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An election victory that widens the North-South gap

Western governments accept the regime’s rigged victory in exchange for what they hope will be a Southern referendum

Long before voting started on 11 April, it was clear that the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in Khartoum would maintain its iron grip on power a...

SUDAN

Election-rigging guide book

Interested governments may turn a deaf ear but the opposition is making sure no one, at home or abroad, can credibly cla...

SUDAN

A moral dilemma

There was no election boycott in Darfur by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, Ibrahim Agboola Gambari told Jimmy Ca...

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THE INSIDE VIEW

The announcement this week by the Maradona of Nigerian politics – General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (aka IBB) – that he will stand as presidential candidate next year for whichever of the 51 political parties that will have him takes us back to the future. It comes just as Acting President Gooduck Jonathan tries to push through critical electoral reforms. While some Nigerians are awed by IBB’s name and reputation for political cunning, others dismiss him as the architect of the anulling of the presidential election won by Moshood Abiola in 1993 and the ensuing damage to the political fabric. Such are IBB’s fabled powers that Nigeria’s plentiful conspiracy theorists claim to see his hand in the coming to power of his former rival Gen. Sani Abacha, Abacha’s demise in June 1998 and that of Abiola a week later. To make headway, IBB will have to explain plausibly how and why the 1993 election was annulled and the source of his equally fabled personal wealth. A coalition of activists in Lagos led by veteran lawyer Femi Falana wants to help: they have filed a petition calling on the new Attorney General to prosecute IBB for his failure to account for the presumed US$12.5 billion oil windfall earnings during the Gulf War in 1991. Falana says that a report by the late economist Pius Okigbo showed that the extra-budgetary payments system set up to manage the extra funds was under the direct control of the presidency amid evidence of a huge misappropriation of funds.

SOUTH AFRICA

In a league of his own

This week, President Jacob Zuma has hard choices to make about Julius Malema, the vociferous leader of the African National Congress Youth League. Malema has several times publicly contradicted the government on local and foreign policy matters and has now publicly fallen out with Zuma and the party leadership. Yet Zuma’s ambition to secure a second term as ANC President is premised on strong support from ANCYL. Now he may have to face down Malema publicly and oust him from the leadership, probably with support from other party structures and the wider electorate.

SOUTH AFRICA

Live by the sword

The timing could hardly have been worse. Only two months before South Africa hosts the football World Cup, incidents involving politicians at opposite ends of the political spectrum have again put the spotlight on race relations. On 3 April came the gruesome murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche. Rumours surround the killing. He was the founder of the racially supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement, AWB). Meanwhile, the leader of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), Julius Malema, was publicly defying the governing ANC, resuscitating an old ‘struggle song’ that calls for the killing of Boers, meaning white farmers.

CONGO-KINSHASA | ANALYSIS

Le scandale pétrolier

President Joseph Kabila is blocking exploration contracts that were granted several years ago and the lack of his approval has left several companies hanging on in Kinshasa, hoping he will sign soon. He may be getting ready to. A new oil code, which is being debated in the National Assembly, would open up blocks freshly apportioned in Lake Tanganyika and gas blocks in Lake Kivu for bids in a new licensing round expected this month. Congo has lagged behind its neighbour Uganda, with which it shares Lake Albert, and that is one reason why it is preparing to take on oil exploration in earnest.

CONGO-KINSHASA

Contention and contenders

In the Albertine Graben (Lake Albert, Lake Edward and land in between and around), the rivalry is international.

CONGO-KINSHASA

Contractual confusion

The disputes about Congo-Kinshasa’s oil concessions, licences, claims and terms have grown so tangled that, we hear, President Joseph Kabila may ask Uganda for help with a review. There were armed clashes between the two countries’ forces in 2007 over their rival claims to oil-bearing areas of Lake Albert and its islands. Amid the ensuing rapprochement, the Permanent Secretary of the Ugandan Ministry of Energy, Fred Kabagambe-Kaliisa, who led negotiations about his own country’s agreements with investors, suggested to Congolese officials that they could get better terms.

ETHIOPIA

Looking for a landslide

The government is determined to win by a landslide in the 23 May elections, to make up for the question marks over those of 2005 (AC Vol 46 No 11). The signs are that it will succeed, through bluster, bludgeon and a sense – in the towns, at least – that the economy is beginning to take off. Foreign supporters of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime in Washington and London are embarrassed by its strictures on the opposition parties and other vestiges of political pluralism. Yet they strongly support the government’s international posture, especially its hard line against Al Shabaab and other Islamists in Somalia (AC Vol 51 No 1).

NIGERIA

A government in a hurry

The mixture of military officers, bankers and feisty female politicians in Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s new cabinet has just over a year to make an impact in five key areas. These are electricity supply, accountability in economic management and financial sector reform, establishing a competent and independent electoral authority, passing wide-ranging reforms in the oil and gas industry, and consolidating peace in the Niger Delta.

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THE INSIDE VIEW

NIGERIA

The Goodluck cabinet

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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.