Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Danny Bradlow, Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria

By Easter 2026 it was still not clear when – or how – the war initiated by Israel and the US against Iran would end. But what was already clear was that it would harm Africa in a number of ways.

Firstly, it would adversely affect the global supply and prices of oil and gas, fertilisers and food. Secondly, local currencies would be affected. More than a month after the war had started a number of African currencies had begun to lose value against the US dollar.

Thirdly, interest rates stopped falling and further rate increases were highly likely. Fourth, there will be a decline in access to affordable foreign financing.

How should Africa respond?

African countries cannot avoid being harmed by the current Gulf war. Nevertheless, based on my work in international economic law and global economic governance, I think there are two lessons that, if followed, can help the continent emerge from the crisis in a better place.

First, governments and societies need to be pragmatic. Their first priority must be to do whatever they can to mitigate the impact of the war, particularly on their most vulnerable citizens. This will require governments to make trade-offs.

They will have to reallocate budgets to at least maintain the level of imports necessary to meet the society’s basic needs. They will need to convince their creditors to help finance their necessary imports. They will also need to persuade them to be flexible enough that they leave governments with at least some policy space.

Second, states and societies need to identify opportunities within the crisis for actions that over the medium term can help them meet their financing, economic, environmental and social challenges. This requires collaboration between the state and its non-state stakeholders. Business, labour, religious groups, civil society organisations and international organisations all have something to contribute.

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Read more: Oil price surge is hurting African economies: scholars in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa take stock

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Action in the short run

The focus of Africa’s efforts in the short term must be on minimising the negative effects of the war and on managing the state’s external debts in the most sustainable and effective way.

This is easy to state, but hard to implement. This is particularly the case in the current international environment, in which it is not realistic to expect donor countries and other international sources of finance to be particularly generous.

African countries will need to convince their creditors to acknowledge that this crisis is beyond Africa’s control and that they should not compound the pain that’s being experienced. This will require, at a minimum, that the creditors agree to suspend debt payments for the next year.

Creditors have already accepted the principle that debt payments can be suspended when debt challenges arise from sources beyond the debtor’s control. Many of them have accepted clauses requiring such action under specific conditions in their most recent debt contracts. They also did this during COVID.

Second, African countries, which are already heavily indebted, should challenge their multilateral creditors to accept the consequences of being among the biggest creditors for the continent. This includes the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank. By custom these institutions are treated as preferred creditors. This means that they get paid before all other creditors. Instead of participating in any debt restructurings, they also make new loans to the debtor in crisis. This shifts the debt restructuring burden onto the debtor’s other creditors. It also increases the total amount owed to the multilaterals.

This cannot continue. These institutions need to be more creative in providing Africa to financing. This should include:

Third, governments should work with the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions to use these institutions more effectively to finance African development. For example:

• They should require the institutions to only undertake transactions that are consistent with their development mandates. This means no more opaque transactions like the recent one that the African Finance Corporation concluded with Senegal.

• African governments should take the necessary action to activate the African Financial Stability Mechanism that they agreed to establish last year. This would create a useful financial safety net for the continent.

Fourth, African governments must build on the efforts they began last year to become a more effective advocate for African development financing interests at the international level. Among these efforts was the initiative by African ministers of finance to develop common African positions on sovereign debt restructurings. Another was South Africa’s launch of the African Expert Panel that proposed a number of initiatives on African debt and development financing.

In the medium term

African countries should advocate for the IMF to review its governance arrangements so that it becomes more accountable and responsive to developing countries, including African states and societies.

They should also advocate for the IMF to more use its existing resources, including its gold reserves, more creatively to support Africa.

Second, Africa should call for a debate on the preferred creditor status of multilateral financial institutions. This has become particularly relevant because the members of the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions are claiming that, like all other multilateral financial institutions, they are entitled to this status.

It is not clear that there are good arguments for excluding these institutions from preferred creditor status while protecting the position of the legacy institutions. This suggests that there is a need for some general principles that help determine which institutions should be treated as preferred creditors. These should be acceptable to all multilateral financial institutions and other market participants.

Third, African societies must make every effort to demonstrate that they are taking control of their own development. They should demand that their governments and all other actors in African development finance behave responsibly in regard to the financial, economic, environmental and social aspects of these transactions.

Another medium term objective should be to limit the illicit financial flows that are so often associated with international trade and investment. This goal would be advanced by the successful conclusion of the current efforts to agree on a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

– Iran war: what African countries can do to get through the crisis and emerge in a better place
– https://theconversation.com/iran-war-what-african-countries-can-do-to-get-through-the-crisis-and-emerge-in-a-better-place-279689

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ian Caistor-Parker, PhD student, University of Warwick

During the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960, the British colonial government confined an estimated 150,000 Kenyans in a sprawling network of “emergency” detention camps.

None of those held in the camps had been found guilty in a court of law. Instead, they were detained on suspicion of supporting the uprising.

British control over Kenya was effectively declared in 1895. A distinctive feature of colonial rule was the decision to encourage white settlement. These settlers were granted vast tracts of Kenya’s most fertile land and pushed policy in an increasingly harsh and unequal direction.

By the early 1950s, many African Kenyans were facing severe land shortages in the countryside and desperate living conditions in urban areas.

In 1952, this situation erupted into the Mau Mau uprising, a broadly anti-colonial rebellion.

The British government responded with overwhelming force. It declared a state of emergency and suppressed the uprising militarily.

Revelations about the extreme violence employed in some emergency detention camps made the continuation of British rule untenable. Particularly key was the Hola massacre of 1959. Guards beat 11 detainees to death and the colonial government attempted to cover up the crime.

Outrage at these events shattered Britain’s grip on the colony, and Kenya achieved independence in 1963 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta.

A great deal is known about these detention camps. They were sites of neglect and brutal violence. Detainees were forced to go through a so-called rehabilitation system designed to make them renounce their support for Mau Mau.

In practice, they were subjected to brutal compulsory labour, were at risk of assault and lived in unhygienic conditions. Some of those who refused to cooperate ultimately faced systematic, state-sanctioned torture.

I am a historian researching punishment in Kenya, and I have been investigating the deeper history of detention camps. My research shows that this emergency detention system was shaped by an earlier network of “ordinary” detention camps. These were established in 1926 and processed more than 400,000 people before the uprising.

These camps, intended as a milder alternative to prison, evolved into a poorly regulated system characterised by exploitation, overcrowding and weak accountability.

These findings challenge the idea that the detention system of the 1950s was exceptional. Instead, it was rooted in long-standing colonial practices, shaped by economic incentives, administrative gaps and coercive labour systems.

Understanding this deeper history matters because it changes how we view the Mau Mau emergency. It proves that the brutal 1950s detention system didn’t just emerge from nowhere – it was built on a foundation of state violence and disorder that had been normalised for decades.

The roots

Influenced by a draconian-minded European settler minority, the Kenyan colonial government adopted a harsh approach to punishing the local population. Judges frequently imprisoned Africans for “technical” offences lacking criminal intent. These included failing to pay tax and minor violations of coercive labour laws.

By the 1920s, Kenya’s prisons were overcrowded and “technical” offenders inevitably mixed with hardened criminals.

In response, the colonial government introduced detention in 1926 as a supposedly milder alternative for technical offenders who had simply broken administrative rules. In theory, prisons were to be reserved for those who had committed crimes involving moral violation. In practice, however, these distinctions didn’t (or couldn’t) hold.

To visibly separate detention from imprisonment, the colonial government gave day-to-day control of detention camps to district commissioners (the powerful heads of local governments), not the prison department.

However, this separation was incomplete. Detainees were legally classified as prisoners (though they were not informed of this). The prison department retained ultimate authority over the camps.

This overlapping authority produced a gap in accountability, which ultimately proved disastrous.

In 1930, seeking to divert more people from formal prisons, government officials removed almost all sentencing restrictions on detention. Subsequently, the only limitations were that sentences had to be under six months and that those with more than one prior prison conviction were ineligible.

Numbers surged immediately, with more convicted offenders sent to detention than formal prisons almost every year until 1952.

Judges increasingly used detention for serious offences, including manslaughter. A limited criminal records system meant that individuals with prior convictions – sometimes as many as 16 – ended up in detention.

Conversely, the amendment did not stop harsh magistrates from continuing to send significant numbers of minor offenders to prisons.

This blurring of populations, combined with a lack of structural and legal separation, meant detention camps mutated into a parallel prison system, serving a different colonial master, district commissioners, but lacking fundamental distinction.

Detention camp living conditions were atrocious. Most district commissioners delegated almost all duties to Kenyan African “overseers”. Overseers were under-trained. Yet they were expected to be on duty constantly and often had to guard more than 60 detainees, making meaningful supervision impossible.

Camps were generally collections of temporary wattle-and-daub huts. Over time, these decayed but were not replaced, resulting in squalid conditions.

Furthermore, overcrowding was endemic. Food rations were poor and basic facilities were often absent. Sickness rates were significant. Detainees responded by escaping at a rate of more than one a day.

Failed reform

In 1937, a high-level committee condemned the system as dangerous and inefficient. Calls for reform from London also grew.

But nothing changed.

Why?

The primary reason was economic. Detainees were a vital reservoir of free labour for cash-strapped district commissioners. When camps were introduced, local governments’ labour budgets were cut. This made detainee labour crucial for maintaining government stations.

In the late 1930s, penal officials sought to reintroduce stricter eligibility criteria for detention. However, they abandoned this idea as it would add to overcrowding in the prison system.

Trapped by bureaucratic gridlock, underfunding and economic dependency, Kenya’s detention system limped into the 1952 emergency – unreformed.

Ultimately, “ordinary” detention camps persisted until the 1980s, far outliving their emergency counterparts.

The consequences

This history exposes stark continuities between the pre-emergency and Mau Mau penal systems. Furthermore, as they were under the control of district officials and lacked standard prison regulations, existing detention camps could, and did, easily become dumping grounds for Mau Mau suspects in the early months of the emergency. Ordinary detention was both a model and enabling mechanism for emergency detention.

– Brutal Mau Mau camps in Kenya were an extension of Britain’s colonial prison system – historian traces their roots
– https://theconversation.com/brutal-mau-mau-camps-in-kenya-were-an-extension-of-britains-colonial-prison-system-historian-traces-their-roots-277856

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kristof Titeca, Professor in International Development, University of Antwerp

Bobi Wine’s escape from Uganda is not just a striking episode in itself, it also offers insight into the current state of the opposition – particularly his National Unity Platform party – and into the divergences within the Yoweri Museveni regime.

The Ugandan opposition leader had been in hiding for almost two months after the January 2026 presidential election, which Museveni won by 72%. Wine came second with 25% of the vote. Museveni, 81, has been in power since 1986.

Wine, born Robert Kyagulanyi, entered formal politics in 2017 when he won a parliamentary by-election.

He soon emerged as one of the leaders of the People Power movement, a loose, generationally charged mobilisation built around the slogan “People Power, Our Power”. It took shape in the aftermath of protests against the removal of presidential age limits in 2018. At the time, the opposition appeared largely exhausted and unlikely to unseat the regime. Bobi Wine and People Power therefore brought a new energy to Uganda’s opposition.

People Power later formalised into the National Unity Platform party, which Wine used to vie for the presidency in 2021. He secured about 35% of the presidential vote against Museveni’s 59%. National Unity Platform became the largest opposition force in parliament with 57 seats.

These results also highlighted the constraints of electoral politics in the face of extensive repression.

This is a pattern that would again become apparent in the 2026 elections.

As several human rights organisations noted, the 2026 elections took place in an environment marked by widespread repression and intimidation.

After the vote, Wine went into hiding. He posted photos and videos seemingly from Kampala, triggering roadblocks and searches across the capital city. On 18 March 2026, he resurfaced in the United States.

I have researched Ugandan politics for over 20 years, and recently published an article analysing the structural challenges Wine’s political party faces in Uganda’s authoritarian context.

Drawing on this work, my reading is that Wine’s escape reveals controlled tensions within Museveni’s regime, where different factions appear to disagree on how to handle the opposition – without signalling a full split. At the same time, it exposes a deeper dilemma for Wine and his party: how to balance international advocacy with maintaining grassroots legitimacy at home.

This moment matters because it highlights the structural constraints facing opposition politics in Uganda, and raises questions about whether meaningful political change can occur within the current system.

Frictions within the regime

The contrasting approaches within the Museveni regime are illustrated by events that followed the 2026 election. In the weeks following the vote, defence force chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba (Museveni’s son) issued a series of unusually explicit statements about Wine.

In a now-deleted tweet, he claimed that 22 members of the National Unity Platform – whom he labelled “terrorists” – had been killed. He added that he was praying that the next death would be Wine’s.

On 26 January, the defence chief escalated this rhetoric, stating that he wanted Wine “dead or alive”. These statements built on earlier threats, including about beheading Wine.

Taken together, they amount to sustained violent threats directed at the main opposition leader.

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Read more: Uganda’s autocratic political system is failing its people – and threatens the region

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Set against this, however, is the fact that Wine was able to evade capture for nearly two months and ultimately leave the country.

It emerged that he did so with assistance from high-level state and security officials.

The same sources and regime insiders reported that intelligence services had informed Museveni about Wine’s whereabouts. The president chose not to act upon this information.

Taken together, these events suggest differences within the regime between factions in the security services, or more broadly between Muhoozi and other centres of power. Potentially even within the first family itself.

But these differences should not be overstated.

The episode does not indicate an open or consolidated split. Criticism of Muhoozi within the regime remains tightly constrained.

What this suggests is a regime where disagreements are contained within narrow limits. Wine’s escape, therefore, points less to a rupture than to an ongoing negotiation over power and strategy within the ruling elite.

And this is becoming increasingly important in light of the anticipated transition beyond Museveni.

Tensions within Wine’s party

Wine’s political strength has always come from where he came from.

He was rooted in the ghetto, and more broadly among urban youth who had long been mobilised by opposition politics but rarely felt represented by it.

Earlier figures like Kizza Besigye could appeal to this group, but Wine embodied it. He spoke the same language and made politics feel accessible to people often treated as outsiders.

That sense of authenticity was central to the early momentum of People Power. It also mattered that Wine broke with a long-standing pattern in Ugandan politics: he did not come from the western region, the core of the ruling elite.

But this “outsider” appeal has become harder to sustain over time. As People Power turned into a political party, and as Wine himself became more embedded in formal politics and international networks, parts of that original base began to feel that something had shifted.

What once felt like a movement of “one of us” increasingly risks being seen as something closer to the political establishment it set out to challenge.

As my research shows, this is not unusual. It is a core dilemma when protest movements turn into parties, especially under repression.

The social media backlash to Wine’s appearance in the United States needs to be read through that lens.

It not only echoes criticism from Museveni that Wine is an “agent of foreign interests”, but also from within the opposition where some radical voices argue that he should have stayed and faced the regime, even if that meant prison. Besigye, for instance, is facing treason charges after he was abducted and extradited from Kenya in 2024.

This criticism echoes a longstanding divide within opposition politics in Uganda: should opposition leaders embody defiance on the ground, or navigate politics through institutional spaces?

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Read more: The making and breaking of Uganda: an interview with scholar Mahmood Mamdani

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Being in the US reinforces a growing perception that Wine is becoming more distant from the people who carried the risks on the ground.

If the party cannot connect its international advocacy and diaspora support back to the everyday struggles of its supporters in Uganda, this episode will likely deepen the feeling that the party has become more of the same.

What role remains for Wine?

There is an uncomfortable reality here. Wine serves a function for the regime. His presence helps maintain the appearance of political competition, particularly within the international community.

Wine now faces a choice. Engaging in electoral politics risks reinforcing the system he seeks to challenge. Stepping outside it risks isolation, repression or loss of political relevance.

How he navigates this tension will shape not only his political trajectory, but also that of his party.

– Bobi Wine’s decision to flee Uganda points to a shrinking landscape for opposition politics
– https://theconversation.com/bobi-wines-decision-to-flee-uganda-points-to-a-shrinking-landscape-for-opposition-politics-279475