Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 5
July 29, 2025
Enemies of progress
Super Falcons of Nigeria train in Ikenne, Ogun State, Nigeria on May 30, 2025. Image �� Skyunit via Shutterstock.com The 2025 Women���s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON), already delayed by a year, was meant to signify a turning point, a long-overdue gesture toward legitimizing women���s football on the continent in the aftermath of a defining and successful 2023 Women���s World Cup. With the promise of increased prize money, broader global reach, and a shiny new trophy, the tournament was meant to represent a new chapter.
But instead, it exposes the fractured earth that the women���s game exists on. The tournament is not a site of progress but serves as an indictment���not only of the national federations tasked with championing women���s football forward but by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) itself, whose apathy operates as a mode of governance. Long before the first whistle was blown, there was already smoke in the air. The concurrent financial woes amongst different federations would set the tone and unearth the gendered politics that continue to define football across the continent.
Despite boasting two of the most accomplished Malawian players in Tabitha and Temwa Chawinga, the Malawian federation did not field a team for the qualifiers due to financial constraints. Yet somehow, it found the resources to fund the men���s side that hasn���t qualified for AFCON since 2021, has never played in any World Cup, or produced world-class talent.
Contrast that to the women���s team that boasts the Chawinga sisters and Rose Smith Kadzere, who are all competing in elite leagues abroad and have been successful doing it. Temwa was the first African to win the Golden Boot in the NWSL; Tabitha did the same in Italy���s Serie A Femminile and had a Ballon d���Or nomination last year. And yet, even with these achievements, the federation has chosen to essentially abandon the women���s team.
But this goes beyond star power. By sidelining the women���s team, the federation also robs dozens of local players of the opportunity to compete, grow, and be seen. And oftentimes, these tournaments become a platform for players to get on the radar of international scouts. But financial neglect was not only confined to the teams that did not qualify.
Ahead of the tournament, news reports revealed that Nora H��uptle, coach of the Zambia women���s national team, had not been paid since her appointment in January by the Zambian federation, which led to an official complaint to FIFA. The federation blamed the previous administration and the Minister of Sports Elvis Nkandu claimed that the outstanding arrears were cleared. However, following their group stage match against Senegal, a journalist asked H��uptle about the status of her outstanding wages, and there was a notable pause in her response.
It���s important to provide context as to how H��uptle came into the role. Before her hiring,�� Zambia���s women���s team had been coached by Bruce Mwape. He had multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him that surfaced ahead of the 2023 Women���s World Cup. Yet he remained in charge all the way through to the Paris 2024 Games. By then, FIFA had launched a formal investigation, the French authorities had initially declined his visa�� (likely due to the accusations), and he was barred from having private contact with his players during the Olympics. H��uptle was seemingly brought in to rehabilitate the image of the federation.
This is not to deny her credentials or worthiness for the role; she has done a great job in a short span of time. But it is to say they understood optics well enough to hire a woman to obfuscate how they shielded an alleged predator. But clearly not enough to meet their basic obligations to her.
Ahead of their first game against Senegal, DR Congo���s squad threatened to boycott training over unpaid allowances and bonuses. The timing was particularly bitter. In that same month, the Congolese government signed a $51 million partnership with FC Barcelona, securing jersey sponsorship to promote tourism. It was their third such deal, following partnerships with AC Milan and AS Monaco, which they had inked earlier in the year.
Nigeria���s Super Falcons, this year’s eventual winners, are not strangers to having wage disputes with their federation. They also threatened to boycott WAFCON over unpaid match bonuses and camp allowances, some dating as far back as 2021. For the Super Falcons in particular, this has unfortunately become a tradition. The Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) is notorious for not paying coaches or players, both on the men���s and women���s sides. The team went on strike before the 2022 WAFCON and again ahead of the 2023 Women���s World Cup. Even in 2019, after their Round of 16 exit at the World Cup in France, the players staged a sit-in protest over unpaid wages.
What makes this neglect gendered is that it���s happening to the more successful national side. And despite their consistency, the Super Falcons still do not receive equal pay to the men���s team. In an interview with journalist Osasu Obayiuwana, NFF President Ibrahim Musa Gusau cited a lack of sponsorship as the reason. But rather than signaling a plan of action, his response felt more like resignation to the status quo.
This dynamic runs parallel with the Banyana Banyana squad, whose campaign to defend their title was mired in strife. They threatened to boycott games ahead of the WAFCON�� over unpaid wages, and this was not their first time having a financial dispute with their federation.�� Two weeks before the 2023 FIFA Women���s World Cup, the team staged a boycott against the South African Football Association (SAFA) over unresolved tournament bonuses and working conditions.
Amid the standoff, SAFA President Danny Jordaan made a patronizing remark that exemplified the federation���s longstanding contempt for the women���s team. In response to calls for equal pay, he said, ���My experience is that these carrots don���t give you better performances; it���s the commitment, the will to win, and the determination to fight that does. Carrots come later.��� It���s a particularly bitter statement coming from a man who has been accused of rape and is currently facing corruption charges. He also said this as if SAFA hadn���t spent decades rewarding Bafana Bafana for mediocrity. The standoff was only resolved when the Patrice Motsepe Foundation stepped in with a R6 million (��$330,638) commitment, with an additional R2 million (��$110,213) provided by the national lottery operator. It was a private rescue of a public failure.
But Banyana Banyana���s struggles didn���t end there. Just before this tournament, Sasol, a major South African energy and chemical company, announced the end of its 16-year partnership with the team. Sasol wasn���t just a sponsor; it was an infrastructural pillar: nurturing the development of players, funding leagues, and creating a pipeline between grassroots and the national team.
According to Fran Hilton-Smith, the former technical director of women���s football at SAFA, the split is driven by SAFA���s failure to meet its commitments, not only on the national end but within the Sasol League. She argues that years of disputes and mismanagement have eroded the trust of one of the few institutions that had consistently supported the women���s game. ���I don���t believe there are companies eager to align themselves with a disorganized entity beset by negative publicity and grievances from clubs regarding unpaid salaries and monthly grants, especially when these companies have disbursed funds intended for such purposes,��� she told Sowetan Live.
It doesn���t help matters that the current national team coach, Dr. Desiree Ellis, a former captain and a decorated figure in African women���s football, is reportedly working without a contract and it is allegedly to avoid negotiating improved terms.
It���s important to name the ethos that undergirds these patterns. Across the continent, women���s participation in football is deemed expendable regardless of performance or potential. The prerequisite for handsome funding is tethered not to success but rather to a heteropatriarchal logic that imagines men���s football as more legitimate and inherently superior purely on the basis of sex.
And routinely, as seen in the case of Nigeria, though it applies elsewhere, sponsorship and revenue are weaponized against women���s football. Financial shortfalls are presented as if they are neutral facts when rather they are a consequence of history. For much of the 20th century, women���s football was either banned or severely restricted while men���s football basked in the sun, enjoying sustained investment, media visibility, and institutional backing. This lopsided playing field wasn���t natural, it was engineered. In today���s economic terms, it would stand as a blatant breach of competition laws. Yet women are consistently blamed for the dysfunction designed to disadvantage them. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Banyana���s situation, in cases where there are funds specifically designated for women, those monies are either diverted or go unaccounted for.
Finally, it also overlooks the double standard: Men���s teams do not have to prove themselves. Even when they consistently underperform or operate at a financial loss, that does not bar them from being indiscriminately funded.�� ��Still, the financial shortchanging were only part of the problem as logistical failures were also demonstrative of how women���s football continues to be structurally undermined.
Firstly, CAF announced the fixtures, dates and locations for the WAFCON only five weeks before the tournament. In contrast, these details for the upcoming AFCON have already been determined and communicated nearly a year in advance.��This kind of last-minute coordination makes it difficult for journalists, corporate sponsors, and traveling fans to plan in advance and these entities are vital for any tournament to be successful. Several journalists and fans online noted the lack of promotion or hype within the host nation. It should be unsurprising then that there has been paltry attendance for the group stage and knockout matches that did not involve Morocco.
But even in the image game, CAF falls short. The executive committee is almost entirely male, the participating teams have mostly male-led federations, and only two of the 12 coaches on the sidelines at this year���s WAFCON are women. It doesn���t help matters that one of those male coaches is Jorge Vilda, the former Spain manager expelled from his role in the wake of the Luis Rubiales sexual assault scandal. Before that event, he had multiple complaints from players about his management style and behavior that ended with several players not returning to the team until his departure. The power brokers in African women���s football are largely men, which ultimately turns the sport into their playground, where they dictate the terms and women don���t have a say in their own domain.
This becomes even more layered when you consider how CAF is eager to take credit for the gains of the women they have demeaned. Throughout the tournament, the faces of Ellis, Barbra Banda, and Racheal Kundananji were plastered across the organization���s digital presence. In isolation, there is nothing to throw caution to. However, it becomes incredibly insidious when CAF has a history of hanging these women out to dry.
As mentioned, Ellis is being actively disrespected by her federation in real time. Whereas Banda and Kundananji are participating in the tournament for the first time because they were excluded in the previous edition. Along with two other Zambian players, they were barred from competing after undergoing opaque gender-verification processes. The debacle not only cost them a missed tournament but set a permanent target on their backs that they are still feeling the ramifications of to this day.
And so when CAF uses terms like ���resilient,��� ���tenacious,��� or ���game changers��� to describe the participants of tournaments, it reads as distasteful. It is racially coded language that casts an expectation of infinite endurance on the part of these women. It reframes their intentional marginalization as heroism. And CAF gets to posture as benevolent on the suffering it has helped to produce and maintain.
WAFCON took place alongside the Women���s Euro tournament. And while it is unfair to compare the two as there is a clear resource gap (hello, imperialism!) or silly to suggest that Europe serves as some kind of beacon of morality or gender equality, the contrast remains jarring. At the Euros, operations ran smoothly. Games were promoted. Crowds showed up. People watched at home, and there weren���t stories of federations sabotaging their own teams. But the difference isn���t just financial, it lies in the things that can be helped. And it is both maddening and heartbreaking to witness just how far removed African women���s football remains from that reality.
And therefore, this year���s WAFCON reveals that CAF, alongside its members, are not advocates but direct adversaries to women���s football on the continent.
July 28, 2025
Gen Z and the spirit of Mau Mau
Photo by Hassan Kibwana on Unsplash. On Tuesday, June 25, 2024, Kenya witnessed the largest street demonstrations in the country���s history. Hundreds of thousands of youthful protestors (mostly of Generation Z but with a significant number of millennials) marched in towns and cities across 34 of the 47 counties in Kenya. From Kisumu to Kirinyaga, Mombasa to Marsabit, and Nakuru to Nairobi, multitudes of young Kenyans who had been mobilizing for weeks on social media came out to express their opposition to the Finance Bill 2024���2025. The contentious bill was going through its third and final reading in Parliament on that day. Even though members of parliament still voted to pass the bill, the president bowed to public pressure and decided not to sign the bill into law. Since then, many of the same groups of protestors have organized and participated in demonstrations against a wide range of issues, including high rates of femicide, extrajudicial killings, abductions of government critics, police brutality against journalists, and the delayed hiring of trainee doctors and other health workers in the country.
Over the past 12 months, journalists, activists, and politicians who are sympathetic to the new Gen Z movement have likened it to the Mau Mau movement that fought for Kenya���s independence from Britain in the 1950s. More importantly, Gen Z protestors themselves have been invoking the history and memory of Mau Mau by gathering at the statue of the Mau Mau leader Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi in downtown Nairobi. The eponymous Kimathi Street has thus become one of the epicenters of mass protests in the city. As Kenyans mark the first anniversary of the birth of the Gen Z movement, this article considers the historical validity of comparing Gen Z to Mau Mau and highlights important similarities and differences between the two movements. It also reflects on some of the key lessons that today���s Gen Z activists can learn from Mau Mau.
The Mau Mau movement began in the late 1940s among migrant Kikuyu farmworkers on European settler farms in Rift Valley Province. The farmworkers, colloquially known as squatters, were protesting new labor contracts that settler farmers introduced after World War II. The new contracts tightly restricted how much settler land squatters could use to farm and keep livestock for themselves���the two economic activities that had long supplemented low squatter wages. Squatters who refused to sign the new contracts were forcibly evicted from the so-called White Highlands and sent back ���home��� to Central Province, where the population density was already the highest in the colony.
Despite these forced evictions, large numbers of squatters refused to sign and instead joined Mau Mau by swearing an oath and paying a membership fee. As the evicted squatters left Rift Valley Province, they spread the message and methods of Mau Mau wherever they went. Between 1948 and 1952, the Mau Mau oathing campaign expanded to the landless inhabitants of Central Province and the unemployed residents of Nairobi. All these marginalized groups saw in Mau Mau���s plan of organized violence their last hope for a better future. The Mau Mau movement went on to fight against government security forces in a long-drawn-out guerrilla war that ultimately brought independence to Kenya in December 1963.
As a historian of the Mau Mau War, I see two striking similarities between the Gen Z and Mau Mau movements. First, similar to Gen Z, Mau Mau was an extremely youthful movement. By the time the colonial authorities in Kenya declared a state of emergency in October 1952, most Mau Mau members were in their 20s and 30s, and some were even in their late teens. Among the top military leaders, for example, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi was 32, General Kago was 32, General China was 30, General Kassam was 28, General Karari Njama was 26, and General Kimbo was 24. The same was true for noncombatant Mau Mau members. At the start of the emergency, Josiah Mwangi (alias JM) Kariuki was 23, and Wambui Waiyaki Otieno was only 16.
Second, just like the current Gen Z movement, the Mau Mau movement was highly decentralized. Even though there was a nominal central command known as Muhimu, which was based at Kiburi House in downtown Nairobi, Mau Mau guerrillas in the forest reserves on Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Range exercised full control over military affairs. And while Dedan Kimathi and General China were the de facto leaders on the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya fronts, respectively, individual guerrilla units still enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in their military activities. Operations such as killing a government chief in Murang���a, looting an Asian-owned shop in Nakuru, or torching the granaries of a European farmer in Nanyuki were usually planned and executed locally. Individual guerrilla units or several groups that were active in a specific area decided who to attack, when, and how to do it.
Both the youthfulness and decentralized nature of the Gen Z movement have been on full display over the past 12 months of regular protests. Most of the protestors have been in their 20s and 30s, and many teenagers have also joined the demonstrations. Likewise, the nationwide protests seem to have been organized locally in what the protestors have dubbed a leaderless movement. While there has been central coordination in choosing protest dates and designing and distributing flyers ahead of the demonstrations, most of the organization and mobilization appear to have been conducted at the county and sub-county levels through social media.
This decentralization was exemplified during the historic protests of June 25, 2024. There has yet to be an official inquiry into the events of that day, but it is still possible to make some tentative conclusions based on the available media reports. When protesters learned around 2:30 p.m. that Parliament had passed the finance bill despite their strong opposition, a surge of righteous indignation appears to have swept through the country, resulting in spontaneous acts of violence. Until that point, protests across the country had largely been peaceful, with a carnival-like atmosphere of chanting, singing, and marching. But within 20 minutes of parliament passing the bill, protesters in downtown Nairobi broke through the police cordon and surrounded the Parliament Buildings.
At 3 p.m., thousands of protestors overwhelmed the police and stormed into parliament, where they shattered glass panels and set fire to a section of the building. Between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., protesters engaged in similar acts of vandalism across the country, targeting national and county government buildings, ruling party offices, and the homes and businesses of MPs who passed the bill. These acts of violence were reported in Embu, Kiambu, Makueni, Nairobi, Nakuru, Nyeri, and Uasin Gishu Counties, and they appear to have been the spontaneous actions of local actors who were deciding in real time how to express their anger.
Yet the similarities between Mau Mau and the Gen Z movement should not be overstated as there are significant differences between the two. To begin with, unlike Mau Mau, which was dominated by the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru communities of central Kenya, the Gen Z movement has brought together young Kenyans from every corner of the country under the banner of a tribeless movement. Furthermore, whereas female guerrillas constituted only about five percent of Mau Mau fighters, with most of these women relegated to domestic chores and sexual services within the ranks, the Gen Z movement stands out in sharp relief because thousands of young women have been playing active and leading roles in the online mobilization and street protests.
Lastly, in contrast to Mau Mau, which was primarily a movement of the most marginalized groups in society, the Gen Z movement is a broad coalition that also includes professional bodies, civil society organizations, and other sections of the Kenyan middle class. In sum, the Gen Z movement is a new, more inclusive, broad-based movement that is in many ways unprecedented in Kenyan history. Any comparisons of Gen Z to Mau Mau should therefore consider both the historical similarities and differences between the two movements.
Although the Mau Mau movement began in the late 1940s, Mau Mau acts of organized violence did not start until 1952. The intervening four years were spent building the movement through mass oathing and the stockpiling of arms and ammunition. No one could join Mau Mau without swearing the secret, sacred oath of unity, which denounced British annexation of Kenya and called on everyone to join hands to reclaim the White Highlands. The oathing ceremony was divided into two parts: the ritual portion, where participants made vows of commitment to the movement; and a lecture segment, where oath administrators instructed new recruits on the aims of the Mau Mau struggle and the political and socioeconomic history of Kenya under British colonialism.
Significantly, Mau Mau oathing ceremonies always took place in the presence of community members who were already part of the movement. Mau Mau members thus participated in countless oathing ceremonies where the aims and history of their struggle were learned and relearned. Given that the vast majority of Mau Mau members were illiterate and semi-literate, the political education disseminated through mass oathing was critical to the growth and expansion of the movement. The effectiveness of this political education was evidenced by the overwhelming moral and material support that Mau Mau civilians provided to guerrillas after the war began.
Among the key lessons that today���s Gen Z activists can learn from Mau Mau, the most essential are building an organized movement and expanding political education among the youth. Over the past twelve months, Gen Z activists have shown that they are extremely effective at mobilizing thousands of young Kenyans through social media to come out to protest. The street demonstrations have become an important avenue for these youth to grieve in community, release pent-up anger and frustration, and ensure that their voices are being heard. The period of mobilization and actual demonstrations usually lasts for about a week before the energy begins to fizzle out. Everyone then goes back to their daily routine, the conversations continue online, and several weeks or months go by before the next round of protests starts all over again.
But what would happen if the periods of lull after every cycle of protests were used to build and expand the Gen Z movement? What difference would it make if members of the Gen Z movement congregated on their own terms rather than in response to yet another police killing or abduction of a government critic? What if the WhatsApp groups that have been so effective at mobilizing protestors were used to organize study groups and distribute weekly readings? What if the X Spaces that have become protest strategy rooms were refashioned into virtual classrooms where study groups could meet every week to discuss the distributed readings? Or what if the X Spaces were transformed into lecture rooms where veterans of Mwakenya and December Twelve Movement could be hosted every fortnight to share their experiences? The possibilities are endless, but the point is that Gen Z���s methods of mass mobilization can be repurposed into useful tools for expanding political education among the youth.
Expanding political education would create valuable spaces for members of the Gen Z movement to discuss, debate, and formulate their own political agenda, which currently risks being co-opted by different factions of the ruling elites. It would also allow the Gen Z movement to learn from other political movements in history, studying their aims, methods, achievements, and failures.
The need for the Gen Z movement to prioritize political education was clearly demonstrated during the Nane Nane Protests on August 8, 2024. What was initially billed as the ���mother of all protests��� was later described as a failure because only youth in Nairobi had taken to the streets. Their counterparts in Nyanza, Western, and Coast regions had all snubbed the protests. Whether by design or coincidence, August 8 was the same day that President William Ruto swore in his new cabinet, which included four leading opposition figures from the same regions that had ignored the protests.
When interviewed about the failure of Nane Nane in the Coast region, Gen Z activists in Lamu and Mombasa explained that the inclusion of former Mombasa governor Hassan Joho in the new cabinet had made them feel ���part and parcel of President William Ruto���s government.��� While this explanation might seem na��ve to Gen Z activists in Nairobi, it points to a deeper history of exclusion and belonging that has long characterized the Kenyan body politic. The Gen Z slogan of a tribeless movement is undoubtedly genuine, but it is an aspiration that must grapple with the harsh reality of six decades of tribalism and regional marginalization in the political economy of independent Kenya. Expanding political education would allow members of the Gen Z movement to learn about the shared histories and distinct struggles of different regions of the country. From the Luo youth of Kisumu who have long challenged police brutality under the slogan Luo Lives Matter, to the Somali youth of Garissa, Mandera, and Wajir who know all too well what it is like to be treated as a foreigner in your own country, to the Nubians of Kibera who have to jump through countless hoops to simply obtain a National Identity Card, prioritizing political education would enable Gen Z to build a truly nationalist movement that can recognize and accommodate the needs and aspirations of all Kenyans.
In conclusion, the memoirs of Mau Mau War veterans all emphasize the significance of oathing to the organization of their movement. In The Swords of Kirinyaga, for example, Kahinga Wachanga made the following insightful observation:
Although Kimathi, Mathenge, and Kaniu were our ���big leaders��� in the forest, there were [other leaders] in the movement [who were] not in the forest. They opposed the government in their [own] ways. There were [also] leaders in prison, detention, and in the reserves and towns. [Therefore,] no leader could reach all the people in the movement. We had no [single] leader or commandant except the oath. The oath was our leader.
Wachanga���s reflection is instructive because it highlights the decentralized nature of the Mau Mau movement and the importance of the political education that was disseminated through mass oathing. If the Gen Z movement wishes to follow in the footsteps of Mau Mau, then it must undertake the slow, difficult, but vital work of building an organized movement and expanding political education among the youth.
July 25, 2025
The climate finance crisis
The aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Idai in Mozambique. Image �� bpcreativedesign via Shutterstock.com. International climate finance, designed to protect the world���s most vulnerable nations from climate catastrophe, has created a system where responsibility and consequence operate in inverse proportion. After all, the countries that have had virtually no contribution to the climate crisis are condemned to face existential threats to their very survival, while the wealthy industrialized nations that traded the health of our planet for a GDP boost remain largely shielded from its worst effects.
Yet this system excludes the very beneficiaries it was intended to serve, a far cry from the mechanism of protection it was envisioned to be. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the coastal plains of Mozambique, where Mother Nature���s seemingly endless barrage of cyclones routinely wreaks havoc, exacting revenge on undeserving communities that have done little to anger her.
These are the same communities that remain locked out of the very mechanisms designed to protect them. This paradox is all the more befuddling considering that the culprit is not, as it often is, a lack of funding; in fact, in 2022, the OECD reported that ���developed countries materially surpassed their USD 100 billion climate finance commitment.��� The question is: If resources are in such plentiful supply, why is it then that less than 10 percent of climate finance reaches the countries most vulnerable to climate change? The answer lies in a system that has transformed abundance into scarcity through its very design.
Of the USD 115.9 billion in climate finance mobilized in 2022, the majority flows to middle-income countries with established institutional capacity, while the least developed countries���those facing the most severe climate impacts���receive disproportionately small shares.�� Mozambique���s exclusion is the unfortunate victim of the institutional barriers that systematically favor administrative sophistication over climate vulnerability. The structure of international climate finance centers around the concept of ���bankability,��� the requirement that climate projects demonstrate measurable financial returns to secure funding. This ultimately yields a system that conditions access to resources on elaborate feasibility studies, comprehensive risk assessments, and detailed financial projections. Unwittingly, these requirements presuppose the very institutional capacity that underdevelopment has denied.
The result? An absurd arrangement where countries with established bureaucratic infrastructure navigate funding mechanisms with ease, while nations confronting existential climate threats find themselves penalized for their lack of resources. The current regime embodies what amounts to a fundamental category error..
This category error is most evident in the impossible task of quantifying climate adaptation���s primary benefit: avoided catastrophe. How does one calculate the economic value of a cyclone that never destroys a village, or a drought that never forces mass migration? The commercial approach demands measurable returns precisely where measurement becomes meaningless, creating a system that systematically fails to account for the very outcomes it purports to achieve.
The predominant focus on mitigation over adaptation serves only to exacerbate this perversity. While multilateral institutions engage in intricate debates over carbon-pricing mechanisms and emission-reduction targets, Mozambican communities require immediate investments in flood defenses and drought-resistant agricultural systems. These adaptation measures, however essential for survival, cannot conform to the quantification that contemporary finance demands.
The result is a system that prioritizes abstract carbon credits over concrete seawalls, condemning vulnerable communities to drown in bureaucratic indifference while the waters rise around them. The shortcomings of the climate finance system yield detrimental consequences for the communities on the front lines; for Mozambique, it encompasses the collapse of agricultural systems across a nation already scarred by colonial extraction.
Mozambique���s rain-fed agriculture, feeding over 80 percent of the population, will be devastated by the two-pronged onslaught of rising temperatures and erratic rainfall. Prolonged droughts will deplete soil moisture and groundwater reserves, forcing farmers to abandon fields that have sustained communities for generations. Simultaneously, intensifying cyclones will destroy crops at harvest, wash away topsoil, and contaminate coastal fresh water with salt water. Add to that an explosion in pest and disease pressures as warmer temperatures expand the range of agricultural pathogens, and small-scale farmers lacking drought-resistant seeds or irrigation will watch their livelihoods evaporate into thin air.
Consequently, the World Bank projects that climate change will push an additional 1.6 million Mozambicans into poverty by 2050, no small feat for a nation of only 33 million people. That���s not to mention the relentless human cost of the crisis we���ve erected: Cyclone Idai���s 2019 assault claimed over 600 lives, while recent cyclones have killed 500 people and displaced half a million across the region. Each disaster brings not only a reminder of the policy shortcomings that failed to avert it but also a warning that the tragedy is merely the latest in a procession, each more unforgiving than the last.
This systematic exclusion constitutes a betrayal of the fundamental principles underlying international climate cooperation. If merely meeting their material financial quotas absolves wealthy nations of their climate obligations while those very resources never reach the populations most at risk, then climate finance ceases to be meaningful climate action, traversing into nothing more than sophisticated moral laundering.
Any attempt to address the exclusion of countries like Mozambique hinges on the fundamental restructuring of the international climate financial architecture to prioritize vulnerability assessment over administrative capability. This demands fast-track mechanisms for highly vulnerable countries, with simplified processes that acknowledge the constraints under which these nations operate.
Capacity building must be reconceptualized as integral to climate finance rather than a prerequisite for accessing it. This reconceptualization proves transformative in how we understand the relationship between institutional development and climate protection, treating capacity building as both a means and an end of climate interventions rather than a barrier to accessing them.
The international community stands at a crossroads: construct a system that serves those most at risk or continue the elaborate charade of climate action while abandoning the world���s most vulnerable communities to an increasingly hostile planet���all in service of maintaining the bureaucratic sophistication that has become our most sacred, and most lethal, ritual.
July 24, 2025
All pull together
Demonstrators flood the streets in Nairobi, Kenya, the third day of protest against Finance Bill 2024. Image �� Simon Libz via Shutterstock.com. The recent protests in Kenya point in various directions. Primarily, the inability of the government to provide adequate benefits to the citizenry. The catalyst was the death of Albert Omondi Ojwang, a prominent blogger and teacher, in police custody. His death, alongside long-standing frustrations over rising living costs, widespread government corruption, and police brutality, have galvanized Kenya���s youth, who a year ago also took to the streets to demand #EndFinanceBill and #RutoMustGo. But of curious importance is the social and political orientation of its language. I want to focus on the phrase ���tribeless, leaderless, partyless������what has come to describe the protests��� transcendence of ���regional, political, ethnic, social, and economic boundaries.��� What might this language reveal? What might it conceal? What could be slipping away, unsaid, in the protests, media, or political rallies?
I shall argue that the language of the protest, intentional or otherwise, conceals those ���centers of complicity��� which form part of our most immediate environments; it reveals our willingness to protect those environments by ���othering��� the source of our social and economic predicaments. Put plainly, by renouncing the ���ethnic,��� the ���social,��� and the ���political,��� we shield, in one way or other, our kin local actors and, in doing so, absolve them of blame.
This reflection was inspired by a series of rather arbitrary questions: Why is the protest aimed at the national government, the presidency in particular? Why are county governments and their leadership on the periphery of outrage? How have governors and members of parliament managed to escape the leash?
One recognizes in these questions the tension between the national and the local, the center and the periphery. But I find it much easier to ask whether there is something fundamental in the question: Why there, not here? In the end, I will draw from these questions a corollary political possibility, and that regards the nature of devolution. With this political feature, the overall reflection could be expressed this way: What does the language of protest say about our understanding of devolution, its practice, its actors, and even its core intent? What has it allowed us to conceal and reveal about our political and social selves?
A lot has been said about the origins and markers of the protest. Its facts are as good as its speculations. I will not indulge in that debate for fear that looking for origins often implies missing the point. Origins rarely matter where social consequences are profound. Whether historical antecedents of a war are myth, fact, or speculation is not the point. The point is: Whatever the reasons, things ���took on a life of their own.��� The result is war and its consequences, protest and its effects.
It has been said that the recent protests transcend ���regional, political, ethnic, social, and economic boundaries,��� as contained in the sequence ���tribeless, leaderless, partyless.��� Astonishingly, this representation has galvanized support across the country. Protests have been witnessed in various counties. For many analysts the reason for the movement���s effectiveness is simple: its transcendence of identities. But if we provoke this assumption, if we ask why this transcendence, the answer proves elusive.
I add to the pool of speculations the following meditation: The language is effective precisely because it is not meant to be. Or at least it does not purport to prove itself effective for its own cause. Such language recognizes itself as the source of a problem while alienating itself from that source. It is as though one looked in the mirror and, confronted by the potential horror of the reflection, refused to look again. That horror, constituted by elements of oneself, is deemed part of the predicament. Thus, my identity, tribe, class, or region becomes my enemy, a source of my depravity. The corruption in my country, the unemployment, and the destitution become consequences of my ���particularity.��� I conclude that, to escape my depravity, I must look away. And as I do so, I desire that other particularities echo that impulse, follow in that direction. We share in the predicament after all, and that mutual assumption makes us whole, one, formidable.
Yet this is a language of paradoxes. It conceals even as it reveals.�� What it reveals is our constant anxiety regarding our identities, and more so, the potential and degree of their viciousness if untamed. It is then not surprising that the language of ���non-identity��� coexists with recalls of the ethnically charged events that culminated in the tragedy of 2008. It is as though ���identifying��� oneself would be to associate with that tragedy, to be its cause and its wielder: the tribe, the class, the party that ���led��� it. For even the title ���leader��� suggests confidence in one���s status, a crude conviction in oneself that negates the rank of others. To have a particular orientation is at once to assert one���s difference, and to be different potentiates the exploitation of those less like us. It is thus far nobler to be ���less��� of oneself��� tribe -less, leader -less, party -less. In taking on this ���lessness,��� one aims to become an unidentified particular of an unidentified pool. One pool. One nation.
But as one would guess, the story of ���our nation��� is too recent to weather all particularities. That is one reason: We are too young to age in a melting pot. The second reason is that identity is not a metaphor; it is not a feather easily plucked by wind. If anything, it is a psychosocial orientation that endures any attempt to tame it in words. Language fails us all the time; the depth of our experiential lives, that echo at the deeper ends of our brains, resists any naming, any language. So, we arrive at the crossroads, at the paradox. What we renounce affirms itself. What is concealed in language escapes our vision.
And what do we affirm without naming? What do we see without pointing with our fingers? A more rudimentary possibility is this: Beyond the recognition that one���s identity might be the source of one���s predicament lies the almost impossible task of critical introspection. I turn away from the mirror, but the mirror does not turn away from me. Unbeknown to me, turning away from the horrors of myself disguises an attempt to shield myself from the condemnation of others. It is hell to be seen in my elementary skin. It is hell to be called a tribalist, a loyalist of a particular party, a descendant of a certain class. So I must turn away. But even then, I have escaped my predicament without critical acceptance; one can say I have undertaken this turn involuntarily. I have turned away, not so much because I have made peace with my culpability but because I want to dissolve in the blamelessness of others. The melting pot I have entered is a dissolution of other turnings, other hells, escaping tragic associations and guilt. In this pot we are all blameless, all tribeless, all leaderless, all partyless.
Without critical, organic introspection, the language of this melting pot is a metaphor. It fails to capture the echo in my brain, or the stimuli of my immediate environment. For with or without my knowledge, attempting to shield myself from blame inevitably entails shielding all those of my kind, those in my immediate environment. When I enter the melting pot, I enter with tetherings. I enter with my tribe. So what remains of my ���tribeless��� insignia?
There is something to be said about why devolution made sense as a mechanism for unifying a nearly fragmenting country after the 2007���2008 tragedy. A similar sense extends, albeit unsuccessfully, to efforts in other African countries adopting decentralization. In the case of our country, the rationale for devolution was countering the centralization of power which had marginalized communities. Concentration of power had proved unsustainable. The elections were the tipping point, where accumulated ethnic resentments linked to social needs like access to land and autonomy came to fore. The 2010 constitution introduced devolution, providing an avenue for local autonomy over political and social processes, including land appropriation.
Hence explanations often attribute this political shift to the desire for inclusion, the need to bring peripheral voices to the center. The ideal was to realize a national whole with shared ���values and principles��� and to limit avenues of tension. Invoking Dr. Migai Akech, Nic Cheeseman and colleagues, in their essay Decentralisation in Kenya: The Governance of Governors observe, ���the new Constitution establishes national values and principles of governance that seek to diffuse, if not eliminate altogether, the ethnic tensions fueled by perceptions of marginalization and exclusion.��� One might argue that this ideal has coalesced over the last ten years, despite staggering in some regions, like in the north; but even in those regions, it has occurred, with considerable intermittence.
We might interject here that, at the most fundamental level, the devolution intent was to localize resentment: to turn the tribal inward, and in doing so, displace blame from the once hegemonic center historically aligned with certain ethnic interests, to organic peripheries. For, by seeking inclusion, devolution simultaneously affirmed ethnic localization.�� ���The production of locality and the production of nativeness,��� writes Achille Mbembe in Afropolitanism, ���constitute two sides of the same movement.���
If devolution aimed to localize resentment, how then could we explain a language turning away from its periphery? Why is protest de-localizing, or precisely, de-tribalizing? In the language of protest, to be native is to be the tribal self; the local arena is ���autochthonous,��� and here kinship produces solidarity. Local actors are my tribal kin with whom I share identity. In becoming ���tribeless,��� I annihilate my identity, and simultaneously, those tethered to me. That way I shield myself and them from blame. To say ���I am tribeless��� is to say ���I have no tribe; my tribal kins do not exist.��� Where there is no existence, there is no culpability, there is no blame. There is no corrupt tribal actor���no complicit governor or member of parliament. What explains my predicament, my unemployment, my insecurity, and all my economic immobility, must thus be located somewhere else. It must be beyond my immediate environment, perhaps at the center, not on this periphery. Perhaps it is at the seat of the president.
We may not know the direction the latest round of protests will take. But so far, its success or effectiveness has been punctured by strife and loss. Could it be that by claiming to be less of oneself, one invites more tragedy than one aims to avert? And could the language of the protest profit by embracing its fullness, turning back to the mirror and reclaiming itself, with its horrors and anxieties? And could the logic of devolution be revitalized and utilized to place burden on peripheral actors who may well be complicit in the predicament?
Devolution brought its blessings and demons to local landscapes. It brought considerable autonomy. But as Jeremy Lind observes, it also shifted resource competition from the center to the periphery. Governors, MPs, and members of the County Assembly are the new ���centers of complicity��� within these peripheries. Could a de-localized language muddle the essential frames of identity and, more so, blur borders of blame? Could it cloud vision, turning it away from itself? Perhaps a precarious turn, perhaps a self-destructive one? It is true the history of our country has revealed to us the complicity of our center. But it is also the case that if the predicament is so acute at home, the default should be to scrutinize our own kin. The periphery is also the new center.
July 23, 2025
Eurafrique reloaded
Demonstration calling for independence of Western Sahara in front of the Moroccan Wall, 2008. Image �� Natalia de la Rubia via Shutterstock.com In October 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted with great pomp by the Moroccan monarch, Mohammed VI. This visit had been preceded a few weeks earlier by the decision of Macron to (openly) recognize Morocco���s sovereignty over the occupied territory of Western Sahara. To understand why Macron made such a decision, it���s essential to broaden the historical, political, and geographical analysis, going back to the early years following World War II. Indeed, analyzing the Eurafrique project developed in the 1950s helps us identify enduring European ambitions in Africa that remain relevant today.
In light of this project, there���s no doubt that Macron���s Sahrawi ���gift��� to Mohammed VI is, above all, a strategic opportunity serving France���s���and, more broadly, the European Union���s���geostrategic interests, enabling France repositioning on the African continent following its Sahelian setback. It is undeniable that the Eurafrique project was developed methodically, taking time, geography, and opportunities into account. In essence, Eurafrique was designed with a very long-term vision���and in that sense, it is still unfinished.
After World War II, French strategists argued that for the then-weakened France to maintain its position as a global power, Paris would need to rely on France���s African territories, which could play a key role in its international ambitions. For them, France���s industrialization depended on a Euro-African perspective, closely tied to geostrategic and military considerations. Africa���s land, energy, and raw materials would allow France to maintain its global political and economic stature. A key aspect of the Eurafrique project was that it would also serve as a counterbalance to the anticolonial positions and growing influence of the United States and the former USSR.
However, for France and Europe to fully exploit Africa���s opportunities, it was first necessary to strengthen the European continent. In this regard, the Schuman Plan (1951) and the construction of the European Union were indeed part of this broader Eurafrique project. The first step was to unite and develop other European nations, such as Spain and Italy. The reunification of Germany was also considered part of Eurafrique���s strategic process. It is difficult���if not impossible���to disconnect the Eurafrique project from Gaddafi���s fall in 2011; although Eurafrique���s theorists could not have predicted this event, Libya���s geostrategic position was nonetheless explicitly mentioned in the project.
In 1952, Anton Zischka already argued in his book Afrique, compl��ment de l���Europe that Europeans needed to focus on countries along the northern and southern Mediterranean coasts. According to him, ���Libya, a matter of European���even global���interest, is a ���test case��� for the entire African continent.��� He added: ���Fortunately, work is being done in the French possessions of North Africa, especially Morocco and Niger.���
This speaks to the strategic planning of Eurafrique���requiring patience and adjustments. Consider this passage from 1957:
We must talk about Eurafrique, and talk about it a lot. The concept, full of possibilities, is still undefined and will only become clearer through a slow process shaped by competing trends. This current lack of form is not a flaw but a chance to shape it with evolving ideas and facts. Key words like ���slow process,��� ���to shape,��� and ���evolution��� emphasize the need for strategic planning and flexibility according to historical developments.
Given Europe���s strategy and adaptation to events, Gaddafi���s fall is clearly tied to the ongoing construction of Eurafrique. In this respect, Libya reminds us of geography���s critical importance with Robert Kaplan and Nicholas Spykman arguing in The Revenge of Geography (2013) that geography ���reveals a government���s long-term intentions and remains the most fundamental factor in foreign policy, because it is the most permanent.���
Regarding Libya, in 2019, French authorities stated that ���we support everything that ensures the safety of the French people and France���s allies, including backing Haftar and his Libyan National Army.����� What���s more, a 2008 French white paper on defense and national security already noted that France���s ���strategic priority zone��� stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, including the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Sahel-Saharan region.
Gaddafi was a real thorn in Paris���s side with respect to its former African colonies. By pouring oil dollars into the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), which he founded, he tried to diminish France���s influence over these countries. After his fall, Morocco attempted to take over CEN-SAD���s leadership, even hosting a meeting of its foreign ministers in Rabat, reiterating its ambition to lead the region���possibly securing greater support for its aspiration to control the Sahara-Sahel area.
With Morocco���France���s key regional ally���at the helm of CEN-SAD, Paris would wield even more influence over Sahelian states. This strategy is reinforced by Israel���s growing regional presence and unwavering alliance with Rabat. As such, Morocco���s recognition by France regarding Western Sahara clearly aligns with a broader Eurafrique strategy.
In this respect, and as Malek Bennabi wrote in La lutte id��ologique (2014), ���Colonialism will always find someone willing to hand over the keys of the fortress in exchange for financial compensation to corrupt their conscience.��� For Bennabi, colonialism���s ideological strategy is to prevent contact between thought and political action���rendering thought sterile and politics blind. It adapts continuously, exploiting mass ignorance and relying on money as a weapon. Bennabi further explains:
Civilizations are not created at random. Colonialism devises military plans and sends instructions informed by deep psychological knowledge of colonized societies, allowing it to act accordingly to manipulate their consciences by class and social level. It uses a psychological map of the colonized world, updated daily by specialists in idea surveillance and control. Colonialism uses the language of ideas���easily corruptible among the intellectual class.
Today, Eurafrique is increasingly relevant as France and the EU face political and economic setbacks from emerging economies like China and the BRICS+ bloc. In a 2024 report, Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, warned that Europe is falling behind the US and China. For Draghi, the EU now faces an existential threat and is doomed to ���a slow death��� if it does not change course.
Initially, Eurafrique was conceptualized with long-term strategy, requiring patience and adaptability. It was not meant to exploit Africa immediately, but to lay rational foundations and prioritize which objectives would be achieved first. For Zischa , ���the creation of Eurafrique is a concrete, simple, controllable enterprise���a task for engineers, unconcerned with global peace congresses or advertising slogans. Eurafrique will be built by technicians, coldly, on concrete data.��� Clearly, patience, strategy, adaptation, and cool-headedness have always been the guiding principles of Eurafrique���s architects.
Thus, Macron���s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the occupied Western Sahara territory must be analyzed through the lens of France���s broader geostrategic ambitions in the Sahel���part of the Eurafrique plan.
Expelled from the Sahel by the front door, France intends to return through Western Sahara, via Morocco. Concerning France���s presence in the Sahel, former French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian once described an ���intelligent reorganization��� as ���reducing our military presence while increasing our influence.��� Given the new geopolitical reality, Paris is shifting its strategy toward Rabat.
In this regard, analyzing Iran in a 2009 report titled Which Path to Persia?, the Brookings Institution explained that it may be difficult for the US to directly intervene in Iran for a regime change. For the authors, one credible and safe option would be to ���leave it to Bibi������ that is, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Analyzing the Sahel geopolitical situation, a close parallel can be drawn between Iran and Israel with Morocco and the Sahel region.
By recognizing Morocco���s sovereignty over the occupied Western Sahara, Paris is repositioning itself in order to maintain its presence and geostrategic interests in the Sahel region. During Macron���s visit to Morocco, he and Mohammed VI ceremoniously declared a ���new bilateral chapter,��� a ���new ambition for the next thirty years��� with broad strategic aims to anchor this renewed Franco-Moroccan relationship at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, at a time of rapid transformation of the international landscape. In other words: ���Leave the Sahel to Mohammed VI!���
It is also through this wider regional geostrategy that Morocco is luring those Sahelian landlocked states such as Mali into a hypothetical project that would give them access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Western Sahara occupied territory. But, as the Malian Doulaye Konate of the Association of African Historians rightly puts it,�����whoever controls Mali controls West Africa, if not all of Africa!���
This new equation also shows���above all���that while the Eurafrique project might seem, to the average person, to be forgotten in some dusty archive box, it is in fact very much alive in the minds of shadowy geostrategic planners. As the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reminds us, ���the things that we do behind the scene, far from the public eye, are far more important than the slogan charade.���
Last but not least, through Morocco, this new French diplomatic offensive also underlines that Africa as a whole remains a theater for the great powers. In this regard, according to Achille Mbembe, ���Africa has been���and remains���the laboratory of a ruthless globalization.��� The inability or refusal of many African leaders to understand this, their lack of planning and long-term strategic vision, facilitates the entrenchment of foreign powers���militarily, politically, economically, and culturally���across the continent, endangering the very nature of Africans��� existence. In this respect, it is important to note that while African countries have won political independence, they have not yet won the battle of ideas.
And as long as their leaders do not recognize that understanding the causes of their failure is more important than fighting the symptoms, there will be no salvation for Africans. As Malek Bennabi aptly said, ���a society experiencing a dual ethical and intellectual crisis at the level of its leadership cannot ensure the conditions necessary for immunity and effectiveness of ideas. Worse still, it becomes vulnerable to pernicious intrusions due to either an ethical deficit within its environment or an intellectual deficit that betrays it.��� Meanwhile, there is no doubt that after reducing its military presence in the Sahel, Paris fully intends to increase its presence in Africa, relying on Rabat, which is itself a close ally of Tel Aviv.
July 22, 2025
The grift tank
Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash. In 2019, the Trump administration suffered a public embarrassment when Mina Chang, a senior appointee in the State Department���s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, was exposed as a fraud. Chang had fabricated key parts of her r��sum�����claiming to have spoken at major political conventions, studied at Harvard, served on a UN panel, and even doctored a Time magazine cover with her face on it. Her scandal revealed more than personal dishonesty; it exposed the negative effects of influence laundering industry on critical government organs such as the ones responsible for vetting.
Chang���who ran a military-linked NGO active in the Middle East and Africa���passed through what should have been a serious vetting process, thanks to Washington���s insular and self-reinforcing culture, where legitimacy depends less on expertise and more on the appearance of authority. Access, credentials, and influence are cobbled together through affiliations, short-term appointments, and think tank fellowships���exchanged within a closed circle of lobbyists, consultants, and political appointees. At the center of this network are think tanks���organizations that call themselves research centers but in practice operate as front offices for corporate, military, and geopolitical agendas.
Think tanks come in many varieties. Some, like the Cato Institute, focus on domestic policy. Others, such as the Atlantic Council, project international influence. While they claim to serve the public interest���championing peace, democracy, or global order���they in reality serve their donors: energy corporations, weapons manufacturers, lobbying networks, and foreign governments. These institutions are deeply aligned with the US security establishment and the broader neoconservative foreign policy consensus that has shaped American global behavior for decades.
Although Africa lacks a dedicated think tank ecosystem like those built around the Middle East or East Asia, this does not mean it is spared the influence-peddling machinery of Washington. On the contrary, it may suffer the worst of it. Treated as an appendage, Africa is handed over to some of the least-qualified actors in a field already infamous for low standards. In other regions, the presence of media scrutiny creates some pressure to strive for a veneer of credibility. Not so with Africa. Despite the continent���s centrality to US commercial, military, and geopolitical interests, it remains obscure enough that anyone with minimal savviness���military contractors, consultants, lobbyists, failed academics���can spin whatever narrative they promote, unchecked. In that vacuum of scrutiny, impostors thrive. One of the clearest examples is J. Peter Pham.
Pham epitomizes inflated credentials and fabricated expertise. Affiliated with the Atlantic Council, he presents himself as a former diplomat, an Africa expert, and an ���author of more than 300 essays and reviews and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books.��� In reality, his career is built not on expertise, but on the vacuum of scrutiny that surrounds Africa policy in Washington.
Pham���s prolific output, upon closer inspection, consists of little more than boilerplate opinion pieces in obscure outlets, recycling Washington clich��s about the world, and repackaging neocon dogma as strategic insight. His books on Africa are entirely self-published, printed through print-on-demand platforms like Amazon���s CreateSpace, which publish anything submitted for a fee.
His book on Liberia was printed by a company that specializes in aviation stationery; Several of his other titles were released through different publishers that share one curious trait: none of them have a functioning website���or even the basic digital footprint that would suggest a legitimate, operational business. Generally speaking, the books themselves, are thin, poorly edited, and error-ridden publications. Although they gave him a career, they are hard to find on Google. One reviewer of the Liberia work wrote, ���This may be the most poorly edited book I���ve ever read.��� Another noted, ���This reads more like a thesis paper than a book and is filled with grammatical errors.��� Even the more generous reviewer admitted, ���It didn���t go through any editing process.���
It���s easy to see, from reading them, why no publisher accepted them. Pham himself seemed aware of this. In an application for a faculty of the year in 2010 (he is an aggressive self-promoter), he claimed���falsely���to have two books forthcoming with Yale University Press: Liberia: The Restoration of a Failed State and Africa Matters: A Strategy for Winning the New Scramble. More than two fifteen years later, neither exists.
It is a testament to the absence of standards for becoming an ���expert��� on Africa that Pham secured a professorship at James Madison University on such a flimsy record. The program he joined���nebulously titled Justice Studies���was less an academic department than a vocational pipeline, designed to prepare students for careers in law enforcement, corrections, and homeland security. It was structured to align with post-9/11 federal funding priorities and had little to do with traditional scholarship. Yet that didn���t stop Pham from marketing himself as a professor of justice studies, political science, and Africana studies.
Unsurprisingly, his teaching reflected the same “fake it till you make it” ethos that had propelled his entir career. Two of the courses he taught, as he explains in the faculty of the year application were ���International Terrorism��� and one titled ���Perspectives on Comparative Justice ��� In the former, students were assigned a terrorist group to monitor and report on throughout the semester���not to understand the political or historical context, but to rehearse surveillance logic. In the latter course, he claimed to draw on his own ���experience��� at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, based on a self-published book about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Pham proudly adds that many of his students went on to careers in national security. The classroom, like the rest of his career, served as a stage for performance���not critical inquiry or genuine engagement with Africa.
During this period, Pham also worked as an adjunct lecturer at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)���a right-wing, neoconservative think tank closely aligned with the Israeli lobby and known for its aggressive, Islamophobic framing of global affairs. In that capacity, he wrote a number of blog posts on Africa, always seeking to draw tenuous links between US wars in the Middle East and events on the African continent. In at least two articles, he recycled standard FDD talking points, inciting against Lebanese Shia communities in West Africa. In one, he claimed that they were involved in the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone.
Pham presented himself as a US diplomat. The reality is less impressive: a two-year stint as Special Envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa���a low-profile and largely symbolic post handed to him by Mike Pompeo as a political appointment. The role was not a recognition of diplomatic skill but a reward for tireless networking, conveniently attached to a portfolio with little authority or responsibility. Pham does�� have some diplomatic experience but with the Vatican, but as usual, he is always exagerates. In some biographical introductions, he described himself as a ���former United States Ambassador to the Vatican������a claim that is entirely false. In reality, he was a low-level Vatican embassy staffer, serving as a priest in two or three countries.
True to form, Pham used even this marginal appointment to further inflate his profile on the global stage. Despite holding a largely ceremonial US envoy role, he somehow managed to collect the highest national honors from no fewer than five undemocratic African presidents���decorations typically reserved for liberation heroes, heads of state, or those with decades of meaningful service. These included the Commander of the National Order of Mali, the Commander of the National Order of Burkina Faso, the Officer of the National Order of Merit of Niger, the Commander of the National Order of Merit of Gabon, and the Commander of the Order of Friendship of Peoples of Burundi.
What���s striking about Pham is not merely his lack of genuine expertise, but the cartoonish way he imagines what expertise in Africa looks like. His writing belongs to the lowbrow strain of a long-standing Western genre: the adventurer-hero intervening in a continent defined by misery, chaos, and backwardness. The highbrow version of this fantasy is epitomized by Heart of Darkness, where Conrad���s narrator doesn���t see Africa as a place with people, history, or thought���but as a formless backdrop of jungle, echoing drums, and unknowable savagery. Even in his moments of sympathy, Africans appear only as groans, shadows, or primal impulses���never as full human beings.
This colonial fantasy has endured for over a century, shaping the worldview of a certain type of Western adventurer. These are not scholars, but self-styled ���Africa experts��� whose knowledge is stitched together from NGO brochures, war memoirs, and Hollywood tropes. They remain oblivious to the continent���s intellectual traditions and the African thinkers who have long dismantled these narratives. Instead of moving past them, they seek to reenact them���often in more sensationalized form. A recent example is In Congo���s Shadow, a book that drew attention for repackaging colonial clich��s as humanitarian concern.
Pham belongs squarely in this tradition. His version of Africa is a landscape of failure and violence, of disease and disaster, waiting for someone like him to impose order. There is no interest in the continent���s internal debates, historical legacies, or political visions. What Pham offers is not analysis but reenactment���one more performance of the colonial gaze, dressed up in the language of security, state failure, and counterterrorism.
Pham���s own account of how he came to the field of Africa studies exposes the absence of genuine intellectual engagement. In the faculty award application, he explained that after 9/11, he ���found not only a research topic, but the pivot��� around which to balance his roles as teacher, citizen, and scholar. That pivot, he claimed, was the idea that failed states ���are not only the havens for terrorism, but also incubators of poverty, disease, violence, and injustice���all of which, in turn, feed into the vicious cycle of escalating violence that knows no borders.���
And yet, this outrageously caricatured vision works���especially in Washington. In fact, the more exaggerated and simplistic the narrative, the more believable it becomes. That is why Pham has been able to reinvent himself as a preeminent Africanist in the US capital. He is everywhere: on panels, in white papers, in policy briefings���any forum with ���Africa��� in its name, and many that have nothing to do with Africa at all. In those cases, he inserts himself anyway, claiming to bring ���the African perspective.��� And it works. In a system that rewards performance over substance, he delivers the right performance.
But the danger here is not merely the inflation of credentials or the reenactment of colonial fantasies. In the context of US Africa policy, these performances are far from harmless. They shape narratives, influence decision-makers, and ultimately crystallize into policy. And when that policy is driven by ignorance, opportunism, or someone else���s agenda, the result is not just distortion���it is real harm.
Take, for instance, Pham���s efforts to insert the Israeli agenda into West African politics by inciting against the Lebanese Shia community���fabricating links to regional conflicts to align African affairs with the priorities of Washington���s Middle East hawks. Or consider a more recent and consequential example: the Somali civil war.
Since 1991, the northern region of Somalia has claimed independence as ���Somaliland��� and sought international recognition. For much of that time, this claim was widely understood���even by its own leaders���as a political bargaining position rather than a settled fact. But this changed with the rise of the global war on terror and Washington���s practice of outsourcing its foreign policy to private actors and lobbyists. The secessionist leadership, through figures like Pham and his network of lobbyists and think tanks, found new access to US power by casting themselves as counterterrorism allies.
What had once been a complex but containable Somali political dispute was inflated into an international flashpoint. Like lawyers turning a family dispute into a scorched-earth divorce, these lobbyists rebranded the issue as one of global strategic importance. Somalia was painted as a Chinese proxy; Somaliland, as a besieged democratic partner. This act of narrative laundering injected fresh volatility into an already fragile situation���and helped reignite a civil conflict that Somalia was only beginning to move beyond.
In 2022, violence finally erupted when communities in northern Somalia opposed to the secession protested, and the secessionist security forces responded with live ammunition. A popular uprising followed, forcing the secessionist forces out of the city. In retaliation, secessionist forces shelled Las Anod for nine months, killing hundreds and displacing over a hundred thousand. The UN and Amnesty International condemned the attacks as indiscriminate. Secessionist leaders refused to talk in large part because they believed Pham and other lobbyists in Washington, DC, think tanks would deliver US recognition.
More recently, these same operatives floated a grotesque proposal: to ethnically cleanse the survivors of the Gaza genocide to the secessionist region of northern Somalia in exchange for US recognition. Desperate for legitimacy, the secessionist authorities expressed willingness to consider the plan. But it collapsed under near-universal condemnation���including firm rejection by the Somali government and by Palestinians themselves.
Pham is not exceptional. He is representative. He is part of a conflict entrepreneurship industry���former ambassadors, failed academics,�� military contractors, freelance consultants, self-appointed humanitarians���who have repositioned themselves as Africa experts in a space that asks little and rewards spectacle. Their credentials are often stitched together from a series of inflated or misleading claims: a few weeks abroad turned into ���field experience,��� opinion pieces framed as research, and unpaid advisory roles described as government service. It���s the standard formula���just enough activity to build a r��sum��, just enough jargon to sound credible. They speak fluently about security, peacebuilding, or investment, but their real function is to repackage someone else���s agenda and sell it to Washington as expert insight.
July 21, 2025
Helen Zille’s transphobia
Helen Zille, at a Freedom Day Rally in Mamelodi, Tshwane. Image via Democratic Alliance on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. Helen Zille has been spewing vitriol on X again, and this time her target is trans people. Her tweet comes following the UK ruling to limit the definition of sex to a binary assigned at birth. Zille celebrated alongside prominent ���gender-critical��� figures like JK Rowling, tweeting: ���They have protected the rights of women across the English-speaking world from a contagion as dangerous, socially, as Covid was, medically.���
Several South African queer organizations (including the Triangle Project, African Trans Network, and Gender Dynamix) voiced condemnation, calling for a public apology and for the Democratic Alliance to take disciplinary action. Many warn that Zille���s public status may galvanize support for views that endanger trans South Africans already disproportionately vulnerable to violence and stigma. Indeed, the fringe gender-critical group First Do No Harm SA quickly released their own statement thanking Zille for her ���courage��� because, ���until now FDHNSA has been the only voice speaking out ������ about the ���fact��� that sex ���cannot be changed.���
It���s not the first time that Zille, current chairperson of the DA���s Federal Council, has come under fire for her comments online.�� Perhaps most infamously, in 2017, she faced disciplinary action after tweeting that colonialism was ���not ONLY negative.��� More recently, in 2023, she received backlash for a prior instance of transphobia.
In light of the rapidly growing moral and legal panic around transgender rights in the Global North, Zille���s comments cannot be dismissed as simply an offshoot of reactionary thought. Rather, they illuminate the disturbing alliance between the anti-gender movement and colonial white supremacy. Whether intentional or not, her comments rest on a history of policing sex and gender in the service of colonial domination. Certainly, the dubious language of her tweet raises an eyebrow: when she says ���the English-speaking world,��� to whom exactly is Zille referring?
Binary sex was enforced by colonial powers to establish racial hierarchy. Knowledge regimes that were part myth-making and part pseudo-science claimed that the more ���civilized��� a group was, the greater the difference between male and female. In Southern Africa in particular, this idea was manipulated to prove the ���superiority��� of whiteness by claiming that intersexuality was more common among Africans.
This trope of the sexually ambiguous African was promoted just as the existence of sex diversity among Europeans was being increasingly ���corrected��� by surgical intervention. To be sure, modes of controlling sex were violent against all trans and intersex people, but they were meted out differently based on race. Colonial scientists and doctors produced a slew of deeply biased texts to back up claims that black bodies were ���naturally��� more sexually non-normative. Meanwhile, in Europe, invasive surgeries were increasingly performed on white intersex children. While black and brown children were marked as already ���unfixable��� by their race, white children were positioned as ���at risk,��� and in need of ���protection��� through ���correcting��� their sex into a male/female binary.
Decrying the abuse of ���vulnerable children��� and (cis) women is an emotional flashpoint all too commonly deployed by the gender-critical movement. Zille, too, echoes such sentiments in her Facebook follow-up to the offending tweet, writing that ���the greatest danger has been posed to vulnerable tweens, teens and adolescents.��� While it is seldom explicitly stated that this refers to white children, it remains uncanny that the gender critical feminist brigade that Zille has aligned herself with comprises a majority of Global North white women���who insist that their phobic diatribe is about protecting women and children���s ���rights��� and a ���common sense��� sex binary. It is tempting to point out that British colonizers, too, claimed to be ���protecting��� both ���women��� and ���rationality,��� both narrowly defined.
The apartheid regime exercised its own racialised controls over binary sex. In 1974, the National Party legalized the change of sex for individuals who had undergone surgery. While this may seem surprising, it granted the state power over designating the ���correct��� sex to (mostly white) individuals who had undergone what they deemed sufficient medical processes. It is also significant that gender-affirming surgery at the time was largely employed to ���cure��� homosexuality. This raises the question: if legal recognition is not new, is the problem with trans existence itself, or with greater self-determination?
While the gender-criticals might not explicitly say ���white��� women and ���white��� children, they don���t need to: their nostalgia for a fictitious past of ���untainted��� binary sex is glaringly resonant with colonial discourse.
For now, Zille seems unsatisfied with the relative lack of uptake of transphobic discourse by South African state actors. However, while a public apology is a start, it is not enough, nor is characterizing ���GogoZille��� (as she is sometimes playfully referred to) as an individual bad egg.
We must be proactive to prevent the anti-gender movement from gaining more traction on South African soil, and strengthen alliances between African and transnational groups who have been resisting the transphobic moral panic since even before it blew up in the US and UK. Let us reject the divisive rhetoric that seeks to split the ���LGB��� from the ���TQI+.��� The struggles of sex- and gender-diverse minorities in Africa have been intertwined since long before the coining of the terms transgender or intersex.
Zille���s tweets hail an opportunity for South Africans to let our actions speak as loudly as our international ���LGBTQI+-friendly��� reputation does. If there is an exceptionalism we should lean into, it is this: white supremacy and its bedfellow transphobia should have no home in South Africa.
July 18, 2025
The specter of Bandung
Kazan, Russia, October 23. Image �� Madina Nurmanova via Shutterstock. At the BRICS Dialogue with Developing Countries in Nizhny Novgorod in June 2024, South Africa���s then Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, when asked about BRICS���s tangible support for African countries, emphasized the need to ���expand dialogue capacities��� and ���create space for the voices of the Global South to be heard.��� While diplomatically worded, her response clearly illustrated that even at the highest levels, BRICS remains distant from offering concrete support mechanisms for the continent. This symbolic exchange sets the tone for a deeper reflection on how far BRICS has moved from the founding spirit of Global South solidarity first articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference.
In 1955, leaders of 29 Asian and African countries gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, in a landmark conference that challenged colonial domination and Western imperialism. The Bandung Conference sought to assert a new vision of sovereignty, solidarity, and self-determination among the recently decolonized nations. It laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement, inspired Pan-Africanism and Asian-African cooperation, and gave voice to a moral and political alternative to Cold War bipolarity.
Seventy years later, as the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) expands its membership and seeks to offer a counterweight to Western hegemony, many are asking whether BRICS represents a continuation���or a betrayal���of Bandung���s spirit. Is BRICS the heir to the anticolonial, egalitarian project of the Global South? Or has it become a pragmatic alliance of economic interests, untethered from the radical imagination of its predecessors?
BRICS, for all its symbolic importance and economic weight, has so far failed to articulate a coherent strategic alternative to Western-led globalization. It lacks not only institutional depth but also the ideological clarity and political will that Bandung embodied. Unlike Bandung, which was rooted in shared anti-imperial struggles and a commitment to moral leadership, BRICS has been hampered by internal contradictions, geopolitical caution, and elite-driven agendas.
The promise of Bandung was not simply unity among postcolonial states���it was a vision of global justice grounded in resistance to empire. Leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah saw themselves as part of a world-historical movement. They were not merely defending sovereignty; they were articulating a new internationalism from below. In contrast, BRICS has often failed to speak with one voice on matters of war, peace, or development. During critical moments���such as NATO���s intervention in Libya, the Gaza wars, or coups in Africa���its silence has been deafening.
China and Russia, to be sure, have increasingly challenged US unipolarity, especially in the wake of the Ukraine war and rising tensions in the South China Sea. But their confrontations with the West are largely framed in realist terms: a clash of great powers, not a struggle for the oppressed. Brazil and India, meanwhile, oscillate between Global South rhetoric and integration into Western-dominated financial and security institutions. South Africa, despite its post-apartheid legacy, has not consistently mobilized the language of liberation in its foreign policy.
The expansion of BRICS in 2024 to include countries like Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina was seen by some as a revival of its southern identity. But enlargement alone cannot resolve the bloc���s identity crisis. Without a shared political vision, BRICS risks becoming a loose consortium of discontent rather than a transformative force. The challenge is not simply to oppose the West���it is to construct an alternative rooted in the struggles and aspirations of the majority world.
There are signs of hope. The push for de-dollarization, efforts to build new development banks, and calls for UN reform reflect a growing impatience with Western dominance. Civil society actors, social movements, and intellectuals across the South continue to invoke Bandung as a source of inspiration. But the gap between elite summitry and grassroots solidarity remains wide.
To recover the spirit of Bandung, BRICS must do more than convene. It must commit to principles: anti-imperialism, economic justice, climate equity, and popular sovereignty. It must listen to the voices from below���from African farmers to Asian workers to Latin American feminists. Only then can it move beyond symbolism and offer a credible path toward a more just and multipolar world. Otherwise, BRICS risks becoming what Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.
Africa���s role in BRICS remains complex and under-explored. While South Africa is a founding member, its ability to shape the bloc���s agenda has been limited. Countries like Zambia, burdened by debt and austerity, have looked to BRICS as a possible alternative to Western financial institutions���but with few concrete results. The New Development Bank���s track record in Africa remains modest, and many governments remain cautious about aligning too closely with Beijing or Moscow. Similarly, in West Asia, BRICS has offered no unified stance on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza or the continued marginalization of Palestine. The bloc���s silence on these issues further distances it from the legacy of Bandung, which was rooted in anti-imperial solidarity and moral clarity.
Perhaps it is time to ask a more provocative question: Should we wait for states to revive the Bandung legacy, or has the mantle already shifted to grassroots movements, academic networks, and local struggles? From climate justice campaigns in Nairobi to feminist mobilizations in Buenos Aires, the postcolonial internationalism of the 21st century may no longer rely on elite summits. If BRICS is serious about honoring its southern identity, it must choose: replicate the hierarchies it once sought to dismantle���or rediscover the radical hope of Bandung through action, not symbolism.
July 17, 2025
Matchday 2: The Battle of Omdurman
Algeria fans celebrating victory over Egypt in November, 2009. Image via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0. What is the greatest match in the history of men���s African football?
This is the central question we grapple with in the latest season of the African Five-a-side podcast. Over the course of five episodes, we traverse the continent, from Omdurman to Johannesburg to Libreville, in search of the fixtures that most profoundly shaped African football.
Fittingly, Episode 1 opens with an exploration of one of the most politically and emotionally charged rivalries in the game���s African history: Algeria versus Egypt in 2009 and 2010. With both nations desperate to end lengthy absences from the FIFA World Cup (Algeria having last qualified in 1986, and Egypt in 1990), the stage was set for an extraordinary series of confrontations. Over the span of just seven months, the two sides met four times: three times in the context of World Cup qualification and once more in the semi-final of the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations.
These matches were remarkable not only for their intensity on the pitch, but also for the way in which they were consumed and debated. For perhaps the first time in African football history, major fixtures were followed fervently on emerging digital social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, marking a pivotal moment in how football fandom evolved on the continent.
So we invite you to settle in, reflect with us, and revisit one of the most momentous chapters in African football history: the Algeria-Egypt rivalry of 2009.
Watch the latest ���Matchday��� episode below, subscribe on YouTube, and subscribe to the podcast.
July 16, 2025
Kagame’s hidden war
An M23 soldier standing at a vista by Port Emmanuel on Lake Kivu by Goma, the capital and largest city of the North Kivu Province in the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on May 26, 2025. All photos �� Kang-Chun Cheng. What do the single biggest foreign investment on the African continent, the protracted humanitarian crisis driven by the rebel M23 paramilitary group in eastern Congo, and the upcoming Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Cup held for the first time in Africa, all have in common?��Rwanda.
Since 2021, the small east African nation has sent thousands of its troops to northern Mozambique���s Cabo Delgado province, after an ISIS Mozambique (ISM) attack at Palma, the site of a $25 billion liquified natural gas (LNG) project. The troop deployment has cost ���200 million according to Africa Intelligence, although it���s unclear who exactly is footing the bill.
In January, Goma���a key city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo���s eastern North Kivu province���fell to M23 rebels. The coup was bloody, with more than 3,000 people killed and 400,000 displaced. Those who have remained live in active fear and forced conformity to M23���s paranoia-fueled grip over the city.
Those who travel to M23 territory���including Goma, Bukavu, Rubaya, and the trade hub of Minova���and journalists in particular, have a good chance of being blacklisted from the Congolese government-controlled territory in the west. The United Nations (MONUSCO) and other humanitarian groups lingering in Goma know this all too well. They have been checkmated; M23 refuses to recognize or negotiate with them, while any sort of liaising with the rebel group would make them outcasts in the eyes of the Congolese government. ���[The UN] has been utterly humiliated,��� someone on the ground in Goma said when I was there in late May.
A carrot market in western Rwanda.Lastly, Kigali will be hosting the UCIs this September. The alchemy of the capital city���s smooth asphalt roads and rolling hills makes for one of the toughest road cycling race courses, a still-Eurocentric sport. This, too, aligns with President Paul Kagame���s vision and pride in bringing Rwanda onto the map as a global destination. Furthermore, championing cycling aligns with its 2030 National Sports Policy: amplifying domestic health and lifestyle through high performance in sports.
In less than three decades, Kagame has managed to achieve what many of his neighbors have been vying for. Rwanda���s economic and social cohesion was catalyzed by a genocide in 1994 that shocked the world in terms of both its violence and psychological manipulation. Seemingly at the drop of a pin, upon receiving orders through radio programs and insidious ideology to kill ���like bugs,��� Hutus turned on Tutsis, slaughtering them with abandon, killing more than one million���70% of the ethnic minority, nearly one-fifth of Rwanda���s total population���in just 100 days. As part of its recovery, Rwanda vowed to overcome its past.
Rwanda recovered from something beyond imagining with the cadence of a seasoned dressage horse, nearly too good to be true. A genocide museum was established in 2004���the resting place of the remains of nearly 250,000 victims. The nation also cleaned itself, literally. At times dubbed the Singapore of Africa, it is regionally unique in how clean its streets are and how safe it is to stroll them, even alone at night.
Yet Rwanda���s aspiration to acquire wealth, derived from both its own mineral riches and those of its neighbors, has hurled the nation in curious directions. Upon the discovery of five trillion cubic meters of gas reserves offshore in northern Mozambique in 2010 by Anardarko, an American energy company, TotalEnergies, Exxon Mobil, and ENI became the main LNG project investors.
In 2021, jihadist insurgents���self-identified as ISIS Mozambique (ISM) and claiming to fight for the Muslim civilians that the Mozambican government has long neglected in Cabo Delgado���launched a deadly attack in Palma that killed nearly 1,200 people. An additional 209 were abducted and presumed dead. TotalEnergies halted the project, declaring force majeure, a decree that still stands today.��Through a series of covert deals with former Mozambican president Felipe Nyusi, Kagame began sending in deployments of the Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) to Cabo Delgado to protect the LNG site and support afflicted local villages.
A checkpoint in Cabo Delgado Mozambique in July, 2024.���Rwandans know that Western aid partners can���t deal with these other conflicts���who else is going to step into northern Mozambique?��� says Ladd Serwart, a senior analyst at the non-profit organization, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED). ���It���s really reminiscent of Israel���s rhetoric in Gaza, ���we are the ones the West has forgotten, we are the victims������and thus, the victims become the oppressor and continue relying on the post-genocide rhetoric,��� Sewart adds.�� Internalized legitimacy creates momentum for external rhetoric. ���It���s not that [prejudice] doesn���t exist���for instance, white farmers in South Africa can point to where [discrimination] happens, but it���s obviously just a small part of the bigger picture.���
Rwanda has developed a reputation as the West���s ���donor darling,��� receiving $1.3 billion in foreign aid in 2021 (with $174 million coming from the US, its biggest donor). It has narrowed to Western definitions of success in both material and expansionist tendencies. Kagame and other Rwandan political leaders have long denied direct military involvement or support for M23. They prefer to allude to justifications for Rwandan involvement in the DRC���threats to both domestic and regional security, Congolese political propaganda to invade Rwanda, violence against Congolese Tutsi���according to a September 2024 ACLED report. This is despite more than 100 separate sources from across eastern Congo indicating RDF presence or support of M23, says Serwat. ���They���re all pointing to the same thing: Rwandan influence is a foregone conclusion.���
Beyond realpolitik, the Rwandans have other skin in the game. Studies and eyewitnesses have long indicated the smuggling of critical mineral resources from eastern DRC to Rwanda and other nations in the region. In his indirect responses to meddling in eastern DRC, Kagame has referenced the colonial construction of the region���s borders, claiming this part of eastern DRC as formerly part of Rwanda.
Yet over recent months, Kagame���s denials have softened somewhat. According to Serwat, at one point, his stance shifted from point-blank denials to, ���We don���t know if the RDF is in eastern Congo anymore.��� Furthermore, the types of arms being used serve as another indicator of RDF intervention. ���If weapons are sophisticated enough, M23 wouldn���t know how to use them,��� explains Serwat. ���The RDF is either training M23 or operating alongside them.���
From a tactical perspective, the relatively limited targeting of civilians could serve as another indicator of Rwandan influence. ���The targeting of civilians by the RDF is very limited. Even for M23, they have been rather restrained in most attacks, limiting the number of civilians caught in the crossfire,��� continues Serwat. ���The RDF does really fear an overstepping of boundaries when it comes to violence and sexual attacks.���
The ACLED data suggests that Rwanda remains one of the most substantive driving forces in eastern DRC. Political deals have a significant influence, with the addition of local dynamics and skirmishes. ���I don���t think M23 can do much beyond Rwandan interest,��� says Serwat. ���Even from a quantitative perspective, high-level ceasefires cut M23 attacks by 75%.���
Concurrently, Rwanda leverages its peacekeeping presence across the African continent when confronted by foreign critique of support for M23, which Kagame has repeatedly denied, threatening to rescind peacekeepers from missions. Peter Bofin, ACLED���s southeast Africa senior analyst, notes that deficiencies in understanding of ���obscure��� places such as northern Mozambique work in Kagame���s favor. Western ignorance of local and regional dynamics supports Rwanda���s expansionist tendencies, the analyst adds.
M23 militia on patrol in Goma, DRC.After more than seven months of slapdash planning with the RDF, a colleague and I arrived in Kigali on a sticky evening this past May, the air practically leaking with the promise of a cloudburst. We were scheduled to depart early the next morning on a Rwandan military helicopter to Pemba, Cabo Delgado, along with 10 other journalists and researchers. This was part of a five-day tour of the RDF���s commitments in Cabo Delgado, from their perspective.
���It���s not going to be a real embed, more of a horse-and-pony show,��� my colleague noted, having embedded with special forces dozens of times in the Middle East over the decades. This would be my first embed������regardless of how ���real��� it would be������I was excited. I was tasked with the photography, and now that we���d landed in Kigali, after unbelievable loads of hassle in the weeks leading up to this ���embed,��� things had to be in the bag.
We were wrong. A few minutes before the scheduled flight, we received a text from the strategist of the Office of the President notifying us that the trip to Mozambique was off due to ���unforeseen issues.��� Scheduling complications with the helicopter landing in Pemba had necessitated a cancellation of the entire trip, we were informed. I was convinced that this was all a setup. But my colleague suspected deeper issues.
���See how embarrassed the Rwandans are,��� he said. They came up with a technical excuse in an attempt to not have the thinning veneer of control in a region they had been working for years to stabilize, crumble entirely. Cabo Ligado reports from that week indicate it was among 2025���s deadliest, recording five ISM-linked attacks.�� The Rwandans indeed seemed determined to offer us an alternative, even if that meant revealing a different hand entirely. ���Everything up in the air,��� my colleague texts me. ���Might go to Goma.���
That���s how we found ourselves peeling off from the other media, scrambling to prepare for Goma in a few days. Entry to M23 territory requires an alchemy of circumstances, from visa officers��� moods to the particular state of affairs in eastern Congo at the time. It���s a topic of speculation within many regional press groups. But we had special backing: the Rwandan Office of the President was facilitating our visit to eastern Congo, connecting us with the M23 spokesperson, and offering to pay for our accommodation and meals (which we had to decline for reasons of editorial independence).
In Goma, our Rwandan companion declined to remove his facemask in public. ���I can���t be identified here,��� he eventually admitted.�� It was one of those trips where I was struggling to keep up with the situation at hand. Rwanda has yet to openly admit backing M23 in eastern Congo, yet those working in the president���s office were ensuring our access to rebel-controlled territory. Only on the way back from Goma after three days on the ground did I turn to my colleague and ask, ���Did that really just happen? The Rwandans connected us to M23?��� We looked at each other and shrugged.
Rwanda���s role across the region underscores a troubling paradox: the same country hailed for post-genocide recovery and global partnerships is also entangled in conflicts that fuel displacement and disorder. Whether deploying troops to safeguard gas fields in Mozambique or quietly shaping events in eastern Congo, Rwanda has positioned itself at the heart of the continent���s most pressing crises. That it is also hosting Africa���s first UCI World Cup this year only deepens the contrast. A nation remade as a model of order now finds its influence shadowed by the chaos it helps contain���and sometimes create.
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