Malawi is much in the news . Not for any particular reason other than music icon Madonna is visiting and being rumoured to be planning another adoption of another Malawian youngster . Malawi’s economy is said to be 1% of Scotland’s – about half the size of Falkirk’s .The country’s population is 12.6 million...
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Latest edition of Scientific American focuses on fashion and the African perspective . Just as Africa’s youth find themselves choosing between Western music and clothes and those rooted in their own tradition, they are now faced with two opposing images of beauty — the Western ideal of an ever thinner frame and the African...
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From the BBC we hear that Aliko Dangote may be the richest man in Africa . Mr Dangote has come along way from his early days of trading commodities in his home town of Kano in the north and now has listed two of his 13 companies on the Nigerian stock market. His stake...
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It is not good news for the future of the continent of Africa from climate change according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Greenhouse gases will later this century put up to 1.8 billion more people in Africa at risk of water stress. Even a modest temperature rise could lead to...
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A previous post discussed the Chinese expansionism in Africa . However , the United States remain a big-player on the continent . Recently formed was the military command structure AFRICOM. Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper published for the U.S. military said :- “AFRICOM’s purpose is to make Africa the primary concern of...
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Nigeria’s Niger Delta crisis goes back to 1920 and the treaties that the forefathers of the people of the region signed with the imperial masters in Bonny. The Niger Delta spreads out over several states in Nigeria and even before Nigeria’s independence in October 1960, there had been serious tensions surrounding the arrangements for...
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Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes? Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the...
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Channel 4′s Unreported World draws our attention to the inroads that Chinese capitalism is making throughout Africa . China’s economic boom is resulting in the biggest scramble for Africa since the end of European colonialism. Trade between Beijing and Africa has more than quadrupled since 2000 and hundreds of new companies, many of...
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It is very disheartening to see people making money out the predicament of others. But to extend such a callous activity to helpless and innocent children is despicably wicked. Sadly though, it happens on a daily basis. At the beginning of this October, Plan International, an NGO based in the UK, started such a...
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Writing in the Ecologist magazine at the height of the Make Poverty History campaign last year, Dr Vandana Shiva (an Indian author and environmentalist) said, “by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. People don’t die for...
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