ADF

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Nigerian Navy announced in March 2014 that it had destroyed 260 illegal oil refineries and burned 100,000 tons of contraband fuel to try to halt oil thefts that are bedeviling the economy of Africa’s largest petroleum producer. Commanding officer Capt. Musa Gemu said sailors of the NNS Delta destroyed the refineries in the Warri South-West area of the southern Delta region. The team also arrested five suspects. Similar missions in the past have failed to slow the estimated daily thefts of 200,000 barrels of oil worth more than $20 million. Critics and analysts say most oil…

Côte d’Ivoire President Alassane Ouattara [REUTERS] REUTERS Côte d’Ivoire is re-emerging as the prime investment destination in West Africa after a decade of political turmoil, but President Alassane Ouattara must weed out corruption and promote reconciliation to keep cash flowing in. Long considered the jewel in the crown of France’s former West African territories, a 1999 coup destroyed the reputation of Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer, as an island of stability in a troubled region. A bloody presidential election in 2000 and a rebellion two years later triggered an exodus of capital that undid decades of development, dubbed…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Angola announced $10 million in aid for the strife-torn Central African Republic, with a possible credit line in the future, during a visit by the CAR’s president in March 2014. Joaquim do Espirito Santo, Africa director in the Angolan Foreign Affairs Ministry, said the aid was to support the transitional government and to respond to the ongoing humanitarian crisis. “There may be negotiations for an agreement opening a line of credit,” he said. Making an official two-day visit to Luanda, Angola, CAR Interim President Catherine Samba-Panza said there were “still peaks of violence” but that the general situation…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who as president was widely credited with returning peace to Sierra Leone after years of brutal civil war, died March 13, 2014, at his home in Freetown, the country’s capital. He was 82. Kabbah led Sierra Leone during and after an 11-year civil war in which 120,000 people were killed, many gruesomely. He was praised for instituting a disarmament program that led to the official end of the war in 2002, with the help of a United Nations peacekeeping force and British military trainers. But after the war, he was criticized for failing to lift…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE A former minister became Nouakchott’s first female mayor in February 2014 after being voted in by councilors to head up the sprawling Mauritanian capital’s local authority. Maty Mint Hamady, 46, is an economics graduate from the University of Nouakchott and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in Paris, one of Europe’s most prestigious graduate schools. A prominent member of the Union for the Republic, the ruling party of Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, she resigned as public services minister along with the rest of the cabinet, a routine step after national elections. About 1 million people — almost a…

Feature Image: Nigerian animator Ekene Nkenchor designs a video game at the Lagos offices of Kuluya, a video game company that is winning fans across the continent. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE] AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE It’s a common challenge in Nigeria and across Africa: how to get rid of pesky mosquitoes whose buzzing disturbs sleep and whose bites can carry malaria and other diseases. Two Nigerian startups have tapped this and other quirks of daily life in Africa to create online and mobile phone video games that are winning fans around the world. It’s easy to see why Mosquito Smasher, which has earned comparisons…

REUTERS Resource-rich African countries are setting up sovereign wealth funds. Oil producers Angola, Ghana and Nigeria started funds in the past two years. Before then, only Botswana, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon had them. Liberia  and Zambia announced plans for funds in January 2014, and Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe have similar intentions. The system is attractive because commodity earnings can be split into one fund for infrastructure and another for savings that can be used as collateral for bigger amounts. “Africa needs higher savings,” said Razia Khan, head of Africa research at Standard Chartered Bank. “If it is…

REUTERS Zakes Hadebe’s minibus taxi has nearly half a million kilometers on it, a broken speedometer and a fuel gauge he struggles to keep just above empty. Yet by 8 a.m. one morning, Hadebe and his rattling Toyota already had overcome rain, traffic and an ever-rising petrol price to ferry nearly 40 commuters from South Africa’s Soweto township to nearby Johannesburg. South Africa’s minibus taxi industry, scorned for reckless driving and dogged by a reputation for violence, moves 15 million people every day, most of them lower-income workers. More like buses than the taxis of New York or London, the rumbling…

ADF STAFF Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s founding president and a leader who ascended to the heights of power and experienced the depths of failure. Today, despite his flaws, he is remembered as a hero in his home country and across the continent. Born in 1909 in the British colony Gold Coast, Nkrumah went to one of his country’s best schools before traveling to the United States in 1935. He graduated from Lincoln University, America’s oldest black college, in Pennsylvania in 1939. He embraced America’s black culture, making friends with its intellectuals. He was elected president of the African Students Organization…

U.S. Africa Command Staff In many ways, the continent of Africa is more peaceful today than it has been in decades. A 2012 analysis published in the journal African Affairs showed that conflicts on the continent have been decreasing in number, size and brutality since the early 1990s. But patches of instability remain. The fallout from the Arab Spring has resulted in loose weapons and volatile political environments across North Africa and the Sahel. The terrorist group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, though weakened after the international intervention in Mali, still lurks in ungoverned areas and moves across porous borders.…