cc Taking inspiration from the late South African anti-apartheid poet–activist Dennis Brutus’s verb-play, Patrick Bond discusses the ‘mubaraking’ currently faced by a number of dictatorships across Africa.

‘The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle against injustice,’ writes Patrick Bond, in a tribute to the late South African poet and freedom fighter, which was presented at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy in February.

Painting the country as both a contributor to and potential victim of global climate change, South Africa’s green paper ‘seems to fit within an all too predictable Pretoria formula’, writes Patrick Bond. It's up to civil society to demand genuine solutions.

Last week’s World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar ended up riotously happy thanks to the eviction of a universally hated Egyptian pharaoh, after near-debilitating logistical disasters at the event’s outset, writes Patrick Bond.

With ‘the current ruling crew’ highly unlikely to respond with ‘genuine post-carbon strategies’, addressing to the huge environmental challenges that South Africa faces will rely on the rise of a mass democratic movement, writes Patrick Bond.

Positive spin about the global climate summit in Cancun is based on reaching international consensus and establishing instruments to manage the crisis using market-based strategies – even though these are ‘failing everywhere they have been tried’. Looking ‘soberly at what was needed to reverse current warming and what was actually delivered, negotiators in Cancun ‘failed by any reasonable measure,’ Patrick Bond writes from Mexico.

‘What may seem to some a progressive and brave government is upon closer examination a tyranny’, which despite ‘rhetoric about land redistribution, is ultimately very hostile to its own society’s poor and working people, women, youth, elderly and ill,’ writes Patrick Bond.

Will Africa end up paying for technologies that commodify life, or demand reparations for ecological damage done by the North, asks Patrick Bond.

In an interview with the Inter Press Service (IPS), Patrick Bond discusses the failings of South Africa’s drive towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the extent to which the country’s government continues to operate against the interests of its poor majority.

The South African Parliament has just released a report that investigates the service delivery protests that have rocked the country over the last decade. But, argues Patrick Bond, the report is ‘utterly inadequate’ and fails to identify the root cause of the protests.