Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal can qualify for next year’s African Cup of Nations (CAF) with victories this weekend. But the most compelling match may be South Africa taking on Egypt in Cairo. Egypt is the most successful team in the history of Africa’s greatest tournament, having won seven times, and they have won the last […]
Just a whole lotta stories clogging my internet tabs: Both First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have Africa trips pending in the next few days. This is great, and both trips have clear policy implications. You know what would be even better? If we started to get some sense of a […]
Africa’s last monarch King Mswati III of Swaziland reportedly has cancelled plans for a “silver jubilee” (estimated to be 1.2 million euros) amid warning from the IMF that the landlocked kingdom is teetering on financial collapse. Well, the truth is that King Mswati needs to cancel many things, including: • He should unban political parties, […]
One can find Khartoum morally abhorrent. One can find Sudan’s regime to be a travesty on human rights. I do on both counts. But you’ve got to hand it to them — from a pure realpolitik/power politics vantage point, Omar al-Bashir and company sure know how the game is played. On Sunday the Northern Sudanese […]
Yes, of course Botswana’s public sector strike hurts the poor disproportionately. In Botswana, as in just about everywhere, the poor outnumber everyone else. But to assert that public sector strikes harm them disproportionately is to not be curious as to whether or not decisions by those against whom the public sector strikers are striking harm […]
I have always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the travel writings of Paul Theroux. On the one hand he is (usually) a graceful writer and an intrepid traveler. The best travel writing transports the reader to a place he or she has never been and may never be, or provides new insights to a […]
This week the second ever Africa-India Summit took place, with New Delhi signaling that it was committed to doing business with the continent and supporting both national and regional development. Trade between India and Africa amounted to roughly $46 billion in 2010, but the partners aim to increase that number to $70 billion by 2015. […]
So, you know that referendum that allowed South Sudan to go its own way? And you know how Khartoum said that it would not intervene to prevent the separation? Well, Omar al-Bashir’s government might have meant it, but they sure were not going to yield the contested terrain of oil-rich Abyei. And so earlier this […]
“This conference cannot close without adopting a single African Charter. We cannot leave here without having created a single African organization…. If we fail in this, we will have shirked our responsibility to Africa and to the peoples we lead.” So said Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie at a Pan-African summit in 1963 at which the […]
In the highest ever voter turnout, South Africans firmly put the governing African National Congress in charge of the nation’s municipalities, taking 61.95%) of the vote nationally. Did the delivery of basic services like water, housing and jobs influence the way people voted on Wednesday May 18, 2011? Of course it is difficult to tell, […]
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