Some critics who have analyzed the circumstances surrounding the well-publicized capture of Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 have concluded that it was an elaborate political web of deceit weaved by the Islamic north to wrest power from a southern Christian president.

Many universities have been shut down due to student protests demanding free higher education. This is the latest expression of the deep inequalities that affect the majority Black population in South Africa. The promise of a better future that underpinned the anti-Apartheid struggle remains unfulfilled. The nation’s unjust economy must be discussed.

Ethiopia is descending into possible civil war. With the recent declaration of a state of emergency, the country is in turmoil due to exploitation of the long-suffering people of Oromia, Ogaden, Gambella and other ethnic groups by the ruling TPLF elite in partnership with international enablers such as China and the United States. TPLF exploitation and widespread repression have created highly rebellious resentment among the people.

Women continuing to push for change in Egypt are bearing the psychological toll of a rigid post-revolution politics and society.

Many young people from Africa are risking their lives making perilous journeys to the West in search of greener pastures. The cause of this is to be found in the failure of African governments to offer opportunities to young people to realize their dreams. Africa is not poor; its children do not need to die in international waters looking for a better life.

Britain’s Labour leader has challenged the neoliberal dogma that has ruled the world ever since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in America in 1981.  This has been disastrous for Africa, where it has come in the form of the so-called "Economic Structural Adjustment Programs"  aimed at restructuring African economies to conform to the demands of the imperialist countries, and not the development needs of Africa.

Media organisations, like most of South Africa’s formal institutions, were infused with institutional racism during the apartheid-era. In many cases this is still unchanged. There has to be a greater acknowledgement of institutional racism in organisations.

At a time when human well-being is measured not only in terms of economic development, but also on the resilience of the environment and the society we live in, it is important to question the nature of livelihood opportunities that young people are being encouraged to pursue and their implications for the future.

Ivory Coast is in crisis. The instability arising from the post-election violence of five years ago continues to deepen. The government is increasingly repressive. Many Ivorians cannot meet the cost of living. Jobs are scarce. Insecurity perpetrated by gangs of unemployed youths makes life uncertain. Yet the government of Alassane Ouattara doesn't seem concerned with any of that. His current project is a new constitution whose barely hidden agenda is to keep him in power beyond 2020.

For 22 years, the Rwandan government’s radically simplified and decontextualized history of the massacres of 1994 has been used to justify President Paul Kagame’s totalitarian rule. For 20 years it has also been used to justify the U.S.-backed invasion, occupation and plunder of the immensely resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo.

President Biya does not live in Cameroon and, therefore, does not know Cameroonians. The absentee landlord spends several months in Europe with no specific agenda in mind. Once back home, he retires to his million-dollar castle to play golf and drink champagne. Biya’s inept governance has brought Cameroon to its knees. Cameroonians should rise up and replace him.

We live in a world which is faced with multiple, interconnected problems, such as climate change and significant environmental degradation, inequality, poverty and food insecurity, but we also have the unique opportunity to redesign and recreate sustainable futures. A whole generation of business education students will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that matches the scale of these challenges. 

For South Africa to dismantle its colonial economic structures it will have to urgently address the knowledge and resources impasse. Through equitable distribution of wealth and resources, free decolonial education should be implemented to cater for the financially excluded Black majority now.

Africa has lost $1 trillion over the past five decades through illicit financial flows. International mechanisms for getting this looted wealth back exist. While some African countries have often claimed that the existence of tax havens hinders assets recovery efforts, lack of political will has been cited as the key problem.

President Khama says that Bushmen live lives “of backwardness,” “a primitive life of deprivation” and “a primeval life of a bygone era.” According to the head of state, they are innately inferior and  it was his government’s duty to “modernize” them, if necessary by force. This has meant opening up Bushmen land to diamond mines and luxury tourist lodges.

Ouattara is trying to achieve in the constitution what he and his rebel allies refused when the change was proposed way back in 2004. There is no sincerity in the current push for constitutional reform. What Ouattara wants is to consolidate state power and make it difficult for anyone else wishing to be president.

This film by Nate Parker makes an important contribution to rewriting the actual history of the African people in the U.S. and consequently world studies. Without an accurate understanding of the development of America as the leading imperialist nation in the world it is impossible to design a program for transforming the present conditions of colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism.

Given the value of mapping, African governments need to raise funds from different sources, including from their development partners, the private sector, international foundations and other users to support not only the training of qualified cartographers and surveyors but also to procure new equipment and software to assist in the design of  quality maps.

There is no violation of human rights worse than the violation of the right to existence. It is this abiding condition that gave rise to the Niger Delta problem. The recurring violence that holds the nation by the jugular is a manifestation of deep-rooted frustration of negligence on the part of government and multinational companies over the plight of the people in the region.

In confronting the historical spectre of Rhodes the youth of South Africa have revisited in a bold and vehement manner the unfinished business of deracialisation and decolonisation.  They are holding the post-apartheid state accountable. The issue now is, how is 350 years of exclusion and dispossession decisively addressed?

Under U.S. pressure, the UN refuses to lift an embargo against the tiny nation of Eritrea, while ignoring constant aggressions by its huge neighbour, Ethiopia. The pretexts for the sanctions “are nonexistent,” yet “Eritrea is doubly punished since the sanctions effectively mean it is restricted in defending itself.” The UN has abrogated its responsibility to uphold international law – and, instead, coddles Washington’s military ally.

Ghanaian professors have launched a campaign for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from their campus because they claim he was racist and considered Indians to be “infinitely superior” to Africans. The statue was unveiled at the University of Ghana in June by the Indian president, Pranab Mukherjee. But, this Indian lawyer argues, Gandhi’s thought had a huge influence in Africa during the struggle for liberation.

Liberation of a land dispossessed people without land is a gigantic colonial fraud. Land is the primary source of life. Food does not grow in the sky. Houses are not built in the air. Gold, platinum, diamonds, oil and all other minerals are dug from the land. Cattle, sheep, goats, horses do not graze in the air. Pastures and water are found in the land. Even the departed demand their graves not in the clouds but in the land.

Despite local resistance, America has set up a sophisticated military telecoms system covering more than three-quarters of the globe in the Mediterranean island of Sicily. The facility enables control of remotely piloted drones, missiles and nuclear weapons, making it the mother of all weapons of mass destruction. It affords the Pentagon eyes and ears all over Africa and the Middle East.

South Africans mark Heritage Day as a public holiday on 24 September to celebrate their cultures and the diversity. In this uplifting poem, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko rejoices at her identity as an African – with roots stretching all the way from the Cape to Cairo.

To think Black first is a revolutionary call to equip Black people with the necessary mental and practical capacity to liberate themselves from the bottom of society where white supremacy through slavery, colonialism and apartheid has condemned them. The legacy of Biko teaches that to think Black first is the means to end divisions among Black people and to forge a united front against white power.

Listening carefully to the at times homophobic and hateful commentary about homosexuality among Africans, a social critique of the international community and the local elite is heard. Dislike of homosexuality is used to protest at the levels of inequality and how corrupt African leaders continue to be supported by the West. The white savior complex ruins rather than helps the cause of LGBTI rights in Africa.

Clinton is part of the Establishment. It is part of her inheritance to provoke wars and control the world in league with global corporations. Nobody knows what lies behind Trump’s mask. May be he wants to “knock the shit” out of the Establishment. May be he is a “narcissist character” seeking reward in the short run. But no one who seriously cares about Africa’s liberation from Empire would support  Clinton.

The increased demand for gold by Chinese traders has worsened illegal artisanal mining in the rivers of Ghana, leading to massive destruction of the water bodies. The Ghanaian authorities seem to be unconcerned. Before long, unless something drastic is done, people will lack clean water for use.

Founded in 1961 during the Cold War as a bloc bringing together nations that neither supported nor opposed the big powers, the Non-Aligned Movement has some 120 member-states mostly in the Global South but only a handful sent representatives to the latest Summit. The low turn out and absence of NAM’s voice in international affairs have led to calls for the re-evaluation of the movement’s relevance in today’s world.

With all due respect to Professor Woodward, one must conclude that he contributes little to a learned examination of the “secessions” of Eritrea and South Sudan, while his admonitions for caution on Somaliland’s quest for international recognition of its sovereignty are based upon little or no knowledge of the country’s history, the merits of its case or its achievements during the last quarter century. 

For decades, the former colonial powers have written the history of the night in which the second UN Secretary-General and his companions died in a plane crash in Zambia. But a new history is about to be written if the recent momentum to find the full truth is anything to go by.

Pambazuka News is preparing a Special Issue on the labour movement and the struggles for Africa's liberation today. The Editors invite articles that examine the movement’s mission beyond agitation for worker rights towards the bigger project of concrete self-determination of the African people.

South Africa’s nuclear programme will be a disaster. Besides the fallouts being witnessed in the jostling for gains by greedy politicians, the project is likely to gobble up huge amounts of public funds that will be difficult to account for as the government will cite national security concerns of nuclear power, thereby curtailing citizens’ right to accountability.

The new film, “A Brilliant Genocide”, tells the story of the largely unacknowledged Acholi Genocide that President Yoweri Museveni committed against the Acholi people for 20 years from 1986 to 2006. Museveni’s troops drove nearly two million Acholis, 90% of the population, into concentration camps. In all that time, the Ugandan military machine continued to be financed by the US.

My father is a man of principles and a stubborn man. I am terrified that he will take his hunger strike to its end. I do not want him to die.

Deeply hurt by Britain’s overwhelming support for Nigeria to crush the Republic of Biafra, Dr Ibiam renounced and returned to the British head of state the three insignias of knighthood that both she and her father, King George VI, had earlier conferred on the esteemed missionary physician for services to church and state.

South Africa’s population is 86% black. Yet between 2010-2014, the Department of Politics at the University of Cape Town has graduated only two black MA students. In 2015, 97% of black applicants were denied admission to the Masters programme. To-date there is not a single black South African enrolled in the programme. Has this exclusion become a way of carving out the task of thinking and intellectual production as an exclusive white preserve?

In one province in Gabon, the stronghold of President Ali Bongo, the results declared by the Gabonese Electoral Commission indicated  that 99.83% of the electorate turned out to vote, and that 95.46% of them voted for Ali Bongo! The question is: how can we ensure that election results in Africa are not dependent on an electoral commission or constitutional court that is in the pocket of the incumbent?

The intersectionality of people’s struggles on climate change calls for concerted efforts towards climate justice. Across the world, communities are made vulnerable by intensified exploitation of natural resources and overproduction for profit. There is a need to launch and strengthen grassroots educational and advocacy campaigns to deepen understanding of the relationship between climate change and human rights.

People not versed in the complexities of the diplomatic world of distorted mirror images in Geneva or Accra or Nairobi may wonder in awe at the agreements negotiated in their name by their representatives in multilateral forums like UNCTAD. But, truth be told, UNCTAD is in no position to deliver the mandate that it got in Nairobi.

The Toronto-based shoemaker took advantage of European colonialism to rapidly set up across the continent, squeezing out local footwear producers, working with apartheid South Africa and even reaching out to Uganda’s Idi Amin.