Patrick Smith
After Somali pirates, Congolese warlords and Zimbabwe in the time of cholera, Ghana’s elections just don’t cut it. Or that’s the verdict of the international news organisations, which have studiously ignored election campaigning in a country that has some...
Meerkat
In September's Africa-Asia Confidential, we reported on Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou's proposed diplomatic truce with China (AAC Vol 1 No 11, 'Dollar diplomacy fails'). No word on the truce yet; but the current chumminess of Ma's Kuomintang (KMT) and Chi...
Dipo
Lunch, last Tuesday at the Dorchester, was an immoveable feast. The tables were laden with food in a sumptuous spread worthy of a royal dinner. The invited guests, try as they did, could not make a dent in the sheer amount of the food made available for t...
Stars Foundation
The IMF's upbeat projection of 6% GDP growth for Africa in 2009 and the effect it hopes this would have on the world economy is optimistic. The Fund claims that the risk of global depression is small because it forecasts China's growth at 9%, India's at 7...
Stars Foundation
The traditional summer bargaining season has come to a dramatic end and the football season has got underway in earnest. Among the usual whirlwind of gossip about which player might go where and which player is unhappy here and wants more money there, the...
Patrick Smith
The tale of secret payments of $50 million payments by Britain’s BAE Systems to a company in the British Virgin Islands which featured on 1 August on the front pages of Africa Confidential and the Financial Times is more than just another ripping corrupti...
Patrick Smith
HARARE: Sunday was a soporific affair on the streets of Harare, except for the government’s Chinese-made Mig jets zig-zagging across the cloudless sky in a show of power. All shops closed; nobody out on a Sunday stroll. Even some of the boisterous evangel...
Patrick Smith
Africa Confidential’s special correspondent reports from Harare as President Robert Mugabe declares victory
Voting was unenthusiastic and turnout low in yesterday's presidential poll, despite Saturday’s bombastic headline in the state-owned Herald claimi...
Stars Foundation
As the international media focuses its attention on the electoral chaos in Zimbabwe, the ethnic cleansing of Darfur by the Sudan government carries on. It is five years since reports first emerged of the Islamist regime’s attacks through its proxy militia...
Patrick Smith
Africa Confidential has been busy investigating the effects of international sanctions on President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe and has uncovered a lot of hypocrisy and double standards. Although Britain has been at the forefront of diplomatic cond...
