Blue Lines
The International Monetary Fund reckons the Covid-19 pandemic will result in sub-Saharan African economies contracting by 3% this year and bouncing back by a similar amount in 2021. Over half of low-income countries are either in debt distress or at high ...
Blue Lines
The peace accord between Sudan's transitional government and three armed groups was a serious step forward from the human and economic damage wrought by decades of conflict. Without ending the myriad civil conflicts, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has litt...
Blue Lines
The lack of a coordinated response by commercial and official creditors to the worsening debt distress faced by resource-based African economies could trigger a wider payments crisis ahead of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and Worl...
Blue Lines
As President Nana Akufo-Addo becomes chairman of the Economic Community of West African States and the Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area prepares to start operations in Accra, it's a bad time for Ghana to get into a trade row with Nig...
Blue Lines
Nigeria was taking no chances in its campaign to ensure that its former agriculture minister Akinwumi Adesina gets another term as President of the African Development Bank. Adesina is the sole candidate in the AfDB's elections on 27 August; the rules sti...
Blue Lines
The future of the International Criminal Court is in question again as it tries to choose a successor to the prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. The United States, although it has never joined the ICC, stepped up its attacks on the court this year, barring its off...
Blue Lines
The prospects of the mass protests against grand corruption and economic mismanagement planned for 31 July triggering a popular uprising against Emmerson Mnangagwa's government are slim but not beyond the bounds of possibility. That is why on 20 July poli...
Blue Lines
In a bid to grab attention amid the global pandemic, the Islamist insurgents in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique are edging towards the site of the country's planned giant gas export plant, Africa's biggest investment project. The latest a...
Blue Lines
After the African caucus at the UN Human Rights council called for a rare urgent debate on human rights in the United States and circulated a draft resolution calling for a high-powered investigation into racism and police violence there, diplomats in Gen...
Blue Lines
An extraordinary letter from James E Risch, chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to World Bank President David Malpass called for the strictest accountability on a $7 million grant to Zimbabwe managed by the UN and the Catholi...
