development.

Funding

Parties are partly funded by the state. The regulatory framework requires that parties prepare regular audited financial reports. Most party funds, however, come through party financiers and the details of these sums rarely enter the formal process of party accounts. Indeed, the role of money in contemporary Nigerian politics is so overwhelming that it tends to supersede other considerations. Precisely for this reason, the country’s political parties provide only very limited opportunities for marginalised individuals—youths, the poor and women.

Marginalization of women in politics

The marginalisation of women from political power in Nigeria’s patriarchal political system dates back to the colonial era, and women were not allowed to vote in Northern Nigeria until 1976. This marginalization has continued into the Fourth Republic. Of the 11,881 electable positions available during the 1999 elections, only 631 women were in contention. Only 181 of them won (a mere 1.62 per cent of the total positions).

Following the political party primaries for candidates in the 2003 elections, it became evident that the elimination of women through a well-orchestrated process of manipulating the outcome of most primaries was virtually party policy across the board. Indeed, the primaries were a charade because most popular candidates—female and male—were eliminated by party barons and replaced by other candidates who enjoyed the support of state and party executives. Studies of 15 female political aspirants reveal the following means of marginalizing women.

The indigeneity ploy

The 1979 constitution introduced the concept of ‘indigeneity’ into Nigerian public law to guarantee a fair regional distribution of power. Over the years, the principle has been subverted to discriminate against Nigerian citizens who are not indigenous to the places where they live and work. Women married to men who are non-indigenes of their local governments suffer discrimination. In their own constituencies, they are told that by marrying out, they have lost their indigeneity. In their husband’s constituency, they are told they do not really belong because indigeneity is based on the consanguinity principle.

Challenges and opportunities

Nigerian political parties were conceived to be cohesive, national bourgeois parties. Nonetheless, the aim or political project of most Nigerian parties has been the development of a national system for sharing out the ‘national cake’ as a system of patronage. This is why the parties are established as coalitions of various factions of regional and economic rent-seekers. Most party leaders see their political party activity as a means to further their business interests.

Nigerian political parties face two challenges. First, an extremely high level of corruption has made politics a competitive business. Second, the regulatory framework for the establishment of parties should to be changed so that new parties do not have to forge coalitions of the wealthy as a basis for their registration.

About International IDEA

Founded in 1995, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) is an intergovernmental organisation that seeks to promote and develop sustainable democracy world-wide.

About CDD

The Centre for Democracy and Development is a non-governmental organisation which aims to promote the values of democracy, peace & human rights in Africa and especially in the West African sub-region.

The full report is available at the link shown.

*Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim, is Principal Researcher at the Centre for Democracy and Development; Fabian Okoye and Tom Adambara are Research Assistants at Global Rights.

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

Riot police in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), fired into the air and used tear gas to disperse demonstrators calling for transparency in the country's general elections, scheduled for 30 July. One demonstrator lost his hand when a tear-gas canister exploded, while a parliamentary candidate was admitted to hospital suffering from tear-gas inhalation after the demonstration on Tuesday.

Next January, the heads of member states of the African Union will meet to discuss science and technology in what will be a unique opportunity to support the continent's scientific renaissance. The projects listed in the plan range from biodiversity research to laser technology. Each is intended to be an Africa-led initiative, based on the conviction that this is necessary for proper integration into Africa's efforts to tackle its own problems and economic needs.

Nigeria's anti-corruption agency has launched a probe into allegations of fraud after a massive overpayment was made to a maritime organisation. More than $4m (£2.2m) was paid to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in March for a bill of $22,000 (£12,000), according to the president's office. Officials say an investigation has been launched into foreign ministry staff.

Fraud and corruption in prisons are on the decline, a senior official has said. "Although the road ahead remains arduous and long, I can confidently say we are winning this battle," said acting National Commissioner of Correctional Services Patrick Gillingham. He was speaking at the opening ceremony of the department's ethics management and anti-corruption training programme in Pretoria.

Ivory Coast, a failing state in West Africa, is a formerly wealthy country is in urgent need of increased attention by the international community. The state is collapsing under the weight of a protracted rebellion that controls half its territory, sharpening ethnic differences, and leading to a dramatic decay in the quality of life of the population. The insufficient international peacekeeping presence prevents a full-scale civil war erupting, without however allowing a return to peace. This no-war no-peace situation also threatens the stability of the whole West African region. But there are lessons to be learned from the experience of East Timor.

East Timor, where the UN created the fragile state of Timor Leste barely four years ago, has once again made tragic media headlines. Despite its smallness, it is once more illustrating an important shortcoming in international politics, and as such captures top world media attention. The current chaos and the collapse of government authority clearly prove that the past nation-building efforts of the international community were insufficient to create a viable independent state in East Timor. The granting of independence after a brief 30 months of UN temporary administration, meant to create a modern state, was premature. The country had suffered too much under the 25 year brutal Indonesian occupation that followed its colonial experience under Portugal, a master that had done little to prepare it for independence. The fragility of the UN state building job has been clearly revealed by the tragic events of recent days, as the country fractures along several lines. The dramatic appeal of its governing authorities for international assistance to restore basic law and order shows that the Timor Leste state has failed and that its ‘sovereignty’ is illusory. The costs of this failure in terms of human suffering for the Timorese population and of instability for its geographic region in South East Asia and the South Pacific are considerable. The expenses that countries contributing to the restoration of order in Timor Leste have, and will have, to bear are also significant.

Despite the past intense publicity aimed at portraying the UN state building efforts in East Timor as successful, we now see that this was not so. It may be tempting to blame “the UN” for this failure, as it has become fashionable to do when the organisation is unable to do magic in the field of peace keeping. Or it may be tempting to blame the Timor Leste authorities for their poor governance capabilities. In my view, none of these would be just. Instead, I feel that we should use the East Timor example to examine some underlying principles that govern our contemporary world affairs, and draw lessons that would be helpful to deal properly with other failing state situations. There are, after all, several such cases at present. They represent still unresolved and burdensome legacies of 20th century colonialism which continue having a serious negative impact on world peace.

As follows from the argument of my book on the subject, the failure of Timor Leste is no surprise. Together with many others, I anticipated it. The East Timorese people suffered from the unwillingness of key UN member states to commit the necessary resources to the lengthy process of state building to prepare the country - over which the UN held sovereignty- for viable independent statehood. Instead, to cut expenses, they pressed for a speedy withdrawal and the granting of a premature independence. Those locals in East Timor keen to become the new power elite eagerly encouraged this irresponsibility.

Having been so strongly geared to the dismantling of colonial empires in the past, the UN members never made the organisation pay much attention to developing a capacity to prepare colonial territories or failing post-colonial weak states for successful independent statehood. It is encouraging to note that now, may be partly as a result of the recent East Timor experience, the UN is setting up a Peace Building Commission (PBC), aimed at strengthening weak states so as to become viable in post-conflict phases. Hopefully key UN member states will muster the necessary political will to endow the PBC with adequate resources to handle this difficult and lengthy task properly instead of just cosmetically. Strengthening of fragile states is crucial for peace, to advance democracy and prosperity. But it is a long process which requires a significant investment. The returns of this outlay are well-worth it. As Timor Leste has just shown us, skimping on state building is not.

Timor Leste would benefit from a strong state building support through the PBC or by some other competent international agency. This will be the only way to ensure that a viable state is eventually put in place in East Timor. The benefits for its population and for the stability of its entire geographic region would be significant. Even if they have to pay for such state building, the longer term savings for its neighbours are considerable. Being called in to keep the peace, as Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia are doing at present is, after all, very expensive.

But Timor Leste is not an isolated case. There are many failing post-colonial state examples crying out for strong international support to restore peace and strengthen state institutions. The PBC will not be short of work if its principals among the UN membership allow it to take on these needy clients.

Ivory Coast, a failing state in West Africa, is one particular example which I mention since I am currently involved with it. This formerly wealthy country is in urgent need of increased attention by the international community. The state is collapsing under the weight of a protracted rebellion that controls half its territory, sharpening ethnic differences, and leading to a dramatic decay in the quality of life of the population. The insufficient international peacekeeping presence prevents a full-scale civil war erupting, without however allowing a return to peace. This no-war no-peace situation also threatens the stability of the whole West African region.

In the view of many of its people, including that of the Ivorian civil society organisations I am currently advising, what Ivory Coast urgently needs is a stronger commitment by the international community to empower the UN to undertake a peace-enforcement action to end the rebellion and restore government authority. Once this is achieved, a strong peace building and state strengthening program, possibly through the UN Peace Building Commission, would be appropriate. During this time, an UN-supported transitional government should conduct intensive reconciliation and civic education activities to restore national unity. The severely damaged state institutions would need to be repaired and their administrative and professional capacity strengthened. Only after the accomplishment of all this would the holding of elections for a new government be meaningful and lead to sustainable peace.

Our big question at present, which is in urgent need of an answer, is whether lessons such as those that have been provided to us by the tragic East Timor experiences have been learned by the international community? Is the political will to empower the UN to do a proper state building job in failing post colonial states going to emerge at last? This negative legacy of 20th century colonialism will not be resolved by continuing to pretend that the UN can perform magic in this field without being provided the means to strengthen fragile states. It is high time for the international community to face this reality and to master the political will to act. The birth of the UN Peace Building Commission is the perfect time to do so. The Ivory Coast is an excellent field in which to apply the lessons that East Timor has taught us. Will it be done this time around?

* Dr. Juan Federer had a long involvement in the liberation process of East Timor. He now is Projects Director of the Center for War/Peace Studies of New York (www.cwps.org). His book The UN in East Timor: building Timor Leste a fragile state (Charles Darwin University Press, 2005) decries the lack of sufficient commitment by the international community for proper state building in East Timor, anticipating the recent crisis.

The French version of this article first appeared in Pambazuka News French Edition No 9 (http://www.pambazuka.org/fr/category/comment/35730)

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

There are two widespread assumptions about university education in Africa: first that the Europeans introduced it, and second that it has declined since independence. Both are false, writes Paul Zeleza. Higher education including universities long antedated the establishment of “western” style universities in the nineteenth century and the post-independence era was a period of unprecedented growth during which the bulk of contemporary Africa’s universities were established.

Discourses about Africa continue to be infected by what we used to call in the 1980s and 1990s Afropessimism, the belief that Africa is irredeemably doomed to backwardness and chaos. Afropessimism embodies two tendencies—vilification of African experiences and valorization of Euroamerican engagements with Africa, that Africa is incapable by itself of historical progress and that any progress evident there is the result of Euroamerican interventions. Discourses of African higher education have not escaped this narrative. There are two widespread assumptions about university education in Africa: first that the Europeans introduced it, and second that it has declined since independence. Both are false. Higher education including universities long antedated the establishment of “western” style universities in the nineteenth century and the post-independence era was a period of unprecedented growth during which the bulk of contemporary Africa’s universities were established.

As a historian profoundly committed to Africa’s development and social transformation, I believe history—a long historical perspective—is a powerful antidote to the fatalism often induced by the overwhelming flow of current events that Afropessimism turns into eternal trends. In this case, as an intellectual historian interested both in the history of ideas and of knowledge producing institutions, and one who is engaged in African and global debates about the future of higher education, the need for a proper understanding of Africa’s long and complicated history of tertiary education is imperative. I offer here brief reflections on the history and contemporary challenges of African universities.

The origins of higher education in Africa including universities as communities of scholars and learning can be traced to three institutional traditions: first, the Alexandria Museum and Library, second, the early Christian monasteries, and third, the Islamic mosque universities. The Alexandria Museum and Library was established in the third century B.C. in Egypt. It grew to become the largest center of learning in the ancient world. The complex is estimated to have housed more than 200,000 volumes, and supported up to 5,000 scholars and students. Clearly, this was a large research institution, and many of the leading Egyptian and other African as well as Greek, Roman, and Jewish scholars of the ancient world studied or worked there at some point in their lives. The library gradually declined as buildings were destroyed by fire, its holdings looted in times of warfare, and scholars left due to political instability in the twilight years of the Roman empire. Alexandria left a rich legacy of scholarship covering a wide range of fields from mathematics and the sciences to philosophy and religion.

It was also in Egypt, one of the earliest centers of Christianity in the world, that monasteries first developed in the third century A.D. Tens of thousands of Christians gathered in the monasteries in the desert not only to escape the exactions of Roman rule, but also for a life devoted to spiritual contemplation. The monasteries and the monastic orders that regulated them provided important spaces for reflection, writing, and learning. The idea and institution of monasteries spread to other parts of Africa, and elsewhere in the world as far as Britain and Georgia in Europe and Persia and India in Asia, out of which some universities later developed.

One country where monastic education developed early was Ethiopia where Christianity was introduced in the fourth century A.D. and became the state religion. From the period of the Zagwe dynasty in the twelfth century this system included higher education, which was largely restricted to the clergy and nobility. At the bottom of the system was the Qine Bet (School of Hymns), followed by the Zema Bet (School of Poetry, and at the pinnacle was an institution called Metsahift Bet (School of the Holy Books) that provided a broader and more specialized education in religious studies, philosophy, history, and the computation of time and calendar, among various subjects.

It is the third tradition, Islam, which gave Africa its first higher education institutions that have endured to the present. Indeed, Africa claims distinction as the center of the world’s oldest Islamic universities and some of the world’s oldest surviving universities. They include Ez-Zitouna madrassa in Tunis founded in 732. Next came al-Qarawiyyin mosque university established in Fez in 859 by a young migrant female princess from Qairawan (Tunisia), Fatima Al-Fihri. The university attracted students and scholars from Andalusian Spain to West Africa. Then in 969 Al-Azhar mosque university was established in Cairo, the same year that the city was founded by the Fatimid dynasty from the Maghreb. It came to be regarded as the most prestigious center of Islamic education and scholarship and attracted the greatest intellectuals of the Muslim world, including Ibn Khaldun the renowned historian who taught there. Another major early Islamic university was Sankore mosque university in Timbuktu founded in the twelfth century where a wide range of courses were taught from theology, logic, astronomy and astrology, to grammar, rhetoric, history and geography.

The legacy of the ancient Islamic university for modern Africa is three-fold. First, many of the Islamic universities have survived to the present, although they have undergone major changes over the centuries, including the introduction of more secular, technical and professional fields of study. This is true of three of the four universities mentioned above—Sankore being the sole exception. Second, in recent times new Islamic universities have been created in several countries across the continent often patterned on the old Islamic universities as part of the wave of privatization of higher education as state control has loosened. Third, the “western” university introduced in Africa from the nineteenth century bore Islamic influences. Europeans inherited from the Muslims a huge corpus of knowledge, rationalism and the investigative approach to knowledge, an elaborate disciplinary architecture of knowledge, the notions of individual scholarship, and the idea of the college, all of which became central features of the European university exported to the rest of the world with the rise of European imperialism.

Missionaries—both European and African including those from the diaspora—initially undertook the introduction of Africa’s “western” style universities. The process was largely concentrated in the expanding European settler colonies of South Africa and Algeria, and in Sierra Leone and Liberia newly established colonies for African diaspora resettlement. The first was Fourah Bay College founded in Sierra Leone in 1826 and more than three decades later, in 1862, came Liberia College. The two institutions became the beacons of West Africa’s bourgeoning colonial intelligentsia and nationalism. Edward Blyden, the renowned Pan-Africanist scholar-activist was actively engaged with both colleges. In addition, there were a series of smaller colleges in Liberia.

In the meantime, in South Africa segregated institutions were set up beginning in 1829 with the South African College in Cape Town (later the University of Cape Town), which mostly catered to the English settlers. In 1866 a college for the Afrikaner settlers was created called the Stellenbosch Gymnasium, which finally became Stellenbosch University in 1918. A small college for Africans, the Lovedale Institution, was created in 1841, which was increasingly modeled on African American industrial and vocational colleges in the United States. Then in 1873 the University of the Cape of Good Hope (renamed the University of South Africa in 1916) was established initially as an examining body before it became one of Africa’s and the world’s leading distance education providers.

As in South Africa, in French Algeria higher education was largely confined to the settler population. It began with the establishment of the School of Medicine in 1857, followed in 1879 by the creation of four specialized schools of medicine, pharmacy, sciences, letters, and law, which merged to form faculties of the University of Algiers in 1909. Another French colony where higher education started in the late nineteenth century was Madagascar where the Antananarivo Medical Training Academy was established in 1896.

It was not until the twentieth century following the European conquest that colonial universities spread to the rest of the continent. Two countries escaped colonization, Liberia and Ethiopia, but both sought to modernize their educational systems. In Liberia, where American models were popular, Cuttington University College was created in 1949 with support from the Protestant Episcopal Church, and Liberia College destroyed by fire in the late 1940s was reconstituted into the University of Liberia in 1951. The brief Italian occupation of Ethiopia 1935-41 shocked Ethiopia into embarking on a drive for educational modernization. In 1949, the government created Trinity College, which was granted a charter in 1950 under the name of University College of Addis Ababa, and renamed Haile Selassie University in 1961.

In colonial Africa, the development of higher education remained limited until after the Second World War because the colonial authorities were generally suspicious of and opposed to the modern educated African elite and their nationalist demands for equality and freedom, and colonial civil servants feared African competition. Africans seeking higher education were often forced to go abroad including the imperial metropoles themselves. During this period higher education was limited to the British and French empires, virtually none was provided in Belgian and Portuguese Africa.

The first colonial university college in Northern Africa was the Gordon Memorial College founded in the Sudan in 1902, renamed Khartoum University College in 1951 and Khartoum University at independence in 1956. A decade later, in 1912, the Islamic Institute was founded; it became a college in 1924 and was renamed the Omdurman Islamic University in 1965. In Egypt, Cairo University was founded in 1908 despite the vehement opposition of the colonial governor. It grew to become one of the largest universities in Africa, with a student population presently of 155,000 students and more than 5,500 faculty members and instructors. In 1938 the university formed a branch in Alexandria, which later became Alexandria University in 1942. In South Africa, a new era in higher education began with the establishment of the Inter-State Native College in 1916, later renamed the University College of Fort Hare in 1951. Fort Hare became a magnate for not only black South African students but also for African students from across Southern Africa as attested by its list of alumni who include such nationalist leaders as Nelson Mandela, Seretse Khama, and Robert Mugabe.

Elsewhere, before the war a few institutions were created that functioned largely as secondary schools or technical schools before they were converted after the war into university colleges. Examples from the British colonies include Makerere Government College established in Uganda in 1921 first as a vocational school before it was turned into Makerere University College in 1949. In Nigeria Yaba Higher College was set up in 1932, which served for years as the country’s major higher education institution. In Ghana there was the Government Training College, which was formally opened in January 1927 and renamed the Prince of Wales School and College, Achimota. Among its most famous instructors was Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, the eminent educator, and its alumni include Kwame Nkrumah who obtained his teacher’s certificate from the college in 1930. These colleges were often affiliated with and provided courses, examinations, and qualifications from British universities.

In the French colonies, higher education was hampered by the preference among both the colonial authorities and the African elites, spawned by the policies and ideology of assimilation, for higher education in the metropole. Moreover, missionary provision of education was rather limited, which undermined the development of primary and secondary education that could feed into higher education. The institutions of higher education established before the war included the French Western Africa Medical Training Institution founded in 1918 in Dakar, the William Ponty School established in Goree in 1903 that provided some medical training and teacher training, schools of marine engineering and veterinary medicine in Goree and Bamako, respectively, and a polytechnic also in Bamako.

It was not until the end of the Second World War that more systematic efforts were undertaken by colonial governments to establish higher education. In the British colonies, the new era started with the establishment of university colleges in Nigeria (Ibadan in 1947), Ghana (Legon in 1948), Sudan (Khartoum in 1949 from the merger of the Gordon Memorial College and the Kitchener Medical School), and Uganda (Makerere was upgraded in 1949). In addition, in Kenya the Royal Technical College was established in Nairobi in 1951, and further south the University College of Salisbury was formed in 1953 and renamed two years later as the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Meanwhile, Fourah Bay College became the University College of Sierra Leone. Most of these new or upgraded university colleges served as regional universities and were affiliated with and awarded degrees of the University of London.

After the war French universities also set up a few overseas campuses in the colonies. The University of Paris established Institutes of Higher Studies in Tunis in 1945, and together with the University of Bordeaux, in Dakar in 1950 and Antananarivo in 1955 that became the University of Dakar in 1957 and the University of Antananarivo in 1960, respectively. In Algeria access to the University of Algiers for Algerians was expanded slightly, although by the time of the Algerian revolution in 1952 there were only 1,000 Algerian university graduates. In the rest of the French colonial empire university education had to await independence.

The Belgians in the Congo followed the French practice as the Catholic University of Louvain established the Lovanium (little Louvain) University Centre in 1949, with which it became affiliated in 1954, while the state created the Official University in 1956 in Lubumbashi. Lovanium also catered for students from Rwanda and Burundi. In the Portuguese colonies higher education lagged behind until the turn of the 1960s. In Angola, institutions to train priests were formed in 1958 in Luanda and Huambo, followed by the establishment in 1962 of two General University Studies in Angola and Mozambique as branches of the Portuguese university system that were converted in 1968 into the Universities of Angola and Lourenço Marques, respectively.

In the meantime, in South Africa where apartheid had been established in 1948 higher education became even more racially segregated than before. Blacks were no longer allowed to attend the “white” universities without special government approval and separate universities were created for Africans in the so-called self-governing homelands and for Coloreds and Indians in the major cities. By 1994, the year that ushered in the country’s first democratically elected government, there were 36 higher education institutions consisting of 21 universities and 15 technikons, of which 19 were for whites, 2 for coloreds, 2 for Indians and 13 for Africans. Needless to say, higher education was far better resourced for whites than for the other races with the Africans at the bottom. In Namibia, under South African occupation from the end of the First World War until independence in 1990, college education started as late as 1980 with the establishment of the Academy for Tertiary Education, followed in 1985 by the formation of the Technikon of Namibia, and the College for Out-of-School Training.

Decolonization was a staggered process as African countries got independent at different times, but the bulk of them did so in the 1950s and 1960s. Colonial rule left behind very few universities, the majority of countries did not even have a single university, so that one of the key challenges for the new independent states was to establish or expand their higher education systems. Also, since the few existing universities were patterned on European models and were rather elitist there was the need to make them more relevant to Africa’s developmental needs and socio-cultural contexts and more accessible to students of different social backgrounds.

Across Africa the growth in higher education after independence was nothing short of phenomenal. The new states embarked on ambitious development programs in which universities were seen as central for training a highly skilled labor force, creating and reproducing a national elite, and enhancing national prestige. The new national universities were quite diverse and flexible in their structures and models. On the whole, they were much larger in size than their colonial predecessors, broader in their missions, and they expanded their disciplinary and curricula offerings from the arts and social sciences to include professional fields of study such as business, medicine and engineering, and they incorporated graduate programs.

In 1960, often taken as the year of African independence, there were an estimated 120,000 students in African universities; the number jumped to 782,503 in 1975 and to 3,461,822 in 1995, and presently it is probably around 5 million. Similarly, the number of universities grew from less than three-dozen in 1960 to more than four hundred in 1995 and several hundred more have perhaps been introduced since then with the explosion of private universities. Today, tertiary education exists in all African countries, although the systems vary enormously in terms of size and levels of development and internal differentiation. For example, in 1995 the largest concentration of university students was in Egypt (850,051), followed by South Africa (617,897), Nigeria (404,969), Algeria (347,410), and Morocco (294,502) (World Bank 2000: 111). In contrast, in the same year there were 23 countries with fewer than 10,000 university students.

There were also sharp gender differences in terms of access to higher education. While several countries had managed to attain gender parity at the primary and secondary levels by 2000, very few had managed to do so at the tertiary level. The exceptions were Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, and South Africa. The gender gap also manifested itself in fields of study and faculty distribution. Women were concentrated in the humanities and social sciences, while they were grossly underrepresented in the sciences and most of the professional fields. As multi-ethnic, sometimes multi-racial, and invariably class societies, access to university education in African countries was further differentiated according to ethnicity, race, and class, as well as, in some cases, religious and cultural affiliations. Class became increasingly salient as the African middle classes grew rapidly after independence, in many cases thanks to the establishment or expansion of university education itself, and sought to reproduce themselves.

The massive expansion of education across the continent not only led to huge improvements in the African human capital stock, it also laid the institutional basis for the social production of African intellectual capacities and communities. But Africa remained the least educated continent in the world, with a tertiary gross enrollment ratio of less than 5 percent, as compared to 10 percent for the low- and middle-income countries and 58 percent for the high-income countries. The challenges facing African higher education deepened with the imposition in the 1980s and 1990s of draconian structural adjustment programs (SAPs) by the international financial institutions including the World Bank that led to severe government cutbacks in social expenditures, including education, especially for higher education whose rates of social return were deemed by the supporters of neo-liberalism to be lower than for primary education.

Thus from the 1980s even as the number of colleges and universities continued to expand, it became increasingly evident that the higher education system in many countries was in crisis, which was expressed in declining state funding, falling instructional standards, poorly equipped libraries and laboratories, shrinking wages and faculty morale. Academics increasingly resorted to consultancies or they became part of the “brain drain” as they sought refuge in other sectors at home or universities abroad. The costs on teaching, research, and Africa’s capacity to produce highly skilled human capital were predictably high.

There were other responses to the crisis besides increasing academic labor migration. One was the proliferation of regional research networks, the growth of an academic NGO sector. Examples include the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the Nairobi based International Institute of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE). These organizations and networks provided crucial support for basic and applied research, both individual and collaborative, and offered training, internships, and fellowships to graduate students.

Another response was seen in the explosion in private universities and the privatization of programs and funding sources in public universities, both of which were manifestations of the growing liberalization of African higher education. The private universities can be distinguished in terms of their institutional types (their status—not-for-profit and for-profit; identity—religious and secular; and focus—business, Christian or Islamic), programs and levels, staffing and funding, and governance structures and regulation. While these universities faced numerous challenges, by the beginning of the 2000s they had begun to outstrip the number of public universities in some countries, a development that profoundly and permanently altered the terrain of higher education.

From the late 1990s African leaders, educators, researchers, and external donors became increasingly aware of the challenges facing African higher education and the need for renewal if the continent was to achieve higher rates of growth and development and compete in an increasingly knowledge intensive global economy. The reform agenda has centered on five broad sets of issues, even if expressions of concern have yet to be matched by the provision of adequate resources. First, the need to examine systematically the philosophical foundations of African universities is widely recognized. Included in this context are issues pertaining to the principles underpinning public higher education in an era of privatization, the conception, content and consequences of the reforms currently being undertaken across the continent, and the public-private interface in African higher education systems.

The second set of issues center on management, how African universities are grappling with the challenges of quality control, funding, governance, and management in response to the establishment of new regulatory regimes, growing pressures for finding alternative sources of funding, changing demographics and massification, increasing demands for access and equity for underrepresented groups including women, and the emergence of new forms of student and faculty politics in the face of democratization in the wider society. Third, there are pedagogical and paradigmatic issues, ranging from the languages of tuition in African universities and educational systems as a whole to the dynamics of knowledge production—the societal relevance of the knowledges produced in African higher education systems and how those knowledges are disseminated and consumed by students, scholarly communities, and the wider public.

Fourth, the role of universities in the pursuit of the historic project of Africa nationalism: decolonization, development, democratization, nation-building and regional integration is under scrutiny. Included in this regard are questions of the uneven and changing relations between universities and the state, civil society, and industry, as well as the role of universities in helping to manage and resolve the various crises that confront the African continent from civil conflicts to disease epidemics including HIV/AIDS. Also, the part universities have played and can play in future to promote or undermine the Pan-African project is a of great interest as African states, through the African Union, renew their efforts to achieve closer integration within Africa and between Africa and its diasporas.

Finally, there is the question of globalization, the impact of trends associated with the new information and communication technologies, the expansion of transborder or transnational provision of higher education, and trade in educational services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) regime. Critical in this context for Africa is the changing role of external donors from the philanthropic foundations to the World Bank and other international financial institutions and multilateral agencies. The impact of these trends on African higher education and vice-versa are of utmost importance and provide one area of fruitful collaboration between researchers from Africa and other world regions.

The challenges facing African universities are serious and disquieting, but higher education in Africa has a long history and it will have a long future. And the onus for ensuring that such a future is a healthy and productive one lies primarily with African leaders, educators, and scholars, who cannot afford the morbid indulgences of Afropessimism.

* This article was first published on the website of the author, who has kindly given permission for its reproduction by Pambazuka News.

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

A local journalist in DRC was shot dead on Saturday (July 7) at his home in Kinshasa, press rights group Journalists in Danger (JED) said. Bapuwa Mwamba was killed by three armed men around midnight at his house in the Matete district JED said. Bapuwa Mwamba worked for a number of newspapers in the capital, including the opposition daily Le Phare. JED said the murder "did not seem to be an act of chance", coming about three weeks before crucial presidential and legislative elections in the vast Central African country, reports the Mail and Gaurdian.

Representatives at the recent Africa Summit stressed the need for governments to spend more money on education. A veteran of 20 African summits, Hassan Sunmonu, secretary general of the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity, recently declared that the Banjul gathering of the continent’s leaders was the best he’d experienced. He raised eyebrows in the gathering of NGOs where he was a panelist, not the least because his remarks came while foreign ministers - sitting at the African Union (AU) executive council - were still preparing their final drafts for their heads of government.

The African Union enters today the 9th of July its sixth year since its start in the city of Sert in 9/9/99 to become a promising African giant and a Space that proved its position at the international level. On this same day of the month of July 2002 and at a huge African wedding in the presence of the Leader of the Revolution and a number of African presidents and the Prominent African Freedom Fighter, Nelson Mandela , it was declared, in the city of Durban, in the Republic of South Africa the birth of the strategic accomplishment, the Great African Union which was realized by an initiative and intensive efforts made by the Leader Muammar Al-Gathafi and with the support of his brothers, the African leaders.

The Governance and Social Development Resource Centre GSDRC) provides access to the best thinking, research and training available in governance, conflict and social development. Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the GSDRC aims to help reduce poverty by better informing policymaking and enhancing professional knowledge and competencies.

As Africans -- especially those of us who live in the West -- we are uncomfortable with our continent's state of underdevelopment in economic growth and human security. And so it is that wherever there is a gathering of Africans, the conversation is likely to revolve around, politics and the sorry state of our continent.

Britain has returned the equivalent of US $1.8 million seized from a former Nigerian state governor, the first time it has returned funds illegally stashed away in a foreign account by a political office holder. The money which was seized from the London home of former Bayelsa state governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was returned to the Nigerian diplomatic mission in Britain, said a statement by London Metropolitan Police.

The Scorpions investigative unit has confirmed that it has information linking President Thabo Mbeki to a French defence company implicated in arms-deal corruption, but says it has no evidence of wrongdoing on his part. Mbeki, who was deputy president at the time, allegedly met executives of Thomson-CSF in Paris in 1998. The company, now known as Thales, was bidding for a stake in the multibillion-rand arms deal.

Zimbabwe may have the fastest shrinking economy in the world, but a small, well-connected elite appears immune to the hardships. According to economist James Jowa, government policies that have allowed the parallel market to thrive, combined with corruption, have led to the skewed distribution of wealth. This means that every evening long lines of people walk home from work in the city centre because they cannot afford bus fares, while a fortunate few cruise past them in expensive cars.

The Kenyan government's directive to have senior officials return luxury cars to cut costs may have been good news to tax payers, but lack of transparency and accountability could undermine the exercise. The government is expected to save about 17 million dollars in running costs, which will be channelled to development projects, from the exercise.