The images of frightened Ivorian people with bundles of possessions on their heads are even more shocking because the refugees are fleeing down well maintained tarmac roads with...

The main milestone in preparations for the 2003 elections will be the Nominating Convention of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on 3-5 January, probably at Eagle Square,...

With one eye to politics after President Mathieu Kérékou departs, a significant proportion of notables are standing in the country's first communal and municipal elections which, after several...

After the loss of more than 200 lives in riots blamed on the attempt to hold the Miss World contest in Abuja, a row is erupting over how...

President John Kufuor's last-minute rejection of the US$1 billion loan from the shadowy International Finance Consortium (not to be confused with the World Bank's International Finance Corporation) raises...

Donors meeting in Paris on 13-14 November pledged US$650 million in aid over four years but that wasn't the meeting's main purpose. Two days of talks with a...

West African states have not given their wholehearted support to plans to send 2,000 peacekeeping troops to Côte d'Ivoire. Nigeria has said its forces will not take part...

Two Fanti law professors from Central Region, former Vice-President John Evans Atta Mills and former Finance Minister Kwesi Botchwey, are battling for nomination as the presidential candidate of...

Plans to audit the shipping registry and timber industry are looking as murky as the subjects themselves. Global Witness has approached the auditors' London office asking to see...

A symbol of regional cooperation, the Nigeria-São Tomé e Príncipe Joint Development Zone (JDZ), launched only in January, looks close to collapse.

Three weeks after the start of Côte d'Ivoire's armed uprising, its leaders have still not identified themselves. The rebel soldiers are overwhelmingly junior but someone clearly organised over...

On 2 October Nigeria banned imports of all textiles in a bid to revive its own ailing industry. It now depends on imports from Asia, some of them...

Côte d'Ivoire is in danger of fragmenting on ethnic lines as efforts to put down an army mutiny turn into an all-out assault on immigrants and on opponents...

With so many peace initiatives competing for the international community's scarce resources, Liberia's peace process needs to keep up its momentum, and President Charles Taylor's critics need to...

Iraq could yet rescue President Olusegun Obasanjo. The prospect of an United States invasion there is driving up the world price of oil, and oil contributes over 75...

Two weeks ago President Olusegun Obasanjo considered threats by the House of Representatives to impeach him if he didn't resign as 'a joke carried too far' by a...

West Africa in general - and Nigeria in particular - is suddenly gaining from a re-evaluation of global strategy in the United States following the 11 September 2001...

It was a 'boom' speech, so called because it suggests the guns will boom again and return him to power. Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings has form: he...

President Blaise Compaoré has a remarkable ability to cause tremendous trouble for his neighbours and still come up smelling of roses. Despite all his years of support for...

The Igbo people of south-east Nigeria took a terrible battering in the civil war of the 1960s, and the region's businesses were almost all destroyed. The recent achievements...

Igbo politics are boiling with preparations for next year's general elections. Since the dream of an independent Biafra was crushed in 1970, many Igbo have felt marginalised, and...

The government has raised eyebrows by contracting a $1 billion, low-interest loan from a group calling itself the International Finance Consortium (not to be confused with the International...

Sam Jonah resigned as Chairman of Ghana Airways on 2 July after the cabinet failed to approve his preferred rescue plan for the airline and the removal of...

Religion is moving fast up the political agenda, as elections loom next year. From antagonistic theological positions, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists explain Nigeria's growing poverty, corruption and crime;...

Nigeria's popular charismatic movement took root with Joseph Ayo Babalola's Christ Apostolic Church in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the late Benson Idahosa of the Church of God...

Most African leaders have at least made a stab at multi-party democracy over the last decade but Togo's President Gnassingbé Eyadéma has never really bothered. Opposition parties are...

Opposition leader Alassane Dramane Ouattara was at last granted a nationality certificate on 28 June (AC Vol 43 No 10) but was still unable to vote in district...

President Fradique de Menezes must perform a tricky balancing act ­ developing the oil sector under transparency rules which donors insist on and keeping his big Nigerian neighbours...

Nigeria's banks are dynamic, indigenous and very profitable. Their attitude to financial regulation is another story. Some of the country's biggest financial egos are now at war with...

Union Bank, First Bank and United Bank for Africa control over a third of the sector. Mid-level banks range from stars to the technically insolvent. Small banks often...

An interesting footnote to tales of corruption during the reign of President Jerry Rawlings is offered by the case of Juliet Cotton, convicted on 17 June by a...

Senegal's 1-0 quarter-final defeat by Turkey this week means that an African soccer team has not yet reached a World Cup semi-final (Cameroon lost a 1990 quarter-final to...

The elections on 14 May were justifiably hailed as a victory for peace. Veterans said they were the least violent in the country's post-independence history (AC Vol 43...

President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah has kept his supporters close about him in a new 22-member cabinet that shuffles posts but makes no real changes. Past efforts to include...

The man who once said 'only an idiot' would want to be Mali's head of state was confirmed as President on 23 May after two rounds of voting...

The political peace depends, shakily, on the opposition's trust that President Laurent Gbagbo will deliver on his promises. The turning point came in February, with the Yamoussoukro Agreement...

Explosions in Conakry's main army camp on 5 May were not because of a coup but they show how the army's dominant role is becoming a liability.

The 14 May presidential and parliamentary elections were lauded as the most peaceful in four decades but political problems loom.

It is a measure of Nigeria's political class that in next year's presidential election, the two most likely candidates - Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari - are retired...

The army is back at the centre of politics, three years after it handed over to an elected government whose head, President Olusegun Obasanjo, is himself a recycled...

A queue of enemies is closing in on President Charles Taylor, who is trying to see them off with fire-power and politics. As the veteran opposition leader Ellen...

President Charles Taylor, expecting United Nations sanctions against Liberia to be extended, despatched his skillful Foreign Minister, Monie Captan, to New York in late April to lobby the...

High on the world stage, President Abdoulaye Wade hosted on 14-15 April an ambitious investors' conference for the New Partnership for African Development (NePAD), while trying to help...

Former military leader Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT) was running narrowly ahead on 1 May with some 27 per cent of the vote in Mali's 28 April presidential elections....

The Ya-Na, overlord of the northern people of Dagbon, is said to have been abducted from his palace by men in military fatigues on 26 March and murdered...

President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah seems sure to win Sierra Leone's presidential election on 14 May. He has support from Sierra Leoneans relieved that peace has come at last...

The slaughter in Sierra Leone was mainly about resources and most people's lack of them. For decades, the Freetown elite and its foreign friends kept the spoils of...

Suddenly Ghana is in political crisis. For the last decade, the country's development of a constitutional democracy and political stability amid the turbulence of West Africa was a...

In its attempt to clean up the banks, the Central Bank of Nigeria risks sparking a crisis. It wants to deter banks and multinationals from dealing on the...

The French immigration authorities have created a huge row in Guinea, by deporting there a group of 18 Liberians who gave evidence last year in the trial of...

Africa's biggest privatisation so far, the US$1.3 billion deal for control of Nitel, Nigeria's state telecoms company, is unravelling. A consortium of Nigerian businesses, banks, state governments and...

Trigger-happy President Blaise Compaoré's human rights embarrassments have gone from bad to worse with an assault on 6 February from Amnesty International over 106 extrajudicial executions documented since...

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair visits President Olusegun Obasanjo this week, he will find his host facing something like a civil war. Officially, the two leaders will...

The chief sponsor of the new party movement is Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the former military leader who bankrolls the United National Democratic Party (UNDP), run by the veteran...

Smiling images of political foes at reconciliation talks seemed to have replaced the murder and mayhem of the past two years until a strike by police brought the...

With parliamentary elections due next month and expectations of an oil boom, a long-simmering political feud finally exploded on 4 February with the resignation of Patrice Emery Trovoada,...

Benin's Finance Minister, Abdoulaye Bio Tchane, will take over as the International Monetary Fund's Africa Department chief next month. He was once tipped as a potential prime minister...

The murder of Attorney General and veteran politician Chief Bola Ige on 23 December raises new doubts about the prospect of free elections in 2003. He was murdered...