"There are no legal restrictions or principles which justify impeding the access of national and foreign observers to the locations of vote counting at all levels," declared an independent legal opinion submitted to the National Election Commission (CNE) earlier this week. The CNE has repeatedly said that the law does not allow more openness, but this has been contested by observers and media. The Electoral Observatory, a coalition of the seven prominent national groups which are observing this election, commissioned the independent legal opinion. In a covering letter, it demanded that the CNE respond publicly to the alternative legal view. The Electoral Observatory said civil society must take action to promote more observer access to the final count to ensure a "clean" election. This is according to the most recent edition of the Mozambique Election Bulletin.

While accepted rhetoric says that donors respond to nationally-owned development plans, the reality is that these plans have little impact on either policy outcomes or the volume of loans a country receives. Opaque assessments conducted by the World Bank - known as Country Policy and Institutional Assessments - do. Critics argue that the scorecard is a way to coerce borrowers into adopting the Bank's preferred model of economic development, argues this article from The Bretton Woods Project.

Emmerson Mnangagwa, the Zanu PF secretary for administration who only last week expressed his interest to become vice President at the party’s forthcoming Congress, is now out of the race after he lost the nomination to Water Resources Minister, Joyce Mujuru. Analysts said Mnangagwa, the Speaker of Parliament and pre-Congress favourite for the post, will have to go back to the drawing back after only four provinces nominated him, with the rest opting for Mujuru.

Members of the UN Security Council visiting Africa's Great Lakes region asked the government of Burundi on Tuesday to speed up the country's peace process and complete the political transitional period by 2005. "It is imperative to conclude the process as there is no alternative to the 2005 elections," Jean Marc de la Sablière, the French ambassador to the UN and head of the 15-member delegation, told reporters on arrival at Bujumbura airport.

At least 20 people have been killed in a raid on the remote town of Birao in the north-east of the Central African Republic, according to reports. The attack comes ahead of a referendum on the constitution and as fears mount that the CAR could soon see an influx of refugees from Sudan's Darfur region.

Four Ugandan MPs say they were whipped with bamboo sticks by soldiers as they travelled to meet their constituents to discuss the constitution. The opposition politicians say they intended to discuss contents of a white paper, which proposes to lift the two-term limit on the presidency. Such a move would allow President Yoweri Museveni to run again in 2006.

Former Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu was a thorn in the flesh of successive apartheid regimes in South Africa until the demise of white rule in 1994. Now, with apartheid gone, Tutu is directing his desire for social justice elsewhere. "We were involved in the struggle (against apartheid) because we believed we would evolve a new kind of society: a caring, a compassionate society. At the moment many, too many, of our people live in gruelling, demeaning and dehumanising poverty. We are sitting on a powder keg," Tutu said this week. More than 40 percent of South Africans, most of them black, live below the poverty line of a dollar a day according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency.

At independence, copper-rich Zambia seemed set to become one of sub-Saharan Africa's richest countries. Today, after almost three decades of continuous intervention by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is one of the poorest. Externally-imposed policies have included trade liberalisation, removal of legal restrictions on prices and amount of competition between businesses (deregulation), privatisation, subsidy cuts, reducing public-sector job opportunities and cuts in salaries. The consequence of this - a spiralling debt, very slow economic growth, destruction of key industries and social crisis - needs urgent attention to stop the situation from further deterioration.

Tanzania is highly dependent on donor aid. It has one of the highest proportions of donor aid to gross national product (GNP) of any developing country. In recent decades a number of new strategies - from structural adjustment to sector-wide approaches and poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) - have been field-tested in Tanzania. Yet despite all these efforts at poverty alleviation and a huge donor presence, Tanzania has steadily slipped down the Human Development Index. Should donors pause to consider whether they need to stop trying new approaches and instead focus on long-term activities?

The Zimbabwean government’s draft bill to establish an electoral commission is a step forward, but lacks key provisions that would ensure this body’s independence and impartiality during general elections in March, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper. The bill is currently being debated in parliament. The briefing paper details how the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Bill contains provisions that fall short of the benchmarks for democratic elections recently agreed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), of which Zimbabwe is a member state. “Zimbabwe’s move to establish an electoral commission is a step in the right direction,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. “But this bill fails to provide the protections needed to ensure a level playing field for next year’s general elections.”

'Seek ye the political Kingdom first and all else shall follow...' so runs the quotation attributed to the father of Pan Africanism, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. I whole heartedly agree with Dr. Tajudeen's analysis of the Foreign Aid Saga in Africa. I will not dwell on the past but on the future.

Where to Africa? So cried Aime Caesaire...You who neither invented the gun powder nor the steam engine!

That poetic rendition of the African psycho-cultural disposition at the dawn of independence, unfortunately applies even today on the eve of social political and economic 'Armaggeddon'.

In making my contribution to the total liberation of the Africans, I have a few ideas to share with my Ugandan brother and scion of the new Pan African renaissance. I will speak figuratively because as the Kikuyu say 'Nyumba nyinyi iciraga utuku', a small house makes its deliberations at night.

I WILL SING A NEW SONG

Have you asked dear Pan Africanist
Why Nkrumah and Nyerere failed?
Have you forgotten why Lumumba died?
Have you forgotten Okot P’Bitek’s song of Lawino?
Do you know why the father of Blacks’ liberation W. E. B Du Bois
Lie buried in Accra…unsung and unmourned!
Tell me my brother if you know why the former ‘African socialist
intellectual’, is dead?
Tell me why Ngugi wa Thiong’o who refused to be James anymore
Now enjoys the fruits of his nemesis capitalist bourgeosie in America?
Tell me why Soyinka and Achebe are sharpening the minds of the
rich as their fellow Africans wallow in intellectual poverty?
Tell me who is left to champion the African course
Tell me why I cannot be bought by the rich if my elder brother and
mentor has been bought?
Tell me now…tell me today…because I have no time to waste
Tell me before I die of AIDS or poverty
Tell me now my brother I can’t wait…my brother cannot wait
I have my degrees but I cannot work
Yes I cannot work because my president has been told to retrench
Me
Told by a World bank/IMF that I did not elect
Tell me who stole my vote

Tell me whether I should succumb to God’s fate as my father did
Or I should rise up like my father’s brother who died during Mau
Mau
Tell me whether I should follow that example of a man who is never remembered
A man who never got what he fought for…a man whose children
never went to school
Tell me…you the new Christ or is it Shaka
Tell me which message you bear…which strategy boils in your
blessed mind?
Tell me this strategy that your brother could not master
Tell me this strategy that your enemies cannot fathom
Tell me today or I call you a dreamer
A big dreamer just like Dedan Kimathi, Kinjeketile, Frantz Fanon
Cheikh Anta Diop, George Padmore…Malcolm X

I know my sister only believes she is beautiful when she looks like
the girl across the wall
But I cannot blame her
It is foolhardy to enslave men on chains…it is in vogue
Men chained in the mind do the master’s bidding
They diligently work for the master’s interest even when he is asleep

I refused to stay in America and my relatives called me mad
‘What have you come back to do here…in poverty…why don’t you
be like the rest?
‘Oh God of heaven, my mother cried…how can my son be bewitched now when I need him most’?

Is this the club of mad men that you invite me to belong to Tajudeen?
A club of men who cannot put food on the table for their families
Because those who control jobs…put them on the black list
A club of men who cannot be quoted in any media at home because they sing a dead song!
A song that the World Bank has banned in an ‘independent’ African nation!

Come closer my brother…look at the young prince of the North
He talks war when African warriors carry the spear no more
When the spear can neither kill a rat nor the python!
He says no more money for AIDS…for condoms…for the cure!
Let those African brothers behave…let them abstain and reduce their numbers
Let them be few even when young women roam without husbands…called by proxy wars and AIDS

I want to sing a new song
I want to sing my song
In my own way
But they want me to sing their song
In their own way
The Clays of Kenya and the Thatchers of Equitorial Guinea
Wants Churchill back in the pearl of Africa
Churchill is back in Sierra Leone
As De Gaulle man’s the gates of Abidjan
Yes…because the African brothers chopped each others’ hands
Yes…because Governor Baring knew ‘the Africans could not rule
themselves’

Tell me Tajudeen why I should join you in the Pan African dream!

The victory of 69-year-old President-elect Hifikepunye Pohamba in the Namibian presidential elections last week heralds a new political era. He succeeds founding president Sam Nujoma, 75, who will step down in March next year after three terms in office. Pohamba, standing against six other candidates, secured 76.4 percent of the vote. The ruling party, SWAPO, scooped a 76 percent share in a nine-party parliamentary contest - the same percentage it won in 1999.

A visiting UN Security Council delegation, which is touring Africa's Great Lakes region, has asked the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to speed up its electoral timetable so that elections would be held on time in June 2005. The preliminary reforms meant to pave the way for elections have not been approved. One of these is the reunification of the armed forces, from previously belligerent groups. So far, only the army chief of staff and other senior army command positions have been integrated. Rank-and-file soldiers still give their loyalty to the their former militia commanders.

The long-running inquiry into Kenya's biggest financial scandal has ended after some 300 days. The so-called Goldenberg Affair is thought to have cost Kenya as much as $600m between 1990 and 1993. During the hearings, former President Daniel arap Moi was accused of being part of a scam that involved re-exporting gold and diamonds. Neither Mr Moi nor his close aides appeared in person but their lawyer denied the allegations on their behalf.

Hundreds of students from Kampala institutions recently participated in a demonstration against corruption in Uganda. Luzira Secondary School, Good Shepherd Primary School in Ndeeba and Kampala Study Centre were among the institutions. The demonstration was organised by the Anti-Corruption Coalition of Uganda (ACCU).

Courses include Leading Developmental Practice, Foundations in Developmental Practice, Developmental Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation course and Developmental Supervision. Visit their web page for more details.

A four-day workshop has ended in Conakry, Guinea. The meeting brought together around twenty-five participants from countries, including Argentina, the Caribbean, and the Netherlands, and with most of them civil society activists. Other participants included one person from the ACP Secretariat, and a consultant who gave a presentation on the Guinean situation with regard to EPAs. The aim of the meeting was for NGOs to strategise around the so-called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that the EU is negotiating with 77 countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group, and which the EU would like to launch in 2008.

This December representatives from peasant movements around the world will gather together with each other and with specialists in land reform policies, at the World Forum on Agrarian Reform, to be held in Valencia, Spain. On the top of their agenda will be debunking the hype emanating from the World Bank on the topic of land reform, and organizing a global campaign to fight the pernicious impacts of the Bank's land policies. In fact, recent shifts in World Bank policies toward land might remind one of the title of the old Clint Eastwood movie, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

The fight against corruption led by President Bingu wa Mutharika is dividing the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), with some experts warning of a threat to Malawi's stability. "The division within the UDF is causing a threat to our young democracy. The problem is that there are some big people in the party who think that we are still in the one-party system of government, where there is no separation of powers between the state and party," said Public Affairs Committee Chairman Father Boniface Tamani.

A top International Monetary Fund (IMF) official said President Robert Mugabe has had a change of heart and now wants to resume relations with the multilateral financier. In a Press statement after meeting Mugabe in Harare earlier this week IMF director for Africa, Abdoulaye Bio Tchane, said the Zimbabwean leader had assured him he wanted a new and meaningful relationship with the lending institution.