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UGANDA

The Museveni machine grinds into gear

The opposition unites, but not entirely – the president and his party will be hard to beat at next year’s elections

UGANDA

The opposition on parade

Kizza Besigye, Olara Otunnu, Norbert Mao, Hussein Kyanjo and Abed Bwanika.

RWANDA

The assassin’s hand

Violence and intrigue – at home and abroad – overshadow the impending elections

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

Can there be too much good news about Africa? Surely not. After a decades-long diet of war and famine coverage, Africa is now feted as the next big economic thing. From McKinsey and Boston Consulting come thorough reports projecting African GDP of US$2.6trn within ten years as investment quickens. McKinsey points out that from 2000 to 2008, inward investment jumped from $9bn to $62bn a year, a rate mirroring that achieved by China. Last week at a business summit in São Paulo, Brazil, Reuters journalists heard predictions that there will appear some 100 specialised funds investing over $20bn in Africa within four years. More than half the world’s fastestgrowing economies next year will be African. But notes of caution must sound when African finance ministers and central bankers try to absorb unprecedented flows with often weak bureaucracies and shallow capital markets. The problem is less with the technocrats and the civil servants and more with politicians who see in the encouraging news an opportunity to consolidate power rather than delivering a development boom. There may indeed be too much good news, if joy at the economic upturn derails efforts to hold politicians to account. Private equity companies enthuse about the telecoms and agricultural markets, but few heed the political downturn, especially those authoritarian regimes that have strengthened their grip in this year’s crop of elections.

CONGO-KINSHASA

Half a century, half the battle

Congo-Kinshasa’s fiftieth birthday celebrations on 30 June were marred on two sides. International accusations of corruption delayed an US$8bn debt deal (see Box), and an oil tanker explosion killed more than 230 people, many of them children watching a World Cup football match. Neither politics nor the economy are working so the big questions remain unanswered: how to use the country’s legendary natural resources honestly and constructively and how best to run a country more than half the size of Western Europe.

CONGO-KINSHASA

Odious debts, now less debt

More than a decade of tortuous negotiations has won US$8 billion of debt relief for Congo-Kinshasa a day after its fiftieth birthday. The historic, moral argument for relief is straightforward. The IMF and the World Bank, under pressure from Britain, Belgium, France and the United States, lent billions of dollars to President Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime in the 1980s when by most independent assessments there was little chance of the money being used for the intended reforms and developments.

SOUTH AFRICA | CONGO-KINSHASA

Secret oil deal

The emergence of Khulubuse Zuma, the nephew of South African President Jacob Zuma, as a leading player in Congo-Kinshasa’s oil industry has provoked curiosity and anger in almost equal measure. Caprikat and Foxwhelp – two companies which Khulubuse Zuma claims to own – are registered in the British Virgin Islands and have won highly favourable production-sharing agreements (PSAs) for Blocks 1 and 2 on the Congolese side of Lake Albert. On 18 June, President Joseph Kabila confirmed the awards in a decree, but neither the state’s Congolaise des hydrocarbures (Cohydro), or oil ministry staffers were involved in the highly secretive negotiations.

AFRICA | FRANCE

The falling euro drags down the CFA franc

The continuing crisis of the rich world’s financial system has thrown off balance the main surviving element of France’s African empire, the franc of the Communauté financière d’Afrique. Both are better known as the CFA. This monetary arrangement sees 15 mostly small and very poor countries use the CFA franc as their currency. The central pillar of the system is that the exchange rate of the CFA is fixed to the euro, the currency of 16 of the 27 European Union countries.

AFRICA | FRANCE

How the CFA Franc zone works

The initials CFA once stood for the Communauté française d’Afrique, later changing to Communauté financière d’Afrique. The name is a colonial legacy and considerable monetary powers are still reserved to the Banque de France, the French central bank. The value of the CFA franc was fixed to that of the French franc until 2002, when France gave up its own currency and adopted the euro; the exchange rate since then remains fixed at 656 CFA francs to the euro.

GUINEA

A second, tougher round

Former prime minister Cellou Dalein Diallo and long-time oppositionist Alpha Condé will battle it out in the second round of the presidential elections, due on 18 July. Political insiders consider Diallo the favourite, thanks to commercial, ethnic and military factors, as well as the blessing of top people in the incumbent junta under General Sékouba Konaté.

GUINEA

Minister Thiam covers his bases

Mahmoud Thiam, the energetic mines minister and former senior staffer at Union de Banques Suisses, insists that his decisions over the past 18 months are not reversible – especially his move to strip western mining conglomerate Rio Tinto of its iron ore mining concessions and transfer them to a Brazilian- and Israeli-led consortium.

SOMALILAND

We’re here to be recognised

A credible vote will not bring prosperity without international recognition. On 26 June, Ahmed Mohamed ‘Silanyo’, leader of the Development and Solidarity Party (Kulmiye) was elected as Somaliland’s fourth president. There was minimal violence, and international observers, including Progressio, a London-based development agency, called the poll ‘a free and fair expression of the popular will of the Somaliland people’. In 2003, Silanyo lost to the outgoing President Dahir Riyale Kahin by a mere 80 votes.

KENYA

Mungiki’s new man

The once unthinkable has happened: Maina Njenga, the much-feared leader of Kenya’s Mungiki militia, is carving out a new career as a mainstream politician. After his release from gaol in October 2009, Nkenga renounced violence, became a born-again Christian and is now a stalwart campaigner for Kenyans to vote in favour of the proposed new constitution in the referendum on 4 August.

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

KENYA

Criminal business is big business

Mungiki started as a Kikuyu quasi-revivalist religious cult in the Rift Valley’s Laikipia District in the late 1980s. Many Mungiki members lost their land in the 1990s when President Daniel arap Moi’s government presided over state-orchestrated electoral violence there. Munigiki migrated to Nairobi’s slums, where they provided services and protection, developing an extortion racket that still controls the matatu transport routes in the towns and the countryside, particularly in Central Province.

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"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
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