The quiet, behind-the-scenes preparations for Cote d’Ivoire’s next presidential election in 2020 were given a jolt this week by a man many expected would play only a supporting role in the process. In an interview published Sunday by the magazine Jeune Afrique, President Alassane Ouattara, who is nearing the end of his second term, said the West African nation’s new constitution would enable him to run twice more, in 2020 and again in 2025. Cote d’Ivoire limits presidents to two terms, and Ouattara had previously said numerous times that he would abide by the restriction. But by claiming that the [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. For well over a year, activists have been buzzing about the potential for a new tribunal in the Central African Republic to foster a tradition of domestic accountability and deter fighting of the sort that has rocked the chronically unstable nation since 2012. The court’s prosecutor, the Congolese military magistrate Toussaint Muntazini Mukimapa, arrived in the country in February 2017, and hopes were high that he would be able to move fast in building cases. Yet as recently as [...]
LOME, Togo—A pediatric inpatient ward in the Sylvanus Olimpio University Teaching Hospital of Lome, the capital of Togo, sat vacant for much of February. The water had stopped running, and staff were short several supplies: a pair of scissors, a rolling cart, a blood pressure cuff to fit children’s arms. Nurses packed patients into a separate ward, where they could be prepared for discharge before hospital staff went on strike again. The smallest patients lay three to a bed, their mothers waiting on makeshift stools for a doctor. The more desperate wandered the complex in search of help. A woman [...]
