Many observers inside and outside of South Africa worry whether the country will be able to pull off the Fifa World Cup in 2010. South Africa will be fine. There will be occasional stumbles, and the masses descending on South Africa will have to deal with periodic glitches that might frustrate those expecting another Germany, […]
Recent rebel pullbacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have inspired some tepid hope that full-scale chaos is avoidable. But while we all want good news to emerge from the beleaguered Congo, the reality is that good news usually ends up being fleeting. Anneke van Woudenberg, a senior researcher on the DRC for Human […]
Today marks the deadline for the new Congress of the People (Cope) to respond in writing to the ANC's legal demands that the new organization change its name. The ANC's attempts to force a name change from Core strikes me as a petty and frivolous nuisance. It would be hard for the ANC to claim […]
It appears that the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar may yet still have his day in the hot Afghan sun as President Karzai has publicly invited him to negotiations to end the violent conflict that has plagued the state since 2001. Karzai has promised the Taliban leader, who was ousted from power by the US in […]
Iraq's parliament is currently working on passing the SOFA. Hold your breath.
ISLAMABAD: Gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead a retired major general of Pakistan Army and his driver in the outskirts of the capital on Wednesday. Major General (R) Ameer Faisal Alvi from the Special Services Group (SSG) had retired more than two years ago. He was heading for his Islamabad office at 9:30am on Wednesday […]
I haven't done much book reviewing on this blog besides Ahmed Rashid's ‘Descent into Chaos‘, and that's really not going to change, but I would like to list a group of recent publications concerning Afghanistan and Central Asia that you may find interesting and worth looking into. Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a […]
Georgia is nervously calling “for an independent investigation into who started the war between Russia and Georgia…after the New York Times and BBC's Newsnight programme raised serious doubts about Georgia's claim that its attack on the breakaway Georgian enclave of South Ossetia on August 7/8 was in response to Russian aggression”. But it was the […]
We can be sure that more information will come to light over time, but as of now we know that Nouri al Maliki's government is pushing out those employees in the government's ministries charged with overseeing the bureaucracy and keeping it transparent. The forcings-out (firings, retirements, etc) were not publicly announced but have recently come […]
The Movement for Democratic Change's Morgan Tsvangirai does not want further sanctions placed on Zimbabwe. Whatever the country's political situation, which seems likely to remain as fragmented and stalemated as ever, with Robert Mugabe firmly in control, Tsvangirai sees sanctions only doing harm to a populace already suffering deeply. Tsvangirai clearly seems to take into […]
South African politics are nothing if not colorful. Senzo Mchunu, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial secretary general of the African National Congress claims that the Congress of the People's Mosiuoa Lekota needs to stop “urinating” on the ANC.
In an exciting change, the Foreign Policy Association is combining the South Africa Blog with this Africa Blog, which will be the new permanent site of FPA Africa commentary. I will continue to post on South African issues, but this transition will be better for me, as keeping both blogs has not always been easy, […]
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