A planned lodge development at the settlement of Molapo in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve has become a source of controversy. Tourists who frequent the 40-room lodge’s luxury accommodation will enjoy the sights of the Kalahari. The outlook for indigenous Bushmen from the reserve is less positive, however.
Violence in South African schools has claimed the lives of a number of children in recent years, while many more have been hospitalised with injuries. In one of the latest incidents, a 15-year-old boy was beaten by a fellow pupil at a high school in Florida, a relatively well-off suburb of Johannesburg.
Since his recent election as head of the ruling party in December, Jacob Zuma has indicated that he is in favour of opening a debate on the issue of capital punishment. The death penalty was scrapped from the law books in 1995, but many are now calling for its reinstatement to help curb the high crime rate.
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/ 24 December 2007
Worried that it may be seen as insensitive to the food needs of Africa, the South African government, which is facing a general election in 2009, has chosen food security in framing a biofuel policy. After months of dilly-dallying, a strategy for the biofuel sector was accepted by the Cabinet at the start of December.
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/ 1 November 2007
Félicien Kabuga has a reward of several million dollars on his head, and tops the list of fugitives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Yet, he’s managed to escape justice for years. The ICTR was set up in northern Tanzania by the United Nations in 1995 to bring high-level perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.
Kenya is set to receive oil from Libya at preferential rates according to a bilateral agreement signed earlier this month between the leaders of the two countries. Insiders in the oil industry say this makes it likely that Kenya will award the contract for the establishment of a petroleum facility of $45-million to a Libya-connected investor.
This year marks the birth of a new ”species”: Homo urbanus. For the first time in history there will be as many city dwellers as rural inhabitants in the world. The executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Anna Tibaijuka, coined this term to describe the rise in city and, consequently, slum dwellers.
Biofuel and renewable energy sources may hold the key to Africa’s energy crisis. Without intervention, this crisis is set to grow — among others, in Southern African cities such as Lusaka in Zambia, Harare in Zimbabwe, Gaborone in Botswana and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
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/ 5 February 2007
This week’s African Union summit failed to make substantive progress on resolving two of the continent’s most urgent crises — in Darfur and Somalia. In November, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s tentative agreement on the deployment of a hybrid AU-United Nations operation in the area in November sparked hope that he was softening his stance on the deployment of UN troops to the region.
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/ 29 January 2007
The world came to Nairobi, capital of Kenya, this week to talk — and shout — about how to achieve a better world. Delegates attended the World Social Forum (WSF) in their thousands to discuss topics as diverse as poverty, land redistribution, women’s issues, water affairs, government impunity and human rights abuses.