Gemma Ware, The Conversation y Daniel Merino, The Conversation
Plus, what’s happening in Chad, three months after rebels killed the president, Idriss Déby.
National Election Board of Ethiopia personnel patrol a warehouse stacked high with boxes of polling kits in Addis Ababa in October 2020.
Photo by Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
Ethiopia’s party system is extremely volatile due to the prevalence of weakly institutionalised and fragmented political parties.
Former DRC President Joseph Kabila, left, congratulates his succesor, Felix Tshisekedi, on his inauguration in January 2019.
EFE-EPA/Kinsela Cunningham
After endless, futile negotiations with the Kabila camp, Tshisekedi appears to have finally recognised the limits of the coalition government and has lost patience.
Nigerian youths protest against police brutality.
Olukayode Jaiyeola/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Although the Nigerian government has announced the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, protesters have not let up. They are now calling for wider reforms.
President Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast.
Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images
When the establishment retains some leverage over reformers change can be slow, superficial, and short-lived. Sudan appears to be a textbook case of this scenario.
Omar al-Bashir seems to have reached the end of his long political road.
EPA-EFE
Martin Plaut, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Al-Bashir’s ability to play a skillful combination of internal and external balancing acts, plus ruthless repression and a divided opposition, kept him in power for three decades.
Campaign ads for Ali Bongo in his successful 2009 bid to succeed his father as president of Gabon. The Bongo family has lead Gabon uninterrupted for over 50 years.
Reuters/Daniel Magnowski
Gabon’s strongman president, Ali Bongo, is barely clinging to power after contested elections, a stroke and a coup attempt. The Bongo family has run this stable central African nation for 52 years.
In Ghana, “skirt-and-blouse voting” means to vote for different parties for presidential and legislative positions.
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Yarik Turianskyi is Manager of the Governance and African Peer Review Mechanism Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs and guest lecturer in African Governance and Eastern European Politics, University of Pretoria