Welcome to Overseas Coverage’s Africa Temporary.
The highlights this week: Ethiopia’s push for maritime entry sparks renewed tensions with Eritrea, the navy phases a coup in Guinea-Bissau, and Nigerians of all faiths face escalating violence.
Ethiopia-Eritrea Escalation
Ethiopian and Eritrean leaders have traded hostile rhetoric in latest weeks, triggering worldwide fears of a contemporary regional battle. The most recent spherical of tensions has largely been pushed by landlocked Ethiopia’s demand for direct entry to the Purple Sea, which it has described as an “existential matter.”
Final month, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed known as for worldwide “mediation” with Eritrea to revive this entry, which he insisted is “inevitable.” Abiy and his officers have additionally floated the concept of taking Eritrea’s southern port of Assab by power. Ethiopia grew to become a landlocked nation in 1993, when Eritrea gained independence after a 30-year battle.
Eritrean Info Minister Yemane Gebremeskel has argued that Ethiopian officers try to “ignite an unjustified battle” with this rhetoric.
In the meantime, Ethiopian officers have accused Eritrea of colluding with a “hardliner faction” of the Tigray Individuals’s Liberation Entrance (TPLF)—the dominant political group in Ethiopia’s Tigray area for 3 many years—to resume a lethal civil battle in northern Ethiopia, which raged from 2020 to 2022 and unfold from Tigray to the Afar and Amhara areas.
In an Oct. 2 letter to United Nations Secretary-Normal António Guterres, Ethiopian Overseas Minister Gedion Timothewos accused Eritrea and insurgent TPLF factions of “funding, mobilizing and directing armed teams” in Amhara.
Eritrea has rejected these claims, writing on X that Ethiopia’s letter to the U.N. is a “deceitful charade.”
Ethiopian-Eritrean relations have lengthy been fraught. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF have been as soon as allies when combating in opposition to Ethiopia’s communist authorities within the Nineteen Eighties, however after Eritrea gained independence and a TPLF-led authorities got here to energy in Ethiopia, the 2 international locations fought a brutal yearslong border battle, with lasting mutual hostility.
The nations signed a peace deal in 2018—a transfer that earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize—and Eritrea fought alongside the Ethiopian Military in the course of the Tigrayan civil battle.
Isaias, nonetheless, was dissatisfied with a 2022 peace deal signed with the TPLF in Pretoria, South Africa—as have been some TPLF factions, which felt they have been sidelined and compelled to disarm, whereas TPLF officers who negotiated the deal secured roles in Tigray’s interim regional administration.
Since then, Eritrea has reportedly mended ties with dissident TPLF factions. “Probably the most highly effective arm of the TPLF factions has begun to type a relationship with their former enemies in the course of the two-year battle: Eritrea,” Yohannes Woldemariam, a Horn of Africa analyst, advised Overseas Coverage.
The most recent confrontation has come as clashes resurge alongside the Tigray-Afar border. In latest weeks, Abiy has accused the TPLF of diverting its regional funds to militant actions. In flip, TPLF officers have alleged that Abiy’s authorities is limiting entry to primary items to “starve the folks of Tigray and push them into revolt.” And officers in Afar have accused Tigrayan forces of crossing into their territory and seizing a number of villages.
In the meantime, Eritrean troops nonetheless occupy areas on the Ethiopian border that they seized in the course of the 2020-22 Tigray battle, regardless of calls from the US and U.N. for Eritrea to withdraw all its forces.
“Regardless of the formulation for de-escalation, the underside line is that the Horn of Africa, and the world, can’t afford one other Eritrea-Ethiopia battle,” Michael Woldemariam and Abel Abate Demissie lately wrote in Overseas Coverage.
Safety specialists are calling for renewed diplomacy from the African Union, South Africa, and the US to cease a collapse of the Pretoria settlement. “The chance of renewed cycles of atrocities is all too actual,” Human Rights Watch warned final week.
The Week Forward
Wednesday, Nov. 26: Native and regional elections are held in Namibia.
Thursday, Nov. 27: The Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Growth hosts the Worldwide Financial Discussion board on Africa in Paris.
What We’re Watching
Guinea-Bissau coup. The navy in Guinea-Bissau stated it had detained President Umaro Sissoco Embaló and brought management of the nation for an “indefinite” interval on Wednesday following Sunday’s disputed election.
Embaló, a former military basic who entered workplace in 2020, and opposition candidate Fernando Dias each declared victory on Monday forward of official outcomes. On Wednesday, a bunch of military officers stated on state TV that that they had halted the electoral course of, and residents within the capital of Bissau reported sounds of gunfire and stated the navy had arrange checkpoints throughout the town.
The election sparked tensions even earlier than this week. The primary opposition social gathering—the African Celebration for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which led the nation’s independence from Portugal—was barred from working after the Supreme Court docket stated it had submitted its paperwork late. Some factions of the navy supported the PAIGC, and with out its personal candidate, the PAIGC backed main opposition challenger Dias.
Guinea-Bissau has skilled a variety of coups and tried coups. The nation’s opposition-dominated parliament has not been in session since 2023, when it was dissolved by Embaló after a coup try.
Violence in Nigeria. As U.S. President Donald Trump threatens navy motion to fight what he has framed as a persecution of Nigerian Christians, Nigerians of all faiths are dealing with rising violence amid a Nigerian military ill-equipped to take care of a poisonous brew of assaults from Islamists, industrial gangs, and secessionists.
On Saturday, the Nigerian state of Niger ordered the indefinite closure of all colleges after the kidnapping of 303 kids and 12 lecturers from a Catholic college, a couple of days after round 25 Muslim schoolgirls have been kidnapped in neighboring Kebbi state.
That day, the federal authorities individually introduced the closure of 41 colleges underneath its management and elevated patrols round forests in northern Nigeria, that are strongholds for terrorism networks.
In the meantime, earlier this month, a high-ranking Nigerian officer, Brig. Gen. Musa Uba, who’s Muslim, was executed by Islamic State West Africa Province militants, alongside 4 different Nigerian troopers in northeastern Borno state. Gangs additionally attacked a church in Kwara state, killing at the least two folks, and a predominantly Muslim village in Zamfara state, killing three and abducting 64.
Between July 2024 and June 2025, nearly 5,000 folks have been kidnapped throughout Nigeria, with prison gangs getting greater than $1.6 million in ransom funds, in response to SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian danger agency. Almost 35 million Nigerians may face extreme starvation by the center of subsequent 12 months because of insecurity affecting agriculture, the U.N. World Meals Programme projected on Tuesday.
G-20 consequence. Amid a U.S. boycott, the G-20 declaration adopted in South Africa final weekend largely targeted on points opposed by U.S. officers, together with local weather change, gender equality, and world wealth inequality.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa made the unconventional transfer to situation the assertion on the opening of the summit, slightly than at its finish. It has been backed by all G-20 members aside from the US and Argentina, whose president, Javier Milei, is a Trump ally.
Officers in Pretoria advised Bloomberg that they anticipate Trump to exclude South Africa from the bloc’s conferences subsequent 12 months when the US holds the G-20 presidency.
What We’re Studying
African visible language. In It’s Good That, Ugonna-Ora Owoh explores the intricacies of Nigerian typography, from a show font impressed by Yoruba conventional wrestling to lettering used at Festac ’77, the largest-ever pan-African pageant.
“Opposite to what could be identified, kind design has all the time had a quiet however regular presence in Nigeria’s visible tradition,” he writes. That custom has risked being misplaced amid the ever-present use of Western fonts, however “a rising variety of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft … [and] that is discovering its approach into world design conversations.”
The decline of the Rand Membership. A Johannesburg establishment as soon as often called a hub for a number of the world’s wealthiest white males has seen its fortunes dwindle alongside South Africa’s financial system, Alexandra Wexler stories within the Wall Road Journal.
The Rand Membership, which was based in 1887 and as soon as had novelist Rudyard Kipling as its visitor, now struggles to remain afloat. “Its experiences, what it’s lived by way of as an establishment, have mirrored what the town’s gone by way of, what the nation’s gone by way of,” one membership member advised Wexler.
