The Covid-19 pandemic has hogged news headlines during the past couple of months, and understandably so. The upshot has been that other crises have received comparatively little attention from the... 

The coronavirus disease – or Covid-19 – is dead serious business. According to the United Nations, the pandemic will likely consign 300 000 sons and daughters of the African soil to the grave,... 

It has been about a month since President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered a national lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19 – a decision that earned him plaudits far and wide, even from his political... 

African elites are notorious for seeking medical care abroad, eschewing medical facilities in their own countries, many of which are in a sorry state, having been starved of cash for maintenance... 

I am a great admirer of Kenya’s PLO Lumumba, who is often on the speaking circuit in African capitals, preaching the gospel of African unity and good governance. The gist of what he says is that,... 

I become quite sceptical whenever the old argument that Africans must find African solutions to their challenges is invoked. The argument’s biggest proponents have been the many obnoxious dictators... 

March 14 was celebrated live and online around the world as the International Day of Mathematics. This was the first time this happened and followed a decision by the United Nations Educational,... 

Africa continues to face a paucity of political leaders whose democratic credentials are worthy writing home about. The latest evidence of this is the decision by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation not to... 

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), described by some as “the last word on [English] words”, has been updated with 29 Nigerian English words and phrases. These include ‘severally’, as in “he... 

I start with a disclaimer: the only discipline in which I received training is the art and craft of journalism. I have never been anywhere near a business school or a lecture hall where the... 

My wife persuaded me to attend a wedding in Harare on the Saturday after Valentine’s Day. We got one of the earliest flights out of OR Tambo International Airport – just to make sure we would... 

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni famously excoriated the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as a trade union of dictators. That was in the mid-1980s. Back then, he was leading an insurrection... 

As I have pointed out before, the flare-ups of anti-immigrant sentiment among some communities in our beloved Mzansi do not define South Africans – especially those at the base of the socioeconomic... 

That Patrice Motsepe is a jolly good fellow is beyond question. He has proved to be one of the world’s more benevolent billionaires, having joined The Giving Pledge in 2013. By so doing, he... 

Constantino Chiwenga’s name should be pretty well known – at least in Southern Africa. He is the army general who, in November 2017, led the coup that toppled the late Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s... 

South Africans are an innovative lot. Much of the world knows about Chris Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant in 1967, but many other citizens of this great nation... 

The myriad of extreme weather events experienced in 2019 should be enough to convince even the most obdurate naysayer to accept the conventional wisdom that global warming – caused by the spewing... 

This year has been quite eventful for Africa, and some of the occurrences that came to pass were captured on this page over the past 50-odd weeks. In this last edition for 2019, I take you down... 

Three events in the past few weeks will go some way towards closing the digital divide between Africa and other continents. News-consuming South Africans should be familiar with one of these events... 

South Africans are still basking in the afterglow of the Springboks’ triumph at the Rugby World Cup. Party poopers like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) tried their damnedest to diffuse the... 

Tourism is something of a cash cow for South Africa. Narrowly defined, the sector accounts for 2.9% of the country’s gross domestic product, but the figure jumps to 8.6% when supply chain linkages... 

The term ‘digital divide’ found its way into common parlance yonks ago. Initially, it referred to the division between those who had access to the telephone and those who did not. After the late... 

Humans have a propensity for being highly vocal when they are unhappy about how they are governed and for showing little hesitation in moving to lands where the grass appears to be greener. South... 

I’m not sure what to make of remarks by Nick Latta, a counsellor at the British high commission to South Africa at a conference in Durban a fortnight ago. She said the UK decided the break away... 

Some of us began to smell a rat when, in early August, Zimbabwe’s Finance and Economic Development Minister, Mthuli Ncube, banned the publication of annualised inflation figures until February next... 

A couple of months back, I waxed lyrical about an initiative to nurture Africa’s high-end information technology talent for placement with global tech companies. Its beauty, I wrote, was that the... 

Botswana nationals go to the polls in less than a fortnight to elect local government representatives and Parliamentarians. Bar a near miss in 2014, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has... 

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Africa’s rhinos have been under siege for over a decade. They are targeted by unscrupulous elements who sell their horns to buyers in the Far East.... 

The latest flare-up of antimigrant violence in parts of Gauteng has been a major talking point across Africa. Regrettably, emotions seem to have taken precedence over cool logic in much of the... 

As news of the demise in the wee hours of September 6 of former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe broke, keyboard warriers went into a frenzy. One tweet encapsulated the predominant sentiment. It... 

So Kenya has joined the ranks of oil-exporting countries. Its maiden shipment of the so-called black gold was dispatched late last month, headed for China. The development was indeed good news for... 

I doubt if many people in Mzansi know of Pihilip Alston. The Australian-born international law expert and human rights campaigner is the United Nations’ (UN’s) special rapporteur on extreme poverty... 

I will bet my bottom rand that many people in our beloved Mzansi know next to nothing about Barbados, perhaps except those who are into pop, R&B, reggae, dubstep, hip hop or electric dance music,... 

I am not privy to how lexicographers go about selecting the word or phrase of the year. But if it were up to me, ‘State capture’ would have won the accolade hands down in any one of the past few... 

As an Afro-optimist, it always warms the cockles of my heart when something positive is said about the continent, especially by someone from outside our shores. The latest person to do so is US... 

A climate double whammy is in store for Africa, according to the UK Meteorological Centre’s Hadley Centre, which predicts in a new study that, over the next 80 years, the continent will be hit by... 

My association with journalism dates to the mid-1980s, when I enrolled for a national diploma course in mass communication. I have been a voracious reader of several major African newspapers ever... 

Last week I wrote about an imminent dilemma that Africa faces: its farmers are old, aged 60 on average, and convincing their offspring to take over when they call it a day – which should be in the... 

I recently read of a Ghanaian university graduate who was reluctant to tell anyone – including his mother – what he intended to do for a living. The youngster’s heart is in farming but, on a... 

My news staple includes newspapers from all over Africa. This means I am fairly au fait with trends on the continent. And one of the latest trends is the emergence of a new type of export, which,... 

Far from the madding crowd characterised by in-country political tensions and economic vicissitudes in much of Africa, litigation that in most cases escapes the international media glare is playing... 

It’s a distressing time for conservationists: the sun appears to be about to set on Namibia’s famed wild horses. The population of the desert-dwelling animals has been dwindling at an alarming rate...