There has recently been a feud between the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) and the National Statistical Office (NSO) over the correct figure for the registered voters in Malawi. During the second week of April 2004, the MEC announced that 6.5 million voters registered for the 18 May 2004 presidential and parliamentary elections. The NSO described the figure as “bogus” because it does not conform to the country's natural demographic trends. “It defies all logic”, observed the Weekend Nation, one of the country's leading weekly papers. Click on the link below to read the full article and others about key issues in the run-up to the elections on May 18.

Public hearings on the Child Status Bill are set to start next week. The Bill was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resources, Social and Community Development in March after serious controversy arose during the second reading debate, especially on rights to custody and children born from rape. The Bill seeks to grant equal rights to all children irrespective of whether or not they are born within marriage.

Ruud Lubbers, the head of the United Nation's refugee agency UNHCR, said on Wednesday that he would seek to repatriate foreigners from several West African countries who became combatants in Liberia's civil war. Lubbers told a press conference at the end of a three-day visit to Liberia that a number of foreigners were handing in their guns as part of Liberia's disarmament, demobilisation and rehabilitation exercise, which began last month.

The sexual abuse of children in the Gambia is increasing as a result of rising poverty in the small West African country and Gambian men rather than European tourists are mainly responsible for the phenomenon, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in new report published this week. Gambia has long been linked with sex tourism, but the UNICEF study, published on Wednesday, found that the main abusers of local children were male Gambian "Sugar Daddies." “The Sugar Daddy Syndrome,” explained Cheryl Faye, head of UNICEF in Gambia, “is the abuse of young girls lured by money or other gifts - perhaps some shoes or a mobile phone - into sex.”

Nigerian-born Damian Iwueke has announced his candidacy for the June 12 European parliament elections making him the only non-native Maltese to contest so far. Well-known as an agent of Nigerian footballers playing in the Maltese league, as well as in business and academic circles, the 45-year-old said he wanted to represent minority groups and all those who are "fed up with the wheeling and dealing of politicians in Malta". Mr Iwueke's main slogan is "Why not?" He said that if someone asks "Why vote for Damian?" the answer should be "Why not?"

The democratic opening presented by Nigeria’s successful transition to civil rule (June 1998 to May 1999) unleashed a host of hitherto repressed or dormant political forces. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between genuine demands by these forces on the state and outright criminality and mayhem. Post-transition Nigeria is experiencing the proliferation of ethnic militia movements purportedly representing, and seeking to protect, their ethnic interests in a country which appears incapable of providing the basic welfare needs of its citizens.

With governments lagging in fulfilling promises made at the United Nations two years ago, millions of children continue to die from preventable diseases and to be deprived of such basic rights as education, safe drinking water, and protection from abuse, UNICEF says. "We are crawling toward goals that we should be marching toward," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy. At the United Nations Special Session on Children in May 2002, governments agreed to time-bound goals intended to improve child health and survival, provide quality education, reverse the impact of HIV/AIDS, and protect children from abuse, exploitation and violence.

Zambian NGOs will continue to track the use of funds saved under the Highly-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, despite the government's suspension of an independent monitoring team. Before its suspension last month, the HIPC Tracking and Monitoring Team, established by the ministry of finance in 2001, identified several alleged cases of abuse of funds involving top civil servants. The team's last report, released in February this year, dealt with investigations into disbursements made in the Copperbelt and Northern provinces, and claimed that thousands of [US] dollars of HIPC funds had been spent on fuel, festivals and political celebrations.

Thanks first of all for your superb weekly newsletter - it's a real pleasure to read, even though it's only the 2nd week I've been subscribed.

I'm just writing to let you know that today's newsletter was mistakenly caught out by the "Spam Assassin" email spam filter running on my hosts' server. The filter is available on a lot of email accounts and websites worldwide.

You could advise subscribers on the website and in the next newsletter to whitelist the email address, if subscribers have that possibility - like I should have done as soon as I signed up!

PZ REPLY: Thanks for getting in touch and informing us about this problem. We would like to take this opportunity to remind all our subscribers to make sure that their email spam filters do not block Pambazuka News.

United Nations forces in the volatile north-eastern Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Saturday stepped up their patrols, a day after they killed at least 10 militia in clashes there, a UN spokesperson said. The UN force is in charge of peacekeeping in the province, which has been beset for several years by brutal ethnic violence between the Lendu and the minority Hema ethnic group. Periodic Lendu-Hema violence in Ituri, which is rich in gold and diamonds, has caused 50 000 deaths and displaced 500 000 people since 1999.

Maybe I’ve been in the news business too long - grown irrepressibly outraged. It’s hard to focus on Michael Jackson’s troubles when thousands of women are being gang-raped in Darfur, Sudan, their heads or hands branded to advertise their violation.

It’s difficult to empathize with American’s obesity problem when nearly
400,000 Darfurians will starve to death by Christmas if the international community does not intervene against their government’s predations.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to understand why the humiliation of a few dozen Iraqi men – however unconscionable – could blunt the thunder of a vast human catastrophe: the ongoing genocide of the Sudanese people.

Perhaps we’ve become numb to the "G-word." The U.S. Government and dozens of organisations working in the region have used the term appropriately to describe the systematic slaughter of black Africans in Sudan. Yet, no movement is in sight from the international community. Though it protests loudly, the U.S. has spread itself thin militarily. The major EU countries voice quiet condemnation of the Khartoum regime, perhaps nervously guarding their commercial interests in the exploitation of Sudan’s vast oil reserves. The African Union has voted Sudan power broker on the UN Human Rights Commission. The United Nations rings it hands, but Kofi Annan, the Director of Peacekeeping Operations during the Rwanda genocide, evidently cannot muster the moral authority to direct Security Council action. Indeed, the crisis represents brilliant timing and political calculation on the part of Sudan’s National Islamic Front government to prosecute its final solution with little interference.

One million people died in Rwanda in 1994 during one hundred days of international dithering. By comparison, Sudan is a slow-motion genocide; the daily death toll is now estimated at 1000 to 2000 human beings. That number will escalate wildly the longer the regime is allowed to act with impunity.

The media has essentially ignored what many are calling "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today." Admittedly, images from the scene are hard to come by. The Khartoum regime has blocked and/or controlled access for every kind of investigator. Can we allow this to militate against coverage? How long do we wait for a galvanizing image? Who will be brave enough to break from the lockstep of domestic navel-gazing to provide extensive, continuing coverage of this cataclysm?

We urgently need journalists, editors and producers to reveal this genocide for the horror it is. This is our watch. We have an opportunity to put steel into the values we claimed to embrace with the slogan "Never Again." Or will we remain more comfortable covering genocide anniversaries than the genocides themselves?

I agree with Tadjudeen (Pambazuka News 154: Great Expectations on South Africa). For the vast majority of Africans in South Africa, the poor are getting poorer. The ANC promised to return 30% of stolen land to landless people. Unfortunately, the ANC has only returned 2.5%. In the meantime, water has been privatised, making it difficult for poor people to access bugfree pipeborne water. This privatisation is already causing a rise in water born diseases such as cholera.

Families are unable to educate their children in a cultural setting, with a syllabuses which can meet their cultural and employment needs. Yet, South Africa is up for sale. Many rich Europeans can find land and or property for 1 million rand, in the midst of starvation, increasing HIV sufferers and unemployment. The expropriation of land, opportunities and resources from the many to service the few "indigenous middle class/elites" is a reflection that, as always, capitalism always serves the interests of the few.

How can the ANC continue to fail the vast majority with shallow rhetoric? One of these days, the disgruntled masses will get very fed up and turn on the very leadership which used to sound so radical and who was so in favour of addressing 400 years of injustice, suffering and servitude. Now, they talk and talk and talk and do not deliver!

What drives a child from their home to roam the streets, to beg, scavenge and scrounge in the rubbish bins for discarded bits and pieces of food and risk sleeping in street alleys with nothing but plastic sheets to keep warm during cold nights? Even for adults, spending a night in the open, at a railway station or a bus terminus is a prospect one never looks forward to, especially during the cold winter season. According to research done by a local non-governmental organisation, Future's International, more than 12 000 children are now living on Zimbabwe's streets.

Guinea-Bissau's recently elected parliament was sworn in on Friday, paving the way for the PAIGC, which controls nearly half the seats, to form a new government in this small West African country. PAIGC leader and prime minister designate Carlos Gomes Junior told IRIN that he would announce his new cabinet next week following formal consultations with transitional President Henrique Rosa.

This year's spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF marked 60 years of their founding in 1944. Fasts in Pakistan and outside the World Bank in DC and a protest rally were some of the actions taken by global justice campaigners to press on issues including debt cancellation. The official meetings remain closed with proceedings undisclosed save for the final communique and press releases. The main issues around which discussions took place included macroeconomic and structural policy measures for economic recovery and growth, IMF surveillance, a debt sustainability framework for low-income countries and progress in providing debt relief under the enhanced HIPC Initiative, a review of progress towards the MDGs, development financing and the strengthening of the voice and participation of developing and transition countries in the work and decision making of the Bretton Woods institutions.

Fresh cracks have emerged in the ruling coalition over the fight against corruption, even as the government reiterated its commitment to fight the vice, no matter the price. The government sent a powerful message that it was prepared to pay any price to fight corruption within its ranks. But even as it was doing so, it also emerged that corruption is likely to become the new battlefield between wrangling factions of the ruling coalition.

Pan-African Postcard: ‘Africa needs action not words’
Conflicts and Emergencies: Somalia - Fixing a broken state
Human Rights: Zimbabwe - Human rights defenders face constant harassment
Refugees and Forced Migration: Uganda - Educating refugees in countries of first asylum
Women and Gender: Africa - Reviewing the Beijing declaration
Elections and Governance: Electoral Commission moves from referee to sparring partner
Development: Skepticism over Africa Commission
Corruption: Lesotho - Lesotho trials keep rolling on
Environment: Africa groups protests over GM
Media and Freedom of Expression: Credo calls for repeal of anti-media laws

In a resolution on internally displaced persons, the UN Human Rights Commission on 20 April 2004 requested the Secretary-General to establish a new mechanism to address the problem of internal displacement. The resolution, which was adopted by consensus, recommended that the mechanism mainstream the human rights of IDPs into all relevant parts of the UN system, engage in international advocacy and action for improving protection of IDPs, and continue and enhance dialogues with governments, NGOs and other relevant actors.

The selection of the new Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato, confirms that the institution is controlled by a small number of governments, none of which are IMF clients, says the 50 Years is Enough Network. "The programs mandated by the IMF benefit business and investor interests in that same small groups of countries, but have done inestimable harm to literally billions of people in the rest of the world over the last 25 years. No Managing Director chosen by the IMF board would be likely to change the direction of the institution," said 50 Years is Enough in a statement.

In its efforts towards regional integration, civil society could forge alliances within sub-regions to take up governance and integration issues that go beyond national boundaries; identify treaties and protocols that have been signed but not implemented by states and monitor and provide support for realizing the African Peer Review Mechanism process at the national level. This emerged from a workshop under the theme of 'The Role of CSOs in Deepening Regional Integration' which was held in Addis Ababa in October last year. The Workshop was organized by the Development Policy Management Forum (DPFM) under a project of Ford Foundation’s Special Initiative for Africa (SIA).