Africa

On Wednesday 18 November, Ugandan opposition politician Bobi Wine was violently arrested once again in the Luuka district. Various reports speak of violence towards him. One vehicle branded with incumbent President Museveni's campaign brutally ploughed into a group of bystanders in Kampala that same afternoon, leaving several people dead – although the number of casualties is still unknown. It is reported that the car was being stoned shortly before the attack. Another presidential candidate, Patrick Amuriat has also been arrested. Other candidates are pausing campaigning until Wine is released.

On 6 October 2020, just five days after the celebration of so-called Nigeria Independence, Nigerians woke up to one of the most unprecedented youth movements in the history of the country. This article attempts to highlight some of the key lessons that can be drawn from this experience.

In this article, a comrade from South Africa explains how the hullabaloo over the perceived rise of the far right is ultimately a distraction for a capitalist regime that has failed to improve the dire living conditions of the masses, or to resolve the decisive land question.

The youth of Nigeria have risen up in revolt against the brutality of the hated SARS police unit. Neither concessions nor the whip of reaction have beaten the #EndSARS movement back, but only driven it forward. This spontaneous outpouring of rage must be put on an organised political footing, aimed squarely at the rotten capitalist regime.

For days, protests have rocked cities across Nigeria. It is organised around #EndSARS, a movement that is calling for a complete ban of the so-called “anti-robbery” wing of the Nigerian Police, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS – no relation to the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2). Set up in the mid-90s to combat incidences of armed robbery, which had become rampant as a result of deepening poverty under the corrupt military regimes, SARS has since then metamorphosed into a dreaded force associated with all sorts of evils.

We are proud to announce the publication of the first issue of the South African Marxist paper Revolution South Africa. Below we publish the editorial for the first issue of the paper, whose first issue argues for the need for a revolutionary way out of the crisis of capitalism and for socialism as the only alternative for the South African masses.

The turmoil in the West African country of Mali deepened this week after a group of soldiers and junior officers based in the capital Bamako detained President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, Prime Minister Boubou Cissé and other top government officials and forced them to resign.

In recent weeks, the potential for open conflict between various states in the South-Eastern Mediterranean has increased dramatically. The Communist Tendency (IMT section in Greece) has already released a statement on the escalation of war tensions between Greece and Turkey over access to hydrocarbons in specific areas of the Mediterranean Sea. Since then, the Turkish air force and navy have been carrying out military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean, which the Egyptian and French navy have countered with their

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As Nigeria is battling with the coronavirus, the merciless bloodshed going on, especially in the northwestern part of the country in recent times, is exacting a much larger human toll. 5,000 people, mostly women and children, have been displaced in the Faskari, Batsari and Dandume Local government areas of Katsina state, the home state of the current Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari. In just a week, over 100 people are reported to have been maimed in these communities.

The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is just beginning to be felt in Algeria. Earlier this month, the government announced that the national budget would be slashed in half due to the global collapse of oil prices. Simultaneously, the much-discredited government is cynically manoeuvring to bury the popular Hirak movement under the cover of this healthcare crisis. But this coronavirus has brought to the fore the contradictions of a bureaucratically-ruled country, corrupted to the core by ‘le pouvoir’. These repressive measures cannot be allowed to asphyxiate the militant mood for change that has once again gripped the country.

Watch our interview with comrade Kazeem about the situation in Nigeria, where the coronavirus poses a catastrophic threat, and the perspective is one of explosive class struggle.

The Moroccan regime has detained over 500 political prisoners, according to the president of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, Aziz Ghali. Amongst them are those imprisoned in the Hirak Rif protests and the Gerak Jaradah movement: trade unionists, bloggers, a journalist… pretty much everybody. Not a day goes by without social media reporting the arrest of new militants or ordinary citizens whose only crime, in the majority of cases, is having published a Facebook post critical of living conditions or of the state’s politics.

Watch our interview with Ben Morken, who discusses the situation in South Africa: the impact of COVID-19, the political crisis and the perspectives for class struggle.

Kano has become the epicentre of the spread of Covid-19 in northern Nigeria. A large number of so-called “mysterious” deaths was recently reported, but the state government of Kano blatantly claims that the sharp rise in deaths is not due to Covid-19. Here we provide an eyewitness account from an IMT comrade in Kano.