West Africa

NIGERIA: Reform and unrest The Supreme Court’s validation of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s contentious 2007 election victory will do little to stabilise Nigeria’s fractious poli...

On the face of it, the speculation that China could take over US$50 billion worth of Nigeria's oil reserves currently licensed to Western oil majors is on the outer reaches of po...

Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania were singled out as key locations for drugs transhipments by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) report for 2008. Diplomatic ...

A difficult year lies ahead for Nigerians as the political class manoeuvres for advantage in the aftermath of the chaotically rigged elections of April 2007. Legal chicanery, polit...

Hopes are high that two of West Africa’s most war-devastated states – Liberia and Sierra Leone – will both see substantial turnarounds in 2008. Both governments have in place impre...

Malian President Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT) finally has something to show for his consistent performance as one of Japan's biggest proponents in Africa with the opening of t...

Mali is not the only Francophone West African country courted by Japan. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal was invited, along with the Presidents of Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, ...

Several countries have seen political progress with freer elections and freer newspapers. Many of the conflicts along the arc of crisis, which ran westwards from Abidjan towards Se...

From their heydays in Nigeria in the 1980s, Latin America's druglords are diversifying their business in Africa. Nigerian traders still play a key role: they are regarded as world ...

The new United States Africa Command (Africom) is not yet operational but the US Navy plans to put ships into the Gulf of Guinea before the formal start-up. A transition team in St...