The bad relations between former strongman, military general, and head of state Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) and President Goodluck Jonathan are yet another sign of the breakdown of elite bargaining, which has been the traditional way elites have ruled Nigeria. If the chief of state is by definition the head of the largest patron-client network, IBB’s would be nearly as strong. Read more »

Last year, international attention was riveted by the near humanitarian disaster in the Horn and East Africa caused by prolonged drought. Relevant UN agencies and NGOs were able to mobilize the necessary resources, and a famine of biblical proportions was forestalled, though there were high casualties among children and the elderly. Read more »

This is a guest post by Asch Harwood and Melissa Bukuru. Asch is the CFR Africa program research associate. Follow him on Twitter at @aschlfod. Melissa is the CFR Africa program intern.

Like mobile statistics (which Asch wrote about yesterday), information on social media use can also be thin. A communications firm, Portland, has set out to address this deficit and measure just how prevalent Twitter and how it is being used across Africa. They analyzed about 11.5 million geolocated tweets across the continent (including North Africa). Read more »

This is a guest post by Asch Harwood, CFR Africa program research associate. Follow him on Twitter at @aschlfod.

A comment was recently made to me citing the huge number of mobile phones in Nigeria—over 90 million—as an indicator of that country’s budding middle class. However, in this conversation, my interlocutor failed to make the distinction between mobile phones and mobile phones subscriptions, which turns out to be important. Read more »

Bayelsa state, in the oil-rich Niger Delta, went to the polls on Saturday to elect a new governor. The winner, by a huge majority, was Henry Dickson, the PDP candidate and a close political ally of President Goodluck Jonathan (also native of Bayelsa). Read more »

This is a guest post by Jim Sanders, a career, now retired, West Africa watcher for various federal agencies. The views expressed below are his personal views and do not reflect those of his former employers.

Some business persons and economists tend to portray Nigeria sunny-side up. One example is Dambisa Moyo’s Financial Times article, “Africa Can Remind the World of the Capitalist Way.” She asserts that “today’s Nigeria is strong enough to avoid a protracted crisis,” and cites an increase in global brands such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart in Lagos to argue that the “growing power of the African consumer” explains why the crisis over President Jonathan’s attempt to remove the fuel subsidy failed to spur a political meltdown. “Nigerian consumers want to buy their groceries and get back to work; they have too much vested in the economy.” Read more »

Unfortunately, much of sub-Saharan Africa is homophobic. Recent legislation, some proposed, some passed, condemns gay marriage and sometimes outlaws gay sexual activity. Nigeria, Uganda, and Liberia all have such legislation pending or passed, often with the provision of draconian penalties. Such legislation appears to be very popular. Read more »

Over the past week there have been curious Nigerian developments. The government has been unable to pay its civil servants and is now a month in arrears. The explanation has been that the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation failed to deposit the government’s oil revenue in the account from which civil servants are paid. Then, this week, the government closed down the press office at Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed Airport. This facility has operated under military and civilian governments and is a generation old. In addition, journalists were reportedly threatened in the Middle Belt. Read more »

This is a guest post by Melissa Bukuru, CFR Africa program intern.

Last week, the UNHCR released a report claiming that one thousand five hundred would-be African migrants to Europe drowned or went missing while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The episode reinforces the common perception that throngs of Africans are knocking on Fortress Europe’s door every day with varying degrees of success. It also reinforces the notion of victimhood – that these immigrants are fleeing unlivable conditions, and that they are at the mercy of their adventure north. But the reality is that most African immigration is intra-continental. Read more »

On February 4, the appeals committee of the African National Congress (ANC) upheld the previous convictions by the National Disciplinary Committee of youth league leader Julius Malema and his closest associates. Malema’s only recourse now is to appeal for mitigation of his sentence that strips him of party membership and his position within the ANC Youth League. In an official statement, the ANC has welcomed the decision. Read more »