Archive


Postcards from Hell
June 20, 2011
Images from the world's most failed states.

Hear the words "failed state," and a certain unshakable set of images likely floods your vision. There is poverty, insecurity, and a disregard for human dignity. Families fight for their survival, and political regimes fight to extend their rule. Some weak states are simply geographical aspirations on a map, filled with destitution and squalor. Others are, if anything, too strong; citizens of Zimbabwe and Syria might be better off if their countries' security forces weren't quite so good at repression.

This is the world of the fragile state -- a world that is a grim reality for an alarming percentage of the global population. A quarter of the world's human beings live in the 60 worst-ranking countries on the 2011 Failed States Index (FSI), which examines the year 2010. Here's a glimpse of their daily existence.

Reform School
April 12, 2011
In the early days of Ivory Coast's election crisis, U.S. policymakers tried to offer Laurent Gbagbo a post at Boston University. Could academia really entice the world's most entrenched strongmen to step down?

On April 11, in the early afternoon as the sun was peaking over Abidjan, Ivory Coast, troops loyal to the country's president-elect, Alassane Ouattara, burst into the presidential palace where Laurent Gbagbo was hiding, after four months of refusing to step down after losing the election. For the last week, as a de facto civil war raged, the international community had engaged in furious negotiations to try to lure him out of the bunker where he and his wife remained guarded by about 1,000 troops. Rumors circulated that he might accept exile, perhaps in South Africa or Togo. But Gbagbo wasn't having it; he'd received many such offers so far and had accepted none of them.  ...

West Africa Lurches Toward War
March 11, 2011
MONROVIA, Liberia — Along a muddy border between the Ivory Coast and Liberia, Ivorian refugees pack into a small wooden boat that resembles a giant, square fruit crate. The raft fills quickly and just as quickly departs directly across the river, where a Liberian immigration officer waits to direct them on the opposite bank. The new arrivals carry nothing but the clothes they are wearing and any small plastic bags they can manage. Once on the Liberian side, they are herded into long lines and processing queues. Many will sleep outside; some will take shelter with ethnic kin, in local villages, who are themselves often struggling to survive....  

April 7, 2011
A history of Ivory Coast's crisis
On March 31, Alassane Ouattara, a tall and trim man of 69 years, took the podium in front of a single camera at the posh Golf Hotel in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Four months after winning a democratic election for the Ivorian presidency that his opponent, the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo, still refused to recognize, Ouattara had lost his patience. "My fellow citizens," he began, "Despite numerous appeals to Laurent Gbagbo and his allies for a peaceful transfer of power, the only response to this outreached hand has been violence." As a result, soldiers loyal to Ouattara, the Republican Force of Ivory Coast (FRCI), "have decided to re-establish democracy and to ensure that the vote of the people is respected."


All the Colonel's Kings
March 25, 2011
How Qaddafi bought friends and influence on the African continent

Just a day after an international coalition began bombing targets in Libya, an African Union (AU) delegation tried to fly to Tripoli to mediate between Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi and rebel opposition leaders. The group, which included five African heads of state, said that both the Libyan leader and his opponents were ready to negotiate. But the plane never landed. On March 17, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that imposed a no fly zone over the country, now enforced by the United States, France, and Britain. The AU's attempt to bring an African solution to an African problem was cut short.

Qaddafi certainly is an African problem. During the four decades that he has governed Libya, Qaddafi has entrenched himself as a dominant political force across the continent. Many an aspiring politician has sought his support; many a rebel movement has turned to him for weapons and training. African heads of state have gone to great pains to maintain good relations with the colonel knowing that to do otherwise might mean Qaddafi's next protégé rebel movement could crop up in their country. Which is why, even as the rest of the world has written off Qaddafi as a maniacal loon, the Libyan leader still has friends in Africa.

The Long Emergency
June 25, 2010
Barack Obama's administration is taking an expansive, ambitious approach to global health. Does that mean giving up on combating HIV/AIDS?

Is AIDS still an emergency?
How you answer that question probably says a lot about whether you think U.S. President Barack Obama's approach to fighting HIV/AIDS abroad is a good idea or a dangerous detour.

Case Raises Questions About U.N.'s Role in Zimbabwe
February 22, 2010
A former U.N. official claims his warnings of a coming calamity were stifled by a U.N. bureaucracy intent on keeping good relations with Zimbabwe's dictator, Robert Mugabe. 

In the 11 months between August 2008 and July of last year, nearly 100,000 Zimbabweans came down with cholera in the first countrywide epidemic of the disease in modern history. Previous outbreaks in Zimbabwe, which have occurred annually since 2003, had affected only pockets of the country. This time, cholera was everywhere. Corpses filled the streets and hospital beds. In some districts early in the crisis, half of those infected died.
It was a tragedy in every way -- not least because the worst might have been prevented. Months before the initial outbreak exploded into a full-blown epidemic, Georges Tadonki, who headed the United Nations' humanitarian office in Zimbabwe at the time, says he warned his superiors of the severe risk, suggesting to the U.N. country director, Agostinho Zacarias, that 30,000 cases or more were possible. But Zacarias stifled that warning, Tadonki claims.


Postcards From Hell
July/August 2010
Images from the world's most failed states.
 
For the last half-decade, the Fund for Peace, working with Foreign Policy, has been putting together the Failed States Index, using a battery of indicators to determine how stable -- or unstable -- a country is. But as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You'll only know a failed state when you see it.

Can Mosquito Nets Stop Terrorists?
September 1, 2009
A previously unreported program sheds light on the battle for Africa's hearts and minds -- and the battle between the State Department and the Department of Defense.
 
A little-noticed discussion in Washington has recently hit fever pitch as members of the U.S. government debate how to turn their ambition -- to win the hearts and minds of the global public -- into action. At issue is how best the United States, now led by an administration promising to re-engage with the world through initiatives like Barack Obama's high-profile speech to Muslims in Cairo, can get its message across to enemies, skeptics, would-be allies, and even close friends.


Latin America's Literary Conscience
October 7, 2010
The 2010 Nobel laureate in literature is a political force in his own right: a champion of freedom, a fierce critic of strongmen, and clarion of democracy. Mario Vargas Llosa is not one to hold back. Here he is, in his own words. 

Mario Vargas Llosa is a literary treasure, author of classic and beloved novels of Peruvian and Latin American life ranging from The Green House to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to The Feast of the Goat. But the writer, who has been named the 2010 Nobel laureate for literature, has a second persona as well -- as one of the most respected and outspoken public intellectuals in Latin America. And unlike many Latin American writers of his generation, Vargas Llosa's politics have veered toward the neoliberal. Peru's president, Alan García, aptly called his award Thursday a triumph for "the visionary intelligence of Mario Vargas Llosa and his libertarian and democratic ideals."

How Will Obama Respond to the Uganda Attacks? 
July 12, 2010
Al-Shabab's assault on Kampala could re-focus U.S. policy toward Somalia.

Until yesterday, most every policymaker who works on Somalia thought -- or, at least, hoped -- that the damage from the country's implosion would remain within its borders. After two coordinated bomb blasts exploded in Uganda's capital of Kampala Sunday, however, the picture has permanently changed. Before, Somalia's Islamist group al-Shabab, a self-proclaimed regional al Qaeda affiliate that controls large swathes of the country, including much of Mogadishu, seemed like a threat to the Somali people and local aid workers but hardly anyone else. Now, after the attacks, al-Shabab has shown its ability to threaten its East African neighbors as well. It's a scenario that has kept East African counterterrorism analysts sleepless for years: a functional jihadist cell that can plan and execute civilian attacks internationally.

Politicized Religion Fuels Christian-Muslim Violence In Nigeria  
March 28, 2010
Religious Dispatches

Toward the end of my stay in Nigeria as a correspondent for The Economist in 2007 and 2008, I asked my driver, an older Muslim man named Bello who was perhaps my most trusted friend there, who he blamed for Nigeria’s corruption woes. “Our religious leaders,” he told me. “If they told our politicians to stop, they would.”


Who's Lobbying for the Coup?
August 4, 2009
A coup in Honduras has shaken Latin America. But in the U.S. Congress, the military is finding friends.


Last Tuesday, as ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was finishing his fifth day crouched along the Honduras-Nicaragua border, hiding in coffee fields to avoid detection, an intimate gathering of ambassadors, officials, journalists, think tankers, and Latin America watchers convened at the Argentine Embassy in Washington. They were there to hear a member of Zelaya's cabinet speak. From the assembled representatives of Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador, Enrique Reina, a former minister of communications who is now Zelaya's choice as his ambassador to the United States, received a universally warm welcome. "Let the Honduran dictatorship know that no government that rises in the black night ... will ever be recognized," thundered the Argentine ambassador to the United States, Hector Timerman. ...

Arming Somalia
September 9, 2009
The United States sent RPGs, machine guns, mortars, and -- in the words of one U.S. official -- "cash in a brown paper bag" to Somalia last spring. Foreign Policy reports on how the shipments took place, and who's not happy about it.


Late in May, as violence consumed the streets of the infamously violent capital city of Mogadishu, Somalia, packages of ammunition, weapons, and cash began arriving from the United States as part of an attempt to help the country's flailing Transitional Federal Government (TFG) stave off collapse. At the time, the Somali government was literally about to fail, reportedly controlling no more than a neighborhood in Mogadishu thanks to a fresh assault by two Islamist insurgent groups: al-Shabab and Hizbul Islam.

When International Women's Day Is a Thing of the Past
March  8, 2011
An exclusive interview with the head of U.N. Women, Michele Bachelet

Michelle Bachelet has broken a lot of glass ceilings in her time: first female defense minister in all of Latin America, first female president of Chile, and now the first head of U.N. Women, the first U.N. body entirely devoted to holding the world accountable for the treatment of women and girls. Bachelet has already earned plaudits in this realm from her days as chief executive in Santiago, where the former pediatrician extended daycare for poor families, widened health insurance coverage, and improved pensions. In her new job, she told FP's Elizabeth Dickinson that she plans to use hard facts to convince governments worldwide that helping women is in their interests -- and, hopefully, bring us closer to a day when International Women's Day, and her own organization, will become unnecessary.

Greed is Global
December 17, 2010
A world of corruption revealed by WikiLeaks.

It's a dirty world. From the diamond mines of Zimbabwe to the government coffers of Pakistan, U.S. diplomats run into corruption everywhere they go. We slogged through the muck and grime of the WikiLeaked cables to find the most egregious reports of official thievery

WikiFailed States
December 13, 2010
What the cables reveal about the world's toughest places.

By now, you've read the WikiLeaked headlines, illuminating the inner workings of U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or detailing the intractable regimes in Iran and North Korea. But what does Cablegate have to say about the world's forgotten conflicts -- the dimmer outposts of U.S. influence where Washington arguably has even bigger messes to confront? FP went through the archives with an eye to our 2010 Failed States issue to see what light the cables shed on these benighted places -- and whether the cables themselves may disrupt the often delicate balancing act of diplomacy.


How Much Turf Does the Somali Government Really Control?
September 23, 2010
It's a bit more than just "a few square blocks." But it's bad news when the insurgents control most of the capital.

Imagine if the U.S. government only controlled a few blocks on either side of the White House, or if French troops securing the Élysée Palace were afraid to march down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It's a good bet your government is in trouble when it doesn't even control the district where the presidential palace is located. Welcome to Somalia. In the capital city of Mogadishu, the government is literally fighting for its life.

New U.N. Report Reveals a Smarter, Healthier -- Yet More Unequal -- World
November 4, 2010
On the 20th anniversary of the world's most in-depth country ranking, the U.N. Human Development Index finds that global progress is largely on track. But those left behind are more numerous than ever.

If one were to look merely at bank slips, the world's countries and people are far less equal today than they were a mere two decades ago. But dig deeper, and the opposite is true: quality of life worldwide is moving toward a rather impressive average. In terms of health, education, and living conditions, the richest and poorest nations are looking more alike. In other words, it's now possible to be a poor country and boast healthy, educated citizens.

The Save-the-World Clock
September 20, 2010
Global leaders promised a decade ago to end poverty by 2015. With just five years left, the U.N. General Assembly -- including an estimated 140 heads of state -- will meet this week to assess progress. How much good has been done? Here's a hint: not enough.

Ten years ago, 189 heads of state sat down at the United Nations headquarters in New York and drafted an impressively ambitious set of anti-poverty goals -- to cut destitution in half, to reduce hunger, to boost school enrollment, and to make the world a more equal, just place. They called their eight targets the Millennium Development Goals, with an aim to "free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected." All this was to be accomplished by 2015.

 Faith in Africa
April 15, 2010
A new Pew Forum survey on religion in Africa breaks ground on how far Abrahamic faiths have spread on the continent and how it has dramatically shaped societies there.


The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life has just released a unique survey of religion on the African continent -- unparalleled in its breadth of geographic and topical coverage. Perhaps its most important finding is that, after years of evangelization almost nine out of 10 Africans are either Christian or Muslim.

Tony Blair Looks Ahead
December 16, 2010
The former prime minister and Middle East envoy offers his thoughts on the peace process, austerity measures, and whether he could have prevented the financial crisis. 

When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was named envoy to the Middle East in 2007 -- representing the "quartet" of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations -- he knew what it meant: "huge intensity and work." Now three years later, after the breakdown of the most recent peace talks, the conflict seems as intractable as ever. In conversation with Foreign Policy's Elizabeth Dickinson, Blair discussed the most knotty problems in the region, from settlements to Iran to the movement to unilaterally recognize the state of Palestine. And with a new age of austerity dawning at Downing Street, Blair had a few key things to say about his legacy and the future of his famous Third Way politics.

Ten Global Issues Obama Should Talk About -- But Won't
January 24, 2011
Tuesday's State of the Union will most likely be a domestically focused speech. But if his administration is going to get serious about foreign policy, Obama might want to take a look at FP's cheat sheet. 
 
Mexico: Arguably, the most important foreign-policy question to the United States isn't Iran or Afghanistan or China -- but neighboring Mexico, where nearly 35,000 people have died over the last five years as a result of the raging narcowar. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón began his crackdown on drug cartels in 2006, Mexico has been transformed -- and not necessarily for the better. The United States is intimately involved in the conflict; American drug users drive demand for the Mexican narcotics trade. Even more directly, 90 percent of the firearms used in the conflict are thought to come from north of the border.

The Oliver Stone Show
June 24, 2010
South of the Border is no portrait of Hugo Chávez or the Latin American left; it's about how one U.S. director views the world. 

Internal State Department Report Criticizes Africa Bureau 

August 12, 2009
Do State Department bureaus mirror the turmoil in the regions they cover? If a critical new report on the Bureau of African Affairs ("AF" in bureaucratic parlance) is any indication, the answer may be yes -- at least for certain offices. 

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concludes her seven-nation tour of Africa this week, AF is receiving mixed and strongly worded reviews back in Washington. A periodic report just released by the department's Office of the Inspector General praised the work of a bureau strapped for resources and burdened with demands, while raising serious questions about staffing shortfalls, planning priorities, and a public diplomacy program that is, in the report's words, "failed." Compared with other regional bureaus, Acting Inspector General Harold W. Geisel said in an interview, the Bureau of African Affairs received a worse review.

Memo to Iraq, From Colombia
February 19, 2009
How to go from being a conflict-ridden deathtrap to a sunny tourist haven.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported on an eccentric Italian traveler, Luca Marchio, who had wandered into Falluja and boldly, unselfconsciously, declared himself a tourist in what remains one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. Nervous Iraqi authorities swiftly escorted him to a safer locale before packing him on the next flight out. He is a little bit naive, an Italian Embassy official told the Times. But maybe Marchio was just ahead of the curve.

Do reform the justice system
Jun 5th 2008 | ABUJA
Despite some advances, the justice system leaves much to be desired

YUSUF MUSA recently stood before a court—for only the second time since his arrest last July for alleged cheating, forgery and breach of trust. The former car dealer had been accused by a colleague of running off with two vehicles valued at 5m naira ($43,200). He spent a month in police custody, followed by four months in prison, before his request for bail was heard. It took 15,000 naira and two more days to complete the paperwork that his lawyer says “could [have been] done in a few hours—even if there is no electricity.” And that was after Mr Musa's family had paid the police 100,000 naira in the expectation that a bribe would help reduce the charges. Mr Musa's experience is more common than not in Nigeria's justice system, though justice has been touted as one of the few institutional successes in Nigeria since its democracy was relaunched nearly a decade ago.

Another deadline goes up in flames
Apr 3rd 2008 AKALU-OLU

Continued gas flaring harms both the environment and the economy
LONG before you reach Akalu-Olu village, in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta region, a metres-high flame of gas gives the place away. Solomon Odum's farm is close by. When he was a child, the land grew more than enough cassavas and yams to feed his family. “Now you could plant from here to the school across town and not have enough,” he says. Half a century after oil exploration began, communities across the Niger Delta region say the environment and the livelihoods that relied upon it are permanently damaged.

Another president who won't go
Feb 28th 2008 DOUALA
Many Cameroonians are angry because their president refuses to retire

THE MAN who has presided over Cameroon for 25 years touts a simple slogan: “Paul Biya for peace”. But it no longer rings true. On February 24th and 25th, in Douala, Cameroon's commercial capital on the Atlantic coast, protesters lit fires on the streets, shooting broke out, and looters ran amok. Taxi drivers went on strike and many other people stopped work too. Shops and petrol stations were ransacked, cars burnt. Black clouds of smoke and the noise of gunfire enveloped the residential area along the main road out of Douala towards the capital, Yaoundé, where police later tear-gassed stone-throwing youths who had set up burning barricades.

A tribunal decides that last year's presidential election was fair

LOCAL newspapers called it D-Day, the day of judgment on the election which brought their president to power last April and which his opponents and an array of international observers deemed fraudulent. This week, as Nigerians pushed and brawled to get into a tiny courtroom where a tribunal was due to give its verdict, tension grew and security tightened. Had the tribunal annulled the election result, as many expected, a dangerous power vacuum could have threatened Africa's most populous country. But after the result was declared valid, people left more quietly than they had arrived. Turmoil did not ensue. For the moment, President Umaru Yar'Adua looks secure in his job.

The aftermath
Feb 21st 2008 NDJAMENA
The rebels are gone, but not forgotten

LOOTED and battle-scarred, the shops on Ndjamena's dusty main boulevard remain closed; thousands of Chadians, refugees in neighbouring Cameroon, have yet to return home; and the risk remains of a fresh rebel assault. But for now the message from President Idriss Déby, who on February 14th called a 15-day state of emergency, is clear: he has survived—again—the very type of coup attempt that first brought him to power 18 years ago.

Democracy by court order
Jan 24th 2008 ABUJA
President Umaru Yar'Adua faces a serious challenge to his legitimacy

FOR most of Nigeria's post-independence history, its politicians were more wary of losing office by a coup or assassination than by an adverse vote in a free election. These days, it is the courts they are worried about. Election tribunals that were set up to investigate last April's flawed elections have so far ordered six governors, over a dozen senators and scores of local-government officials to leave office for various electoral shenanigans. On January 28th, President Umaru Yar'Adua is due to appear before his own tribunal—and even his ruling party cannot be certain of the outcome.

Dec 6th 2007 LAGOS
Illicit drugs flow in from all over and then flow out to Europe
A FAIRLY typical recent morning at Murtala Mohammed, Lagos's main airport, saw four traffickers carrying cocaine, heroin or marijuana caught, arrested and X-rayed before noon. All but one of them lived abroad, in Belgium, India and Spain. Stuck without money or just looking for more, they had agreed to swallow the stuff or slip it into their luggage. Since the beginning of the year, Nigeria's Drug Law Enforcement Agency has made 234 similar arrests at this Lagos airport. But this, according to the agency's director-general, Lanre Ipinmisho, is just grazing the surface of the country's booming drug trade...

A Desperate Suitor (Contributed reporting)
Dec 6th 2007 LISBON
After China and America, it is Europe's turn to woo Africa
IT IS a coincidence, but an appropriate one nonetheless, that Europe should try to relaunch its relations with Africa in Lisbon. It was from here, in 1415, that Portuguese ships first set out to begin the European exploration and conquest of the dark continent; and it will be here on December 8th that politicians from 53 African and 27 European countries will gather at a summit to bury the old colonial relationships in favour of something more modern and “equal”, as the Europeans like to put it...

Bleak Publishing Houses
November 22nd, 2007, ABUJA
Award-winning novelists have more readers abroad than at home
WHEN a bookstore in Makurdi, the central state of Benue, wants to buy Chimamanda Adichie's latest novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun”, it sends a text message to Muhtar Bakare in Lagos, down south. Mr Bakare, a publisher who heads Kachifo, replies with a bank account number and a price. Once the money is transferred from Makurdi to Lagos, Mr Bakare loads the books onto a public bus, which then begins a day-long trip to the other side of Africa's most populous country...


On the Frontier of Finance 

NOT so long ago, a cruel joke among international bankers was that sub-Saharan Africa was less an emerging market than a submerging one. Local bankers had no reason to change that impression; for all the political and economic turmoil, tiny and informal markets, and shabby infrastructure, they mostly made good money doing very little. Using low-cost deposits to buy high-yielding government bonds, they harvested some of the best net-income margins in the world. The corollary, of course, was that most Africans had no access to financial services...

An Eerie Lull in the Violent Delta

November 8th, 2007, OKRIKA AND PORT HARCOURT
Can peace break out in Nigeria's oil-richest states?

IT IS a nice, warm afternoon, just right for a football match in Okrika, an island village a few miles south of the big city of Port Harcourt, capital of Nigeria's oil-rich Rivers state. Local teams gather to compete for one of three large trophies and the pot of money that comes with victory. Politicians and chiefs have been invited. It is your average local tournament—save for the host. This “unity and peace” competition, worth 15m naira ($120,000), replete with tents, music and commentators, is in the gift of Ateke Tom, an alleged militant wanted by the Nigerian government...

A Nation in Waiting
October 19, 2007 ABUJA
The people are watching the new president to see which way he will go

DESPITE the stench of April's elections, described by many observers as the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed, the new president, Umaru Yar'Adua, has been enjoying a honeymoon with the Nigerian electorate. For a country that has known little but corrupt military or civilian rule in the past 40 years or more, Mr Yar'Adua at least looks and sounds different. But now Nigerians are waiting for him to take the harder decisions that alone may sort out some of their country's more intractable problems. Only then will they be able to tell if he is truly up to the job.

A Dressing Down
October 12, 2007 ABUJA
The perils of wearing supposedly indecent clothes

IT DOESN'T always pay to dress up for a party in Nigeria: it may earn you a hefty fine or even a stint in jail. In the northern city of Bauchi, capital of one of the 12 Nigerian states where people must obey sharia law, 18 young men have been on trial for cross-dressing while celebrating an alleged gay marriage. Charged first with sodomy, which carries a death sentence, they were taken to court in August and accused of the lesser crime of idleness and being vagabonds, punishable by a year in jail plus a few lashings...

Reforming the Oil Industry
Sept 27, 2007 ABUJA
In a country where corruption infects almost everything, is reform feasible?

THE Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, for decades a source of corruption and national shame, is to be abolished by Nigeria's new president, Umaru Yar'Adua, and replaced by five new companies. The president, who will head a special oil council to oversee the changes, says he wants the reforms completed in six months. It would be an astonishing achievement if it happens and works...



Nigeria: An African Finds Peace in Europe
May 16, 2008 ABUJA--In her first moments with the reader, Oge is seated on a train, moving cautiously towards its destination, with passengers moving in and out of stale railway carriage seats, entering and exiting anonymously with each passing station. Oge was born in the Nigerian city of Enugu, but the reader finds her as a young woman living far from home, in Belgium. The environment is new, unexpected, and lonely. “Everything here is different,” the narrator says in the opening pages of Chika Unigwe’s The Phoenix. “I had expected it but the magnitude of the difference still unsettles me.”

Chad: Conflict Hinders Fight Against Aids
April 19, 2008 N'DJAMENA--Although treatment for Aids patients in Chad has been expanding, health officials worry that there is a risk that the disease might spread faster than it once did because of conflict. This strife is equally threatening programs that were already in place. Displaced populations, increasing poverty and deteriorating infrastructure have all complicated the country's battle against AIDS....


Nigeria: Struggling For Peaceful, Fair Elections
April 15, 2008

BWARI--By 8:30am on a recent Saturday morning, five polling stations sat proudly along the main road through Bwari satellite town outside Nigeria's capital city, Abuja. Traffic flowed as usual; hawkers roamed the streets selling sweets, fruit, and groundnuts. Voters in front of the local government office formed two short queues, one for men and one for women, which grew longer as time passed....Within two hours, the quiet had vanished. The main street was flooded with youths, piling their bodies closer and closer to the polling stations. Voters at the local government office had abandoned their queue, choosing to cluster around the election table instead. Many of their names were missing from the electoral register, they complained, even though they held official voters' cards....

Chad: Refugees in Cameroon Face Dilemmas
February 25, 2008

KOUSSERI--Just three days after moving to her new, permanent home as a Chadian refugee in Cameroon, 55-year-old Esther Deborah walks directly to her tent at the edge of a freshly-erected camp. "The house is not much farther," she reassures us with every other step. She folds back the crisp white pieces of fabric that make up the door, revealing her daughters — ages eight and 10. "We are suffering here," she says. "But we can't go back to N'Djamena [Chad's capital] yet. Our house was destroyed—they stole everything."


Nigeria: Govt Plans to Chase Tobacco Firms Out
January 24, 2008
On the heels of massive law suits filed against tobacco companies British American Tobacco and Philip Morris, the Nigerian government has announced its intention to ban smoking in public places in Nigeria's capital territory. Government ministers in Abuja have also said they plan to issue new health regulations controlling tobacco products and prevent tobacco companies from entering the market in the future....


Nigeria: Farmers Turn to Science to Boost Crop Yields
January 8, 2008
SABON GARI GANU--Late last June, farmers in Sabon Gari Ganu village in northern Nigeria's Katsina state divided their plots of land into 56 rows. Using seeds from 16 African countries, the farmers planted each row with a different variety of millet—some small seeds, some round, some dark and some light. Throughout the rainy season, the farmers watched carefully to see which varieties would grow and which would not.


Nigeria: New Agriculture Projects Focus on Processing, Marketing

January 8, 2008

ZARIA--It smells of freshly ground peanuts inside the mud-walled room where Dr. A. A. Oredipe is standing. His eyes are focused, but moving—inspecting the machine that this small village in northern Nigeria uses to crush peanuts before the paste is taken to market...


Niger Delta 'Brothers At Eachothers' Throats'
December 7, 2007

CALABAR/PORT HARCOURT--Roy Mog-Appia's attention is focused on a sheet of white paper, where he scribbles hastily. A few minutes later, he slides the notepad across the table. "My Village," reads a carefully crafted ten-stanza poem. "…Where farmlands are overtaken/By pipelines and poverty pitch/Brothers at each others' throats…"

December 3rd, 2007

KUJE--Kevin Aniebonem's voice is difficult to hear over the generator roaring in the background. The 24-year-old buys four liters of petrol every day to keep a light bulb running in his showroom of curtains, drapery, and fabric. The $10 he spends on fuel is money he has to make up for with higher prices and sales every day...

Nigeria: A New Publisher, Creating a New Industry
November 28th, 2007

ABUJA--When Bibi Bakare-Yusuf holds her two reviewers’ copies of Kemi’s Journal—one printed in India and one in Nigeria—side by side, the difference is night and day.
Abidemi Sanusi’s 2005 release looks vibrant with its red Indian-printed cover depicting Kemi’s world—her thoughts, her person, her attitude. The same book, printed in Nigeria, looks a bit dull. The blue hues fade into the surroundings and the thinner paper inside smears slightly from ink that is not quite refined enough...


Nigeria: Sharia Court Bans Satirical Play
October 28, 2007
KADUNA--Early in October, Shehu Sani started preparations for the opening of his third play, The Phantom Crescent. He wanted to perform it outside, in a park in Kaduna, where people could easily gather to watch. The actors were hired and the invitations posted. Those invitations, however, caught the eye of clerics in this northern town of Nigeria. On October 3, a few days before the opening curtain, the Upper Sharia Court in Kaduna State issued an injunction, preventing anyone from "selling or in any way circulating" the manuscript...


ABUJA--"Take a flag," Rosemary Obelu asks of each person entering Eagle Square, the Abuja site of presidential inaugurations and special events in Nigeria. Her fingers are overstuffed with green and white flags fixed on plastic stands, and extras hang from her wrist in a plastic bag.




NIGERIA: Tensions rise with start of trial of Delta leader
ABUJA, 15 April 2008 (IRIN) - In a demonstration of support for prominent Niger Delta militant Henry Okah, who the government put in trial in early April, militant leaders have said that they will escalate armed conflict. "We have pulled out of any peace talks, we have not disarmed so there really is no progress since Henry's arrest," the spokesman for the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) who goes by the name of Jomo Gbomo wrote in an e-mail to IRIN on 13 April.


ABUJA, 3 April 2008 (IRIN) - Violence was relatively low in the run-up to local elections on 29 March in Nigeria's oil-rich Rivers State but with evidence emerging of massive voting irregularities in favour of the ruling party, human rights groups warn the worst may not be over. "If this is the way the state has decided to treat [its voters] they will do everything to destroy the state," Patrick Naagbanton, who coordinates the Port Harcourt-based non-governmental organisation Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development, told IRIN.



DOUALA, 25 February 2008 (IRIN) - Residents of Douala awoke to heavy gunfire on 25 February. Columns of thick black smoke rose over the city as youths burned buses, cars and tyres, blocking off major arteries in the city. There were also reports of widespread looting. “We can’t leave our homes,” a man in Akwa, an area in the city centre, told IRIN. “I live near a school and can see teachers sending home all students that arrive. Rioters are occupying other schools in the area."
CAMEROON-CHAD: Aid reaches refugees in Maltam amid difficult conditions

KOUSSERI/MALTAM, 21 February 2008 (IRIN) - As refugees began moving from the northern Cameroonian town of Kousseri to a more permanent site in Maltam some 32 kilometres away this week, services and facilities were being rapidly prepared to accept them but conditions remain extremely basic. Refugees, most of whom fled Chad at the beginning of February when anti-government rebels launched an attack on the capital N’djamena, started being trucked to Maltam on 16 February.


CHAD: Aid work continues despite state of emergency

NDJAMENA, 18 February 2008 (IRIN) - While aid officials say they do not expect the government’s recent announcement of a state of emergency to impact on their operations, they say they are facing rising security threats. “In the last few years, we have been working more or less in [a state of emergency,]” said Nicolas Palanque of the non-governmental organisation CARE. “There are peaks in insecurity but up to now we have not been targeted because we are a humanitarian organisation.”



CAMEROON-CHAD: Refugees from N’djamena still fearful of returning


KOUSSERI, 14 February 2008 (IRIN) - Fighting ended in Chad’s capital N'djamena almost a week ago but many of the tens of thousands of Chadians who sought refuge across the River Chari in northern Cameroon say they are not planning to return for now. “We are afraid to go back,” 20-year-old N'djamena resident Patrice Djerane who is camping out near the dusty border town of Kousseri, told IRIN. He went there with his mother while his father remains in N'djamena keeping the family abreast of conditions there. “We’ll go back when peace comes. Until then, we’ll wait.”

NIGERIA: Poor oil spill clean-up methods affect Niger Delta communities

EDERE, 7 February 2008 (IRIN) - A few days after villagers in Kedere in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region noticed oil seeping from the pipe that runs beside the village, a few boys from the village went out with shovels, dug pits a few feet deep, scooped the oil into the ground and burned it, finally covering it with sand. “During the dry season, it looks nice,” Anyakwee Nsirimovu, director of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt, told IRIN, describing the simple process which he said is a common spill clean-up tactic in the region.


PORT HARCOURT, 1 February 2008 (IRIN) - Tiophelis spends his days running. He won't say exactly where, but, like hundreds of other boys and men in the creeks of Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region, he is constantly on the move for fear of attacks by the Nigerian military. The soft-spoken boy’s voice cracks over the phone - Tiophelis refuses to meet in person. He is a militant, a member of one of countless groups that claim to be fighting for freedom from poverty, underdevelopment, and political oppression for the people in the Niger Delta region.


NIGERIA: Police corruption blamed for wave of arrests

PORT HARCOURT, 28 January 2008 (IRIN) - Residents of Port Harcourt's poorest neighbourhoods say that police have wrongly blamed them for street violence between rival cult groups last year and are carrying out indiscriminate raids into their communities motivated by financial greed not criminal investigation. In the most recent of what residents in the Diobu neighbourhood said is a string of police incursions into their community, on the night of 17 January state police arrested at least 200 men and boys in a single raid.

Nigeria: Gas Flaring Wrecking Delta Communities

ABUJA, 12 December 2007 (IRIN) - Civil society groups in the Niger Delta region have warned that the government is destroying communities’ health and Nigeria’s environment by flouting laws against gas flaring, a technique used in oil production. For decades gas flaring has been used to separate crude oil from the associated gases that are extracted with it, but Nigeria flares more gas today than any nation in the world after Russia, even though it is only the world’s eighth largest oil producer...



Driving to Death
ABUJA, 28 November 2007 (IRIN) - One of the most dangerous things anyone can do in Nigeria is get into a car. “Remember that every road user is mad,” reads a hand out from the Nigerian NGO, Volunteers from Safety Alliance. “You are the only sane one.”

ABUJA, 23 November 2007 (IRIN) - The Nigerian senate has called for a review of the 2006 agreement in which Nigeria agreed to transfer ownership of the disputed Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon.


ABUJA, 23 November 2007 (IRIN) - Patience Israel, a 20-year-old hairdresser, lived in a decent home in Karimo, a squatter settlement near Nigeria's political capital, until it was demolished in January 2006...

NIGERIA: New hope for old 'master plan' on Niger Delta

CALABAR, 19 November 2007 (IRIN) - The government of President Umaru Yar'Adua says it is serious about tackling the root causes of violence and poverty in Nigeria's troubled Niger Delta with a ‘master plan’ to develop the region and provide basic services....

NIGERIA: Govt hits tobacco companies with whopping law suit

LAGOS, 9 November 2007 (IRIN) - The Nigerian federal government filed a suit in the High Court of Abuja on Tuesday against tobacco companies British-American Tobacco, Philip Morris International, and International Tobacco Ltd., seeking US$42.4 billion in reparations for damage they have caused to Nigerians’ health...




Post-Conflict Irresolution
August 10, 2007
Sierra Leone is a model of successful peacekeeping. A British-led and U.N.-sanctioned intervention in 2002 put a stop to a decade-long civil conflict that killed 50,000 and left many more mutilated and displaced. But this West African ...


Ousmane Sembene
June 15, 2007
Remebering one of West Africa's greats.



A Lens into African History
August 9, 2007
BRUSSELS -- When Dr. Emile Muller returned to Belgium in 1938 after working for 15 years in the Congo, he didn't say much to his family about his time there. But he brought home a suitcase of nearly 3,000 photos. These black-and-white ...

Spectators to Genocide
August 1, 2007
Four years, 200,000 dead and two million displaced people later, the United Nations has finally authorized a peacekeeping contingent for Sudan's Darfur region.


Gadhafi's Ransom
July 25, 2007
First the good news. The ordeal of the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor, incarcerated in Libya since 1999 on trumped-up charges of infecting more than 400 children with HIV, is finally over. The bad news is that the West wavered for eight long years while the nurses were sentenced twice to death only then to give in to Libya's ...


Democracy on Trial
July 18, 2007
Let's play name-that-state. After the EU declared its 2005 elections flawed, this country's troops killed 193 protestors and arrested 20,000 more. Last week, 42 of the accused were convicted of inciting violence to overthrow the state (down from an original charge of genocide and treason). Thirty-five were condemned to life in prison and forbidden to vote on Monday. Some of the accused were journalists, ...

Markets Wide Shut
July 13, 2007
Italy has long been a drag on Europe's economy, with GDP growth trailing even the euro zone's modest rate for at least 10 years running. Some of the reasons, such as high taxes, are easily quantified. But others, such as the lack of openness in its markets, haven't been -- until now.

The EU's Sex Appeal
July 6, 2007
The European Union wants to join the YouTube generation and close that annoying "democracy deficit" (in wonkspeak) with citizens who aren't sufficiently interested in Brussels's efforts on their behalf. So, for the past week, for anyone who cares to click his way there, EUtube has gone live as a channel on YouTube.

Europe's Appeaser
July 4, 2007
Meanwhile, as brave Zimbabweans call for outside intervention (see related editorial) while the country goes down the tubes, the European Union's incoming president wants to roll out the welcome mat for the man who made it all possible: President Robert Mugabe.



Nigeria on Strike
June 22, 2007
Nigeria's President Umar Yar'Adua came into office on May 29 after a sham ballot a month earlier. Africa's most populous and oil-rich country isn't easy to govern in the best of times, but the new President is fast learning that it's near impossible without political legitimacy


Sanctioning Sudan
June 18, 2007
The diplomatic baby steps taken in recent days to ease the suffering in Darfur are welcome. But only the willfully ignorant would take the Sudanese regime at its word.


Justice for Taylor
June 8, 2007
Former Liberian President Charles Taylor pulled a trick out of the Slobodan Milosevic playbook this week by turning his war crimes trial at The Hague into a public spectacle. The U.N.-backed Special Court of Sierra Leone would be wise to put a quick stop to these antics. If not, it risks wasting the chance to close a murderous chapter in West African history.



Africa's Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling
The New York Times
May 20, 2007

Spare Change is Big Business in a Culture of Generosity
The New York Times
August 21, 2006

Chinese Take Turn at Turning a Sub-Saharan Profit
The New York Times
August 18, 2006





Wanted: A New Liberian Force The Mail & Guardian August 11, 2006
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