Some 850 smallholder farmers from across mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar met in Morogoro from September 29 to October 1 for the National Smallholder Farmers’ Conference and the 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) of MVIWATA, the network of Tanzania’s smallholder farmers’ groups. The theme was “Towards Food Sovereignty: Land Security, Agroecology and Economic Justice for Smallholder Farmers” (“Kuelekea Uhuru wa Chakula: Uhakika wa Ardhi, Kilimo Ikolojia na Haki Uchumi kwa Wakulima Wadogo”).
The AGM is MVIWATA’s highest body. Founded by farmers in 1993, the organization interacted directly with 58,916 farmers last year, 57% of whom were women, according to its own count. Two days of conference debate precede the AGM, allowing members to debate policy before coming together to decide the way forward. For this year’s AGM, MVIWATA farmers took up the key issues of land, markets, seed and, for the first time, carbon trade.
Dr Bashiru Ally, Tanzania’s Minister of Livestock and Fisheries, opened the meeting, saying he had come to listen rather than lecture. He turned quickly to land: conflicts between peasants and pastoralists, he said, had killed at least fifteen people across five regions in September alone. He asked MVIWATA to help the government end the land conflicts.
Guests included the ambassadors of Cuba and Palestine, the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers’ Forum, the Tanzanian Socialist Forum, and Pan Africanism Today, which delivered a message of solidarity on behalf of more than seventy movements and organizations in Africa. MVIWATA also read its statement of solidarity with Palestine and Cuba.
Land discussions dominated the first day. Delegates said the courts were out of reach for most peasant farmers. MVIWATA’s chairperson, Apollo Chamwela, told those attending the AGM that in Magungu village in Kiteto, more than sixty farmers had lost their land when it was allocated for grazing. Subira from Msomero and Salum from Rudewa, both in Kilosa district, described village land taken by outsiders with the collusion of the local officials who should have prevented it. “How can the government take the side of the minority against the majority?” Subira asked. “Where should we run to cry?”
The second day of the AGM focused on markets: not markets in the abstract, but the system through which smallholders are made to sell their crops. Under Tanzania’s warehouse receipt system, farmers deliver produce to licensed warehouses, usually through cooperative unions, and it is sold by digital auction on a government-controlled exchange rather than at the farm gate. Delegates described a system in which farmers have little say over the floor price, and in which middlemen registered as farmers, “ghost farmers” in the words of MVIWATA Executive Director Stephen Ruvuga, sit where prices are set and gain at the real farmers’ expense.
Officials on the platform conceded that small producers outside the cooperative unions are “falling between the cracks.” The session on seeds addressed the regional seed law before the East African Legislative Assembly. The carbon session, the most heated of the three days, heard delegates from Dodoma, Katavi and Kagera describe companies counting trees and signing open-ended contracts with individual farmers who were given no opportunity to understand or scrutinize what they were signing.
On the final day, the conference resolutions were adopted by acclamation. MVIWATA will compile its members’ land grievances and submit them to the government through Dr Bashiru Ally, as he had offered. It will expand its legal aid and follow up on cases stalled with officials. It will document flaws in the crop-marketing system, present them to the authorities, build a seedbank dedicated to indigenous seeds, convene an inclusive forum on carbon trade, and track, analyze and critically engage carbon projects and their effects on farmers.
The AGM then turned to the organization’s future. Its strategic plan for 2027–2031 will put agroecology first, keep land access as a priority and make a farmers’ bank the next major task, starting with TZS 20 million raised from members themselves. Self-reliance ran through the proceedings: members debated doubling their own annual fee, and left energized to prioritize instruments through which farmers can continue to defend themselves. The meeting closed with the election of the board that will lead MVIWATA for the next three years.
In its 33rd year, MVIWATA left Morogoro with a sharper agenda: a dossier of land grievances to present to the government, a seed bank and a farmers’ bank to build with members’ own resources, and a public position on carbon trade. The new leadership’s first test will be whether the government acts on the dossier, and whether members fund what they voted for.
Jonis Ghedi-Alasow is the Coordinator of the Pan Africanism Today Secretariat.
The Government of Kenya announced a second Ebola death, after the detection of at least nine infections in the country so far, including the index case, a Kenyan citizen who also died and who had traveled from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country that declared an outbreak last May.
Africa CDC Urges Global Help as Ebola Spreads: Kenya Reports Its Second Ebola Dead in the CountryAs detailed in a statement late Friday by the Kenyan Ministry of Health, the deceased patient was a 65-year-old woman who was the third confirmed case in Kenyan territory.
“She was a direct contact and close family member of the first (deceased) case and was in quarantine when she developed symptoms on October 13, 2026,” the Ministry explained.
After being admitted to a hospital infectious disease unit and receiving care from specialized medical teams, the woman succumbed to the disease on Friday afternoon.
The Ministry of Health mourns the death of a 65-year-old woman who was receiving care for Bundibugyo Ebola and extends heartfelt condolences to her family, friends and community. Seven patients continue to receive care. All nine cases remain within one cluster, with no evidence… pic.twitter.com/HSWQcC0mck
— Ministry of Health (@MOH_Kenya) October 23, 2026
The Ministry assured that it would facilitate a “safe and dignified burial” for the patient, in accordance with public health protocols.
“This loss raises the number of deaths to two among the nine confirmed cases. The seven remaining patients continue to receive care in the two isolation facilities,” the Executive specified, reiterating that “all cases are part of the same group of known contacts and there is no evidence of community transmission.”
“Her death is a painful reminder that Ebola is a serious disease that can be fatal and that the condition of patients can change suddenly,” the Ministry concluded.
Kenya confirmed its first imported Ebola case on October 5, corresponding to a forty-year-old man who had lived the last seven years in the DRC.
Patient zero received treatment in several Congolese hospitals before traveling by road to Kampala (Uganda’s capital) and, subsequently, flying to Nairobi, where he landed on October 3 and died two days later.
Multinational ‘anti-war bloc’ uses Istanbul summit to call for a diplomatic solution to Middle East crisis
Foreign ministers at a summit of eight European and Middle Eastern countries have urged the US and Israel not to renews their attacks on Iran, warning a fresh outbreak of fighting would spread conflict and push oil prices even higher.
The development of a new multinational “anti-war bloc” represents a challenge to the increasingly open plans by the US and Israel to relaunch strikes on Iran while talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme remain deadlocked.
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© Photograph: Massimo Percossi/EPA
© Photograph: Massimo Percossi/EPA
© Photograph: Massimo Percossi/EPA
Booker Ngesa Omole, general secretary of the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K), has been acquitted by the Mavoko Law Courts in Machakos County, ending a prosecution that the party has described as politically motivated since his arrest in February 2026.
In a statement issued on October 22, the party’s Central Organizing Committee welcomed the ruling as a victory for democratic rights and called for accountability over what it described as Omole’s abduction, torture, and political persecution.
Speaking outside the court after the ruling, Omole said the verdict confirmed the party’s position that the charges against him were intended to target his political activities.
“With finality, the court sitting today at Mavoko Law Courts has clearly indicted the current Ruto regime,” he said. “It has corroborated what we have told the Kenyan public, that framed-up charges against politicians and revolutionaries cannot endure in any competent court.”
Omole said the judiciary had a responsibility to act as a check on state power and defend “the people’s democracy and freedom.” He accused the state of using criminal proceedings to pursue political opponents, adding that it “continues to fail to indict us on criminal charges but wants to persecute us politically.”
“The acquittal is not for Booker only,” he said. “It is for the Communist Party and for all other people who want change in this country. I did not go to jail for nothing. I went to jail to make a statement, and today we prosecuted the case both in the court of public opinion and in Mavoko Law Courts.”
According to the party’s statement, Omole was abducted by armed men in plain clothes in Isiolo on February 24, 2026, and transported towards Nairobi before being detained at Mlolongo Police Station. The party says that he was tortured while in custody, sustaining injuries to his arm and tooth, as well as cuts to his fingers.
The party further alleges that Omole was detained for more than four days before subsequent court proceedings and his eventual release on bail. He faced criminal allegations involving firearms, ammunition, drugs, and assaults against police officers.
The prosecution case was subsequently weakened after the complainant and a prosecution witness, submitted a sworn affidavit on March 9 seeking to withdraw his complaint and earlier statements.
The court acquitted Omole on all counts on October 16, 2026. It also ordered the immediate return of the party’s property held by police, according to the Central Organizing Committee.
The acquittal brings the criminal proceedings against Omole to an end, but the party says it will continue pursuing accountability for the events surrounding his arrest and detention.
In its statement, CPM-K called for an independent investigation into the alleged abduction and torture, as well as the conduct of the police officers involved.
The party also demanded full compliance with the court order to return its seized property and called for an end to what it describes as the criminalization of communist and revolutionary political activity.
“The court has acquitted our General Secretary. The state must now answer for what was done to him,” the statement declared.
CPM-K argued that the case should be understood within the broader political and economic conditions confronting Kenya, accusing the government of using state institutions to intimidate those organizing workers, poor peasants, students, and other oppressed groups.
The party said the acquittal would not end its political activities or its demands for accountability. Instead, it called on its supporters and international communist and workers’ organizations to intensify solidarity efforts and defend democratic freedoms.
Omole has faced threats and arrests before. In April 2025, a car carrying him and other activists was shot at. In September 2024, he was arrested during a wider crackdown on leftist activists. He also survived an assassination attempt on his life while at his residence last year.
Switzerland says patient is wife of Swiss diplomat and believed to have contracted virus while travelling in Uganda
Health officials across Africa are racing to determine how Nigeria’s first Ebola patient in more than a decade became infected, amid fears the outbreak could spread further after reaching a fourth African country.
The Swiss foreign ministry said on Friday the patient in Nigeria, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the outbreak was first detected in mid-May before spreading to Uganda, Kenya and now Nigeria. The woman was believed to have contracted Ebola while travelling with her husband in Uganda, the ministry added.
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© Photograph: Sodiq Adelakun/Reuters
© Photograph: Sodiq Adelakun/Reuters
© Photograph: Sodiq Adelakun/Reuters
On October 9, fighters from two jihadist groups clashed near Gonadaouri, in Burkina Faso’s Oudalan province, not far from the Malian border. One side belonged to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate. The other belonged to the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), known until 2022 as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. The two […]
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© Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
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