The South African mining sector could be in for a seismic shift. Executive leadership of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa has issued a call for mines nationalised and cooperatives established as a way of dealing with poverty After a meeting of its national executive committee (NEC) last Sunday, Numsa said that nationalising [...]
Despite a drop-off of instability in the Delta today, oil exploration in Nigeria has slumped to the lowest in a decade after producers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA backed away from investment until the country’s petroleum law is finally passed. Just one exploration well was drilled in Nigeria over the past two [...]
Amnesty International and a conglomeration of human rights activists have stated that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union have betrayed the people of Zimbabwe by ignoring human rights abuses by President Robert Mugabe’s supporters while paying lip service to implementation of political reforms. Amnesty International Africa director Erwin van der Borght [...]
Xinhua reports that the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR) office cautioned the Ugandan media on Wednesday to avoid inciting the public during the general elections slated to begin on February 18th. Birgit Gerstenberg, UNHCHR representative in Uganda, told reporters here that although the media should fully exercise the right of freedom of [...]
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono has warned multinational banks currently operating there that they would suffer consequences if they refuse to write loans to ZANU-PF officials or others on Western sanctions lists in another fantastic example of civility in the face of foreign fiscal trepidation. In a monetary policy statement posted to the [...]
The case is important and it set a precedent. Yet, to many, the awarding of damagesmatters less than the fact that, at long last, gay Ugandans stood up and demanded to be treated as equal citizens. What heartens a particular Guardian reporter is that it set a precedent. They had the courage to challenge popular hate and [...]
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, seeking a fourth term in office, will arrest his main opponent Kizza Besigye if he carries out his own vote count and announces the results, the presidency issued yesterday. Besigye stated in early October his party planned to hold a parallel count of the presidential election expected to be held on [...]
The Zimbabwean government has recently opened its long awaited one-stop shop investment centre that is expected to reduce the registration period from the current 50-plus days to only 11 in an effort to reel in foreign and domestic investment long stifled from a paralyzed joint government. Besides failing to woo investors to the country because of [...]
Democratic Republic of Congo is seeking political stability, battling economic woes and stubborn rebel insurgencies as it gears up for elections due next year. The polls for the presidency and parliament, due to start in November 2011, will be the second since the official end to the 1998-2003 war, which drew in six foreign armies [...]
The long-standing and ongoing boom in commodity prices has given natural resources investors much to cheer about. It’s also revived a leviathan once thought tamed: resource nationalism or “indigenization”. Following a benign period of global deregulation, liberalization and privatization – the “Washington Consensus” of the post-Cold War era – Tim Woods reports that natural resources [...]
