Blue Lines
The arrival of South Africa's former President Thabo Mbeki in Harare this week for talks with Zimbabwe's leading political figures points to the depth of the country's crisis. Strikes and protests are set to intensify, despite a violent crackdown by Presi...
Blue Lines
Sudan's Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok will probably come away empty-handed from his first trip to Washington DC since replacing the overthrown Omer el Beshir as Sudan's leader. Top of Hamdok's wish-list is that the United States end its economic sanctions...
Blue Lines
Suddenly the stakes in Sudan have been raised – between the revolutionaries and the supporters of Omer el Beshir's ousted regime. For weeks, rumours have been swirling about an impending coup by die-hard Islamists in state security, militias and Beshir's ...
Blue Lines
Multilateralism might get another lease of life if some of Africa's top bureaucrats have their way. One of the few advantages of Africa's balkanisation into 54 states is the voting power that this gives the continent in such organisations as the UN Genera...
Patrick Smith
This week we are covering South Africa's budget, Botswana's election, the repercussions of the killing of the Islamic State leader, a mooted referendum in Kenya, talks on the dam on the Nile between Egypt and Ethiopia and the World Bank's Doing Business r...
Blue Lines
Although he pulled in dozens of Africa's leaders to the first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi on 23-24 October, Russia's President Vladimir Putin is years behind the competition in courting Africa. Russia-Africa trade has doubled to US$20.4 billion over the...
Patrick Smith
We start this week with knife-edge negotiations over Britain's attempts to leave the European Union and their implications for Africa. And then to Nairobi where President Kenyatta is taking on parliament over interest rates. Russia says that 47 African le...
Patrick Smith
This week we start with the boost for Ethiopia and Kenya before looking at the gloomy growth forecasts ahead of the IMF and World Bank's meetings in Washington this week. Calls for the British, United Arab Emirates and Indian governments to impose sanctio...
Blue Lines
Batten down the hatches. Shorn of its economic diplomat-speak, the World Bank's latest update for Africa sounds a loud warning about rising poverty, the debilitating effects of discrimination against women and galloping government debt, especially to comm...
Patrick Smith
This week the news agenda starts in Pretoria, where despite a successful summit with Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa is under mounting pressure to set out a radical new strategy to get his country out of the ...
