Patrick Smith
A wise head in Algiers advised a young activist to curb his enthusiasm for the forced resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika: 'Don't call this a revolution. At best it's a revolt… we don't even know if the flight of Ben Ali from Tunisia was a revol...
Patrick Smith
This week our correspondents file from the slow-motion exit of
President Bouteflika in Algiers, the chances of a
long-awaited cabinet reshuffle in Nairobi, news about more ambitious
borrowing and spending plans from the re-elected President Buhari in Abu...
Patrick Smith
This week we look at a surprising legal deal in Luanda, the
power crisis that could shape South Africa's
elections, how politics and climate change worsened the Mozambique disaster, a personal post-election battle in Nigeria and the unravelling of Kenya's...
Blue Lines
In Mozambique, Cyclone Idai has torn through the homes of over 1.7 million people in what is turning into a regional catastrophe. Eye-witnesses speak of an 'inland ocean' forming west of Beira, which has been almost completely cut off from the rest of th...
Patrick Smith
Today we start a new series of news despatches from our correspondents across Africa and beyond. Our aim is to give you a sense of the news agenda for the week ahead as well as spelling out the implications of events that are still playing out.
Our news ...
Blue Lines
The campaign to stop President Abdelaziz Bouteflika from running for a fifth term in Algeria's elections has provoked both shock and surrealism. Shock because the millions of young Algerians marching in Constantine, Oran as well as the capital Algiers is ...
Blue Lines
The gargantuan numbers aside – state power company Eskom has unserviceable debts of 420 billion rand (US$30bn) – the most pressing equation in South Africa's budget is a political one. Ahead of national elections on 8 May, President Cyril Ramaphosa has to...
Patrick Smith
This week we look at the delayed general election in Nigeria, a tough budget in South Africa, an oil rights dispute between Kenya and Somalia and the complexities of Ethiopia's plan to sell a large stake in its state-owned telecoms company.
NIGERIA ELECT...
Blue Lines
A year into his presidency and a quarter century after the first free elections in South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa has to strike a balance in his State of the Nation address to Parliament on 7 February. On the one hand he wants to assure people th...
Blue Lines
Shakier economies and an accelerating youth revolt dominate our second special issue on the year ahead
There are clear parallels between the wave of protests demanding radical change across Africa this month with the early days of the North African revol...