Africa Follow

"GEORGE BUSH is coming to South Africa with his hands dripping with the fresh blood of Iraqi people. When they roll out the red carpet for him, it will be to hide the bloodstains." That's how Trevor Ngwane, the leading South African anti-privatisation activist, summed up what Bush's tour of Africa means.

IMAGINE THE outcry if the Home Office gave residency to a Muslim political activist wanted by Interpol in connection with the murder of a policeman. Imagine if that person was found living in luxury and working with children. Now imagine if that person was a racist member of South Africa's fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), which used extreme violence to oppose black majority rule.

Bob Geldof is 100 percent wrong on Bush and Africa BOB GELDOF is right to attack the European Union's "pathetic and appalling" response to Africa's human crisis. But he is totally wrong to praise George Bush's policies towards the continent. Bush's administration is the central actor in making sure that debt payments are pumped out of Africa.

"TO THE eight who want to rule the world, the world replies - resistance!" The chant was in French, but taken up by people from a dozen or more European countries - and some from Africa, Asia and Latin America too.

Zackie Achmat is one of the leading figures of the South African movement fighting to get lifesaving drugs made available to everyone living with HIV and AIDS. He was an anti-apartheid activist from an early age. Although he is HIV positive, he is refusing to take antiretroviral drugs until they are made available for everyone in the South African public health system. He is chair of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).

Soon after the 11 September attacks George Bush declared that the US and the world were facing "the first war of the 21st century". He was contemptuously brushing aside a war in which almost 3.5 million people have died. This has been going on since 1998 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Central Africa. It still goes on today.

ALAN MILLER, a steelworker at the Stocksbridge plant in South Yorkshire, was sickened by the news last week of massive job cuts at the plant. Bosses of the Corus steel firm decreed that 1,150 jobs are to go across Britain - including hundreds at Stocksbridge. This was part of their "restructuring" plan to boost profits.

REMEMBER THE headlines when in January Spanish police arrested 16 North Africans who lived in Barcelona and Girona? "Major Al Qaida Attack Foiled" trumpeted the BBC. Tabloid papers ran lurid tales and the Guardian declared that "the group was poised to launch bomb attacks in Europe".

GEORGE BUSH is spending at least $140 billion (£87.5 billion), according to his chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey, to unleash terror on the people of Iraq. At the same time 15 million people today face the threat of famine in the Horn of Africa.

THE MEDIA have whipped up hysteria against refugees from Algeria after last week's killing of a police officer in Manchester. They paint a picture that those coming here from the North African country are all potential killers, linked to a dangerous network of Islamist terrorists. This is racist nonsense. And the real reasons people are fleeing Algeria are rarely even discussed.

Kenyans had good reason to cheer when Uhuru Kenyatta was heavily defeated in the presidential election at the end of last year.

DECADES OF one-party rule in Kenya in East Africa ended last weekend and people came out onto the streets to celebrate. Election results showed that opposition candidate Mwai Kibaki had easily defeated Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta was the candidate of the outgoing leader, Daniel arap Moi. Moi became Kenya's ruler in 1978.