Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Environmentalists protest a resort project in the Seychelles, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces name a rival government, and Nigeria wins the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament.
Qatari-Backed Resort Divides Seychelles
Conservationists are campaigning against a Qatari-funded luxury resort project in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean that is Africa’s smallest and least populous country.
The resort is expected to open in 2027 on Assomption Island, which lies near a UNESCO World Heritage coral site and is “one of the most remote and pristine places on the planet,” according to Mongabay. Assomption is the gateway to Aldabra Atoll, an isolated coral island that is home to the world’s largest population of giant tortoises.
Aldabra and Assomption are each roughly 620 miles from the Seychelles’s main populated island of Mahé. The two islands’ remoteness has so far protected them from human habitation and damage, allowing wildlife to thrive. But now, environmental groups are raising alarms about the potential toll of the resort project, claiming that the Seychelles government has not been transparent about the potential ecological consequences.
Friends of Aldabra, a collection of local and international environmental groups opposed to the development, visited Assomption last month and told Foreign Policy that construction had continued despite local objections to the project. In March, the group’s campaign received support from American actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “Time and time again, precious ecosystems and local communities are silenced for profit,” DiCaprio wrote on Instagram.
The project, funded by the Qatar-based Assets Group, includes luxury villas and a wellness spa; an existing airstrip has been nearly doubled from 1,200 to 2,000 meters to accommodate high-end tourists. Assets Group says it is committed to ensuring environmental safeguards.
Assomption “is a perfect and pristine destination to create one of the finest and unique resorts, for those who appreciate the best in relaxation and rejuvenation, while we also focus on protecting and preserving the marine life and wider eco-system,” Assets Group CEO Abid Butt told business magazine THP News last November.
The Island Conservation Society (ICS), a nonprofit group that receives Seychelles government funding and completed an impact assessment of the project, has defended the decision to break ground on the resort as an economic necessity. The Seychelles government believes that developing Assomption will generate revenue that it can use toward the upkeep and conservation of the island.
Assets Group was the only investor to submit a proposal after the Seychelles government launched a tender for development in Assomption in 2023. The Seychelles’s economy is highly dependent on tourism and vulnerable to climate change.
The ICS argues that the alternative source of revenue to support the island’s ecosystem was an Indian military base, which would have been more damaging to the environment. The Seychelles government in 2018 struck a deal for the Indian Army to establish a base on Assomption to counter China’s growing influence in the Indian Ocean. But the plan was later abandoned after local opposition and protests.
A spokesperson for the government-owned Islands Development Co., which manages Assomption, compared the resort development positively to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, another UNESCO protected site. However, experts say overtourism in the Galápagos Islands has resulted in trash mountains and invasive species.
Even as it promotes the project, the ICS conducted an environmental and social impact assessment that highlighted the potential for invasive species to be introduced onto the island through humans; it also flagged the airstrip as a potential threat to giant tortoises.
A petition by a group of young activists against the island’s development has so far reached more than 18,000 signatures. Resort projects, the activists wrote, “choose profit over natural heritage.”
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, July 30: The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Africa subcommittee holds a hearing about critical minerals on the continent.
Thursday, July 31: The South African Reserve Bank makes an interest rate decision.
Thursday, July 31: Zimbabwe’s finance minister presents the government’s midterm budget review to Parliament.
What We’re Following
Sudan’s rival government. Last week, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) named a 15-person government council to challenge the internationally recognized Sudanese government in Khartoum. The council tapped RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo as its leader, with politician Mohamed Hassan Othman al-Taayshi serving as prime minister. Khartoum called the RSF council an “illegitimate entity.”
Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023 and has spiraled into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. An expert at the International Crisis Group told the New York Times that the RSF’s new parallel government “will only make the war even harder to end and Sudan even harder to piece back together.” Nearby Libya has two rival governments that emerged out of a civil war.
Togo represses protests. Ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations in Togo have left at least seven people dead in recent weeks. The protests follow the country’s switch from a presidential to a parliamentary system.
In 2024, the administration of longtime Togolese leader Faure Gnassingbé—who then served as president—changed the constitution to allow Gnassingbé to evade term limits and transition to a new role called the “president of the council of ministers,” effectively a prime minister. Gnassingbé has been in office for 20 years, part of his family’s 58-year rule of Togo.
Gnassingbé assumed the new position in May, and mass protests followed. Amnesty International has condemned Togolese authorities’ “unnecessary and excessive use of force against protesters.” The organization wrote that it had documented cases of torture by security forces.
China invests in Angola. Chinese state-owned infrastructure firm Sinohydro will invest $100 million in Angola to develop new sources of grain imports, per a deal signed Thursday in the country’s capital of Luanda. Angola granted Sinohydro a 25-year, tax-free land concession to develop 30,000 hectares across six eastern provinces, Bloomberg reported.
The Sinohydro agreement is the second agricultural deal between China and Angola in the past few weeks. A subsidiary of Chinese state-owned conglomerate CITIC on July 21 announced a $250 million investment to develop soybean and corn farms in Angola.
The Angolan government hopes to expand large-scale domestic farming and cut its own dependency on imported goods. About 60 percent of output from the Sinohydro concession will be exported to China, according to Angola’s agriculture minister.
Al-Shabab takes Somali town. Islamic State-linked al-Shabab rebels seized control of the central Somali town of Mahaas on Sunday. Federal troops and allied militias pulled back shortly before al-Shabab entered the town, which lies about 220 miles north of Mogadishu.
The attack came shortly after Somali officials announced that U.S. Africa Command had captured Abdiweli Mohamed Yusuf, the finance chief of the Islamic State in Somalia. In a statement released on Saturday, Africom announced that it had “conducted an operation against the ISIS-Somalia terrorist network in Somalia on July 25,” without revealing further details.
This Week in Sports and Culture
Nigeria’s soccer victory. Nigeria pulled a stunning comeback from down two goals in the second half to beat host Morocco in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations soccer final on Saturday in Rabat. The Super Falcons won their 10th title with a 3-2 win against the Atlas Lionesses—preserving their perfect record in finals appearances at the tournament.
Despite being Africa’s most successful women’s team, Nigeria’s Super Falcons have previously boycotted games over unpaid wages and expenses, some dating back to 2021. Their victory is a setback for Morocco, which recently made investments in its team. Morocco hired Jorge Vilda a month after he was sacked as the coach of Spain’s women’s team in September 2023 as part of a sexual assault scandal that roiled the Spanish federation following the Women’s World Cup that year. But the Moroccan team has now suffered a stinging loss on home soil.
“Moroccans love football, and they love results. I ask them to continue to support us, until the last minute,” Moroccan striker Ibtissam Jraidi said ahead of the final match.
Ciara gets Beninese citizenship. American singer Ciara became a citizen of Benin at a ceremony in the city of Cotonou on Saturday. The country last year enacted a law granting citizenship to the descendants of enslaved people in a bid to attract Black diaspora tourism.
This month, Benin’s government launched a digital platform called My Afro Origins to process applications. Citizenship is open to people over 18 who don’t hold citizenship in another African country and can prove that an ancestor was taken from anywhere in Africa as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Beninese authorities accept DNA test results as proof of African ancestry.
What We’re Reading
Françafrique 2.0? In Africa Is a Country, Abdelkader Abderrahmane argues that French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara is “part of the Eurafrique plan”—a longer term maneuver to reassert French influence across the Sahel.
“The inability or refusal of many African leaders to understand this, their lack of planning and long-term strategic vision, facilitates the entrenchment of foreign powers—militarily, politically, economically, and culturally—across the continent,” Abderrahmane writes.
AI election campaigns. In the Continent, Chinasa T. Okolo argues that AI-generated propaganda is posing a “grave threat” to democratic elections in Nigeria, South Africa, and Burkina Faso. “As these technologies become more sophisticated and accessible, their threat to credible democracy will only intensify,” Okolo writes.