Niger exports enough uranium to France to generate 50 per cent of the latter’s electricity supply, writes Khadija Sharife. But ordinary Nigeriens reap little benefit from France’s control of their country’s uranium resources, with over three-fifths of the population living below the poverty line and reports of radioactive contamination of water, air and soil by multinational mining operations.

With tens of millions of hectares of land across Africa auctioned off to corporations and governments in secretive deals, in this week’s Pambazuka News Khadija Sharife takes a closer look at a set of agreements between the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) and a group of white South African farmers. Will this partnership come at the expense of local people, Sharife asks, or could it generate models for freeing the continent from food insecurity through the sharing of resources and humanity?

Sudan’s oil deposits have made it one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, yet ‘violence, disease and malnutrition’ continue to kill its people, Khadija Sharife writes in this week’s Pambazuka News. With access to natural resources from water to grazing land already at tipping point and cited as a root cause of the country’s conflict, Sharife assesses the role played by the Khartoum government and multinational interests in diverting much needed oil wealth from the Sudanese people.

Once perceived as an icon of progress in Africa thanks to wealth from its copper mines, today over 75 per cent of Zambia's population lives below the poverty line. In this week’s Pambazuka News Khadija Sharife recounts the country’s ‘riches to rags’ story – a story that is being repeated in former resource colonies across the continent, which although ‘politically liberated’ have ‘remained economically chained’.

The Lake Kivu basin, which Rwanda shares with the DR Congo, contains vast quantities of methane gas, which can be used to provide desperately needed electricity. But a deadly threat lurks beneath the waters of the lake, as Khadija Sharife finds out in this week’s Pambazuka News.

As developed nations attempt to secure supplies of food and biofuels to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the food and energy security of their populations, Khadija Sharife writes in this week’s Pambazuka News about the rush by foreign investors to buy up agricultural land across Africa, all too often at the expense of the wellbeing and livelihoods of local communities.

As a range of eminent scientists back genetically modified crops as the answer to food security in Africa, Khadija Sharife asks in Pambazuka News whether proponents of the ‘Green Revolution’ have the interests of the continent’s people and the environment at heart, or are more concerned with generating profits for the companies that control the technology.

Tanzania is sitting on top of a US$39 billion ‘pot of gold’, Khadija Sharife writes in Pambazuka News, but unless the government can capture a more just proportion of royalties and taxes from the multi-nationals with concessions to mine the commodity, the country, one of the ten poorest in the world, is likely to get poorer still.