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Another close contest has seen National Democratic Congress (NDC) President John Dramani Mahama narrowly shading victory over New Patriotic Party (NPP) rival Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in an election that should cement Ghana’s reputation as one of Africa’s most vibrant and responsible democracies. But growing questions over big-ticket investment projects, and rising tensions between the parties over the direction of oil revenues, mean the outlook is less comfortable than it may seem.

The Arab street is still potent, especially when its energy feeds into the political ambitions of other powerful groups, such as the Egyptian army and Gulf states that have become uncomfortable at the leading role of the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen) – and even its allies such as Qatar – in North Africa since the 2011 ‘revolutions’. With its politics driven from the street but shaped in the corridors of power occupied by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), the Tamarrod (Rebel) movement’s call to fill Tahrir Square with protestors on 30 June proved sufficient to overthrow elected President Mohammed Morsi and his Ikhwan-dominated government.


Political decisions are likely to come thick and fast as a successor is chosen to Hailemariam Desalegn, who resigned on 15 February amid turbulent scenes across the country. The 180-member ruling council of the crisis-ridden Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), comprising 45 members from each of its four regional parties, has convened a three-day congress from 1 March to elect a new prime minister. Providing a degree of consensus can be maintained, this should be a set-piece event; the powerful EPRDF executive committee began deliberations on 26 February to hammer out a deal.

The party’s over in Juba following South Sudan’s independence day on 9 July, but the new, officially English-speaking state carved out of the Republic of Sudan remains under intense scrutiny, from international organisations and business groups, as well as from international oil companies which must come to terms with the region’s new political configuration (AE 213/1).

It is easy to forget that Côte d’Ivoire remains classed as a ‘fragile state’, when viewed from Abidjan’s refurbished hotels and burgeoning malls, many developed by long-established Lebanese families who are trading up from their traditional supermarkets. The African Development Bank’s return after 11 years in Tunis exile is one factor pushing up real estate prices and school fees in wealthier neighbourhoods.

The impact of coronavirus on construction and project completions was underlined by figures for Q1 2020 produced by African Energy Live Data and presented at a 6 July Africa Investment Exchange (AIX) webinar on Africa power negotiations. This showed that only 240MW of net installed capacity was added in Q1 2020 (as a total of 438MW was installed but several big rental contracts ended). If this performance continued across the year, there would be a historic low in the installation of new generation capacity.

The conflict over the former Spanish Sahara is all too often forgotten. But there is a growing feeling in policy circles – shared by companies eager to exploit the territory’s hydrocarbons and mineral potential – that the Western Sahara standoff is overdue a promotion up the international policy agenda. Crisis in the Sahel, where French and African Union forces have confronted jihadist radicals in Mali, has added to pressures to revisit the intractable conflict, more than 40 years since the Polisario Front liberation movement was formed, 38 years since Morocco’s late King Hassan II organised his ‘Green March’ into the territory, and 22 years since a United Nations-sponsored ceasefire was declared.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2011 Peace Prize to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, just four days before the first round of Liberia’s presidential elections, was a controversial one. In her first term, Johnson Sirleaf did a remarkable job of launching the revival of a country emerging from civil war and economic chaos, but her decision to seek a second term was controversial as she had pledged to serve just one term

Nigerian business leaders may bask in the nation’s inclusion (with Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey) among the ‘Mint’ economies, predicted by Brics creator Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs to lead the next generation of emerging markets. That status will be confirmed if, as expected, Nigeria overtakes South Africa as Africa’s largest national economy. Optimism has been reinforced by the promise of initiatives such as the 2013 privatisation of electricity assets, much of it funded from local capital markets. But there are still plenty of issues to give rise to concern, even when security concerns in the north and Niger Delta are discounted.

The United States is no longer the global hyperpower, former colonial powers have lost their captive markets and China has emerged as an economic superpower in Africa but not yet a dominant global force. While geopolitical tectonic plates shift, African governments are being solicited by ever more potential allies, trading partners and investors. In an evolving marketplace for money and influence, China has set the bar very high by hosting grandiose triennial Sino-African summits, but others have big ambitions too.

It was a long trip for most to get to Tokyo, but transparency campaigners and governance gurus were all over the mid-October International Monetary Fund/World Bank Group annual meetings, advocating more rigorous legislation to be drafted by resource-rich but fragile states, and mobilising help for smaller states to implement expensive new laws such as the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca)

It is a measure of its rise to prominence that China is the prism through which other nations now define their relations with Africa. This is the product of decades of energetic diplomacy and China’s willingness to provide unprecedented levels of finance, infrastructure development, contracting and small business engagement. This dominant position was richly underlined by the 3-4 September Forum on China-Africa Co-operation, which drew African leaders to Beijing in numbers the continent’s other commercial partners can only dream of.

Under immense pressure from the global spread of Covid-19 and plunging oil demand, governments and IOCs must once again fine-tune their strategies to meet hostile market conditions. This may mean not only delaying upstream projects but cancelling them altogether as, in the longer term, global markets shift out of carbon dependency.In the short term, efforts to revive the so-called Opec+ cooperation between Opec and non-Opec crude exporters should help to reverse the price slump, but the deal seems unlikely to raise prices to levels envisaged in producer governments’ 2020 budget forecasts.

The murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff during what appears to have been a planned attack on the consulate in Benghazi could hardly send a more negative message about Libya’s prospects. Security has been top of the agenda for the interim authorities who have ruled the country since its liberation. But it also seems to have topped the ‘too difficult’ list.

Prime minister-designate Habib Essid initiated fresh consultations with political parties on 27 January after initial soundings suggested the Assemblée des Représentants du Peuple (ARP) would not approve his proposed cabinet. Given the now well-established tradition of political dialogue between opposing political forces, this is not expected to long delay the formation of a fully constitutional and democratically legitimate government, which will end the transition started by the ousting of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali four years ago. Against this massive achievement, huge challenges also confront the nation, not least the deteriorating instability in Libya and Tunisia’s own great economic problems.