Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Botswana, a global leader in tackling HIV/AIDS, declares a public health emergency; China reroutes its exports to African nations; and radical left-wing South African politician Julius Malema is found guilty of hate speech.
Botswana’s Public Health Emergency
Botswana, which has long been at the forefront of global efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, declared a public health emergency on Aug. 25, citing financial challenges that have led to hospitals running short of essential medicines and equipment.
The shortage has come amid challenges with Botswana’s medical supply chain, a global downturn in the diamond market, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign aid cuts.
Botswanan President Duma Boko blamed the state procurement agency Central Medical Stores (CMS), which in turn blamed middlemen for inflating drug prices. “The current prices often are inflated five to 10 times. And under the current economic conditions, this scenario is not sustainable,” Boko said in a televised address.
In early August, the Botswanan Health Ministry warned parliament that the system was “severely strained” and that it owed around $74 million to private health facilities and suppliers, prompting it to suspend nonurgent surgeries. Last week, Boko approved around $18.7 million in emergency funding for the military to distribute medicine.
Thabo Lucas Seleke, a lecturer in global health policy at the University of Botswana, suggested that one sustainable path forward would be to disband CMS “in its current form” and convert it to “an autonomous entity governed by an independent body.”
As Seleke told Foreign Policy, “From 2010 to 2012, Botswana in collaboration with PEPFAR [the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] developed a CMS reform agenda because CMS was marred with a lot of controversy where there was a lot of theft.” But it’s unclear what happened to those recommendations.
For now, Seleke said that the new emergency funding should be put under “legal and institutional safeguards to prevent diversion, elite capture, or politicization.”
Meanwhile, Botswana—one of the world’s largest diamond producers—is also facing an economic slowdown, as the global diamond market has crashed this year. The diamond industry accounts for around 80 percent of the country’s exports and a quarter of its GDP.
In June, Botswanan diamond miner Debswana—a joint venture between the government and mining giant De Beers—cut production by 40 percent after its sales nearly halved last year, partly a result of more consumers turning to lab-grown diamonds. The same month, the Botswanan Finance Ministry said that the country’s monthly public wage bill was far higher than available funds.
For many years, successive governments had proposed diversification away from diamond mining, but like many African nations, Botswana has struggled to find capital to drive the economy away from natural resources. Recently, Botswana’s government, which holds a 15 percent stake in De Beers, has been pushing for majority ownership in the corporation; currently, British multinational Anglo American owns the other 85 percent.
The country is now hoping that a new $12 billion Qatari investment pledge can help turn around its economic fortunes. The agreement, announced on Aug. 21, will see Qatar’s Al Mansour Holdings finance key sectors including infrastructure, energy, mining, agriculture, and tourism.
Amid the economic downturn, Botswana has also been affected by Trump’s decision to halt most foreign aid. As early as February, health experts warned that U.S. aid cuts, including to PEPFAR, would undermine the country’s health services. As of earlier this year, Botswana—which faces the third-highest rate of HIV prevalence in the world—still relied on the United States to fund around a third of its HIV response.
Less than four months ago, Botswana became the first country with a high HIV burden to achieve the World Health Organization’s “gold tier” status for eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV as a public health threat. Botswana has cut mother-to-child HIV infection rates down to just 1.2 percent from around 40 percent in the 1990s.
Now, there’s a serious risk of rolling back Botswana’s massive gains on tackling HIV/AIDS. Several projects researching pediatric HIV in Botswana have also been imperiled due to Trump’s termination of research funding to Harvard University.
The Week Ahead
Thursday, Sept. 4, to Wednesday, Sept. 10: The Intra-African Trade Fair is held in Algiers, Algeria.
Friday, Sept. 5: Tunisia releases inflation data for August.
Saturday, Sept. 6: The Africa Creator Festival is held in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Monday, Sept. 8, to Wednesday, Sept. 10: The Africa Climate Summit is hosted by the African Union and Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.
What We’re Watching
China exports growth. China has rerouted more of its goods to Africa since Trump announced higher tariffs on Beijing, according to a Bloomberg report. Chinese exports to the continent will likely exceed $200 billion for the first time this year, with a 25 percent on-year jump so far. China’s biggest African buyers are Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa.
At the same time, Beijing has been pushing its military training scheme for police and army officers as an alternative to Western defense cooperation, the South China Morning Post reports. Somalia is the latest African nation to engage in training with China, joining countries including Ethiopia and Nigeria that have made similar deals.
Hate speech conviction. Radical left-wing South African politician Julius Malema has been found guilty of hate speech for remarks made at a 2022 political rally, including his statement that a “revolution demands that at some point there must be killing.”
Malema and his party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, featured in the now-infamous video montage that Trump played during his showdown at the White House with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May.
The country’s Equality Court ruled last Thursday that Malema’s comments “demonstrated an intent to incite harm.” Malema was previously found guilty of hate speech in 2010 and 2011, although the latter ruling was later overturned. In 2011, he was ousted from Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) party.
AfriForum, an Afrikaner group that has lobbied the United States for sanctions against ANC members—and that rights groups have labeled as “white supremacist”—celebrated the ruling.
Guinea-Bissau’s elections. Political analysts are raising doubts that Guinea-Bissau’s upcoming presidential elections in November will be free and fair.
The elections have already been postponed for one year, sparking a dispute between President Umaro Sissoco Embaló’s government and the opposition. The opposition also says that Embaló’s mandate should have ended in February, but the country’s Supreme Court ruled to extend it until Sept. 4.
In March, a delegation from the Economic Community of West African States that had arrived in Guinea-Bissau to help resolve the electoral dispute abruptly left the country after receiving threats of expulsion from Embaló, who is seeking reelection. Last month, Embaló expelled journalists working for the state news agency of Portugal, which formerly colonized the country, without citing a reason.
This Week in Culture
Egypt unearths sunken city. Last month, archeologists in Egypt unearthed remnants from the 2,000-year-old sunken port city of Canopus near Alexandria. The discoveries include a giant quartz sphinx holding the cartouches of King Ramses II and part of a marble statue of a Roman nobleman.
Archeologists believe that Canopus was a holiday “party town.” It predated Alexandria and served as the main site for Greek trade during Ptolemaic and Roman rule. As sea levels rose, the city was fully submerged by the 8th century C.E.—a fate that scientists predict also awaits Alexandria as early as 2100.
France restitutes skulls. As Paris attempts to mend its relationship with former colonies in Africa, it has returned three human skulls to Madagascar, which gained independence from France in 1960.
The restitution includes a skull believed to belong to a king from the Sakalava community who was beheaded by French colonial forces in 1897. The other two skulls belonged to his generals, and all three were held in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
This is the first restitution since the French parliament passed a law in 2023 to facilitate handing back human remains acquired in conditions that “harmed the principle of human dignity.”
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Trump’s Economic Policy Is More Radical Than You Think by Howard W. French
- So You Want to Work in International Affairs by Luke Coffey
- China and India May Be Moving Toward a More Coordinated Foreign Policy by Chietigj Bajpaee and Yu Jie
What We’re Reading
Nigeria’s literary archives. In the World of Interiors, Kola Tubosun revisits Black Orpheus, a pioneering journal founded by German academic Ulli Beier in Nigeria. From 1957 to 1967, the journal mixed bold modernist graphics with writing from African literary giants and the diaspora. Contributors included Senegal’s first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and American poet Langston Hughes.
“Through its exploration of Black liberation, negritude and cultural identity, it sought to bring the literature and visual arts of West Africa into dialogue with the rest of the world,” Tubosun writes. “It published some of the first reviews of Things Fall Apart, and the writing contained within its covers cannot always be found elsewhere.”
A selection of Black Orpheus covers will be displayed in an exhibit at Britain’s Tate Modern, Nigerian Modernism, from October 2025 to May 2026.
Why Wagner left Mali. In June, the Wagner Group announced that it was pulling out of Mali, saying it had accomplished its mission to fight terrorism despite a resurgence of al Qaeda-affiliated groups.
However, an investigation by the Sentry suggests that disagreements with local troops and the public had made Wagner’s presence untenable. The report supports various media investigations alleging that Wagner massacred civilians.
“Wagner’s actions have been detrimental to prospects for peace between Tuareg separatists in the north and the Malian state in Bamako,” the report states. “This is a development that countries like Niger, which has suffered from two successive Tuareg rebellions in the past, should be acutely aware of.”