Last month was no different. When he unveiled the largest diamond to be mined this century, President Mokgweetsi Masisi exclaimed: “I can see new roads being built.”

The translucent gem is the size of an adult’s palm. The second-largest diamond ever found, it could sell for tens of millions of dollars. 

And 10% of that will go to Botswana because, unlike other countries rich in raw materials, the Southern African state has kept its seat at the table. Through agreements with mining companies, it earns crucial dollars and keeps a share to sell for itself.

But Masisi has to work harder than his predecessors to keep the cash cow alive.

Botswana is the world’s biggest producer of mined diamonds by value, and mines 20% of all diamonds by weight. That value is falling rapidly because of lab-grown diamonds. These are cheaper and hardly distinguishable from mined ones.

In January, the middle-income country estimated that its economy would grow by 4.2%. But then diamond sales nearly halved in the first three months of the year.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund changed its own estimate and said the economy would grow by only 1%. It also advised the country to spend less on infrastructure because it would have less money.

Seeing the shifting market, Botswana has started to change its diamond marketing strategy and invested in making splashier announcements: big rare finds that make international news.

Canadian miner Lucara Diamond has helped. The Karowe mine, 500km north of the capital Gaborone, gave up this diamond after two other big finds in its 12 years of operation. One of these was reportedly sold for more than $50 million. 

Last month’s 2 492-carat stone was found using X-ray technology designed to identify and preserve large, high-value diamonds so that they can be extracted whole.

But discovery of rare, highly sought after stones is “not the basis for an industry”, says mining historian Duncan Money. “Ultimately, it doesn’t change the fact that synthetic diamonds are becoming cheaper and better.”

So Masisi’s other bet is to swing for more of the pie — even as it dwindles.

Last February, he threatened to sever ties with Anglo American, which together with Botswana co-owns mining giant De Beers, and local miner Debswana, which runs four of Botswana’s five active diamond mines.

Masisi’s critics accused him of nationalist rhetoric but when the Debswana arrangement was renewed (in principle) a few months later, the half century partnership had some crucial new changes.

Where Debswana used to sell only 25% of its diamonds to the state-owned Okavango Diamonds marketing company, it can now sell 30%. And that number will grow to 50% over the next 10 years. The rest will still go to De Beers, in which Botswana has a stake of 15%.

In addition, De Beers will invest a billion pula ($75 million) into a fund for development, ramping that up to 10 billion over 10 years.

The Botswana government’s work to protect its diamond income also means keeping others out. This May, when Anglo American announced it would split from De Beers, Masisi said Botswana was prepared to buy more of a stake in the spin-off, to keep out “bad guys” with “impatient capital”. 

De Beers made only $72 million last year — which is a bust in the diamond industry. But its profits have historically ranged between $500 million and $1.5 billion, according to Mining Weekly. Its target is to return to an annual core profit of $1.5 billion by 2028.

Masisi reckons that if Botswana puts enough public money in the game to patiently ride out the booms and busts of the erratic diamond industry, he and his successors will continue building roads, schools and hospitals. Others, like Duncan Money, reckon it’s time for Botswana to start diversifying its economy instead. — Additional reporting by Kiri Rupiah.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

The scale of the problem is daunting, given that we can’t even keep the existing

population fed. Of the 1.5 billion people that live in Africa today, about 10% face severe food insecurity — that means they sometimes go entire days without eating a proper meal. Hundreds of millions more don’t always know where their next meal is coming from.

Now add another 900 million people into the mix. Something has to change. The people tasked with figuring out what this change looks like are meeting next week in Kigali at the African Food Systems Forum. With the participation of the African Union, the forum will

debate and then promote a 10-year plan to accelerate and transform agriculture in Africa.

The premise is deceptively straightforward: to feed the people, you have to fix the farms — in particular, the continent’s 33 million smallholder farms. These farms grow 70% of Africa’s food, but do so with some of the lowest yields in the world.

But exactly how to fix those farms, while protecting the farming communities, is a matter of increasingly bitter debate.

The most influential figure in this debate is not an African farmer or political leader, but a software engineer from the United States who has not worked a field in his life — although he does own quite a few: an estimated 109 265 hectares in 19 US states.

The American dream

Bill Gates, the world’s seventh-richest person, believes that modern industrial agricultural practices can solve world hunger. In the US, he has leveraged his fortune, estimated at $129 billion, to buy up so many fields that he is now that country’s biggest owner of farmland.

Farming in the US looks very different to farming in Africa. The size of an average US farm is 100 times bigger than its African equivalent. American farmers also tend to grow a single cash-crop, like maize or soybean, from genetically modified “hybrid” seeds. 

Because they cannot reproduce themselves, new seeds must be bought every year from industrial agriculture companies such as Bayer and Syngenta, along with all

the chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.

All those inputs mean it is an expensive model, and farmers need access to finance to make it work. But when it does work, it delivers: maize yields in the US are about 11 tonnes a hectare. In Kenya, the average is just 1.4 tonnes per hectare.

For Gates, the solution to hunger in Africa lies in bridging the gap between these two numbers. To feed more people, African farmers need to grow more food — and to do so, they must learn how to farm like their US counterparts. 

Farms must get bigger. African farmers need access to the latest hybrid seeds, and the

capital to purchase them. Tired soil needs help from chemical fertilisers, crops need

protection from bugs and disease, and harvests should be sold at market rather than stored for subsistence.

It sounds simple, but in practice this would be nothing short of a revolution in African agriculture, overturning centuries of traditional methods.

A revolution is exactly what Gates is proposing. In 2006, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), and between them have ploughed more than a billion dollars into reshaping both national and continental agricultural policies.

But the revolution has not gone according to plan.

A food system in collapse

Last month, the African Centre for Biodiversity released a report that sought to answer a question: is Zambia’s food system collapsing?

The country is suffering through one of its worst-ever droughts. Nearly half of maize under

cultivation has been lost, while the price of this staple food has risen by 30%.

More than six million Zambians, from a population of 20 million, are at risk of acute food shortages and malnutrition.

This was not part of Bill Gates’ vision. Successive Zambian administrations have been among the most enthusiastic adopters of the kinds of policies recommended by the Gates Foundation.

The country is a poster-child for Agra’s drive to industrialise African agriculture, having implemented in 2009 a new subsidy programme to incentivise farmers to switch to commercial seeds and intensive fertiliser use. More than a million farmers did.

But, instead of increasing yields, the new approach simply increased farmers’ vulnerability to climate shocks such as the current drought, the new report concludes.

The use of hybrid seeds and imported fertilisers has degraded the soil, making it difficult to grow anything else; and the push to replace subsistence crops with cash crops, which then failed, means that farmers and their families are going hungry.

“We used to grow diverse crops,” said Mary Sakala, a Zambian farmer and chairperson of the Rural Women’s Assembly, which commissioned the report. “But now governments and agribusiness have pushed farmers into monoculture that depends on inputs. Their programmes have made us all vulnerable.”

It’s not just Zambia: broader continental studies have also cast doubt on the effectiveness of Agra’s policy proposals, including one commissioned by the Gates Foundation itself, along with Agra’s other funders. That study, released two years ago, found “Agra did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders”.

Another study, by Tufts University in the US, found no evidence in national level data of the 13 key countries targeted by Agra to suggest that its “green revolution policies had any meaningful positive effect on crop yields or food security”. 

Despite objecting to its findings, Agra appears to have taken at least some note of its findings: it removed “Green Revolution” from its name in 2022, and is now known by its acronym alone.

‘Playing god’

“Bill Gates and big agribusinesses are playing God,” said Durban-based cleric Bishop Takalani Mufamadi. “They claim to be messiahs of the hungry and the poor,

but they have failed dismally to deliver because of the industrialisation approach,

which degrades soils, destroys biodiversity, and values corporate profit over people. It

is immoral, sinful and unjust.”

Mufamadi was speaking last Wednesday on behalf of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, which called for the Gates Foundation to commit to “reparations” to repair the damage its agricultural policies have caused in Africa. 

Although he would not be drawn on a specific figure, he said that the foundation must work with the people who have been harmed to “repair the land and the water table”.

This call was echoed by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a civil society

umbrella group that claims to represent more than 200-million smallholder farmers, pastoralists and indigenous peoples across the continent.

“The path they are leading us on is a kind of agriculture where we cannot farm without the use of agrichemicals,” said general coordinator Million Belay.

This, he argues, leaves farmers vulnerable to extreme weather events and the fluctuating prices of inputs like fertilisers, which are usually imported.

Belay’s criticism goes a step further: he argues that the Gates Foundation has used its enormous political and monetary influence to crowd out alternative ideas.

“I’m not saying that African governments have no agency, they do also have agency, but they are tied up with debt and other money challenges, which opens the door for the Gates Foundation and other big funders to come and influence our policies and strategies.”

The Gates Foundation rejected these critiques.

“Our support of many organisations like Agra helps countries prioritise, co-ordinate, and effectively implement their national agricultural development strategies, based on country plans, to achieve this goal.”

Enock Chikava, the Gates Foundation’s director of agricultural delivery systems, went on: “We also believe that engaging in open dialogue with a diversity of African voices — including farmers themselves — is critical to our work and will continue to seek out constructive dialogues to address food and nutrition security around shared goals and the best ways to achieve them.”

For now, however, those dialogues will not include groups such as Belay’s Association for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which will not attend the forum in Kigali next week — a forum where Agra plays a major role, with support from development partners such as the Gates Foundation and industrial partners like Bayer and Syngenta.

This means that, once again, it is Bill Gates’ vision for the future of African agriculture that is likely to shape continental policy for the next decade — whether it works or not. 
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

Gazing at mountains that have been her home for almost a century, the 90-year old

recalls the most difficult time her community has ever faced: the year of hunger.

In 1944, drought hit Tiazite and continued for three years. Her home, a three-hour drive northeast of the Ouzoud Waterfalls, became a barren expanse of despair. The springs dried up, the oak and carob trees withered, family grain reserves were nearly depleted, and livestock perished one by one.

“We had no choice but to leave,” Al-Ma’ti says. The villagers migrated southeast to desert oases where water and gardens still promised life. For two years, they could not return to the mountains.

Upon their return to Tiazite, Al-Ma’ti says her community was determined to never face such hardship again. But today, she fears history is repeating itself. For more than five years, Morocco has grappled with another severe and long drought. It dried up Tiazite’s natural spring and triggered panicked responses that have divided the village.

Because of the drought, for more than five seasons, the village hardly harvested any barley, olives, or almonds, the main crops cultivated there.

Yet, a new well dug by the local municipality six months ago remains unused because of disputes over how to share its water.

Some residents want the water reserved for personal use only but the area is home to large almond and olive orchards that need it too, and are important to the local economy and nutritional needs.

Many of these orchards date back to when Al-Ma’ti and her contemporaries returned to the land after the 1940s drought. Desperate to avoid a repeat of their ordeal, the villagers chose to “live with the land not against it” as Al-Ma’ti puts it. 

They replaced livestock with olive and almond trees, and imposed stiff fines for animals that trampled gardens.

In time, plant-based agriculture became the area’s mainstay. Each family was allocated a share of water from the village spring using a unit of measurement based on a day and night cycle.

But that system appears to have been discarded, along with the natural spring it was based on, which has run dry. The problem is people failed to reach an agreement on a new system.

“The community must establish an association to oversee the daily management of water distribution,” says Abdelmajid Tamzoura, head of the BeniHassan family in the area.

But others want the village’s Tiazite Charity Association to manage the well. Saleh Ben Kroom, the treasurer of the association, which was set up in 2015, says it already has the financial and administrative capabilities to manage this facility.

Underpinning the deadlock are old grievances. While the old rules of water sharing were universally applied and effective when the natural spring ran, their limitations were not always accepted happily, especially during difficult times.

“Some grudges arose,” says Ben Kroom. “These grudges did not die with the grandparents’ generation; instead, they were inherited by successive generations.”

Those that didn’t suffer those rules gladly would prefer to negotiate new ones starting with a blank slate, and those that liked them see that as an attempt to “impede the preservation of the village’s natural responses”, as Ben Kroom puts it.

As the deadlock lingers, the effect of inadequate water intensifies. With their own olive, almond and barley harvests still throttled, Karam says families now rely on flour subsidies from the government.

And some residents are improvising, often in costly and ineffective ways, by extracting water elsewhere.

In this arid, harsh environment, the survival of Tiazite depends not only on the availability of water but on the ability of its residents to work together, overcome differences and embrace their shared heritage. 
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

Of the 17 tonnes of gold exported last year, more than half came from Kédougou’s Sabodala mine. Yet, in the same area, one barely gets the most basic of services.

“Gold exploitation leaves pollution for the population, but scarcely any benefits,” says Ahmad Dame Seck, the principal at Dindefelo school in Kédougou. He says his pupils graduate (or drop out) into unemployment and struggle in the informal sector, or migrate to Europe, despite the money-making machine in the area.

Endeavour Mining, the United Kingdom-based company that bought Sabodala mine in 2021, has earned at least $598 million from it since. In its latest financial statements, the company values the mine as an asset worth more than $2.5 billion. 

Its other assets are mines in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Mali, which it values at nearly $3 billion.

Endeavour Mining keeps 90% of the profits from its Senegalese operations — sharing them with its shareholders, of course. The Senegalese government takes the remaining 10%.

Inequitable resource extraction deals are one reason Senegal struggles to raise enough revenue to run the country. When its coffers run dry, the government is driven to borrow from the international money markets. In a bitter irony, it often turns to the very same firms that are taking the lion’s share of the revenue from the country’s gold mining industry.

New analysis by The Continent shows that 40% of the shares in Endeavour Mining are owned by 17 investment firms that are also trading in Senegal’s sovereign bonds. The Senegalese government owes them more than $271 million.

When Senegal pays annual interests on those bonds — up to 7.75% depending on the bond note — the firms that are already taking much of the money from Senegalese gold earn from the country being cash-strapped. 

This dynamic — lining pockets to borrow from them — repeats itself in many countries. 

African states have issued dozens of international bonds, borrowing at least $84 billion from global investment firms such as BlackRock, Fidelity, HSBC and Schwab.

These firms also often own millions of dollars of shares in the multinational companies extracting local resources.

Private creditors’ loans, of which bonds are but one example, tend to be the harshest kind of national debt to accumulate. Interest rates are high, there are no grace periods and lenders listen only to the markets. When states default on interest payments, economic chaos ensues.

Zambia, Ghana and Ethiopia failed to pay interest on their bonds after the Covid pandemic and other economic shocks undercut the growth their borrowed money was projected to spur. 

These defaults pushed their leaders to turn to the International Monetary Fund for bailouts, the requirements of which include hard-nosed economic policy changes such as floating national currencies and hiking taxes. The pain of some of these policy changes has driven citizens to the streets in protests that are sometimes fatal, and always costly to local economies.

Yet African governments have continued to dig deeper into this kind of debt.

According to data from the United Nations Trade and Development agency, African governments owed more than $777 billion to private creditors by the end of 2023. Private creditors now hold about 44% of Africa’s national foreign debt, compared with 30% in 2010.

It’s not an evenly distributed risk. Middle income countries are often ineligible for low-interest lending from institutions such as the World Bank and turn to the private creditors more often.

But enthusiasm for that risky path is not equal. In South Africa and Angola, private creditor loans make up 88% and 78% of national debt. In Algeria and Botswana, it’s negligible, even though their economic health is comparable.

In the long term, if the Senegalese government is luckier than Zambia, Ghana and Ethiopia have been, it will make enough money to diligently pay bond interests until its own resource sector meaningfully pays into the domestic coffers.

In the short term, however, the people profiting from that sector, and from those interest payments, are not your average Senegalese citizen.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, RSF adviser Ibrahim Mukhayar said the conflict — which has killed more than 15 000 people and displaced 10 million — had erupted because of the influence of the extremist Islamic movement in the country on the SAF.

“The Islamists, with their extreme ideology, control the SAF and are determined to regain control of the country by any means necessary, including taking the most extreme measures to achieve their objectives in the war,” Mukhayar said.

Last Friday, the US said it had concluded talks in Geneva, Switzerland, in which it attempted to navigate a peaceful “democratic transition” between the RSF and the Sudanese government’s armed wing. 

The talks, which began on 14 August, included a delegation of observers from the African Union, Saudi Arabia, Sudan’s neighbour Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the UN. The UAE has been accused of supporting the paramilitary group with weapons but officials have denied this.

While there was an RSF delegation to the talks, Sudan’s de facto government, headed by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, did not attend, saying they were aimed at “whitewashing” the RSF and countries that support the paramilitaries.

US Sudan envoy Tom Perriello told a press conference in Geneva that the results of the talks were insufficient to address the humanitarian crisis, which he acknowledged was slow, due to the absence of the SAF. 

Al-Burhan, who leads the governing Transitional Sovereignty Council, told reporters in Port Sudan on Saturday that the military would “fight for 100 years”, if necessary, to defeat the RSF. 

“We will not put down our weapons as the rebellion continues. We will not co-exist with the rebels and we will not forgive them,” he said.

RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, claims to control 72% of Sudanese territory including the capital, Khartoum. 

According to Mukhayar, the RSF will keep up its efforts to gain control of Sudan while it continues peace talks to manage the country’s humanitarian crisis. 

“We believe the real reason behind the SAF’s rejection of the Geneva negotiations is that the US Secretary of State proposed real control mechanisms for what is happening in Sudan,” he said.

This is not the first time peace talks have been held on Sudan’s civil war. In May 2023 — a month after the fighting broke out — talks were organised by Saudi Arabia and the US but were suspended after the SAF accused the RSF of failing to abide by the declaration.

The January discussions, attended by both forces, took place over three meetings in Manama, Bahrain. Reportedly, among those present were Egypt and the UAE, which are supporters of the SAF and the RSF, respectively. 

According to military sources, the RSF stated conditions for a ceasefire, including the reinstatement of Hemedti as deputy chair of the Transitional Sovereignty Council. The talks yielded no results.

The peace talks mediated by the US come on the back of a new report by Amnesty International detailing a weapons flow through the Sahel region from countries like Russia, China, Turkey and the UAE, which has fuelled Sudan’s conflict. 

“Shipment-level trade data indicates that hundreds of thousands of blank guns have been exported to Sudan in recent years, along with millions of blank cartridges [which] Amnesty International believes are being converted en masse into lethal weapons in Sudan,” the organisation said in a statement. 

The report identified recently manufactured or recently transferred small arms and ammunition from countries such as Serbia, Yemen and China that are being used in the conflict by both the RSF and the SAF. 

The RSF has refuted Amnesty International’s claims, saying the report is based on “poor information”. 

“This claim is false from beginning to end and lacks compelling evidence. There is a lot of misleading information circulating … In what sense is RSF getting arms from Russia? In fact, in my perspective, Amnesty International’s report was based on poor information,” Mukhayar said.

Amnesty has called on the UN Security Council to amend its arms embargo to restrict weapons being transported into Sudan and also wants the council to strengthen its monitoring and verification mechanisms related to arms sales. 

The 16-month-long war began after Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir was toppled in a 2019 coup which split the military power, that was once one body, into two factions namely, RSF and SAF.

The RSF, an independent security force recognised under Sudanese law in 2017, was contracted by the government to act as border guards before the force participated in the coup to topple al-Bashir. 

Four months later, the military and the pro-democracy movement reached a power-sharing deal that birthed a joint military-civilian council that would govern Sudan for the next three years until elections were held.

Dagalo was announced as the council’s vice chairman headed by al-Burhan with economist Abdalla Hamdok as Sudan’s prime minister and leader of the transitional cabinet. 

However, before signing the deal that should have ushered in a new dawn for Sudan, activists accused the RSF of participating in the killing of dozens of pro-democracy protesters.

In October 2021, the RSF participated in another coup to overthrow the transitional government which halted the agreement to set up a democratically elected government. The move triggered new mass pro-democracy rallies across Sudan which was plunged into what has been described by the UN as a “humanitarian nightmare”.

Intense fighting broke out in Khartoum and quickly escalated across Darfur to the west, with the RSF taking control of most centres.

The war in the North African country has led to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. 

The International Organisation for Migration’s latest weekly displacement tracking matrix showed that 9.9 million people have been internally displaced in all 18 states in Sudan — 2.8 million before the April 2023 war and 7.1 million since. More than half are women and a quarter are children under the age of five. 

Sudan is also home to the world’s largest hunger crisis, with an estimated 26.6 million people — more than half the population — facing food insecurity, according to the UN World Food Programme, while 14 areas in the country have been declared “at risk of famine”.

A report by Human Rights Watch details the RSF’s involvement in widespread acts of sexual violence in areas of Khartoum, which it describes as “acts that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity”. It says RSF members have in some cases sexually assaulted women and girls in front of their families and forced them into marriages in RSF-controlled regions.

Although the report states that fewer cases of abuse were attributed to SAF members, there was an increase in cases reported after the SAF took control of Omdurman early this year. It reports that men and boys were raped while in detention centres.

Mukhayar rubbished the claims and said that the accusations were “false and lack credibility”. 

“The testimonies submitted are one-sided, as no organisation, including Amnesty International, has entered Sudan to date to verify what is happening, despite our invitation and sincere desire to provide the information they request,” he said. 

According to Human Rights Watch, researchers have had limited access to Khartoum with the dangerous conditions and lack of services and logistics barriers to obtaining information for reports on the humanitarian crisis. 

Mukhayar said he is hopeful that peace talks will continue on the sidelines and that Sudan will achieve a “democratic state” that will prioritise the people. 

“Rebuilding the country will undoubtedly be challenging but history has shown that the greatest nations can rise from the debris of war. We will not lose hope and we will never give up on our country,” he said.

The mpox declaration about a week ago had a twist: the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) officially declared it first. This is a major milestone for the regional body, which is pushing for a new public health order.

Africa CDC’s announcement “represents Africans recognising their own problem and taking steps to promptly address it”, said Professor Dimie Ogoina of the Niger Delta University Teaching Hospital. The infectious diseases physician was the first to describe sexual transmission of mpox in Nigeria in 2017.

“A global outbreak occurred in 2022 largely because the 2017-2019 outbreak in Nigeria was ignored by the global community,” he said.

The lessons were not learned and it is leading to the same outcome this year.

“We warned everyone about it,” Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo told the publication Science earlier this month.

The DRC declared a national outbreak in December 2022 and largely had it contained until late last year. Now, the outbreak has spread to Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. 

So far in 2024, nearly 3 000 cases and 517 deaths have been confirmed in at least 12 African countries.

In the past few days, cases have been reported further ashore in Sweden, Thailand and Taiwan, with a new sexually transmissible strain driving the spread.

Africa CDC’s mpox emergency declaration came a day before the WHO’s and is the first chance to test if the power to declare a health emergency will make a real difference. African countries demanded that power in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. Optimists expect it will.

“A mandate such as this allows the Africa CDC to accelerate the release of resources by

African governments in response to an African public health emergency,” said Dr

Ebere Okereke, the former chief executive of the Africa Public Health Foundation.

Spring Gombe, a strategist who has advised international agencies on health policy, expects this allows for more nuanced responses by each country.

“Heavily affected countries, like the DRC, will need, and will get, different solutions

to those on the brink, like Burundi or Kenya or South Africa.”

But a more powerful mandate also places the Africa CDC on a collision path with global health policy movers, in particular the WHO.

In 2022, it was accused of lobbying against more autonomy for the African body. At an African Union meeting, about a dozen African health ministers appeared to regurgitate talking points from a document prepared by the WHO’s Africa office, to argue for reining in Africa CDC, reported Devex, a social enterprise and media platform for the global development community.

Friction between regional and global public health players, especially during an active emergency, would be consequential. Declaring a public health emergency is only ever one step. 

Routes of transmission need to be stopped, treatments developed, awareness raised

— and all this needs coordinated actors and countries working together.

In the best of both worlds, a more autonomous and initiative-taking Africa CDC could lead African leaders to “take full ownership and show full commitment to addressing outbreaks on the continent without waiting for handouts from the global north”, said Ogoina.

But they will still need to try to do this without stepping too hard on the bigger toes, which mobilise most of the money needed to marshal a coordinated global response. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

Similar concerns swirl around President Paul Biya in Cameroon.

At 91, he is the oldest president in the world. But he has given no indication that he will step aside any time soon.

Perhaps because of the president’s perceived frailties, the criticism is louder than ever before. It comes from disaffected youth, as well as established opposition and civil society groups.

There are also rumbles of discontent from within the ruling elite — all jostling for position in an increasingly bitter succession battle. 

They know Biya’s hold on power can survive anything except his own death — and that can’t be too far away.

Biya’s administration is responding with a familiar tactic: brutally cracking down on dissenting voices.

The highest-profile recent example is that of 23-year-old Junior Ngombe. He is a barber by day and a digital activist by night, campaigning for democratic change and urging his 35  000 followers on TikTok to register to vote. 

Ngombe was outraged last month when another outspoken activist, Steve Akam — known as Ramon Cotta on TikTok — was arrested in neighbouring Gabon.

Akam had been in exile in Gabon for a decade, but he was suddenly picked up by local authorities, who delivered him to their Cameroonian counterparts at the border. 

This was a clear violation of extradition procedures, say human rights groups.

Akam promptly disappeared, and has not been seen since.

Ngombe took to social media to denounce Akam’s arrest.

“To hunt those who denounce or criticise your system of governance, and those who have opposing views, you put all your ingenuity at work to lay hands on them. Why not use this energy positively?” Ngombe asked in a TikTok video.

Shortly afterwards, Ngombe was detained by three plain-clothes intelligence officers. 

He was transferred to the capital Yaoundé in a military vehicle, and held in the notorious Secrétariat d’Etat à la Défense — a facility previously noted by Human Rights Watch for the “widespread use of torture”. 

A week later, he was granted bail by a military tribunal, and may still have to appear before a court even though he has not been formally charged with anything.

“His arrest was not in conformity with the law,” said Ngombe’s lawyer, Akere Muna.

Dozens of opposition leaders, journalists, political activists, human rights defenders and other government critics have been jailed or forced into exile in recent months, according to Ngo Mbe Maximilienne, the executive director of the Central Africa Human Rights Defenders Network.

“The political and human rights situation is very preoccupying,” Maximilienne said.

Human Rights Watch offered a similar assessment. 

“The Cameroonian government has for years cracked down on opposition and free speech, jailing political activists, journalists, and dissidents.

“Ahead of elections in 2025, it has increasingly restricted freedoms of expression and association,” it said in a statement last week.

The Cameroonian government has itself warned that criticism of Biya and institutions of state will not be tolerated.

“It is unacceptable for compatriots, be they political party leaders or opinion leaders, to use irreverent, insulting or even offensive language with regards to the person who is legitimately and happily presiding over the destiny of Cameroon,” government spokesperson René Emmanuel Sadi said last month.

To this end, the regional administration that governs Yaoundé decreed that entry to the capital will be denied to those deemed likely to offend the head of state, organise uprisings or cause serious disturbance to public order.

“It’s ideal to prevent disorder than to restore law and order,” said Emmanuel Mariel Djikdent, the senior divisional officer for Mfoundi and a Biya appointee.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

“They beat me with a machete while my hands and legs were tied,” he says in the voice note, “This assault has changed my life.” 

The voice note has since gone viral, prompting the Independent Complaints Commission, which investigates the police, to take up his case.

That’s the kind of reaction Kachingwe was hoping for when he sent the note.

“This is a corrupt world,” he said. “I know I can’t just get help so I want human rights organisations to know about this.”

But, if prior complaints to the commission are any kind of predictor, viral empathy may be all the justice Kachingwe ever receives.

In the small hours of 17 February, robbers broke into the premises of Popat Wholesalers where Kachingwe worked. Nothing was stolen but when he informed his boss, he showed up with police officers from the criminal investigations department.

The police detained the guards, including Kachingwe, for interrogation.

“This is when they tortured us,” he says. “They didn’t stop even when I screamed. They made fun of my private parts.”

Kachingwe says his injuries were ignored for two days until other officers not involved in the assault took him to Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. 

From the hospital he was taken back to the same cell. He was eventually charged with theft, along with one of his colleagues.

Kachingwe says his health passport — a booklet issued by the ministry of health and kept by patients as a portable medical record — went missing while he was at the Blantyre police station. 

It held information about the assault, medication prescribed and follow-up appointments.

He has since had some of the information from the hospital’s electronic recording system noted in an older health passport. It shows that on 4 July, months after his detention, Kachingwe underwent surgery for serious injuries to his genitalia.

Aubrey Kawale, the officer-in-charge at the Blantyre police station, denies Kachingwe was assaulted in police custody, saying he only learnt of the allegations after the voice note went viral.

“If the issues were reported to us rather than social media, we would have investigated and dealt with officers involved,” he says.

As the civil courts examine the charges against Kachingwe, the police oversight body will investigate his own claims against officers. It has a dismal record.

Established by law in 2020, the commission receives and investigates complaints by the public against the police. It has received 285 complaints over the years but 186 of them remain under investigation. Only 50 investigations have been resolved, 10 were withdrawn and 39 complaints are categorised as “pending”.

The body’s complaints log is a troubling look into the misconduct of Malawian police. It includes 37 complaints of physical assault and nine reports of wrongful death in police

custody. 

One complaint documents the case of a 13-year-old boy whose hands were amputated allegedly a result of police negligence. Another case has parallels with Kachingwe’s: a security guard died allegedly because of police action.

Many of the cases remain unresolved in part because of collusion within the police force, says the oversight body’s commissioner, Christopher Tukula.

“There is still a tendency to protect each other or conceal information among officers,” he told a parliamentary committee earlier this month. “There is a failure to report issues to oversight institutions in fear of reprisals.”

The commission is also struggling with limited resources and inadequate training for investigators.

All this leaves Kachingwe in painful limbo. “I’m heartbroken and frustrated,” he said.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

They built custom GPTs — artificial intelligence programs — to educate each other about the proposals, gathered in X Spaces to plan protests, and even had TikTok influencers doing political education.

During the protests, they used walkie-talkie apps to coordinate their movements and mobile money to crowdfund the medical bills of the injured.

This is what Gen Z activism looks like: civic engagement reimagined for the digital age. 

But technology can be a double-edged sword. The same digital infrastructure

that empowers protesters can be used to repress them. The Kenyan government appears to have used more than a few tools from the tyrant’s digital toolbox to respond to the June uprising.

Its first move was to shut down the internet on 25 June. This is the first time such a disruption has happened in Kenya (which likes to bill itself as the “Silicon Savannah”). Internet watchdog Netblocks said the outage occurred just as protesters attempted to storm parliament in Nairobi.

As the protests raged on, journalists, activists and dissenters began to disappear.

CNN reported that this included at least a dozen prominent social media users, who were abducted by Kenyan security forces on the night before the storming of parliament.

According to Amnesty International Kenya’s Ramadhan Rajab, those who had been abducted afterwards spoke of their phone functioning strangely before they were picked up; cars waiting at their residences and favourite hangouts; and their abductors confiscating their phones as soon as they took them. 

These stories draw attention to the surveillance infrastructure that Kenya has invested in over the years.

Nairobi streets have about 2 000 police surveillance cameras, according to a 2023 investigation by Coda Story. The Communications Authority of Kenya has a device monitoring system (DMS) capable of intercepting text messages and phone calls.

The agency fought a long legal battle against campaigners, who argue the DMS unduly breaches privacy, but eventually secured the right to use it.

In addition, according to a 2017 investigation by Privacy International, Kenya’s spooks can directly intercept telecom networks, even without the operator’s knowledge.

The abductees’ stories raise suspicion that some combination of such capabilities were used to target them.

When initial attempts at repression failed to quiet the protests, President William Ruto tried a less combative approach: a widely publicised X Space to meet the protesters online, where it all began.

He followed this with a full cabinet reshuffle to signal he was listening. But the olive branch was ultimately ineffective at reconciliation, and the unrest continued.

A more insidious but familiar tactic entered the fray: disinformation that blames foreign entities for domestic troubles. Speaking at an event in Nakuru on 15 July, Ruto suggested that money from the Ford Foundation had been used to fund the “anarchy”.

The accusation, which he provided no evidence for, and which the Ford Foundation has strongly denied, initially landed flat offline — but that didn’t discourage its promotion by a small army of dubious social media accounts.

The first post linking the Ford Foundation with the protests appeared on 23 June, and was published by Sam Terriz, a state official.

A surge of more than 500 posts, from accounts aligned with Ruto’s administration, built on it, often using cherry-picked funding disclosures from the foundation’s  website and manipulated images.

Subsequent disinformation campaigns have since blamed LGBTQIA+ groups, human rights defenders and journalists.

Whether people believed these messages is almost immaterial. They distracted, muddied public discourse and made the truth debateable. They also harassed key players to exhaustion as they tried to counter the deliberate spread of falsehoods.

Kenya’s protests appear to have lost momentum for now, and Ruto is back to touring the country.

But his government’s actions over the past two months leave a digital blueprint for politicians to use against the surge of protests across the continent, and cast a troubling shadow over Kenya’s Silicon Savannah brand.

The state’s tactics are forcing activists to take counter-measures.

“People have reduced their digital footprint, changed their numbers or phones, are restricting their communications to less popular apps like Signal, or even abandoning cellphones entirely,” said Amnesty’s Rajab.

The move towards encrypted apps shows that as states invest in more sophisticated surveillance, people learn to be more vigilant about privacy when using technology. According to Top 10 VPN, demand for virtual private networks in Kenya rose by 534% in the period right before 25 June.

This response brings to mind Chinua Achebe’s proverbial bird, which learnt to “fly without perching” once “men learnt to shoot without missing”. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

This is their biggest military setback on the continent to date and will draw attention to the Kremlin’s diplomatic and security strategy in Africa.

It has also revealed Mali’s near total dependence on Russian fighters in consolidating their fragile hold on national territory and in ending a cycle of chronic violence that continues to destabilise vast parts of the region.

Videos and images of dead foreign fighters were shared on social media after three days of intense fighting in the northern town of Tinzaouatene, near the border with Algeria.

Filming these scenes were the apparent victors — fighters affiliated with the Permanent Strategic Framework (CSP-DPA), a rebel coalition fighting for greater autonomy over the north. 

The coalition includes militants from al-Qaeda’s Sahel branch, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).

The CSP-DPA’s political and military influence in Kidal and neighbouring regions has long undermined the sovereigntist posture of junta leader Colonel Assimi Goïta. 

Last August, Wagner mercenaries and the Malian Armed Forces launched a military campaign against the CSP-DPA, which upended a peace deal that the Tuareg separatists had signed with the civilian government in Bamako in 2015 for future co-existence and inclusivity.

In November, Malian forces and the mercenaries entered Kidal town after routing the CSP-DPA. Pro-junta groups cheered as they waved the Malian flag and took photos alongside the Russian forces. 

The Wagner banner was briefly hoisted at the Kidal fort, symbolic of how the group was the backbone of Mali’s operations, despite the junta’s repeated denials that the private military firm was operating in the country.

Artisanal miners in the middle

The 2012 rebellion by armed groups that later formed the CSP-DPA and JNIM was among factors that precipitated the present instability in the Sahel. 

The current alliance between them remains unspoken as their ideologies are at odds — the CSP-DPA seeks to be the legitimate political authority in the north, while JNIM promotes strict Islamist values. 

However, their coordination is underpinned by similar goals, such as payback for alleged abuses carried out by the Russian fighters, including reports of arbitrary killings and detentions in the north.

Local rights groups have said that many of the victims were artisanal gold miners as the mercenaries sought to control sites in the north, likely to replicate the resource-for-security model seen in its operations in the Central African Republic, Syria and Libya.

The overall defeat in Tinzaouatene will test what has been touted as a win-win cooperation between Russia and Mali’s junta, which has brokered similar deals between the Kremlin and neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger as they formed the Alliance of Sahel States confederation.

Nearly three years after the mercenaries first arrived in Mali, militancy has continued to spread, military rule has become prevalent and geopolitical wars have intensified as the West drastically loses its foothold in West Africa to the Kremlin.

Telegram channels affiliated with the mercenaries acknowledged battleground losses — some saying as many as 80 mercenaries, including key Russian war propagandists, had been killed — but expressed defiance and solidarity, raising the likelihood of reprisal attacks in the coming weeks. 

It is rumoured that the Kremlin could dispatch reinforcements to the Sahel to sustain its influence. Ukrainian officials claimed to have provided the CSP-DPA with intelligence ahead of the raid. 

This appeared to reinforce claims in Russian state media that Ukrainians are active in the Sahel, especially after a doctored image of the armed group holding the Ukrainian flag alongside a flag of Azawad — northern Mali’s short-lived independent state — was widely shared.

Mali’s military rulers also — unusually — acknowledge the weekend’s defeat but warned against negative portrayals of the armed forces. 

It carried out retaliatory airstrikes using Turkish drones with the support of the Burkinabe army, under the banner of the Sahel alliance, where the majority of casualties were gold miners. 

The Malian junta is unlikely to back down on attempting to ensure the north is consolidated by the army. It will rely heavily on the alliance, which is already stretched thin by the tide of violence in Burkina Faso and Niger.

Russian reinforcements and continued access to weapons from emerging military powers such Turkey and Iran will feed operations.

The CSP-DPA is likely to continue resisting, having been buoyed by the Tinaouzaten victory. Stability will remain precarious.

Beverly Ochieng is the senior analyst for Francophone Africa at Control Risks. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.