Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Protesters take to the streets in Tunisia and Libya, Chad withdraws from the International Criminal Court amid U.S. pressure, and a new political party is launched amid a power struggle in Senegal.
Anti-government protests erupted in Tunisia and Libya over the weekend in response to power cuts amid a severe heat wave. These are the latest in a trend of youth-led mobilization against systemic government mismanagement across the continent.
Starting on Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators have blocked major roads in Libya’s capital of Tripoli to protest rising oil prices and daily 14-hour power cuts as temperatures in parts of the country soared to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
Although a petrostate, Libya is experiencing an electricity crisis driven by years of underinvestment in critical infrastructure. The country often implements load shedding to cope with aging infrastructure, but the frequency of power cuts increased in June. Public frustration over the cuts has tipped into broader anti-government sentiment.
The protests only took place in western Libya, but demonstrators called for the removal of both the eastern and western rival governments, chanting, “The people want justice that punishes those who squander the people’s money,” and “Electricity—where have the billions gone?”
Libyan protesters shut down branches of the country’s central bank and forced the Mellitah Oil and Gas complex west of Tripoli to briefly suspend operations. According to the Libya Herald, they also tipped trucks full of soil and rubble to block entrances to government buildings as well as the state television channel and the state telecommunications company.
Meanwhile, thousands of Tunisians demonstrated in the capital of Tunis on Saturday to mark five years since President Kais Saied staged a power grab and suspended parliament. On July 25, 2021, Saied declared a national emergency and began to rule by decree, ostensibly to fight other politicians’ “hypocrisy, treachery, and robbery.”
The demonstrations followed several protests in Tunisian cities last week amid rolling blackouts and water cuts as temperatures also reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 150 and 200 people have been reported dead since power cuts began on July 12, according to the Organisation of Young Doctors in Tunisia. Extreme heat triggered at least 900 wildfires across the country in a three-day period last week.
Demonstrators over the weekend demanded Saied’s resignation and the release of political prisoners after Haifa Chebbi, the daughter of jailed opposition leader Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, posted a Facebook video last week saying that prison conditions had become unbearable for her father, uncle, and other prisoners. “This is the fourth summer they have been in jail. This is the fourth summer like this,” she said.
Rached Ghannouchi, an 85-year-old opposition leader who is held in the same prison, collapsed in detention due to the heat, Chebbi added. On July 24, the Committee for the Respect of Freedoms and Human Rights in Tunisia warned that cells had “turned into ovens” in a place where “many of these detainees are elderly.”
Both Libya and Tunisia have seen several anti-government protests in recent years. Libya has faced an economic crisis since civil war broke out in 2011, with mismanagement of oil revenues, rising living costs, and soaring public debt. Tunisia’s economy, meanwhile, has collapsed under Saied, with high youth unemployment and GDP growth of just 2.5 percent last year, compared with an African average of 4.4 percent.
Demonstrations have not led to major political change in either country. “The outage underway this summer demonstrates that concentrated executive rule has not, and structurally cannot, fix Tunisia’s basic services,” Ikram Ben Said argued in the independent Tunisian outlet Nawaat.
As war in Iran continues to push up prices of oil and basic commodities, there are likely to be more protests in Africa. But some countries are cracking down, even before demonstrators can head to the streets. The Tanzanian government, for instance, banned a protest that was scheduled for July 7; while it never took place, nearly 200 people have been arrested over the planned demonstration, including 51 opposition members.
Thursday, July 30: Zimbabwean Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube unveils a midterm budget.
Chad leaves ICC. Chad became the latest francophone African country to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday, following Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger’s announcement of their withdrawal in September.
Chad said that the decision followed a call on Thursday from Frank Garcia, U.S. President Donald Trump’s new assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “The American side expressed its concerns about the functioning of this institution and called on Chad to review its accession to the Rome Statute,” the Chadian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Chadian authorities also said that ICC investigations have unfairly targeted African nations, citing that nine of the court’s 13 cases since its founding concerned African states.
The United States is not a party to the ICC, which Trump has long treated as an adversary. He first imposed sanctions on ICC officials during his first term following its investigation into U.S. troops’ alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Tensions increased in 2024 after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of committing war crimes in Gaza. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed to dismantle the court “brick by brick.”
There’s at least one additional geopolitical reason that Chad may want to avoid the ICC. U.N. experts have found that Chad may be helping facilitate arms transfers from the United Arab Emirates to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Earlier this month, the ICC announced a breakthrough in its investigations into RSF attacks on the cities of El Geneina and El Fasher, which the U.N. said had “hallmarks of genocide” against non-Arabs.
Senegal’s new party. Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye launched his own political party on Saturday amid a power struggle with his ally-turned-rival Ousmane Sonko, who heads the ruling Pastef party. A number of officials have resigned from the Pastef party to join Faye’s new Republican Patriots.
Sonko backed Faye to run in the 2024 presidential election as Pastef’s candidate after his own bid was disqualified after prior convictions for defamation and “corrupting youth.” Faye then appointed him prime minister, but the pair have clashed in recent months over debt negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Faye dismissed Sonko as prime minister in May, but Pastef has a parliamentary majority, and he was elected president of the National Assembly soon after his ousting. Sonko then said that his party would not take part in the new government unveiled in June, jeopardizing the IMF deal.
Unlikely impeachment. A South African court has temporarily halted a parliamentary inquiry into whether President Cyril Ramaphosa should be impeached over the undeclared theft of $580,000 stored in a sofa at his Phala Phala game farm in 2020. Ramaphosa has been accused of hiding the theft and money from the police and tax authorities; he maintains that the funds were legitimate proceeds from selling buffalo.
The ruling freezes the work of the 31-member parliamentary impeachment committee until a review can be completed of the original 2022 independent panel report that established that Ramaphosa should face impeachment. Even if the impeachment goes ahead, it is unlikely that Ramaphosa will be voted out of office.
U.S. strikes in Mali? Last week, a Washington Post article suggested that the Trump administration was weighing military action against Islamist militants in Mali, similar to airstrikes it recently conducted in Nigeria.
However, the Malian government, which partners with Russia’s Africa Corps, has said that it had not been informed of this, adding that any such intervention must respect the country’s “sovereign choices.” They have received “no confirmation and no official statement,” Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop told reporters at a military conference in Bamako.
Africa is once again China’s top destination for megaprojects. In the first half of 2026, Chinese Belt and Road investments on the continent nearly tripled from the previous year, hitting a historic $33.5 billion, according to a report by the China-based Green Finance and Development Center and the University of Queensland. The authors suggest that Chinese manufacturers are attracted to Africa’s preferential trade access to the United States and European Union markets.
Big-ticket projects include a nearly $15 billion renewable energy and ammonia project in Ethiopia, a $10 billion steel mill in Egypt, and $1.4 billion toward grid expansion and logistics for the Tazara railway line in Zambia—a rival to the U.S.-backed Lobito Corridor.
Meanwhile, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development’s annual report shows that Chinese companies were the largest investors in Africa’s greenfield projects last year. These included China’s $2.5 billion crude oil refinery in Ethiopia, another $1.1 billion refinery in Zambia, and $1.1 billion to expand a copper mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Togolese dissent? The Togolese government has spent years torturing pro-democracy protesters in military prisons, and last year, a constitutional change cleared a path toward indefinite rule for President Faure Gnassingbé, Hannah Uguru reports in the Continent.
Detainees detailed beatings and humiliation by Togolese soldiers. One victim told Amnesty International, “They poured water over us and hit us on the buttocks with cords. They hit the soles of our feet and asked us, ‘Are you going to go out and demonstrate again?’”
Telegram investigation. A large network of Hausa-language accounts on Telegram is selling access to child sexual abuse material, according to an investigation by Al’amin Umar and Mansir Muhammed in HumAngle.
Hausa is spoken in West and Central Africa, mainly Nigeria and Niger. So far, the Nigerian government has failed to crack down, and social media platforms do not employ enough moderators who speak African languages, the authors write. “Over three months of monitoring, HumAngle found no public record of investigations or prosecutions specifically targeting the Hausa-language Telegram ecosystem.”
In a statement to HumAngle, Telegram said it had removed more than 305,000 accounts related to child sexual abuse material in 2026 alone.
