State repression in the Southern African nation has reached ridiculous lows. President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’ government appears to be paranoid. It boggles the mind how long this surreal state of affairs will go on.

Last week, the Addis Ababa dictatorship suddenly released jailed prominent journalist Reeyot Alemu and four bloggers without explanation. Reyoot has vowed to continue her struggle for democracy in her country, where many other journalists, bloggers and political leaders remain in jail.

Kenya’s constitution guarantees freedom of the media, but President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee coalition has introduced several bills that undermine rather than enforce that principle. Journalists are vulnerable to legal harassment, threats, or attack, while news outlets are manipulated by advertisers or politician-­owners. The deteriorating climate comes at a crucial time for Kenya’s democracy, security, and economy. A CPJ special report by Sue Valentine and Tom Rhodes.

The system of development is broken. The concept remains a shell that hides wasted time, effort and sentiment. Those espousing the development system as it currently exists should carefully consider whether their efforts are bringing around the promised goals.

What is important for the Kenyan politician today is the economic resources of the state and the ease with which they can be used by them and their accomplices. The Kenyan state provides endless opportunities for this kind of exploitation.

The original owners in Africa that were supposed to keep the skulls and bones of their Ancestors may not even be aware of the whereabouts of the kota. Does it not matter that what is part of a people’s belief may be decorating the rooms of non-believers elsewhere in the world for aesthetic pleasure?

Angolan political activists exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protest face illegal arrest, torture and assassination in the hands of the security forces. The justice system has also been compromised to protect the government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

State authorities and their allies all over the world are conspiring to suppress the freedoms and rights of citizens and communities, achieved after struggles of centuries. Because almost all states are implicated in acts of brutality in the name of fighting terrorism, no state is criticised by another, or by UN agencies, much less brought to answer charges.

Hundreds of people signed an online petition demanding an apology from the organisers of the popular Kuska Karnival that was held in Swakopmund, a city on the western coast of Namibia, saying the event stirred up racism and was insensitive to the feeelings of black people, after pictures of people dressed as Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members and some painted as black labourers appeared in the German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung.

Glebelands with its neatly constructed family units is one of the very few hostels that the government proudly parades as proof of its commitment to the eradication of apartheid’s social engineering. It is therefore shameful that this same government has permitted the persistent and excessive violence which has left over 30 people dead.

While some improvements spelled out in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals have been reached, the majority of humanity in developing countries will not benefit from goals set within the global capitalist system. They remain prone to widening economic inequality, declining oil and commodity prices, and imperialist wars for resource extraction.

Civil society organizations state that the new BRICS bank should support inclusive, accessible, participative development that is driven by communities, addresses poverty and inequality, removes barriers to access and opportunity, and respects human rights, local cultures, and the environment.

As was widely feared, the contentious protocol on seed was adopted at the regional meeting in Arusha, Tanzania. The protocol’s underlying imperatives are to increase corporate seed imports, reduce breeding activity at the national level, and facilitate the monopoly by foreign companies of local seed systems and the disruption of traditional farming systems.

Government delegations from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa convened this week at the annual BRICS Summit in Ufa, Russia, to formalise the creation of the world’s newest multilateral development bank, the New Development Bank. The NDB should aim to achieve three zeros by 2050: zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emission.

President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” and lulled into a stupefying silence black voices that should have demanded answers as to why the Charleston attack was not considered a terrorist attack, even though it fits the definition. Because of this depraved indifference to black life by the U.S. government, African Americans critically need international solidarity.

More than 150 Marxists met in Johannesburg to ponder some 70 papers at the World Association for Political Economy forum, where 82-year-old Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin was named winner of WAPE’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Despite the diversity of viewpoints, there seemed to be concurrence that a convincing, unifying intellectual critique of both local and world-scale capital is needed.

As a new generation of Pan-African activists, such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement, steps up, it is important to revisit the lessons taught by previous trailblazers, like Amilcar Cabral, leader of the liberation struggle against the Portuguese in West Africa.

President Paul Kagame threw a mighty tantrum following the arrest in the UK of his spy chief, Gen. Emmanuel Karenzi Karake. But the exiled opposition party Rwanda National Congress has welcomed the arrest, applauding the new efforts by some Western nations to demand accountability from the brutal tyranny in Kigali.

If the 1994 genocide against Tutsis stands out as the most depraved and tragic chapter in Rwanda’s history, its corollary is certainly the three years that followed in which a slower, largely hidden campaign of abject cruelty was meted out against Hutus in Rwanda and the DRC. Rwanda's spy chief Emmanuel Karake, arrested on 20 June in the UK, was the mastermind of this unacknowledged genocide against Hutus.

Most people oppose dual citizenship because they think that people in the Diaspora already enjoy life there. As such, the addition of dual citizenship is seen as a bloated advantage. This is not correct.