Are Africans too choosy about what they eat? That’s the question on many people’s minds after Malawian President Peter Mutharika recently said that he doesn’t understand why millions of his starving citizens don’t just eat mice and grasshoppers. Does Mutharika have a point or are people right to be angry about what he said?
An unidentified Zimbabwean woman picks up crumbs that fell off the VVIP table after President Robert Mugabe’s 92nd birthday party which cost $800,000 in a country where millions face hunger and starvation.
South Africa’s worst drought in 23 years is not only crippling rural towns and farmers. In urban areas, many poor and working class households are beginning to notice shifts in the price of their staple food items.
According to an Oxfam Davos report, global economic inequality is widening at an alarming rate, with the 62 richest people owning the same as half the world’s poorest. Furthermore, about 30 percent of Africa’s financial wealth is held offshore, costing an estimated $14 billion in lost tax revenues annually.
Within hours of Zuma’s imprudent announcement that he was appointing as minister of finance an ANC backbencher and former mayor to 200 000 people in the West Rand (until residents burned down his house and chased him out), the South African banking index lost R128 billion in share value (its worst hit since October 2001), and the rand fell by 5.4% to a record low of R15.38 to the dollar. Within days, Zuma had to replace him by reappointing a former minister, Pravin Gordhan, to the job.
It can no longer be hidden or talked away; the South African economy is headed for the wall, and extreme politics is set to take centre stage.
From #Rhodesmustfall to #Feesmustfall, South Africa’s young people are taking the transformation of society into their own hands. The recent upsurge in student demonstrations started as a protest against fee increases at WITS University on 14 October 2015. This wave of protests is about far more than simply a monetary problem.
“There is going to be blood this year if my party doesn’t win,” said the young man Tanzania, and his fellows cheered him on. For a country that is deemed to be a harbour of peace, it is especially scary to hear passionate young people throwing words like blood around in conversation, as if it were nothing. Yes we want change, but what price are we willing to pay for the change? Can this change also be peaceful?
Child marriage has never been a cultural practice. Not at any given time. It was and is still a product of poverty, where young girls are taken as surety for a better life by desperate parents
Okey Ndibe on the trials of being a commentator on Nigeria
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