Africa & Global Power

N o shots fired. No peace talks scheduled. The Morocco-Algeria rivalry is the continent's most consequential cold war you rarely read about. In August 2021, Algeria severed diplomatic ties with Morocco. No ambassadors have been exchanged since. The land border between the two countries has been closed since 1994. In September 2024, Algeria went further and imposed visa requirements on Moroccan citizens. Two countries that share a 1,900-kilometre border, a language, a religion, a colonial history, and a continent have not been able to hold a serious diplomatic conversation in over three years. [1] The standoff is often framed as a dispute over the Western Sahara. That framing is true but incomplete. The Western Sahara question is the trigger, the justification, and the public face of a rivalry that runs much deeper: a competition for regional leadership between two large, proud nations that both believe they are the natural centre of gravity in North Africa and the Sahel. Unders...

T he boom brought dollars. The bust brought lessons. What Nigerian startups do next will define the ecosystem for a decade. Nigeria’s startup story has always been told in superlatives. Africa’s most funded tech ecosystem. The continent’s first fintech unicorns. The largest concentration of tech talent in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2020 and 2022, Nigerian startups attracted extraordinary sums of venture capital, riding a global wave of cheap money and investor enthusiasm for emerging markets. Then came the reckoning. Global interest rates rose. Risk appetite contracted. High-profile layoffs swept through Nigerian and pan-African tech companies. Some well-known names shut down entirely. Funding that once flowed freely dried to a trickle. By 2024, total startup funding across Africa fell to just $1.1 billion, a 44 percent drop from 2023 and a staggering decline from the roughly $5 billion raised at the peak. [1] In 2025, the picture began to shift. African startup funding recovere...

S ix new members. More African nations lining up. But joining BRICS is not the same as gaining power. The expansion of BRICS has been one of the most discussed diplomatic stories of the past two years. At the 2023 Johannesburg summit, the original five members invited Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to join. Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE formally entered in January 2024. Indonesia joined in early 2025 as the tenth member, and nine additional nations were named as official partner countries, including Nigeria and Uganda. [1] Dozens more have expressed interest or submitted requests. For African leaders and analysts, the expansion raises questions that are both urgent and unresolved. Is this a genuine shift in the global balance of power toward the Global South? Or are African nations trading one form of dependency for another, this time anchored in Beijing and Moscow rather than Washington and Brussels? The honest answer is that both possibilities are real. Which ...

A genda 2063 is Africa’s most ambitious continental plan. It is also largely unknown to the 1.5 billion people it promises to transform. Adopted at the 24th Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government in Addis Ababa in January 2015, Agenda 2063 is the AU’s 50-year blueprint for transforming Africa into “the global powerhouse of the future.” [1] Organised around seven aspirations — from a prosperous, integrated continent to one characterised by good governance, peace, and African cultural renaissance — it is, on paper, the most comprehensive development framework Africa has ever produced. The honest question, eleven years after its adoption and thirteen years before its midpoint, is whether Agenda 2063 is translating its ambition into measurable transformation — or whether it is joining the long archive of pan-African declarations that inspired at adoption and gathered dust thereafter. What Agenda 2063 Actually Is Agenda 2063 is operationalised th...

  T he naira’s collapse isn’t just an exchange rate problem. It is a symptom of decades of structural dysfunction. In the space of less than three years, the Nigerian naira went from N460 to the dollar in mid-2023 to nearly N1,740 at its lowest point in late 2024 — a depreciation of more than 270 percent. [1] By early 2026, with monetary tightening, reserve rebuilding, and the early impact of the Dangote Refinery on import substitution, the naira has recovered to the N1,350–1,500 range. [2] That recovery is real. It is also fragile. And it does not begin to address the structural causes that have made the naira one of the most volatile major currencies in Africa for most of the past decade. This piece is a comprehensive explainer. Where did the naira crisis come from? What actually happened between 2023 and 2025? What does the road to genuine stability look like — and what does it demand of Nigeria’s economy and policymakers? The Deep Causes: Why Nigeria’s Currency Has Al...