Obama is wrong to say that the country must remain united at any cost because he does not understand that underlying the fear of violence is the fact that Nigeria is a failed colonial fiction. Break up is the only way.

The intervention by President Mugabe’s wife in vendors’ clashes with the police is just talk. Vendors have become the vanguard of Zimbabwe's informal economy, but they lack recognition, support or protection from a State that disproportionately invests more in the formal economy and draws resources away from the poor.

Tanzanians will go into an election likely to be very competitive this October. One key concern is that the top political parties keep well-trained militias, despite the law prohibiting this. This has caused security fears around the election.

Ethiopia’s rich heritage in music immortalized in vinyl records is vanishing into the international collector scene alongside other artifacts. There is a need to reclaim and honor the vinyl classics as part of the ancient nation’s cultural memory.

There is no legal instrument or method to circumvent the presidential terms limit under Article 101 of Rwanda’s constitution, save for a coup which would suspend or abrogate the constitution in its entirety. By the letter and spirit of the 2003 constitution, while the length of a presidential term may be decreased or increased from the current seven years, the two terms limit cannot be legally lifted.

The tactics that the once revered liberation party ruthlessly deploys to protect its corrupt bigwigs and their business associates from justice are simply shameful. President Zuma and allies have now become fully untouchable by anti-graft prosecutors and investigators.

The apparent calm in the West African nation is deceptive. Many unresolved issues have created seething tensions that make the likelihood of renewed violence real. A transitional phase is required, for all actors to prioritize the birth of a new contract and prepare a new electoral cycle by building on past failures.

Whether Buhari takes the Nigerian presidency in next week’s hotly contested elections or Jonathan remains is all but irrelevant; real change will only happen when the masses band together, organize and demand better futures instead of lining up behind the rich and powerful whose futures are already secured.

"The officers used brutal force to arrest us. Out of eight human rights defenders arrested, I was the only woman. One of the arresting officers sexually molested me by grabbing my private parts before shoving me into a waiting truck full of anti-riot police who had been brought to disrupt our peaceful protest. We were later released without charge."

Farmer organizations, indigenous groups, trade unions and other civil society organizations, under the umbrella of Our Land Our Business, call World Bank’s annual Conference on Land and Poverty a sham.

The recent diktat by Nigeria’s first lady that her husband’s political opponents be stoned is yet another red flag that the bungling government in Nigeria is not sincere in conducting violence-free elections.

Every neo-liberal ideology promotes the false belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. But although socialism has been persistently assaulted by imperialists over the years, people who live under this system are by far better off than those who do not.

What was the real intention behind Morocco’s decision to hold an international forum in occupied Western Sahara, Africa’s last colony? Peter Kenworthy judges it to be a legitimization of Morocco’s occupation by both the occupier and the attending heads of state and international figures.

With his vast wealth provided by tax payers and intolerable acts the man should be consigned to an old-folks home, not a position of power.

Ethiopianism is at the heart of the quest for total African liberation and unity. This glorious early resistance should offer a powerful inspiration for the African people to confront current challenges that are more subtle and insidious than those faced during slavery and colonialism.

Reading Fanon’s thought, one cannot help being absorbed and shaken by his truth and foresight on the bankruptcy and sterility of national bourgeoisies who have tended to replace colonialism with a new class-based system replicating the old colonial structures of exploitation and oppression.

He claimed to be a different kind of soldier and promised not to hang on to power, and never to install a dictatorship. Who said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

Two years ago, crimes against humanity suspects Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto took power in Kenya. The duo who cut their political teeth under the tutelage of brutal despot Daniel arap Moi, the self-styled “professor of politics”, have spared no effort to push the country back to the dark days of autocracy.

Talk of affirmative action is now being replaced by “diversity.” This vague concept of diversity paves the way for an increase in the daily use of institutional racism, not only by employers but by other white people in powerful positions.

To what extent can an Afrikan police chief be realistically more committed to fighting institutional racism than a white one? Merely having an Afrikan person at the helm will not end police brutality.