Khadija Sharife

Come sunset, when Africa's primary source of energy, the sun, goes down, and students pack away their books or settle to study beside candlelight, Africa truly does become the 'dark continent'.

‘It took 13 years to go through the legal process and clearly before we started this, corporations felt they could almost operate with impunity.

From the deforestation that caused the collapse of the Mayan civilisation to the fatal breaches in the mega-dam of Marib, the capital of Sheba, man-made environmental catastrophes have often set the precedent for the fall of empires. Rarely has the planet concurrently experienced such peril.

After seven years of pacing legal hallways, South Africa’s apartheid victims have finally received the green light from a US judge to sue multinational corporations that knowingly aided and abetted the apartheid regime.

It used to be that single-digit – or better yet, double-digit – GDP growth was precisely the medicine that economic doctors prescribed to ailing patients –underdeveloped economies. More recently, Africa has been applauded for celebrating single-digit growth in 30 African countries in 2008.

'We cannot assure our development on our own,' stated France's pet dictator and Africa's longest-serving ruler, Omar Bongo. The Gabonese leader was talking about national economic development, but he might just as well have been talking about his own personal economic development.