In Case You Missed It 6/07/15 — 6/14/15

Peo­ple get busy, and it can be hard to keep up with the week’s news. To help you keep up with the lat­est news com­ing out of Africa, we will now com­pile a week­ly list of the most impor­tant sto­ries from think pieces, to opin­ion pieces to impor­tant devel­op­ing sto­ries. We hope it will be help­ful in sort­ing out the impor­tant stuff in a world inun­dat­ed with infor­ma­tion and break­ing head­lines, and bring your atten­tion to the issues that may not have got­ten the most cov­er­age dur­ing the week.

This week, we start off with a look at U.S. rela­tion­ship build­ing in Africa through invest­ments, the larg­er impli­ca­tions of Good­luck Jonathan’s peace­ful tran­si­tion of pow­er, and a con­tro­ver­sial return.

1. Last month, Sarah Crozi­er wrote about the grow­ing eco­nom­ic influ­ence of African mar­kets. Now, USA Today high­lights the grow­ing dis­par­i­ty between invest­ment in Africa between Chi­na and the U.S. While the U.S. has sig­nif­i­cant­ly raised its invest­ments to $14 bil­lion in the con­ti­nent, it pales to Chi­na’s behe­moth invest­ment of $75 bil­lion in the past 10 years. There is, how­ev­er, oppor­tu­ni­ty for the U.S. to cre­ate more mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships through the spread of demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals, writes John Burnett.

2. Pres­i­dent Good­luck Johnathan’s recent turnover of pow­er to the elect­ed Muham­madu Buhari stands as an exam­ple of the impor­tance of trans­fers of pow­er The New York­er says. Phillip Goure­vitch high­lights sev­er­al of the numer­ous African states where strong­men have refused to relin­quish pow­er, includ­ing Burk­i­na Faso, The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go and Burun­di. Mean­while, Burun­di has delayed its next vote until July 15, after a con­tro­ver­sial bid for a third term by cur­rent Pres­i­dent Pierre Nkurunziza.

BBC

Omar al-Bashir receives a grand wel­come as he returns to Sudan.

3. Sudanese Pres­i­dent Omar al-Bashir returned to Sudan this week, despite a South African court order under the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court (ICC) that he stay in South Africa under inves­ti­ga­tion of war crimes. Sudan’s For­eign Min­is­ter Ibrahim Ghan­dour called the charges “lame and mean­ing­less.” 4. African coun­tries are explor­ing the open­ing of a free trade zone through­out the con­tient in effort to stim­u­late intra-con­ti­nent trad­ing and eco­nom­ic growth. How­ev­er, many poten­tial bar­ri­ers still stand in the way of the vision, which states hope to see com­plet­ed by 2017.