on March 10, 2008,Judge Hlophe of the Cape High Court (who has been embroiled in a previous corruption scandal related to property developers) issued an order for the forced removal of the residents of Joe Slovo settlement in Langa, as requested by Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, Western Cape Housing MEC Richard Dyantyi, and John Duarte and Prince Xanthi Sigcawu of Thubelisha Homes.

The following memorandum was prepared by members of the Merti Range Users Association in northern Isiolo, Kenya. It expresses their concern about concessions recently granted to a Chinese company to prospect for oil in the rangelands. It illustrates the potential threats of this kind of external investment on the ecosystem and local livelihoods, and the lack of transparency in the negotiations.

Memorandum submitted by the Merti Range Users Association of Isiolo, Kenya, in relation to a Chinese company undertaking oil prospecting activities in the area

To: Hon. Kiraitu Murungi, Minister for Energy
Hon. Mohamed Abdi Kuti, MP Isiolo North
The Director, NEMA
The District Commissioner, Isiolo District
All Councillors, Isiolo County Council

Whereas Rangeland Users Association is an institutional framework developed for the purpose of the welfare of the pastoralist people living in Merti division of Isiolo district;

Recognizing that pastoralism is the mainstay of the economy of the area and thus the majority of the population are therefore members of the association;

Further noting that a Chinese company is now said to engage in undertaking oil prospecting activities in the heartland of the rangeland on which the pastoralists raise their livestock and manage the environment, its fauna and flora;

Apprehensive that the said prospecting activities will lead to massive environmental destruction, thereby destabilizing an already fragile ecosystem that is constantly pressurized by the vagaries of ever-changing climatic conditions;

Further noting that the said Chinese company is undertaking these activities in total exclusion of the local people and its leadership;

Realizing that this oil prospecting activity will ultimately lead to not only destroying the existing ecosystem, its economy and the people depending on it but have serious long-term negative effects on the environment on which we derive our livelihood;

And having further realized that the said Chinese company is not willing to engage the local population, its leadership and institutions on any of the issues,

We therefore submit the following:

1. That an urgent immediate action be taken by the elected leadership to engage the relevant government organ/department to ensure the above-raised concerns are addressed in the following manner.
2. That the Chinese company is practising unethical labour procedure in total contravention of international labour conventions, Kenyan labour laws and rules of natural justice. This they do by engaging persons without any signed papers, not informing them of their renumerations, working long extensive hours without commensurate overtime payments, tight social restrictions bordering on enslavement and human rights abuse. This is all supposedly happening in your own country and village. This must be urgently redressed and corrected.
3. That any further employment opportunities must be given to the local people unless such expertise cannot be sourced locally.
4. All sourcing of goods and services must also be given to the local people as propriety.
5. That the oil company should pay for the havoc they will cause to the local economy in view of the destruction their activities are going to occasion to the environment, economy and infrastructure in the area such as roads.
6. That the process of granting concessions and rights by the government must involve the local pastoralist communities whose livelihood depends wholly on this land and the natural resources found thereon.
7. That these are grave matters touching on lives and livelihoods and should be addressed with the urgency they deserve.

*Signed for and on behalf of 68 elders representing all the localities of Merti division, Diba Golicha Galma, Chairman, Range Users Association, Merti.

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

A very important and astute analysis by NCBL on Africom (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/45604#comments). Along with the clarity we also need to put forth solutions - such as state, national, continental and global resource authorities to capture the surplus profits (resource rent) from oil and other natural resources, including surface land, and distribute these funds equitably.

An outbreak of acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) in and around the town of Belet Hawo, southwestern Somalia, has killed at least 11 people in the past three weeks, medical sources said on 28 February. "Eleven people have so far died in Belet Hawo hospital and the villages around it," Saaid Mohamed Samatar, a doctor with the Gedo Health Consortium (GHC), said.

A Nigerian rebel group from the oil producing Niger Delta accused the government on Friday of denying their detained leader access to lawyers and relatives despite a court order that he should be allowed to see them. Henry Okah of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) was arrested in Angola on September 3 and handed over to Nigeria on February 14. His detention in a secret location by Nigerian authorities has raised tensions in the delta.

WWF recently released a report on "EU Consumption, Global Pollution". The report shows that the global CO2 emissions from EU consumption are 500 megatonnes (12%) higher than EU production. The countries most impacted by the EU's carbon imbalance are China, South Africa and Russia. The situation reflects the fact that the Europe mainly exports services and high-value added products while importing more energy-intensive and low-value added products. Imported goods also tend to cause more emissions because production in some countries is more pollution intensive than in Europe.

At least 22 people have been confirmed dead a week after cyclone Ivan struck Madagascar. It has also left thousands of people homeless and displaced in the north-west town of Anosimahavelona. The announcement of further three of heavy rains by weather forecast officials has already caused panic in many parts of the Indian Ocean, including the capital, Antananarivo. These places are already affected by floods.

Climate change could pose a new threat to food-insecure Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the USAID Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET). Christopher Funk, a geographer-climatologist from the University of California Santa Barbara and member of FEWS NET, presented their draft Climate Change Impact Report at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, United States

Swaziland’s timber plantations have been held up as a model of sustainable forestry management, where other plantations around the world are considered to have had negative environmental and social impacts. However, the authors of this report argue that these plantations are sustainable in the narrowest sense of the term, that of “long-term productivity” rather than “sustainability” as it is understood in a development context.

Swaziland’s timber plantations have been held up as a model of sustainable forestry management, where other plantations around the world are considered to have had negative environmental and social impacts. However, the authors of this report argue that these plantations are sustainable in the narrowest sense of the term, that of “long-term productivity” rather than “sustainability” as it is understood in a development context.

Southern Africa has been warned to brace for more and heavier rains as the peak of the rainfall season approaches. The rainfall season in most of southern Africa stretches from October to March with a peak in late February. A forecast for the period January to March 2008 issued by the SADC Drought Monitoring Centre warns of heavy rainfall across most parts of mainland SADC and Madagascar.

My good friend, Moses Ochonu, a Professor of African History at Vanderbilt, once penned an essay about the frustrations of offering balanced and optimistic perspectives on the Nigerian condition, even in the context of "considerably lowered" expectations. Prior to a trip to Nigeria, Ochonu had taken the precaution of fortifying his psyche against the trauma of disappointment by lowering his expectations in line with what he deemed would be the quality of the social contract between a tragically atrophied postcolony and her citizens. He tried not to expect good roads; he tried not to expect stable power supply; he tried not to expect water from the taps; he tried not to expect safety of life and property; he tried not to expect smooth delivery of any of those routine services the state renders to the citizen; he tried not to expect courtesy from public officials; he tried not to expect people not to demand bribe. In essence, he prepared himself mentally for a trip to, well maybe not exactly hell, but to the famed threshold between earth and hell in Yoruba mythology. Although not quite in hell, the inhabitants of this liminal zone are sufficiently close to feel the heat as we see in some of the novels of D. O. Fagunwa. To protect himself, Ochonu placed the bar of expectation so low as to bury it in the sand. Yet, Nigeria managed to burrow deep into Ochonu's sand, find that buried bar of expectation, and settle down comfortably below it. In the light of this situation, my friend agonized over the dilemma of teaching Africa positively in the North American classroom when quotidian details keep pulling the rug off the feet of even the most unrepentant Afro-optimist.

A few days after I read Ochonu's piece, pondering how brilliantly it mirrors my own experience, another colleague, a Francophone African national, phoned from the US. As he had just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, we talked Africa. He had not read Ochonu's piece but what he had to say revealed an extraordinary convergence of opinions between him and Ochonu. He told me he'd perfected a "mental survival kit" for traveling in Africa. He watches the screened flight indicator very closely in the plane. Once he notices that the plane has entered the airspace of the African continent, he takes off what he calls his "toga of Western standards" and wears his danshiki of considerably diminished expectations. That way, he's never disappointed. On the contrary, he is even pleasantly surprised whenever things work. That's the only way this seasoned Afro-optimist maintains his sanity when crisscrossing the continent.

The normalization of the substandard in Africa, its osmotic seepage into the weft of continental modes of being, can sometimes provide material for Nobel-class comedy. Accused of organizing the worst election in human history, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's immediate past president and current national joke, lashed out at the international community for criticizing an election that satisfied African standards! How can rational people expect an African election to measure up to international standards, Obasanjo fumed. His opinion was promptly supported by Lady Lynda Chalker, the talkative British leech who always arranges to be in the company of the most reactionary elements within the ruling cabal in Nigeria. The elections were indeed very successful by Nigerian and African standards, she crooned. Our humiliation was complete. Bless her soul! The old lady wasn't to blame. Our leaders delivered the mouth with which to abuse us to her on a platter of gold. I once took a taxi from Lomé to Kpalimé in Togo. It was a standard Peugeot 505 car meant for a driver and four passengers. As is customary in so many parts of the continent, the driver squeezed two passengers in front and sardined four in the back for a total of seven people in a car meant for five. When I drew attention to this, the driver laughed heartily and gave me a paternal response: "ca c'est pour les blancs" (those standards are for white people).

Nowhere is this production of comedy out of monumental tragedy more palpable than in the impatience with which Africa's seems to replace one negative international headline with another. Darfur supplied endless materials for international headlines and gave value, sense, and meaning to the lives of Western actors operating in what I've called the Mercy Industrial Complex. While Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Bono were still shedding darfurized tears for international cameras, a jealous Zimbabwe drove Darfur out of the headlines. For a while, it looked like Zimbabwe was going to stay the course and spend some respectable time in the headlines but Nigeria had other ideas. Nigeria drove Zimbabwe out of international headlines with the joke she called elections in April 2007. As the giant of Africa, one would have expected other African countries to be deferential and allow Nigeria sufficient time in the sun but Kenya had other ideas. Kenya drove Nigeria out of the headlines with even worse elections, effectively confirming the seminal thesis of Professors Olusegun Obasanjo and Lynda Chalker on African elections. Before Nigerians could recover from the Kenyan affront, the shock of coming to terms with the fact that it is possible for any African country to offer a worse election scenario than Nigeria, South Africa drove Kenya out of the headlines with news of sporadic power cuts! News of power outage and rationing in South Africa got less than two weeks in the international headlines before our impatient friends in Chad drove South Africa out of the headlines. As I write, rebels have shot their way into the capital, displacing people and creating another potential refugee crisis. By now, the jet engines should be revving to move the Mercy Industrial Complex to N'djamena until another African theatre of the absurd drives Chad out of the headlines.

As a scholar paid to research and teach Africa in the West, Africa's generous production of negative headlines presents the most daunting professional challenge. You are a student of Eurocentrism. You are a student of the production of Africa in Western imagination. You are familiar with the image of Africa in the Western media. You know the tropes and metaphors of "the Africa that never was", as the title of one famous book very aptly puts it. In scholarly circuits, you are familiar with the history and discursive trajectory of Afro-pessimism. In fact, you are part of the postcolonial, dissident, and dissentient response machine to Western traducers of our past and our present. You prepare graduate seminars aimed at teaching your students how to approach Africa objectively; how not to pathologize Africa as eternal negation; how not to reduce the continent to a theatre Hobbesian self-abasement among "natives" and "tribes"; how to sift through Western sensationalism in order to arrive at objective intellectual insights. You teach them to be critical. You don't want them to wax positive when the facts are negative just to butter up their African professor. You help them to establish connections between things by placing developments in Africa in the context of broader global situations and their implications.

You do this, hoping and praying that by the time they come back to class next week, Africa would not have supplied another round of headlines that could make a mess of the entire basis of your seminar. You are aware that intellectual objectivity imposes the recognition of the supply side of things on you. The Western media may sensationalize Darfur, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya but those countries supplied the material for sensationalization in the first place. Africa hardly ever disappoints. Every time they come to class, there is a fresh set of headlines to discuss briefly before class: they always google African news. "What's this thing about elections in Nigeria"? I try to give answers. "What do you make of the situation in Kenya"? I send them to The Zeleza Post to read analyses by Wandia Njoya and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. As you answer the questions, you are boiling within. But you are not mad at them. You are in fact very happy that they take your seminar and Africa sufficiently seriously to do that extra reading in African current affairs. Deep down, you know you are mad at Africa for the endless supply of the macabre. At times you feel so empty and drained that you begin to wonder if your self-imposed task of Afro-optimism makes you look like that funny character in the Yoruba folk tale who spends his/her life trying to fill a basket with water. That proverb, I guess, is the answer of the Yoruba people to the myth of Sisyphus. Every time you give an Afro-optimist lecture, the continent supplies new headlines to puncture your optimism but you keep on pouring water into that basket. Stubbornly. Your love story with Africa keeps you going. Love, hope, and faith convince you that you may one day fill that basket.

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org. This article first appeared at The Zeleza Post.

The authorities and aid agencies in Madagascar are coming to grips with the destruction left by cyclone Fame; although there is room for improvement, the response so far has shown that the 2007 cyclone season taught valuable lessons. In late December tropical cyclone Fame made landfall in the northwest of the island "as a category one, meaning winds of 120 to 150 kilometres per hour," said Edouard Libeau, Emergency Specialist at the UN's Children Fund (UNICEF) in Madagascar. Fame tore through the centre of the island and then slowly dissipated as it moved east towards the Indian Ocean.

A few days after villagers in Kedere in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region noticed oil seeping from the pipe that runs beside the village, a few boys from the village went out with shovels, dug pits a few feet deep, scooped the oil into the ground and burned it, finally covering it with sand. “During the dry season, it looks nice,” Anyakwee Nsirimovu, director of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt, told IRIN, describing the simple process which he said is a common spill clean-up tactic in the region.

Chad is also a story [see Alex De Waal's article at ] of blood oil, in my opinion, and the blood is on the hands of the World Bank and western governments. Recall that in the 1990's the World Bank agressively backed western oil companies to overcome all obstacles and construct the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, delivering Chadian oil to gaping western fuel tanks. (Ironically, at the time the World Bank was running ads on CNN warning us that increasing fossil fuel consumption might contribute to global warming!) The Bank's public justification was that extracting the oil was the only hope for development in Chad. Some of us opposed the pipeline and the World Bank's role, on the grounds that Chad had no effective government and a history of conflict, and that the oil money was unlikely to be of real benefit to Chadians under those conditions. The oil has been in the ground for millions of years; we argued for keeping it there a few more years until we could be sure it would be well used. Obviously the conflict in Chad predates the oil exploitation, but the World Bank literally poured oil on the flames, providing something much more valuable for rival factions to fight over. Now we are seeing the kind of 'development' oil has brought to Chad: more years of civil war and the resulting human suffering. Will we be surprised to see western governments install or prop up whichever 'government' is likely to keep the oil flowing?

The World Bank's involvement in the carbon market is under hot debate. In this article, Janet Redman from the Institute for Policy Studies opposes its approach while Jon Sohn, from Climate Change Capital argues that there is a role for the Bank to play.

The death toll from a cyclone that hit Madagascar on Sunday has risen to 12 people from two and 5 000 others are in need of aid, a senior relief official said on Friday. "The latest official count is 12 dead, with more than 5 000 victims," Jean Rakotomalala, executive secretary of the Malagasy government's National Office of Disasters, told journalists.

Crops in South Asia and Southern Africa are likely to be worst hit by climate change and need greater investment in agriculture development and adaptation strategies, say US scientists. The conclusions, reported today (1 February) in Science, are based on an analysis of climate risks for crops in 12 food-insecure regions.

Communities close to Tanzania's Lake Natron had publicly opposed to the proposed plans to erect soda ash plant in the area. The plant will threaten the survival of the world's largest population of Lesser Flamingo Phoeniconaias minor. A traditional chief from Pinyinyi, a village in the area, who questioned why they would "accept a project that will later destroy us," described it as "taking a fish and throwing it into the bush."

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) was conceived and built primarily to supplement the water supply of the industrial hub of South Africa. The additional water has however, provided an important benefit beyond the original aims of the project -- it is reducing the salinity of the Vaal Dam reservoir. The reservoir near Vereeniging -- about sixty kilometres south of Johannesburg - is the principal water reservoir for Gauteng Province, the largest industrial and mining centre on the African continent.