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.

Reportedly, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan has invited World Bank officials to vet all federal government contracts. “Very soon we will get people from the World Bank to be at my office. For every contract we want to award, irrespective of the structures we have on the ground, they will assess it so that if a job is supposed to cost N10,000 and it’s awarded for N10,000, the likelihood that the contractor bribing anybody will be reduced,” Jonathan was quoted as saying. Read more »

Preliminary reports from Senegal are that Sunday’s polling and subsequent ballot counting has gone well, though Western media concentrates on Dakar and other large cities. Nevertheless, an important, domestic NGO, RESOCIT, deployed more than two thousand local observers and concluded that there was an “astonishingly” low number of incidents of violence and fraud. Read more »

Delegations from South Sudan (Juba) and Sudan (Khartoum) have announced they will meet immediately to demarcate the border between the two countries. The goal is for the talks to be completed within three months. However, this round of negotiations will not address five disputed areas, about which talks will continue. In another border issue, the Khartoum press reports that the two countries have signed an agreement to monitor border areas and to open ten crossing points along the 2200km border. Read more »

Normally placid, elegant Dakar is roiled by pre-election demonstrations. The issue is President Abdoulaye Wade’s apparently desperate attempt to hang on to presidential power via a third term bid this weekend. Wade claims his re-election would be legal under the frequently revised (by Wade) constitution. The Constitutional Council has ruled that his first term does not count because the two-term limit law was introduced after his first term began. His opponents have objected to the decision. Former Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo, as head of an African Union observer mission, has gone to Dakar, apparently to try to persuade Wade to step down. Thus far, Wade has refused. So, the stage appears to be set for a contested election this weekend – Wade (like Gbagbo in Ivory Coast) almost certainly has more popular support than outsiders estimate. If he does win, extensive court challenges seem inevitable. Read more »

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, in a February 16 lecture (PDF), reflects on the threat of Western re-colonization of Africa in the context of enduring racism as a way to encourage greater African unity. Read more »

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

John Campbell has regularly made the point that from 1999 to 2007  increasingly bad elections led Nigerians to withdraw from the political process. Despite official proclamations, the 2007 elections were thought to have had an extremely low turnout.

A recent paper (PDF) by the National Bureau of Economic Research (h/t to Chris Blattman), “Looking Beyond the Incumbent: The Effects of Exposing Corruption on Electoral Outcomes,” provides what could be some empirical evidence from their randomized experiment in Mexico to support this observation. Read more »

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 »