Africa

South Africa is ablaze once more. In the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly Natal) and Gauteng (which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria), the cities are burning. Shops and businesses have been turned to ashes; trucks are on fire; mobs of excited young men are smashing and looting; a Durban ambulance, trying to take a critically ill patient to hospital, was attacked; in the middle of a crippling Covid-19 lockdown, pharmacies have been plundered and vaccination sites have been suspended; motorways have been closed; over 70 people have been killed. The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called out the army. These rioting young men lead wretched lives, mainly because of the ANC government, which has ruled South Africa for 27 years.

Multiple reports have confirmed that the Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau is dead. Shekau’s demise came after Boko Haram last week clashed with Isis in Sambisa forest in northeast Nigeria. Some reports suggested that the Boko Haram leader detonated a suicide vest rather than be captured by the Isis militants. Isis’s West African Province (ISWAP) is often characterised as being under the Boko Haram umbrella, but the two factions have become deadly rivals in the region. And with terror engulfing the continent, along with the rise of an African Islamic State, it is Isis that is now the beneficiary of Shekau’s death.

The treatment of black people, particularly by law enforcement, has become a principal point of protest in the western world. But little it said about the millions of black Africans mistreated by the ruthless security forces of authoritarian African regimes. If black lives matter regardless of where they are in the world, then it’s time to challenge the immensely privileged black African ruling elite that clings to power by persecuting its often-voiceless Black African citizens. The numbers tell the story. An estimated 5.4 million people or 8 per cent of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s population died in the 1997-2003 conflict at the hands of government security forces and non-state armed militia.

Eight law enforcement officials, including three policemen and five members of a local anti-jihadist force, were killed in a jihadist attack in Burkina Faso on Tuesday. Jihadist raids on two military bases in Somalia, using suicide car bombers, killed 23 on Saturday. On Friday, South Africa decided to deploy its troops in bordering Mozambique, days after Islamist militants took over the town of Palma, killing dozens of locals and forcing thousands to flee. The past week is only a sample of the jihadist peril currently engulfing Africa. These terror attacks reaffirm the growing strength of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups, including al-Shabaab, Isis, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and their affiliates.

On 14 January, Ugandans go to the polls in what is likely to be the closest election the country has ever had. Their unusual choice: embattled incumbent Yoweri Museveni or popstar-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Yoweri Museveni is Africa’s third-longest ruling leader. He is a political chameleon — once a Maoist revolutionary, he has posed as both a liberal progressive and a nationalist conservative while in office. The three-and-a-half decades of the Museveni administration are difficult to describe in a sentence or two, perhaps because most Ugandans cannot remember them all: the average Ugandan was born in 2004 (compared to the average American, who was born in 1982).

The world’s first conflict triggered by Covid-19 exploded on 4 November in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. Before your eyes glaze over at news of fresh African horrors — hundreds dead in battles and air strikes, ethnic massacres, civilians fleeing, charities calling for food aid — consider this frightening new reality. For the first time in modern history, wars and insecurity now ravage a continuous line of African states from Mauretania’s Atlantic shores to the Red Sea — a 6,000km Sahelian suicide belt of jihadis, state failure and starvation. Intervene too hard in this mess and you get David Cameron’s ill-conceived 2011 Libyan bombing raids. Gaddafi gets butchered in a storm drain, the arsenals are pillaged and weapons flood the Sahara.

As if 2020 hasn’t already scared the hell out of us all, a plague of locusts is upon us. When I first witnessed a swarm swirling across my farm in Kenya, it was hard to see them in the nightmarish way they’re depicted in Exodus or the Book of Revelation. They were millions of pink and golden Tinker Bell fairies, flying in a halo around the sun, filling the air with the sound of rustling skirts. But the breeding cycle of a locust is only a few months and they are growing in numbers exponentially. Soon, it’s predicted, we will see individual swarms equivalent to the size of London, each of which consumes as much food as half the population of the United Kingdom on a daily basis.