• Ayoola Babalola

Dangote’s refinery ended Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel and became Africa’s most important energy asset overnight when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz. But it also became the country’s most powerful monopoly.

• Richard Seymour

Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.

• Sushovan Dhar

A joke born from a Chief Justice’s insult grew to 22 million followers and forced out a cabinet minister in eight weeks. What does this reveal about India and about the limits of leaderless revolt everywhere?

• Ahlam Chemlali
• Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde

European officials are calling the EU-Mauritania migration deal a success. Here’s what the numbers don’t count.

• Markus V. Hoehne

Washington’s own record of intervention in the Horn of Africa — not Mogadishu’s — is the strongest case against recognizing Somaliland now.

• Mahbub Abdillahi

As the UN and the US pull back from Somalia’s security architecture within months of each other, Mogadishu insists it is ready. The gap between that confidence and the country’s political reality tells a different story.

• Nabil Ferdaoussi

When thousands of young Moroccans stormed Ceuta last week, it was not an invasion, but the latest in a five-year pattern of coercive migration diplomacy on a border with five centuries of colonial history behind it.

• Hilmelda Tenkeu

A charter twenty African governments just endorsed defends seed sovereignty and economic independence in one breath, and moves to gut abortion and queer rights in the next. 

• Obongodu Paul Unanam

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency secures thousands of convictions every year, but when it comes to politically-connected elites, it’s a different story.

• Ninu Sonuga

From Eko Atlantic to the Niger Delta, elite enclaves have become the defining spatial expression of Nigeria’s political order.

• Awonusi Ayomide Jesudamilare

Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.

• Sada Malumfashi

Nigeria’s democracy has become dangerously fixated on capturing the presidency. Reviving regional politics may be the country’s best hope for rebuilding democratic accountability.

• Shreya Parikh

Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.

• Kawthar Jeewa

A landmark housing ruling in Cape Town and anti-migrant marches in Durban look like opposite stories. But they are two extremes of the same colonial question: who is permitted to occupy space?

• Mebratu Kelecha

Successive debt regimes in Ethiopia have shown that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development, sometimes all at once.

• Wangui Kimari

The Kenyan government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience resembles the way colonial regimes used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”

• Mandla Radebe
• Vijay Prashad

Kevin Cox’s NLR essay on South Africa claims to correct liberal and culturalist accounts through historical materialism. But it reproduces the very epistemic and analytical failures it sets out to overcome.

• Gunnett Kaaf
• Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

The Conference of the Left was not a solution to the crisis of the South African left, but an opening. What follows must be built differently from what came before.

• Okakah Onyango

Although the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya was framed as a partnership, it was actually France desperately looking for a new door into a continent that wants to throw it out.

• Khwezi Mabasa

The leaders of South Africa’s anti-migrant movement claim that Black African migrants are primarily responsible for unemployment, crime, and failing public services. None of these claims is supported by evidence.