Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Bola Tinubu’s government erodes press freedom in Nigeria, Italy releases a notorious Libyan police chief wanted by the International Criminal Court, and South Africa trades threats with U.S. President Donald Trump.
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Rwanda-Backed Rebels Announce Unilateral Truce
The Congo River Alliance, which includes the March 23 Movement (M23), announced a unilateral cease-fire starting Tuesday, possibly to regroup after the rebels faced significant pushback from Congolese and Burundian forces as they looked to seize the South Kivu provincial capital of Bukavu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The rebels then declared in a statement that they do not intend to capture any further areas, despite saying otherwise last week. This may be because the Congolese army recaptured areas in South Kivu.
M23 have previously declared shortlived cease–fires when the rebels need to reorganize. The Congolese government called this latest cease-fire “false communication” and the U.N. reported continued fighting in South Kivu.
Last week, the M23—armed and funded by Rwanda, U.N. experts say—seized control of North Kivu’s capital of Goma. Congolese authorities counted at least 900 dead and 2,900 injured in Goma during clashes, alongside ongoing reports of sexual violence.
Had the M23 seized Bukavu, the rebel group could have consolidated North and South Kivu into a breakaway region, meaning that Rwanda would no longer share a border with a territory controlled by the Congolese government.
Why Rwandan troops are in Congo. Rwanda has shifted from outright denial to a defensive position when it comes to explaining the estimated 4,000 Rwandan troops fighting alongside the M23.
“Rwanda is defending its territory. Rwanda is under threat,” Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe told BBC Newshour. He added that Rwanda and the M23 “have a common goal.”
Kinshasa’s retort was blunt: “The Democratic Republic of the Congo is being illegally occupied by Rwanda. This is the clear result of decades of impunity, of not holding President [Paul] Kagame accountable for his flagrant violations and his disregard for international law,” Congolese Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner said.
By backing the M23, Rwanda has “created a monster in the Great Lakes region,” she added, and called on Western nations that have bankrolled the Rwandan government to stop their support.
Rwanda claims that the M23, made up of primarily ethnic Tutsis, is protecting Congo’s Tutsi population and that Congo’s army is recruiting from Hutu extremists within the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), some of whom perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Rwanda says the FDLR poses a threat to its Tutsi-dominated government and to the Tutsi population in Congo.
What the M23 wants. Many observers argue that the M23 itself has generated hostility as a result of its mass killings of civilians, gang rapes, and looting. Almost 5 million people have been displaced in the country. The M23 takes its name from a 2009 peace treaty and began fighting in 2012, when it claimed the Congolese government had failed to fully uphold the treaty and integrate the group into the Congolese army.
The rebels’ motives, like Rwanda’s, appear to be economic. Rwanda is a mineral-poor country yet exports vast amounts of coltan—a mineral used to power laptops and smartphones—much of which the U.N. says has been illegally smuggled from Congo. Since 2021, the M23 has focused its efforts on seizing territories with lucrative coltan mines.
Corneille Nangaa, the head of Congo River Alliance—M23’s political wing—said last week that its goal was to oust Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi and seize power. “We will continue the march of liberation all the way to Kinshasa,” Nangaa said.
Nangaa is a former Congolese elections chief who confessed to rigging the 2018 election to benefit Tshisekedi. Nangaa was sentenced to death in absentia last August for war crimes, insurrection, and treason.
Mass international pressure on Rwanda, spearheaded by the United States, led to the M23 withdrawing when it last seized Goma in 2012. The change of administration in the United States has given Rwanda an opportunity to run rampant, knowing that major powers are distracted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and conflicts in the Middle East. The risks for Kagame are fewer than a decade ago. Washington has cut foreign aid globally, leaving it with less leverage than it had in 2012.
Rwanda has taken in Afghan refugees and is one of the largest contributors to peacekeeping in Africa, having sent troops to the Central African Republic and Mozambique. It received 270 million pounds (about $340 million) in aid from the U.K. government in an aborted refugee deportation plan.
The “government’s commitment to deploying Rwandan soldiers in multinational peacekeeping missions has not only strengthened the country’s foreign relations but also projected the narrative of Rwanda as a developmental success. This carefully crafted public image is not reflective of reality,” Rwandan opposition politician Victoire Ingabire wrote in Foreign Policy.
A war of words has played out publicly on social media between Kagame and his South African counterpart, President Cyril Ramaphosa, who accused Rwanda of targeting Pretoria’s peacekeepers deployed under the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a 16-member regional bloc. South Africa has lost at least 13 troops in Congo. Ramaphosa said further killings of South African troops would amount to a declaration of war. Kagame responded in a post on X that SADC was a “belligerent force.”
Uganda, also accused of backing M23 by the United Nations, has said it is boosting security inside Congo to protect itself against the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan rebel group operating in Congo. But the Ugandan military’s main priority seems to be protecting gold mines in Congo, from which the country also benefits due to smuggling operations, according to the U.N.
The Congolese government has asked European soccer clubs—including Arsenal, Bayern Munich, and Paris Saint-Germain—to end Rwandan sponsorship deals, accusing them of being “directly responsible” for the rapes and deaths of Congolese people. Ultimately, it will fall to the European Union to cut off aid to Rwanda, but so far EU nations are dragging their feet.
Wednesday, Feb. 5: The U.N. Security Council discusses its mission in South Sudan.
Thursday, Feb. 6: President Ramaphosa delivers a State of the Nation address in South Africa.
Friday, Feb. 7: The U.N. Human Rights Council holds a special meeting on atrocities in Congo in a session requested by the DRC government.
Friday, Feb. 7 to Saturday, Feb. 8: Regional blocs SADC and the East Africa Community hold a joint summit on the conflict in Congo, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Saturday, Feb. 8, to Sunday, Feb. 9: International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva visits Ethiopia.
South Africa takes on Trump. President Trump announced a halt to U.S. assistance to South Africa over land reform. More than three decades after the end of apartheid, about 70 percent of South Africa’s farmland is still owned by white South Africans, who make up less than 10 percent of the population. Ramaphosa last month signed an expropriation bill into law aimed at addressing the disparity by allowing land to be seized without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest.”
Much of U.S. assistance is in the form of foreign aid, which Trump has stopped with his South African-born ally, billionaire Elon Musk. PEPFAR-funded facilities for treating the country’s large HIV-positive population remained shut in South Africa, despite limited exemptions announced over the weekend, posing a danger to millions of South Africans dependent on antiretroviral medications.
“There is no other significant funding that is provided by the United States in South Africa,” Ramaphosa said. Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s mineral and petroleum resources minister and African National Congress chair, said African nations should implement retaliatory measures on critical minerals. “They want to withhold funding, but they still want our minerals. … Let us withhold minerals. Africa must assert itself,” he told the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town on Monday.
South Africa and eight other nations on Friday also formed the Hague Group to defend the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the face of what they described as defiance of ICJ orders and attempts by U.S. officials to sanction the ICC. The alliance includes Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, and Senegal, which vowed to boycott arms transfers to Israel.
Egyptians protest Trump’s Palestinian displacement plan. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated at the Rafah border crossing on Friday, in a state-sanctioned and coordinated protest against a proposal last week by Trump that Egypt and Jordan take in millions of Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Hosting large numbers of Palestinian refugees is a red line for Egypt. Over the weekend, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League released a joint statement rejecting any plans to move Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people or West Bank Palestinians to other countries.
Italy investigated over Libyan release. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is being investigated for embezzlement, as well as aiding and abetting a crime, over Italy’s release of a Libyan police chief wanted for war crimes by the ICC. Osama “Almasri” Najim runs an infamous detention center and is wanted for human rights violations against migrants, including murder, torture, and rape. He was arrested on an ICC warrant in Italy’s northern city of Turin last month and flown home on an Italian state aircraft shortly afterward—without the ICC being informed.
The arrest was ruled “irregular” by Rome’s attorney general because Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio had not been informed ahead of time of the arrest and because Najim was deemed dangerous. Nordio, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, and Alfredo Mantovano, the cabinet undersecretary for intelligence matters, were also being investigated, Meloni said in a video message shared on social media. There’s speculation that Italy released Nordio due to its controversial agreement with Libya on intercepting migrants heading to Europe illegally.
Repression under Tinubu. Imprisonment and physical assault of journalists in Nigeria have increased under President Bola Tinubu’s administration. About 28 Nigerian journalists have been detained since Tinubu became president in 2023. Nigerian investigative platform the Foundation for Investigative Journalism launched a hotline last week for journalists facing arrests or violence. The Nigerian Guild of Editors and the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project warned in a joint statement in December that journalists and rights defenders faced “escalating dangers.”
Meanwhile, complaints to Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission have more than doubled, according to the latest data released by the rights body. Complaints of human rights violations jumped to 355,726 in December 2024 alone, compared with the 1,147 complaints recorded in January 2024.
The U.N. has also appealed for $910 million to address the humanitarian crisis in northeastern Nigeria, following more than a decade of insecurity. About 7.8 million people need aid, and 33 million face acute food insecurity.
Tanzania’s billion-dollar nickel railroad. Tanzania and Burundi have signed a $2.15 billion agreement for two state-owned Chinese construction firms to build a 175-mile railway to transport critical minerals. The line, financed by the African Development Bank, will link a Burundian nickel mine—providing essential components for electric vehicle batteries—to Dar es Salaam Port in Tanzania.
Visa investment in Nigeria. Nigerian digital banking company Moniepoint secured a $10 million investment from Visa to expand contactless payments across Africa. According to the Nigerian government, much of the country’s foreign investment last year outside of oil was in digital financial services, alongside the expansion of Nigerian-owned banks across Africa. In 2023, Moniepoint ranked second in the Financial Times’ list of Africa’s fastest-growing companies. Its closest rival in Nigeria is the Chinese-owned firm OPay.
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South Africa’s online poetry library. In the Conversation, Tinashe Mushakavanhu writes on the Deep South Books and Archive, a free-to-access digital treasure trove that preserves South Africa’s literary history. The poets featured are those published by independent press Deep South Books. During apartheid, “Black poets were often censored, banned or exiled as their work confronted the injustices of a racist system,” he writes. “This digital archive recasts the story of South African poetry as insurgent, independent and driven to define a distinct aesthetic.”
Nigeria’s love for Vinyl. In the Continent, Samuel Banjoko reviews the Egwù Vinyl Festival, which took place in Lagos in late December. Jùjú music pioneer Shina Peters—the soundtrack to Lagos megaparties during the 1980s and ’90s—was the headliner alongside vinyl DJ sets celebrating Nigeria’s musical history from the 1970s onward. “In a city that is eager to embrace the new, it was a celebration of the old-school,” he writes.
A three-day escape to Ghana. In the New York Times, Accra-based Chiké Frankie Edozien explores what’s on offer for tourists in Ghana’s thriving capital—from the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, a shrine to Pan-Africanism, to discovering new bands at the Zen Garden. The music there “is often a mix of traditional Ghanaian highlife and palm-wine music, with sounds created from a meld of acoustic guitars, local strings and percussion,” he writes.
