Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

Kagame has successfully deflected criticism, partly thanks to Western guilt over the genocide (a recent report commissioned by Macron said that France bears an ‘overwhelming responsibility’) and partly by implying that criticism is a vestige of colonial condescension. But Western opinion may be starting to turn against him, at least if Michela Wrong’s book – and the favourable reception it has received – is anything to go by. And Kagame’s standing isn’t helped by his economic record. The supposed miracle he has worked over the last twenty years has turned out to be a sham. Officially, the Rwandan economy has been growing at a rate of 7 per cent a year, but according to an anonymous statistician in the Review of African Political Economy only South Sudan has experienced ‘a faster increase in poverty’. Two-thirds of the population now lives below the poverty line, an increase of 15 per cent in a decade. 

Corruption and hypocrisy tend to be systemic: if you see them at the top you’re sure to encounter them at the bottom. Liberia has been rebuilt with impressive speed; the road networks are now even better than they were when I was last there. But the graft has got worse. On my trip in a shared taxi from the border of Côte d’Ivoire to Monrovia, a journey of about eight hours, we were stopped more than half a dozen times by Immigration and Customs and charged an informal fee each time. On one occasion on the Liberian side, having refused to pay, I was singled out for a one-on-one interview by a ‘chief’ in the privacy of his office: ‘a big man like you’, he said, could surely ‘find something’ for him. We both laughed as I peeled off a few notes from the wad of local currency I had to cart around for this sort of occasion. Anyway, he explained, it was a security issue: no money, no surveillance, and no safety for travellers or foreign nationals. Didn’t I know about the civil war that had raged in Liberia back in the day?

At​ 35 per cent, the turnout for Nigeria’s general election in February was the lowest since democracy succeeded military rule twenty years ago. During the three weeks I spent on the road in the run-up to the vote, it became obvious from the fitful campaigning and the paucity of crowds at rallies that numbers would be low. Matters weren’t helped by the sudden decision of the...

On 5​ January this year, Nigerian security operatives abducted 12 men from a hotel in Abuja, the federal capital. All were members of the self-styled government of the Republic of Ambazonia, Africa’s latest secessionist movement in neighbouring Cameroon, and all were refugees in Nigeria, some of long standing, among them Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, the would-be president of the aspiring...

The scene was set for the rise of an extreme sectarian movement. There would be no shortage of foot soldiers: Comolli points out that with a population approaching 200 million, Nigeria has ‘the highest number of non-attending schoolchildren in the world’: 10.5 million in 2010, the last year for which figures are available. Most are concentrated in the north, where ‘70 per cent of the population is illiterate.’ All that was needed was an eloquent figure who could applaud the governors’ embrace of sharia while pointing out that they fell far short of the code of conduct they favoured.