Donors have expressed concern over alleged malpractices in the awarding of government contracts, and warned that Kenya risked losing donor support unless authorities intensified the fight against corruption. "This is a key moment in Kenya's fight against corruption. What is required is intensification of effort and purposeful commitment," said a joint statement issued on Monday by the embassies of Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

A Nigerian appeals court has quashed a lower court judgement that nullified the election of a state governor from the ruling party, saying there was inadequate evidence to prove opposition allegations of vote rigging. Announcing the unanimous decision of a panel of five appeal court judges sitting in the central city of Jos, Justice Pius Aderemi said on Monday they were overruling an electoral tribunal judgement which had voided the election of Boni Haruna as governor of Adamawa State in eastern Nigeria.

One person was killed and several others were injured on Wednesday when police clashed with demonstrators who took to the streets in the western Kenyan town of Kisumu to demand a quick enactment of the new draft constitution. The confrontation between the demonstrators and police was the first public show of frustration with President Mwai Kibaki's National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) government, which came to power following a landslide electoral victory 18 months ago.

Mary Wandia (FEMNET) and I have worked closely with the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women, Commissioner Angela Melo, in lobbying the governments and regularly exchanged information and ideas. The AU Commissioner for Political Affairs also went around speaking to countries about ratification. We got two ratifications (Libya and Rwanda) since coming to Addis Ababa.

Yesterday [06 July] the President of Botswana [Festus Mogae], during a debate on gender, announced that his country will sign, ratify and implement the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa.

The Assembly is adopting a declaration on gender and it includes a commitment to ratify the Protocol by the end of 2004; and no country objected to this deadline.

We reached out to all the countries that have signed the Protocol as well as most of those who didn't. The news is encouraging. Most countries seem to have started the process of ratification though they are at different stages of discussion. Mary and I are very optimistic that it would come into force by December 2004; but a lot also depends on the national campaigns. Mary will send around the declaration that is being adopted by the heads of state and that could be used in the national campaigns to remind the authorities of their commitment.

The Special Issue of Pambazuka News (Pambazuka News 162) to support the campaign on ratification of the Protocol on the Rights of Women was a very useful campaign tool. It became popular at the African Union meeting.

Aside from lobbying we did several interviews with the press highlighting the campaign. As you all would agree, media is a powerful tool to use for the campaign and we hope that everybody will be engaging the national media to keep up the pressure on governments. Feel free to use information from the special issue of Pambazuka News. Likewise, you can reproduce the petition and make it specific to your country. Please continue to spread the petition to publicise it and get as many signatures as possible.

Faiza Mohamed
Equality Now

Transparency International is using the forthcoming AU meeting in Addis Ababa as an opportunity to call upon the African Leaders to sign, ratify and begin putting in place structures which would allow for the implementation of the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption and the United Nations Convention against Corruption. To date 30 countries have signed but only 3 (Comoros, Libya and Rwanda) have ratified it. The convention requires 15 ratifications to enter into force.

Reporting on the worst corruption scandal of President Mwai Kibaki's Government, a watchdog committee of MPs has demanded that the Kenyan Finance Minister, David Mwiraria, should be held responsible for involving the Government in the Sh2.7 billion passport scandal. In addition, the committee has urged that three former Permanent Secretaries should face fraud and conspiracy charges and that other deals involving the UK firm Anglo Leasing should be investigated.

Angolan Foreign Affairs Minister, João Miranda, on Sunday, in Addis Ababa, refuted strongly the allegations from the African Union commission for human and people's rights, which qualifies as xenophobic the repatriation of illegal foreigners, that has been carried out by the Angolan Government.

Once considered a status symbol and the preserve of the urban elite, mobile phones are now changing the lives of rural Zambians. In a country with low telephone connectivity, mobile phones penetrate remote areas that have yet to be connected by landlines.

Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on anti-poverty targets, said Africa's heavy debt burden was untenable and urged the continent not to pay its debts if rich countries refused to cancel them. The U.S. economist, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, spoke at a conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on hunger on the eve of a summit of the heads of state of the African Union, which estimates sub-Saharan Africa's foreign debt at $201 billion.

On July 22, the World Bank will celebrate its 60th birthday. That day will mark 60 years of failed policies, 60 years of misguided loans, 60 years of increasing debt, and 60 years of dubious development projects. Join the Global Day of Action on J-22 and call for the World Bank to give communities the right to decide their own development path; stop investing in oil, mining and gas; respect human rights; exclude large dams from renewables initiatives;operate in full transparency; cancel 100% of impoverished country debt.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) invites applications to its Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program. Established in 2001 to enable activists, scholars, and journalists from around the world to deepen their understanding of democracy and enhance their ability to promote democratic change, the fellowship program is based at NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, in Washington, D.C.

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), invites applications for the Transitional Justice Fellowship Program, a funded, four-month residential fellowship program in Cape Town, South Africa, for approximately 24 professionals from select countries. Over a four-month period, fellows will discuss multiple strategies to be deployed following a period of conflict or repressive rule in order to bring about a more just, democratic, and peaceful society in their respective countries.

This paper argues that efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on school enrolments through changes to education policy and increased funding are unrealistic and misguided. The paper predicts that, as with previous efforts to reach development goals, the international aid community will attribute the failure to achieve the education MDGs to the broken promises of donors. In conclusion, the paper recommends the creation of historically-grounded, country-specific education goals, and recognition of the broader economic and political environments which influence decisions regarding education.

United Nations humanitarian agencies say they are concerned by the Sudanese Government's abrupt transfer of more than 5,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in the war-torn Darfur region from one IDP camp to another without any consultation or advance warning. Between Wednesday evening and last Thursday lunchtime, about 1,000 families were transported by Sudanese authorities from a camp at Meshtel to a more established camp at Abu Shouk, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Although the Namibian government is against the institutionalisation of orphans, some orphanages, or rather houses of safety, have sprung up to provide accommodation for needy children in the interim. With the Namibian population not too keen to foster orphaned children due to mainly financial difficulties, the kids need to be accommodated somehow. The extended family, many agree, remains the best choice to keep the orphans within the family set-up, but for the same reasons of resources, houses of safety and orphanages, where they collaborate with the line ministries, are necessary, some say.

Over 17,000 children aged between seven and 12 years have fled from the Lord's Resistance Army rebels' captivity since 1986, a Northern Youth Connection (NYC) survey has revealed. The Aga Khan High School students, led by Darren Hynes, a teacher, initiated the NYC, a community service programme. Hynes said about 22,000 children have been abducted between 1986 and 2002, an estimate of 30 children per day.

Having studied the Protocol and the rights of women in several African countries, the ratification and advocacy of the Protocol is absolutely vital to African women's rights.

Sign the petition on the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa at:

I regularly receive your newsletter. Thanks for what you do for me.
Pierre Felix Kandolo, DRC

I would like to comment on the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, which is to be ratified by member states of the African Union. While it is a known fact that women constitute the majority of this continent’s population (and indeed of the world!), very little is being done by African leaders to foster women's rights. For example, how can a leader talk about women's rights when girls who finish their secondary (pre-university) education are unable to pursue their studies at university level, due to financial constraints? Are they forgetting that to educate a girl (future woman and possibly mother) is to educate a nation? Without education, no adequate rights!

Sign the petition on the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa at:

Reading Nigerian newspapers online often requires a huge dose of patience lest you do severe damage to the computer staring you in the face. Doing this alongside an unrelenting assault by those I call Reaganistas in the US requires a greater dose of restraint to avoid jail on grounds of committing grievous bodily harm. While not unmindful of what they say about speaking ill of the dead, I believe we do need a balanced perspective in these times of effusive praise and fawning adulation for Reagan.

I have been confounded by the unbalanced, uncritical and shallow tone of many articles on Reagan in the Nigerian newspapers and frankly stunned by at least two editorials in our more enlightened newspapers. Unlike op-ed articles, newspaper editorials ought to be more reflective, balanced and restrained in their judgment. Not so for the ones I have read.

Reagan has been credited with ending the Cold War; others have attributed as his greatest attributes the fact that he paid little attention to detail, got to work at 9 a.m., took a nap in the afternoon and retired at 5.p.m. He was not an insomniac like Nigeria's president, so the argument went.

To another set, it was the vision thing - a man of few beliefs - low taxes, less government, strong nation, who focused on them all like a beam and regained greatness for his country. And not to be accused of lop-sidedness, some feebly acknowledged that he may have plunged his country to its greatest economic recession in a period of unrivalled expansion and did not care much for African-Americans. Perhaps some of this is true, they may even all contain aspects of truth, but they are not the whole truth about Ronald Reagan's presidency. We may never agree on what the whole truth is, but we should also not let Reaganistas intimidate us into silence. Now, what, in my view, is Mr Reagan's record?

On the Cold War, I am not aware of any definitive documentary evidence that apportioned sole responsibility to Mr Reagan for ending the Cold War. Sure, if symbolism were the sole basis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, soundbite platitudes like Soviet Union is the “evil empire” or “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, might have sufficed, but discerning observers certainly knew that the Soviet Union of the 1980s was a deflated and declining power primarily on account of bad governance.

The fact is that most of what Mr Reagan did, such as the INF Treaty, was more a continuation of Mr Carter's policy rather than a rejection. However, some in the Reagan administration as well as right wing academics deliberately exaggerated the Soviet Union's power in order to get their “Star Wars” and padded contracts for America's military industrial complex. As James Schlesinger, jnr, America's erstwhile Defence Secretary said of Star Wars, “it was nothing but a collection of technical experiments and distant hopes” which Mr Reagan treated “as if it were already a reality.”

Even with this, partisan observers can only argue that Mr Reagan merely accelerated what was, at best, inevitability. As we grapple with the return of the Cold War under someone who thinks of himself as a clone of Mr Reagan, we should ask ourselves if the so called war on terror is not another agenda foisted on the country and the world by actors driven by dogma rather than common sense.

On his “voodoo” economics of low taxes, small government and strong nation, ask David Stockman, who was his Budget Director. In his book, The Triumph of Politics, Stockman had this interesting sentence about Reagan's supply side economics, “If the Securities and Exchange Commission had jurisdiction over the White House, we might all have had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood penitentiary.”

The deficit ballooned from $79 billion to $179 billion in his first year in office alone. He talked often about tax cuts, but eventually raised taxes through excise duties, but no, these were not taxes, they were merely “revenue enhancers”. By the time he left government in 1988, few would agree that American government was smaller than it was when he assumed office in 1980.

But for me as an African, my biggest yardstick for judging Mr Reagan's place in history was his foreign policy. A man not given to moral leadership, strategic thinking or deep introspection, he quickly embraced the false distinction drawn by his UN Ambassador, Jean Kirkpatrick, between “totalitarian” (left wing) and “authoritarian” (right wing) dictatorship, a thesis which soon provided the basis for crushing left wing despots whilst embracing right wing dictators and “constructively” engaging the apartheid government in South Africa became the first test of this thesis.

Soon, Reagan's CIA Director, William J. Casey began his assault on nationalist movements deemed to be close to the Soviet Union by providing financial and military support to their opponents. From Renamo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from the Contras in Nicaragua, who Mr Reagan described as the 'moral equivalents of the American founding fathers', to the Mujaheedin in Afghanistan, Mr Reagan utilized proxy wars to sow the seeds of today's terror around the world in the name of fighting communism.

Even the New York Times mildly opined in its obituary, “The Reagan Doctrine…was to have lasting repercussions in the fight against terrorism”. And, those who want to know about the right wing dictators, who benefited most from Reagan in Africa should ask Liberians about Samuel Doe, the Congolese about Mobutu Sese Seko, the Sudanese about Nimeiry and the Somalians about Siad Barre - four countries which received 80 per cent of US aid to sub-saharan Africa under Reagan.

It is hardly a coincidence that Africa's most virulent and unrelenting post Cold War conflicts have occurred in these four countries. In my view therefore, Reagan failed the test of greatness as far as foreign policy was concerned and he was largely absent without leave in his domestic policies.

I don't begrudge Reaganistas for their efforts at pushing Reagan as a saint, and I have taken the daily assaults on American television with extra-ordinary equanimity - afterall, I am a stranger in this land - but I resent half baked analyses by my own compatriots that fail to advance our knowledge in any way.

Of all the obituaries I have read here on Reagan, allow me to quote at length Professor Thomas Cronin, McHugh Professor of American Institutions. According to him, “Americans evaluate the greatness of a President on criteria that are over and above popularity and re-election. Did Reagan expand opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, gender or income bracket? It is my view that Reagan has not enlarged the equity factor nor the educational opportunities for most Americans”.

On the global scale, he continued, “President Reagan was lacking in moral leadership, an essential quality for greatness. He was too late, too little, and too lame when it came to human rights at home and abroad.”

There is no doubt that Reagan admirers can quote others who hold contrary views and they reserve the right to do that. I might even agree with them that he projected and injected boundless optimism of America's greatness, which affected and infected his people during his time in office, but when it came down to it, Reaganomics left Americans with a deficit that succeeding generations will continue to pay, sowed the seeds of terror through his Reagan Doctrine, promoted irresponsibility and incompetence in government and showed a clear hostility to equality among the races. Now, this may be a harsh judgment but I hope it allows Reaganistas to at least acknowledge that the jury is still out on Reagan's greatness, and we should all await history's judgment on him.

* Dr Fayemi is Senior Visiting Scholar in African Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA.

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