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... 

Apologies to readers of this column who cannot tell FIFA from UEFA or CAF: this week I focus on football, which the Brazilian legend known to much of the world simply as Pele famously described as... 

Where are the hot-heads at the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) and the other teacher unions? We need them to stop Angie Motshekga in her tracks. She quietly slipped out of the... 

The story is told of a correspondent for British news agency Reuters who, in 1961, was sent to verify whether then United Nations (UN) secretary-general Dag Hammarkjold had landed at Ndola Airport,... 

I made a subtle confession in last week’s column: that I rate the dear departed Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence leader, as one of the greatest Africans of all time. In my estimation,... 

Barring unforeseen glitches, this edition of Engineering News will hit the newsstands on May 24, a day before the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day when then Ethiopian leader Emperor Haile... 

It always comes as a breath of fresh air when an African leader receives a pat on the back for his or her accomplishments. This is because political leaders who distinguish themselves are something... 

A post on Ghanaian Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia’s Twitter feed towards the end of last month caught my eye. It was a twenty-worder: “Not a single Ghanaian, irrespective of his or her remoteness,... 

Another dictator has bitten the dust. As I write, Sudanese strongman Omar Hassan al-Bashir is languishing in the notorious Kobar prison, on the outskirts of Khartoum, where thousands of political... 

Huge sums have been pumped into research and development in recent decades, and the upshot is that science and technology are on fast forward. Over the past century, thousands of ideas across many... 

Unemployment is a major socioeconomic problem in South Africa and the rest of the continent, and the youth bear its brunt. The massive investments in education by governments have not made a... 

Southern Africa is in mourning. More than 1 000 people have perished since the tropical cyclone, Idai, lashed parts of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe last month. The toll will likely increase, as... 

I have in the past used this column to lay into a top KwaZulu-Natal Education Department official for ranting about the rather lacklustre performance of the province’s matriculants, despite the... 

It has been 14 years since my employers persuaded me to become a desk-bound pen-pusher. This spelt an end to my career as a reporter, which I had thoroughly enjoyed, save for the all-too-frequent... 

Education accounts for the lion’s share of the Budgets of many countries. This huge investment, it is reasoned, is a prerequisite for future prosperity. But, as survey after survey has... 

Like the rest of the world’s developing regions, Africa is faced with a youth bulge. Coined in the mid-1990s by German demographer Gunnar Heinsohn, the term refers to the phenomenon whereby success... 

That the politics of the governing party in Zimbabwe are repellent is common knowledge. Zanu-PF has perfected the art of rigging elections over well-nigh four decades and has not hesitated to... 

It is just before 14:00 on the afternoon of February 20 as I wait for the National Budget Review 2019 to be published in its electronic form. While doing so, I am reminded of a time, not so long... 

It’s election season in Africa. At the time of writing, Nigerians and their fellow West Africans in Senegal were due to go to the polls in a few days, while the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)... 

That I am an Afro-optimist in no secret. This simply means that, unlike doomsayers like Donald Trump, who once likened our countries to latrines, I strongly believe in the Africa Rising narrative.... 

Just more than a year ago, African heads of State and government converged on the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to launch 2018 as the continent’s Anticorruption Year. No stone was going to be... 

Our 2018 matriculants – those who wrote the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams and those who attended schools affiliated with the Independent Examination Board (IEB) alike – deserve a huge pat... 

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in this couple that the African Union will this month be providing details of its plans to launch a pan-African passport as part of its efforts to improve the... 

In last week’s instalment of this column, I took issue with African institutions’ not-so-golden silence while rogue governments on the continent ride rough-shod over their citizens. One of the... 

African institutions have often been accused of being long on talk and short on action. A case in point is the deafening rhetoric about good governance by the likes of the Southern African... 

Time flies indeed. It has already been a year since my editor invited me to contribute a weekly column in Engineering News, an opportunity that I grabbed with both hands. During the past 50-odd... 

First things first – M-Pesa stands for mobile pesa, with pesa Swahili for money (I have been busy building up my Swahili vocabulary ever since Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced a... 

Mozambique’s founding President, the late Samora Moises Machel, is famous for having coined and popularised the slogan Aluta Continua! (Portuguese for ‘the struggle continues’). He used it to rally... 

At the end of this month – or at least by the middle of December – scores of young men and women will be completing their undergraduate studies at South Africa’s 26 public universities and at the... 

Nineteenth-century British imperialist and entrepreneur Cecil John Rhodes had grand plans to construct a railway line from Cape Town, on the southern tip of the continent, to Cairo, in North... 

It’s mind-boggling. Donald Trump is a darling of more than half of Nigerians, the very people he derided as hut-dwellers not so long ago. This, of course, is if a new study conducted by the Pew... 

In rather melodramatic fashion, one journalist, writing in June this year, portrayed the rate at which the world is losing its forests thus: “Image looking down on huge swathe of lush forest – but...