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Africa
Equatorial Guinea
May 28, 2026, 7:06 AM Equatorial Guinea has no asylum policy. The Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, including roughly a dozen in Africa. Under an opaque $7.5 million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea’s all-powerful president Mbasogo has turned a hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported from the United States. Trapped for now in a country many had never heard of before arriving, men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Mauritania wander the hotel’s long corridors and gaze out the windows at the shimmering pool they are not allowed to use. Recently, an East African man complained to a police officer about his situation. The officer responded by saying his problems would go away if he went to the hotel’s fourth floor and jumped out the window. Equatorial Guinea is one of the richest countries in Africa thanks to its oil resources. A former Spanish colony, after gaining independence in 1968, its fate shifted in the 1990s when U.S. companies started drilling for oil along its vast coastline. The subsequent boom transformed the economy, yet over half the population still lives in poverty. Mbasogo's 57-year-old son and heir apparent, Obiang Nguema, chronicles his lavish lifestyle on TikTok - soaking in infinity pools, feasting on lobster, traveling on private jets - even as citizens of Equatorial Guinea are banned from the platform. Obiang, who serves as vice president, has faced international sanctions because of corruption across his father’s administration. But the U.S. lifted sanctions. There are virtually no critical voices in Equatorial Guinea, where the government has been accused by rights groups and the U.S. State Department of detaining, torturing and even killing those that dare to speak out. (Source: ABC News - U.S.)
Ethiopia
21 May (2026) Hegemony and the fragmentation of the Horn. The Hormuz Shock of 2026 hit hard, forcing shipping lines to reroute around a choked Strait and turning the Horn of Africa into the port of last resort for much of the world’s redirected cargo. Ethiopia, now well past 120 million people and still the planet’s largest landlocked country, suddenly felt the full weight of its old vulnerability. For years, more than 90 percent of its trade had funneled through Djibouti in what looked like simple convenience but had become a dangerous strategic chokehold. In response, Addis Ababa has pushed hard to build the Berbera-Lamu-Addis axis, a network meant to smash that monopoly and create real redundancy. What has emerged: a state of volatile equilibrium. Diversification pulls outside powers deeper into the region’s already tense politics. As the Berbera-Addis logistics axis reaches operational maturity, its growing throughput is openly challenging the long dominance of the Addis-Djibouti Rail line. The 2024 memorandum of understanding between Ethiopia and Somaliland major upgrades funded through substantial port investments, Berbera now handles containers far more efficiently and offers a practical 11-hour road journey to Addis Ababa. Ethiopian exporters finally have a faster, cheaper option for reaching Gulf and Asian buyers. The foreign operator involved acts as a powerful non-state player that quietly reshapes control on the ground. Somaliland gains badly needed revenue, jobs, and a boost to its governing institutions. Ethiopia secures its vital sea exit. But the recognition-for-access bargain has sharpened tensions with Mogadishu. Ethiopia has stepped directly into Somalia’s sovereignty disputes. Further south, Kenya’s LAPSSET project offers Ethiopia another important outlet through Lamu Port on the Indian Ocean. Full multimodal connections keep advancing. Lamu gives Ethiopia a deep-water option that stays relatively sheltered from Red Sea troubles. The route’s relative distance from northern conflicts provides strategic insurance. Success here depends heavily on security cooperation between Ethiopian and Kenyan forces along the Moyale-Marsabit-Turkana corridor. Lamu remains a promising safety valve rather than a complete replacement. Djibouti has fought back, it has firmly rejected Ethiopian calls for any kind of sovereign corridor through its territory, offering only minority equity stakes in existing facilities. It has leaned harder into partnerships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, expanding rail links and port capacity to stay indispensable. Egypt’s involvement goes well beyond commercial interests. Defense agreements with both Djibouti and Somalia have allowed Cairo to build what amounts to a hydropolitical bracket around Ethiopia’s trade routes. The bitter GERD dispute over Nile waters supplies the main fuel. Upstream dam control now connects directly to downstream efforts to influence who controls access to the sea. In this way, river politics and port politics have become two sides of the same struggle, forcing Ethiopia to manage threats that stretch from its western rivers to its eastern ports. None of these physical corridors can work at scale without digital backbone. Ethiopia’s Fayda national digital ID, paired with the EthSwitch payment platform, now makes paperless transit possible at Berbera border crossings. Linking these systems with Somaliland’s developing financial infrastructure is no longer optional; it is the price of making the corridor competitive, but it also introduces fresh risks around data security, cross-border regulations, and patchy connectivity. Getting payment gateways to talk to each other across jurisdictions is fast becoming one of the most important quiet battles in the entire axis. The environmental and social costs refuse to stay hidden. Look at the Boma-Gambella Transboundary Landscape, area spanning Ethiopia and South Sudan. It supports one of the continent’s great mammal migrations and sustains pastoralist communities whose lives depend on open grazing routes. Smart planning could turn these same corridors into genuine tools for environmental peacebuilding: Shared conservation zones, community involvement in protection efforts, and livelihood programs that benefit local people. But agricultural expansion, resource grabbing, and unplanned settlements keep pushing the ecosystem toward its limits. Decisions made about routing in places like Boma-Gambella will shape not just trade volumes but the survival of entire ways of life. Debt problems hang over every kilometer of these new corridors. Funding packages for LAPSSET segments and Berbera upgrades come with repayment terms that increasingly clash with Ethiopia’s obligations to the IMF and World Bank often pushing logistics-related payments ahead of schools, hospitals, or rural roads, locking the country into cycles where infrastructure serves outsiders’ strategic goals more than its own citizens’ urgent needs. Migration adds another painful layer. Better roads have made it easier for people to move, and irregular journeys toward Gulf job markets have surged, painting a grim picture of deaths and suffering along these routes. Berbera and Lamu together do break the old single-point dependence on Djibouti. Protecting multiple long corridors eats up security resources and stretches already strained forces thin. Al-Shabaab and various insurgent factions active inside Ethiopia’s Somali region now have more places to strike. Greater overall resilience bought at the direct cost of higher exposure and constant operational pressure is the uncomfortable new reality shaping every planning meeting in Addis Ababa. A trilateral Berbera-Lamu-Djibouti Corridor Commission could create space for real coordination on customs, security protocols, and dispute settlement before small disagreements spiral. Pushing harder for EthSwitch-style digital integration across all partners would cut costs and build confidence through transparent data. Environmental rules must become non-negotiable, with full social impact studies that actually listen to pastoralist voices, especially in sensitive zones like Boma-Gambella. Migration policies should treat the corridors as protected livelihood channels instead of accidental highways for desperation. The move away from Djibouti’s unipolar control toward this multipolar Berbera-Lamu-Addis system is rewriting the Horn’s economic geography in real time. Ethiopia wins room to maneuver and space to grow. But every new road and digital link multiplies opportunities while also multiplying points of failure, elite manipulation, and outside interference. Ethiopia’s drive for secure sea access grows directly out of its huge population and development ambitions. The real test ahead is whether the region’s powers can turn these corridors into something bigger than tools of hegemony. If they fail, it will simply harden the patterns of fragmentation and rivalry that have already cost the Horn far too much. If they succeed, the axis could anchor a more stable interdependence. (Source: Horn Review - Ethiopia)
By Girma, Researcher
Mali
05/06/2026 - 20:24 GMT+2 A court in Mali has handed a 20-year jail term to an official at the French embassy accused of being a spy, undermining state security, working for the French intelligence services. He was detained on 13 August 2025 in the company of several Malian officers, who were allegedly plotting a coup to overthrow the military junta. The court railed against 'foreign states' trying to destabilise the insurgency-plagued country. (Euronews - France ; "Ap - U.S., AFP')
Arctic
27/05/2026 - 18:20 GMT+2 Since 2021, the EU has supported a global ban on new oil and gas drilling as part of its Arctic policy for environmental reasons. In an open letter to five European Commissioners, a Nordic coalition of financial institutions, trade unions and climate scientists issued a stark warning to the European Commission on Wednesday, calling on European Union leaders to maintain its existing ban on new Arctic oil and gas drilling as the bloc is revising its policy in the region. The letter's premise lies in both environmental concerns and potential security threats to Europe, given its proximity to Russian territory, where Moscow often boasts nuclear drills. It argues that the changing geopolitical situation has heightened the security risks in the Barents Sea, with oil and gas infrastructure being potential targets for hybrid warfare due to the proximity to Russian territory and the Northern Sea Route. Oil spills and leakages could cause irreversible environmental damage. They argue that projects on the Norwegian continental shelf take about 13 years to develop, meaning any new Arctic fields approved today would not reach full production until around 2040. The letter notes that estimating extractable resources in the Barents Sea are actually 78% lower than official Norwegian government forecasts. Any new commercial production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) would require the EU to sign 20-to-25-year gas purchase agreements, since existing capacity is fully utilised for decades. The move would lock Europe into fossil fuel dependency long after its 2050 net-zero climate deadline. "We believe that the most effective way to continue to strengthen the EU's long-term energy security is to ramp up EU’s electrification and domestic renewable energy and efficiency measures, not to deepen dependence on imported fossil fuels," reads the letter. Norwegian energy company Equinor supports the EU's updating its Arctic strategy and argued against stopping all oil and gas exploration in the North. (Source: Euronews - based in Lyon, France)
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