Patrick Smith
This week we start in the East, picking up the pieces from the Japan-Africa summit, and then to Zambia where an opposition politician is being hauled before the courts accused of insulting the President. In Kenya, fresh battles are breaking out over budge...
Blue Lines
This week's Tokyo International Conference on African Development, held confusingly in Yokohama, shows the growing competition between foreign powers on the continent. Although Japan's commercial ties with Africa – some $10 billion of trade a year – are m...
Patrick Smith
We start this week with the new government in Sudan, then to Kenya for a contested census, and to the next steps after elections in Jubaland, Somalia. Despite the best efforts of Angola's President Joaõ Lourenço, the latest diplomatic deal between Preside...
Patrick Smith
This week we start with a new government in Sudan, then one in Nigeria, and then to Zimbabwe's economic and political crises. The propaganda battle over China's Huawei intensifies, new warnings about the severity of Southern Africa's drought and a controv...
Patrick Smith
This week a Nigeria-South Africa
summit is in prospect, a new power-sharing government in Sudan,
and more mining rows. Also ahead, big protests loom in Zimbabwe,
opposition complaints about the election come to court in Malawi,
and yet more presidential ...
Blue Lines
The first reaction to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change's plans to mount national protests next week against Zimbabwe's economic meltdown might be: what took them so long?
It also follows the last wave of protests in January when the MDC lagg...
Patrick Smith
This week we have another step towards a political transition in Sudan, a surprise presidential contender in Kenya, a storm in Nigeria over the arrest of a protest leader and another in Tanzania over a journalist's detention. Zimbabwe's Finance Minister t...
Patrick Smith
We start in the Hague, where the International Court of Justice is to rule on a key East African maritime border dispute, and then to Washington for the election of a new IMF chief. Then our correspondents take in land reform in South Africa, the new gove...
Blue Lines
Boris Johnson took over as Britain's Prime Minister on 24 July after easily beating former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt for the leadership of the ruling Conservative party. A Johnson premiership raises the prospects of Britain leaving the European Union ...
Patrick Smith
We start with the dramatic charging of top finance ministry
officials in Nairobi, and then head towards South Africa's
politicised legal dramas pitting two presidents and their proxies
against each other. A new mining deal in Tanzania could boost resource...
