Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: The United States expands its joint military operations with Nigeria in the country’s northeast, Senegal’s political schism deepens after the ousted prime minister is elected parliament speaker, and the Trump administration plans to accept more white South African refugees.
In recent weeks, joint U.S.-Nigerian airstrikes have eliminated a top leader of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and killed 175 militants in Nigeria, according to statements from Washington and Abuja.
The expansion of U.S. operations in the northeast, the epicenter of Nigeria’s insurgency, has been welcomed by Nigerians and politicians fed up with insecurity. So far, the joint strikes have not led to civilian casualties, unlike Nigerian-led strikes, which frequently accidentally kill civilians.
Yet experts told Foreign Policy that Washington may find itself facing the kind of animosity it experienced in the Sahel if military operations don’t change Nigeria’s complex, decadeslong insurgency, which has metastasized in recent years into a “ransom economy” as armed groups murder and kidnap citizens across the country for profit.
For years, Abuja has battled several jihadi groups operating in northern Nigeria, including Boko Haram, which emerged as a terrorist group in 2009; the Sahelian group Lakurawa, which formed the following year; and ISWAP, which splintered from Boko Haram in 2016.
In the northwest, bandits operate from forested hideouts, engaging in mass abductions for ransom. Farther south, in the Middle Belt, nomadic Fulani herders, who are predominantly Muslim, are migrating southward due to drought in the north, leading to violent clashes with largely Christian farmers over land and water access.
Overall, Nigeria’s crisis reflects wider state failure to provide security and basic funding of public services such as electricity, water, and education.
Nigeria has consistently carried out strikes against these armed groups. Yet Ladd Serwat, the senior analyst for Africa at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), said that jihadis easily replenish their ranks.
Some of the people who join these militant groups are forced to “for their own safety, because of the absence of [state] authorities or the belief that insurgents are going to offer them better protection,” Serwat said.
Nigeria also has the largest population of out-of-school children globally, mainly in the north, and armed groups have relied heavily on child recruitment. “That’s the pool from which these bad guys recruit from,” said Kabir Adamu, the CEO of Abuja-based Beacon Security and Intelligence. “All you have to do is drive around the urban centers in Nigeria and see the number of kids that are out on the streets doing what they shouldn’t be doing.”
Around 30,000 people have been killed in violence across Nigeria since President Bola Tinubu took office in 2023, according to ACLED data.
Meanwhile, kidnappers operate with near impunity. Earlier this month, Boko Haram carried out large-scale school abductions in Nigeria’s southwestern Oyo state. The attack in Tinubu’s political heartland—which involved the filmed beheading of a mathematics teacher that was widely circulated online and the kidnapping of at least 46 students and teachers—marked a terrifying expansion of Nigeria’s insurgency.
Last month, 416 people were kidnapped by Boko Haram from Borno state. “Not a single person has been arrested and prosecuted” for that attack, Adamu said. “You can’t have a situation where there is no justice, there is no accountability.”
The United States became increasingly vocal about Nigeria’s security situation late last year. In October, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration redesignated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” over false claims of Christian genocide. (In reality, all faiths in Nigeria have been affected by the violence.) Media reports have suggested that the move was driven by lobbying by Nigerian separatist groups.
In December, the United States carried out strikes against Lakurawa in Nigeria’s northwestern state of Sokoto, which residents said failed to kill any militants. Attacks by Lakurawa continued after the strikes. The following month, Trump warned of a “many-time strike” campaign if the Nigerian government failed to protect Christian populations.
Since then, Nigerian National Security Advisor Nuhu Ribadu has spent months engaging in diplomacy to transform Washington’s destabilizing rhetoric into joint military cooperation. Still, critics have argued that the $9 million Nigeria has spent on lobbying in Washington is wasteful when around 40 percent of Nigerians live below the international extreme poverty line of $3 daily per person.
Despite the reported success of recent joint strikes, experts have their doubts over the campaign’s long-term success. “I don’t think that airstrikes alone would be enough to combat insurgency. Insurgents … are quite embedded in certain areas within civilian populations,” Serwat said.
Washington’s stated objective of “protecting Christians” could even worsen the insurgency, Adamu argued. Jihadis “may use this as a basis for additional recruitment in Nigeria, and say, ‘Come and join us so we can stop the spread of U.S. politicization in Nigeria,’” he said.
“Politically, it may also backfire on the government” ahead of next year’s general elections, Adamu said, “since there’s a strong anti-U.S. sentiment, especially in northern Nigeria.”
Friday, May 29: The United Nations Security Council is set to renew sanctions against South Sudan.
Monday, June 1: Ethiopia holds general elections. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is highly likely to win, and his ruling Prosperity Party is expected to retain its parliamentary majority.
Senegal’s political schism. On Tuesday, lawmakers elected Ousmane Sonko, Senegal’s recently sacked prime minister, as parliament speaker in a bold challenge to President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Faye dissolved his cabinet and dismissed Sonko last week, following months of political tension between the former allies.
Faye ran in the 2024 presidential elections as the candidate for the PASTEF party, led by Sonko, after the latter’s candidacy was disqualified due to a defamation conviction. But since then, the party has faced internal rifts over International Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiations and the handling of Senegal’s high debt-to-GDP ratio.
On Monday, Faye named former banker Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo as the new prime minister. But as the political schism continues to play out, Sonko may have the upper hand, with PASTEF—which remains largely loyal to Sonko—controlling 130 of the 165 seats in Senegal’s legislature.
Sudan’s Colombian fighters. The United Arab Emirates has recruited Colombian mercenaries to help fight alongside the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
Sudan’s civil war, which erupted between the RSF and the Sudanese military in April 2023, has killed more than 150,000 people and displaced 14 million. The UAE has reportedly backed the RSF since the conflict began, leading to Sudan’s government accusing it of “complicity in genocide”—an allegation that the UAE has rejected.
Afrikaner refugees. The Trump administration plans to allow an additional 10,000 white South Africans into the United States, claiming that they face an “emergency refugee situation” due to “unforeseen developments in South Africa,” according to a State Department notice sent to Congress last week.
The decision, which could cost Washington an additional $100 million, raises the Trump administration’s cap on refugees to 17,500. Nearly all of the refugees admitted into the country in Trump’s second term have been Afrikaners.
France-Botswana deal. Following its fallout with Niger’s military government, French state-owned nuclear giant Orano has shifted its focus to Botswana’s more than 800,000 tons of untapped uranium reserves.
After months of media speculation about a deal, Botswanan President Duma Boko confirmed earlier this month at the Africa Forward Summit co-hosted by France and Kenya that Orano Botswana, which registered as a company on April 10, has secured exploration rights.
“It’s not something that starts now,” Boko told the BBC’s Focus on Africa. “They already hold prospecting licenses, and we anticipate that they will do the drilling, the prospecting, establish the different quantities of deposits of uranium.”
For Botswana, the world’s top diamond producer, the agreement is part of its push to diversify its economy as buyers turn to manufactured diamonds.
Arsenal’s African identity. Viral videos last week showed fans across Africa celebrating Arsenal’s first English Premier League title in 22 years. In Africa Is a Country, Sean Henry Jacobs argues that this shouldn’t come as a surprise because the soccer club is essentially African.
Before Arsène Wenger’s tenure as manager of Arsenal between 1996 and 2018, Arsenal had recruited little from Africa. However, Jacobs writes, by “2025, more than two dozen African-born players had played for Arsenal, primarily due to Wenger’s doing.”
Virginia Woolf in Lagos. For Channels Television, Nebianet Usaini reports on filmmaking twins Arie and Chuko Esiri, whose adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway into the film Clarissa was widely praised by critics at the Cannes Film Festival this month.
Filmed and set in modern-day Lagos, the story follows a high-society woman preparing to host a party and features British and U.S. diaspora actors alongside Nigeria’s Nollywood stars.
“In an elegant piece of visual symbolism,” Usaini writes, “the film features a wonky mosaic in the shape of Nigeria that the wealthy hosts cannot seem to hang straight.” Chuko Esiri said at Cannes that the artwork is “a perfect motif of the nation. It’s slightly off and needs correcting … but no one quite knows how.”
