The Mettaboy Report

The staggering accumulation of crises in recent months seem to have overshadowed the ongoing sectarian bloodbath between the Muslim and Christian communities in the Central African Republic. Over 2500 peoples have died since January, and more than one million  of the 4.5 million population displaced internally,  by violence whose roots are complex but have however been simplified and reduced to a religious cleavage  by international community and most analysts. This is the first time, religion is source of violence in the country, and the worst ever in its history.   On scale of brutality, the conflict in the CAR is notorious and compares with few in the continent in terms of catastrophic levels of violence, too. At the core, the civil war is not a fight about the right way to God as widely viewed.  But the escalating levels of violence so far, is an end of a long progression which started by a complex interaction of factors, in particular, deteriorating...

The Ebola outbreak has hit a panic button at the core of the political, social and economic establishment across the continent. In a herd-like fashion, one country institutes a blanket ban, triggering others to follow, apparently with no careful assessment of unintended consequences.  Some countries like Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea have even extended the reach of their bans to all travellers from West African countries. But the most significant heavy-handed ban so far is by Kenya, the fourth largest economy and major hub of air travel in the continent. Those extraordinary, fear-based measures only go to demonstrate the wide distance between policy and evidence in Africa. The targeting of people from the affected countries instead of Ebola is misguided and a non-starter in the chain of death of the disease, which will only end up in not only doing harm to those beleaguered economies but to all countries, even those who have put in place bans. Targeting people instead o...

                                        The raging outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa, a strain never seen in the region, is scary indeed. To see and read about medical professionals who are supposed to know more than anyone in the society, fall helplessly in the line of duty is very frightening. And when the media love for anything drama is added; fear goes off the roof. Ebola is another of Africa’s brand-killers. And it seems to take the shine away from the story, of a continent that has been rising unprecedentedly in a post-financial crisis era, where economic growth is in short supply. Even the recent historic US-Africa Summit and its outcome were overshadowed by the world-wide panic over the viral contagion. Two African Heads of States of the affected countries even declined an opportunity to take pictures with the first  American President of African blood— preferring ...

       While the country has many unifying threads [1] , relations between the state, society and security institutions  are fragile and complex. As a result Madagascar has experienced periodic political and security crises with the latest lasting five years. [2]   Although the conflict in the country does not often erupt into violent confrontations, the underlying causes continue to be a major security threat to the region. In fact, the elections held in 2013 were a major step forward but did little to address the underlying causes of the coup: the lack of civilian democratic control of the security sector. The roots of conflicts date back to the pre-colonial and colonial periods. While societal cleavages are multiple and complex, tensions between the highland and coastal ethnic groups which existed before colonialization were reinforced and continued in part even after independence from France in 1960. The majority of the coastal populations (known ...