Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 8/30/2024
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East.
Last week’s links are here.
General
Michael Brenes profiles Kamala Harris’ top foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon. Brenes sees Gordon as a reformist; to me he sounds fairly status quo.
Eric Parrado in the Financial Times: “Time to Rethink Exchange Rate Orthodoxy for Open Economies.”
Adekeye Adebajo in Project Syndicate: “Africa’s Future Hinges on Revitalizing Multilateralism.”
Sahel and West Africa
“At least 400” civilians were killed in Barsalogho, Burkina Faso on August 24 by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims), an affiliate of al-Qaida.
Deadly and destructive floods have hit much of the region, including Nigeria, Niger, Mali, and elsewhere.
Nigeria has some new top appointees: Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (Mohammed Mohammed); Director-General of the Department of State Services (Adeola Ajayi); and Chief Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun.
Ken Opalo on economic reforms and political messaging in Nigeria:
The fact of the matter is that [President Bola] Tinubu needs to use his very limited political capital and the Nigerian state’s constrained administrative capacity judiciously…Otherwise, the reforms will fail on two counts. First, they will not move the needle on developmental outcomes. Pushing millions of people into poverty will erase hard-earned human capital gains. Inflation and the naira devaluation will wipe out households’ hard-earned savings for naught. Finally, countless private firms will go under due to rising cost of inputs and suppressed demand. Second, painful reforms that are not accompanied by visible and attributable outcomes will come at enormous political cost and risk instability.
Eromo Egbejule in The Guardian on “thousands of Nigerian women and girls being exploited in the sex industry across towns and cities in Ivory Coast.”
The Malian Armed Forces and the Wagner Group took serious losses at Tinzaouaten, far northern Mali, in July. They’ve followed up with drone strikes that are killing civilians. Algeria is objecting.
Mali’s “cotton king” Bakary Togola and four co-defendants get a five-year prison sentence for corruption
International Crisis Group on “Breaking the Cycle of Farmer-Herder Violence” in Chad.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visits Mauritania, Senegal, and the Gambia on a migration-focused tour. The sociologist Aly Tandian discusses migration: “These youth who leave want to be at the heart of globalization, not victims.”
North Africa
Algeria is scheduled to hold presidential elections on September 7, and Tunisia on October 6. I wrote about Algeria’s three candidates here. Meanwhile, Tunisian President Kais Saied replaced almost all of his cabinet ministers on August 25, surprising most observers. Only two ministers were spared, including the recently appointed Interior Minister Khaled Nouri.
The crisis surrounding the Central Bank of Libya continues, transfixing domestic and international attention. Here are reports and analyses by Célian Macé, Salma El Wardany, Tarek Megerisi, and Anas El Gomati.
Senior U.S. officials - military and civilian - met Khalifa Haftar (!) on August 27. Who is watching?
Greater Horn of Africa
The U.N. World Food Program is investigating two of its top officials in Sudan over allegations including fraud and concealing information from donors about its ability to deliver food aid to civilians amid the nation’s dire hunger crisis, according to 11 people with knowledge of the probe.
ACLED: “Drone Warfare Reaches Deeper into Sudan as Peace Talks Stall.”
Abdellatif El Menawy in Arab News: “Egypt’s Key Role in Ending the Civil War in Sudan.”
Also, Egypt “delivered its first military aid to Somalia in more than four decades on Tuesday,” and Ethiopia is not pleased.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam “has more than doubled electricity production.” Will construction be finished within the year?
Mashriq
Karam Shaar and Steven Heydemann at Brookings: “Networked Authoritarianism and Economic Resilience in Syria.” An excerpt:
As Syria slips from official and public view, however, less and less attention is directed toward the Assad regime, how it keeps itself afloat, and how recent shifts in the tactics it uses to insulate itself from both economic sanctions and an increasingly restive society are likely to fuel the effects that the United States and its allies view as most threatening. These include further increases in refugee flows, a worsening humanitarian crisis, and renewed waves of radicalization. Out of public view, and even as Syria continues to be plagued by many different vectors of crisis, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his innermost circles are reorganizing how they intervene in and manage the country’s economy.
The Economist: “Israel’s Settlers Are Winning Unprecedented Power from the War in Gaza.” For more, see also this ACLED piece from June 2024.
Israeli forces launched a massive operation in the West Bank on August 28. I have not seen any standout commentary and analysis yet, but here is a backgrounder from Al Jazeera in English and here is a report from Al Arabiya in Arabic.
Roza al-Hakimi at Sanaa Center: “The Impact of War on Youth Activism in Yemen.” A quote:
The worsening political crisis in 2014 and the beginning of a new war in 2015 marked a turning point for youth activism. Some young people subsequently joined armed groups, and many others left the country altogether, negatively impacting youth political participation inside Yemen. The conflict has forced new approaches to activism, including mechanisms to connect youth inside Yemen and abroad. Activists have managed to work together on advocacy campaigns that have, for example, called for an end to the war or the opening of roads to ease burdens imposed on civilians. Still, youth activism in Yemen faces several challenges, including the limited experience of young people and the dangerous security situation that makes organizing on the ground difficult.
Madeleine Baran at the New Yorker on a 2005 massacre by the U.S. military in Haditha, Iraq, and the military’s ensuing effort to keep the photographs away from the public. The publication of this piece, one should note, occasioned some critical commentary recalling the New Yorker’s own role in the march to war in 2003.