Tag: Jacob Zuma

Rosatom – Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation – has recently signed Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with a number of African nations to build nuclear power plants within their borders. I spoke to David Himbara, a professor of international development and African energy activist, about the likelihood of Rosatom actually building these nuclear plants. Currently, Sub-Saharan Africa faces an extraordinary level of energy poverty.

Elections should be the season of hope. Steve Biko declared that our fight was for an open society, a society where the color of a person’s skin will not be a point of reference or departure, a society in which each person has one vote. We have the vote – but the political parties do not represent the aspirations of the people. Millions of Black people remain poor and oppressed. When we organize outside of the ANC, we are violently repressed.

South African President Jacob Zuma, in his State of the Nation address, promised to speed the pace of land redistribution and housing construction to replace the country’s urban shantytowns, but nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, the number of people living in shantytowns has doubled and the state violence to evict the residents has increased.

We are our own liberators. We must organize and continue to build outside the ANC. We must face the realities of the situation that we confront clearly and courageously. Many more of us will be jailed and killed in the years to come. What they have done can never be forgotten nor forgiven. – Ayanda Kota

Ayanda Kota, chairperson of the Grahamstown, South Africa, Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, was brutally beaten and arrested by the police today. Will he suffer the same fate as South Africa’s Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid leader and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who died in 1977 at age 31 in police custody, or Andries Tatane, a math teacher and community newspaper publisher whose police murder, caught on video during a protest on April 13, 2011, shocked the nation?

Congolese youth are not going to give up. They’re fighting day and night, educating their peers, their communities and mobilizing throughout the country to bring about change, whether it comes today or tomorrow. They’re clear that they have to be organized to protect their interests, and no one, no one, can protect their interests like they can.

So now in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, we have Libya, thanks to U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy. No other three countries – and leaders – in the world could today commit the crime of abusing United Nations resolutions to wage a war of aggression against a sovereign country ...

The Platform to Stop Impunity in Rwanda requests the South African government accept the extradition petition issued by the Spanish government and hand over the indicted Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa to the Spanish authorities. Add your organization as a signatory.