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No Day After

CAMEROON

Cameroonian President Paul Biya is 92 and has ruled his Central African country for 42 years. Despite his age and length of time in office, however, he appears to have made no succession plans. Instead, he’s expected to run again for president in the Oct. 25 general election.

His allies in parliament in the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement political party recently extended their terms and postponed their elections by a year to 2026, too. Meanwhile, Biya has banned opposition groups that might pose a threat to his rule, Human Rights Watch noted.

Even so, Cameroonians are thinking about “life after Biya,” wrote World Politics Review.

Many hope the corruption, electoral fraud, the suppression of dissent, the press, free speech, and civil society – authorities recently threw a rapper in jail for insulting a local official – might change when their president leaves office.

Those Cameroonians also hope the economic stagnation that has gripped the country for years will be reversed.

Economic growth in Cameroon has lingered at around 3 percent for 30 years – not an impressive rate for a developing country – due to bad governance and a lack of public and private investment, the World Bank noted.

Foremost among the causes for this anemic growth is corruption in the country’s vital oil industry, where revenues have been flagging. Swiss commodity trading and mining company Glencore, for example, now stands accused of bribing Cameroonian officials for oil contracts, according to the Africa Report. Glencore pled guilty to similar charges in 2022.

Separatists in the English-speaking western region of the county, who want to break away from the French-speaking areas, have also hampered growth in six out of 10 of Cameroon’s provinces. As Reuters explained, this conflict dates back to 1960 when French and British colonies were merged to become one country.

Conflicts between Nigerian forces and Islamist militants such as Boko Haram have also spilled over the border in Cameroon’s north, further destabilizing the country and triggering refugee crises as people flee violence, added the Norwegian Refugee Council.

These large-scale challenges result in problems that affect the services that people really need. A third of the doctors who graduate from medical schools in Cameroon, for example, have left the country in search of work elsewhere, reported the Associated Press. That’s especially true for nurses, who emigrate around the world to fill staff shortages.

Earlier this year, Biya, noting the rising brain-drain, appealed to young Cameroonians’ sense of patriotism and duty to remain in Cameroon, saying leaving was “not the solution” to Cameroon’s problems, Deutsche Welle reported.

Rather than solving the problems that lead young people to leave, Biya seems committed to ignoring them while focusing on retaining his control over his people, said leaders of the opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, in an interview with Voice of America.

If reelected – as he surely will be – Biya will rule up to 2032. By then, he will be 98 years old, VOA noted. The issues that need to be addressed will linger for his successor to deal with. And the emigration will go on.

“You can’t use moral appeal or patriotism to make people stay,” Tumenta F. Kennedy, a Cameroon-based international migration consultant, told DW. “Addressing the mass movement requires efforts on addressing the root causes of migration, such as political instability, economic hardship, lack of job opportunities and last but not the least, security concerns.”

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Bombshell Postal

SOUTH AFRICA

The head of South Africa’s Post Office, Fathima Gany, recently dropped a bombshell on lawmakers. As the Financial Times reported, Gany announced that she needed a $214 million bailout for the service or else it would be forced to shut down. She shed 4,000 of 11,000 staff and closed a third of the postal service’s branches, yet still couldn’t claw out of bankruptcy or the $487 million debt load.

The fate of country’s Post Office, founded in 1792, symbolizes the problems that South Africa faces today. Basic services are decaying. Economic opportunities are tightening. Costs are rising. Poverty is inveterate. The International Monetary Fund listed those and other problems facing the country.

The debt especially concerns many outside of the country. China, for example, has invested heavily in South Africa as well as other countries on the continent. As outlined by the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, these deals often involve Chinese financing of extractive industries, like mines; infrastructure to move goods, like new railways, roads, ports, and airports; and diplomatically and politically beneficial projects like sports stadiums.

At the recent China-Africa Summit in Beijing, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, felt moved to refute sentiments that Chinese investors in Africa were setting the stage for a “debt trap” where Africa was forever in hock to the Chinese, Reuters noted. In the same remarks, he said he and Chinese leaders had reached a new energy deal that would benefit South Africans. He didn’t specify details.

But it is clear: Ramaphosa is presiding over a state that is crumbling. A judge recently sent a top official in the country’s national passenger railway system to prison for 15 years for working using forged university qualifications, for instance, the Associated Press reported. The case revealed that he even used a fake job offer to entice railway executives to double his salary to convince him to stay with the organization.

Meanwhile, as Ramaphosa spoke in the Chinese capital, his political standing at home was perhaps weaker than ever. As World Politics Review wrote, Ramaphosa only managed to barely win reelection in the South African Parliament in June after promising to share power with opposition leaders and appointing their handpicked candidates for a few cabinet seats.

He was vulnerable because his party, the African National Congress, which overturned the racist Apartheid regime in the 1990s, had performed poorly at the May polls, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in three decades. The party had failed to fix the country’s most pressing challenges: high unemployment, inequality and corruption, explained CBS News.

Still, as Chatham House wrote, “South Africa’s election provides an important example (for the region): that leaderships can no longer take power for granted, and that citizens across the region are seeking real change … and are impatient (for it).”

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Getting Polished

BOTSWANA

The president of Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi, appeared transfixed recently as he held up the rough-hewn, 2,492-carat diamond in his hands. The rock, he said, would finance the future.

“Kids going to school. Food coming in,” Masisi said at a press conference. “It’s a real diamond. Coming from a real country brought out by real people impacting real people.”

Diamonds and power have long been friends, especially in southern Africa.

Gems in the British crown jewels, for instance, include shards of the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found, wrote the Washington Post. The Cullinan was a 3,106-carat stone mined in South Africa in 1905. Other shards figure in other British royal household rituals.

Masisi and his allies have sought to wrest control of the diamond industry from the London-based De Beers Group and created the Diamonds for Development Fund to steer diamond revenues into local economic development, National Jeweler reported. He has also proposed requiring mining companies to sell a 24 percent stake in mines to local investors or the government, Reuters added.

Diamonds have arguably given Botswana headaches, too, however. Speaking to France 24 at a summit of the Group of Seven in Paris, Masisi criticized the bloc’s mandate that all diamonds sold in the wealthy bloc receive certification in Belgium to prevent Russia from profiting from the diamond trade. During the same event, he said Africa should leverage its resources to produce its own vaccines rather than relying on foreign relief to maintain public health, a problem underscored during the Covid-19 pandemic and more recently the outbreak of Mpox.

Masisi has maintained good relations with the US in a bid to hedge potential problems related to Russian commerce. African defense leaders recently met in Botswana, for example, to discuss security challenges on the continent, reported Voice of America. The US organized the meeting in part to counter the expansion of Russian influence in sub-Saharan Africa.

The recently discovered 2,492-carat diamond was in an area that has previously produced many precious stones due to the region’s volcanic activity in the distant past. “All of the stars aligned with that volcanic eruption, and the conditions were just perfect,” diamond expert Paul Zimnisky told the New York Times.

Even diamonds can’t solve all of Botswana’s problems, unfortunately. The value of the stone has slumped recently, dragging on the country’s economy, wrote Bloomberg. These shifts are tough for a landlocked nation that faces unique challenges due to its lack of access to the sea, the United Nations noted.

Still, the country has growing clout and vigorously pushed back on Europe recently when it felt itself slighted or taken advantage of. For example, when the United Kingdom tried to make a deal to send asylum seekers landing on its shores to Botswana for processing, the country said no (Rwanda accepted the deal).

Then earlier this year, European countries including Germany pushed for a ban on trophies from hunting elephants and other wildlife in Africa for conservation reasons. Botswana, with the world’s largest elephant population, reacted by offering to send 20,000 elephants to Germany. “It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana,” Masisi said.

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When the War Ends

ETHIOPIA

Alemetu, pregnant, was trying desperately to fall asleep when the men from the rebel Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) came for her.

Held hostage for four weeks in an abandoned school in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, she was beaten with a horsewhip and suspended upside-down from a tree for hours. To release her, the rebels asked for a ransom of 110,000 birr (about $1,900).

That’s almost double what the average person in Ethiopia earns in a year.

As the Guardian reported, her family tried valiantly to raise the funds – but also had to pay almost as much to free her uncle, a local farmer. Meanwhile, after they paid, the rebel group – which says it is trying to get independence for the region – set fire to her home.

Alemetu’s experience is part of the kidnappings and general lawlessness that have become the norm in Ethiopia in the wake of a civil war that ended two years ago. In March, for example, 16-year-old schoolgirl Mahlet Teklay was kidnapped in the northern regional state of Tigray. When her parents couldn’t pay the $51,800 ransom, the kidnappers killed her.

And last month, three public buses carrying at least 167 passengers were traveling to the capital Addis Ababa, bringing students home for the summer holidays from Debark University in the Amhara region, Deutsche Welle reported. Gunmen hijacked the buses and demanded thousands of dollars in ransom for the victims. Many are still being held.

“It is very rare to find a family who has not been affected by kidnapping,” Alemetu told the Guardian after being released. “The government has no control.”

Once only occurring in certain areas of Western Oromia where the OLA operates, kidnappings have spread to war-torn Tigray, Amhara and elsewhere in the country outside of the capital. They have also moved from being political to more financial – where once only officials and government employees were targeted, now no one is spared, wrote the Africa Defense Forum.

The government of Abiy Ahmed Ali, Ethiopia’s prime minister, does not talk much about the kidnapping “pandemic.” Instead, it touts its so-called successes in ending the war in Tigray, and turns the focus on the economy, specifically how it has attracted donors and investors, observers said.

For example, in July, the president, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, announced a series of market-friendly reforms including the floating of its currency, intended to open the doors to a $3.4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, wrote Africa Confidential.

Abiy is hoping to turn the page on the war and signal to investors and donors that Ethiopia is back in business. But that’s wishful thinking, says the Hill. Already, since his float of the currency, the dirr has lost 60 percent of its value against the dollar, with prices rising so fast that restaurant menus no longer list them, ABC News wrote.

Even though the war with Tigray ended officially in 2022, fighting continues there – but also in Oromia and also in Amhara, where government troops battle regional militias known as the Fano. The fighting threatens to turn into another civil war, wrote Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, talks with both rebel groups have gone nowhere.

If anything, the violence is becoming more entrenched, not just in these regions but elsewhere, too, wrote the Economist: “It’s metastasizing,” a Western diplomat told the magazine. “It’s quite, quite terrifying.”

It’s not just kidnappings; murders and rapes are spiraling, too, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect wrote.

“We have heard repeated stories about women being gang raped – being raped by one person is starting to be perceived as trivial,” Birhan Gebrekirstos, a lecturer at Mekelle University in Tigray, told the New Humanitarian, “we’re getting used to these stories.”

Part of the reason for the violence is that the rebel groups need money, wrote the Institute for Security Studies. Another is that the government has weak control over some regions. Instead, security forces often participate in the violence, or collaborate, even cut deals with the bandits. And it’s become a buyer’s choice of which rebel groups to join because there are few opportunities for the young in the country, which has been in the throes of an economic crisis for years. In some places, the situation is so dire, that famine looms, according to the International Rescue Committee.

Abiy is missing the point, said Al Jazeera. Investors are not interested in a country where lawlessness and corruption are out of control. Foreign and local businesses there are already being stymied when trying to move goods and workers, or seeing their workers kidnapped. Africa Intelligence reported in June that France-based Meridiam’s $2 billion geothermal project in Oromia is being abandoned because of insecurity.

Meanwhile, Abiy wants to attract high-paying tourists, recently meeting with the head of hotel giant, Marriot. But no visitor wants to visit a country where the possibility of being kidnapped is so high, say analysts.

Meanwhile, the instability of the country is dragging the entire Horn of Africa into it.

In recent months, “Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has stirred up new tensions with neighboring Somalia, become entangled in Sudan’s civil war (on the rebel’s side), and even made threatening gestures toward Eritrea, which had been Abiy’s ally in the Tigrayan war,” Foreign Affairs magazine wrote. “Meanwhile, the government’s primary foreign patron, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has been funneling arms and money to Ethiopia, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have been doing the same to Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, threatening to drag the region into a proxy conflict.”

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Common Ground

TANZANIA

Architects in Tanzania are using three-dimensional printers to construct housing and other buildings, also using soil rather than artificial materials – the production of which emit greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

The builders hope to construct a village called New Hope to the west of the capital of Dar es Salaam that will include a school for almost 500 girls as well as farming plots, livestock pens and recreational areas, reported CNN.

This positive story suggests Tanzanians can live in greater harmony with nature and each other as they attempt to strike a balance between modern and traditional approaches to life.

But it isn’t always the case. One major issue in Tanzania today, for example, involves officials kicking traditional Maasai communities off their ancestral land to make way for conservation efforts and economic development. The Maasai are nomadic pastoralists whose lives revolve around their herds.

As Amnesty International explained, Tanzanian officials and private businesses, including a trophy-hunting company tied to the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, have colluded to evict Maasai folks from their land. Officials have also shut down government services in Maasai communities to compel people to move to towns and cities, added Human Rights Watch.

The government frequently offers displaced Maasai people houses to live in and a few acres of land to farm. “But the houses do not reflect the needs or complexities of Maasai families, which traditionally are large, polygamous, multigenerational and multihousehold,” argued an Al Jazeera opinion piece.

Those who speak out against the relocation have faced threats and intimidation from rangers and security forces, creating a climate of fear, HRW wrote. “You’re not allowed to say anything,” one displaced resident told the organization, adding that people have “fear in their hearts.”

Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan says she wants to protect the environment from the Maasai’s livestock. She has proposed enlarging the area of protected land in the southern African country from 30 to 50 percent of its territory, cutting into the Maasai’s ancestral lands, noted Deutsche Welle.

But critics of the evictions say the government gives hunting and tourism companies free rein on the vacated land. Hassan’s plans also involve new airports, tourism facilities, and other accoutrements of a growing capitalistic economy, added Bloomberg.

These moves might cause international friction. Kenya, for example, frowns upon the trophy hunting that Tanzania promotes, reported Reuters. Kenyan officials fear that elephants that generate money from tourists there might cross the border into Tanzania where hunters might kill them. In July, for instance, hunters in Tanzania had shot five bull elephants in the prior few months.

There arguably is little point in preserving nature, Kenyan officials told the newswire, if the goal is to destroy it.

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The Tyranny of Doubt

MALAWI

In March last year, Cyclone Freddy ripped through Malawi and southeast Africa, killing 679 people, displacing almost 660,000, and causing property damage totaling more than $500 million.

Thirty-nine-year-old mother Gladys Austin was one of those hundreds of thousands who had to flee her home in the southern village of Makwalo after heavy rains destroyed a sandbar on the Ruo River, reported the Guardian. The resulting floods also washed away her livestock, grain, and the rest of her goods. Luckily, she and her family received international aid to rebuild. But many Malawians have not been so lucky.

A year after Austin and her community struggled with flooding, communities in Malawi were dealing with one of the worst droughts in memory due to the meteorological phenomenon, El Niño.

Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera recently declared a state of disaster due to the drought throughout much of the country, reported the Associated Press. He said Malawi needed $200 million in humanitarian assistance to cope with the problem, or else face potential famine. The drought was already forecast to shave multiple points off of the country’s gross domestic product, further constraining growth that would help the country overcome its deep poverty and desperate need for economic development.

The good news, however, is that Malawians have created a “laboratory for low-cost community-led projects” to improve climate resilience, wrote World Politics Review. Farmers, for example, are teaching each other about soil conservation, water management and crop diversification. Others have developed plans for inter-cropping, or growing multiple crops together, composting, organic pest control, and other measures that mitigate the effects of climate change on agriculture.

These efforts extend to more sophisticated commercial enterprises. In the capital of Lilongwe, for instance, computer scientists have established a technology incubator that now supports firms, for example a banana tissue culture lab, CNN noted.

Malawi has also been working closely with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – Blair is a former British prime minister – to help develop AI companies so that they might leapfrog other stages of economic development and benefit sooner from the latest tech trends. The Malawi University of Science and Technology also recently launched an AI research center with the assistance of American schools, Voice of America added.

Still, Malawi faces governance challenges under Chakwera that could threaten to stymie anyone’s dreams of a better tomorrow in the country. Amnesty International recently criticized a top court decision to uphold a ban on same-sex sexual conduct, for example. The US State Department decried Chakwera’s oversight of torture and other human rights violations, too. Some journalists investigating corruption, meanwhile, are in hiding, even as the corruption chief resigned under pressure.

Malawians face the tough task of standing up for their rights and fighting to survive the weather. And as Deutsche Welle noted, despite making strides in some areas, locals say that “Doubts about the country’s future loom large.”

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Nothing to Lose

KENYA

In late June, Kenyan President William Ruto blinked. After winning the 2022 general election on his plans to reform the economy, he scuttled planned tax hikes and conceded that he was reversing his position in the wake of protests by Gen Z and millennials who ransacked parliament and stayed on the streets for weeks, despite a crackdown that led to at least 50 deaths.

Now protesters want Ruto to step down, too, even after he fired most of his cabinet in a move designed to show his critics that he is open to change.

“The arrogance is gone, but the lies are still there,” wrote prominent social justice activist Boniface Mwangi on X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Reuters. “Yesterday they unleashed goons and police to kill peaceful protesters. That will not stop us.”

This attitude is one reason why the Economist believed the protests could change the East African country forever.

The protests erupted after Ruto announced his plan to raise levies on commodities, increasing living costs as many Kenyans are already struggling to make ends meet, wrote CNN. Now they have also expanded to include general discontent with government incompetence and corruption.

“It’s about a generation demanding a better future, one where they are not perpetually marginalized,” Daystar University political analyst Wandia Njoya told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.

As Inge Amundsen, a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, noted in the Conversation, Kenyan politicians frequently enact laws and rig regulations to benefit themselves and their circles. These politicians then use their influence to control companies, government agencies, civil institutions, and other groups, cementing their power and creating networks of patronage and illicit activities.

Ruto has announced reforms that aim to attack political corruption. But whether or not he can pierce the elite networks that benefit from these relationships will depend on how much political capital he wants to expend on changing the country’s power structure that helped propel him to office.

In the meantime, the protests are spreading on the continent. Youth groups are organizing similar mass demonstrations in Nigeria, Uganda, and elsewhere where officials appear more likely to help themselves than tackle the issues that are harming their constituents, noted World Politics Review. In Nigeria, for example, wrote Semafor, protests kicked off on August 1, leading to at least a dozen deaths. Military authorities have said they stand ready to restore order if necessary.

But that might only stop the momentum temporarily, especially as global economic growth is expected to decrease, exacerbating economic struggles and limiting opportunity.

“It’s a wake-up call,” Xavier Ichani, who teaches international relations at Kenyatta University in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, told Semafor, referring to the widening movement. “Governments need to move with speed and address the grievances of the people.”

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Mirror Image

WEST AFRICA

Earlier this month, a triumvirate of military leaders who oversee military juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger signed a pact to establish the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a new confederation that they said would combat jihadism and foster prosperity in Western Africa.

“We have the same blood that runs in our veins,” said Burkina Faso’s leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, at the ceremony in Niger’s capital Niamey, according to France24. “In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors who fought and won for us this land that we call Mali, Burkina, and Niger.”

Traoré, who came to power in 2022 in a coup, recently extended his term in power for another five years, and linked the new confederation to his version of the region’s heroic legacy. “In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors who helped the whole world rid itself of Nazism and many other scourges,” he said. “In our veins runs the blood of those valiant warriors that were deported from Africa to Europe, America, Asia … and who helped to build those countries as slaves.”

Afolabi Adekaiyaoja was skeptical. The research analyst at the Centre for Democracy and Development, a Nigerian think tank, argued in World Politics Review that the AES in the long run would spell more trouble for the region.

That’s because the three leaders are banding together to counter the powerful Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS), whose leaders have contemplated intervening in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger because they all came to power in coups, Adekaiyaoja said. Now, in declaring themselves separate, they have divided the region.

ECOWAS member Benin, for example, slapped sanctions on Nigerien oil exports in 2023 to force the coup leaders in that country to allow ousted President Mohamed Bazoum to return to office. Niger refused. Now, as Africanews reported, Niger might lose out on massive revenues from an oil pipeline that has been built with Chinese investments, unless they can reroute their pipeline through less stable neighbors like Chad.

Niger has also kicked out American and French troops previously based in the countries to combat Islamic militant groups that have rampaged across borders, fomenting violence, kidnapping or murdering locals, and developing corrupt moneymaking operations, noted the BBC. Russian military support has often replaced the exiting Western forces.

These groups, affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group have waged a grinding insurgency since 2015 that has killed thousands and displaced millions in the region.

The AES has struggled to maintain security in this environment so far. Armed thugs killed at least 26 people recently in Mali near the border with Burkina Faso, the Associated Press reported. An Al Qaeda-linked terror group was suspected of orchestrating the attack. Meanwhile, fighters in these conflicts have traveled farther afield in the region, to fight in Sudan’s civil war, for example, exporting instability, added University of Washington PhD candidate Yasir Zaidan in the Conversation.

The AES has a lot of work to do to instill confidence. But as Virginie Baudais, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Sahel and West Africa Program told France24, they could hardly do worse than what was in place before.

She said that the three states’ decision to create its own bloc was driven in part by more than a decade of failure by Western-backed regimes in the Sahel to hold back the tide of insurgent jihadist movements.

“It’s a response to the loss of credibility of the European states and of ECOWAS in the region in the fight against terrorism,” she said. “The three leaders all claim that they are achieving good results in the fight against terrorism thanks to their established military cooperation. Clearly, each country cannot fight against these groups … the only option is cooperation.”

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The Blood Minerals

RWANDA

Rwandan President Paul Kagame recently won reelection in a landslide, adding five more years to his 24-year rule. At the point that election officials had counted almost 80 percent of the ballots, he had garnered more than 99 percent of the vote. The news was testament to either how popular Kagame remains in his country, as supporters say, or how effectively he’s able to repress the opposition, as critics allege.

On the foreign front, however, things are far less certain. Rwanda has long interfered in its neighbors’ affairs, for example with Burundi. Now, tensions between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda are worsening, raising fears of more dirty wars, genocides and other tragedies occurring in the region after a few decades of relative stability.

Recently, American diplomats, for example, echoing Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, raised concerns about Rwanda supporting rebel groups in the eastern DRC. These fighters fund their military operations through illicitly trading minerals like gold and tantalum, reported the East African newspaper. The rebels, furthermore, traffic their so-called “blood minerals” via Rwanda and Uganda, creating financial networks for violent criminals throughout the region.

Specifically, the US says Rwandan leaders back M23, a rebel force mainly made up of Tutsis, which controls tantalum mines near the DRC town of Rubaya. These statements preceded a United Nations report that estimated that as many as 4,000 Rwandan troops are stationed in the DRC alongside M23 fighters. The violence between Congolese government troops and M23, meanwhile, has killed hundreds of people and displaced nearly 2 million.

Rwandan officials have denied responsibility for the atrocities that M23 fighters have allegedly committed, like attacking a camp for disabled people in May which killed at least nine people, Agence France-Presse noted. But, as the Associated Press explained, Rwandan leaders also have admitted to deploying these forces to defend their country against potentially aggressive Congolese forces and to prevent the DRC’s political instability from spilling across their border. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government has justified its involvement with rebel groups on the grounds that it is protecting Tutsi populations from further genocide, wrote Christopher P. Davey of Binghamton University in the Conversation.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Institute for Strategic Studies researcher Valtino Omolo said these actions could lead to Kagame and other high-level officials facing economic and diplomatic sanctions for meddling in the DRC.

The irony would be embarrassing. Rwanda recently marked the 30th anniversary of its genocide in 1994 when the majority Hutu population massacred 800,000 members of the Tutsi community and others. Now Rwanda stands accused of flouting international norms and human rights. The stakes are extremely high, too. Rwanda and Uganda invaded the DRC in 1996 and 1998, sparking two massive wars that continued the bloodshed in the region.

Still, it’s unlikely that Rwanda’s meddling – in spite of the danger of war breaking out in the region – will lead to sanctions, says World Politics Review.

“Western powers associate Kagame’s time in power with domestic stability, economic growth and an ‘effective’ security partnership in Mozambique,” it wrote, referring to a conflict in the southeast African country between the government and militant groups. “As a result, the West has been eager to overlook the Kagame regime’s domestic human rights abuses and regionally destabilizing behavior.”

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Prosperity, by Fiat

RWANDA

A notable international exchange occurred recently when Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister of the United Kingdom, announced that he would scrap his Conservative predecessor’s plan to fly migrants to the southern African country of Rwanda.

Starmer said the plan was a “gimmick” and “dead and buried”, and it was now time to “turn our back on tribal politics,” reported Yahoo! News.

The UK has already paid around $280 million to Rwanda, a formerly impoverished nation still grappling with the legacy of the 1994 genocide where the Hutu ethnic majority massacred 800,000 people mainly from the Tutsi minority community. Starmer hoped to recoup that money. Rwandan President Paul Kagame likely has other ideas, however.

The British approached Rwanda “to address the crisis of irregular migration affecting the UK – a problem of the UK, not Rwanda,” said Kagame’s government in a statement. Rwanda “has fully upheld its side of the agreement, including with regard to finances.”

The response reflected Kagame’s confidence in his hold on power and his international standing – but also showcased his questionable methods to stay in office.

Kagame is expected to win a fourth term when Rwandan voters hold presidential elections on July 15. He has served since 2000 and in that time, he has centralized power in the country and suppressed dissent while also pushing through economic reforms that have expanded the country’s economy, explained the Liechtenstein-based analysis group, Geopolitical Intelligence Services.

The president is credited with expanding life expectancy, promoting a boom in the tourism industry – underscored by luxury hotels proliferating in the capital of Kigali – kickstarting an entrepreneurial landscape featuring tech startups, building a new stadium that hosts basketball games, and other developments. All have helped turn Rwanda into an example of development and innovative success on the African continent, National Public Radio wrote, even as Kagame’s support of rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere has destabilized the region.

Kagame has also baldly stifled his opponents’ chances, wrote World Politics Review. Electoral authorities only approved Kagame and two other candidates, the Democratic Green Party’s Frank Habineza and the independent Philippe Mpayimana, according to the BBC. A critic of the president, Diane Rwigara, was blocked from running.

A Rwandan court had previously sentenced another vocal critic, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, to eight years in prison. In a first-person piece in Al Jazeera, Umuhoza described how she spent five years of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison after her trumped-up conviction on charges of denying the genocide. Kagame pardoned her a year after the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled that her rights had been violated.

Umuhoza wasn’t optimistic about the upcoming election. Her name won’t appear on the ballot, either, despite her attempt to run. “It already promises to entrench the persistent suppression of opposition voices by the current government in Rwanda,” she wrote in Foreign Policy. “As a victim of this suppression, I find myself once again barred from participating in an electoral process that I, as a Rwandan, have a right to take part in.”

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