Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: The Congolese opposition pushes back against a new bill that could extend President Felix Tshisekedi’s time in office, a South Sudanese whistleblower is abducted in Nairobi, and Washington cuts funding for HIV and AIDS treatment in South Africa.
Violent clashes erupted between protesters and state security forces earlier this month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, over a bill that could create a pathway for a third term for President Felix Tshisekedi. At least one protester was reportedly killed and at least 38 others injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
A broad alliance of opposition parties, known as the Article 64 Coalition for the Defense of Constitutional Order (C64), organized the June 12 demonstrations and has planned further protests on July 8. It has denounced the bill, which Parliament ended up adopting last week, as an attempt by Tshisekedi to remain in power.
Currently, Congo’s constitution allows presidents to serve a maximum of two five-year terms. The bill, however, permits a constitutional overhaul through a national referendum if state institutions face “major dysfunction.” Any new constitution would also effectively reset Tshisekedi’s time in office, allowing him to serve a third term as if it were his first. The bill still awaits the president’s signature.
“I have not asked for a third term, but I tell you this: If the people want me to have a third term, I will accept,” Tshisekedi said at a press conference in May. His second term is set to end in 2028.
Congo’s Catholic bishops, who hold considerable political influence, warned on Saturday that the bill risks plunging the country further into instability. Members of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo said that they see “neither the necessity, nor the urgency, nor the appropriateness” of changing the constitution, arguing that Congolese leaders should instead seek to foster peace.
“In a context where political rivalries increasingly take on ethnic and tribal dimensions, the outbreak of another civil war is a real possibility,” the bishops added.
Delly Sesanga, a member of the C64 coalition and the leader of opposition party Envol, welcomed the bishops’ statement. “Touching the constitutional pact today is deliberately adding a political crisis to an already existential security crisis,” he said.
Congo faces multiple threats, including a new Ebola outbreak in its east, where Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have seized cities and mines. More than 260 people are confirmed to have died from the rare Bundibugyo strain spreading in three eastern provinces.
In September, former Congolese President Joseph Kabila was sentenced to death in absentia for various crimes, including treason, after he visited Goma, the Congolese city then-recently captured by M23 rebels. Kabila claimed that he wanted to help find a solution to the fighting, but Tshisekedi’s government accused him of colluding with M23. Kabila himself overstayed his final term in office by two years.
Tensions have also simmered throughout Tshisekedi’s tenure. His coalition, the Sacred Union of the Nation, dominates Parliament: It commands 454 of the 500 seats in the National Assembly and 95 of the 108 seats in the Senate. Yet Tshisekedi’s reelection in 2023 was marred by allegations of voter fraud, and his administration has faced widespread accusations of silencing the opposition.
In March, Human Rights Watch warned that Tshisekedi’s administration was using Congo’s National Cyber Defense Council to arrest and detain “political opponents on dubious grounds.” The group said it had documented around 17 people who were “forcibly disappeared or reported missing” between July 2025 and this March.
Tshisekedi has loosely attempted to link a critical minerals-for-peace deal signed with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to his own efforts to change the constitution. The deal gives the United States preferential access on mining in exchange for U.S. security support.
“The Americans have asked us to implement certain reforms in the justice system,” Tshisekedi said. “These reforms cannot be carried out without revising the constitution.”
While experts largely agree that Congo needs judicial reforms to combat state repression, changing the constitution is expected to primarily expand Tshisekedi’s power.
As Michelle Gavin recently wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. “No matter how much American officials may wish to pretend that they have nothing to do with governance choices abroad, leaders with dubious mandates wish to project something else entirely.”
Friday, June 26: The U.N. Security Council discusses Sudan and the adoption of sanctions against Congo.
Monday, June 29, to Friday, July 3: Finance ministers from the Southern African Development Community hold a meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Another Kenyan abduction. South Sudanese businessman and whistleblower Athorbey al‑Gaddhaffy‑Dit was abducted at gunpoint in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 10, before being deported to South Sudan’s capital of Juba, where he is being held in military detention, according to rights groups.
Gaddhaffy‑Dit, also known as Gadafi Athorbey Guet, has previously spoken out about alleged corruption connected to Crawford Capital Ltd., a private tech company that the South Sudanese government employed to manage tax collection. A U.N. Commission on Human Rights report released in September described Crawford as “a central player in a range of corruption schemes and diversion mechanisms” connected to South Sudan’s “political elites.”
African governments, including Uganda and Tanzania, have previously suggested that the Kenyan government facilitated abductions in its territory, including that of Kizza Besigye, a Ugandan opposition politician captured in Nairobi in November 2024 and transported to a military jail in Kampala on charges of treason.
The latest controversy unfolds alongside mounting domestic opposition to Kenyan President William Ruto’s administration. On Monday, a Kenyan court found Health Minister Aden Duale in contempt of court for disobeying orders to halt the construction of a U.S. quarantine center in Kenya to treat Americans suspected of exposure to Ebola.
As I covered in last week’s newsletter, critics such as the Katiba Institute have accused “both the Kenyan and the United States governments” of viewing themselves “entirely above the Kenyan judicial system.”
U.S. cuts funding. The Trump administration has decided to end funding for HIV and AIDS treatment in South Africa, the country with the highest number of people living with HIV in the world. The U.S. State Department cited failure to address concerns around supposed white persecution in the country as part of the reason for the move, the Daily Caller reported last week. (Claims of “white genocide” in South Africa have been widely debunked.)
Until 2025, the United States provided around $400 million per year to South Africa through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). South Africa was a top beneficiary of the program until Trump reentered office and issued an executive order in February 2025 pausing U.S. aid to the country. A $115 million PEPFAR Bridge Plan designed to temporarily sustain HIV and tuberculosis programs in South Africa ended this March.
South Africa’s National Department of Health said it received no formal notification about the withdrawal but had been working on contingency plans since Washington froze aid last year.
Washington’s decision comes with some irony, as it has largely ignored the rising xenophobic attacks in South Africa toward Black migrants. Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe have repatriated hundreds of their citizens ahead of an order by vigilante groups that Africans from other nations leave South Africa by June 30.
Ghana’s extradition bid. Ghanaian authorities said last week that a U.S. immigration court’s decision to grant former Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta permanent residency earlier this month does not shield him from facing justice or stop ongoing extradition efforts against him.
Ofori-Atta faces corruption charges over a controversial $400 million national cathedral project, which critics say caused significant financial loss to the state during his time in office from 2017 to 2024. Although the site was cleared for construction, the cathedral was never built, and around $58 million of taxpayer money was spent on it.
Ofori-Atta traveled to the United States in January 2025 for prostate cancer treatment and was declared a fugitive the following month by Ghanaian authorities.
Landslide victory. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party has maintained its overwhelming parliamentary majority, winning 438 of the 501 contested seats in Ethiopia’s June 1 election.
The final results, which were released on Sunday, pave the way for Abiy’s expected reelection by parliament in October. If Abiy, who first took office in 2018, secures another five-year term, he will have plenty of runway to continue advancing his economic reforms, which have led to some GDP growth but also risk escalating tensions with neighboring countries over sea access.
Russia’s Tunisian recruits. In Inkyfada, Malek Khadhraoui and Jihen Nasri report on Tunisian students who left for Russia on the promise of joining academic programs or taking up delivery jobs but ended up fighting in Ukraine. At least one has been killed, while others remain missing.
“Since 2023, Russia has stepped up its overseas recruitment efforts to offset its losses in Ukraine and circumvent the impact of international sanctions,” they write. “The profiles targeted follow a consistent pattern: young applicants seeking to study abroad, job seekers looking for an economic way out, and prospective migrants for whom Russia is presented as a gateway to Europe.”
Egypt’s “king of thugs.” In the Continent, Ashraf Khaled reports on the arrest of Sabry Helmi Nakhnoukh earlier this month. Nakhnoukh was known as the Sisi regime’s hired enforcer, and his arrest is widely seen as the Egyptian government turning on one of its own.
“The speed of the crackdown on the man once known as Egypt’s ‘king of thugs’ surprised many Egyptians. For decades, Nakhnoukh appeared untouchable,” Khaled writes. A security expert told him, “My best guess is that Nakhnoukh either crossed a red line or found himself in conflict with a bigger thug with stronger connections and greater clout.”
