Africa

French troops in Mali.

[Click HERE for more on Mali.]

By Roger Annis

February 6, 2013 – A Socialist in Canada, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- ”France is in Mali for the long haul.” That’s the headline of the France daily Le Monde on February 4. The newspaper’s front page, as well as pages 2 and 3, were devoted to a discussion over "what next" for France and the world in Mali.

The views of the newspaper’s editors are explained in a front page editorial. (The editorial translated into English is below.) Describing in the politest of terms France’s historic role in Africa as a slave and colonial power, and summarising the political situation in Mali and west Africa as a “struggle against narco-Islamists”, the newspaper argues for a long-term, Haiti-style tutelage of Mali.

[For more on Nigeria, click HERE.]

By Baba Aye, SWL national chairperson

January 3, 2013 -- International Socialist Tendency -- The Socialist Workers League (SWL Nigeria) is bothered by the continued attacks against Comrade Femi Aborisade (pictured), a leading member of the SWL and the editor of Socialist Worker, the League’s newspaper, who is a senior principal lecturer at the Polytechnic Ibadan. Eight armed men stormed his house on December 29, 2012. This was the second of such attacks within five weeks.

the SWL promptly wrote to the commissioner of police demanding that action be taken to safeguard Comrade Aborisade and indeed all residents within the premises of the institution. At that time, we were rather reticent and refrained from categorically declaring the attack as being political. But for similar attacks to take place barely a month after, with the armed hoodlums calling out his name and demanding that he comes out, shows that there is much more to this matter than one of armed robbery.

By Patrick Bond

January 1, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Either:

1) Africa owes its takeoff to a variety of accelerators, nearly all of them external and occurring in the past 10 years:

• billions of dollars in aid, especially to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria;

• tens of billions of dollars in foreign-debt cancellations;

• a concurrent interest in Africa’s natural resources, led by China; and

• the rapid spread of mobile phones, from a few million in 2000 to more than 750 million today.

Business increasingly dominates foreign interest in Africa. Investment first outpaced aid in 2006 and now doubles it.

Or: