Somalia-Ethiopia Tensions Mount

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Floods devastate the Sahel, a court allows moderators to sue Meta in Kenya, and Nigeria’s homegrown electric cars.

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A third round of Turkish-mediated talks between Somalia and Ethiopia has been postponed indefinitely. The talks had been due to take place last Tuesday in Ankara, but instead Turkey is pushing ahead with indirect negotiations and meeting separately with each party. The delay comes as Mogadishu accused Addis Ababa of supplying weapons to the breakaway Puntland region in northeastern Somalia.

“Somalia strongly condemns the unauthorized shipment of arms and ammunition transported via Ethiopian territory to Somalia’s Puntland region,” the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Friday.

“Documented evidence confirms the arrival of two lorries transporting weapons from Ethiopia to Puntland … executed without any diplomatic engagement or clearance,” the statement continued. Ethiopia has not responded to the accusations.

In late March, Puntland authorities announced that the region would operate as an independent state—three months after Ethiopia announced a port deal with Somaliland, another breakaway region in Somalia that claims independence. Landlocked Ethiopia agreed to lease 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) of coastline from Somaliland in exchange for recognition of the region’s independence.

Since that announcement, Mogadishu has signed defense deals with Turkey and Egypt. The deal with Ankara allows for the deployment of Turkish troops to Somalia, including its territorial waters, for two years. On Monday, Somalia received its second shipment of weapons and ammunition from Cairo as part of a new defense pact. “Somalia is an Arab state in the Arab League with rights, according to the Charter of the League, to collective defense against any threat it faces,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said at a press conference with his Somali counterpart in Cairo in January.

Somalia’s government has asked the African Union that existing Ethiopian peacekeepers in the country be replaced with 5,000 Egyptian soldiers serving within an updated AU peacekeeping mission targeting al-Shabab.

According to statements by Somali government officials, the mission set to begin in January 2025 will no longer include Ethiopian forces.

The prospect of Egyptian troops near its borders is something Ethiopia opposes because of a separate dispute over a mega-dam on the Nile. Cairo has since warned its citizens to leave Somaliland: “The current security situation in Somaliland limits the ability to provide any consular assistance to Egyptians there,” said a statement circulated by Egyptian local media.

Each party seems focused on inflaming tensions. The standoff is also weakening Somalia’s federalist form of government as regional leaders disagree on which peacekeeping forces they want in their respective areas. South West State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, known as Laftagareen, has publicly opposed an Egyptian deployment and instead supports the Ethiopian troops who currently secure the area.

Laftagareen fears his region would become the site of a proxy war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but the standoff is also clan-based. Worryingly, tensions in the Horn of Africa have been allowed to simmer without any regional effort from bodies such as the AU to defuse possible escalation.

Wednesday, Sept. 25, to Monday, Sept. 30: The 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) continues in New York City.

Thursday, Sept. 26: Foreign ministers from the BRICS nations meet on the sidelines of UNGA.

Wednesday, Sept. 25, to Friday, Sept. 27: The Power & Energy Africa trade exhibition is held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Friday, Sept. 27: A U.N. Security Council report is due on the situation in Somalia.

Nigeria begins a federal court case against 10 anti-government protesters on charges of treason following nationwide protests in August.

Monday, Sept. 30: The International Court of Justice holds public hearings on a land and maritime dispute between Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

Sudan-Russia ties. As mass starvation and cholera threaten Sudan, Russia is inking deals on gold extraction in the country. A Russian trade delegation visited Sudanese officials in Port Sudan last week to discuss the start of gold extraction from multiple sites in the country as soon as next month, the Sudan Tribune reports. Talks also focused on the possibility of Russian companies using Sudan’s ports as a gateway to the continent. Both of Sudan’s warring generals have committed “harrowing” abuses in the country’s 17-month civil war, a U.N.-mandated mission reported this month.

U.S. returns to Chad. A “limited number” of U.S. Special Forces are set to return to Chad following negotiations, U.S. Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman told Voice of America last week. The return was widely predicted, as the ejection of U.S. troops in April was perceived as a political chess move by Chadian President Mahamat Déby ahead of staged elections in May.

Washington is also negotiating with Benin, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast on the possibility of a military base in one of those countries to counter armed groups. As Jack Detsch reported in Foreign Policy, U.S. lawmakers are pushing to reauthorize the Global Fragility Act, which would train local forces in Benin, Togo, and northern Ghana to counter extremism.

Kenya takes on Meta. A Kenyan court has upheld a ruling that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, can be sued in the country by former Facebook moderators. Nearly 200 African moderators sued Meta, claiming they lost their jobs with the content moderation firm Sama after attempting to unionize in Nairobi.

They were rejected when applying for the same roles at another firm, Majorel, after Facebook changed contractors. Meta had argued that it did not directly employ Sama’s sacked staff. The court in Nairobi also upheld a separate February 2023 ruling that Meta could be sued over alleged worker exploitation. Meta had argued that it couldn’t be sued in Kenya because it is not registered there.

Floods devastate West and Central Africa. Niger will delay the start of the academic year by nearly a month because some schools have been partly destroyed by recent flooding and others are being used to house those displaced by floods. Authorities pushed the start date from Oct. 2 to Oct. 28. Unusually heavy rainfall has hit Niger, Chad, Mali, and Nigeria, impacting at least 4 million people. In conflict-affected northeastern Nigeria, nearly half of the city of Maiduguri is underwater after a local dam overflowed following torrential rains.

Nigeria’s homegrown EVs. Nigerian-owned electric vehicle manufacturer Innoson has launched its first series of electric cars made in the country. Unlike many African electric vehicle manufacturers, the company, based in Nigeria’s southeastern Anambra state, has not imported major components from China to assemble the vehicles because it argued that the raw materials for EV batteries exist in Nigeria.

The Nigerian government has struggled to reach its target of making 30 percent of all vehicles driven in the country be electric by 2025—mainly because it hasn’t invested in it. Although EVs are uncommon in Nigeria, there are around six private companies in the country manufacturing electric motorcycles, trucks, and bikes.

Musk meets Ramaphosa. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met with billionaire Elon Musk on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week to discuss approval for Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet. Starlink hasn’t received regulatory approval in South Africa—Musk’s country of birth.

Companies require at least 30 percent local ownership under South Africa’s Black economic empowerment law. The broadband currently operates in about a dozen African nations, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Sudan, but faces complaints by local providers of unfair competition since it doesn’t employ locals.

Musk’s relationship with the South African government has been tumultuous since Musk shared conspiracy theories on his platform X about a supposed white genocide occurring in South Africa.

State graft has weakened people’s view of constitutional governance in South Africa and many of Africa’s other robust democracies, according to the latest annual report from polling firm Afrobarometer. What appears to be driving the decline in support for democratic rule in some nations include botched elections, political impunity, and a lack of presidential accountability, the report highlighted. Still, across 39 countries surveyed, 80 percent of people rejected autocratic rule and preferred democracy to any other form of government.

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Egypt’s historic address. In New Lines, Saker El Nour writes on the significance of a visit to the Nubian village of Dahmit by Muhammad Naguib, Egypt’s first president, who ruled from 1953 for just one year. Naguib was the only senior Egyptian official to have ever given a public speech in the Nubian language of Kenzi. Nubians were marginalized in Egypt before Naguib’s presidency and have been ever since. Naguib was placed under house arrest for 30 years by Gamal Abdel Nasser, who seized the presidency. He died in 1984.

The EU’s violent migrant reduction. Rape and torture have been used to curb Italy-bound migration through Tunisia, according to an investigation by the Guardian. A European Union deal pledged some $118 million in funding to Tunisia in exchange for curbing migration, which appears to have been spent on the national guard. Migrants reported beatings by Tunisian police, rapes by the national guard, and being dumped in the desert without food and water. Concerns are being raised by rights groups over the high infant mortality rate in squalid camps.

German grave robberies. In the Republic, Karen Chalamilla interviews Tanzanian filmmaker Cece Mlay on her recent documentary The Empty Grave about Tanzanian families who have been demanding the return of their ancestors’ remains from Germany. Executed leaders of movements against colonial rule—in what was then German East Africa from 1885 to 1918—were exhumed from their graves and taken to Germany for research attempting to prove Africans were inferior to Europeans.

The German anthropologist Felix von Luschan owned a collection of Tanzanian human remains that amounted to around 6,300 samples by the time of his death in 1924. Most of these human remains have yet to be returned.