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Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), a global mining company that got its start in Kazakhstan, has won a new $101.5 million license to dig for copper at the Frontier mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company has been criticized by Global Witness for its purchases of rights from offshore companies connected to Dan Gertler, a controversial Israeli diamond merchant.

Per-capita income in the Congo is under $300 a year and experts at the Carter Centre, which was founded by former US president Jimmy Carter, say there is a reason. "In a mining sector defined by irregularities and mismanagement, large industrial mining projects can earn huge profits for investors and government officials,” Sam Jones, associate director of the centre's human rights program, told the Guardian. “(L)ittle revenue finds its way back into desperately impoverished Congolese communities for schools, healthcare, or other social services.”

First Quantum, a Canadian company, acquired the rights to mine for copper at Frontier in 2001 but was forced to turn it over to Sodimco, a state owned company in 2010 by the Congolese government. The licences were then sold to Fortune Ahead, a Hong Kong shell company. Meanwhile First Quantum filed multiple legal claims demanding $4 billion in compensation for Frontier and other assets nationalized by the Congolese government.

Dynamic African leaders such as Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Isaias Aferworki of Eritrea and several others, followed in the footsteps of Africa’s founding fathers, and sought to reverse the decline of the continent and build progressive nations in which people’s rights are respected, in which different ethnic groups lived together in peace and harmony and a world in which Africans were respected on equal terms with others. ‘Developmentalism’ became the new ideology of the day. Future generations will judge them but for now, let us celebrate their good intentions.

It should be noted that Burkina Faso and its capital Ouagadougou is one of the most historic places in West Africa. It was the scene to intellectual and cultural renaissance before colonialism desecrated this land.

Given endemic police corruption and Venezuela’s strong military tradition, it was little surprise that Maduro recently turned to the armed forces to serve as a defacto police force, as a short term – but increasingly permanent - solution to widespread insecurity.

The high rate of corruption is due in large part to increasing penetration of organized crime into many federal, state and municipal institutions.

While observers and analysts have applauded the reform initiative, it has not yet led to improved law enforcement. One problem is that it remains underfunded – some measures, such as the wage increase, have yet to be implemented.

African Union dithering has likely lost all opportunity to create a "soft border" of Abyei, possibly serving as a model for the entire North/South border. But the idea has much support in many quarters, and is perhaps best articulated by Jérôme Tubiana: "This [a referendum determined purely by numbers] puts Abyei at risk of becoming an encysted problem like Western Sahara," he said, adding that crisis-easing options such as power-sharing were almost impossible to invoke now because a referendum had been promised to the Ngok Dinka and even, via the CPA, agreed to by Khartoum.

The antigovernment demonstrators think France still pulls the strings, and while French officials deny this, their actions often suggest otherwise. In Gabon, where the election of an autocrat’s son dashed hopes for ending 40 years of rule under the Bongo family, Mr. Sarkozy’s man in Africa, Alain Joyandet, showed up at Ali Bongo’s pomp-filled inauguration, telling reporters that Mr. Bongo “must be given time.”

recently noted persistent human rights abuses by Cameroon

French officials have discouraged scrutiny of African leaders’ corruption, the fruits of which often end up in Paris. A French good-government group’s campaign to expose and recover the “ill-gotten gains” of three of the most notorious leaders — the late Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea — has been opposed by the prosecutor of the French Republic on the grounds that the group has no standing to sue, and that the facts are “ill defined.”

There’s no doubt, either, that both Libya and the Ivory Coast have reinforced many peoples’ opinion that the West will support “change” and “democracy” only when its own interests are advanced.

When you consider just how many seriously flawed African elections have gone by recently without the slightest objection from France, the U.S. or the U.N. — Gabon, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda – it’s painfully obvious that Western support for African democracy is highly selective. With all the despots who have been in power for decades in Africa, how did Gbagbo suddenly become so terrible?

Sobukwe was arrested in Soweto, Johannesburg, in 1960 and subsequently imprisoned for organising and leading the March 21, 1960 anti-pass march. It was a peaceful protest against an indentification card that was mandatory for Africans under the apartheid regime. The march culminated in the settler-colonial regime massacre of people at Sharpeville and Langa townships of present-day Gauteng and Western Cape respectively. While wee may probably never be able to hear Sobukwe’s voice again because the settler-colonial regime ensured he remains silent beyond his grave by banning him and destroying the audio material containing his voice, his ideas remain. We wish we could hear him talk.

there had to be an African democratic government

there had to be rapid extension of industrial development to help, among other things, alleviate pressure on the land as well as ensure full development of the human personality in a socialist context.

It is my submission that regarding presidential terms limit, under Rwanda’s constitution, Kagame has only two options: either to abide by the Article 101 provision that ‘Under no circumstances shall a person hold the office of President of the Republic for more than two terms’, or overthrow the constitution and his government, which would allow him to write a new constitution.

Dr Rodney was assassinated in 1980 against the backdrop of a mass movement for political change in Guyana, which was being led by his party, the WPA, and inspired partly by him as a symbol of the times. After years of inaction by both the PNC and PPP governments, the Ramotar-led PPP in 2014 mounted a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the assassination.

It immediately became clear that this move was meant more as a political manoeuvre by the PPP than as a search for the truth. The PPP, leading a minority government, was prepared to do anything, including pimping the martyr, to regain total power.

As was the case with many intellectuals of his generation, Dr Rodney did not confine his energies to the traditional classroom. Rather, he extended the classroom to include the street corners and bottom-houses where the masses of people could be reached. Walter Rodney was the consummate public intellectual, whose academic work was first and foremost a tool and avenue for socio-political change. As a product of the Caribbean decolonisation and Independence moments, he saw his primary role as one of service to the wider community in aid of making independence and freedom meaningful to all citizens, especially the poor.