Trouble is looming in villages and towns where some Australian mining companies are exploring and mining for gold in Ghana’s Upper West Region. A Citi News investigation has revealed that questionable land records are at the foundation of a rising tension between the local people and the mining companies.

Also, the villagers’ view that the mining companies, including Azuma Resources, are violating their economic and religious rights to explore for gold is fueling tension tensions.

In this report, Citi News’ Latif Mahama has been investigating the various issues stoking the tension between villagers and mining companies in the Upper West Region.

During the China-Africa meeting in South Africa last month, where China pledged $60 billion for Africa’s industrialization, the hype continued about the Asian giant’s beneficial role in the continent. But the truth is that China has undermined Africa’s development for nearly 30 years now.

The latest executions in Saudi Arabia should make it very clear that the Western powers' "war on terror" has nothing to do with opposition to chopping off heads and sectarian religious fanaticism. Instead of condemning this crime, the US, UK and other Western powers have continued to give the Saudi regime, if not their public political blessing, at least their practical backing – in the name of the necessary alliances they claim flow from that "war on terror".

By engineering chaos in Libya with the violent of Gaddafi in 2011, NATO effectively turned over the entire armoury of an advanced industrial state to the region’s most sectarian militias, including Boko Haram. Moreover, the success of Boko Haram is strategically beneficial to the US in its attempts to sabotage the country's development and in particular its burgeoning relationship with the People's Republic of China.

The outcome of the meeting, the so-called Nairobi Package, was a slap in the face for the peoples of the South. It was especially egregious that the US used the 10th Ministerial, with the help of the Kenyan leadership, to undermine the future of Pan-African trading relations and to drive a wedge between the BRICS societies and those that the US wants to manipulate in the poor countries. The 10th Ministerial has hastened the demise of the WTO.

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) announces the second round of its small research grants competition in memory of Lionel Cliffe, the founder member who died in 2013. It is intended to promote research in the spirit of his work, and is restricted to African scholars and/or activists based in Africa.

Should Africa expect much from the WTO talks in Nairobi? The WTO political game is played with complete lack of any democratic or moral scruples. The Empire speaks of democracy and good governance, ad infinitum, but there is not a morsel of it within the WTO system of global economic governance. The Empire gets away with total impunity.

At the ongoing WTO Ministerial in Nairobi, Kenya, Africa must be prepared to accept no deal than accept a bad one. It is time for progressive forces in the Global South to act in peaceful non-violent resistance against the injustices of the Empire and its cynical deployment of the WTO as a weapon of war against the people of the world for the benefit of the small, corrupt, coterie of mega-corporations for whom profits come before humanity.

Engler masterfully lays out the ways in which Canada participated in the exploitation of Africa during slavery, through colonialism, via Canadian mining companies that operate in Africa and through aid and Structural Adjustment Programs, and through implementing global neoliberal policies.

China’s cooperation with Africa promises great benefits for the continent. But the Chinese government owes it to its people not to allow the fruits of the suffering of the Chinese to be monopolised by corrupt African elites. They must carry out thorough due diligence before they give the Chinese people's money as loans to African regimes.

The policy contains the same old package of unfounded assumptions, pseudo-science, half-truths and lies, which forms the core of the delusion that climate change and greenhouse gas emissions can be regulated and controlled by the neo-liberal capitalist market that demands more intensive use of fossil fuels like coal and petroleum.

Mainstream thinking on climate change governance is dominated by neoliberal ideologies and constrained within neoliberal policy frameworks. Therefore, practitioners accord primacy to narrowly conceived, financialized solutions, despite the lack of evidence that climate problems can be solved through financial means or institutions; and the growing decade of evidence that financial approaches can even be counterproductive.[1]

The world is in crisis. The nation-state and the international system have failed to serve the needs of all humanity fairly. While privileging a minority, this unjust system has marginalized most of the world’s people. Global terrorism is a reaction to this failure. A new international political economy is urgently needed.

The progressive pan-African stance that guided Tanzania’s politics in the 1960s and 1970s is gone: its place has been taken by tribalism and chauvinistic nationalism. The political demands enshrined in the Peasant Manifesto of 2015 offer an alternative to the bankrupt politics of giant parties and the 5-year elections.

If we are to effectively tackle terrorism, there needs to be some truth-telling, historical perspective and a genuine desire to get to the heart of the beast. We must acknowledge that terrorist organisations are often a product of real or perceived injustices and are borne out of a sense of desperation. And they are often supplied with arms by the very forces that claim to be fighting them.

No sensible American would want the world to judge all Americans by the hateful actions of the Ku Klux Klan, a hate organization that has committed its share of atrocities and terrorism over numerous decades. Yet many are ready to use their positions, status and wealth to demonize, dehumanize, criminalize, anathematize and generalize about a group of people because of a few evil individuals who commit violence in the name of Islam.

As China released its 13th Five Year Plan last week, there are key ingredients of China’s model of development, which African countries can definitely learn from.

While Russia's interest in sub-Saharan Africa is nothing new, Russian authorities have realized that it’s time to move back primarily to reclaim its economic footprints and to find old Soviet-era allies, but that step comes with new challenges especially from other foreign players and the changing internal political and economic conditions in Africa.

As trade and investment relations of African countries with China grow, African officials must step up negotiations to secure benefits for their people and promote African businesses and investments in China to counter one-sided patterns. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) is great platform for this.

India-Africa cooperation that promotes economic and technological exchange and the indigenous transformation of Africa’s natural resources could help move the continent up the global value chain.