It’s a sign of how bad things are when even the modest proposal that everyone on planet earth gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk. – Terry Eagleton

Naomi Klein aptly described the first World Social forum as “the end of the end of history”. The fall of the Berlin Wall signified the end of a utopia gone badly wrong. Thatcher and her followers were able to speak with confidence that There Is No Alternative to the barbarism of capitalism devouring the guts of most of humanity. For sometime, Fukuyama’s apocalyptic “end of history” seemed real. It became almost impossible to breathe and dream. The hegemony of global capitalism had reached maddening proportions. It is said that in 1992 Nike paid Michael Jordan to advertise its shoes, and here was the madness - he earned more than the entire East Asian industry which produces those shoes.

Then in 2001, the city of Porto Alegre, situated in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, reverberated with a fresh call: “Another World is Possible!”. The birth of the World Social Forum was a noisy affair. The force of this new possibility stood in contrast and opposition to the rigid and soulless World Economic Forum happening at the same time on the beautiful island of Davos in Switzerland. Those who took the side of the wretched of the earth looked to Porto Alegre, and those who worship the power and logic of money turned to Davos. The battle lines were drawn. Ever since, world politics have not been the same. This year will see the fifth installment of the World Social Forum return to its base after the 2004 event was held in Mumbai, India. The WSF has come to mean many things to many people: celebration of hope, new ways of doing and thinking, and the limits of resistance to capitalism in our times.

African murmurs

The 80s saw Africa saying NO! to the devastation visited upon the continent through the killer medicine of the Structural Adjustment Projects (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF, which required iron-fisted men to carry out their mission – from the safe distance and sanctity of parliament and state houses – in the name of development and democracy. To achieve this madness nothing was spared; even the anti-colonial history and memory was appropriated, as was revolution and socialism. But the African NO! was simply named “food riots”; this was a resistance which did not speak for itself and the IMF quickly worked these “ food riots” into its four-staged re-colonisation strategy, revealed by Joseph Stiglitz after his sojourner as a servant of the devil.

The call for Africa’s “second liberation” was stillborn and was appropriated into a limited desire for “multi-party democracy”. Instead of freedom from the shackles of neo-colonial bondage, multi-party democracies continued the one-way traffic of African wealth to the North and domestic suburbs where the national representatives of the system reside. In the words of the African revolutionary thinker A.M. Babu:

"It is much better for the international bourgeoisie for locals to supervise their own dependency, it lessens tensions and the real master is invincible. We are busy chopping each other’s heads through military coups and the struggle for power in order simply to prove ourselves better supervisors on behalf of international capital, and to enjoy the rewards in wealth or absolute power”.

What Babu did not anticipate was the effective utilization of democratic discourses and the ideology of development to sustain the same position in the interest of global capitalism. African leaders chose to do unto themselves what global capital would otherwise do unto them. As South Africa’s ruling party (Mandela’s African National Congress) policy ideologue put it:

"We don’t oppose the WTO. We never joined the call to abolish it, or to abolish the World Bank or the IMF. Should we be out there condemning Imperialism? If you do those things, how long will you last?"

Resistance was colonized, tamed and tailored to serve the purpose of the hegemony of money. Resistance needed to liberate itself from the party, the leader, the old orthodoxies, hierarchies and empty discourses. It was the creative power of resistance and poetry of the indigenous people of Chiapas in Mexico which gave the world the beginnings of a new language – a language which found expression within the WSF. What started in Africa as a murmur now found a name – the monster was named “neo-liberalism”. The dream returned, history could be made again. Chiapas fortified the possibility of the peoples of the world to say a collective NO! and many YESES!

In the past five years, the view that there is no one answer, no one single manifesto, no pre-determined history (as the nineteenth-century Russian populist Herzen declared, “History has no libretto”) seemed both to gain ground and drive the desire to make history afresh through trial and error, rather than rely upon the certainty of yesteryears’ political fantasies. Of course, those who held old views found new energy from the emergent global peoples’ resistance – Marx, Lenin, Mao and even Stalin occasionally reared their heads. The freedom from the burden of certainty was best articulated by one of the World Social Forum’s superstars, the French small-scale farmers’ leader and bane of agri-business, José Bové. When asked whether the Seattle gathering represented a new internationalism, Bové answered:

"There are no pre-conceived ideas. Those days have gone – thank goodness – when popular movements were slotted into theoretical constructs. Seattle showed the opposite. People came together not with any worked out theory, but to take action… far too long, theories and analysis have been shuffled around, promising change. People today have lost confidence in these theories. Seattle revealed the existence of an informal worldwide network. "

The birth of the WSF is generally perceived to have carried on the spirit of the 1999 battle of Seattle. The collective NO! saw the closure of a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) right within the belly of the beast. From there onwards the evil triad of the WTO, World Bank and IMF could only hold their meetings behind army barricades. The people of the world had won the moral high ground despite their leaders’ shameful genuflection to these institutions. The WSF gave the new resistance a space to share the new language. By and large, the forum strove to be anti-hierarchical and non-vanguardist. The WSF spoke about “space”, “reflections” and “networks of resistance”. These new discourses and praxis somehow gave expression to a movement of movements, but there were shortcomings – and deep ones, too.

If Klein was ecstatic about the first forum, by the third she was crying “highjack!”. The event had been taken over by established left-leaning political parties and the Latin American big men: Lula of Brazil, Chavez of Venezuela and the ever-presence of Castro, even in his physical absence. Perhaps the most devastating critique came from the pen of the respected radical thinker James Petras, who saw the 2002 meeting as a “tale of two forums”. One forum promoting reformism and accommodation could be found representing the established political parties, NGOs and a myriad of intellectuals, and was based in the main venue, the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC). On the other hand, there was the more radical, anti-establishment forum which occurred in hundreds of small and big meetings, circles of articulation and self-organized spontaneous conversation away from the university and media attention. Others began to argue that the WSF had become a jamboree of a motley concoction of agendas and interests, as recent greetings from one of the regular attendees shows:

"Hope you all doing well. I’m in Porto, and now joining the throngs who pretend to struggle, we the passport wielding, credit card swiping, voyager mile accumulating, cyber connected, defenders of the rights of the working class, the Dalits, the landless peoples’ rights for self-determination. I watched with glee as the internationalists were hooking up at airports, hotels, taxis. “Hi comrade, long time. Since Mumbai”. “Hi comrade, long time, since Cancun, are you going to Hong Kong. I am still struggling to get funding”. Yeaaaaa., this is the new age struggle; and I am part of it. Now that I have more time on my hands (thanks to?donor sponsored air-conditioned hotel room)…"

The biggest conceptual and organizational challenge to the WSF came from a parallel meeting, organized under the catchy name “Mumbai Resistance 2004” (MR). The critique delivered by MR 2004 was devastating (if not over-stated at times); tough questions were asked around the origins and funders of the WSF. One of the most serious charges was that the WSF is nothing but a valve and a permitted space of dissent, and does not really threaten the interest of global capital. MR 2004 pointed to the once CIA-controlled Ford Foundation as one of the main funders, and the agenda of the moderate French players, such as ATTAC and Le Monde Diplomatique, was also held up as evidence of the castrated possibilities of the WSF. MR 2004 did not mince its words: he who pays the piper plays the tune. True, more and more global South NGOs found legitimacy by association, and Northern Funders continue to determine, in particular, the African representation to the WSF. These were often the same donors who would not touch national movements and counter-hegemonic projects at a national level. Increasingly, those who have sustained and given impetus and life to the WSF find themselves outside; the Zapatistas are excluded because they are involved in armed combat, the FARC of Colombia was denied space for a press conference in 2002.

Lack of Black Voices

One of the key fault lines in the WSF activities has been the lack of a platform to build and raise the black voice and black issues. This is surprising given the fact that Brazil is home to the biggest black population outside of Africa, and racism continues to ensure that the darker you are, the lower you find yourself in the Brazilian social ladder. The lack of prominence of the black question in the global resistance, and at the WSF in particular, can be accounted for by examining the historical inequities which developed along the color line. A second factor is the historical denial of race as a legitimate area of resistance. This is partly a result of the out-dated Marxist philosophies raven with arrogant universalizing Eurocentrisms, which privileged class over any other category of exclusion.

* Andile Mngxitama is a Johannesburg based land rights activist and member of the Wewrite editorial collective. This is the introductory editorial to the latest edition of – A Journal for Black Thought. In the edition, the problem of exclusion is discussed by Radha D’ Souza and Michael Abrahams. Frank Wilderson debates the uneasy relationship between Marxism and the Black Subject, and Aziz Choudry points to how global struggles run the risk of eclipsing older struggles such as those of the indigenous peoples in places like Canada, USA and New Zealand. The promises and challenges facing the ASF are examined in a piece by Amanda Alexander and Mandisa Mbali.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

>>>>>Links to news from the WSF

- Euphoria in short supply at WSF
http://www.tni.org/archives/bello/euphoric.htm
- News and reports from the WSF
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/eventos/10.html
- Blogside at the WSF
http://dorseynation.blogspot.com/
- Updates from the WSF
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/2603.html

Previous promises to Africa have not always been honoured and the continent Blair once described as a "scar on the conscience of the world" waits to see if the outpouring of goodwill at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland will be any different. "There has certainly been an increase in rhetoric, and not for the first time," said Kenyan Arthur Muliro, analyst at Rome-based think-tank the Society for International Development. "Africa has been on the radar screen in this way many times before. There has been no shortage of promises, but in real terms nothing has changed."

US lobby group Africa Action has rejected the conclusion of a United Nations (UN) Special Commission report, which this week declares that a pattern of government-sponsored killings, displacement and other forms of violence in Darfur, Sudan, does not constitute genocide. The report, which acknowledges that abuses carried out by government and militia forces in Darfur may constitute "crimes against humanity", comes just one week after UN and African Union (AU) troops confirmed new attacks against civilians by the Sudanese Air Force, killing at least 105 people, most of these women and children.
LINK
- Report of the UN commission of enquiry
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/sudan/2005/darfurcoi.pdf

We are just setting up a fishfarm as part of our Household Food Security program for our members. Those who are affected by HIV/AIDS are the focus of this project as it will provide source of good nutrition and income generation for them. We will appreciate expert advice on ecologically viable methods for raising catfish sustainably. Please contact John Dada, Programs Director, Fantsuam Foundation ([email protected])

Fantsuam Foundation has done groundbreaking work in Nigeria that is having a big impact in BayanLoco, Kafanchan and the surrounding villages. FF was established as one of the first rural-based ICT educational institutions in Nigeria in 2000. That year, they were awarded the first Hafkin Africa Prize for their innovative use of ICT. Part of the prize money was set aside to provide scholarships for 10 women to attend basic computer literacy courses at the school. This modest beginning has led to the establishment, in 2003, of Nigeria's first rural-based Cisco Networking Academy. The Foundation's achievements have also been featured on CNN's Global Challenges Program (December 19th, 2004).

Thousands of Sudanese refugees living in camps in northern Uganda are reluctant to consider repatriation for a variety of reasons, including the lack of facilities in southern Sudan, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, told IRIN. The agency reported that the refugees felt the landmark peace agreement signed in December 2004 in Nairobi, Kenya, was not inclusive of all Sudanese groups.

I just wanted to make this observation:

The head of every state should indeed be a good leader. When this is not the case like in most Afrikan countries, then we the people should assume the responsibility of educating ourselves first and then others. We will then be talking about assuming good leadership.

The time has long past when we Afrikans should even talk about debt cancellation. Even the capitalist countries do not expect our countries to pay back these "debts". They use this argument as a control tool. They talk about cancelling parts of them depending on their mood. This is an insult! It is a total waste of time discussing this and other issues like all the other so-called accords with capitalist European institutions. We p*** on these "agreements".

In western Europe every community and political group is opposed to the privatisation of water supply and so on. But these same Europeans are putting on a hell of a lot of pressure on our Afrikan states to privatise our water and power supplies and even our agricultural companies. Imagine! No, we understand Europe just wants to control Afrika. They can package this in whatever form they like and with whatever phrases they create: "Good Governance", "Democratisation", "Fight against poverty", "Fight against corruption", but what they mean is CONTROL.

We Afrikans have to learn the lessons of the past in order to find out what our common agenda should be. We should start to think for ourselves, bear our own names, act for ourselves and "get this monkey off our backs".

Permit me to end with these two quotations:

"Blackman, set up your own table and stop eating the crumbs from another man's table, for if the crumbs seize to fall ..." - Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey

"Powerful people will never educate powerless people in what they need to take the power away from them. The aim of powerful people is to stay powerful by any means necessary! "- John Henrik Clarke

Through AFFORD's Opportunity Africa Programme, we have secured an internship with the World Bank in Luanda, Angola for 2 to 3 months – there is no deadline at the moment, but we would like the person to start as soon as possible. To be eligible for the internship, one must be an Angolan national, fluent in Portuguese and living in London. The internship will be paid and this is an opportunity that would benefit some young Angolans living in London to gain some experience in the field of international/African development. As the first step – the young Angolans attend the Opportunity Africa careers seminar on Tuesday 8 February 2005 from 6pm to 9pm at the AFFORD Offices in Vauxhall (31-33 Bondway, Vauxhall, London). The nearest tube and train station is Vauxhall (Victoria Line). Our office is opposite the new bus terminal outside Vauxhall station.

The corruption trial of a prominent South African businessman resumed on Tuesday with the court hearing details of his financial links to Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who has presidential aspirations. The high-profile case of Schabir Shaik on fraud and corruption charges has put Zuma on the defensive since it opened in October amid allegations that President Thabo Mbeki's deputy accepted kickbacks and bribes.

Bob Geldof is bored with visiting Africa and being called upon to raise money whenever the troubled continent faces a crisis - he would much rather be associated with his music. "I'd dearly love not to have to go there the day after tomorrow. More often than not, it bores me profoundly - the pace of change is far too slow, and Africans excuse their own complicity in exactly the same way as our politicians."

>>>>> Pambazuka News asks: "Does Africa want Bob Geldof?" Send your comments to [email protected]

The United Nations has confirmed that it has drawn up a list of people accused of human rights abuses in Cote d'Ivoire who could eventually face trial, but UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the names would remain secret for the time being in order not to jeopardise any future legal action. Radio France Internationale (RFI) reported last week that the UN had named 95 people in a blacklist that formed a secret annex to a still unpublished UN report on human rights abuses committed during Cote d'Ivoire's two and a half-year-old civil war.

Political divisions in Malawi were set to deepen after a meeting at the weekend to discuss the possible expulsion of the country's president from the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) party for alleged misconduct. "The meeting is intended to fire [President Bingu wa] Mutharika for being ungrateful to a party that sponsored him to become president," UDF secretary-general Kennedy Makwangwala reportedly told Agence France Presse late on Sunday.

At last something is coming around the corner. You might agree with me that children have always been delicate assets of our world communities. No wonder the United Nations formed an organ looking at their plight - UNICEF. Much as a lot of things and programmes have been done to do with children, their voice has been heard from the background. Its either someone does something for them or dictates their choices. And child rights activists will tell you that this is child exploitation.

Can you now imagine listening to a child sharing his or her views independently on radio without someone putting words in their mouths? It could sound quite ambitious to some, but this is what 2005 is looking forward to on Radio Chikuni. Suggested as the best idea for Interactive Radio Instructions (IRI) Campaign Programmes for 2005 under the Education Development Centre (EDC), 'Our Talk' will be the first radio programme in Zambia to be hosted by children. As if that is not enough, this programme will be hosted not just by children but IRI or Taonga Learners.

These are children who could not go to formal schools for various reasons, among them being lack of money due to poverty, traditional beliefs, having no one willing to sponsor them and other logistical hindrances. Called Ijwi Lyesu in Tonga, the programme producers, who are children themselves, will be hosting fellow children to discuss various issues that are affecting their daily lives.

The executive producers will just be helping them identify the issues and how to present the programme. This is in an effort to give them time to share their thoughts, hopes, visions and ideas to the development of their communities. It begins on Friday 17:30hrs starting January 15, 2005. As they always say that children are the leaders of tomorrow, 'Our Talk' will be shaping and tidying the path for their ideal. As Jesus said "the brick that the builders ignored became the most sought for later. "Today's rejects are tomorrow's heroes."

You may get the story from our website http://www.chikuniradio.org

Do you believe one can become a prisoner today and a president tomorrow? It may sound impossible to many but this has already happened in the world and on the African continent. We should all change our attitude towards prisoners and treat them as normal human beings not as beasts.

In Africa we have witnessed prominent leaders serve years in prison and later come out and become presidents. The former and the first president of South Africa Nelson Mandela served a term from the early sixties to the early 90’s. In Kenya we have witnessed our own first president the late Jomo Kenyatta serve a prison term and later after we gained our independence he became the first president.

In Kenya there was once a minister for home affairs who made very harsh rules for prisoners. He denied them beds, blankets and other basic needs. In a turn of events the same minister was implicated in matters warranting him to be in prison. Finding that there were no beds and blankets he demanded these things from the store. He was reminded of the orders he had made. It was such a shame for a fat man like him suffering from high blood pressure and gout.

During the social day at the industrial area prison in Nairobi which was held on the 30th of October the Kenya Human Rights Commission chairman Maina Kiai commended the government for the reform exercises that are taking part in most of the prisons in the country. He noted that: “There is a library in the prison which is a step forward to the inmates but in the library their are no books that deal with human rights.”

A university student who is an inmate at the prison acted as the spokesperson of the inmates at the prison. He thanked the government for the reforming works that it had started in the prisons but he requested them to reduce the congestion in the prisons.

Their were shouts as the officer in charge tried to cut short the speech although the vice-president intervened and asked him to finish his speech. He continued by asking the Minister for Justice and Constitutional affairs Kiraitu Murungi and the Chief Justice Evans Gicheru to pay them a visit since they had issues they wanted to tell him.

The vice-president Hon. Moody Awori who was at the event to officially open a hall for the inmates received cheers as he stood up to present his speech. The inmates, who referred to the vice-president as ‘uncle’, stood up to listen to what he had to tell them. The vice-president thanked the non-governmental organizations that had offered material support to the prisons and said that their was a move to start the training of warders to reduce the cases of inmates being assaulted by the warders. He added that the education program in the prisons would go on uninterrupted.

It may not come as news that the World Bank is choking the rural poor. But participants at the World Forum on Agrarian Reform in Valencia in December, learned the literal truth of it from Filipino delegates, who brought news of an all too familiar story. Last month, 14 people were killed outside the Hacienda Lusita, a sugarcane plantation in the Philippines. Among those killed were a two-year-old and a five-year-old, who suffocated on the teargas that the police fired into a crowd of protesters. The 5,000 workers at the plantation, farmworkers, and sugar-mill workers were fighting the firing of union members during wage negotiations, and demanding an increase in their wages: they want an increase of $1.78 on top of the daily gross pay of $3.39, together with medical benefits. The Labour Secretary authorized the use of force to compel the strikers to return to work, and on November 16, a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and other military vehicles rammed the picket line, following up with water-cannon, teargas and rifles. Firepower like this doesn't come without friends in high places, and the Hacienda Lustia is well stocked with them: it's owned by Corazon Cojuangco Aquino's family, she of the 1986 populist overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos.

The rural violence in the Philippines isn't an aberration. Activists from the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil, the Bangladesh Krishok Federation and the Colombian Asociacion Nacional De Usuarios Campesinos were just some of the groups reporting rural activists being killed, routinely and frequently, simply for standing up for their rights to food, dignity and justice. The killers are the police, the military, and private militias. They take their orders from the landed elites, the plantation owners, the buyers. Who in turn constitute the government. Which in turn pari pasu walks with the World Bank.

The armed violence is not the only kind of repression available in rural areas. The chronic structural violence of the landed elites is handily maintained by the tyranny of the market. And all of this is legitimized by a "post-Washington consensus" that pretends no other destiny for the rural poor than peonage, death, or migration to the cities. This is the agrarian prophesy of neoliberalism, and it has the means to turn vision into reality.

Summer

You might be wondering what this agrarian revolution looks like. Well, it's going to take time to work it out. And democracy. The one-size-fits-all school of agrarian reform isn't one that Via Campesina are keen to replicate. There are, however, principles and mechanisms for distinguishing progressive from reactionary agrarian transformation, which can be applied in specific circumstances, the principles of Food Sovereignty as developed by Via Campesina involve "Food sovereignty is the peoples', Countries' or State Unions' right to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries, ... including prioritizing local agricultural production in order to feed the people, access of peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds, and credit; the right of farmers, peasants to produce food and the right of consumers to be able to decide what they consume, and how and by whom it is produced; the populations taking part in the agricultural policy choices and, the recognition of women farmers' rights, who play a major role in agricultural production and in food."

This last point is the litmus test of the vision for rural transformation. The agrarian reform Via Campesina advocates isn't about reconstructing some past idealized rural existence, in these rural idylls, women were uniformly exploited and no amount of nostalgia through the soft focus of "heritage" can alter that fact. Since the exploitation of women is at the very heart of agrarian capitalism, there's going to have to be some fairly heavy changes in agrarian relations. As Shalmali Guttal, from Focus on the Global South put it, "perhaps with all these changes, we don't really mean agrarian reform. What we're really saying is that we need agrarian revolution."

In South Africa, there is occasion to test these principles. Apartheid has shaped an exceptional agrarian landscape, and if there is such a thing as a classical agrarian society, South Africa isn't it. The histories of dislocation, urbanization, eviction, colonization, cultural rearticulation and conquest have left South Africa looking very different from the rest of the continent, let alone the rest of the world. Although the idiom of land for all South Africans had played a central mobilizing role in the struggle against apartheid, the government has made pitiful progress in its commitments to justice for South Africa's rural and disenfranchised poor. This is in no small part because, in the ten years since the democratic dispensation, the capture of the state by neoliberalism has been swift and almost total. From the heady days of the Freedom Charter, in which the ANC proclaimed in 1955 "All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose", the ANC let it be known in 1994 that 30% of agricultural land would be transferred within five years. The target has been pushed back a little since then: the government's current aim is to redistribute 30% of agricultural land by 2015. To do that, it would need to transfer 2.1 million hectares a year, between now and then. The prospects aren't good, it has only managed to transfer this much in the eight years since the programme started. Part of the reason for this sloth is the government's commitment to neoliberal conceptions of agrarian justice: no expropriation from those who have for generations profited from the sweat of Africans. Instead, the "willing buyer-willing seller" approach to land redistribution, in which property rights trump all other rights - is the principle of justice that guides the state. It is an almost global and certainly Pythonesque phenomenon that, when confronted with the idea of willing-seller/willing-buyer, poor people observe that they'd probably be willing to buy had they any money, but if they had money, they wouldn't be poor and landless.

In South Africa in particular, one might think that the inequities of apartheid might enter the calculus of justice in land reform. Instead, the law is being used to frustrate the process of land reform. For example when dealing with restitution claims of families evicted in 1913 with the introduction of the Native Land Act the government requires communities to submit their land claims to the state. For this the claimants need a lawyer. But since the government's legal aid system is acutely under-funded, the only public lawyers available are buried in criminal cases. Gary Howard, of the Campus Law Clinic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, one of the few places where a handful of land claims can be processed, is clear: there are precious few places with the resources and knowledge capable of addressing the land question through legal means in South Africa. In other words, the ANC's land reform programme seems to be intentionally designed to fail.

*Raj Patel is a researcher with the Land Research Action Network, co-edits the Voice of the Turtle, and works at the Centre for Civil Society, in Durban. www.voiceoftheturtle.org and

The Namibian Police have begun examining documentation related to corruption and fraud at the Social Security Commission (SSC) with a view to prosecuting the culprits. The Police confirmed that they had started "studying information" which emerged from a report following the Presidential commission of inquiry into the parastatal's affairs in 2002-3. If the Police decide to formulate charges against any of those accused of wrongdoing, it will be the first time since Independence that a commission of inquiry has prompted the criminal prosecution of individuals.

Members of the political opposition in Uganda are working to avert what they say is a brewing political crisis as the time runs out for transition to a multiparty system. Members of Parliament opposed to the Movement system, who number only 81 in the 304-strong parliament, are lobbying the Speaker of the House, Edward Ssekandi, to avert a build-up of political tension by speeding up the transition from single-party rule to a multiparty system. The date proposed in 2004 in the roadmap was April 2005.

President Laurent Gbagbo's armed forces have begun transferring to Abidjan four attack aircraft damaged by French peacekeepers during a flare-up of hostilities in November, sparking fears of a resumption of hostilities among city residents. Opposition dailies accused the United Nations of giving Gbagbo the “green light” to resume fighting following its bombing raids on the rebel-held north in early November, which were intended to pave the way for a ground offensive. This was stopped in its tracks after French troops incapacitated the air force's small fleet of jet bombers and attack helicopters on the ground.

Writing about the world's response to the Boxing Day tsunami disaster, Kevin Watkins, director of the UNDP Human Development Report, states that while relief operations in Asia are of importance "it is no less of an imperative to break the grip of abject poverty and avoidable suffering in Africa and elsewhere." Watkins concludes: "We must build on the groundswell of compassion unleashed by the tsunami to end the injustice and indifference at the heart of Africa's crisis. We have the opportunity. Later this month, the UN Millennium Project will set out an agenda for mobilising the resources needed to halve extreme poverty, reduce child deaths and educate children. Britain can push the G8 to act on aid and unfair trade. Public opinion must get behind Africa."

The governor of the Plateau State in central Nigeria, whose trial recently resumed on money-laundering charges, may also be tried in Britain on similar charges. Scotland Yard officers arrived in Nigeria this week to testify against officials linked with the disappearance of millions of dollars from the coffers of Plateau State in Central Nigeria. Scotland Yard says that Mr. Dariye may also face charges in London for laundering several-million dollars from the state treasury to British bank accounts.

* Editorial: Markets respond only to money and the needs of the rich at the expense of poor women and men. That’s why women will fight against the free export and import of agricultural products at a WTO meeting later this year, says Mohau Pheko of the Gender trade Network
* Comment and Analysis: Public health services across the continent can only be described as a public health emergency, says a civil society statement addressed to African leaders meeting in Abuja, Nigeria
* Human Rights: Nigerian civil society organizations leak a long-awaited human rights report
* Women and Gender: Women are on the frontline in resistance to neo-liberal policies, yet they are often marginalized within their organizations, says this commentary from www.zmag.org
* Elections and Governance: Burundi’s Ndayizeye is told not to change a draft constitution and South African trade union Cosatu vows to visit Zimbabwe
* Development: News from the World Social Forum in Brazil
* Health and HIV/AIDS: Funds injected into communities to fight HIV/AIDS can cause community conflict, a study in Nigeria finds
* Environment: Civil society organizations demand a moratorium on World Bank backed logging in the DRC
* Jobs: English-French/French-English volunteer translators needed for Pambazuka News

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