*The Council strongly disagrees with this view but the author raises serious substantive issues.* William Hartung thinks the United States should not provide additional military advisors to support Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram. Given the Nigerian military’s record of corruption and human rights violations, such aid will most likely be useless, if not outright counterproductive. William D. Hartung. On his trip to Nigeria to attend the inauguration of the country’s new president Muhammadu Buhari late last month, Secretary of State John Kerry indicated that the Obama administration is ready to send more military advisers to aid in the fight against…
Author: CASADE
Shannon D Beebe. “If the West is to continue to assert that there should be African solutions to African problems – as is so often espoused – then it is the West that must change its security paradigm.” One thing is certain for Africa in the twenty-first century: its strategic importance in the world will continue to climb, for reasons such as resources, markets, and continued concerns over weak governance allowing for a host of international challenges – terrorism key amongst them. What is uncertain for Africa is at what pace and consistency the continent will be able to…
J. Peter Pham. Even as, coming out of the annual NATO summit in Wales, the United States and its allies are promising to ratchet up their response to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, another militant group, Boko Haram, is rapidly gaining ground in Africa, achieving many of the same operational and strategic successes that have made ISIS such a force to be reckoned with, including significant dominion over territory and populations. More alarmingly, except for a fleeting moment earlier this year when the brutal kidnapping of nearly three hundred schoolgirls and the ensuing social-media campaign focused the…
Nnamdi Awa-Kalu. As inaugural speeches go, President Muhammadu Buhari’s defining moment in his address to the nation on May 29th earlier this year has passed into Nigerian political shibboleth, making waves for the simplicity of the message as well as for the complex web of loyalties it appeared to cut away with just a few words: “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody”. The street photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, much beloved of the on-the-go generation of camera-totting freelancers who roam the globe in search of stories, spoke often about striving for un moment décisif, that split second when…
By 2014, not only were all countries free from colonialism, but most had also overthrown the autocrats who all too often followed foreign rule. In some cases the original liberation movements have virtually disappeared. For example, Patrice Lumumba’s Mouvement National Congolais, which led what we now call the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence in 1960, never recovered from its leader’s assassination and Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year one-party state. In Ghana, the Convention People’s Party of the first post-independence British colonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah, won just one seat in parliament in the 2008 election. The National Council of…
James Akena. The first years of this century have produced Africa’s best decade of economic expansion since the end of the colonial era, with many countries showing growth rates of 5 percent or more since the year 2000. Prospects are good that growth will remain at this level for the next few years. This surge in growth was due in part to increased commodity prices fueled by Chinese demand. It also reflects improved systems of African governance, underpinned by the spread of democracy continent-wide. Translating growth into development — and jobs — requires other steps. For one, African countries will…
Greg Mills And Jeffrey Herbst. Reviewed By Stanley Uleys. If a miracle were to sweep Robert Mugabe out of office, how would Zimbabweans start to repair their broken country? Try to rebuild it piece by piece? But if the old autocrat were to depart and similar successors take his place, how long would it take for a national rebirth to begin? What would the guidelines be? Zimbabwe would emerge from its dark age to discover that while it was slipping back, much of the rest in Africa had moved forward. The immediate future, analysts say, is brighter than at any…
Ikemefuna S. Nwoye. One major challenge that has confronted most countries with natural resources is the ‘oil curse’ or in its causative form the ‘Dutch disease’. A country is said to have the ‘oil or resource curse,’ when it is experiencing political and socio-economic challenges such as volatility of revenues from its natural resources sector due to exposure to global commodity market swings, government mismanagement of resources combined with weak, unstable or corrupt institutions.2 In the case of ‘Dutch disease’, the country is experiencing an increase in exploitation of natural resources and a decline in the manufacturing sector.3 Since the…
In a two-day summit held in Dar es Salaam from May 20 – May 21, 2015, to discuss a wide range of issues that include sustainable growth and development, security and female entrepreneurship, rising urbanization, and the use of data to inform public policy in Africa, participants and speakers from Africa and around the world gathered at the Hyatt Regency Kilimanjaro to offer solutions. Amongst the distinguished delegates and speakers are Ambassador Alfred Dube of Botswana, Dr. Yaw Ansu, Chief Economist at the African Center for Economic Transformation, Dr. Jakkie Cilliers, Executive Director of the Institute for Security Studies,…
Benjamin Powell (Editor). Reviewed By Joseph Keckeissen. A recently published work is a must fit in any economist’s library, as well as that of any layman interested in the ongoing problem of poverty. It address the question: Why have so many of the earth’s nations escaped from the depths of poverty while so many other aspiring nations have been entrapped, being poorer today than they were at the moment of their decolonization forty years ago? Benjamin Powell’s compendium is a composite of thirteen highly convincing articles that demonstrate, from a free market point of view, that the unique royal path…