Like an absentee landlord, Africa is flagging its demands nowadays on multilateral fora such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the G-20 and the United Nations General Assembly. For a continent with 54 countries, over a quarter of the “Global South”, it is populated at BRICS and the G-20 by South Africa, an atypical representative of the Black continent.
Challenges and disruptors
Africa, in general, and the Sahel region in particular, are passing through several existential challenges such as misgovernance, unplanned development, the dominance of ruling tribes and corruption. Recently, new disruptors such as the Islamic terror, inter-tribal scrimmage, changing climate, runaway food inflation, urbanisation and youth unemployment have further strained the traditional socio-political fabric. As the past military interventions by France, the United States and Russia’s Wagner Group to curb the militancy have shown, they frequently become part of the problem. These interventions have costs: keeping dictatorships in power to protect their economic interests, such as uranium in Niger, gold in the Central African Republic and oil in Libya.
