West Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The arrest took place in a Paris suburb, but its ramifications may be felt most acutely thousands of miles to the south, in West Africa. On Tuesday, Vincent Bollore, the French billionaire and head of the Bollore Group, was detained in Nanterre for questioning over the circumstances under which the holding company obtained major port deals in Guinea and Togo. He was placed under formal investigation the following day. The allegations touch on the shady dealings that persist at […]

In February, Liberia’s former president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was awarded the prestigious $5 million Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, becoming the fifth winner since the prize was established in 2007. It was the latest in a long line of honors acknowledging her efforts to rehabilitate Liberia’s democracy after more than a decade of civil conflict. In the eyes of pro-democracy activists, however, Sirleaf’s record was far from perfect. One of the most commonly cited weak spots was her commitment to freedom of the press. Her time in office certainly represented an improvement over that of her predecessor, the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Over a three-day period in December 2015, Nigerian security forces carried out an operation in the northern town of Zaria that resulted in the deaths of more than 300 civilians, according to an official commission of inquiry. The attack targeted the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, or IMN, a Shiite organization founded in the 1980s by Nigerians inspired by the Iranian revolution. Nigeria is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni. As […]

In mid-March, Canada announced it would be sending 250 troops and six helicopters on a 12-month deployment to support the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali, which is considered the deadliest peacekeeping mission in the world. Since 2013, 162 troops from the U.N. mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, have been killed by al-Qaida and other extremists. Canada’s involvement in international peacekeeping has lagged in recent years, but shortly after taking office in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that his government would commit 600 troops to U.N. peacekeeping missions. In an email interview, Simon Palamar, a research fellow on […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It was a rare example of a protest in the Central African Republic that managed to get the world’s attention, however briefly. On Wednesday, demonstrators placed at least 16 dead bodies outside the offices of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the capital, Bangui. The demonstrators said the dead were civilians killed by U.N. peacekeepers during recent operations in a mostly Muslim neighborhood of Bangui known as PK5. For the past several years, the Central African Republic has been […]

Almost a month after voters went to the polls in the first round of elections, Sierra Leone has chosen a new president. Julius Maada Bio, the candidate for the Sierra Leone People’s Party, secured 51.8 percent of the vote in the March 31 runoff against Samura Kamara of the ruling All People’s Congress. Maada Bio, who lost in the first round of 2012’s presidential race, was sworn in as president on April 4. This is not the first time Maada Bio has led Sierra Leone, as he was the military head of a transitional government for three months in 1996. […]

A court in Burkina Faso was due to resume hearings this morning in a trial against the alleged perpetrators of a short-lived coup nearly three years ago that came close to derailing the West African nation’s transition away from quasi-authoritarian rule. In September 2015, members of the country’s presidential guard stormed a Cabinet meeting in the capital, Ouagadougou, taking the country’s acting president, Michel Kafando, hostage along with the acting prime minister and several other high-ranking officials. Kafando’s transitional government had been installed after a popular uprising in October 2014 forced the resignation of Blaise Compaore, who served as president […]