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Reluctantly to the election

The political stalemate in the coalition is blocking reforms and economic recovery and may force a snap election – if South Africa can’t forge a deal

The next revolution

The crisis at Telecel Zimbabwe points to the political and economic problems with the new indigenisation laws, which man...

RWANDA

FPR dissidents break cover

Some former allies of President Kagame lead a campaign against him as grenades explode in Kigali and dissidents are accu...

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

The combination of militia attacks in the Middle Belt, killing over 200 people, and bombs in the Niger Delta has given Acting President Goodluck Jonathan the pretext to assert his authority – despite his questionable constitutional position and the opposition of most of the 36 state governors. The sacking on 17 March of all the ministers appointed by ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua means the balance of power swings back in Jonathan’s direction. He started the process by removing the much excoriated Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa, then sacked National Security Advisor Abdullahi Sarki Mukhtar and is now reshaping the regime, helped by three veteran soldiers: Lieutenant General Theophilus Danjuma, who chairs Jonathan’s Advisory Council, the new National Security Advisor, Gen. Aliyu Mohammed Gusau, and former Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Owoye Andrew Azazi. The mass ministerial sacking may be a ploy to purge Yar’Adua’s placemen but reappoint committed reformers, such as Oil Minister Rilwanu Lukman and his Deputy, Odein Ajumogobia, and Finance Minister Mansur Mukhtar. It may also prompt another clash with the governors who have sided with Yar’Adua’s camp in recent weeks. It may be a risk worth taking, given the outbreak of political violence around the country. After clinging to Yar’Adua’s baba riga for months, the more ambitious politicians may now press for early elections, while they block attempts to reform the present corrupt system.

RWANDA

The President's would-be rivals

Lieutenant General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa has often been seen as a potential rival to President Paul Kagame. He enlisted among the Inkotanyi Tutsi exiles in Uganda who formed the Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR, Rwandan Patriotic Front), at first as a second lieutenant, rising to command the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) in time for the invaders’ triumph of 1994. Four years later, he was Army Chief of Staff and he was fierce: ‘We have the will, we will kill until they lose appetite for war,’ he told the BBC, speaking of the Hutus who had become rebels in exile in Congo-Kinshasa.

SOMALIA

More troops for Mogadishu

The Transitional Federal Government has a new component. On 15 March in Addis Ababa, the TFG signed an agreement with Ahlu Sunna wal Jama’a, the council (and militia) that administers Galgadud and other areas. It gets the right to five ministers, one minister of state, five assistant ministers, ten director generals and directors, three ambassadors and twelve other diplomatic posts, and the deputy commanders of the armed forces, police and security. ASWJ troops will become an integral part of the TFG army. A joint committee is to try to implement the agreement within a month.

SOMALIA

Whitehall strengthens Sharif

No one was left in any doubt about the purpose of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s four-day trip to Britain last week. He wanted, he told a 9 March audience at the Karimia Institute, political, economic, humanitarian, military and security support. This included money, training and continued acknowledgement that he was the voice of religious moderation. To stabilise Somalia, he told an 8 March meeting at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), ‘The only way is to strengthen the government – everything needs strengthening’. To audiences packed with officials of many kinds, he proved adept at appealing to the diplomatic urge to find someone to engage with.

UGANDA

The north makes its stand

A year ago, opposition politicians agreed to form a national alliance, the Inter-Party Organisation for Dialogue, to defeat incumbent President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, now in his 24th year in power. On paper, most oppositionists still support the idea but some candidates are rethinking strategy and may prefer to run on their own.

MOZAMBIQUE

Aid strike in Maputo

Diplomats and foreign aid organisations are due to meet in Maputo on 19 March to decide whether to call off what amounts to an aid strike against President Armando Guebuza’s government. It is the latest trial of strength between his hard-headed regime and the Western states vying for diplomatic influence.

AFRICA | UNITED STATES | EUROPE

US military calls up Europe

The United States Africa Command (Africom) wants help with its task of promoting stability and fighting terrorism on the continent and hopes to get it from the European Union. On 4 March, an Africom team from its base in Stuttgart travelled to Brussels to meet European ministers and staff of the European Commission Secretariat to discuss how to coordinate their programmes. Military cooperation has to involve arrangements for troops and hardware from individual EU member states (some formerly colonial ones but also others including Poland), backed sometimes by money from the EU’s Cooperation budget.

AFRICA | UNITED STATES | EUROPE

Military money

In budget-cutting Washington DC, European cooperation is welcome even if European budgets are a fraction of United States’ funds. The US government has cut its Africom budget to US$278 million this year, compared to $310 mn. in 2009. Africom has about 1,300 staff and oversees about 5% of US aid to Africa. Washington’s military operations in Africa remain tiny, less than 1% of its operations in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

NIGER

Confusion after the coup

The 18 February coup was almost surgical and was popular with the many people who wanted President Mamadou Tandja ousted, but the follow-up appears more improvised and chaotic (AC Vol 51 No 5). The group of Djerma officers (mainly colonels and captains) first had to contend with attempts by Tandja’s supporters to undermine the junta from within. General Ali Saidou, who was head of state in 1987-93, has also been drafted in to give the troops some wise words.

TOGO

Tarnished triumph

Opposition politicians say the results of the 6 March elections were fraudulent but show little stomach for confronting the heavily militarised regime in Lomé or elsewhere. France and would-be mediators in neighbouring Burkina Faso stayed quiet. The official results gave President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé 61%, Jean-Pierre Fabre of the Union des Forces de Changement (UFC) 34% and former transitional Prime Minister Yawovi Agboyibo’s Comité d’Action pour le Renouveau just 3% of the votes cast. Implausibly, these figures repeat the official numbers recorded after the 2005 elections.

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

TOGO

The men at the centre

* Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé, 44, won a second five-year term, on a platform of economic development and reform, with few details. He will be sworn in on 3 May, after the Constitutional Court (despite complaints) confirms the provisional results.

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Africa Confidential In The News

Reuters, 16 January 2012
UPDATE 1-Nigeria: will it fall apart or can it hold?
[Goodluck Jonathan is] "eerily calm considering we could be weeks away from a major confrontation," said Africa Confidential editor Patrick Smith. "The absolute failure ... to wheel on southerners and northerners at the same time to say this is a national crisis and we have to pull together, is striking."

BBC Newshour, 14 January 2012
Suicide bomb kills Basra pilgrims; elections in Taiwan; and special focus on Nigeria
Africa Confidential's editor Patrick Smith speaks to Julian Marshall in the special focus on Nigeria.

BBC Newsnight, 24 August 2011
Risk Islamists will move in to fill Libya power vacuum
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi claimed that if he was ousted from power Islamist radicals would seize control of Libya. Patrick Smith speaks to Newsnight's Robin Denselow about whether he is likely to be proven right or wrong.

BBC, 16 August 2011
Solomon Mujuru: Obituary of a Zimbabwean 'king-maker'
"He had all the mystique of a liberation war hero that has served him to present-day politics," Patrick Smith, editor of the London-based Africa Confidential magazine, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

TIME Magazine, 1 June 2011
Death, Prison or Exile: Gaddafi Is Out of Options
"My understanding is that they would be delighted if he did a duck," Smith says.