Vol 58 No 10 | BURKINA FASO High Court, high drama 12th May 2017 All the lawyers defending 34 ministers in ex-President Blaise Compaoré's last government have walked out after challenging the legitimacy of the Ouagadougou court. The defendants are accused of...
Vol 58 No 10 | GUINEAUNITED STATES Thiam verdict makes waves 12th May 2017 After a six-day trial, former Mining Minister Mahmoud Thiam was convicted in a New York court on 3 May of laundering US$8.5 million in bribes relating to mining...
Vol 58 No 10 | NIGERIA An avenger unmasked 12th May 2017 All the masked vigilantes in comic books have secret identities but few expected a member of the Niger Delta Avengers, one of the region's most effective militant groups,...
Vol 58 No 9 | GUINEA BISSAU Vaz clings to power 28th April 2017 The President is ignoring the constitutional requirement to call elections and Parliament is deadlocked Three years after general elections that were widely hailed as free and fair and which ended two years of post-coup transitional government, and two years after a promising...
Vol 58 No 9 | SENEGAL Macky challenger gaoled 27th April 2017 Dakar's Mayor Khalifa Sall is in prison only because President Macky Sall fears his growing challenge to his power, say his supporters. The President's far more charismatic namesake...
Vol 58 No 8 | NIGERIA Ambition and ethics 14th April 2017 Politicking ahead of the 2019 elections and the derailing of the anti-corruption campaign frustrate President Buhari's team In the four weeks since his return from medical leave in London, President Muhammadu Buhari has struggled to regain the initiative. This comes against a background of intensifying...
Vol 58 No 8 | LIBERIA Heroes and villains 14th April 2017 Corruption during the Ebola outbreak is enfeebling the health-care system, according to secret audits When nursing assistant Salome Karwah, an Ebola fever survivor who had appeared on the cover of America's Time Magazine as a Person of the Year in 2014, died...
Vol 58 No 8 | GUINEA Sex, rebels and Paris trips 14th April 2017 President Condé steams ahead in the opinion polls but dissent within his party is growing as local elections approach The career of the governing party's youth leader came to an abrupt end in late February when the latest in a series of sex tapes which have been...
Vol 58 No 8 | SIERRA LEONE Runway overrun 14th April 2017 Despite promising the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that he would not go through with it, President Ernest Bai Koroma has still not given up on the...
Vol 58 No 7 | NIGERIAUNITED KINGDOM The great oil chase 31st March 2017 A joint British-Nigerian probe into how tens of billions of dollars of oil money went missing promises to be the most thorough yet Oil industry experts calculate that Nigeria may have lost US$100 billion from 2010 to 2015 from outright theft and excessively disadvantageous production and trading deals. Audits by international...