Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: African countries respond to climate change-driven wildfires, drought, and flooding; Gabon ends a 19-year fishing agreement with the European Union, and Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema secures a second five-year term.
In recent weeks, deadly wildfires have ravaged forests across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, while seasonal floods have displaced thousands of people across West Africa. These climate extremes compound a severe food crisis that has been growing over the past year, driven by prolonged droughts and erratic weather patterns that heavily damaged regional crop yields.
In Nigeria, where roads have been submerged in the deluge, experts have warned that flooding has changed from being a seasonal challenge into a persistent problem worsened by climate change and poor city planning.
In the capital of Abuja, politicians and environmental experts have criticized the federal government for allowing the construction of commercial and residential buildings on green belts that could have absorbed some of the floodwater. Critics also argue that the government has failed to address long-standing waste and drainage issues.
Last month, Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama held an emergency meeting after June floods killed at least 13 people and displaced some 48,000 others. Mahama also ordered the demolition of all buildings obstructing waterways around the capital, Accra.
In Ivory Coast, the government has announced that it plans to move a total of 5,000 people from flood risk zones in the capital of Abidjan after more than 50 people were killed in floods in recent months. Rapid urban growth has led to the expansion of vulnerable informal homes in areas prone to floods and landslides. Authorities have already begun demolishing informal settlements, but some evicted residents have said that they have nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, a rare “super” El Niño climate pattern threatens to bring severe drought to nations in the Sahel and southern Africa, as well as flooding to eastern Africa, starting around September. El Niño is forecast to cost African nations between $10 billion and $20 billion in economic losses and could trigger mass migration, the African Development Bank has warned.
“El Niño is not just on our doorstep; it is inside the house and turning up the heat, and this is only a warm-up act,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last month.
According to the U.N., more than 18 million people in eastern and southern Africa could face food insecurity beginning in September. There is particular concern about the impact of El Niño in Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia—all nations that are already affected by conflict.
Other countries that rely on agricultural production are already feeling the effects of drought while preparing for the coming floods. Kenya, for instance, is facing a projected harvest loss of around 30 percent for maize, a staple of Kenyans’ diets.
The “impacts are already being felt through reduced agricultural productivity and growing water scarcity,” David Koros, the assistant director of forecasting at the Kenya Meteorological Service Authority, told Kenyan newspaper the Daily Nation. “The signals we are tracking are becoming clearer and stronger, and they have the potential to significantly alter Kenya’s weather patterns later this year.”
These regional climate patterns will not just affect Africa. El Niño in particular will likely compound disruptions to global supply chains caused by the Iran war and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, driving up grocery and consumer bills in Europe and the United States. The prices of rice, palm oil, sugar and coffee could rise between 50 and 100 percent globally.
Tuesday, Aug. 18, to Thursday, Aug. 20: The Namibia Oil and Gas Conference is held in Windhoek.
Wednesday, Aug. 19, to Friday, Aug. 21: The third U.S.-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit is held in Accra, Ghana.
EU fishing agreements. Africans are increasingly rallying against sustainable fisheries partnership agreements with the European Union in an effort to protect depleted fish stocks and regain economic control. These pacts grant EU vessels license to fish in an African nation’s exclusive economic zone in exchange for financial compensation or development support for local fisheries.
Mongabay reported last week that Gabon had officially ended its 19-year fisheries agreement with the EU, citing lopsided economic returns. Gabon received an average of only $3 million per year from the bloc—a fraction of the actual market value of the lucrative tuna that EU fleets have fished from its waters. The agreement formally expired on June 29 and has not been renewed.
In nations such as Senegal, Mauritania, and Guinea-Bissau, tensions have long existed between the EU and local fishing communities. I’ve previously reported on illegal overfishing by European, Chinese, and Russian trawlers in West Africa—a trend that analysts have pointed to as one reason for deadly illegal migration to Europe, as coastal nations heavily reliant on jobs generated from the fishing industry face reduced stocks.
Zambia’s election. Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has been reelected for a second five-year term, securing 60 percent of votes cast on Aug. 13. His closest challenger, Brian Mundubile, received 38 percent of the vote, according to official results released Tuesday.
Vote counting was briefly suspended on Friday after polling staffers were attacked in some areas. On election night, security forces also arrested opposition figures in a raid on Mundubile’s house over an alleged insurrection plot, according to local media. Mundubile claimed that Zambian soldiers fired shots in his home and injured several people; Maambo Hamaundu, the permanent secretary of the Zambian Defense Ministry, called the shooting claims “a total fabrication.”
The electoral victory will allow Hichilema, whose government has faced backlash for diminishing press freedom, to continue with his plans for electricity expansion and critical minerals mining.
Ebola cases rise. The ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has infected more than 5,000 people and killed more than 2,300, making it the deadliest outbreak of the disease on record in the country.
According to a new study published in Nature Medicine, the strain causing the outbreak is genetically distinct from previous Bundibugyo viruses, indicating that it began with a fresh animal-to-human transmission event. There is still no vaccine or specific treatment for the strain, though new clinical trials are hoping to change that.
Security extension. Tunisia has extended the use of its military buffer zone along its border with Algeria and Libya by one year, effective from Aug. 29. Tight security in the desert area was first introduced in 2013 to combat arms smuggling, militant movements, and irregular migration.
Meanwhile, the killing of Maj. Gen. Fawzi al-Mansouri, eastern Libya’s military intelligence chief, in a car bombing last week has complicated U.S. plans for unification. Libya remains divided between the U.N.-backed western administration in Tripoli and a rival eastern faction led by Khalifa Haftar and his self-proclaimed Libyan National Army.
Critics argue that recent negotiations to reunify Libya, conducted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy Massad Boulos, have legitimized the Haftar family and could prolong divisions between the two administrations.
Cameroon won its first-ever Women’s Africa Cup of Nations title in a 3-0 victory over Malawi on Sunday. Earlier, Cameroon defeated its neighbor Nigeria, the tournament’s 10-time winner, in the quarterfinals in a shock 1-0 game, ending the defending champions’ run. It also knocked out hosts Morocco to reach the final.
The tournament, which was held Morocco’s capital of Rabat, went without incident compared with the refereeing controversy that marred the finals of the men’s Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year.
Sudan’s ghosts. In Equator, Sudanese academic Magdi El-Gizouli rejects the common narrative that Sudan’s civil war is a mere power struggle between two generals, framing the conflict instead as a product of capitalism and Emirati influence driven by international debt, resource extraction, and foreign efforts to protect economic interests.
“The ‘Sudan industry’—a particular subculture of spooks and mediocre diplomats, humanitarians and development professionals, academics and adventurous journalists—adopted a posture of benevolent neutrality at the outset of the conflict, and have since then done little but sloganeer for ‘humanitarian aid’,” El-Gizouli writes.
“Long before the world took notice, around its genocidal nadir in 2003, a grinding, under-resourced war over land and resources was underway in Darfur,” he adds. “Its wealth was decentralised, seasonal and mobile: livestock that had to be grazed, gum Arabic that had to be gathered, and crops like tobacco, sesame and groundnuts that had to be farmed. Controlling this economy meant dominating space, trade routes and people.”
Making of a migrant crisis. In the wake of the recent migrant wave in Spain’s African exclave of Ceuta, Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami argues in the Nation that Morocco’s prioritization of high-cost infrastructure such as stadiums and railroads over improving local jobs, healthcare, and education has created a cycle of young people attempting to seek opportunities in Europe.
“That thousands of Moroccans are willing to leave the country at the first sign of opportunity is a terrible indictment of these priorities,” she writes. “Jobs and human rights together operate as ‘pull’ factors, drawing the imagination of young Moroccans and making them believe that a better future means a future outside Morocco.”
