Africa Archive

Throughout history, one way the world has learned about severe political and humanitarian crises in remote locations is from unexpectedly large flows of refugees. When massive numbers of people decide to take enormous risks to escape the country of their birth, leaving their possessions and their loved ones behind, it is a sign of crisis—and often a portent of worse things to come. That’s why the recent tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands of would-be refugees have drowned seeking to reach Europe’s shores, are calling urgent attention to a seldom-mentioned crisis: the quiet catastrophe in Eritrea. The most shocking […]

I carry a plastic chair over to sit with Pastor Samuel Tewogbola outside his house in the southern Nigerian town of Igarra. The family goat wanders past us, nosing the earth. It’s November 2014, and I am doing preliminary research for a future book. Tewogbola is a fire-and-brimstone preacher—43 years in a hard-line Pentecostal church. When I arrived with my friend Esther, his daughter, he made us all kneel in his doorway while he intoned thanks to Jesus for our safe journey. We’re philosophizing, talking about what makes up good human character, and about money—how money is used to buy […]

On the morning of Oct. 30, 2014, throngs of protesters overwhelmed security forces in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, and burned the National Assembly building, physically preventing deputies from voting to further extend President Blaise Compaore’s tenure. That “popular insurrection,” as almost everyone in Burkina Faso now calls it, continued into the next day, driving the authoritarian president out of the country after 27 years in power. Just over five months later, on April 7, under an interim government and with the assembly building still out of use, a new set of parliamentary deputies, including many former protesters, met in temporary […]

The average European leader probably lacks the number of brain cells required to process the sheer amount of bad news he or she currently receives on a daily basis. This is not because they are stupid, but because there is so much dire news to digest. In the past two weeks, over 1,000 migrants have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean; there has been fresh fighting in Ukraine; and the Greek government has careened toward total bankruptcy. The European Union has responded to this torrent of crises with a mixture of big talk, half-measures and fraying tempers. At a summit […]

Last week, a wave of xenophobic violence struck two of South Africa’s largest cities, Johannesburg and Durban. Mobs torched foreign-owned shops and killed seven people in the country’s worst attacks against foreigners since 2008, when over 60 people were killed in similar incidents. The localized unrest quickly became a regional crisis, as multiple African governments issued angry statements on behalf of their citizens, millions of whom have migrated to South Africa in search of economic opportunity since the end of apartheid. South African President Jacob Zuma has been scrambling to respond; so far he has deployed the army to quell […]

Forty years after its independence from Portugal and 13 years since the end of the civil war that immediately followed, Angola has made great progress in consolidating peace and stability, but continues to face many challenges. Foremost among them is managing an economic crisis, exacerbated by staggering inequality, while avoiding the potential social and political fallout it could generate. The country’s political landscape could also prove perilous: The ruling party, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), faces both a determined opposition and a potential internal battle over who will succeed longtime President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The […]

Earlier this month, Kenya suspended the licenses of 13 Somali money transfer agencies operating in Nairobi in a bid to limit funding to al-Shabab militants. In an email interview, Sarah Hearn, an associate director and senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, discussed the role of remittances in Somalia’s economy. WPR: How important are remittances for Somalia’s economy? Sarah Hearn: Remittances, described as Somalia’s lifeline, are the largest source of family support and development finance in the country. There are no official remittance figures, but NGOs have estimated that migrants send up to $1.3 billion per year […]

The past two years have been deeply unsettling ones for South Africa’s economy, defined by sluggish growth rates, power shortages, service delivery protests and endemic labor unrest. International ratings agencies are getting wary and could eventually downgrade the country’s sovereign credit rating. President Jacob Zuma’s government is currently failing to satisfy any of the key constituencies with a material stake in its economic policy: its own support base, an increasingly fragmented labor movement and investors at home and abroad. Like other emerging markets around the world, including the once-solid BRICS, South Africa’s economy is in a sea of trouble. Since […]

The United Nations is an organization that is willing to learn from failure. This is fortunate, because it fails quite a lot. The U.N. has absorbed the lessons of previous catastrophes, such as the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, and now deploys peacekeepers far more professionally than in that nightmarish era. In the near future, it will face a reckoning over more recent failures, as its efforts to bring peace to countries destabilized by the Arab revolutions—most notably in Syria but also in Libya, Yemen and Mali—have veered off course, costing thousands of lives in the […]

On March 30, Joan Kagezi, a senior Ugandan prosecutor, was assassinated in front of her children while on her way home from the grocery store in a Kampala suburb. Kagezi was one of the key prosecutors in the trial of 13 suspected members of the Somali militant group al-Shabab accused of perpetrating the July 2010 bombings in Kampala that killed 76 people watching a World Cup game. The start of the Kampala trial in the middle of March was a landmark in Uganda’s fight against terrorism. But now the Directorate of Public Prosecutions has lost one of its stars. With […]

Clashes between the opposition and security forces continued for a second day in Guinea’s capital. In an email interview, Mohamed Saliou Camara, a professor of history and international relations at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, discussed domestic politics in Guinea. WPR: What have been the major issues of contention between the government and the opposition during Guinea’s political transition back to democracy, and where do they stand in the run-up to this year’s presidential election? Mohamed Saliou Camara: Two of the major issues of contention between President Alpha Conde’s government and the opposition are national dialogue and political inclusion. Guinea returned to […]

Gabon hardly ever makes headlines outside of the French-language press, so it’s little surprise that the storm brewing over this small, oil-rich country on the west coast of Central Africa for the past few months has received little attention. Yet all indicators point to political turbulence ahead in the run-up to Gabon’s next presidential election, which is scheduled for mid-2016, given a series of protests and strikes, including a teachers’ union strike that has paralyzed Gabon’s education system since February. The growing social unrest has affected Gabon’s economy, with its health, petroleum and telecommunications sectors all feeling the impact; in […]

After a six-week election delay in February, Nigerians went to the polls last weekend. To the surprise of many, they voted out an incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, who faced growing criticism for failing to address corruption, poverty and the threat of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. Jonathan was defeated by 72-year-old Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general who led a successful military coup in 1983 and, more recently, was runner-up in the previous three presidential elections. Buhari’s decisive victory, which relied on substantial support from northern and southwestern Nigeria, was the first electoral defeat of an incumbent president in Nigerian […]

On March 11, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian unveiled an updated version of the Military Programming Law for 2014-2019, a five-year blueprint for the country’s force structure and defense budget that will be debated in Parliament in June. As part of the revised law, previous plans to reduce the armed forces have been walked back, with the government announcing new investment to meet persistent threats at home and abroad. However, in a climate of stagnant economic growth and austerity-driven fiscal constraints, doubts persist about how sustainable this approach is. Le Drian’s announcements are a direct consequence of the Charlie […]

In late February, the United States signed a trade deal with the East African Community (EAC), the bloc of five countries around Africa’s Great Lakes. In an email interview, Nora Carina Dihel, a senior trade economist at the World Bank, discussed U.S. trade with the EAC and the rest of Africa. WPR: What is covered by the recent U.S. trade deal with the EAC, and what impact is it likely to have on the economies of the EAC? Nora Carina Dihel: The new cooperation agreement signed by trade ministers from the five EAC countries—Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda—and the […]