The biggest story out of Africa last year did not occupy the headlines the way dramatic revolutions in the Maghreb, civil strife in West Africa, the independence of South Sudan, famine in the Horn of Africa, piracy off the Somali coast, fraud-ridden elections in the ironically-named Democratic Republic of the Congo, and various other developments each did in turn. Rather, as The Economist noted last month: “Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing [economies] were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6 percent this year and nearly 6 percent in 2012, about the same as Asia.”
Higher prices for commodities were responsible for part of the growth spurt, but other factors were also involved, including wise choices made by African leaders and peoples regarding economic reform, the rule of law, as well as the use of new technologies—all of which encouraged significant investment in their economies. The signs of hope, however, are now threatened by the spread of violent extremism by Islamist groups along the Sahel belt across the continent and the increasing links between the militants.
Al-Qaeda’s franchise in North Africa, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has been an unintended beneficiary of the fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Buoyed by the flow of arms and fighters out of Libya, the group has in recent months initiated skirmishes with government forces in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. Last week, its fighters boldly attacked a military installation in the Kidal region of northeastern Mali that had just been constructed with funds from the European Union’s Special Program for Peace Security and Development and unveiled at the end of November during European Commissioner for Development Andris Pielbags’s visit to the country. AQIM and a new splinter group calling itself the “Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa” have also struck at the tourism and commercial sectors with a spate of kidnappings of Westerners, including in the last month the abduction of tourists in Timbuktu and an engineer and a technician at a cement factory near the northern Malian town of Gao. Read the rest on:
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