confidentially speaking
The Africa Confidential Blog
AFRICAN UNION SUMMIT: Trade, war, elections, and financing make for an agenda full to bursting point
Patrick Smith
We start in Addis Ababa this week with the opening of a
critical summit of the African Union. Then to Monrovia for the
carnival-like inauguration of President George Weah. After that we go to the
European courtrooms for the latest episode in Nigeria's
pursuit of ill-gotten oil wealth.
AFRICAN UNION SUMMIT: Trade, war, elections, and
financing make for an agenda full to bursting point
Meeting in Addis Ababa for a week starting today (22-29 January),
Africa's presidents, foreign ministers and top diplomats face a
formidable agenda at the AU summit. Armed conflicts, election disputes,
financing mechanisms for the AU itself and a continental trade treaty
need resolving.
AU Commission chairman and veteran Chadian
diplomat Moussa Faki Mahamat has been working to
boost cooperation with the United Nations and the European Union. His
itinerary of the past year – South Sudan, Somalia,
Congo-Kinshasa, Burkina Faso,
Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania
– is a guide to the AU's most pressing political and security problems.
There are also deepening, chronic crises, some tracked by the
international media and others overlooked. Libya's
political crisis and the horrific conditions faced by African migrants
is now receiving attention after global media coverage but the
challenges to President Paul Biya in Cameroon
by Anglophone oppositionists and their Francophone allies has been
largely ignored.
Beyond national crises, there are several regional disputes
brewing: most directly between Ethiopia and Egypt
over the potential of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to reduce the
flow of the Nile; and the reverberations in Africa of the diplomatic
ructions between Saudi Arabia, Qatar
and Iran, and the Saudi-led alliance fighting a war
in Yemen.
At the summit, Rwanda's President Paul
Kagame takes over from Guinea's Alpha Condé
as Chairman of the AU. He will be urging his fellow leaders to accept a
formula to finance the organisation by levying a 0.2% tax on imports
into all member states.
LIBERIA: George Weah's inauguration draws soccer stars
and raises high hopes for economic revival
The first African to be voted best footballer in the
world, George Weah, was also the first ex-professional footballer on
the continent to be inaugurated as president of his country today (22
January). Among the invited celebrities was Cameroon striker Samuel
Eto'o.
Weah's presidency faces the tough realities of
creating jobs, building many more roads and power stations, and
attracting more investors to launch productive enterprises. Almost
two-thirds of Liberia's 4.5 million people are under 25 and Weah's vote
came overwhelmingly from the younger generation, many of whom are tired
of what they see as politics dominated by a sterile elite.
NIGERIA: Abuja is suing JP Morgan bank for $875
million in oil corruption row
The dispute over the sale of a prospecting licence OPL
245, one of the richest in the region, to Royal Dutch Shell and Italy's
ENI, has now drawn in the New York-based investment bank. Nigeria has
hired top barristers in London to retrieve some $875 million which it
says was illegally transferred to a former oil minister, Dan
Etete, by JP Morgan.
The Bank has until March to file its defence. Like Shell and
ENI, which face legal action in the Italian courts, JP Morgan denies
any wrongdoing.
IN VERY BRIEF
ZIMBABWE: President Mnangagwa
brings forward elections to May after reshuffling the military and
intelligence services
AFRICA: Mobile money companies top the list
of investor start-ups in Africa according to Disrupt Africa report
EGYPT: Opposition candidates claim their
campaigns are being blocked in run-up to Presidential elections in March
RWANDA/TANZANIA: Presidents Kagame and Magufuli
agree to lay foundation stone on 407-kilometre railway from Isaka to
Kigali
TUNISIA: Security forces claim to have killed
a top Al Qaida official after warnings about returning
jihadist fighters
