A couple of years ago a friend of mine from law school accosted me at a breakfast table in a Harare hotel. I introduced him to my breakfast meeting companion, the director of a Southern African regional NGO. Immediately after the introductions my erstwhile schoolmate charged at the NGO director: "You are going to give me a job in an NGO, aren’t you?" The NGO director recovered just enough to ask why my schoolmate wanted a job with an NGO.
It’s a reminder that we live in a global world when in Britain you are as likely to be treated by a South African or a national of another developing country as you are by a British nurse. It’s a trend that the South African government is preparing to take steps to reverse, starting with Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s imminent trip overseas aimed at encouraging South African nurses to come back.
Dengue fever is sweeping South-East Asia in an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus that is already threatening to become the worst in almost a decade. Hospitals across the region are filling up and the number of deaths mounting, with no country left immune, from the richest, ultra-modern Singapore, to the poorest, such as Laos and Cambodia.
"Determined" is the adjective that seems to fit Linda Olga Nghatsane best. What else do you call a public health practitioner who built up a successful farm in just three years, all in order to combat malnutrition? Last week, her determination was recognised when she won not only the business entrepreneur award, but also the overall title of Shoprite Checkers/SABC2 Woman of the Year 2007.
He should go to Washington more often. Gordon Brown may have been dreading his encounter with George W Bush, knowing that every appearance Tony Blair made alongside the American president cost him votes by the crateload, but the recent joint press conference at Camp David actually did Brown a favour
This was supposed to be the moment Ahmed Bel Bacha was waiting for — the end of his five years in prison at Guantánamo Bay. Instead, the Algerian is fighting to stay put rather than return home. Bel Bacha, reportedly slated to leave Guantánamo Bay soon along with three of his countrymen, fears he will be tortured back in Algeria
”I’m not ready for the Yellow Pages,” says Azmi Bishara, the exiled former leader of Arab nationalist party Balad, when I quiz him about his itinerary on his visit to South Africa. That seemingly cryptic statement, I soon discover, is characteristic of his dry humour, which surfaces when Bishara puts aside politics and speaks about his young family, writes Kwanele Sosibo.
Under an old foam mattress in one of Monrovia’s slums, Niome David keeps a dark memento — the underwear her nine-year-old daughter was wearing the night she was raped. The mother refuses to wash out the blood stain, keeping it as proof of the brutality her child endured. In a nation inured to violence, the fact that she knew to preserve evidence is also, somehow, a sign of hope.
The Republic of Congo heads into a second round of voting on Sunday, but many there are wary of electoral chaos and the fact that their lives aren’t improving much, despite their country pumping out billions of Âdollars from oil every year. The remaining 84 seats in Congo’s 137-seat Parliament will be fought over after a first round of voting in late June gave President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s Congolese Labour Party a huge victory and a further stranglehold on his rule.
The United States’s decision to arm its allies in the Middle East is being seen by many regional experts as a last resort, in anticipation of failure of Washington’s policies on both Iraq and Iran. The stated aim is to reassure Sunni Arab states that the US will stand by them in the face of uncertainty in Iraq and an increasingly powerful Iran.