It was Ghana’s longest, costliest and most acrimonious election campaign. It ended with a grand party for the National Democratic Congress on 9 December and attempts by the...

With a population nudging 25 million and a fast-growing lower-middle-income economy with gold, oil and gas production, Ghana can lay claim to running Africa’s most important multi-party...

President Alassane Dramane Ouattara’s cabinet reshuffle on 22 November emphasised old loyalties and economic competence, firmly pushing neo-liberal economic buttons. Out from the premiership went consensus man Jeannot...

The appearance of a shaken Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra on state television just before dawn on 11 December proffering apologies to the Malian people along with his...

Growing divisions among Mali’s politicians and military, as well as among foreign powers, will delay plans for an internationally backed intervention to oust jihadists from the north and...

Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada’s government failed to reach the end of its term, as Africa Confidential predicted (AC Vol 53 No 22, Opposition shakes Trovoada), and lawyer Gabriel...

China Union’s plan to relocate six villages near the Bong iron mine has been met with anger from the people of Lower Bong County, posing yet another threat...

Two new large dams will be built before President Goodluck Jonathan’s first presidential term expires in 2015, according to the government. The companies constructing the dams, however, admit...

Only weeks into her new role as Minister of State for Power, Zainab Ibrahim Kuchi announced a major project to address Nigeria’s chronic power shortfall. In early November,...

President Ernest Bai Koroma avoided a potentially contentious second-round in the presidential poll by defeating Julius Maada Bio outright on 17 November. It was announced on 23 November...

The bombing of a church in Kaduna State on 25 November and attacks on a police station in Abuja on the following day seemed designed, at least in...

The federal government has played politics with the Boko Haram insurgency, using it to silence opposition from northern politicians who claim that President Goodluck Jonathan has broken the...

It has been Ghana’s longest-ever campaign and electors are being offered a real choice of policies and people but still the two major parties are running neck-and-neck ahead...

Foreign campaign contributions are illegal in Ghana but are not properly tracked because the main anti-corruption agency, the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justice, lacks the capacity....

Ahead of the 17 November elections, the country is starkly split between the two main parties, the governing All People’s Congress and the Sierra Leone People’s Party. These...

The youth of Freetown helped to swing victory for Ernest Bai Koroma in 2007, runs the conventional wisdom. Overwhelming support in the capital was decisive in convincing even...

The member of parliament and former Speaker Edwin Melvin Snowe has renewed the offensive against Robert Alvin Sirleaf, Chairman of the National Oil Company of Liberia, and President...

Findings by a government-commissioned task force that over US$100 billion has been siphoned off from Nigeria’s oil and gas industry since 2002 is causing a political storm. It...

The next hearing of the case of the 11,000 people of Bodo versus the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell in the High Court is scheduled for 5 November, when...

The biggest challenge yet to the government of Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada saw the three opposition parties band together in a major demonstration on 19 October with ‘Save...

This week, teams of West African, African Union and United Nations military planners descended on Bamako to get an agreement from President Dioncounda Traoré’s government on a strategy...

A small, apparently unorganised, armed group attacked Bra air force base near Bissau on 21 October and troops killed six men. The transitional government promptly (but without evidence)...

Leading opposition presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo and his New Patriotic Party are stepping up criticism about the financing of Chinese projects in the energy and telecommunications...

The influence of Chinese money on Ghana’s heated politics has crossed a legal red line, say activists who accuse telecoms company Huawei of bribing officials of the ruling...

Faced with difficult negotiations with its Chinese partners and the seemingly implacable demands of the population, the Nigerien government admitted in mid-October that the Chinese-built Société de Raffinage...

On 12 October, the United Nations Security Council discussed a worrying report by a UN Group of Experts that says that supporters of former President Laurent Gbagbo are...

Former President Laurent Gbagbo’s loyalists fled to Ghana in droves when he was finally deposed in April 2011. They did so hoping for political support from Jerry Rawlings,...

President Faure Gnassingbé’s prospects of staying in office in the long-term are diminishing. Ever since he succeeded his late father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, in February 2005, opposition to dynastic...

There was an inevitability about the clash between President Faure Gnassingbé and his elder brother, Kpatcha Gnassingbé ever since the time when they accompanied their dying father on...

So far, those blocking reform are winning hands down in the running battles with reformers in the government. Yet their victory could prove to be a hollow one...

A review of Guinea’s biggest mining contracts due this month will raise new questions about the future of the US$10 billion Simandou iron-ore project. The report will also...

President Dioncounda Traoré’s formal request to the United Nations was clear. On 18 September, he asked for a resolution for military intervention, under Chapter 7 of the UN...

Momentum is building for international backing for the proposed military intervention in Mali to expel the jihadists.

President Ernest Bai Koroma has decided to keep his Vice-President, Samuel Sam-Sumana, on the governing All People’s Congress ticket in the 17 November general elections. Koroma spent most...

A major electoral controversy came to an end in mid-September when President Ernest Bai Koroma reversed the decision of the National Electoral Commission Chairwoman, Christiana Thorpe, to raise...

Guinea-Bissau’s appearance at the United Nations normally attracts no fanfare but this year there was much anticipation when its interim President, Raimundo Pereira, overthrown in the 12...

China International Fund, a Hong Kong-based outfit which works closely with Beijing’s state corporations, will become one of the Freetown government’s most privileged business partners following the signing...

They were left out in the cold by President Alpha Condé in 2011 (AAC Vol 4 No 11), but the businessmen behind the China International Fund are making...

China will continue to support the Bamako government’s position and ‘will bring our aid to the extent that it is possible, in particular to the army, where we...

What prompted President Yahya Jammeh to start eliminating all the residents of death row in Banjul’s infamous Mile Two Jail? Some attribute it to his heavy dependence on...

The handling of the killing by Malian troops of 16 Islamic preachers, nine of them Mauritanian, threatens the delicate balance between the interim regime and the army, say...

Frank Timis’s Tonkolili iron-ore project has problems running its trains on time – and even on the line, Africa Confidential has learned. In early September, his firm, African...

The United Nations Mission in Liberia should serve another year, according to its latest progress report. It is cautiously optimistic in general but is more forthcoming in describing...

President Dioncounda Traoré has now officially requested military help from the Economic Community of West African States to help quell the revolt in the north. Sensitive to the...

President John Dramani Mahama set out an ambitious election manifesto on 4 September and enjoyed a boost from the opinion polls, just four days after the National Democratic...

As soon as he touched down at Abidjan's Felix Houphouët-Boigny airport on his return from the 19-20 July fifth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing, President Alassane Dramane...

After the state funeral of President John Evans Atta Mills on 10 August, it took just three days for Ghana’s vituperative party politics to resume. There are presidential and parliamentary...

The long shadow of oil and gas revenues falls across what is set to be Ghana’s most expensive election campaign in history. International oil companies are under particular...

United States businessmen are accusing Vice-President Samuel Sam-Sumana of diverting commercial investments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaign funds for the All People’s Congress (APC) in the 2007 elections....

Mali’s regional neighbours are planning a three-phase military intervention, according to a document from the Economic Community of West African States which Africa Confidential has exclusively obtained. The ‘Strategic Concept’ report...

For Ghanaians, funerals assume a special role in the social order. Multiply that a hundredfold for the funeral of a sitting head of state. While their compatriots were...

With Accra shrouded in funereal red and black cloth and world leaders sending their condolences, Ghana's old political guard has been busy.

Crimes committed before the civil war of 2011 should be treated differently from those committed by both sides during the conflict, Côte d'Ivoire's President Alassane Dramane Ouattara argues.

Freetown's pre-election politics have been so fractious that diplomats, including United Nations representatives in the country, fear that it would take a miracle for the country to avoid...

The country won a respite from the increasingly bitter pre-electoral campaigning among the major parties as all sides united in sympathy for President Ernest Bai Koroma after the...

Despite support from groups like George Soros’s Open Society Institute, President Alpha Condé’s government persists in striking troublesome mining deals. The government and the African Iron Ore Group,...

Ahead of the Fifth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC V) in Beijing on 19-20 July, President Mahamadou Issoufou declared that Niger’s cooperation with China on natural...

In a desperate bid to hold itself together, a much weakened Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad has abandoned its ambition of an independent Azawad state. The...

Mali’s transitional Prime Minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, is now echoing the talk in the corridors of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) of creating an enlarged...

The fog around Samuel Mebiame is clearing. His signature appears,along with those of ministers Mohamed Lamine Fofana and KerfallaYansané, on the controversial loan Guinea took from the South...

Which are the more stunning figures? The billions of dollars of investment sluicing into Nigeria despite its deepening security crisis? Or the billions of dollars of oil and...

The latest wave of attacks on churches, police stations and even building workers across northern Nigeria seems to be the insurgents’ response to President Goodluck Jonathan’s sacking of...

No witch-hunt. That was Macky Sall’s message after he won a resounding mandate with two-thirds of the vote in the presidential run-off in March. Now he hopes he...

The Norwegian court trying Anders Behring Breivik, the self-confessed killer of 77 people in July 2011, has heard evidence on his stay in Liberia. In the 1,500-page...

Macky Sall will celebrate his first 100 days in office in July. The new President is making discrete changes to relations with Asian countries established under his predecessor,...

Benin’s Syndicat national des travailleurs de l’administration des transports et des travaux publics (Syntra-Ttp) is leading public calls for African governments to hold Chinese construction companies to account...

The Guinean government’s decision this week to shut down a bid by South African businessmen who wield high-level political connections, to run its national mining company follows growing...

• Walter Hennig, Chief Executive Officer of Palladino, a South African. The considerable fortune enjoyed by the Hennig family comes mainly from diamond trading and farming, though Walter...

Guido Santullo grew rich on government business while his patron Lansana Conté was President of Guinea. Now, the government has requisitioned his property complex and he threatens to...

When day dawns in northern Mali, another faction emerges. Sharp divisions have opened within the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad over how best to confront the...

Coup plots in Côte d’Ivoire are linked to the murder of United Nations peacekeepers in the west of the country, officials in Abidjan say.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission is giving ‘appropriate consideration’ to a request that it share with the victims the financial penalties (‘disgorgement’) it levies on companies...

Private foundations such as those run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and financier George Soros can marshal funds in Africa to rival the aid budgets of agencies such...

Trial Chamber II of the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone on 30 May sentenced Charles Ghankay Taylor to 50 years in prison for his central role...

Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo has begun to distance himself from his hardline radical supporters and could well be on the road back to accepting constitutional rule. Sources in...

Captain Amadou Sanogo’s military followers duly saluted his 20 May deal to back Dioncounda Traoré as interim President, but his radical civilian allies were determined to press...

After weeks of wrangling, Tuareg nationalists and their jihadist allies reached a shaky agreement to share power in northern Mali and formally declared the Islamic Republic of Azawad...

China is Sierra Leone’s largest foreign investor. However, you would not know that from the chaotic state of Sierra Leone’s mission in Beijing, which has had to change...

The belated announcement by President Goodluck Jonathan on 22 May that he wants the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to act on the US$6.8 billion fuel subsidy fraud...

While demonstrators stormed the presidential palace in Bamako and assaulted interim President Dioncounda Traoré, the leaders of the Tuareg revolt were hammering out a provisional government for what...

The National Democratic Congress government is reeling from a fusillade of abuse by the party’s founder, ex-President Jerry John Rawlings, who describes the people around President John Atta...

When the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) chose Julius Maada Bio to compete against President Ernest Bai Koroma last year, the pro-government media reckoned the November 2012 polls...

As Sierra Leone absorbs the guilty verdict on Liberian former President Charles Ghankay Taylor for ‘aiding and abetting’ Revolutionary United Front rebels, the Revolutionary United Front Party, a...

The Islamist burning of the shrine of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar in the ancient city of Timbuktu last week has compounded the national trauma of March’s military coup...

The Economic Community of West African States has given the confused military junta twelve months to ease itself from power. However, the United Nations is holding out for...

Just twelve months after the start of commercial oil production, Ghana has mortgaged its lucrative oil marketing monopoly to Unipec via the state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corporation –...

Macky Sall was sworn in as President on 2 April. His victory in the second-round runoff ended Abdoulaye Wade’s twelve years in power, along with his attempts to...

The military coup of 12 April was the culmination of a steady rise in tension and political instability over several weeks. An alliance, possibly temporary, of ex-President Kumba...

Ex-Governor of Delta State James Ibori could be back in Nigeria as early as late 2016. He was sentenced to 13 years in gaol for $50 million worth...

Those leading Côte d’Ivoire’s return to normality repeat time and again that security is improving. The government of President Alassane Dramane Ouattara, hoping to tempt foreign investors, says...

The atmosphere is warming up, even though elections are still over six months away. Worries are growing that President Ernest Bai Koroma’s All People’s Congress (APC) is ramping...

The report on the US$6.8 billion fuel subsidy fraud by the Chairman of the National Assembly Ad Hoc Committee, Farouk Lawan, was tabled on 24 April....

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has unleashed a storm of controversy by appointing three of her sons and a nephew to important jobs in government. Most attention centred on her eldest...

After regional leaders called his bluff with financial sanctions and threats of military action, putsch leader Captain Amadou Sanogo beat as dignified a retreat from power as he...

Tuareg separatists of the Mouvement national de la libération de l’Azawad are in a bitter struggle with a jihadist faction – Iyad ag Ghali and his Ansar Eddine...

Niger won much praise for the smoothness of the 2011 presidential poll, which returned the country to democracy after a year under the military junta that had deposed...

In September 2011, Colonel Moammar el Gadaffi’s son Es Saadi el Gadaffi arrived in Agadez in the dead of night in a mysterious convoy of vehicles, surrounded by...

After President Yahya Jammeh’s victory in November’s presidential poll surprised nobody, the parliamentary elections of 29 March were similarly predictable. Anticipating fraud, the five major opposition parties...

With Islamists, putschists and nationalists claiming all the attention in Mali, the growing food crisis in the Sahel is in danger of slipping under the radar. There were...

On the eve of the national convention of the governing People’s Democratic Party on 24 March, former President Olusegun Obasanjo deplored the lack of discipline in the PDP....

• Chief Mike Oghiadomhe, Chief of Staff to the President: as Edo State Deputy Governor, he made friends with his opposite number in Bayelsa, Goodluck Jonathan. He is...

The protests in Bamako started out with disgruntled soldiers, angry at how politicians had allowed their comrades to be overrun by Tuareg rebels. This then snowballed into a...

Dakar’s streets were just as joyful as those of Bamako at the fall of their long-term leader, although Senegalese were relieved that the agent of change was electoral...

Multinational corporations and anti-corruption activists are jockeying for influence in Conakry as President Alpha Condé talks to the China Development Bank about finance for a US$8.6 billion development...

Macky Sall’s election as President of Senegal has caused many to wonder if Chad’s ex-President Hissène Habré will still be welcome.

Having pleaded guilty to ten money-laundering charges and obtaining a money transfer by deception and fraud, James Onanefe Ibori, the former Governor of Delta State, will...

Officials from the China Development Bank (CDB) are offering to finance a substantial part of the Conakry government’s US$8.6 billion overhaul of mining and industrial infratructure, according to...

Planning and construction work on Ghana’s US$850 million gas pipeline is slowing down because the lead contractor – China’s Sinopec – fears that national elections in December could...

The government’s decision to borrow US$3 billion from the China Development Bank (CDB) has become a key election issue, much to the irritation of the authorities in Beijing,...

President Mahamadou Issoufou is under pressure to reduce petrol prices at the pump. On 23 March, the Syndicat National des Travailleurs du Commerce (Syntracom)warned that unless the government...

As the government contends with a Boko Haram militia determined to make the north ungovernable, a new round of attacks has erupted in the oil-producing Niger Delta. Apart...

Security agents trying to disentangle the roots and widening network of the Boko Haram militia have identified links with a group of senior military and police officers who...

Could President Yahya Jammeh, who has run one of the region’s most corrupt and brutal regimes since 1994, be planning to reopen diplomatic relations with Iran?

On 18 March, Guinea Bissau chooses a successor to the late President Malam Bacai Sanhá, who died in harness on 9 January.

Correspondence on the recall of the United Nations chief, Michael von der Schulenburg, indicates an almost irrational hatred of him by President Ernest Bai Koroma.

President Abdoulaye Wade’s failed to clear the 50% hurdle in the first round of the presidential election on 26 February and must slug it out again on 18...

Controversial British-based mining entrepreneur Frank Timis’s African Petroleum Corporation announced a ‘significant’ oil find off the Liberian coast on 21 February.

Calling for African Union membership to be limited strictly to democratic states, Ghanaian presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said in London on 29 February that the AU...

The government of West Africa’s leading narco-state remains tight-lipped about a corruption case involving three officials of the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry who were arrested in November 2011...

A war of words has broken out between Negbalee Warner, Chairman of the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company, and his Managing Director, T. Nelson Williams. At issue is a US$25 million...

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon closed the door on a bitter dispute with the government of President Ernest Bai Koroma by recalling his Executive Representative for the...

The financial firm JP Morgan estimates that Simandou’s Vale-controlled blocks can produce 50 mn. tonnes of ore annually by 2020. That compares favourably with the output of...

Hard choices confront President Alpha Condé as he comes under pressure to set a date for parliamentary elections this year. Polling was postponed from November 2011, after Condé...

The deepening row over Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s financing of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) is a nightmare for President John Atta Mills’s re-election campaign. The scandal has...

The Woyome scandal has so far claimed two cabinet ministers. The Education Minister and former Attorney General, Betty Mould-Iddrisu, resigned on 23 January, after her successor as AG,...

Battle-hardened fighters of the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad – equipped with heavy weapons they brought back from Libya – are confronting the Malian army in...

Attacks by the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) have been not only fierce but well planned. The late January assault on Ménaka, in the far...

The announcement by United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on 9 February that Gambia’s putschist President Yahya Jammeh had requested UN assistance in the case of...

After looking distinctly lacklustre in recent weeks, President Abdoulaye Wade’s prospects for re-election have brightened considerably while the opposition looks divided and riot police keep the streets on...

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is taking action on her green credentials after featuring in a New York Times piece headlined ‘A Nobel Laureate’s Problem at Home’. The op-ed accused...

A bruising election year in Ghana kicked off with President John Atta Mills’s 9 January announcement of the death of South Korean company STX Corporation’s US$10 billion housing...

President Alassane Dramane Ouattara is trying to move the economy away from an over-reliance on agriculture, which accounts for 40% of gross domestic product, and into mining and...

Mines, Petroleum and Energy Minister Adama Toungara has the President’s ear, so he is likely to keep his position in the cabinet reshuffle many believe to be imminent.

Since the killing of more than 185 people in Kano on 20 January, southern Nigerian politicians have been railing at Northern and Muslim leaders for their failure to...

Boko Haram has a supreme leader and a consultative body, the Shura. The leader, Abubakar Shekau, was second-in-command until Mohammed Yusuf was killed in police custody in July...

The prospects for massively increased violence in Dakar are strong after several people died in the last days of January during opposition rallies against President Abdoulaye Wade. This...

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has lowered the political temperature, preaching political reconciliation and pledging strong commitment to the nation’s youth after a worthy but uninspiring inauguration ceremony and...

A scandal is growing over the government’s decision in 2010 to pay 58 million cedis (US$34.45 mn.) in compensation on a ‘financial engineering’ contract to Alfred...

Nobody in government, least of all President Goodluck Jonathan, seemed prepared for the torrent of opposition excited by the decision to end fuel subsidies. This doubled the retail...

Almost alone among his colleagues in government, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Sanusi Lamido Aminu Sanusi has made a credible case for the removal of fuel subsidies*. He...

Western commentators and politicians are lining up to pour accolades on Ghana. Some are self-interested: they aim to show that their policies and aid budgets are working. Aid...

The authorities are still tracking down protestors on Príncipe island who, at dawn on 8 December, burned the national flag in front of the Regional Government building in...

After heavy lobbying by the African Union, the International Criminal Court chose Fatou Bensouda of Gambia as the new ICC Chief Prosecutor. Her nine-year term begins in June,...

For a year that was meant to presage Nigeria’s great economic leap forward, 2012 could hardly have opened more inauspiciously. First came President Goodluck Jonathan’s declaration of a...

Insulated from political chaos, this year’s budget assumes a gross domestic product growth rate of 7.2%. The International Monetary Fund reckons it may be just under 7%. Early...

Once again, politics could shape Ghana’s economic future. The national elections due on 7 December 2012 will determine which party is to manage the transition to a medium-income...

The straight-talking director of Ghana’s Electoral Commission, Kwadwo Afari-Djan, and his team have organised five multiparty elections since 1992, each one more credible than the last. The 2012...

Ex-President Laurent Gbagbo’s trial at the Hague may raise ethnic and political tension but if President Alassane Dramane Ouattara can keep the lid on this, the promising economic...

The presidential and legislative elections due in November 2012 will be close-run, pitting President Ernest Bai Koroma and the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) against Julius Maada Bio and...