*** No surprise poverty in “Africa’s Kuwait”

All Africa reports, “Equatorial Guinea is one of the world’s top 30 oil producers, according to its Ministry of Mines, but corruption watchdog group Global Witness says most in the country still live in poverty.

Global Witness US-based policy advisor, Sasha Lezhnev, told IRIN: “Equatorial Guinea is the dictatorship that no one talks about. The government earns billions in oil every year, yet 60 percent of its population lives on less than US$1 a day.”

** Lenin’s Tomb on the US torturing it’s own prisoners If you can handle the video

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

***Republic of T has created this Timeline using online timeline tools (did you know they existed?)

***Sports journalist, David Zirin, talks about the politics of sport and sport as a battle ground for dissent.

*** Some alternative and more useful ways of spending $700 million

just can’t help wondering what else we could do with $700 billion.

According to the United Nations, the entire debt for the entire continent of Africa was about $320 billion in 2003. Adjusting for inflation and further accumulated debt, let’s call it an even $350 billion.

You could install solar panels on 20 million American homes for $300 billion. (I’m ballparking a rather conservative $15k for full installation of enough solar infrastructure to fully power an average American house; the price would surely come down drastically at that scale.) By the way, 20 million houses is more than one-quarter of the entire stock of occupied detached houses in the U.S.

***Church of England priest calls for gay men to be tattooed on the bottoms

Reverend Peter Mullen wrote: “Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan: SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with: FELLATIO KILLS.”">Reverend Peter Mullen wrote: “Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan: SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with: FELLATIO KILLS.”

Maybe the priest should be tatooed with the words “homophobic”

Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka on the new Obasanjo library

the “Most nauseating exhibition of executive extortionism” in the country which should not be allowed to stand.

What I am tempted to say is not repeatable outside of my private space BUT fortunately Soyinka is able to express my feelings in clean English and adds more venom to this waste of space, waste of money narcissistic project - OBJ has fallen in love with his own reflection in a cement box full of books. Commenting on the possible location of the Institute of Black Culture and Understanding in said cement box of books, Soyinka said…

It is weird, extremely weird that any mind with a sense of political and ethical honour should choose to site an institution for International Understanding within the premises of the man whose eight years of governance, marked by a consistent contempt for, and defiance of the rule of law, as earlier mentioned culminated in the murder of Democracy in his own nation in the 2007 Nigerian elections.

This, let it be recalled, merely followed a crude, corrupt, bulldozer effort to subvert the nation’s constitution and award himself a third year in office. This totally avoidable dispute constitutes a legal question mark and a moral soul-searching for UNESCO, for the nation, and for cultural and intellectual forces everywhere.”

Breatheeeeeee..

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Olusegun Obasanjo
Wole Soyinka
Nigerian Presidential Library

TAKE ACTION!
Completely Abolish U.S. HIV Travel Ban: Please write your Representative now!

Dear Friend,

Recently we celebrated the passage into law of H.R. 5501, the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 (PL 110-293), which reauthorized the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to a tune of $48 billion over the next five years. In passing this legislation Congress lifted the 1987 ban on non-U.S. citizens living with HIV/AIDS from entering the United States, whether as visitors or immigrants. Africa Action had long campaigned against this shameful ban that did nothing to fight HIV in the U.S. but only reflected deplorable ignorance at the highest level of U.S. policy makers on how HIV is transmitted. In fact with this ban on, HIV/AIDS in the U.S. ballooned from being a localized problem to being the national crisis it is today.

Not only was the ban a terrible public health policy, it also seriously violated the human rights and dignity of people living with HIV/AIDS globally. It is because of this ban that no major international HIV/AIDS conference has ever been held in the U.S. Congress’s decision to lift this ban constitutes a major victory on the part of advocates and activists campaigning against HIV/AIDS internationally.

However the struggle is still on as HIV still appears on the list of “communicable diseases of public health significance” that automatically restricts entry into the United States. Please join Africa Action Board member and Congresswoman Barbara Lee in urging Congressional representatives to co-sign a letter urging the White House to completely abolish the discriminatory travel ban.

Write your Representative now asking them to co-sign the Lee/Waxman/Berman letter to remove HIV from the list of diseases that automatically bar entry to the United States

TAKE ACTION NOW!

For more information about Africa Action campaign to end HIV/AIDS in Africa, visit www.africaaction.org

Sincerely,

Staff @ Africa Action

Immigration
HIV/AIDS
United States
Africa
Health
Discrimination
Travel

Excitement gripped me when I was able to go back across the border to visit my family in Zimbabwe. Pleased as I was, I tried to ignore all the media reports on the country’s disregard of acceptable and proper treatment of human beings. Before going home, I braced myself for whatever the hell was to befall me! Imagine going back home to unpredictable situations, disastrous conditions, or even impending death - and when home is Zimbabwe this is no exaggeration. If you have been in South Africa you are immediately suspected of being MDC. Anyway, going home was the only way to please my mum!

From Johannesburg I boarded a bus directly to Harare, Zimbabwe. I paid 300 Rands for the trip and took at least seven hours to reach the Beitbridge Border Post. The border was highly-congested, with border officials dragging their feet at main checkpoints. My stay there was four hours. Later, the bus had to leave for Harare at around 5 o’clock in the morning. The bus took eight hours to reach Harare.

My arrival in the capital city was met by a great shock. There was no transport to ferry me to my small city of birth, Marondera. Familiar to my country’s economic woes, I immediately settled on the fuel disaster as the explanation. However, I waited by Fourth Street, just behind Roadport for any transport, and immediately arrived a smoking, dusty, ready-for-scrap Mazda T3500 lorry, and not wanting to miss it, I jostled alongside other stranded commuters onto its back. Along the way the driver demanded Z$500 million, as transport fares. He said this was to enable him to buy fuel.

As we drove past Ruwa, a small town just outside Harare, the black-marketeers of fuel waved down the driver. It was a clear signal that only Zimbabwe could run dry, but never the black-marketeers. Immediately, the driver parked by the roadside, but was told to restart and get fuelled in a small patch of thick bush, obviously to be hidden away from the raging battalion of the army or police. He complied. I tried to get as close to the black-marketeer as I could to grasp details of his conversation with the driver, but had to gather the two were arguing over the exact price of the ‘precious liquid’. It seemed the young man was attempting to refuel the lorry before settling on the actual price.

When I arrived in the newly-crowned city of Marondera[formerly a town, and recently given a city status], I just slept overnight, eager to catch the morning bus to my mother’s plot, that she was allocated by the ruling Zanu-PF party. The house in Marondera belongs to my grandfather, my mother’s stepfather. Currently, the four-bedroomed tiny property is home to my mother’s sister, together with her three children. Her first-born is a boy, who has two younger sisters as well. The next morning I took a lift to the Baker Plots that were grabbed from a Mr. Baker, a white farmer. Mr. Baker is one of the 4 000 white farmers whose farms were forcibly grabbed by the ruling government in 1997, under the influence of the late and former Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi.

I paid Z$200 million from Marondera to Baker’s. Initially, the driver of the small, out-of-date obsolete Datsun Pulsar had asked for Z$300 million, arguing that the exchange rate of the ZimDollar Versus the South African Rand was unpredictable, thus the need to cater for the unexpected devaluation of the dollar. True to his utterances, and as I had to experience for myself during my short stay in Zimbabwe, the Z$ keeps falling on an hourly basis. To stay on the safe side, one has to keep a close and tight guard on the ‘now indispensable’ Tito Mboweni product.
[Read more…]

• news24.com/News24/Africa/Zimbabwe (Obama speaks out):
  US presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday the international community must do more to try to help resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis, and to put pressure on Robert Mugabe, who is clinging to power. He singled out South Africa as one country that needs to apply more pressure on Mugabe, 84, who has refused to step down.

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• africanloft.com (Considering the options left):
  Not only has Mugabe boasted that it is God that can remove the state of Zimbabwe from his claws, more or less telling the opposition that the presidency is not open, yet, Even the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is laying low as a refuge at the Dutch Embassy in Harare.

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• allafrica.com (UN Chief urges justice for victims):
  The United Nations human rights chief today called for justice and accountability in response to the campaign of political violence that has marred Zimbabwe’s electoral process. The Southern African nation has been beset by deadly unrest since the first round of the presidential election on 29 March. The violence and intimidation led to the withdrawal of Morgan Tsvangirai, of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), from the 27 June run-off in which he was set to face President Robert Mugabe.

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• int.iol.co.za/index.php? (Is Britain considering military intervention?):
  Britain has drawn up two contingency plans for military action in Zimbabwe, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. BUt the government insisted military intervention is not being considered. The Times reported that two plans have been drafted by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) following a request from the department’s crisis management team.

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• theleoafricanus.com/2008/06/22/ (Soyinka says let’s remove Mugabe):
  Listen to the interview on the BBC here. Soyinka’s statement comes as the embattled opposition Movement for Democratic Change announced today it was withdrawing from the run-off election this Friday, on June 27.

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• basotho.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/ (Guerilla intervention?):
  Wole Soyinka thinks Mugabe should be whipped off the throne [source]. And I think he should, too. There is no oil in Zimbabwe, so the Occident isn’t gonna go rushing in to save the day. It would in any case have been a bad idea. So the West is out on this one, except for yelling from a distance.

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• news.bbc.co.uk (New Frontline States):
  For southern African leaders meeting in Swaziland under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), the election crisis in Zimbabwe may be proving a headache. But the grouping has its origins in dealing with intransigent regimes, as it was set up during the struggle to end white rule across southern Africa.

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• news.bbc.co.uk (Mandela speaks out/with video):
  Former South African leader Nelson Mandela has added his voice to the growing international condemnation of the political violence in Zimbabwe. In his first public comments about the crisis, he noted “the tragic failure of leadership” of President Robert Mugabe.

——————–

• news.bbc.co.uk (Mbeki calls for negotiations/with video):
  South African President Thabo Mbeki has called for negotiations between Mugabe’s party and the MDC.

——————–

• business.africanpath.com (Hear Zimbabweans speak):
  Lance Guma speaks to political analysts Brian Kagoro and Dr Alex Magaisa, who debate the options for intervention by the United Nations, the African Union and SADC in the crisis. The programme also explores whether Zimbabweans have mortgaged their fate to the hands of outsiders, while doing nothing themselves.

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