West Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Malawi’s opposition alliance is claiming victory for its candidate, Lazarus Chakwera, in the country’s unprecedented rerun of last year’s presidential election. The electoral commission has released only a partial selection of official results, but state television reported Thursday that Chakwera is leading incumbent President Peter Mutharika nationwide with nearly 60 percent of the vote. If Chakwera’s win is confirmed, it would be historic, marking the first time in sub-Saharan Africa that an opposition party has democratically taken power after an election was […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Kenya won a surprisingly contentious race for a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council, defeating Djibouti in a run-off vote Thursday. Djibouti’s loss was an unlikely blow to China, which appeared to have encouraged Djibouti’s unprecedented candidacy in order to increase its influence on the Security Council. Africa is guaranteed three of the council’s 10 elected seats, which rotate every two years and supplement the five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. African countries […]

France announced earlier this month that its armed forces had killed Abdelmalek Droukdel, the emir of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, during a June 3 military operation in northern Mali. The operation, carried out by French troops with the help of intelligence and surveillance aircraft provided by the United States, represents a rare, quantifiable victory for France and its counterterrorism partners in the region as they struggle to contain a bloody insurgency by jihadist groups. A veteran of Algeria’s brutal civil war in the 1990s, Droukdel’s rise and fall in many ways mirrors the fortunes of the organization […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Liberia is preparing to lift the state of emergency that has been in place since April to curb the spread of the coronavirus, as President George Weah declared that the outbreak had been sufficiently contained. But the pandemic has raised troubling questions about freedom of the press in the country, with senior members of Weah’s administration publicly threatening journalists at its onset. “Press freedom in Liberia has taken a nosedive,” James Harding Giahyue, a Liberian journalist and former colleague who reports for both local and domestic media, told me recently. In April, Liberia’s solicitor general, Sayma Syrenius Cephus, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Burundi’s outgoing president, Pierre Nkurunziza, who took power in 2005 promising to unify a country emerging from civil war, only to oversee an increasingly brutal crackdown against his regime’s opponents, died suddenly Monday at the age of 55. Officials said he suffered a heart attack, but there is speculation he may have died of complications from COVID-19 after he spent months downplaying the risk of the coronavirus. Nkurunziza’s death ahead of the August inauguration of his hand-picked successor has officials in Burundi […]

In early May, a high-speed boat pulled alongside the Rio Mitong, a Panama-flagged cargo vessel, just off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. Using ladders to board the ship, a group of assailants kidnapped two crew members, taking them back to the shore, where they subsequently held them for ransom. Another ship was reportedly attacked that same night, elsewhere in the Gulf of Guinea. These attacks are just two among many recent incidents in this vast and strategically significant body of water, where armed robbery, piracy and kidnappings at sea have escalated in recent years. Though piracy overall has decreased globally, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The president of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina, was set to sail through his August reelection and secure a second term running the multilateral lender. Now his future is less clear after the United States—the institution’s second-largest shareholder—rejected the findings of an inquiry that exonerated Adesina of allegations of corruption and favoritism. The bank’s Board of Governors has now agreed to launch its own independent investigation. Beyond raising questions about Adesina’s future, the new investigation creates turmoil at a time when […]