Houses, Diamonds, and Power – Qatar’s Quiet March Across Africa
I watched that Lusaka handshake and felt the weight of history. President Hakainde Hichilema stood beside Sheikh Mansour bin Jabor bin Jassim Al Thani as Al Mansour Holdings announced nineteen billion dollars for Zambia. The headline promise is 1.5 million homes. The fine print includes sweeping financial-sector changes, a national investment and development bank, and sovereign-backed investment vehicles. This...
How Africa can stop being a pawn and become the grandmaster
I grew up watching the board, not just the pieces. In Africa, we were often told to celebrate when one of our pawns reached the eighth rank and became a queen. Yet in the real game that shaped our continent, we were too often trapped in the opening, sacrificed for someone else’s checkmate. Today I want to talk about...
Kahawa Tungu – The Bitter Drink Sweetening Africa’s Eastern Coast
I grew up knowing that on the Swahili coast, real conversations begin with a tiny cup. We call it kahawa tungu. Many elders also say kahawa chungu. Either way, it is the same thing: strong, unsweetened, cardamom-kissed coffee that arrives in a small cup but carries centuries of history. When I sit on a baraza bench in Lamu or Old...
Who Gets Rich Off Africa’s Poverty
I keep coming back to a single graph. It shows the number of Africans living on less than $2.15 a day. More than 460 million people. That is one in three Africans. And yet this is the same continent that produces the oil that fuels Europe, the cobalt that powers Silicon Valley, the gold that backs up international banks,...
Israel’s Footprints Across Africa
Israel’s reopening of its embassy in Lusaka after more than half a century is more than a diplomatic ribbon-cutting. It is a signal that Jerusalem is steadily rebuilding a footprint across Africa that has risen and fallen since the 1960s. On August 20, 2025, Israel formally re-established its mission in Zambia, with both sides framing the move as a...
America’s Billion-Dollar Hustle in Africa
I want to tell you a story about Africa’s money, but not the kind of money that Africans count in markets or stash in mobile wallets. This story is about the money that slips offshore, the money siphoned up by America’s most powerful corporations. It is about how Africa has quietly become one of the most profitable theaters for...
White Privilege and Africa’s Foreign Policy Chains
The Price of a Headline A careless headline in London can drain billions from Africa. A New York op-ed about instability in an African election translates into higher borrowing costs for governments across the continent. The math is brutal: perception becomes premium, and premium becomes poverty. This is not just media bias. It is white privilege disguised as objectivity, and it...
Ibrahim Traoré – The Geologist who became a Brave Soldier
In the flickering glow of a single lamp, a young Ibrahim Traoré sat in his parents' modest home in Kéra, Bondokuy in Burkina Faso’s agricultural west. His father was a nurse while his mother was a housewife. His two brothers Inoussa and Kassoum were close to him then and are still close now. The quiet night air carried the murmurs...
1.9 Million Reasons to Change Capitalism
In mid-2022, there were 1.9 million job vacancies in Germany, an all-time high in the country's history. Meanwhile 1.9 million Kenyans are suffering from depression. A large part of this depression is driven by a lack of jobs. On the other side of Africa in West Africa and Central Africa, rising insecurity and violence has pushed more than 1.9...
Qatar’s Billion-Dollar Blitz in Africa
Not long ago, Qatar was a country boxed in by its neighbors. The 2017 Gulf blockade was supposed to squeeze it into submission. Instead, it forced Doha to reinvent itself as a global mediator and investor, a state that survives and thrives not through size but through strategy. Africa, with its vast minerals, young markets, and fragile states, has...
