Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Tensions escalate in South Sudan, Namibia’s new president trims her cabinet, and a measles outbreak in Morocco.
If you would like to receive Africa Brief in your inbox every Wednesday, please sign up here.
Nigeria Suspends Female Senator for Alleging Sexual Harassment
Nigeria’s electoral body has rejected a petition filed by voters from Nigeria’s North Central region demanding the dismissal of a female lawmaker who accused the Senate president of sexual harassment.
Nigeria’s Senate ethics committee suspended Sen. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan for six months without pay citing “unruly and disruptive” behavior after she accused the legislative body’s president, Godswill Akpabio, of sexual harassment and filed a petition against him in early March. She alleged that Akpabio blocked her motions from being heard on the Senate floor because she rejected his sexual advances. Akpabio has denied the allegations.
The campaign to remove Akpoti-Uduaghan from office and call a by-election was ostensibly signed by residents of the Kogi Central district she represents. However, Nigeria has a legacy of cash payments to sway political votes and petitions. Nigeria’s electoral body on Tuesday said the more than 400,000 signatures submitted lacked identifiable home addresses and contact details.
The senator’s suspension is the latest high-profile incident in the country, where those alleging sexual harassment and assault are punished for speaking out. In 2019, photographer Busola Dakolo’s allegations of rape against celebrity pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo prompted a criminal investigation against her. A Nigerian court ordered Dakolo to pay a fine for wasting its time.
In 2020, Nigerian police held a woman in custody after she accused Afrobeats pop star Oladapo Daniel Oyebanjo, known as D’banj, of rape. And last September, the Nigerian military sacked a female soldier and claimed she was “mentally unstable” after she accused a senior officer of sexual harassment.
Nigeria has one of the lowest rates of representation of women in parliament globally, ranking 179th out of 183 countries, as measured by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Akpoti-Uduaghan is one of only four women in Nigeria’s 109-seat upper chamber. Less than 4 percent of members of parliament in Nigeria are women, compared with 29 percent in the United States, 41 percent in regional neighbor Senegal, and 45 percent in Africa’s biggest economy, South Africa.
For more than a decade, Nigeria’s male-dominated legislature has rejected a series of bills that sought to guarantee special seats for women in the National Assembly as well as equal access to employment, land ownership, and inheritance and marriage rights.
Akpabio has faced a previous sexual harassment allegation. Joy Nunieh, the sacked former managing director of the Niger Delta Development Commission, accused Akpabio of graft and unwanted sexual advances in July 2020.
Nigeria has never elected a female state governor, and the country’s biggest parties have never put a woman on a presidential ticket. Women elected to the National Assembly face frequent accusations of being prostitutes, a charge also leveled at Akpoti-Uduaghan. In the northeastern state of Bauchi, women said they were repeatedly told not to run in elections and were called prostitutes when they did, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper reported in 2019.
So rampant is the label that the country’s third-largest party put out a statement last November denouncing it. “There are certain people who still regard women in politics as prostitutes. It has become a common narrative in this country,” said Dudu Manuga, who oversees the Labour Party’s campaigns around female voters.
Nigeria’s few female politicians haven’t come out in support of Akpoti-Uduaghan, and responses from her male colleagues have sparked further outrage. Adeseye Ogunlewe, who was Nigeria’s works minister under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, said on national television that any man would find it impossible not to look at Akpoti-Uduaghan passing by.
“I want it to be taken seriously,” Akpoti-Uduaghan told Deutsche Welle. “I believe I was suspended to silence me.” She also claimed her candidacy was disputed in her first term in 2019 over her multiracial heritage. (Akpoti-Uduaghan’s mother is Ukrainian.)
Her allegations have sparked a national conversation about power dynamics and harassment. In the court of public opinion, Akpoti-Uduaghan has gained overwhelming support, but her legal case is unlikely to change Nigerian politics, where the gatekeepers are wealthy, geriatric men.
The judge overseeing her suspension appeal was forced to step down from the case on Tuesday after the Senate president challenged his impartiality and the court’s authority.
Wednesday, March 26: Ghana’s monetary policy committee meets for the final day of a three-day gathering that began on Monday.
Friday, March 28: South Africa releases its budget data for February.
Thursday, April 10: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to visit South Africa.
Namibia trims cabinet. Namibia’s first female president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, was sworn into office on Friday, becoming Africa’s second woman to directly win a presidential election, after Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The 72-year-old will need to tackle the country’s 37 percent unemployment rate and extreme inequality—second only to neighboring South Africa.
On Saturday, she announced a staff reduction, cutting the cabinet to 14 ministers and seven deputies from the previous 21 ministers and 21 deputies. The cut was made through merging ministries and placing oil and gas oversight under the presidential office. Vast oil discoveries have generated record foreign investment in the country.
Bombing in Sudan’s Darfur. Sudan’s army has rejected claims made by rights groups that it bombed and killed hundreds of people at a market in the village of Tora (about 25 miles from the North Darfur capital, El Fasher) on Monday. The Darfur Initiative for Justice and Peace said the bombing was the deadliest since the start of the war, while the Sudanese Emergency Lawyers group called it a “horrific massacre.”
South Sudan risks civil war. Germany’s Foreign Office temporarily closed its embassy in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, on Saturday, amid the deterioration of a 2018 power-sharing agreement between President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar. South Sudan’s military—overseen by Kiir—clashed with forces loyal to Machar at the Wunliet military camp close to Juba.
The army also carried out airstrikes on the town of Nasir, in the country’s northeastern Upper Nile state, in an effort to crush an armed youth group called the White Army—from the same ethnic Nuer community as Machar and which fought alongside his forces in the civil war between 2013 and 2018. Officials in Nasir said the bombing killed 21 civilians, including women and children, according to South Sudanese media.
On Monday, Kiir arrested officials loyal to Machar and last week fired the governor of Upper Nile state, James Odhok Oyay, who is a member of Machar’s party, the SPLM-IO. Odhok Oyay was replaced with military commander Lt. Gen. James Koang Chuol.
M23 gains continue. The Rwanda-backed M23 armed group announced Saturday that it would withdraw from the town of Walikale, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was seized a few days earlier. But as Africa Brief has covered previously, M23 often makes false withdrawal or cease-fire announcements when the group needs to restrategize or reposition troops.
The latest withdrawal announcement was made after Congo’s army and allied militia launched an air attack on Walikale’s airport and partially cut off M23’s road access to supplies. Residents reported on Monday that M23 soldiers were still in the town, which suggests that the group intends to continue its advances. Walikale is relatively close (about 250 miles) to Kisangani, the country’s fourth-largest city.
Meanwhile, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, held direct talks in Doha, Qatar last week, but it’s unlikely that a cease-fire agreement is close. Angola on Monday withdrew from its role as mediator in the conflict in order to focus on its leadership of the African Union. President João Lourenço says another African nation will take over the peace efforts.
Morocco’s measles outbreak. Moroccan authorities have blamed a nearly two-year battle to contain a severe measles outbreak on the “global anti-vax movement.” Takeup of measles vaccinations dropped in the country after the COVID-19 pandemic. Morocco’s Health Ministry in January began vaccinating adults in an attempt to curb infections; previously, only children under 18 were eligible for measles vaccines in the country.
More than 120 people have died and more than 25,000 people have been infected in the outbreak, which began in September 2023—impacting prisons and schools and overwhelming state hospitals.
Nigerian state of emergency. President Bola Tinubu declared a six-month state of emergency in Rivers, Nigeria’s third-largest oil-producing state, and suspended Gov. Siminalayi Fubara, his deputy, and all state lawmakers following misconduct allegations, political infighting, and a blast that significantly damaged part of the Trans-Niger Pipeline on March 16.
Tinubu said in a televised address that he was forced to intervene having received “disturbing security reports detailing incidents of vandalization of pipelines by some militants without the governor taking any action to curtail them.”
U.S. loan for Mozambican gas. On March 13, the United States approved a $4.7 billion loan to fund French giant TotalEnergies’ liquified gas project in the troubled northern Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique. The U.S. Export-Import Bank had agreed to partly finance the project in 2019, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, but funds were frozen in 2021 due to violent unrest sparked by al-Shabab militants.
The project is for gas exports to Europe, but Mozambicans complain that they are instead being pushed toward solar programs that displace them from their farms and do not benefit them. A September 2024 investigation by Politico reported that Mozambican soldiers defending the gas plant from militants had raped, tortured, and killed dozens of villagers living near it.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Africa without aid. Suspension of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has shut about 80 percent of emergency food kitchens in Sudan, which prevented thousands of people from going hungry during the country’s civil war. However, some analysts suggest the aid cuts provide an opportunity for African leaders to be more self-reliant. “While genuine concern has been expressed about the potential impacts for Africa of the dismantling of USAID, the chance for a root-and-branch reassessment and reform is one that the continent itself cannot afford to miss,” Ebenezer Obadare writes in Foreign Policy.
Saving a flooded city. Floods displaced about 200,000 people in Maiduguri, in northern Nigeria, when a dam collapsed in September 2024 following weeks of heavy rains. Nearly 80 percent of animals in the state zoo were killed in the deluge. Six months later, and despite limited early state intervention, Maiduguri has recovered largely through locally organized relief efforts, Taiwo Adebayo reports in The Associated Press.
Congo remembers Foreman. The death of boxing champion George Foreman last Friday has prompted reflections on his infamous 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” bout with Muhammad Ali in Zaire (now Congo). Mobutu Sese Seko, then president of Zaire, saw a chance to introduce his country “to the world as a stable nation … on the path to becoming a developed powerhouse,” John Eligon writes in the New York Times. “It put Zaire on the map, and united the country of more than 200 ethnic groups — yet failed to deliver the economic prosperity that Mr. Mobutu had promised.”
