The PPA has a new blog, and it might be the awesomest blog ever. Go check yoself the FPA Music and Global Affairs Blog. Just please return back here. I fear that Robert is going to put forth a flurry of content making the rest of us irrelevant in your eyes.
Twenty years ago, on 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela left Victor Verster prison in Paarl. Today South Africa and the world celebrates that epoch-shifting event. After twenty-seven years the ANC leader, who had by the 1980s become a symbol of the anti-Apartheid movement and the embodiment of South Africa’s pariah status, was free. Mandela spent […]
I received an email from a reader this morning. The emailer (it was basically anonymous, and so I do not know the writer’s gender) asserted that they like this blog, but believe that I am too negative about Africa, and suggested a website (theirs, I assume) for me to visit that takes a sunny view […]
Two stories from today serve to hint how precarious Nigeria’s political situation might be if Goodlove Jonathan’s Interim Presidency goes awry. In his first day in power after taking over the presidency for Umaru Yar’Adua, who is hospitalized in Saudi Arabia with no indication if he will ever recover well enough to return to power, […]
One reason why Jacob Zuma is likely to weather the storm surrounding his latest controversy is that his popularity ratings were incredibly high before the story broke and had been rising throughout the early months of his presidency. According to polls in November 2009, 77% of South Africans felt that Zuma was doing his job […]
Nigeria’s Vice President Goodluck Jonathan has now taken over as the country’s Interim President, a position he will maintain until (and if) President Umaru Yar-Adua is able to recover from his rather dire health problems and return from Saudi Arabia. Theoretically the country has thus avoided a major political crisis and Jonathan said all of […]
Guinea’s interim president, General Sekouba Konate, has named Rabiatou Serah Diallo, secretary general of Guinea’s National Workers Confederation, to head a council charged with managing the country’s long-awaited transition from military to civilian rule. The National Transition Council will consist of 101 Guineans from civil society, political parties, religious groups and members of the ruling […]
South Africa’s Congress of the People has weighed in on Jacob Zuma’s recent revelations about his out-of-wedlock child. The upstart party, facing its own internal turmoil, plans to call for a motion of no confidence in Zuma when Parliament resumes this week. The gesture is almost certain to amount to symbolic grandstanding, though if all […]
We are fast approaching the year anniversary of the fragile alliance that is Zimbabwe’s Unity Government,” and while the worst aspects of the country’s economic disaster have stabilized, virtually no progress has been made on breaking the impasse that has set in between Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC. And of course […]
Both houses of Nigeria’s National Assembly have passed a motion asking that Umaru Yar’Adua hand temporary power to his deputy President, Goodluck Jonathan. Yar’Adua has been out of the country (and by most accounts out of contact) since November and speculation has run the gamut as to just how sick he is. He has been […]
I was traveling all weekend without internet access and I will be gone for much of this week and am not certain if I’ll have internet while I am away. As a result, a relatively commentary-free links dump: Texas in Africa is tired of folks in the media asserting that the crises in the Democratic […]
These are not South African President Jacob Zuma’s best days. To make an American analogy, Zuma right now comes across to much of the public like a mix between Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Bill Clinton survived his sexual peccadilloes, though they wounded his presidency and legacy substantially and may well have helped cost Al […]
At Business Insider Lawrence Delevingne has a lengthy expose on the realities of at least one major company’s attempt to do business in Senegal. From Delevingne’s intro paragraphs: For entrepreneurs, Africa represents the last great open market. The upsides can be tremendous. Tens of billions of dollars from around the world, especially China, have gone […]
The FPA’s Great Decisions television series, which provided the initial impetus for all of the FPA blogs, has kicked off its 2010 season. They are all worth seeing, of course, but regular readers of this blog will be most interested in Episode 2: “Justified Force,” which looks at Kenya and East Africa in the wake […]
The United Nations is upping the pressure on Ivory Coast to hold a long-promised election. The country’s current political crisis began with an attempted coup against President Laurent Gbagbo in September 2002, which left the country with a nasty split between the rebel-held north and a government-controlled south. The election has already been delayed six […]