Less than six months after the country's first democratic elections and only four months into the government's mandate, Tunisia's ruling party, Ennahda, has announced its intentions to hold the country's next elections one year from now.

LAGOS – Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, who was elected only eight months ago, is already swimming in a sea of troubles. On January 1, New Year celebrations were abruptly cut short when Nigerians woke up to learn that the government gasoline subsidy had been withdrawn. The country’s poor immediately hit the streets, already angry because their corrupt and incompetent government has been unable to repair state-owned refineries, thereby forcing Africa’s largest oil producer to import petroleum products.

LONDON – Free, fair, and transparent democratic elections are no longer strangers to Africa. Indeed, they have become a regular occurrence. But the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the end of November will likely be Africa’s most daunting electoral challenge so far. If the vote comes off successfully, democrats and democratic norms will receive a boost in every corner of the continent.

HARGEISA – Drought, famine, refugees, piracy, and the violence and terrorism endemic to the shattered city of Mogadishu, a capital ruined by civil war: these are the images that flash through peoples’ minds nowadays when they think of the Horn of Africa. Such perceptions, however, are not only tragically one-sided; they are short-sighted and dangerous.

On April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton United States cargo vessel, was hijacked by four Somali pirates several hundred miles east of Mogadishu. Bobbing in a lifeboat with the skipper, 53-year-old Richard Phillips, they began negotiating with the ship’s owners via cellphone for a multimillion-dollar ransom.

The outskirts of the Dadaab refugee complex are jammed with dome-like huts made of sticks, refuse, plastic sheeting and discarded cartons from aid packets. Toilets are scarce, and water is delivered periodically by truck. More than 60,000 people are occupying these makeshift encampments built atop a harsh arid landscape in the far east of Kenya, just over the Somali border. The ragged domes in the desert look like something from the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max.

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WHILE the eyes of the world have been riveted on events in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, a post-election stalemate in Côte d’Ivoire, once the jewel of west Africa but now a byword for bloody chaos and division, has been getting nastier by the day (see article). More than 400,000 Ivorians have fled their homes, three-quarters of them from Abidjan, the country’s once shinily prosperous commercial capital, most of them in the past few weeks. Hundreds have been killed, mainly by the forces of Laurent Gbagbo, the former president who has refused to step down after being roundly defeated by his challenger, Alassane Ouattara, at the polls in November.