Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: The U.K. Defence Ministry investigates Kenya murder case, Libya’s leadership crisis, and Hollywood’s African accent problem.
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Kais Saied’s Final Assault on Democracy
Tunisia holds a presidential election on Oct. 6 that is expected to be the final nail in the coffin of the first democracy to emerge from the 2011 Arab Spring protests.
As the vote approaches, President Kais Saied has used the country’s legal system to imprison or arrest at least a dozen potential election candidates and ban others from running. Foreign election monitors have been banned from observing an election that’s expected to be boycotted by a majority of the public.
Only two candidates have been approved to run against Saied: Zouhair Magzhaoui, who is seen as close to the president, and Ayachi Zammel, who on Tuesday was jailed for 12 years on charges of fraudulent voter endorsements. He has been in jail since last month when he was sentenced to a total of more than two years in prison in separate cases. Zammel has had 37 prosecutions launched against him.
It will be the first election held under the country’s new constitution, which was drafted by Saied and passed in July 2022, in a referendum largely boycotted by voters. The constitution gives the president the right to hire and fire the prime minister and parliamentary ministers. The new laws also established a bicameral parliamentary system for the first time, by creating the National Council of Regions and Districts as a second chamber—but only 12 percent of Tunisians turned out to vote for new members.
Saied came to office in 2019, backed by young voters in a process considered free and fair by international observers.
He vowed to end corruption in the country and turn around a beleaguered economy but has ruled by decree since seizing power in July 2021. “Young people organized Saied’s electoral campaign in 2019. They are now abandoning him,” Tharwa Boulifi wrote last year in Foreign Policy.
The president has fired his prime minister, reshuffled the cabinet, and replaced judges and all of the country’s regional governors. A “fake news” law known as Decree 54 has been used to silence critics and the media since it came into force in September 2022.
On Friday, lawmakers voted to strip the Administrative Court—Tunisia’s last independent judicial body—of its power to rule on electoral disputes. Lawmakers argued that the court is no longer a neutral body and could annul the election and plunge Tunisia into chaos. But critics see it as a way to remove any legal recourse from rejected candidates in challenging election results that Saied is almost guaranteed to win.
Italy’s far-right government and the European Union have ignored these examples of democratic backsliding in favor of anti-migrant deals, propping up Saied’s government with aid packages in exchange for violently deterring mostly Black migrants from traveling on toward Europe. U.S. lawmakers are calling on Washington to use its influence to help restore democracy in Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa. Last year, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced the Safeguarding Tunisian Democracy Act to limit funding to Tunisia.
The Week Ahead
Thursday, Oct. 3: Tanzania’s central bank announces interest rate decision.
Sunday, Oct. 6: Tunisia holds a presidential election.
Tuesday, Oct. 8: Oil trading giant Glencore and its former head of oil Alex Beard appear in a London court to face bribery charges relating to the Swiss commodity trader’s operations in Nigeria and Cameroon.
What We’re Watching
U.S.-UAE ties spark hypocrisy claims. Emirati leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met with U.S. President Joe Biden last week. Following the meeting, the United Arab Emirates was designated as a “major defense partner,” sparking criticism since U.N. sanctions monitors and several rights groups have accused the UAE of arming the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s bloody war.
In a statement, the White House said the designation would “further enhance defense cooperation and security in the Middle East, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean regions.” Writing in Foreign Policy in August, Yasir Zaidan urged the U.N. Security Council to “publicly address the UAE’s reported support of RSF crimes and the Emirati government’s violation of the international arms embargo in Darfur.”
The Sudanese army on Monday rejected an accusation by the Emirati government that its forces had bombed the residence of its ambassador in Khartoum. Elsewhere in the region, the UAE is accused of fueling a dispute between Somalia and Ethiopia by backing a Somaliland port deal that would include the UAE building a new port as part of the agreement.
Kenya-Haiti mission. On Monday, the U.N. Security council extended the Kenya-led police deployment to Haiti by one year but declined to transform it into a U.N mission. The mission to help fight gangs in Haiti will now last until October 2, 2025. However the decision not to grant it status as a U.N. peacekeeping mission leaves Kenya seeking funds to increase personnel from about 400 to the total desired force of 2,500, which includes officers from Caribbean nations. “Additional financial contributions are urgently needed to support the MSS mission—and this resolution encourages voluntary contributions for the support of the mission,” said U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
Libya’s leadership crisis. Libya’s rival governments agreed on Monday to appoint Naji Mohamed Issa Belqasem as the new central bank governor after talks mediated by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. Belqasem was previously the bank’s director of banking and monetary control.
The country’s U.N.-recognized government based in the capital, Tripoli, unilaterally replaced the previous central bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, over accusations that Kabir mishandled oil revenues. His dismissal led to a shutdown of oil production and exports by the eastern-based government led by warlord Khalifa Haftar.
The British army launches an inquiry. The U.K. Defence Ministry will investigate allegations of abuse by British troops deployed to Kenya in recent years. The announcement came one day ahead of an ITV Exposure documentary, which aired on Sunday, looking into the killing of 21-year-old Agnes Wanjiru, whose body was found dumped in a hotel septic tank in 2012 near the U.K. army’s barracks in Nanyuki, in northern Kenya, about 125 miles north of Nairobi.
British troops had allegedly paid Wanjiru and other local women for sex on a drunken night, which was the last time that Wanjiru was seen before her body was discovered. A Sunday Times investigation in 2021 identified a British soldier accused of her murder who was named by his fellow troops after he allegedly confessed to the killing. Reports in the U.K. media claim soldiers laughed and joked about the murder on Facebook. A 2019 inquest in Kenya concluded that British soldiers were responsible for her murder and ordered further investigations.
Twelve years after the killing, no one has been charged. The ITV documentary alleged that payment for sex has continued despite a ban by the British government. British soldiers were alleged to have regularly paid for sex with local women and to have raped girls as young as 13. A Kenyan parliamentary inquiry delayed by a year began in May.
This Week in Culture
Hollywood’s unchanging African accent. Actor Idris Elba’s announcement that he will adapt Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart into a TV series received some backlash in Nigeria due to Hollywood’s long-standing portrayal of African accents, which are often inaccurate caricatures. Elba will take on the lead role of Okonkwo and will produce the series alongside fellow actor David Oyelowo, who is British Nigerian; Elba himself is of Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian descent. But questionable portrayals of African languages in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Woman King, Hotel Rwanda, and Concussion by Black stars born outside the continent—including Elba himself in a short film released last week about Afrobeats star Asake—are part of a wider perception of Hollywood’s harmful misrepresentation of Black Africans as monolithic.
Things Fall Apart was first published in 1958 and explores the destruction of identity and culture during colonialism from the perspective of an Igbo society. It has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Critics in Nigeria are fearful about a “generic African” being dramatized in what is considered one of Nigeria’s most iconic novels and are urging the inclusion of local actors and extensive dialect coaches.
Chart of the Week
Last week, Rania al-Mashat, Egypt’s minister of planning, economic development, and international cooperation, lamented the fact that countries in the so-called global south receive less than 15 percent of the world’s renewable energy investment, with most inflows of cash concentrated in wealthier economies. Her comments came during a sideline event at the U.N. General Assembly. “Countries in the global south are already facing an increasing investment gap in sustainable energy, making it challenging for developing nations to transition to clean energy technologies,” Mashat said. China leads investments in clean energy globally.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- How Nasrallah Became One More Corrupt Warlord by Thanassis Cambanis
- How Beirut Reacted to Nasrallah’s Death by Stefanie Glinski
- Can Israel Kill Its Way to Victory Over Hezbollah? by Daniel Byman
What We’re Reading
Behind U.S. toxic agrochemical lobbying. An investigation by several international news outlets found that the U.S. government funded highly toxic pesticide lobbying in Africa, possibly worsening the health of Kenyan farmers. A Missouri-based “reputation management” firm called v-Fluence had between 2013 and 2019 undermined efforts to ban toxic pesticides in parts of Africa by promoting them to local farmers in support programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development. According to the Guardian, more than 30 current U.S. government officials are on the membership list of v-Fluence, most from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
African health workers in Germany face extortion. Last month, Kenyan President William Ruto struck a migration deal with Berlin. Germany will receive 250,000 skilled and semi-skilled Kenyan workers, including nurses, doctors, and social care workers, in a bid to address workforce shortages, particularly in the health care sector, where 280,000 additional nurses will be needed in the next 25 years to care for its aging population. But such deals are open to exploitation, Hannah Jagemast and Jamil Zegrer report in the Tunisia-based outlet Inkyfada. Tunisia has the second-largest number of nurses working in Germany after the Philippines, but a bureaucratic vetting process has led to fraud and extortion by job agencies, leaving many Tunisians out of pocket.
How cycling became Eritrea’s national identity. In African Arguments, Mohamed Kheir Omer writes on how Eritrea became one of Africa’s top cycling nations. Cycling was a colonial import from Italy, which introduced bicycles for postal deliveries, but Eritrea’s mix of mountainous regions and flatlands helped local cyclists in high-altitude training that gave them an edge when they competed in lower-altitude international races, including Biniam Girmay, who recently became the first Black cyclist to win the Green Jersey points classification in the 2024 Tour de France. The jersey is awarded to the rider who accumulates the most points in the race and is second only to the Yellow Jersey in the race as the most coveted prize in cycling.
Read More
The Dark Side of Tunisia’s Phosphate Boom
As Kais Saied’s government tries to capitalize on demand for a critical mineral, the country’s environment and Gafsa Valley residents are suffering.
Tunisia’s Kais Saied Is Doubling Down on Xenophobia
As the country’s financial crisis worsens and Saied’s popularity wanes, the president has decided to scapegoat Black migrants and condone violence against them.
Young Tunisians Don’t Trust Kais Saied Anymore
Those who once supported the president and his coup are starting to doubt his ability to rescue the country amid an economic crisis.