The peaceful march by oppositionists to a rally at Accra sports stadium on 25 November has put the country's wobbly economy back at the political centre-stage and President...

Street fighting over control of a local market in the old capital, Lagos, in late November, in which over 100 people have died, started just as President Olusegun...

The former ruling party pulled it off again: Mamadou Tandja of the Mouvement National pour la Société de Développement polled 59.9 per cent of the vote in the...

Crisis has come in the struggle by President Henri Konan Bédié to exclude from next year's presidential election the recently retired Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary...

Beleaguered President Alpha Oumar Konaré and Prime Minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta chose la rentrée and the end of the rainy season to counter-attack, following unprecedented criticism of both...

Recent high-level visitors to Abuja have left apparently convinced that President Olusegun Obasanjo is reversing 20 years of corruption and mismanagement in Nigeria's oil industry, the heart of...

A three-headed battle for control of Ghana's flagship Ashanti Goldfields Corporation began after its board declared on 28 September that it couldn't meet potential liabilities of US$450 million...

Commerce Minister Khalifa Sall amazed British business audiences in Belfast, Glasgow and London by saying he wanted Senegal to be 'saved' from the influence of Paris. More conventionally,...

The bitter pre-election campaign for the national presidency is wrecking the country's reputation for stability and its hopes for the foreign loans and investments that it needs. Côte...

The government talks of 'national reconciliation'; its critics put it another way, saying that President Blaise Compaoré's regime wants to wipe away its bloodstained image. Now everyone is...

The election to replace the dead dictator, General Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara, is due on 17 October, organised by the man whose soldiers killed him. Major Daouda Malam Wanké,...

The pact commits General Gnassingbé Eyadéma to holding fresh parliamentary elections next year and then stepping down in 2003 (which he was scheduled to do anyway). Opposition parties...

For now, it is no longer business as usual in Nigeria. In just three months, President Olusegun Obasanjo's whisk broom of reform has swept away the notoriously parasitical...

Three months on, the economic policy of General Olusegun Obasanjo's government remains opaque. While the price of oil, which at US$20 a barrel is nearly twice that...

The normally placid holiday season is the scene of frantic government activity. The reasons are ADO and the IMF. The scandal over the embezzlement of 18 billion CFA...

As battle-hardened rebels saunter into Freetown, guns slung over their shoulders, Sierra Leoneans are arguing about the price of their hoped for peace. A month after the...

The arrival of a contingent of Legionnaires in the latest French troop rotation raised eyebrows in Dakar. A presidential election is due next February and the country...

Britain's 23 July expulsion of senior Liberian diplomat Gerald Cooper is an early blow to President Charles Taylor's efforts to improve relations with the West.

President Alpha Oumar Konaré wants to go down in history. Prime Minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta wants to succeed him as President. Both are in danger of being disappointed....

The contest to succeed Prime Minister Carlos Veiga is heating up. The ailing Veiga (he is said to have diabetes and regularly visits his doctors in Portugal) announced...

Sierra Leoneans reacted with a mix of relief and scepticism following the signing of the Lomé peace deal on 7 July which brings Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United...

Britain's Department of International Development is at the centre of a political row after cancelling a contract with consultants linked to the opposition Reform Movement. The consultants, United...

Government business took off at a frenetic pace after the 29 May inauguration of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Launching proceedings, Obasanjo made a powerful attack on corrupt contractors,...

It was a spectacular coda to 16 years of military rule. On 29 May, more than 30 heads of state, ex-heads of state and international dignitaries -...

'Is this 1999 or 1979?' asked one senator on seeing President Olusegun Obasanjo's list of 42 ministerial nominees. Another opined more diplomatically that the list favoured 'experience over...

Jerry John Rawlings' ruling National Democratic Congress is frenetically purging party ranks and has launched a full-frontal assault on a group of dissident NDC politicians known as...

Weaknesses on both sides may just offer a chance of serious negotiations on power-sharing and amnesty (AC Vol 40 No 6) as talks between President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah...

Who was behind the crude attempt to smear President Nelson Mandela by linking him to an oil deal with Nigerian middle-man Chief Antonio Deinde Fernandez? Copies of...

It's now clear that President Olusegun Obasanjo's incoming civilian government will face a major financial crisis when it takes office on 29 May. The massive drawdown in foreign...

The Nigerian conundrum - ‘it takes a soldier to end army rule’ - is to be tested again. General Olusegun Obasanjo, the choice of most army officers...

Election monitors coined a phrase for General Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidential victory on 27 February: the result was not ‘free and fair’ but ‘generally reflects the will of the...

General Olusegun Obasanjo's newly elected government starts work on 29 May. But the bright hope is dimmed by an unexpectedly grim financial legacy from the outgoing military...

The murder of President Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara on 9 April was a genuine coup d'etat. After a couple of days' confusion, the dead man's supposed ally,...

President Henri Konan Bédié's attempts to make political capital out of his government's problems with the International Monetary Fund have badly misfired.

Friends of President-elect General Olusegun Obasanjo say he is incensed by the decision of the outgoing military regime under Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar to award 11 oil exploration blocks...

President Gnassingbé Eyadéma's latest round of fraudulent elections, held on 21 March, could provoke Togo's suspension from the European Union's preferential trade treaty known as the Lomé IV...

Foreign pressure is growing for President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to start substantive negotiations with the Revolutionary United Front. Even Kabbah’s closest backers question his grip over the mainly...

General Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s first military officer to hand power to an elected government, looks set - 20 years later - to become the first officer to win...

In the party conventions and in the lobbies of Abuja’s smart hotels, the talk is of who should be the new civilian president - and of how to...

The voters’ mood, when they elected President Charles Taylor in July 1997, was summed up in a slogan: ‘He killed my ma, he killed my pa but I...

The latest leader to succumb to the need for personal air transport is President Mathieu Kérékou, who has secured three billion CFA francs to buy a second-hand personal...

Nigeria's politicians, soldiers, bankers, farmers, taxi drivers and creditors all know that the economy is weaker than at any time since Independence in 1960. Indeed, the figures agreed...

Ivorians are warming up for two battles this year. The first is between reformers, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who want to decommission...

The frequent visits of convicted fraudster Nico Shefer and Fred Rundle, former Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging spokesman, to President Charles Taylor in Monrovia have attracted the attention of officials monitoring...

As regional diplomats struggled to negotiate a truce on 3 February, the French-backed peacekeeping initiative, Renforcement des Capacités Africaines en Maintien de la Paix (RECAMP), was at...

Prospects for a political solution to Sierra Leone’s rebel war seem to have perished along with the more than 2,000 civilians officially reckoned to have been...

Among others, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Britain and the United States believe Liberian President Charles Taylor has trained and armed the brutally effective rebels of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary...

Backstabbing is getting more vicious among barons of the ruling Alliance pour la Démocratie au Mali (Adema). Few doubt that Adema will win the presidential election in...

The 144 employees of Timbuktu airport wrote to complain that their pay arrived late. They couldn’t afford to travel across the desert and mountains to the capital, Bamako,...

Algerian troops raided into north-west Niger in late November, with approval and support from the government in Niamey, Africa Confidential has learned.

Any diplomatic damage caused by the postponement of President Henri Konan Bédié’s official visit to Britain (AC Vol 39 No 24) seems to have been repaired fast. Whitehall’s...

Suffering from one of his recurrent bouts of malaria and against medical advice, President Jerry John Rawlings insisted on personally addressing, inter alia, the armed forces, the security...