Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: John Dramani Mahama wins the presidency in Ghana, Belgium is ordered to pay Congo reparations, and Cameroon’s Koyo Kouoh takes the helm of the Venice Biennale.
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Nigeria’s President Goes to Paris
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Nigerian President Bola Tinubu in Paris last week, marking the first state visit to the country by a Nigerian leader in more than two decades as France looks to pivot to Anglophone Africa after recently being booted out by several of its junta-led former colonies—such as Mali and Niger.
Over the past decade, Paris has been courting the continent’s biggest non-Francophone economies, including South Africa, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Macron made his first official visit to South Africa in 2021, and in 2019, he had made the first ever visit by a French president to Kenya since its independence from Britain in 1963.
On Nov. 28, both Chad and Senegal—historically staunch French allies—announced their intention to terminate military cooperation agreements with France.
France began withdrawing its military assets from the capital N’Djamena on Tuesday with the return of two warplanes, but Chad’s decision can be viewed as politicking. Chadian military leader Mahamat Idriss Déby made a similar move in April, when he asked U.S. troops to leave weeks ahead of a presidential election. It was widely perceived as a negotiating tactic and a ploy to win public favor in the election, in which Déby was running.
Déby, whose legitimacy is disputed, faces various challenges to his presidency and continues to play a game of chess with Western leaders in order to remain in power. Chad has recently forged an alliance with Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, while U.S. officials have reportedly agreed to a return of military cooperation.
Chad has implemented a media blackout on legislative elections scheduled for Dec. 29. The head of the country’s media authority banned the broadcast and production of audiovisual content by online outlets that had not applied for authorization, which the Chad Electronic Media Association denounced as “illegal and arbitrary.” About 15 opposition parties have refused to take part in the vote.
In contrast, Senegalese leader Bassirou Diomaye Faye shares similar views on France as the Sahel’s coup nations of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. That’s why he was put in charge of negotiating the three nations’ return to the Economic Community of West African States regional bloc. Faye had also pledged during his election campaign in March to fight France’s “economic stranglehold” on the country.
“Today, China is our largest trading partner in terms of investment and trade. Does China have a military presence in Senegal? No. Does that mean our relations are cut? No,” he said last month.
During Tinubu’s state visit, a mostly white French military band gave a viral rendition of Nigerian Afrobeats star P-Square’s song “Taste the Money,” complete with fake Nigerian accents. The French cover band seemed to miss the irony: The musical twins known as P-Square backed third-party candidate Peter Obi rather than Tinubu in last year’s disputed presidential elections.
Tinubu, an unpopular president dealing with a nosediving economy and a currency in free fall, signed a critical minerals deal with France much to the ire of many Nigerians, who felt that the French had a poor record when it comes to offering fair deals to African nations despite Paris having long been a key trade partner. In recent months, many international businesses have exited Nigeria due to its depreciating currency, leaving Tinubu desperate for foreign investment.
“We’re partnering with France, who [has] been responsible for countries like Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and the likes, and we haven’t seen significant developments in those places in the last 100 years.” Ahmed Buhari, a political affairs analyst (who has no relation to former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari) told Voice of America.
Such was the backlash that Tinubu’s special advisor Sunday Dare was forced to clarify on Thursday on social media that France was not taking over the country’s mineral wealth.
“The French are not Taking Over. No where in the document was it agreed or suggested that Nigeria has signed away Mining Rights to the French nor does it cannote anything against Nigeria’s Economic and Security interest as being maliciously circulated,” Dare wrote.
The deal includes a 300-million-euro ($315.8 million) investment to boost infrastructure and partnership in agriculture. During Tinubu’s visit to Paris, Nigerian banks Zenith and United Bank for Africa also signed agreements to operate in the French capital.
Macron may be able to woo Africa’s English-speaking leaders, but African public opinion is another story. France is widely perceived as a poisoned chalice and is likely to fuel animosity against any elected African leader who seeks an overtly public partnership.
In Nigeria’s presidential elections—the next of which will be held in 2027—northern states hold the deciding vote. These states have much in common with neighboring Niger. Tinubu’s likelihood of a second term has become precarious, and partnering with France won’t help him at the polls.
Wednesday, Dec. 11, to Thursday, Dec. 12: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visits Nigeria.
South Africa hosts G-20 finance deputies and central bank governors in Johannesburg at a meeting that began Monday.
Thursday, Dec. 12: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts his Angolan counterpart João Lourenco on a state visit to discuss trade and investments.
Sunday, Dec. 15: Nigeria’s statistics office releases inflation data.
Mahama wins Ghana election. Former Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama will be its next president. He won elections held on Saturday with 56.6 percent of the votes against his main challenger, the incumbent Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, who accepted defeat ahead of official results.
Two years ago, I met Mahama on a British Airways flight from Accra. Aside from posing for a selfie with Foreign Policy, he vowed that he would return triumphant in the next election and sort out the economy. But he did have a previous five years in office to do that.
Mahama first took office in 2012, following the death of his predecessor John Atta Mills, before winning an election held December that year. By the time that his second term ends, Mahama will have served a total of nearly 10 years in office—longer than the constitutional limit of two four-year terms.
As Francis Kokutse highlighted in the Continent on Saturday, both of the main candidates helped to create Ghana’s economic mess. Ghana has one of the most robust democracies in West Africa, with smooth transfers of power, but a handful of men have essentially played musical chairs with its presidency for decades amid frequent International Monetary Fund bailouts. Ghana struck its 17th IMF bailout in late 2022 with a $3 billion loan.
Kenyan Haiti mission. Kenyan President William Ruto has been having a rough month dealing with the abduction of a Ugandan opposition leader in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, as well as various corruption allegations. The IMF has said it intends to send a mission next year to assess alleged corruption.
His problems escalated on Friday when around 20 of the roughly 400 Kenyan police officers fighting gangs in Haiti reportedly quit over delayed wages and poor conditions which the Kenyan government denies.
The security situation in the country continues to deteriorate. At least 180 mostly elderly Haitians were murdered over the weekend by a gang leader in the capital over accusations of witchcraft, according to the United Nations human rights commissioner. The decision in October not to grant the U.S.-backed initiative status as a U.N. peacekeeping mission has left Kenya seeking funds elsewhere to increase personnel.
Belgian court orders reparation payments. In a landmark ruling, Belgium’s court of appeals has ordered the government to pay reparations for “crimes against humanity” to five mixed-race women, now in their 70s, who were forcibly removed from their families in colonial-era Belgian Congo and sent to Belgium.
The women had asked for a payment of 50,000 euros each, and they launched their appeal after losing their case in a lower court in 2021. In 2019, the Belgian government issued a formal apology to an estimated 20,000 victims taken from their Black mothers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the 1940s and 1950s. In most cases, their white fathers refused to recognize them. They were often placed in church-run orphanages in the Congo and Rwanda and denied Belgian citizenship.
Venice Biennale’s new curator. Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh, who heads the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, has been named the artistic director of next year’s Biennale Arte—becoming the first African woman to hold the role. The late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, at the time the director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, became the first African-born curator of the Biennale in 2015. That year’s iteration was entitled “All the World’s Futures” and sought a global focus that was inclusive of non-Western artists.
But Kouoh doesn’t seem to be focused exclusively on boosting the continent’s standing within the exhibition. “It’s not going to be an African Biennale,” she told the New York Times. “It’s going to be an international Biennale—as it always is.”
Egyptian tourism recovers. Visitor numbers to Egypt have marginally picked up since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza caused a drop in tourism last year. Tourism revenue contributed 8.1 percent of Egypt’s total GDP in 2024, up from 8 percent in 2023, according to the country’s tourism ministry. Attacks by Houthi rebels on Red Sea shipping have weakened another key source of currency for Egypt’s struggling economy, diverting around 40 percent of traffic away from the Suez Canal early this year.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Why Assad’s Regime Is Collapsing So Quickly by Charles Lister
China and North Korea Throw U.S. War Plans Out the Window by Raphael S. Cohen
The Battle for Ukraine Is a War of Demography by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Sudan’s political hip-hop scene. In Africa Is a Country, Ibrahim Osman charts the history of Sudanese hip-hop and its roots within the country’s pro-democracy movements. “Sudanese hip-hop has emerged not only as a form of rebellion but also as a repository of the nation’s collective memory. What began as borrowed beats from American rap tapes has evolved into a genre that is uniquely Sudanese,” Osman writes.
U.S.-backed Lobito Corridor. The mega railway project has been lauded in international media coverage following U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Angola but has been met with far more skepticism in African media outlets. Revisiting David Hundeyin’s September argument in the Pan African Review that the “problem is that the investment in question is exactly what you would expect an American investment in Africa to look like if the year were 1956.”
Trumpism in Africa. In the Elephant, historian Toyin Falola argues that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is popular among “Africans wary of Harris-inspired wokeism” but that support could quickly erode if Trump continues an Africa policy focused on countering Russia and China. The United States “cannot respond to a Chinese military base with a new base of its own or scurry to buy back sympathy by lavishing attention on African states only when China does” Falola writes.
