Questions remain about how well Nigeria’s government will manage public dissatisfaction, ethnic and religious divisions, and violent resistance from the Islamist Boko Haram movement.
Jeffrey Sachs has seen his economic theories been applied to disastrous effect.
Progress on the political roadmap to move Somalia out of conflict and toward stable, permanent, and representative government by August 2012 seems to be facing intractable barricades. The roadmap calls for the adoption of a new constitution by July, with parliamentary elections to take place in August of this year. With less than six months remaining and al-Shabab forces controlling much of the country, the likelihood of constituting a representative constituent assembly, finalizing a draft constitution, and conducting a national referendum is unrealistic if not impossible.
On January 1, 2012, Nigeria’s fuel regulator announced that the government was immediately discontinuing its fuel subsidy to help cut government spending, causing an overnight spike in fuel prices from $1.70 to $3.50 per gallon. Such a hike would be outrageous even for Americans. But for a drastically poorer country like Nigeria—where 70 percent of the population of 160 million lives below the poverty line—it was insufferable. Cheap fuel is one of the few benefits Nigerians enjoy as citizens of Africa’s largest (and the world’s 14th-largest) oil producer.
Nigeria is facing a perfect storm of crises including a national strike, widespread protests, and sectarian violence in the north. Although the strikes, attacks, and protests raise the specter of another civil war in Africa’s biggest oil producer, the United States and the international community should avoid aggravating the situation by seeming to encourage a military solution.
Hope engendered by the referendum to create South Sudan last year has been undermined by inter-ethnic strife and mass killings by the forces of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir.
Libertarians and atheists have some commendable stances — but for the wrong reasons.
During the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOG) meeting in Perth, Australia in late October, UK Prime Minister David Cameron warned a number of African leaders that if their respective countries ban homosexuality, they could risk losing UK aid money.
He may not have anticipated the swiftness and fury of the African response to his statement.
The image of Nero fiddling as Rome burned—albeit apocryphal– has stuck as the metaphor for willfully irresponsible government. Government representatives, gathered at climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, have been fiddling for the past week. Of the hundreds of closed-door sessions, official meetings and informational seminars, all that’s come out so far is cacophony. By the looks of it, they plan to fiddle right through to the end, wasting one of the last opportunities to respond in time to a threat that affects not only their societies, but the entire planet.
China’s imminent replacement of the West as the dominant international economic and political force in Africa epitomizes the most dramatic shift in geopolitics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet the United States and Europe, Africa’s traditional trading partners, seem incapable of responding to the challenge and retaking the initiative. Instead, their response has been to wring their hands in despair and make ineffectual noises about human rights and democracy.