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A second term for Sirleaf

Old alliances and enmities are re-emerging as the leading candidates launch their campaigns for next year’s national elections

Beny’s railway coup

The colourful Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz has finalised two remarkable deals this year: he has sold 51% of his ir...

ANGOLA

Boom-bust all over again

China is offering another mega-loan and oil prices are rising again but Luanda’s short-term finances are fraught

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

In the heat of the deal-making after Britain’s general election stalemate, former Conservative Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind accused outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown of acting like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – trying to stitch together a coalition of ‘the losers’ to block the Conservative Party from taking power. As political insults in Westminster go, it does not get much more serious than that. Immune to such sensitivities, President Mugabe told a journalist at the World Economic Forum in Dar es Salaam on 7 May that he was rather cheered by the prospect of a Tory return to power in Britain. They were, he mused, a much more honourable group than Labour and Tony Blair. He seemed nostalgic about the role played in 1979 by Conservative Foreign Secretary Peter Carington, who had insisted on meeting Mugabe against PM Margaret Thatcher’s wishes. This week, Mugabe’s colleagues in Harare publicly shared his optimism about breaking the logjam in Anglo-Zimbabwean relations under a new Tory government. Zimbabwe policy may be a low priority for Britain’s new leaders, but African observers saw many parallels in the post-election horsetrading in Westminster. Other Commonwealth observers, such as Marie Marilyn Jalloh (Sierra Leone), Ababu Namwamba (Kenya) and Innocent Chukwuma (Nigeria), were surprised by the lack of security in British elections: voters were not required to show identification and the postal-vote systen was open to massive fraud.

ANGOLA

The IMF makes up with Luanda

Prior to the global financial crisis in 2008, many were questioning the International Monetary Fund’s relevance, especially in African countries which were increasingly turning to the international financial markets to raise funds. For those which secured countertrade deals with China, the IMF was usually unable to compete with the terms on offer. For years, Angola’s government resisted agreement on a financing programme with the IMF on the grounds that it undermined economic sovereignty. IMF demands for budgetary accountability and public financial reporting were particularly irksome.

SOUTH AFRICA

Zuma’s economic tightrope

More than a quarter of all South Africans seeking work in the formal economy cannot find it. The urgency to get the new National Planning Commission up and working was shown by figures just released, which reckon that the unemployment rate for the first quarter of 2010 increased by 0.9% to 25.2%. Hailed as a brilliant Finance Minister under then President Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel has spent nearly a year coming up with the 24 commissioners for the NPC, the body he heads that will coordinate long-term development planning.

SOUTH AFRICA

The Patel alternative

The battle for control of economic development planning continues and the National Planning Commission’s mandate has not yet been agreed. President Jacob Zuma blundered when, in his address to Parliament on 24 June last year, he said that macroeconomic development planning would be addressed by the Department of Economic Development.

CAMEROON

Another corruption crisis

The death of journalist Germain Cyrille ‘Bibi’ Ngota Ngota in the notorious Kondengui maximum security prison has caused outrage in Cameroon and abroad and could prompt political change in President Paul Biya’s ailing regime. Ngota’s demise has again undermined Biya’s claims that he is determined to address the systemic corruption in Cameroonian politics and business. On 3 May, World Press Freedom Day, the government sent armed troops to break up a peaceful protest at the news of Ngota’s death by more than 300 journalists in front of Prime Minister Philémon Yunji Yang’s office in central Yaoundé.

CONGO-KINSHASA | ANALYSIS

Elections loom as Kabila comes under fire from all sides

President Joseph Kabila and the ruling Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et le Développement (PPRD) have called for the United Nations’ peacekeepers to quit Congo-Kinshasa as soon as possible, to convey a symbolic reassertion of the country’s autonomy. They also want to put more pressure on the foreign mining and oil companies to increase the still woefully inadequate state revenue. Both strategies are meeting with mixed success.

CONGO-KINSHASA

The UN packs its bags

The Mission des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (Monuc) believes it has made progress in its stabilisation strategy for eastern Congo. Since the beginning of 2009, US$260 million have been invested in programmes in the Kivus, the Uélés, Ituri and Tangayika on roads, demobilisation, job creation and infrastructure. Four thousand fighters have been persuaded to demobilise. The optimistic United Nations Commander, General Babacar Gaye, reckons that the Congolese armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), have managed to neutralise 60% of the rebel Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR).

ZIMBABWE

Diamond disputes

There are not many ways to get rich in Zimbabwe just now and the best is diamond mining. The business is dominated by the ruling clique in the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) but even there, rival factions led by General Solomon Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa fight for dealing rights and revenue. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been dragged into the row; some of the companies in the Marange Chiadzwa dispute (ACVol 51 No 8) are accused of donating 3 million South African rand(US$398,000 mn.) to the MDC’s 2008 election campaign.

NIGER

A food crisis foretold

The Niamey junta is tinkering with its transition programme but it is better at handling a food emergency than the previous regime Aid workers have been warning for some time now that millions of people in Niger will go hungry again this year. When they did the same thing five years ago, President Mamadou Tandja denied there was any problem. This time, the soldiers of the Conseil Suprême pour la Restauration de la Démocratie (Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, CSRD), who ousted Tandja in a February coup, acted faster and more effectively (AC Vol 51 Nos 5 & 6). They quickly accepted that there was a problem so severe that it amounted to a famine.

ERITREA

Opposing Issayas

Eritrea’s opposition is planning an all-inclusive National Conference for Democratic Change in July. The prime mover, the Eritrean Democratic Alliance (EDA), has secured support from Ethiopia and is buoyed by the momentum of the United Nations’ sanctions against President Issayas Afewerki’s regime in December 2009 (AC Vol 51 No 5).

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

ERITREA

Blaming the USA

On 23 December 2009, the United Nations Security Council voted 13 to 1 (Libya) with one abstention (China) to impose sanctions on Eritrea because it supported extremist opposition in Somalia, seized Djibouti territory and continued to try to destabilise Ethiopia. The sanctions include an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze. Names of individuals and organisations to be subject to sanction are the responsibility of the UN Sanctions Committee and the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, whose mandate was extended for this purpose.

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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.