There’s a tendency among technophiles and people in the development industry ‘to state the obvious and make it sound incredible’, writes Sokari Ekine, in this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, but AppAfrica’s insights on Google SMS in Uganda make a refreshing change.

On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, Sokari Ekine reflects on the murders of three Nigerian journalists. She accuses the Nigerian press of colluding with government in its own oppression and presenting an illusion of the free press by failing to defend its own members.

"A vote for secession [in the 2011 referendum] is a foregone conclusion - given overwhelming Southern popular sentiment - but the time remaining to ensure that the process is orderly, legitimate, and consensual is desperately short. The potential flashpoints for a new war are many. Any new armed conflict runs the risk of becoming rapidly regionalized and difficult to contain, let alone resolve." - Alex de Waal. This comment comes in the first chapter of a timely assessment by the Heinrich Boell Foundation of the options for Sudan after the elections and the forthcoming referendum on Southern Africa.

The Federation of African Journalists (FAJ), the African regional organization of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), strongly protests the Zambian government’s on-going attempts to impose a statutory regulatory council on the media in the country, a move strongly opposed by the Zambian independent media community.

The Federation of African Journalists (FAJ), the African regional organisation of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), has denounced the prevailing climate of insecurity in Nigeria which led to the murders of three newspapers journalists during sectarian violence which has gripped Africa’s most heavily populated nation.

Amnesty International has called for a retrial by a regular court of 26 men jailed by an Egyptian emergency court for their alleged links to the Lebanese group, Hizbullah amid allegations of torture. The special court on Wednesday sentenced the menGovernment urged to conduct a – who included Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians and one Sudanese – to jail terms ranging from six months to life.

The Somali Journalist Rights Agency (SOJRA) concerns the desperate pleading for help from the prominent and well respected Somali journalist who is currently in exile in Athens, the capital of Greece. A journalist Mohamud Mohamed Hallane, who is well known in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and in lower Shabelle region contacted SOJRA on Thursday April 29th, 2010 and requested for help while he faced an unkind condition during his dash for freedom.

A South African team facilitating power-sharing talks between Zimbabwe’s feuding political parties is expected in Harare Thursday as part of continuing regional efforts to break a deadlock threatening to derail the country’s fragile coalition government.

After years of slow growth and outright despair at whether broadband would ever take off on the African continent, research suggests that the market is inching ever closer to a tipping point, according to US-based Reportlinker.com professio nal search engine. 'As submarine cables find their way along Africa's coastlines, the continent is slowly but inevitably emerging from what we have long referred to as the Dark Ages of African bandwidth, an era of bandwidth bondage of sorts, characterized by excessively high prices, near-zero broadband penetration rates and self-defeating regulatory models,' the firm said Tuesday.

The East African Community (EAC) Thursday partnered with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a US-based non-profit organisation whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education. According to the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the EAC and OLPC, the two organisations agreed to work together to leverage the advantages of the laptops in transforming primary school education and to promote strategies for better access to laptops and connectivity -- especially for the region's underprivileged children.

To mark the World Press Freedom Day, 3 May, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has identified 10 symbolic cases worldwide in which journalists have been killed with impunity. For instance, the CPJ says, in the Philippines, political clan members slaughter more than 30 news media workers and dump their bodies in mass graves.

At 11 p.m. on 2 January 2008, back from Nairobi, Kenya, an exhausted Ory Okolloh — a Johannesburg-based Kenyan lawyer in her thirties — posted the following message on her blog: “For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out.

Press freedom is now a core value of all humanity, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam, but the ‘recent history of the independent press in Ethiopia is a chronicle of brutal crackdowns, arbitrary imprisonments and harassments of local and international journalists, shuttering of newspapers and jamming of external radio transmissions’. The Ethiopian people have the ‘inalienable right to have the information they need to make informed decisions about their form of government, leaders and lives,’ Mariam argues.

Does your community need access to information but has limited or no access to the internet or email? Do you want to be able to share more information than 160 characters allows? Freedom Fone offers the possibility to extend the reach of information to citizens and groups presently excluded from the information loop because of lack of access to resources such as computers and the internet.

Microsoft will want to be a player rather than just a big spender in South Africa’s black empowerment policy, the company has said following the announcement it would spend about half a billion rands (about US$ 64 million) in the next seven years to boost local business partnerships.

Zimbabwe is expected to pass legislation that could help it take better advantage of information technology, despite the economic crisis that has gripped the country. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Bill, which would pave the way for implementing a strategic ICT plan launched in February, is currently awaiting cabinet approval before it goes to parliament for further scrutiny.

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the five-hour detention of Samuel Obiang Mbana, correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Africa n°1 radio, at the police station in the capital Malabo on 14 April. The journalist was arrested at Malabo international airport where he went to cover arrivals for an extraordinary summit of heads of state of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC).

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has denounced the convocation on Monday in Douala, of Mrs. Henriette Ekwe, Director of the Weekly newspaper, Bebela by officers of the Secret Information Service, the military security and the Head office of External Research (DGRE), over her appearance on a programme broadcast on Equinox TV on April 6th.

French state-owned company Areva continues to deny any wrongdoing after findings that populated areas in Niger remain contaminated with high levels of radio-activity. The company seems to be escaping censure partly because of lack of data on cancer-related causes of death among Nigeriens working at or living near the uranium mines.

Zimbabwe's power-sharing government has not carried out critical media reforms as promised under the country's September 2008 Global Political Agreement, Human Rights Watch said in a report. The 26-page report, "Sleight of Hand: Repression of the Media and the Illusion of Reform in Zimbabwe," says that the Zimbabwe Africa National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the former sole ruling party, still holds the balance of power in the coalition government forged with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the former opposition movement, in February 2009.