New African articles from October 2003

New African archives from October 2003

Independence a la Muluzi.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I have enjoyed reading Baffour's blunt write-ups and comments and I have also shared some of his views and frustrations over events in Africa. However, with the July issue, I felt like hitting him on the nose hut realised that it would not only...

Cheer-leading Muluzi.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I refer to your July issue cheer-leading session masqueraded as an "interview" with President Bakili Muluzi by Balfour Ankomah and Khalid Bazid. What was this interview all about? A PR stunt? To begin with, cheering Muluzi the way Baffour...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2003... In our last issue, we wrongly described Seydou Diarra, the prime minister of Cote d'Ivoire's national unity government (in the interview with Albert Tevoedjere) as "one of the rebel leaders fighting against the government". We regret the error...

Bush visit did not fool us.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... After bringing chaos to Iraq, the American president, George W. Bush, recently visited Africa to mislead us further. Interestingly, leaders of big countries like Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo seem to believe him. Sad indeed to hear this, because...

Liberia's sad picture.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... Your August/September issue carried a saddening photograph of the atrocities in Liberia. This photo carries some lessons for the world. I only hope that the various warring factions in Liberia would dialogue to achieve lasting peace in...

US token measures in Liberia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... "Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of," so counsels Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac. Liberia is in a quagmire. For more than a decade now the country has been embroiled in a...

New African too one-sided.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I started reading New African three months ago. I find it has an anti-Western attitude that I can very well understand, but it's not very productive and you are being too one-sided. It may very well be that the USA is to blame for Taylor's...

African complicity must end.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I agree with Lester Lewis (NA, March) that without our complicity, it would be very difficult for the West to play the political games they continue to play in Africa. Since colonial times, the Western powers have used so-called...

Can I smell a rat?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... Your special report last year on the depression of the gold market aimed at weakening the economies of gold producing countries, including Ghana, was a damn good one. The ultimate goal is re set our goldmines up for takeover through...

Coalition? Forget it!(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... A number of efforts have been made by the Ugandan opposition parties without success to deal with President Yoweri Museveni's amorphous system called "The Movement". Many attempts have been made by the opposition along the lines of a...

Thank you New African.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... For over a year, I had been looking for a magazine that touched the life of the African people and explained the harm the colonial masters did, and still doing, to our beloved continent. Now that I have come across New African, I would like...

Land, a God-given right.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... Your magazine is very informative and speaks for most of us. Please keep up the good work. I am very much interested in the issue of land in Southern Africa. From what I know, the land issue in Zimbabwe is now going in the right direction....

This is no good, sir: "the Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far worse than we have been told ... We are today not far short of a disaster"--Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), writing in 1920 on the then crumbling British occupation of Iraq, which was, as it is today, under guerrilla attack.(Baffour's Beefs)
October 1, 2003... I will go straight to the point. Three things I do not understand. First, why does Ghana, in this day and age, still keep General E. K. Kotoka's name on its only international airport in Accra? Second, why is the UN Special Court in Sierra...

Just imagine if they all ran under one African Union flag.(The Gallery)
October 1, 2003... It is a long way from 1936 when Adolf Hitler would not shake the hand of the African-American sprinter, Jesse Owens, at the Berlin Olympics because he was black. Today, world athletics is so dominated by Diasporan and Continental Africans that...

The lost tribe.(Black History Month)
October 1, 2003... The African presence in Asia is well documented by Homer (8th century BC) and Europe's "Father of History", Herodotus (5th century BC). Negroid skeletal remains in Asia date back 95,000 years. As Africans in the UK (both continental and...

John Chilembwe a forgotten hero.(Black History Month)
October 1, 2003... On 23 January 1915, John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor, led an Uprising against British rule in Malawi (then known as Nyasaland). It was crushed in less than a fortnight on 3 February when Chilembwe's body was found by government troops....

Cultural Materialism, born in Africa: Cultural Materialism attempts to explain why throughout history, from slavery to colonial rule, exploitation involved co-operation and partnership with local ruling classes, or why after independence the African middle classes adapted to whatever new order was, and still is, imposed from outside.(Lest we forget)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... Study visits to Mozambique and South Africa in the 1950s might have been the starting point for "Cultural Materialism", a new social science developed by the American professor, Marvin Harris, who rose to become one of the distinguished social...

Nigeria/Liberia Taylor in, but not welcome: Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, arrived in Nigeria on 12 August to begin his life in exile. Pini Jason and Tom Mbakwe explain why the people of Nigeria opposed his presence in the country.(Around Africa)
October 1, 2003... In all his previous visits to Nigeria, Charles Taylor enjoyed the full protocol befitting a president. But when he arrived in Nigeria on 12 August to begin his life in exile: in scenic Calabar, no drums were rolled out for him. He was...

South Africa/Ghana: merger or takeover? South Africa's AngloGold is set to "merge" with Ghana's Ashanti Goldfields in the biggest deal to create the world's biggest gold producer. But is it really a merger or a takeover.(Around Africa)
October 1, 2003... Will it be a merger or a takeover? That was the question as AngloGold, the giant South African company set its sights on Ghana's Ashanti Goldfields. AngloGold is 51.4% owned by the South African conglomerate, Anglo-American. But the terminology...

France/Africa: no more mercenaries: Paris is fed up with being embarrassed by the mercenary activities of French nationals in Africa, and it has promised to clamp down hard on such activities.(Around Africa)
October 1, 2003... With the recent arrest in Paris of 11 mercenaries who were preparing to assassinate the Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, the French government now says it will no longer allow the kind of free-wheeling mercenary activity long associated with...

Kenya: who wants to be vice president? At the time of going to press, President Mwai Kibaki was yet to pick a new vice president, but he faced a simmering conflict within his hurriedly put together ruling coalition.(Around Africa)
October 1, 2003... The death of Vice President Michael Kijana Wamalwa in London on 23 August, saddening as it is, has brought a temporary relief to the nine-month-old ruling National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government that has been grappling with internal strife...

Austria/Africa: police brutality caught on camera: a 33-year-old Mauritanian, Cheibani Wague, was brutalised to death by the Austrian police, all of which was videotaped.(Around Africa)
October 1, 2003... At 3.30 pm on 21 July, Dr Florian Klenk, the political editor of the Falter newspaper in Vienna, first showed me photographs of Cheibani Wague whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back and his feet tightly braced lying in a Vienna street....

When a forked tongue bites itself: "you don't have a stable Iraq. You don't have support for the American presence. You don't have greater democracy in the region ... or a diminution of terrorism." What does George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have then? "The finest military in the world!".(Under the Neem Tree)
October 1, 2003... The Iraqis must be--as the Nigerians put it--"laughing and crying" at the same time. Laughing that George W Bush, who declared victory over Saddam Hussein as "Mission Accomplished" only in May; the "bring-era-on" warrior guy who strutted aboard...

Sierra Leone: Foday Sankoh as I got to know him: Foday Saybana Sankoh, the Sierra Leonean rebel leader, died in jail on 29 July, survived by his Senegalese wife, Fatou. Here, Ebow Godwin, our correspondent in Lome, Togo, who knew him very well, tells about the lighter side of Sankoh's life.(Feature)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... The news of the untimely death of the former RUF rebel leader, Foday Saybana Sankoh, alias Okuruba" or the Warrior, hit me like a bolt of thunder. I got to know him during the ECOWAS-sponsored Inter Sierra-Leonean Peace Talks in Lome in May...

Zimbabwe: can football kick political animosity into touch? Zimbabweans believe their fist ever qualification for the African Cup of Nations tournament in Tunisia next January, after 23 years of failure, is a sign that they can solve their problems without outside help. Tendai Madinah reports from Harare.(Feature)
October 1, 2003... The unity shown by Zimbabweans across all strata of economic, social and political divisions in rallying behind the national soccer team, the Warriors, days before their qualifying match against Eritrea in Harare on 5 July, holds a lot of...

Cote d'Ivoire: living on hope: faced with a harsh economic reality, Ivorians are trying to confront the new challenge of survival with one weapon: hope.
October 1, 2003... In Abidjan, it is not business as usual. Life in Cote d'Ivoire's commercial capital has hit an all time low, following nearly eight months of civil war. Technically the war is over, especially since the ceasefire on 4 July. Yet, for most...

Idi Amin: hated in life, loved in death? After 24 years of exile in Saudi Arabia, Idi Amin Dada, the former Ugandan president, finally succumbed to high blood pressure and kidney failure on 16 August. Curtis Abraham and Tom Mbakwe look at the man and his times.(Feature)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... The end finally came at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Saudi port of Jeddah early morning on 16 August. But Amin's legacy dies hard. In lift, he was cast as a "buffoon" and "one of the world's most brutal dictators", but his death...

Sudan squandering the best chance yet for peace? Jacob J. Akol, a Sudanese journalist, on why America should not allow Khartoum and Cairo to scupper the peace process in Sudan.(Feature)
October 1, 2003... A day is fast approaching when the long-suffering people of Southern Sudan will utter the name of "George W. Bush" with either admiration or dread; and by extension the name of the United States of America. It all depends on the outcome of the...

Should African countries liberalise at any cost? Restrictions on importation of goods that can be produced locally has become a matter of extreme urgency, writes Professor S.K.B Asante who rather wants African governments to arrogate to themselves the right to define their nations' economic interests, instead of leaving that to the play of market forces.(New African Market)
October 1, 2003... In recent years, African countries are being urged by various multilateral institutions to adopt policies of rapid economic liberalisation, in dm interest of economic growth and efficiency. Specifically, using the slogan, "economic...

South Africa hits oil: Pusch Commey on the joy in South Africa over the country's new oil find deep in the sea. It will cut the country's daily oil import by half.(New African Market)
October 1, 2003... It was all jubilation in August when South Africa struck oil in its sable oil fields, 95 km off its sleuth coast. The find was based on Africa's first oil producing ship. Petro SA's R3 billion ultra hightech mining project opened the last of...

Cameroon: too much oil was bad news for cocoa: the government of Cameroon has launched an initiative to revive the country's cocoa and coffee sectors. Tansa Musa reports from Yaounde.(New African Market)
October 1, 2003... Before Cameroon began exporting oil in 1977, cocoa and coffee were the mainstay of the economy, contributing about 80% of the country's gross domestic product. But after two decades of neglect and a poorly handled economic liberalisation...

Ecobank on course.(New African Market)
October 1, 2003... Ecobank, the African regional banking group with headquarters in Lome, Togo, made good progress last year. It achieved significant improvement in profits despite the difficult global and sub-regional economic environment. Net profit rose...

What is Africa's economic role in the world? What are Africa's unique selling points? Agriculture? Minerals? A place where stuff comes out of the earth aplenty? What does the global economy think Africa exists for? The ministers who met in Cancun, Mexico, (10-14 September), were not supposed to mull over such things.(Not in Black or White)
October 1, 2003... Cancun will come to what? Dare I say, "Not a lot"? Not a lot. Drifts and drags. Nothing to write home about. Send a memo not a postcard from Cancun. Memo of Misappropriation to an African country: "Dear X, How are you? Feeling bad, I hope. By...

Nigeria 'you are no longer the governor. You have resigned!' Have you ever heard about a governor who resigns from his post but does not know that he has resigned? It happened in July in Nigeria's Anambra State.(Special Feature)
October 1, 2003... Nigerians have seen all manner of coups in the nation's chequered history. But the events that took place recently in Awka, the capital of Anambra State, left the nation astounded--a military coup was familiar but a civilian coup led by the...

Mauritania keenly awaits its elections: Mauritania is expected to hold presidential elections on 7 November, and the people can't wait to show where their loyalty lies, especially after the abortive coup on 8 June.(Special Feature)
October 1, 2003... Having crushed the coup attempt in June, Mauritania is keenly awaiting its presidential elections expected to be held in November, although at the time of going in press, the government had not formally announced the election date. The major...

Botswana: Basarwa's campaign for their land continues.(Right of reply)
October 1, 2003... The British anthropologist James Suzman attacks Survival International's defence of the Gana and Gwi "Bushmen" in Botswana--Diamonds or development?. (NA, June). He portrays Survival as "ham-fisted", riding "roughshod over... local......

22 medals for Africa.(Athletics)
October 1, 2003... Africans had more reason than most for satisfaction with their performances in the 9th IAAF World Championships in Athletics held in Paris. Even though the continent could muster only 11 gold medals in total, the honours were spread so...

Botswana is not working against Zimbabwe: Botswana is not aware of, or party to, any plans to enforce a regime change in any country in the region. Even if the Americans and the British were planning to do so, Botswana would never allow itself to be used for such treacherous activities.(Endtail)
October 1, 2003... I take the floor on a matter of serious concern to my government. We are being accused of working with the Americans and the British to bring about a forceful regime change in a member state of the SADC, namely our friendly neighbour, the...