The South African government has vowed to respond to the double shock of the coronavirus pandemic and a credit ratings downgrade by making overdue structural reforms to prevent the...

The new presidential election mandated by the Constitutional Court in February was always going to be bad news for President Peter Mutharika, especially with the new requirement th...

The first reaction of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front high-ups to the pandemic was to blame the West, or at least to gloat at its misfortune. Defence Minister and Z...

President Mokgweetsi Masisi's leadership on the coronavirus crisis got off to a bad start. On 21 March, days after telling the nation about isolating, not travelling, and all the o...

Even without the coronavirus pandemic it was always doubtful that 2020 would be the year Angola would return to growth, as President João Lourenço had promised. After...

Although the coronavirus pandemic has yet to affect Namibia seriously – as April began there were only 10 confirmed cases and no deaths – President Hage Geingob's government has in...

One person who may have welcomed the coronavirus was Prime Minster Thomas Thabane, who was in a terminal political crisis when it struck. He had promised to resign by July but now ...

Madagascar is on few international airline routes, so Covid-19 came late to the island. The authorities were able to impose quarantine on arriving travellers early, even before the...

The collapse of the global financial markets, the tanking oil price, and the threat of a major global economic recession have radically altered the backdrop to South Africa's econo...

More than any other continent, Africa has copious reserves of the vital minerals central to the transition to sustainable energy in the leading industrial economies.