Over twenty years ago, there was a high profile pop concert organised by the Live Aid group, to help the famine in Ethiopia. Now two decades later nothing has changed. The Live 8 concerts addressed the effects of poverty not it causes. Unless the present social system has changed, for many more decades...
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Female circumcision, like male circumcision, is a practice that dates back to the remotest of times in history. Today, however, the former has come under fire by feminists and other concerned groups and individuals. Why male circumcision is not touched is not clear. Perhaps the whole issue is still part of the male chauvinistic...
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In Swaziland more than a third of the population is in need of food aid, after its worst ever harvest, said a UN food agencies’ report. A prolonged dry spell has left around 400,000 vulnerable people in need of approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of food assistance until the next harvest in April 2008....
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The BBC is reporting that child labour , in fact , near enough actual slavery , remains an unresolved problem in the Ivory Coast , the world’s biggest cocoa producer. A 2002 report by the industry body, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, put the number of children working in dangerous conditions in cocoa...
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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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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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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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The party political campaigns for next year’s general election have commenced early. With the elections well over a year away politicians, as usual, have positioned themselves in various camps and have begun allying themselves into competing coalitions. Increasingly nowadays, in Kenya’s tribal and ideological politics, politicians group themselves together and divide the country into...
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This year, 2006, has been election year for several African countries. It is therefore important that we take a serious look at the nature of this periodic event. Conventional wisdom has it that elections are indicative of how democratic country is. The real question, however, is how democratic the elections themselves are. One...
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Futurologists, Alvin Toffler being the best known, have long heralded the imminent arrival of the “post-industrial society” – an arcadia in which automation has almost done away with work and our main problem will be how to cope with an excess of leisure. Indeed, labour productivity has risen steadily and at an accelerating rate...
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