By Nosmot Gbadamosi
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: South Africa prepares to take the helm of the G-20, Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Morocco, and a superhighway takes shape between Ivory Coast and Nigeria.
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Will Ruto’s Scandals Harm U.S.-Kenya Ties?
Kenya’s government says it has launched an investigation into how a prominent Ugandan opposition leader was abducted from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Nov. 16 and taken back to Uganda, amid what has been a bad few weeks for Kenyan President William Ruto.
Kizza Besigye, a longtime rival of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, disappeared on that Saturday while visiting the country for a book launch by Kenyan politician Martha Karua. He reappeared several days later at a military court in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, charged with various terrorism offenses including the illegal possession of firearms.
“He is not a soldier. Why is he being held in a military jail?,” asked Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, who is the executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations program on HIV and AIDS. The U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, urged the government to release Besigye and said that Uganda should end the “deeply concerning practice” of “prosecuting civilians in military courts” in violation of international human rights laws.
In July, 36 members of Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change—one of Uganda’s biggest opposition parties—including one individual who held refugee status in Kenya, were deported from Kenya and charged with terrorism in Kampala.
Besigye’s transfer to Uganda came the same week that Kenya’s Catholic Church released a statement criticizing Ruto’s government for alleged corruption, abductions, and normalizing a “culture of lies” among elected leaders. The church rejected a roughly $40,000 cash donation by Ruto four days later, saying it would not facilitate “unjust enrichment.”
Kenyan authorities denied involvement in the abduction. But on Friday, Ugandan Information Minister Chris Baryomunsi said on state television that the incident was coordinated with Kenya.
“Otherwise, how would you arrest somebody in the middle of Nairobi and then bring him back to Uganda …. without the full knowledge and support of the government in Kenya?” he said.
Last week, the Kenyan president was also forced to cancel more than $2.5 billion in deals with Indian billionaire Gautam Adani after the tycoon was indicted for fraud by U.S. prosecutors a day earlier.
Ruto had ignored a monthslong backlash by the Kenyan public and accusations of opaque dealings by the Adani Group’s proposal to invest $1.85 billion in Kenya’s main airport in exchange for a contract to run it for 30 years, and a $736 million deal with the energy ministry to construct power lines. But in a state of the nation address last Thursday, Ruto said he had canceled the deal based on “new information provided by our investigative agencies and partner nations.”
Ahead of Ruto’s speech, Human Rights Watch said Kenyan security forces had “abducted, arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and killed perceived leaders of the anti-Finance Bill protests” that took place in June against Ruto’s administration. Since June, the autonomous Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has documented at least 74 forced disappearances and more than 1,370 arbitrary arrests by security forces.
In his speech, Ruto said that many of those detained were “criminals and subversive elements.” He added: “I condemn any excessive or extrajudicial action which puts the life and liberty of any person at risk, including disappearances and threats to life.”
Washington has, in part, helped refurbish Ruto’s reputation—a move that further damaged U.S. standing in the eyes of the wider African public. President Joe Biden’s administration doubled down on close ties with Ruto despite various warnings about his unpopularity among Kenyans and corruption allegations. As Kenyans demonstrated against Ruto’s government over the summer, Biden designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally and secured its involvement in the Haiti peacekeeping mission.
“To much of the world, hearing Americans talk about democracy promotion rings hollow,” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy wrote in Foreign Policy last month. The United States risks “undermining the long-term effectiveness of other parts of our assistance packages if we fail to prioritize programs to support good governance and combat corruption,” he added.
Meanwhile, Kenya’s National Ethics and Corruption Survey concluded in its most recent yearly report that the average bribe that Kenyans were forced to pay doubled in 2023.
Wednesday, Nov. 27: Namibia holds presidential and parliamentary elections.
Tanzania holds local government elections.
Monday, Dec. 2: Commodities giant Trafigura faces trial in Switzerland on charges of paying bribes to secure contracts with Angola’s state oil company, Sonangol. Trafigura has signed up to be one of the first users of the U.S.-backed Lobito Corridor.
Wednesday, Dec. 4, to Friday, Dec. 6: Africa Investment Forum held in Rabat, Morocco.
South Africa’s G-20 presidency. South Africa will soon become the first African nation to chair the G-20, taking over from Brazil. The yearlong term will officially begin on Dec. 1, and South Africa will use it to focus on advancing global economic growth and sustainable development, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced last Tuesday.
Pretoria is the only African member of the group and has pushed for a greater African voice on the international stage. The South African government has said that with the recent admission of the African Union into the G-20, it will focus on issues that are of consequence to Africa and the global south, such as promoting access to clean energy and reforming the often predatory mining of Africa’s critical minerals.
Nigeria investigates itself. The head of Nigeria’s human rights body, Tony Ojukwu, said on Friday that a recently released report—into claims from a Reuters investigation that the Nigerian military carried out forced abortions on thousands of women in the northeast—has prevented the country from facing an International Criminal Court (ICC) probe.
Four Reuters articles published in December 2022 reported that the Nigerian military ran a secret, systematic, and illegal abortion program targeting women who were raped while being held captive by Boko Haram. The Nigeria Human Rights Commission said in a report earlier this month that it found “no evidence” to support the claims. The commission said that it carried out an 18-month investigation and interviewed 199 witnesses, including those from the military, former militants, and women rescued from Islamist militants. The commission’s “subsequent report demonstrated Nigeria’s commitment to investigating and addressing human rights abuses, thereby avoiding ICC intervention,” said Ojukwu.
Nigeria’s rights body was critical of the government during the #EndSARS protests against police brutality in 2020. However, the commission’s funding is dependent on the Nigerian government. Ojukwu raised the avoidance of a possible ICC extension in parliament this week as lawmakers discussed an “improved” budget allocation for the organization next year.
Xi visits Morocco. Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Morocco on Thursday and was welcomed by Crown Prince Moulay Hassan. Morocco’s status as a key renewable energy hub as well as its free trade agreements with the United States and European Union make it a vital partner for Beijing as Donald Trump threatens double-digit tariffs.
Chinese electric vehicle battery manufacturer Gotion High Tech announced plans in June to begin building Morocco’s first “gigafactory” for $1.3 billion in 2026 in Kenitra, a city to the north of the Moroccan capital of Rabat.
Moscow’s new embassy. Russia will reportedly open its first embassy in Togo’s capital, Lomé, next year. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he had met his Togolese counterpart, Robert Dussey, on the sidelines of a ministerial Russia-Africa forum in Sochi earlier this month to advance trade and investment ties.
Togo and neighboring Benin share a joint Russian ambassador, Igor Evdokimov, who is based in Benin. Evdokimov is seeking to counter a possible redeployment of U.S. troops from Niger to Benin by offering Russian military assistance to Beninese authorities, Russian outlet Sputnik reported this month. “Unlike our Western colleagues, we recognize Cotonou’s right to freely choose its partners in the sphere of defense and security,” Evdokimov said.
This Week in Infrastructure
West Africa could soon build its own superhighway. The governments of five nations within the proposed $15 billion Abidjan-Lagos Corridor have committed to $6.8 billion in additional funding for creating business zones located near the highway. The corridor would feature a six-lane superhighway, passing through Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria.
The proposal followed a meeting held last week by the Economic Community of West African States, a regional bloc. Official construction for the coastal route is slated to begin next year, and when completed, the road could carry up to 85 percent of the goods being traded among West African nations in a bid to boost intraregional trade. Currently, only 15 percent of total African trade is between the continent’s countries. The project is being financed in part through the African Development Bank.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Russia’s War Economy Is Hitting Its Limits by Marc R. DeVore and Alexander Mertens
Putin Is Throwing Human Waves at Ukraine, But Can’t Do It Forever by Alexey Kovalev
Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right by Stephen M. Walt
Eswatini gold smuggling. An investigation in amaBhungane—based on leaked documents from Eswatini’s financial intelligence unit—reveals vast amounts of money moving from South Africa through Eswatini to Dubai. The money is allegedly linked to a member of King Mswati III’s family and a Dubai-based businessman. According to the report’s allegations, the transactions are connected to a gold-smuggling operation reaching from Zimbabwe to the United Arab Emirates.
Algeria’s brutal war. In New Lines Magazine, Chahrazade Douah interviews Stanislas Hutin, a French veteran who fought in the Algerian War of Independence, which began in 1954. Hutin described torture and the indiscriminate use of napalm during the French empire’s military campaign to hold onto the territory. He is part of a collective of former French soldiers who donate their military pensions to aid projects in Algeria and the surrounding region.
Malawi follows Mali on back taxes. Mali has been in the headlines recently for forcibly detaining foreign executives as it sought a greater share of income from operators mining in the country. But Mali’s military leaders aren’t the only African government seeking to reclaim taxes, Jack McBrams reports in the Continent. Authorities in Malawi have demanded nearly $310 billion in unpaid taxes from foreign extractive companies.
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