Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. A campaign to get the Nigerian government to shut down a notoriously corrupt police unit has evolved into the most significant protest movement in Nigeria in decades, with demonstrators across the country calling for sweeping police reforms and an end to human rights abuses by security forces. President Muhammadu Buhari has tried to quell the protesters by promising to meet their demands, even as security forces have responded with a brutal crackdown, including the use of live ammunition, killing at least 10 [...]
The global economy is gradually healing from the economic blows dealt by the coronavirus pandemic, but the recovery remains fragile and halting. Reduced trade is more a symptom than a cause of those trends—and what governments do in terms of additional fiscal stimulus will do far more to determine the shape of the recovery in the United States and other countries. Still, trade policy could be a factor, supporting or undermining the nascent recovery. President Donald Trump’s trade wars have already complicated the direct response to COVID-19 infections—by making imports of some critical products more expensive or harder to find—and [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Ethiopian lawmakers voted to sever ties with leaders of the northern Tigray region this week in a move that one Tigrayan official called “tantamount to a declaration of war.” The decision by the upper house of Ethiopia’s national parliament, the House of Federation, is the most severe in a series of tit-for-tat provocations between Tigrayan leaders and federal officials and puts Tigray at risk of losing up to $281 million in federal budget subsidies. Tensions between the two sides arose early in [...]
