At “the premier forum for global economic and financial cooperation", Europe and North America occupy 9 of the 20 seats. Asia has six. Latin America three and the Middle East one. Africa, representing 16 percent of the world population, occupies one seat. In the World Bank, systemic racism has kept Black people out of influential positions.

Like the richer countries of the North that are adopting tougher controls to stem the migration of people from the more impoverished, conflict-ridden South, South Africa is employing similar tactics. But this approach is futile, unsustainable and anti-people.

This year's ranking of NGOs shows that most are based in the West although they carry out their activities in the Global South; are disproportionately headed by white men, and many continue to display stereotypical and patronising images of Africans as poor and needy victims.

The securitisation of immigration control has failed to solve the migrant crisis because it ignores the root cause: a global system that puts profits before people.

As currently taught, Economics specializes in branches of the tree without understanding the nature of the forest. Absence of the study of the political and social context, determined historically, makes the subject an apologetic message for current power relations, leading to poor understanding of economic phenomena.

The increased expansion of Empire in Africa now requires a re-examination of the theories of Pan-Africanism and Socialism as advanced by Kwame Nkrumah and other anti-imperialist leaders of the 1950s-1980s. Africa cries out for unity now more than any other period of the post-independence era.

If the economic and human rights situation in Ethiopia is really as rosy as it is painted by the EPRDF government, how come hundreds of thousands of its youthful population are risking their lives to flee the country and die in the deserts of the Sahara, Sinai and Arabia, beheaded by fundamentalist lunatics in Libya and killed in South Africa?

Ethiopia is going into elections in less than two weeks. A US senior official caused a storm when she recently described the country as a “young democracy”. It is a stunning hypocrisy that America continues to support one of the vilest dictatorships in Africa.

Pierre Nkurunziza is neither the first nor the only head of state in Africa’s Great Lakes region to seek another term of office against provisions of the constitution. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni orchestrated the removal of term limits from the constitution altogether. DR Congo and Rwanda’s presidents both want an extension of their regimes.

President Nkurunziza, a former rebel leader, has run Burundi according to the only model he knows: an authoritarian, predatory and aid-dependent regime. But this week's coup against him must be condemned. The African Union and the continent’s leading nations must support Burundians to attain democracy.

The argument pushed by Nkurunziza and his backers for a third presidential term is unconvincing. This, and the fact that many people have really not enjoyed the fruits of peace under his 10-year rule, is what has galvanized relentless opposition to the regime.

The protests occurred against a backdrop of sustained political and economic marginalisation by the Nkurunziza regime and widespread fear. Protest leaders successfully tapped into individual discontent and anxieties generated by exclusion and repression by a violent dictatorship.

A few days before the 'attempted' coup this week, a blogger in the Burundian capital Bujumbura gave a chilling account of the breakdown of law and order in the capital. The organisers of the protests seemed to have no particular plan and the people were beginning to turn against themselves.

Post-civil war Burundi faces steep challenges that remain unaddressed. History seems to be repeating itself after a decade of fragile, hard-won peace following the signing of the 2000 Arusha Accord. President Nkurunziza's departure alone will not heal the nation.

Over one hundred organisations have issued a statement addressed to World Bank president, Jim Kim, questioning the Bank’s support for a multinational chain of low-fee, profit-making private primary schools targeting poor families, which Kim recently praised as a means to alleviate poverty.

‘African solutions to African problems’ is a popular adage among the ruling classes on the continent. Africa is old enough to deal with its own issues. Yet leaders in the 15-member SADC bloc are in the process of dismantling their own regional court to shield governments, heads of state and other powerful people from justice.

Key challenges include how to support genuinely addressing the root causes of many intractable conflicts, which often involve deeply entrenched inequalities of wealth and power, while often having to meet headquarter demands for short term, quantifiable results rooted in linear and problematic assumptions about how change manifests.

Economic growth in West Africa is badly threatened by the cocaine trade. The power of cocaine cartels is enormous, and the scope of their business to pervert and corrupt society at every level is making itself felt.

The real parasites in South Africa are institutions such as the moribund royal households that are maintained in luxury by taxpayers without delivering any meaningful public good.

When we commemorate May Day we rarely reflect on why it is a public holiday in Africa or elsewhere. Sian Byrne, Paliani Chinguwo, Warren McGregor, and Lucien van der Walt tell of the powerful struggles that lie behind its existence.