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Editor’s Note: Africa Watch will be out on vacation for the next two weeks. It will return on January 8.
More than 340 Nigerian schoolchildren, abducted by gunmen in a night raid last week, were released on Thursday and are reuniting with their families. Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of the children from its boarding school in the northwestern state of Katsina, and the celebration of their release was tempered by concerns that the jihadist group may now expand beyond its traditional base in the northeast of the country. Critics of the government also question whether the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari is equipped to contain a resurgence of Boko Haram.
On the night of December 11, militants armed with AK-47s stormed the Government Science Secondary School for boys in Kankara city. An estimated 800 students attended at the time, although hundreds managed to escape. Boko Haram later posted videos taking responsibility, including a clip where one of the kidnapped children says: “We have been caught by the gang of Abu Shekau,” the leader of Boko Haram. But Nigerian officials and security experts suspect that the Kankara raid was actually carried out by local gangs collaborating with Boko Haram as it tries to expand its campaign in northern Nigeria.
For many Nigerians, the attack had painful echoes of previous school kidnappings that Boko Haram has carried out in its efforts to eradicate Western education methods that it considers non-Islamic. That includes the group’s 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the northeastern city of Chibok, sparking international outrage and a social media campaign known as #BringBackOurGirls. An estimated 100 of those girls are still missing, and the parents of the boys who were abducted last week were concerned that their children would face a similar fate.
Nigerian officials have not confirmed how they managed to free the students, although security officials announced earlier in the week that they were approaching the hideout of the kidnappers.
Even as Buhari celebrated the release of the students, he acknowledged growing discontent over their failure to deliver on his promises to end the Boko Haram insurgency. He also received harsh criticism earlier in the week for taking a trip to his farm in Katsina, his home state, but not visiting the school or the parents of the abducted children. At a rally on Thursday in the capital Abuja, protesters carried signs that read: “Buhari values his cows more than human lives.” In a tweetBuhari called on Nigerians to be “patient and fair with us as we deal with the challenges of security, the economy and corruption.”
It may be too much to ask after an insurgency that has left more than 36,000 dead and 2 million more displaced since it began in 2009. There is evidence that both Boko Haram and the Nigerian security forces have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, reported last week. Even when he called for a formal ICC investigation into the allegations, there is no sign that the violence is abating.
In addition to the kidnapping at the school, Boko Haram allegedly killed more than 70 farmers last month in a rural area of the northeastern state of Borno. Another attack last Saturday, in the Diffa region, in neighboring Niger, left 28 people dead.
Stay up to date on the news from Africa with our selected Africa news cable daily.
Here is a summary of news from other parts of the continent:
east africa
Somalia: The government officially cut diplomatic ties with Kenya on Tuesday, accusing its neighbor of interfering in Somalia’s internal politics and violating its sovereignty. The decision was made when Muse Bihi Abdi, president of the breakaway Somaliland region, completed a three-day visit to Nairobi and reached an agreement with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to open a Kenyan consulate in Somaliland. Although Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia in 1991, it is not internationally recognized and Mogadishu still claims control of the territory. Now, Kenyatta’s reception of Abdi appears to have broken the already deteriorated relationship between Nairobi and Mogadishu. Somalia expelled the Kenyan ambassador last month and withdrew its own envoy from Nairobi after accusing Kenya of interfering in the electoral process in Jubbaland, the semi-autonomous Somali state that borders Kenya, ahead of federal parliamentary elections that were supposed to would be held this month.
The breakdown of bilateral ties could affect regional efforts to fight the militant group al-Shabab, as the delayed elections in Somalia are sparking protests in Mogadishu. Al-Shabab is likely to “take advantage of this volatile political situation,” Abdullahi Abdille Shahow wrote in a WPR report this month. Kenya provides 3,600 soldiers to an African Union peacekeeping force fighting Islamist extremists.
A vehicle wrecked after an al-Shabab attack in Mogadishu, Somalia, on August 17, 2020 (AP photo by Farah Abdi Warsameh).
North Africa
Sudan: The United States officially removed Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, paving the way for Khartoum to access international loans and direct aid that could help rescue its ailing economy. “This achievement comes with numerous opportunities for Sudan’s development,” tweeted Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. US President Donald Trump agreed to remove Sudan from the list after Khartoum paid $ 335 million in compensation to American victims of the al-Qaida bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Sudan was home to members of al-Qaida under dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was toppled in a mass uprising last year. Sudan’s transitional government also moved to normalize ties with Israel following an interim agreement in October to remove Sudan from the terrorist list, an apparent quid pro quo that has been Trump’s strategy to negotiate normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries in recent months at the expense of “decades of international diplomacy, including long-standing positions in the United States,” as WPR managing editor Frederick Deknatel recently explained in his weekly Middle East Memo.
West africa
Ivory Coast: President Alassane Ouattara took office Monday for a controversial third term as opposition leaders continue to call for protests against his government. Ouattara, 78, had initially vowed to resign after the end of his second term, the constitutionally set limit, but backtracked on that promise after his preferred successor, Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly, died of a heart attack in July. . His repeal sparked months of intermittent clashes between opposition supporters and security forces that have killed at least 85 people since August, prompting critics to accuse Ouattara of “endangering his country’s fragile peace during the last decade, “as Clair MacDougall put it. wrote in a November WPR briefing. Ouattara announced the formation of a Ministry of National Reconciliation this week, “to consolidate social cohesion” after his victory in the October elections that were boycotted by the opposition and considered unfair.
Guinea: President Alpha Conde was sworn in for his third term this week in neighboring Guinea, following a victory that was also marred by violence and has been disputed by the opposition. At least 20 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces since the Oct. 18 vote, and opposition leaders and hundreds of their supporters have been arrested. But amid the COVID-19 crisis, “the government has been able to easily deflect concerns about electoral manipulation and systematic violence,” Lindsey Pruett explained at a WPR briefing in November.
Central Africa
Republic of Congo: President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who has been in power for 36 years, has been nominated by most of the 17 parties in his ruling coalition to seek another term in the upcoming elections in March 2021 that he will surely win. Despite failing to rescue the oil-dependent country from an economic crisis triggered by a collapse in world crude prices in 2014, the 77-year-old Nguesso has successfully maneuvered to maintain his grip on power, including approval of a constitutional referendum. in 2015 that removed presidential term limits. After his victory in the 2016 elections, Nguesso’s two main rivals were convicted of undermining state security and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
South Africa
Swaziland: Prime Minister Ambrose Dlamini died Sunday at age 52, four weeks after testing positive for COVID-19. He had been hospitalized in neighboring South Africa since December 1. King Mswati III appointed Dlamini, a banking and telecommunications executive, to take over as head of government of the small absolute monarchy in November 2018. The position has limited authority, but Dlamini had focused on reviving the economy. since he took office. With a population of about 1.1 million people, Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, has recorded nearly 7,000 COVID-19 infections and 130 deaths, according to the Health Ministry.
Top readings on the Web
Terrified survivors recount attacks on civilians in Tigray: The Ethiopian army claims it has made extraordinary efforts to prevent civilian deaths during its offensive in the northern Tigray region that began in early November. But in a small farming village in South Tigray, Agence France-Presse’s Robbie Corey-Boulet heard eyewitness testimony to the extrajudicial killing by federal troops of three men and a boy in mid-November, at the height of the campaign against forces allied with the regional ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The government denies the report, but Corey-Boulet, a former senior editor for WPR, writes that residents of various towns and villages in the region have “accused both the government and pro-TPLF fighters of, at best, cases, putting civilians in danger – and, at worst, actively targeting them. “
The Swahili teacher killed in a Nazi concentration camp: Born in 1904 in Dar es Salaam, when Tanzania was still part of German East Africa, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed fought in the German colonial army during World War I and worked for German companies. He finally settled in Berlin, a few months before the Nazis came to power. His efforts to get along under the regime ultimately failed, and he was sent to a concentration camp in 1941, where he died almost three years later. For Deutsche Welle, Harrison Mwilima writes about historian Marianne Bechhaus-Gert’s efforts to commemorate Mohamed, writing a book about him and requesting a “stumbling block”, the small bronze plaques that commemorate the Nazi victims, which are will install out of your last known address. “It was very important for me to think of something that would also commemorate the victims of Africa,” Bechhaus-Gert told Mwilima.
Andrew Green is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. He writes regularly on health and human rights issues. You can see more of his work at www.theandrewgreen.com.
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