By Gill Lusk
'We were blessed to have the State of Qatar!', declared the head of the Darfur Regional Authority (DRA) on 8 May in London. Not everyone says that, at a time when the Gulf emirate is rising up the international monitoring list for jihadist funding. Along ...
By Patrick Smith
The post-mortem on Kenya's 4 March election could prove as important as the vote itself. It is under way after Raila Odinga, presidential candidate for the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord), submitted a detailed petition to the Supreme Co...
By Patrick Smith
by Patrick Smith in Nairobi Questions about Kenya's election results four days after voting and the crash of electronic systems meant to provide safeguards against rigging are raising the political temperature. Opinion is divided between those who want th...
By Patrick Smith
BAMAKO: Mali and Libya were the only African states to surface in the three US presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In fact it was Romney who raised the spectre of the jihadist takeover of northern Mali, fresh from his lates...
By Gill Lusk
'Protests over Sudan austerity measures' say the headlines. Yes, people are indeed protesting about the government removing subsidies on fuel and sugar, two of the commodities that Sudanese hold most dear. And they are protesting when the government tells...
By Gill Lusk
Picture the scene. A score of motley officials, aid workers and journalists are seated around a table at Britain's Overseas Development Institute in London. At the head of the table sits Pa'gan Amum Okiech, Secretary General of South Sudan's governing pa...
By Patrick Smith
Life for those accused and convicted of war crimes got marginally worse last week. Thomas Lubanga, militia leader and recruiter of child soldiers in Congo-Kinshasa, faces the prospect of two decades in a cell in the Hague.Joseph Kony, the leader of Lord's...
By Patrick Smith
The elevation of dealmaker extraordinaire Katumba Mwanke to Congo-Kinshasa's Order of National Heroes, two days after he was killed in a plane crash in Bukavu on 12 February, prompts an unhappy comparison with the only other two recipients of the award: P...
By Patrick Smith
The shootings and bombings in Nigeria's northern commercial capital of Kano on 20 January are reckoned to have taken over 170 lives. They followed the established pattern of attacks in northern Nigeria over the past month: a surprise attack on police stat...
By Gill Lusk
Never has there been so much criticism of the Arab League by the international Arab media. Yet the League’s emergency meeting in Cairo on Sunday only boosted the numbers in its mission to monitor abuses in Syria, refusing to accept United Nations obse...