21 October 2020 The young Nigerians who were protesting at Lekki Toll Plaza in Lagos on Tuesday night were not the African touring company of ‘Les Misérables’. Lekki is one of the poshest suburbs of Lagos, full of gated communities, and most of the protesters were literate, media-savvy youths who reeked of urban cool. The …
29 July 2020 “Assessing the people of America’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains.” That seemed to be the line taken by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas last week in his opinion piece for the New York Times. It caused great outrage, the Opinion Editor …
Sometimes Donald Trump gets it right. In February he cut off US military aid to the central African country of Cameroon because of its appalling human rights record (and didn’t even offer to restore it if the Cameroon government dug up dirt on his political opponents at home). Last Friday he acted again, dropping Cameroon …
Lengthy delays before announcing the results of African elections are commonplace (the Democratic Republic of Congo last month, Zimbabwe last July, etc.). It just means that people voted the wrong way, and the government needs time to re-arrange the results before publishing them. Postponing the vote at the last moment is much less common, and …
Newspapers still need copy to hold the ads apart even when nothing much is happening. So I was quite pleased when I noticed that the presidents of two African countries, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, were both “missing in action”: spending most of their time in hospitals overseas, while their spokespersons denied that there was anything wrong. …
As military interventions go, it was practically flawless. Last month Gambia’s long-ruling dictator, President Yahya Jammeh, lost an election that turned out to be a little freer than he had planned. After first conceding defeat and even phoning up the victor, property developer Adama Barrow, to congratulate him, Jammeh changed his mind and decided to …
“I think, once a dictator, always a dictator,” said Sonnie Ekwowusi, a columnist for Nigeria’s This Day newspaper. “Many people are afraid that if (Muhammadu Buhari) wins, they will go to prison.” Well, Buhari did win the presidential election, and there are many people in Nigeria who really should go to prison, mainly for corruption …
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, has lived up to his name again. Three minutes after he left an election rally in the northern city of Gombe on Monday, a suicide bomber blew herself up in the nearby parking lot. “The president had just passed the parking lot and we were trailing behind his convoy when the …
There’s going to be an election in Nigeria in mid-February, and the weird thing is that it’s not going to be all about Boko Haram. The Islamist terrorists are now killing people at the rate of at least 500 a month — two 9-11s a year, in a country with half the population of the …
A coalition of imams and organisations representing British Muslims has written Prime Minister David Cameron asking him to stop using the phrase “Islamic State”when talking about the new country carved out of Iraq and Syria by Islamist terrorists. That’s what Abu Baqr al Baghdadi, who has proclaimed himself “the caliph of all Muslims and the …