Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Ethiopians go to the polls amid growing political rifts in Tigray and beyond, an Ebola quarantine facility in Kenya sparks controversy, and insurgency worsens in the Lake Chad Basin.
Ethiopia’s election on Monday is almost certain to hand a new five-year term to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But that victory may exacerbate the growing political rift in the country, which threatens to destabilize Africa’s second-most populous nation.
Ethiopia’s electoral body suspended or canceled voting in dozens of constituencies due to what it described as “unfavourable conditions” and violent disruptions. Voting did not take place at all in the northern region of Tigray, which was at the center of a devastating civil war from 2020 to 2022. The region now faces mass internal displacement and renewed fighting in recent months between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Meanwhile, violence from the Fano militia in Amhara and fighting among federal, regional, and separatist forces in Abiy’s home region of Oromia derailed voting in parts of those areas. An armed attack in a farming community in Oromia began over the weekend and continued on election day, killing dozens of civilians, the Addis Standard reported.
Abiy’s Prosperity Party, which won around 94 percent of parliamentary seats in the last election in 2021, campaigned on strong economic growth, which has been driven by economic reforms (such as easing foreign exchange controls and floating Ethiopia’s currency, the birr), coupled with record gold and coffee exports. Officials expect a GDP growth of 10.2 percent for the 2025-26 fiscal year—a figure much higher than most of the continent.
Yet Ethiopia remains fragile under Abiy’s leadership. The 2022 Pretoria Agreement, which ended the civil war in Tigray, is on the verge of collapse, and there are worrying signs of a renewed war with neighboring Eritrea.
In 2019, a year after first taking office, Abiy won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to a 20-year war with Eritrea. The two countries then fought alongside each other against the TPLF during the Tigray war, but tensions have since spiked over Abiy’s push for access to the Red Sea and Eritrea’s refusal to withdraw its troops from border regions in western Tigray. (Ethiopia lost maritime access when Eritrea gained independence from it in 1993.)
Abiy’s reelection paves the way for advancement of his Red Sea ambitions, which he describes as an “existential” imperative for Ethiopia. His push has already triggered an alliance among Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt, which has its own grievances with Addis Ababa over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, risking a broader regional conflict.
In April, the TPLF said that it would take back control of the region’s government, effectively ending the Pretoria deal. Certain TPLF factions were dissatisfied with that agreement, which they believed sidelined them and obligated them to disarm, while other TPLF officials, who had negotiated the deal, secured prominent roles in the interim regional administration.
The TPLF claimed that the federal government extended the interim administration’s mandate without its approval, and on Tuesday, the group announced a series of administrative and judicial appointments to replace that administration. The move, which effectively creates two rival cabinets, came after more than a year of power struggles within the TPLF and accusations that Addis Ababa was withholding funds to the region.
Despite all this, the Prosperity Party is projected to win in another landslide against the more than 40 opposition parties it faces, largely because its opponents are highly fragmented and lack the broad national appeal and the financing required to mount a serious challenge to Abiy’s party.
Ethiopia has also experienced democratic backsliding under Abiy’s tenure. The government has limited independent media, harassed and detained journalists, and severely curtailed free speech, according to Human Rights Watch.
“The Ethiopian people have demonstrated that they do not need anyone to advise or lecture them in order to build their state and establish a democratic system,” Abiy said as he cast his vote in his hometown in Oromia. “These next five years will be a period where we see many historic turning points for Ethiopia.”
Yet, as one voter said, “People aren’t paying much attention to this vote because, for them, everything is already decided, everything is already calculated. We know the result and nothing will change.” Final results from the election are due on June 11.
Wednesday, June 3: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department’s proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which includes funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and an “America First” global health strategy that some African nations have already rejected.
Thursday, June 4: The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a nomination hearing on William Trachman for ambassador to Tanzania.
Thursday, June 4, to Friday, June 5: The European Union’s Africa Working Party holds an informal meeting in Ayia Napa, Cyprus.
Ebola outbreak. Two people were shot dead on Monday near an airbase north of Nairobi, where hundreds of young Kenyans were protesting an Ebola quarantine facility for Americans suspected of being exposed to the virus in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
On Friday, a Kenyan court temporarily blocked the government from allowing the United States to open the 50-bed facility. A lawsuit filed by the Law Society of Kenya and Katiba Institute, a local civil society group, argued that the site violates constitutional mandates on parliamentary oversight and public participation.
Critics have linked the Trump administration’s global health policies, including aid cuts and the withdrawal of funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), to the slow detection and management of the latest outbreak, which likely went undetected for two months.
A recent report from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board warned that although infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent and disruptive, the world has been unprepared to face them even after COVID-19. This has been “amplified by politicized responses, attacks on scientific institutions and polarization that have outlasted the crises, leaving societies less resilient to the next emergency,” the report concluded.
As of Tuesday, the WHO has recorded 321 confirmed Ebola cases and 48 deaths in Congo. Authorities in neighboring Uganda have confirmed nine cases and one death.
Rwanda-U.K. deal. A panel of international arbitrators in The Hague has rejected a $134 million claim by Rwanda against the United Kingdom after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrapped a migrant deportation deal in 2024.
Rwanda argued that it had spent considerable funds in preparing to host migrants who had arrived in Britain via small boats as part of a deal struck by Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak, in 2022.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration, however, ruled that diplomatic exchanges between the two countries after the deal’s cancellation amounted to an agreement that Britain would not make the two future $67 million payments to fund migrant relocations.
Mining merger? The deadline for Chinese state-owned Zijin Mining’s $4 billion acquisition of Canada’s Allied Gold has been extended from May 29 to July 29, according to a statement released on Friday. The two-month delay came after regulators in Beijing questioned the deal’s cost and the risks associated with Allied’s largest mine in Sadiola in western Mali, the Financial Times reported.
Mali is experiencing ongoing attacks by separatist and jihadist rebels in its north. In recent years, Mali’s military government has also arrested foreign mining executives over tax disputes and local mining directors for allegedly failing to repatriate foreign currency from export revenues.
Nigeria’s northeast is the epicenter of its worsening insurgency. Jihadi groups—especially Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a powerful offshoot of Boko Haram—have expanded their operations in northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin, which traverses Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.
According to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth, Abuja will continue to receive Washington’s support to fight ISWAP, which the two militaries targeted in recent joint strikes.
Sudan’s crisis. In Foreign Policy, Suha Musa argues that the Iran war is already having devastating effects on Sudan, which is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis amid its three-yearlong civil war.
“The Iran war has complicated the situation and further diverted attention from Sudan,” Musa writes. “The overlapping web of actors involved in both conflicts has made the road to peace in Sudan more convoluted and fraught.”
Rwanda-Russia deal. In Al Jazeera, Vivianne Wandera argues that a nuclear cooperation deal that Rwanda and Russia signed last month is part of a wider trend whereby African countries are increasingly seeing Western partners as unreliable.
Moscow has “moved quickly to exploit this uncertainty,” Wandera writes. “Russia’s nuclear outreach is part of a broader strategy to expand its influence on the continent, with agreements reportedly signed in countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.”
