This week’s Palava Praise goes to Leymah Gbowee, Liberia’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate and living proof that women’s organizing is not decorative work. The Nobel Committee recognized Gbowee for her nonviolent leadership through the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a movement that helped push Liberia toward the 2003 peace agreement and later helped mobilize women’s participation in the 2005 elections. Today, she continues that work as co-founder and executive director of the Women, Peace and Security Network Africa. As March fills up with the usual speeches about women’s rights, Gbowee offers a more demanding lesson about the power of matriarchy. Peace does not come because power suddenly grows a conscience. It comes because ordinary women organize, persist, and force history to move. We thank Gbowee for her commitment to change, especially in Liberia. 

This week, Liberia’s House of Representatives paused a proposal that would have made it easier for the President to remove Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission commissioners without Senate approval. The Senate also summoned Justice Minister Oswald Tweh over concerns that recent legal actions by the Ministry of Justice may have crossed into legislative territory. A country does not fight corruption by weakening the independence of the bodies meant to confront it. Liberia’s administrative body continues to avoid accountability in this regard. 

Zambia pushed back on a U.S. health funding deal after concerns that its terms did not fully protect national interests. The draft reviewed by Reuters linked continued funding to a separate bilateral compact that sources tied to mining collaboration, while health advocates also warned about one-way data-sharing risks. At the continental level, Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya said there are “huge concerns” about data and pathogen-sharing terms in similar U.S. health deals, and Zimbabwe has already withdrawn from its own negotiations over what it described as an unequal exchange. 

A Kenyan intelligence report presented to lawmakers says that more than 1,000 Kenyans have been recruited to fight for Russia in Ukraine. Reuters reported that recruiters allegedly targeted former soldiers, police officers, and unemployed people with promises of high-paying jobs; as of February, 89 Kenyans were on the Ukrainian frontline, 39 had been hospitalized, and 28 were missing in action. AP reported that families marched in Nairobi this week demanding accountability, prosecution of those involved, and the return of their loved ones. A government that cannot protect its citizens from being deceived into colonial combat is being confronted not only with a diplomatic crisis, but with the moral consequences of economic abandonment at home.

South Africa is mourning anti-apartheid veteran Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota.

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