In 2015, Cote d’Ivoire’s president, Alassane Ouattara, coasted to re-election, scoring a landslide win over a divided opposition. In 2016, he basked in Cote d’Ivoire’s designation by the International Monetary Fund as Africa’s fastest-growing economy. That year also saw the adoption of a new constitution that Ouattara hoped would help the country definitively turn the page on a prolonged era of crisis and conflict. This year, by contrast, is proving to be much more difficult. Already, 2017 has brought a series of mutinies by the security forces as well as a large-scale strike in the public sector. All the while, [...]
In December 2016, the people of Gambia elected an opposition presidential candidate for the first time in the country’s history. The outcome caught virtually everyone by surprise, including the incumbent, Yahya Jammeh, who had brutally ruled the small West African nation as a veritable mafia state for more than two decades. Despite initially conceding defeat on national television, Jammeh reversed his position a few days later, declaring the election null and void after claiming he had personally discovered “voting irregularities” in the final results. Jammeh’s attempt to defy the will of the Gambian people sparked a two-month-long crisis, provoking an [...]
On Thursday, more than two dozen ministers from the government of former President Blaise Compaore appeared in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, for the opening of a trial over the events that precipitated their ouster two and a half years ago. Though Compaore’s legal team successfully obtained a one-week postponement, Burkinabe got to see their once-untouchable leadership answering to a court that could potentially hold them accountable for at least some of the crimes committed by the old regime. The case is no doubt symbolically important for a country that endured nearly three decades of Compaore’s inefficient and corrupt rule, followed [...]
