News stories about civil liberties in Africa seems to come along like buses: grouped together in waves, and very bad when they hit you. From only a little perusing of the Internet, here’s the Top Five Bad News Stories from Africa.

5) Mozambican archbishop alleges condoms are a tool of genocide - The head of the Roman Catholic Church in Mozambique has attacked the use of condoms, asserting that they, and the anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS, are deliberately infected with HIV “in order to finish quickly the African people”. He alleges that this condoms have replaced colonialism as whitey’s way of keeping the African man down.

At the moment, over 16% of Mozambicans are infected with HIV, making it one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. That 16%, over 3m people, are only kept alive by the production of anti-retrovirals, and the pandemic is only kept in check by the use of appropriate contraception.

The anti-retroviral drugs and condoms are distributed for free, or at heavily discounted rates, by Westerners that feel it is the White Man’s Burden to cure Africa of its maladies. If the African leaders think we’re trying to kill them, they can stop helping themselves fight the pandemic, and they can see how long it is before they all drop dead.

4) Nigerian corruption plumbs new depths - Nigeria’s parliament has reported that $5m has been acquired by the new Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives illegally. Patricia Etteh, the first female Speaker, is accused of taking that money in bribes from companies tendering offers for government contracts. And it’s understandable that she’s suspected. In the six months since taking up the position, Etteh has bought twelve cars and rebuilt her house. She hasn’t tried to explain where she got the money for all that.

More than anything, the one factor that cripples Africa’s development is corruption, and no country in Africa is worse-affected than Nigeria. Since 1960, $220bn of Nigeria’s fabulous oil wealth has been stolen by politicians, leaving tens of millions of Nigerians destitute as victims of state thievery. Nigeria was right to renew its anti-corruption drive, but, if the old habits displayed by Patricia Etteh die hard, there can be no progress towards a better future.

3) Kenyan Church gets homophobic and belligerent - Kenya’s branch of the Anglican church has rejected moves by the US Episcopal Church to compromise over the ordination of gay priests. “That word ‘halt’ is not enough,” said Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi. Kenya has led the African churches in the belligerent line taken over the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain, amongst others, Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003.

This indicates the moral mess that most African authority figures, particularly churches, are in. Their American brothers and sisters offered to cease ordaining gay priests - permanently and totally - and it was rejected out of hand by the Kenyans. The Americans were conciliatory in pandering to the Kenyan church’s bigotry and hatred. The Episcopal Church’s reward is not only a slap in the face from the Kenyan archbishop, but a loss of its own liberal common sense of which it was once proud. Now, no member of the Anglican Communion can truly claim to represent compassion.

2) Zimbabwean government steals white farmers’ land. Again - The Zimbabwean ‘parliament’ has rubber-stamped Robert Mugabe’s plans to expropriate businesses owned by Zimbabwean civilians (colloquially known as ‘whites’) and give them to his cronies (colloquially known as ‘freedom fighters’).

Just as Zimbabwe is suffering from one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world today, Zimbabwe has now decided to take farms from farmers, who know how to grow crops, and give it to militiamen, who know only how to kill white farmers.

1) Four African countries teeter on the edge of war - Two old wounds have reopened across Africa. Soldiers from DR Congo and Uganda have exchanged fire across the border, the dispute over led to the last Congolese war (known as “Africa’s Great War”) and left 3m dead. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea and Ethiopia are continuing to exchange accusations that they breached the terms of the peace treaty that ended a decade of intermittent war in the 1990s.

The two crises, the likes of which tend to be regular occurrences in the respective regions at the best of times, have come about because the countries’ governments have been pig-headed to the point of not caring about their own people.

The fight in central Africa is over oil rights: an issue that shouldn’t matter to the state, as the oil rightfully belongs to the company that discovers it, not the government that oppresses the local inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Eritrea-Ethiopia ding-dong is over good old-fashioned national pride: Ethiopia’s government thinks Eritreans should sing a different national anthem, whilst Eritreans are quite happy singing their own and think it’s so good they want a few Ethiopians to sing it, too. These four governments clearly think that shooting foreigners makes their people happier than letting them get on with their lives.

The problems that affect Africa are simple and recurring ones: intolerance and bigotry, oppression and belligerence, corruption and theft. They are underpinned by an ignorance and anti-intellectualism that belittles opponents and makes political debate curt and moot. Lots of problems blight Africa, but these are the most important. They are of their own making, and they are easily remediable.

PS This ain’t gonna become a recurring feature. Piss off.

Inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to appear at speak at a top American university was never going to go down well. Inviting him to speak at Columbia University, in New York City, was the height of stupidity.

That’s the same New York City that counts amongst its inhabitants almost two million Jews that Ahmadinejad wants to wipe off the map, and was the target for the 9/11 terror attacks that Ahmadinejad has asserted was perpetrated by the US government.

But, just to make sure he goes home even more unpopular than he arrived, he pushed the boat out that extra bit further. Other than decadent Americans and conspiratorial Jews, I wonder who else the Iranian President hates. Oh, yeah…

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who told you that we have it.

The evil tyrannical dictator doth protest too much. Or, if you’re more Simpsons than Shakespeare: “Nice man. I wonder if he’s gay.”

It came as a response to a question regarding the execution of Iranians - in total, 200 this year alone - amongst whom were homosexuals, who may or may not (or, put another way, were) executed for being gay.

Now, I don’t know who the heck taught young Mahmoud to debate in school, but he (or she, but it’s Iran, so he, otherwise she’d be stoned to death) should have told him never to accept the premise of an opposing argument. So, Mahmoud, strapped to argue that homosexuals aren’t stoned to death for the way they’re born, decided to attack the premise: by arguing that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Iran.

Yeah, I’m sure the decadent Western gay epidemic hasn’t spread to Iran. After so fully failing to understand history and geography, Ahmadinejad has decided that he would be even cooler if he flunked science, too. Oh, wait, that already happened. Boy, little Mahmoud must have been the coolest kid in the playground.

Having a world leaders conference at Columbia was a good idea. The best and most important universities in the world - a group to which UCL belongs - deserve to host the best and most important speakers. Sadly, Ahmadinejad was clearly not the best speaker, nor would he be particularly important were it not for the fact he’s making nuclear bombs behind the bike shed.

Rewarding him for his crimes, and those of his predecessors and compatriots, by giving his ideas the oxygen of publicity, is not acceptable. Except, of course, when his ideas are so f***ing stupid, that we can laugh at them, and hope the oxygen just allows that kid to burn up before he grows up to do something really stupid. Oh…

Libertarians occupy an awkward position in the political landscape. A lot of my friends try to pass themselves off as libertarians, bragging about their belief in low taxation, only to trail off and leave an unnerving silence when it comes to social issues. However, to be a libertarian, one must unite both creeds, under the one intellectually consistent ideology. One must believe that not only does the state not have any role to play in the boardroom, but in the bedroom, too.

On 26 August 1969, the Canadian Criminal Law Amendment Act came into effect, changing forever how much the Canadian state would involve itself in affairs in the bedroom. It decriminalised homosexuality, the contraceptive pill, and abortion. So great an impact did it have that, when passing through the House of Commons, it was known as the ‘Omnibus Bill’, although still bearing the more dour name of Bill C-150.

The bill was proposed by Pierre Trudeau in 1967. Trudeau was then the Justice Minister, and responsible for sweeping away all the outdated and outmoded laws of state. In this capacity, he made it quite clear that laws that impinged upon sexual rights would be first to go, declaring, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” As it happens, Trudeau was elected leader of the Liberal Party, and therefore Prime Minister, at the marathon 1968 party convention, allowing him to get his bill passed and to dominate Canadian politics for the next two decades.

To claim that Trudeau as a libertarian idol would be just as false as my conservative friends to claim their own libertarian credentials. Trudeau never understood economic liberalism, and, as time went on, his sence of righteous justice, his intolerance of intolerance, declined. In 1970, he even declared war on Canada (really, he did). However, thanks to his force of character, on this day 38 years ago, the face of Canada changed, and the frontiers of the state rolled back, so that they could never threaten the bedroom again.