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Storm in an oil barrel

A commercial dispute between the government and a US oil company has become diplomatically damaging – so President Mills is looking for a way out

The 3.8 billion dollar question

Aside from the party political rivalries, geopolitics and diplomatic jousting involved in the Kosmos Energy debacle in G...

KENYA

More gluttony

An attempt by MPs to vote themselves a fat pay rise comes unstuck – the Treasury is running out of money

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

In Africa, respect for the elders lives on. This week the African airwaves buzzed with accolades to two sons of Africa, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and with homages to an adopted son, Basil Davidson.

The celebration of Madiba’s 92nd birthday on 18 July was especially poignant in the wake of his granddaughter’s death in a car crash a month ago and the spectacular success of South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup, for which Mandela had campaigned.

To widespread regret, Archbishop Tutu, 79, has announced that he is to retire from public engagements. He was a leading public critic of apartheid in South Africa while Mandela was serving a 27-year gaol sentence. The link between the two men will continue as Tutu will work one day a week with The Elders, a group established by Mandela to help address international crises.

The 10 July death of British historian and journalist Basil Davidson at the age of 95 has prompted a flurry of tributes from readers of his pioneering contributions to African history.

After leaving school at 16, Davidson was a journalist in Paris before joining the British secret service to work with anti-fascists in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. His critique of apartheid made him a ‘prohibited immigrant’ to South Africa; he was best-known for his prolific documentation – in some 30 books – of pre-colonial African history.

SOUTH AFRICA

Zuma’s first-term casualties

Someone in President Jacob Zuma’s office has read a management textbook and reproduced chunks of it as government policy. Ahead of his post-World Cup cabinet ‘lekgotla’ (big meeting) on 19-20 July, President Zuma sent all his ministers a paper telling them he wanted a ‘new programme of action’ for the rest of his presidential term, with an ‘outcomes-based’ approach centring on 12 ‘priority areas’, for which delivery targets will be set. The core items are jobcreation, rural development, education, crime, economic development and skills. Ministers would sign performance agreements committing them to deliver. Collins Chabane, the Minister for Monitoring and Evaluation, would watch progress. He used to be a singer and is not taken seriously by the cabinet colleagues whose performance he would monitor.

AFRICA | FRANCE

Forgotten promises

On 14 July, troops from 13 African countries marched down the Champs-Elysées in the annual Bastille Day parade, while elderly sub- Saharan veterans of the French colonial army saw their pensions put on a level with comrades in France. These gestures, intended by President Nicolas Sarkozy as a salute to former colonies on the 50th anniversary of Independence, were widely seen as symbols of post-imperial paternalism. What has happened to the President’s election-night promise of 2007 that Africa would be one of his three foreign policy priorities, alongside Europe and the Middle East?

SOMALIA | UGANDA

Fighting on a new front

President Yoweri Museveni welcomes African Union leaders to Kampala on 25 July playing a role he has made his own: military leader and regional policeman. Ugandan opposition politicians fear that the two Al Shabaab bombs which killed at least 76 people in Kampala on 11 July have made victory impossible for them in February’s elections. Insecurity favours the incumbent and international criticism of Museveni, already muted, will diminish further.

SOMALIA | UGANDA

Secretive Shabaab

Al Shabaab’s political tactics and internal dynamics are deliberately, systematically opaque, on the classic Islamist model. It is both nationalist and avowedly part of the global jihad. Shabaab’s fighters may number anything between 3,000 and 10,000 and it recruits across the region. The bombs in Kampala on 11 July, which Spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage claimed for Al Shabaab on 12 July, are a response to the Uganda People’s Defence Force’s key role in the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), sent to shore up Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG, AC Vol 51 No 6). For Shabaab, the bombings initiated a regional jihad while exploiting opposition to Amisom in Mogadishu, where it regularly lobs mortars into residential areas, killing civilians that Shabaab uses as human shields.

CONGO-KINSHASA

Katanga makes a comeback

In the main square of Lubumbashi on 11 July, more than 20 people were arrested while demonstrating for the independence of Katanga. A month earlier, the Place de la Poste had been renamed the Place Moïse Tshombé, in memory of the President of the shortlived secessionist Katanga state, which was suppressed by a United Nations force immediately after Congo was granted its own independence by Belgium in 1960. Tshombé, who held Katanga in 1960-63, died in Algeria in 1969. May’s banned demonstration commemorated the 50th anniversary of his declaration of independence.

SENEGAL

He’s old but he’s running

At 84 and still looking chipper, President Abdoulaye Wade plans to run for the presidency again in 2012. His advisors insist he is full of ideas and enthusiasm and he has begun to clean up the political terrain, with moves to restore standards in public affairs. In mid-July, through an advisor, he made peace overtures to the building entrepreneur Bara Tall, who is fighting a court case against what many see as a state vendetta aimed at his business. Yet Wade will be 86 in 2012 and one of his numerous constitutional changes restores the presidential term to seven years, instead of the present five.

SENEGAL

Wade’s one-man band

Power is concentrated in the hands of President Abdoulaye Wade; development strategy is led by his son, Karim Wade. There are 41 ministers (plus a new Vice-Premier, a job suddenly announced for Awa Guèye Kébé on 3 July) but most have little clout. President Wade takes the big decisions, then allocates subjects to individual ministers with narrow technical briefs and narrow political bases of their own. Some estimates put Karim in charge of 46% of the entire national budget. Presidential sources insist the real proportion is less, when projects funded by foreign aid are included.

SENEGAL

Karim the successor

The presidential succession of Karim Wade is far from a fait accompli, not least because his father, Abdoulaye Wade, does not yet want to step down. One French diplomat, who knows both men well, told Africa Confidential: 'When you see them both together, you realise that there is a great taboo in the family, which is the end of [Abdoulaye's] political life. Karim is very respectful and shy in front of his father - I am sure he has never put the topic of succession on the table by himself.'

ZIMBABWE

What mattered was the football

Robert Mugabe has earned a reputation as one of the globe's leading gatecrashers but his poise, self-confidence and chutzpah have not rubbed off on his travelling entourage. Officially invited to the football World Cup opening and closing matches in South Africa, President Mugabe arrived at the VIP box with a platoon of henchmen. The world football authority, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) allowed only Robert and Grace Mugabe in and the rest, including Robert Junior, were shown the red card and had to find less august billets.

BLUE LINES

THE INSIDE VIEW

In Africa, respect for the elders lives on. This week the African airwaves buzzed with accolades to two sons of Africa, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and with homages to an adopted son, Basil Davidson.

The celebration of Madiba’s 92nd birthday on 18 July was especially poignant in the wake of his granddaughter’s death in a car crash a month ago and the spectacular success of South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup, for which Mandela had campaigned.

To widesp...

ZIMBABWE

Restless spirits

Sibangilizwe Nkomo, the sole surviving son of Joshua Nkomo (1917-99), is campaigning to exhume his father's remains from the 'foreign' soil of Heroes' Acre in Harare and transfer them to the Matopos Hills near Bulawayo, sacred to the Ndebele people. Sibangilizwe believes that his father's spirit is unhappy at having to accompany a lot of upstarts from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) whom he never trusted in life. In his final years, as Robert Mugabe's Vice-President (and owner of several rich farms), Joshua was deeply upset at what the President was doing to the country.

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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.