Jacob Zuma is facing a barrage of criticism. But he won’t give up without a battle

IN HIS new year’s address to the nation, President Jacob Zuma hailed 2010 as “the most important year in our country since 1994”. Even at the time, it seemed like hyperbole to compare the year of South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections to hosting the football World Cup. But little did Mr Zuma know how tough, at least for him, the first few months of 2010 would be. Less than a year into his presidency, he is facing calls from within his own party to step down after just one term. Some in his ruling African National Congress (ANC) say he should go by the end of the year.

Yet 2009 had ended on a high note. According to an Ipsos poll in November, 77% of South Africans said Mr Zuma was doing a good job, up from 50% seven months before, and 70% felt the government was doing well, despite a lack of progress in reducing crime, tackling corruption or creating jobs, nearly 1m of which were lost last year. But fully 71% said they would still vote for the ANC, up from an impressive 66% in the general election a year ago. ...

A United Nations agency under attack

THE World Food Programme (WFP), created by the United Nations in 1962 to save lives, has since grown into the behemoth of the aid business, envied and disliked in almost equal measure by many of its smaller peers. It says it feeds 90m people a year in 73 countries. Yet some query whether it always fulfils the high ideals of its humanitarian mandate.

The WFP has had to get used to fierce criticism, particularly of its operations in Africa. The main complaint is that food aid creates a dependency culture among the poor. The WFP employs large numbers of press officers in its headquarters in Rome and elsewhere to jump to its defence. Even so, a recent scandal over its work in Somalia has pricked it. An internal UN report accuses the WFP of abjectly failing to get food to starving Somalis. The report says that systematic collusion between local WFP staffers, Islamist militants and food transporters has led to the diversion of up to half of the food it ships to Somalia, with some of it going to jihadists. The WFP has hotly denied the allegations of corruption, but it has ceased working with three transport contractors who are alleged to have been involved in arms trading. ...

A row over whether alcohol should be tolerated for some or banned for all

TOURISTS may be forgiven for thinking that drinking alcohol in Morocco is legal. You can happily buy the stuff in supermarkets, bars and smarter restaurants, but Muslims, who make up the vast majority of Moroccans, are strictly forbidden to drink it. Islamists dislike this compromise—and were delighted when the mayor of Fez, the religious capital, recently suggested it could become Morocco’s first entirely dry city.

It is not the first time that the Islamists have opposed the country’s tolerant attitude. In December Ahmad Raissouni, a hardline cleric, issued a fatwa calling on Moroccans to boycott supermarkets that sell alcohol. Two years earlier Islamist politicians had been outraged by the holding of a wine festival in Meknes, a conservative city at the heart of Morocco’s wine-producing region. Columnists in the populist press grumbled that Morocco was losing its Islamic identity. ...

How the government is stacking the odds in its favour

CAMPAIGNING is under way for the country’s first real multi-party elections since 1986, due to be held on April 11th. Voters, opposition politicians and foreign governments, all seemingly united in their dislike of President Omar al-Bashir, had hoped that these polls would bring about a “democratic transformation” of the country. But there is every sign the Sudanese will have to wait quite a bit longer for genuinely fair elections.

The coming polls are the result of a peace deal signed in 2005 to end a 50-year on-and-off war between the Muslim northern half of the country and the Christian and animist south. According to the UN, they are also “some of the most complicated elections ever”. Voters will choose a national president, a national assembly, state governors, state assemblies, the president of the semi-autonomous south, and the southern assembly. In addition there are several different types of voting systems, including first-past-the-post, a straight majority one for choosing the president, proportional representation and a women’s list. In all, voters in the north must cast eight different votes and those in the south must cast 12. ...

Some of Iran’s most celebrated film-makers are being hounded abroad

FILM-makers in Iran have always had to get by with just a few breaths of artistic air yet made memorable movies in the process. The country’s cultural tsars disliked the taboo-busting productions of Jafar Panahi but reluctantly allowed them onto the screen. Films such as “The Circle”, about the wretchedness of women, and “Offside”, a story of girls who dress as boys in order to get into the male-only environment of a football match, at least showed that Iranian censorship had failed to kill creativity. But now the accommodation has ended. Earlier this month Mr Panahi was arrested, along with several other people, while shooting what a loyalist website called “an anti-regime film”.

Mr Panahi’s strained relations with the authorities broke down after last June’s disputed election. As a judge at the Montreal film festival, he infuriated the government by wearing a green scarf to show his support for the opposition and was briefly detained back home for attending a ceremony for victims of official brutality. ...

The rulers sound cocky as an inchoate opposition ponders its next move

IF THERE were an Oscar for chutzpah, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be a shoo-in. Ever since last June’s disputed election spawned a serious opposition movement, Iran’s polarising president has exuded self-confidence, not hesitating to proclaim a new world order even as Tehran, the capital, descended into mayhem. Now, with the opposition in the doldrums and the West seemingly unable to check Iran’s progress towards nuclear self-sufficiency, its leaders are beamingly proclaiming the crisis to be over. The Islamic Republic is again shining its anti-Western, anti-Israeli light across the world.

Last month’s arrest of Abdolmalek Rigi, whose Jundullah guerrillas have carried out bombings and assassinations in the country’s south-east in the name of his fellow Baluchis, a Sunni minority ethnic group that straddles the border with Pakistan, occasioned much self-congratulation on high. Shorn of his distinctive beard, Mr Rigi was paraded before Iran’s television cameras and “confessed” to receiving aid from the American arch-enemy. Mr Ahmadinejad taunted the Americans for their heavy-handed approach to tackling terrorism. “If you want to arrest terrorists,” he said, “learn from Iran.” ...

A religious issue is threatening the government’s cohesion

AFTER a year in office, Israel’s right-wing-cum-religious coalition is feeling an ominous tremor of internal discord. The issue, the bane of so many past coalition governments, is state and synagogue. A bill easing conversion to Judaism, championed by the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and his ex-Soviet immigrant party, Yisrael Beitenu, has run into furious resistance from the ultra-Orthodox party, the United Torah Judaism (UTJ), a coalition partner.

“When I die, I’ll go straight to heaven just for having pushed through this bill,” says David Rotem, chairman of parliament’s law committee and a member of Yisrael Beitenu (meaning “Israel is our home”). “I don’t know where opponents of the bill will go.” Ultra-Orthodox members, apparently confident of their place in heaven, protested. A member of the Labour party, another coalition partner, said that if the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there. ...

A government reflecting the people’s will should slowly and messily emerge

DOZENS of explosions woke up voters in Baghdad on March 7th, heralding the day of the general election. Every few minutes another thunderous bang reminded them to stay at home, away from polling stations. Officials said the city had been hit by a barrage of mortars. Voter turnout was lower than before, in Baghdad little more than 50%. It was hardly a shining model of democracy.

The American army played down the violence. Most of the bangs, said its spokesman, had been caused by water bottles stuffed with explosives. Insurgents had put them in bins around the city and set them off by mobile phones to terrify voters. Two big bombs had killed at least 38 people but nobody was badly hurt by the bottle-bombs, said General Ray Odierno, the American commander. The bangs were an act of desperation by a fading insurgency. The turnout overall was said to be 62%. Despite the fear, many Iraqis were plainly determined to assert their democratic right to choose their leaders. Barack Obama called the election a “milestone in Iraqi history”. ...