War in Ethiopia By Gwynne Dyer Another October coming up, and still the Nobel Peace Prize Committee refuses to give Donald Trump his Prize. They even gave one to Barak Obama, who was Black and a Democratic and had only been in office for twenty minutes. Meanwhile, they ignore a man truly worthy of the […]
3 November 2024 Botswana and America: Different Elections By Gwynne Dyer Botswana’s elections have always been seen as a model for Africa, but the one last week has a somewhat wider relevance. The way its politicians handled victory and defeat could serve as a model for politicians in the United States. Botswana has been democratic
28 April 2024 War in Africa By Gwynne Dyer “We could see an all-out war between all the tribes and that is really the doomsday scenario. At this point, it’s not unrealistic,” the head of an international non-government organisation that is working in Sudan told the Al Jazeera news agency last week. (She asked them
31 December 2023 Abandoning the Sahel By Gwynne Dyer On Sunday, the last of 12,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops left Mali, ordered out by the military regime that seized power after two successive coups in 2020 and 2021. They leave behind them 310 Blue Helmets killed over ten years, and a country in chaos. Also
17 May 2023 The Baby Bonus Doesn’t Work Any More By Gwynne Dyer I was one of five children – not seen as a particularly big family in Newfoundland at the time – and there was one year when we allegedly beat Guatemala to have the highest birth rate in the world. (That’s probably not
23 November 2022 Vinland: A Question of Timing By Gwynne Dyer “If the 20th century AD were dated at the same resolution as the 20th century BC, the two World Wars would be indistinguishable in time; and the Montgomery Bus Strike might post-date the release of Mandela.” So wrote the ECHOES team of palaeohistorians at
2 November 2021 Dismantling Africa UPDATE by Gwynne Dyer Something is going wrong in Africa. Nigeria and Ethiopia, the two most populous countries on the continent, are both stumbling towards disintegration. There are now 54 sovereign African countries, which really ought to be enough, but in a few years there could be 60. Ethiopia is
“India is shrinking the flow of water into Pakistan,” said Pakistan’s Chief Justice Saqib Nisar on Saturday, renewing a ban on showing Indian TV shows and Bollywood films on Pakistani television. “They are trying to [obstruct the construction] of our dam and we cannot even close their [television] channels?” On the face of it, this
It was a bit like appointing Count Dracula as the goodwill ambassador for the blood donor service. Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint, and regularly produces events that would never be credible in a novel. Like the decision last Thursday to appoint Zimbabwe’s Robert
There are a number of ways to win an African election. The simplest, obviously, is to win the most votes, but this is sometimes hard to achieve, especially if you have been the president for a long time and people are getting fed up with your rule. If your country’s constitution only allows two terms