East Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. After months of protests and more than a dozen deaths, the situation in Togo is beginning to draw more attention, and public comment, from other heads of state in West Africa. Since August, opposition leaders in Togo have organized large-scale anti-government protests in cities throughout the country, calling for reforms and the departure of President Faure Gnassingbe. The Gnassingbe family has been in power for half a century, with Eyadema Gnassingbe ruling for 38 years before dying in office […]

Long before a demonstration against South Sudan’s president forced Nikki Haley to evacuate a displaced persons camp in Juba on Wednesday, it was a safe bet that much of the coverage generated by her first trip to Africa as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. would concern the civil war in that country—with some possible competition from her stop in the Democratic Republic of Congo. President Donald Trump specifically mentioned both countries when he announced in September that he planned to send Haley to the continent. Haley has been openly critical of the South Sudanese and Congolese presidents for months, increasing […]

On Oct. 14, a huge truck bombing in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, killed at least 350 people, the deadliest act of terrorism in the country’s history. The manner and scale of the attack reveal much about the security situation in Somalia and the ongoing war against the Islamist militant group al-Shabab. In an email interview, Yasin Ahmed Ismail, who leads GLAFPOL, a research, analysis and consultancy group operating in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, explains the faults in Somalia’s security system, the government’s ongoing campaign against al-Shabab, and how the Trump administration’s intensified engagement in Somalia could change things […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. “I did not do anything that can make me regret.” That was South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, defending his leadership of the world’s youngest nation in a rare interview with The Washington Post published over the weekend. Most people, though, would dispute Kiir’s claim that he has not been a main driver of the country’s civil war, which began in 2013 with fighting between factions loyal to Kiir and the former vice president, Riek Machar. Kiir’s soldiers have been […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The target for elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo only seems to get further away. This week, the country’s national election commission issued a statement saying it would be unable to organize a vote before April 2019—nearly two and a half years after the expiration of President Joseph Kabila’s mandate. Congo’s opposition and the donor community were expected to lodge strong protests to the new timeline, which would represent a brazen violation of a political accord reached at […]

Kenya’s long-running political drama is sinking deeper into crisis, testing the outermost limits of the country’s election laws. Its highest court seemed at first to have struck a rare victory for judicial independence with its declaration that August’s presidential election, which gave a second term to President Uhuru Kenyatta, was “invalid, null and void,” necessitating a rerun. But as the weeks have passed, the Supreme Court ruling looks more like a mixed blessing that guaranteed a prolonged political morass. The new vote was supposed to take place before the end of October, but very few of the underlying problems identified […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. An ambush in Niger that killed three U.S. Army Special Forces and five Nigerien soldiers this week focused attention on the U.S. military’s presence in West Africa, a region typically seen as France’s domain. The attack, which marked the first time U.S. troops were killed by a militant group in Niger, occurred Wednesday about 120 miles north of Niamey, the capital, near the border with Mali. It was not clear if the Americans were specifically targeted. The International Crisis […]

KAMPALA, Uganda—Not long after he took office in 1986, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, had a singular diagnosis for his continent’s ills. “The problem of Africa in general, and Uganda in particular, is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power,” he claimed in a book titled, appropriately enough, “What Is Africa’s Problem?” But now the former guerilla fighter seems to have changed his mind. Uganda is currently moving full steam ahead with an unpopular constitutional amendment that will effectively guarantee the 73-year-old Museveni the ability to remain in office for the rest of his life, by lifting […]

The Kenyan Supreme Court’s ruling that nullified the results of August’s presidential election was a watershed moment for the African continent. Kenya became the first African country to have its election results invalidated and a fresh election ordered by its highest court. Citing widespread “irregularities” in ballot counting, the unreliability of electronic voting machines and the absence of transparency at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, or IEBC, which oversaw the vote, the court declared that “[if] candidates do not respect the rule of law; if the average citizen, political parties and even candidates themselves do not perceive them as […]