The territorial ambitions of Ethiopia – or, more accurately, Abyssinia (present-day northern Ethiopia comprising the Tigray and Amhara regions) – are deep-rooted. They emanate from the thinking that ...

As we close out 2025, we reflect on a year marked by defining moments—significant wins, painful losses, and the passing of respected elders in the public sphere. In this conversation, our guest Zahid ...

In 1989, when he was the deputy speaker of parliament, Kalonzo Musyoka, the former vice president and now an opposition leader, was a man who would not brook criticism of the one-party state under ...

We first heard of Alice at a press conference on 19 January 1987, given by Yoweri Museveni, the man then relatively new to the Ugandan presidency. We’d been summoned to State Lodge in Mbale, at the ...

On Thursday, 4 December, President William Ruto signed a US$2.5 billion five-year US-Kenya health cooperation framework on behalf of the government of Kenya. The framework is the first to be signed of ...

Karura Forest, Nairobi’s iconic urban green haven, has recently become the focus of a management dispute between the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) and Friends of Karura Forest (FKF). The disagreement ...

An old map of Africa showed me how calmly power redraws the world. The Kenya–US health pact does it again — using soft language to mask a new extraction, this time of African health data in the global ...

Paul Krugman, 2008 economics Nobel Laureate and prolific New York Times columnist narrates how as a young man he went to work for Government and an old hand, presumably a senior government economist, ...

We mourn the loss of Rasna Warah, a fearless writer, truth-seeker, and unwavering voice for justice. Her contributions to The Elephant and her broader body of work challenged injustice, exposed ...

Corruption, however you define it, is so integral to the way human commercial and political affairs play out that all major global developments in its regard have been driven by geopolitical shifts.

Africa’s post-colonial promise of democratization that began in the 1980s and 1990s with the “second independence” struggles now confronts a defining and painful reckoning. The optimism that ...

In many parts of the world where ethnic balance has not been achieved, politics turn violent. Ethiopia is a classic example where a lack of ethnic balance leads to ethnic violence. The Ethiopian ...