It has been described at once as "historic," "symbolic" and an incident to be handled with caution. But what should really be made of the meeting of opposition leaders that saw rivals Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara hugging and pledging to work together?
At an age when most people are enjoying a quiet retirement, Reshoketswe Mabulelong has started not just a new career but one which finds her wading across muddy building sites in a hard hat, shouting orders at men. "No, no, you can’t ask my age, just say I am a senior citizen," says Mabulelong sternly.
In a move to slash bandwidth prices, the government has instructed the communications regulator to nationalise the landing station for the undersea SAT-3 submarine cable and to declare it an essential facility. At present, as SAT-3’s largest investor, Telkom has monopoly rights on access to and pricing of international bandwidth on the undersea cable.
In a culture where one-night stands, reality porn and Playboy logos on kids’ stationery have all become shrug worthily normal, it takes quite a leap of imagination to be sexually subversive. Take up pole dancing? No, that’s so commonplace that women organise group lessons for hen parties. Threesomes? No longer noteworthy. Faux-lesbianism? Yawn
Arnie drives a Hummer. And not just one. At one time the governor had a fleet of eight of the brutes to ferry him from photo op to photo op. He also has a private jet, which can be seen whooshing over the beach at Santa Monica as it takes him from his Los Angeles home to his office in Sacramento, 650km to the north.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the public face of fiscal rectitude and good governance in Nigeria has been axed as chair of the Nigeria Economic Intelligence Team, while on a trip to the United Kingdom to get further debt relief. Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo has appointed Minister of Finance Esther Nedadi Usman in her place.
The familiar bearded face gazes out from a billboard over a sunlit old Havana beside the reassuring slogan Vamos bien. Close by, another poster wishes the world’s longest-serving leader a happy birthday and calls for ”another 80” years.
Now, however, for the first time since he led his rebel army into Havana in 1959, the man who epitomises Cuba has stepped down, albeit temporarily.
Most historians nowadays find little to admire in the historical figure of Cecil Rhodes. His name has come to the fore during three recent centenaries (the centenary of his death in 2002; the Rhodes Scholarships, 2003; and Rhodes University, 2004), writes Paul Maylam.
As a non-South African, I will make no attempt to claim to understand fully how much Rhodes’s legacy negatively affected Southern Africans. It would be foolish, even heartless, if anyone ever condoned Rhodes’s racist, imperialistic actions. But is it fair or just to reduce Rhodes to the total sum of wrong things he did in his time? Surely there is more to Rhodes than what is highlighted in Adebajo’s article.
A year on from the Gleneagles summit — and governments, NGOs, multilateral organisations, civil society and the private sector are taking stock of what has been achieved in the past year. As an African-originated multi-national business committed to helping achieve the millennium development goals we believe two relatively unheralded achievements have evolved from ”the Year of Africa”.