Emeka Siwe and Jonathan Elandu, two U.S. bloggers who cover African politics, have been detained in Nigeria apparently without charge. Read the full story at Africasia…
A US journalist’s rights group said on Friday that Nigeria is holding a US-based blogger without charge, in the second such incident in two weeks.
Emmanuel Emeka Asiwe, editor of [...]

My friend Paul Asiimwe of Sipi Law and Afro-Ip writes:
On the 28 October, 2008, the Parliament of Uganda passed the Trade Secrets Bill into law.
The passage of this bill comes against the backdrop of reluctance on the part of investors to increase investments, particularly those that may require protection of sensitive business and technical information [...]

The legacy of poor leadership in Africa gets a new footnote…
Zimbabwe’s parliament has been forced to adjourn until November 11, after running out of money to sustain its operations as delays in setting up an inclusive government continues to paralyse national institutions. The suspension of parliament was announced by the acting leader of the [...]

Governments in Africa may soon have to think twice about doing deals with private, closed-source software development companies. Linux developers in Kenya have taken a stand demanding that the government rethink policies that forgo local developers for big corporate groups that offer huge deals to win bids…
After losing out on many software tenders to [...]

In “Is Developmental Aid Stifling Africa’s Growth?” I presented Andrew Mwenda’s argument that the key to Africa’s future growth will be free trade and responsible governance, not developmental aid. It seems that this meme is getting more popular by the day.
The African Executive writes in “Aid: Losing Global Popularity?“…
The world seems to [...]

In his essay “An Alien Inheritance”, Richard Dowden makes a strong case for completely overhauling African government. His claim is that democracy was forced on many of these nations impractically by the West and that in order for them to be more productive, they need to ‘be more African’. I’m inclined to disagree, [...]

This is a rather long article and is available for download in HTML and PDF format for reading offline.

The combined populations of China and the fifty-three countries that make up Africa account for well over 2 billion people or 1/3 the population of the entire world. The African continent holds the people of three [...]

The ThinkTank Initiative invites applications from independent African organisations that are committed to using research to inform and influence social and economic policy. The Initiative will provide multi-year funding to promising think tanks, and will work with successful applicants to improve their organizational performance.