Tag: Mozambique
The announcement that Algerian President Bouteflika won’t run for re-election but will instead postpone the upcoming vote until the conclusion of his recently decreed comprehensive constitutional reform process represented the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years, making one wonder whether the world has been ignoring an almost decade-long “African Spring” or if something else entirely is going on across the continent.
Although Donald Trump can barely place a single country in Africa, his few utterances on the continent have yielded what can only be described as a nostalgia for the 1960s. It was a decade that saw three white minority-ruled governments ruling in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the South African territory of South-West Africa.
With the global moral outrage sparked by a demented dentist’s sadistic murder of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, one would think this kind of thing was an aberration. But no, these kinds of slaughter trips were actually part of a neocolonial strategy for the “economic salvation” of sub-Saharan Africa. More grotesquely, big “game” hunting in Africa was supported by various “free-market” environmental groups as a way to “monetize” wildlife and other “non-market” resources. Here’s part of a chapter from my book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me which describes a bizarre scheme for a theme-park for gun-slinging executive tourist types in Mozambique. Read it and weep…
The countries of Southern Africa go through a period of elections taking place in succession. On November 28, seventy-three-year-old Prime Minister Hage Geingob, a leading politician of Namibia, won the presidential election receiving nearly 87 percent of votes. With the population slightly over two million Namibia is an important contributor into the world economy. The country is the fifth largest uranium producer (after Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Niger) and is expected to become the leading world uranium raw material exporter in 2015. While Namibia is known predominantly for its gem diamond and uranium deposits, it is also rich in gold, manganese, copper, tin, tungsten and zinc. Wide opportunities exist for offshore gas extraction (with deposits still not fully explored)…