For Nigerian women, gender equality remains a bridge too far as increased social influence fails to translate into political power.

Reading selections for the weekend of September 30, 2016.

As the horrific suffering in Ethiopia’s Tigray region continues, the United States and other members of the international community are sounding ever more urgent alarms. 

Invoking historical rough justice and persistent infantilization by the West, African countries have, to widespread astonishment, refused to give a full-throated backing to Western sanctions against Russia. Seventeen of the thirty-five abstainers from the United Nations General Assembly vote on March 2, 2022, to condemn the Russian “aggression against Ukraine” were African. More troublingly, even more African countries abstained from voting on the UN April 7, 2022, resolution to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council over “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” in Ukraine. The latter list included South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, and Nigeria, which hitherto had joined 140 other UN members to condemn the Russian invasion.

Any doubts about the bipartisan consensus in Washington around the need to compete with China in Africa were erased in the early months of 2021, when senior Biden administration appointees like U.S. …