African countries are missing an opportunity to work closer together to boost trade and infrastructure
Libya
Have jihadists crossed the Rubicon in Mali?
A maxim of President Francois Hollande’s election campaign was to reduce France’s overseas interventionist activities. Since the 1960s France has intervened militarily on nearly 50 occasions, mainly to evacuate foreigners as it did in 1990 and 1991 in Gabon and Zaire and in 1994 in Rwanda. Until 2011 France continued to act as the ”policeman” […]
Will the real pharaoh please stand up
The resignation of Egypt’s cabinet this week shows the paralysing complexities surrounding the process of transition to democracy in post-revolution societies in the Arab world. Only in Tunisia, the country that ushered in this huge wave of change in North Africa, has the transition to democracy been relatively smooth, albeit accompanied by some challenges. It’s […]
Gaddafi: Rough justice
On July 13 1793 the assassin Marie-Anne Charlotte De Corday d’Armont entered the private rooms of Paris-dwelling Jean-Paul Marat, “L’Ami du peuple[1]“, revolutionary, Jacobin and soon: dead. The much-feared one greeted her from his reclining position in the bath, the treated water soothing his blistered, itchy skin no other place offering suitable respite from the […]
The price of no more Gaddafis? No more Mandelas
Gaddafi may have lost his final battle last night, but South Africa lost the war. As the last country to stand with the embattled “father of the nation” in spite of the West’s determination to get rid of him, South Africa’s international reputation was dragged through the mud as harshly as Gaddafi’s bloodied corpse was […]