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The weakness of the Afro-optimistic perspective is reinforced by recent research showing that foreign investments  to a large extent are directed towards African agricultural land for the production of energy crops and food for export. Such investments often take place in interaction between foreign and domestic African interests, and with the support of international aid. Such projects are highly mechanized and require little labour. Large-scale agriculture focuses mainly on a single crop, thus undermining biodiversity. Irrigation is necessary but often leads to conflicts with local smallholder farmers, of whom the majority are women. In Africa, smallholders have weak water and land rights, despite their paramount importance of their production for food security – they produce 90 per cent of the food in Africa.

This large-scale agriculture uses 75 per cent of the country’s farmland, but contributes only 60 per cent of the gross annual agricultural production. It employs only two people per 100 acres, while small-scale farming provides jobs for 15 people in the same area, accounting for the bulk of food production.

Meles Zenawi ripped the final EU EOM election report as “trash that deserves to be thrown in the garbage”. He said, “The report is not about our election. It is just the view of some Western neo-liberals who are unhappy about the strength of the ruling party. Anybody who has paper and ink can scribble whatever they want.” Of course, Meles was legendary for his mastery and exquisite delivery of gutter language in political discourse. He could out-tongue-lash, out-mudsling, out-bully, out-vilify and out-smear any politician on the African continent. Meles also called the 2005 EU EOM Report a “pack of lies and innuendoes”.

Since he believes civil society is the core of a democratic process, President Obama should use his leverage to ensure civil society institutions function freely in Ethiopia before the 2015 "election". What is President Obama’s leverage? Aid money. The hard earned tax dollars of the American people. American tax dollars given to African dictators in the name of helping Africans but end up in African dictators’ offshore accounts. Aid money talks and is heard loud and clear by the tone deaf TPLF bosses. As Dambissa Moyo documented in her book Dead Aid, the TPLF regime got a whopping 97 percent of its budget from foreign aid. Simply stated, the TPLF regime will not survive a single day without aid transfusion from the pockets of hardworking America taxpayers into its blood stream. President Obama needs to wag the annual welfare aid check in the faces of the salivating TPLF panhandlers and tell them what he told Africans in Accra Ghana in 2009:

The tendency to cyclical overvaluation of the exchange rate in developing countries has been due to both the excessive reliance on external savings in the form of foreign capital flows and the Dutch disease in the context of excessively open capital markets and lack of appropriate regulation.

Dutch disease impedes other tradable industries from prospering.  It does so by creating a wedge between the "current account equilibrium exchange rate" (the exchange rate that balances the current account) and the "industrial equilibrium exchange rate" -- the exchange rate that allows tradable industries to be competitive utilizing state-of-the-art technology.

Surely, the companies operating here could not hope for a better space for reckless exploitation and incredibly high profit margins. Added to this is the fact that the regulatory regime is largely non-existent and even the conduct of environmental impact assessments are selective.

Oil has certainly greased the engines of exploitation, oppression and war in Sudan. It is oiling the machines of separation today. What will it lubricate next?

At a time when the continent should be coming together and erasing the arbitrary boundary lines drawn by colonialist adventurers, we continue to fragment. Certainly, this cannot be the only way to overcome poor and parasitic governance.

in Mozambique the structures of the popular organs such as the women, youth, workers and peasants were weakened. International and western non-governmental organisations invaded the rural communities while the working people were denied the basic democratic rights for collective bargaining and industrial democracy.

Jonas Savimbi had fought tenaciously to be the standard bearer for Western capitalism in Angola. However, very early on the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party) accepted the IMF (International Monetary Fund) terms and conditions for neoliberal capitalism.

The MPLA leadership built relations with China to widen their bargaining position with international capital. However, this outreach to China and Brazil did not affect the privatisation process. In fact, Chinese private entities such as the Chinese Investment Fund strengthened the capitalist element of the party by importing conditions of labour relations that denied rights to Angolan and Chinese workers.

Liberation had become a business and the victories of the people were being distorted for the wealth and power of the ruling families.

Jacob Zuma has demeaned the meaning of links to the ancestors by invoking the ancestral spirits on the side of capitalist accumulation.

Within the church, the schools, universities, the old media and other intellectual and ideological institutions the struggles intensified but the white capitalists understood that the black capitalists supported the idea of the superiority of the capitalist mode of production. In essence, these blacks supported ideas of racial hierarchy and sent their children to schools that practised overt racial discrimination. So bold had the whites become that at one of the premier universities, the University of Cape Town, it was decided that there was no need to teach African studies.

In this political wasteland, Robert Mugabe appeared attractive and earned massive applause when he visited South Africa.

Throughout Africa it is imperative that education for transformation support the calls for social transformation. Private property cannot be nationalised with the same mindset that supports the crude consumption of the black capitalists in gated communities. These capitalists manipulate the workers of South Africa on the basis of racial and ethnic identification, and more significantly, these capitalists promote xenophobia to discriminate against other African workers who believe in the concept of Africa for the Africans.

e Villiers said the body appointed to look at the problem favours neutralisation as the best solution to the problem of AMD. ‘Certainly, it will be an economically viable solution, if logistics such as the reservoirs needed for the neutralization to be carried out in (continuously over a very long period of time) can be sorted out, which seems unlikely at the moment. ‘The proposals by corporations to step in with their proposed solutions have apparently been shot down, because they wanted to sell the cleaned water back to Rand Water, making a profit in the process. ‘I’m not sure why mining houses are allowed to pollute while making a profit, and corporations who want to clean up are apparently expected to do so without the benefit of making a profit,’ she said.

In an interview with The Africa Report, Turton said that not only will mines evade the legal minimum requirement of the ‘polluter pays principle’ but also profit from it. ‘What’s more, that profit is all but guaranteed, because it will be underwritten by the state in the form of a mooted Public Private Partnership (PPP),’ he said. The deal allows for mining houses to access a R3.5-billion deal with no tendering process, as well as select ‘treatment’ that was described by Turton as the ‘least cost option’ via a process shrouded in secrecy, enabling the WUC to act as both consultant and reviewer.

Transparency International, had set out in detail the leaders’ extensive luxury real-estate holdings in Paris. Last month, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.

“People don’t like France because France isn’t helping Africans freely choose their leaders,” said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “