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Into the unknown

An exciting election looms next year: no one knows who is going to run and, more importantly, who is going to win

President Goodluck Jonathan has a year to make good on his promises to tackle the electricity crisis, lead a credible anti-corruption campaign and imp...

NIGERIA

Reformers, politicians and generals

Three groups are emerging within the governing People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

ZIMBABWE

Squashing the judges

The courts, despite everything, persist in doing justice sometimes and the President is not amused

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

Top French officials may have hoped to find some respite at the 25th Sommet Afrique-France in Nice on 31 May-1 June, as they take a break from the Eurozone crisis. It may not work that way. Most of the African governments attending the summit have adopted the CFA currency, linked initially to the French franc and now to the euro, and will have some tough questions for their hosts about its future stability. African bankers, in Abidjan for the African Development Bank Annual Meeting, have been discussing the growing concern of their Japanese and Chinese counterparts about the spiralling Eurozone debt. After Asian investors reported falling interest in Eurobond issues, Reuters news agency proposed, only half-humorously, the launching of an Afribond instead.

Asian investors will loom large at the Africa-France summit. A big team of French officials will be in Nice to talk about ‘triangulation’ – how French expertise can work with Chinese companies to launch new projects in Africa. Over 100 French business leaders, such as Vincent Bolloré, Martin Bouygues and Jean-Louis Vilgrain, will meet the African delegations and seal new deals. So will the new Director General of the Agence Française de Développement, Dov Zerah, whom President Nicolas Sarkozy chose personally. But the suits are set to dominate proceedings in Nice, with Zerah and the aid brigade playing a supporting role. State coffers in Europe may be running low but the Eurozone companies will not willingly cede ground.

ZIMBABWE

Legal limits

The Harare legal profession is enjoying itself at the expense of fellow practitioner Jonathan Samkange, a favourite in the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front who shuns the human rights lobby; he also represented British mercenary Simon Mann, accused of the 2004 coup plot in Equatorial Guinea . So it came as a surprise this month when Samkange was charged with perjury over his conduct in one of the cases about diamond rights.

GUINEA

Votes and the mining houses

Of the 20-odd candidates running in the 27 June presidential election, two veterans stand out. They are Alpha Condé, the pugnacious leader of the Rassemblement du Peuple de Guinée (RPG), and Cellou Dalein Diallo, President of the Union des Forces Démocratiques de Guinée (UFDG) and Prime Minister under the late General Lansana Conté. Coming up on their flank is Sidya Touré of the Union des Forces Républicaines (UFR). This could be the freest election since Guinea seized independence from France in 1958, although supporters of the leading candidates all fear interference from the junta.

GUINEA

Promising contracts

Guinea’s interim government has seen through several big developments in the mineral sector, in spite of an agreement that no new deals be ratified until after June’s elections. In April, the Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz sold 51% of his Guinean operations to Brazil’s Vale. Together, they have pledged to spend US$8 billion on exploiting iron ore concessions, to be exported via a railway corridor through Liberia.

WEST AFRICA | INTERNATIONAL DRUG TRADE

Dealers on a high

The quantity of illegal drugs seized in Africa has been falling. However, that indicates not the success of anti-trafficking policies but the increasing skill of the traffickers in avoiding getting caught. The profits to be made are so huge that local politicians and law-enforcers ignore the dangers to health and to society. The current street battles between drug dealers and police and army in Jamaica may help to focus minds.

AFRICA | MINING

Out of Africa and into Asia

Two of the world’s biggest and most controversial commodity traders, Trafigura and Glencore, are building up their metals businesses in Africa, to compete with Chinese rivals and meet demand from Asia. The aim is to control the supply chain from extraction to distribution. Both firms are based in tax-havens in Switzerland (Baar and Lucerne) and are notoriously secretive.

MADAGASCAR

An unconvincing egotist

Andry Rajoelina, President of the incumbent Haute Autorité de la Transition (HAT), has said that he will not stand in presidential elections later this year but he is determined to set terms for a new constitutional framework, boycotting the deal negotiated with his opponents at talks in Mozambique and Ethiopia last year. The 24 May reshuffle – with General André Lucien Rakotoarimasy now at defence and three other soldiers among the ten new ministers in Prime Minister Camille Vital’s new government – reflects the growing political role of the military. Yet there is no sign that it will bring Madagascar’s transitional regime any closer to the compromise with opposition leaders that might resolve the 18-month political crisis. If anything, the mood is becoming more polarised.

CONGO-KINSHASA

More muddles in the mines

The review of Congo-Kinshasa’s contested mining contracts was completed months ago but the business is still clogged in the mire of decision-making. One victim is Kingamyambo Musonoi Tailings in Katanga, a project intended to produce more than 100,000 tonnes of copper and 20,000 tn. of cobalt from mining residue. KMT was supposed to start up within a year but is running at least a year late. First Quantum Minerals has invested almost US$600 million in the scheme; FQM, a joint venture listed in Toronto, Canada, holds 65% of KMT. Its partners are South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (10%), the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (7.5%), local parastatal Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines, 12.5%) and the state (5%).

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

Top French officials may have hoped to find some respite at the 25th Sommet Afrique-France in Nice on 31 May-1 June, as they take a break from the Eurozone crisis. It may not work that way. Most of the African governments attending the summit have adopted the CFA currency, linked initially to the French franc and now to the euro, and will have some tough questions for their hosts about its future stability. African bankers, in Abidjan for the African Development Bank Annual Meeting...

CONGO-KINSHASA

The fight for cellphones

Vodacom-Congo may be Congo-Kinshasa’s largest mobile telephone concern, with more than 4 million subscribers, although its rival Zain claims to have more. Vodacom’s internal battles are bigger still. Vodacom International owns 51% of the shares; Congo Wireless Network, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, owns 49%. They agree on little. Other conflicts divide CWN’s shareholders. Vodacom-Congo is feeling the pinch, and in mid-May the employment authority, the Inspection Générale du Travail, gave it leave to dismiss 11% of its workforce; it employs 500 people directly and perhaps ten times as many indirectly. That prospect upsets Labour Minister François-Joseph Nzanga Mobutu Ngbangawe (son of the late Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko) while the trades unions complain that the company has failed to produce the financial statements needed to justify the cuts.

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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.