Morgan Tsvangirai joined Robert Mugabe’s government a year ago

Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has joined President Robert Mugabe in dismissing calls to enshrine gay rights in the new constitution.

“I totally agree with the president,” he said, state media report.

Homosexual acts are currently illegal in Zimbabwe. Mr Mugabe once said gays were “worse than pigs and dogs”, sparking international condemnation.

Gay rights has become a controversial issue in several African countries in recent months.

Mr Tsvangirai joined his long-time rival Mr Mugabe in a power-sharing government a year ago but relations between the two men remain tense.

‘Very worrying’

President Mugabe told a belated celebration of International Women’s Day that he had recently learned of moves to introduce gay rights in the new constitution currently being discussed.

“That issue is not debatable, it’s not up for discussion,” he said, according to the state-owned Herald newspaper.

“It is just madness, insanity. The ancestors will turn in their graves should we allow this to happen.”

And Mr Tsvangirai said he agreed.

“Women make up 52% of the population… There are more women than men, so why should men be proposing to men?”

Chesterfield Samba, director of the Gays And Lesbians of Zimbabwe (Galz), told the BBC News website he was seeking clarification of the comments.

But he said, if confirmed, they would be “very worrying”.

He also confirmed that Galz would be making a submission to the constitutional review commission.

Although homosexual acts are illegal in Zimbabwe, Galz has an office in Harare and Mr Samba said the police generally left them alone.

Supporters of Mr Tsvangirai hope the new constitution will pave the way for free elections, possibly as soon as 2011.

In Uganda, an MP has introduced a draft bill which makes homosexual acts punishable by life in prison and death in some circumstances.

In Malawi, a gay couple has spent three months in jail after holding a party to celebrate their engagement.

And in Kenya, police intervened after rumours that a couple were planning a gay wedding.

BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8588548.stm

President Zuma is welcomed by Uganda officials at Statehouse in Entebbe. Extreme right is President Museveni. Photo by Stephen Wandera

 About 155,000 Burundian refugees, seeking Tanzanian citizenship, have had their requests granted, according to a communiqué from the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), published on Thursday in Bujumbura, the Burundi capital.

Some of the refugees fled from Burundi in the 1970s because of the ethnic clashes there.

According to the UNHCR, however, some 500,000 other Burundian refugees in Tanzania had elected to return home since 2002.

Read more at: http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/burundi:-155,000-burundian-refugees-granted-tanzanian-citizenship-2010031245723.html

 Remittances update

http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/rem1003.php

Editor’s Note

A 2009 report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) notes that some 30 million African workers outside their countries send home approximately $40 billion a year in remittances. But with only as many “payout” locations on the continent as in one Latin American country (Mexico), the process is expensive and dominated by two large money transfer companies which work primarily with banks. There are large untapped opportunities for lower costs, particularly for rural Africans, if more governments allowed and fostered the participation of post offices and micro-finance institutions in remittance transfers.

A 4-page newsletter, Financing Facility for Remittances, with a report on the 2009 Global Forum on Remittances is at:http://www.ifad.org/remittances/newsletter/1.pdf

For statistics on remittances to and within Africa, see: http://www.ifad.org/remittances/maps/africa.htm

For a previous AfricaFocus Bulletin on remittances, see: 
“Africa: Sending Money Home,” at 
http://www.africafocus.org/docs07/rem0711.php 
END editor’s note 

 Global Integrity released its 2009 Report on corruption on 23/02/2010.

Some of the Ugandans held in South Africa meet a ugandan delegation led by Minister Matia Kasaija and Gen. Kayihura. Photo by A. Kloppre 

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

Our Mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

(excerpted from www.ted.com)

While the entire site is fascinating, the section on “The Rise of Collaboration” (http://www.ted.com/themes/the_rise_of_collaboration.html) has interesting perspectives on technology-enabled collaboration.

Quite an interesting list of books, sent to me from Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series/PSHR.html

“Open Access provides the means to maximise the visibility, and thus the uptake and use, of research outputs. Open Access is the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds.”

– Taken from Open Access: What is it and why should we have it? , posted on http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130&Itemid=390

This website is a great resource for more information on the Open Access Movement

Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook – http://www.openoasis.org/

Author’s Rights

Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite gives journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author’s rights. The guide includes references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites to foster further exploration of this topic.

http://www.archive.org/details/AuthorsRightsToutDeSuite

If they could (according to a worldwide Galluip poll), about 700 million adults worldwide — more than the entire adult population of North America and South America combined — would like to move to another country permanently. The United States and Canada top the list of most desired destination countries.

If everyone who wanted to move to Canada actually did, the country’s population would grow by 170%.

More information on this poll is available at the Gallup website.