This week French president Nicholas Sarkozy paid what was billed as a 'working visit' to Kigali. It was the first of its kind for a French president in almost two decades. Given the history of tensions between the two countries,many analysts were interested to see what would come out of the meeting between Sarkozy and Kagame.Would Sarkozy apologize for French role in the Rwandan genocide? Why is France all of a sudden interested in the region? Philip Gourevitch summed the visit thus-- 'French statesmen are not in the habit of travelling to small African countries that they used to run as puppet regimes to eat fistfuls of crow. But that is precisely what Sarkozy did last week when he stood beside Kagame in Kigali and declared that France had made mistakes during the genocide, and had to reckon with them. Afterwards, commentators made much of the fact that Sarkozy had not issued a full apology. But in a country whose history is still bloodily contested, Sarkozy’s frank acknowledgment of the truth of his former antagonist’s reality sent an unmistakable message. Without France’s cover, the pretense that Rwanda’s genocide is an open question is stripped barer than ever."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/03/the-arrest-of-madame-agathe.html#ixzz0h88namCP

Rama Isibo a political analyst and columnist based in Kigali found the entire spectacle of French flags flying in Kigali 'rather peculiar'. Below is an exerpt of our chat after Sarkozy left Kigali.

Even though malaria is both curable and preventable,each year it takes the lives of thousands of people in Africa. So many health experts say that there is a need to change malaria fighting strategies especially in areas of high transmission. In Uganda Dr Dick Stockley has been practicing medicine for over 30 years. He says that the main problem in dealing with malaria has been in the diagnosis. Many people come to him with a fever and headache claiming to suffer from malaria. He says that this 'default' mindset to think that everything that ails them is malaria,makes it hard to come up with the correct statistics on the disease. But this does not end with the patients only,the health workers are also prone to thinking that whoever comes to them with a headache and fever has malaria....
Listen to more of the interview below!

Much of the debate about the growing gap between rich and poor in Africa focuses on issues like development, the cost of living, education etc. But in our analysis of the existing information and research on the topic demonstrates that the root cause of poverty and income disparity is linked to the presence or absence of a strong family unit comprising of both parents. Studies show that broken families earn less and experience lower levels of educational achievement. Worse, they pass the prospect of meager incomes and family instability on to their children, ensuring a continuing if not expanding cycle of economic distress.So on Upfront this week,we discussed the effects of growing up in a broken family.It is true that traditionally in many African societies, divorce is viewed as negative, an aberration from the "normal" two-parent family structure. That possibly explains why there are fewer divorces in many rural communities. The opposite is true for many urban African families where culture plays a lesser role in marriage. On the show we talked about some of the dynamics of a broken home. For starters,the lowered socio-economic circumstances of many families following divorce--men are the main income earners even though women often play the primary caretaker roles. In most cases women end up with the custody of the the children end up with the mother--whose income is essentially cut in half or completely taken away by the departing husband. So less financial leverage for a struggling mother with her kids means: less advantaged school, and possibly decreased availability of access to parents due to the strains of balancing work, home, and child care responsibilities.All this ends up affecting the growth of children and manifests itself in the struggles of every child as they transition to adults.

Listen to the show above.