"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
With France withdrawing troops after chasing Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) from towns in northern Mali, the central government in Bamako should urgently launch a serious process of national reconciliation, particularly with the Tuareg and Arab minorities, according to a new reportby the International Crisis Group (ICG) released Thursday.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s special adviser on political matters, Ahmed Gulak, leads a growing list of Nigerian business and political elites who ran or still run secret offshore companies and accounts where they either hide their wealth to evade taxes, launder money or commit fraud, according to a cache of documents reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ.
The Small Arms Survey’s Human Security Baseline Assessment (HSBA) for Sudan and South Sudan project released a new paper which describes the first year of renewed war in South Kordofan (June 2011–July 2012), focusing on the conduct and dynamics of the conflict and the primary armed actors.
Flying back from Dakar and Bamako to my home near “Little Senegal,” I snatched up Courrier International’s special issue “Afrique 3.0″ while passing through Paris. Tom made a quick surveyof it just as it hit the newstands. Now that we’ve had a little more time to spend with it, what to make of it? A bit of the old, a bit of the new, some sharp thinking and some shop-worn thoughts. A mixed bag, but all in all, it’s a treat.
While welcoming the European Commission’s ambitions on climate and energy presented [yesterday] in a Green Paper, the EC has covered up the negative social impacts of Europe’s biofuel policies by severely underestimating the amount of biofuels-related land grab in Africa and the impacts on global food prices in an EC report also out [yesterday], claims international anti-poverty agency ActionAid.
Bamako doesn’t feel like the capital of a country at war. True, people are stressed, and the pace of life might have slowed. The city’s building frenzy has subsided. Ça va pas, but things are calm, even if late in March, far from cool. In the distant North, a fifth French soldier died over the weekend, and my tantie, a venerable hajja, cried for him.
Ory Okolloh, the Executive Director of Ushahidi , is from Kenya but currently lives in Johannesburg. Her blog is "outlet for her opinions. While it is primarily focused on Kenya, she reserves to write about whatever she wants."
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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