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Published 16th March 2012

Vol 53 No 6


Nigeria

Oil cuts as Delta erupts

Niger Delta: Chevron LPG installations lit up at night. Oil pollution in the Delta is causing tremendous problems for the local community. Petterik Wiggers / Panos
Niger Delta: Chevron LPG installations lit up at night. Petterik Wiggers / Panos

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

Piracy and militant attacks are cutting oil production in the Niger Delta as the government struggles with northern insurgents

As the government contends with a Boko Haram militia determined to make the north ungovernable, a new round of attacks has erupted in the oil-producing Niger Delta. Apart from the financial damage of a new Delta crisis, it adds to the government’s credibility problem. As a government led by Niger Deltans, it was expected to pacify and then start developing the region.


Abacha’s ghost and Boko Haram

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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Security agents trying to disentangle the roots and widening network of the Boko Haram militia have identified links with a group of senior military and police officers who held po...


Empire-building in Addis

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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A fast-growing economy, grand hydropower schemes and one of Africa’s biggest armies all reinforce Ethiopia’s regional dominance

Leaders from China, India, Europe, Japan, Turkey, the United States and across Africa are expected at what the government plans as a show of Ethiopia’s regional leadership. The Tan...



BLUE LINES
THE INSIDE VIEW

Has the International Criminal Court, as Paul Kagame charged, ‘been put in place only for African countries’? Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars, only securing its first conviction on 14 March, it might also be thought a shameful waste of resources. All that effort, just to convict Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for recruiting children as soldiers nearly ten years ago.

Prosecuting criminals w...

Has the International Criminal Court, as Paul Kagame charged, ‘been put in place only for African countries’? Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars, only securing its first conviction on 14 March, it might also be thought a shameful waste of resources. All that effort, just to convict Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for recruiting children as soldiers nearly ten years ago.

Prosecuting criminals with vast resources at their disposal, however, is neither cheap nor easy – some of them are heads of state, after all, and have vast funds with which to fend off justice. This was also the court’s first case. It needed to be a success.

So much for the resources. And the fairness? ‘Why not Argentina, why not Myanmar, why not Iraq?’ Jean Ping complained. The court’s answer was, because most of the cases were themselves referred by Africans. They knew their own countries were too fragile to bring to justice villains of such magnitude.

Which, lest we forget, the ICC did. Lubanga was a frequent visitor to these pages in 2002 and 2003 during the worst of the Congo-Kinshasa bloodbath, a cruel, greedy warlord with the blood of tens of thousands of Congolese civilians on his hands. There were many like him. Indeed, in the lonely years to come, he may echo Ping’s words and ask, ‘Why me?’ Why not those who gave him orders, sponsored, condoned and collaborated with him, such as first the Ugandan, and then the Rwandan, governments?

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Opposition turns up the heat

Civilian and military opponents of the Khartoum regime win more battles in their campaign

Over a hundred people tried to storm a police station in Khartoum’s Ed Deim area on 6 March after Awadia Agabna died in clashes with police. Protests then spread. She was from the ...


The rise of Tendai Biti

Tendai Biti has been the star both of the Movement for Democratic Change as its General Secretary and of the Government of National Unity as its Finance Minister. He was perhaps lu...


Poisoning the atmosphere

President Kikwete remains aloof from party strife, so the anti-corruption faction and its enemies keep on fighting

Bitterness is growing in the disputes within the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi and government and CCM skeletons are refusing to stay in the closet. The latest row concerns the Depu...


Khartoum rewrites history

Despite bombing civilians, the National Congress Party (NCP) has some success abroad in the propaganda war, persuading governments to accept its version of events: that the Sudan P...


Business gets a seat at the table

Infrastructure investment is financed partly from the National Treasury or appropriations by Parliament. Yet a large share of the finance comes from the budgets of state-owned ente...


The neighbours start talking

A new warmth in relations could mean the reopening of the common border but agreement on Western Sahara remains problematic

Several high-level diplomatic meetings initiated by Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane in recent weeks have raised hopes that Algeria and Morocco might finally reopen their border,...


Dead banker tweeting

In mid-February, the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi’s old guard and their well-connected business friends experienced a collective shudder when the former Bank of Tanzania (BOT) Gov...


How to buy growth – for $100 billion

Both trades unions and business question the accountability of the government’s huge public spending programme, which would invest 850 billion rand (US$112 bn.) in power generation, transport and telecommunications over the next three years, plus more than R400 bn. for six new nuclear power stations by 2030

The announcement of these grandiose schemes in Parliament last month coincides with leadership contests within the governing African National Congress, which will choose its presi...


Constitutional reform blow

ZANU-PF opposes the reforms planned to precede the elections and knows how to scupper them

The process of drafting the new constitution is teetering towards collapse. So the various factions are honing their plans for what could be a bruising election campaign under the ...


Getting out of the bush

Accountants and managers at the BBC are calling time on the African service and cutting British influence on the continent

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to eviscerate its highly successful African Service looks counterproductive. It is all the more surprising given that Africa is bein...



Pointers

Friends reunited?

Could President Yahya Jammeh, who has run one of the region’s most corrupt and brutal regimes since 1994, be planning to reopen diplomatic relations with Iran?


Gomes in the lead

On 18 March, Guinea Bissau chooses a successor to the late President Malam Bacai Sanhá, who died in harness on 9 January.


Euro-Right backs Boers

Afrikaners complaining of a ‘Boer genocide’ are joining forces with far-right members of the European Parliament to protest the murder of white farmers in South Africa. In 2010, th...