BY ELIUD KIBI At the AU-EU ministerial meeting in Brussels, Foreign Affairs CAS Ababu Namwamba urged the UN to finance Africa’s counter-terrorism mission in Somalia. “The promotion and maintenance of peace and security in the world is the primary mandate of the United Nations,” Namwamba said. Kenya was not saying this for the first time....
By Prof. Hassan Keynan The Ogaden Question (OQ) has been a constant and powerful dynamic in the complex historical processes that convulsed Abyssinia and its successor, Ethiopia. It has occupied this sensitive and inherently radioactive space in the turbulent geopolitical equation in the Horn of Africa for six centuries, with remarkable persistence and tenacity. It...
By Elizabeth Giorgis The youth protest movement that emerged in Ethiopia in 2016, forged a fundamental shift in power relations by 2018. Tech savvy youngsters in Ethiopia challenged prevailing social media theories by employing communication technologies for the mobilization of collective action. It was against the severely repressive political regime of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary...
By Abdisamad Nur-Bidar “I fail to understand why the stories of important [Somali] personalities are not told, to be documented for archiving.” Adan Makina. I heard Mr. Makina’s message loud and clear. It was a clarion call for decent and honest Somalis to raise their voices and focus, tell, and highlight the positive human stories...
Ethnic tensions between Ethiopia’s two regions, Oromia and Somali erupted into violent conflict that killed at least dozens of people and drove thousands of men, women and children from their homes during the second week of September 2017. Reports on social media about the death toll and displacement of people are wildly different depending on who reports them. Pro-government...
By Muktar M. Omer THERE can be no better visualization of life under the archetypal “Big Man” in post-colonial Africa than the portrayal of the fictional African tyrant in Achille Mbembe’s “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity”. In this moving theory of power, oppression, tyranny and a sickening social situation the Cameroonian theorist refers to as the...
Somalia’s capital is buzzing: estate agents thrive and it recently hosted a TedX conference. But Mogadishu is facing a fresh challenge as drought forces half a million people to seek aid. Jason Burke visits a growing camp on the outskirts A man takes a selfie in Mogadishu’s new Peace Park. Photograph: Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP By...
By NEIL CARRIER, The Star While Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate has been misrepresented over the years as a place of pirates and terrorists, most notably in the recent Hollywood film Eye in the Sky, for most Kenyans it is a place heaving with shopping malls all offering bargain goods such as clothes and electronics. It is...
Donald J. Trump is the new man in charge of the US, and Africa seems to have little cause for celebration. But what does the new Commander-in-Chief really think of the continent? By The Conversation Al-Shabaab’s constant attacks on Somalia are among concerns Donald Trump’s advisers have about Africa. Reuters/Feisal Omar Africa has occupied a...
By Abdelkarim A. Hassan “Somalia must have a working government. I have greatly learned that since I became president.” Hassan Sheikh. The fall of the Barre regime and the subsequent civil war that followed in 1991 caused the displacement of more than 2 million Somalis who are scattered around the world. The uprooting of these...