For over two decades, Somalia was at war with itself, a legitimate government was overthrown in 1991, plunging the nation into a deadly civil war. Amid the power vacuum warlords tore apart the Horn of Africa nation, and Somalia’s waters became free-for-all as unlicensed foreign fishing fleets went on an illegal fishing frenzy.

Foreign trawlers have been illegally taking millions of tonnes of Somalia’s fish denying the country millions of dollars in revenue and stirring deep-seated frustrations in local Somalis and eventually morphed into one of the world’s most dangerous maritime security threats that made Somalia's coastline one of the most dangerous in the world.

There is little doubt amongst Somalis that conflicts like these provided the original impetus for what became the piracy phenomenon. In the local setting, illegal fishing, and the economic damage it inflicted, left traditional fishing communities so angered and impoverished that they began attacking the illegal fishing vessels, acting as a sort of militia coast guard.

However, criminal gangs subsequently saw the profit potential and started hijacking more valuable commercial ships unconnected to illegal fishing. Thus the scourge of Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden was born.

Africa's Largest Dam: Geopolitics of the Nile

The dam is at the center of Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter. Economic growth in Ethiopia, which is Africa’s second-most populous nation, has been stifled by a lack of electricity. Industry revenues are decimated by the nightmare of daily, unpredictable power cuts. The dam’s power will also help with similar problems in Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti, all of which are connected to Ethiopia’s grid and will begin importing power from it in the coming years. Long but futile negotiations over the years have left Egypt and Ethiopia and their neighbor Sudan short of an agreement to regulate how Ethiopia will operate the dam and fill its reservoir.

Egypt, which is Africa’s third-most populous nation, relies on the Nile for more than 90% of its fresh water supplies and wants a legally binding treaty on how Ethiopia can use the Blue Nile’s waters. With the construction of the Dam (GERD) underway, a complex trans boundary water situation is at hand: the GERD is nearing completion, with no specific agreement yet on water sharing or reservoir operations. The dam can capture more than the average annual flow and can thus dramatically change the river’s flow. Although most Nile waters originate in Ethiopia, nearly all use occurs downstream in Egypt and Sudan. Egypt, fearing major disruptions to its access to the Nile’s waters, originally intended to prevent even the start of the GERD’s construction. In fact, Egypt has called the filling of the dam an existential threat. At this point, though, the GERD is nearly completed, and so Egypt has shifted its position to trying to secure a political agreement over the timetable for filling the GERD’s reservoir and how the dam will be managed, particularly during droughts. Thus the Geopolitics of the Nile has been a hot topic.

Sudan is caught between the competing interests of Egypt and Ethiopia. Although Khartoum initially opposed the construction of the GERD, it has since warmed up to it, citing its potential to improve prospects for domestic development. Nevertheless, Khartoum continues to fear that the operation of the GERD could threaten the safety of Sudan’s own dams and make it much more difficult for the government to manage its own development projects.

Low taxes have drawn many foreign companies to Mauritius and account for a huge portion of the country's $16 billion GDP. Mauritius is one of Africa's richest countries on per capita basis. However Mauritius long been shadowed by financial secrecy, with the island’s government overseeing LEGAL but QUESTIONABLE processes that have allowed global companies to siphon millions of tax dollars away from other African nations.

The Earth is a large, complex planet made up of many different systems that interact in countless ways, sometimes deep and often surprising ways. Take the Amazon tropical rainforest for example. There is no place on earth quite like it, it is one of the greatest natural habitats on the planet, it covers 40% of the South American continent, contains nearly 400 billion individual trees within the forest, and creates one-fifth of our planet’s oxygen.

As big and mighty as it is, the Amazon is sustained by the Sahara desert. It is nothing short of extraordinary. On one side of the Atlantic ocean is one of the most inhospitable and driest wilderness on Earth with searing temperatures and little to zero rainfall. On the other side is one of the wettest and most fertile locations on earth. Despite over 10,000 km of open ocean separating the world’s largest rainforest and the world’s largest hot desert, the two regions are intimately connected and do share a vital commonality, nutrient-rich dust

The partitioning of Africa by European empires has had decades of devastating social, economic and political impacts, and millions of lives have been lost in post-independence Africa defending what are actually colonial borders. We are overdue for an African renaissance, completing the decolonisation process– which remains as unfinished business until boundaries are changed.

Africans and others have proposed many new maps of Africa. One recurring idea is to redraw its borders into smaller states on the basis of ethnicity or its proxies, like shared language.

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Despite almost 30 years of democracy since the country overhauled a racist apartheid regime designed to keep the country's black population under the thumb of an elite white minority, the rainbow nation has been unable to shrug off the tag of the most economically unequal country in the world.

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In much of the world, national borders have shifted over time to reflect ethnic, linguistic, and sometimes religious divisions. Spain's borders generally enclose the Spanish-speakers of Europe; Italy and Croatia roughly encompass ethnic Italians and Croats. Thailand is exactly what its name suggests, the land of the Thai. Africa is different, its nations largely defined not by its peoples heritage but by European colonialism.

But as the continent becomes more democratic and Africans assert desires for national self-determination, the continent's decision to maintain colonial era borders is a subject of intense debate.

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In this edition, at least 30 jihadists have been killed by #Rwandan forces who were deployed to #Mozambique. Rwanda is just one of several countries that sent troops to the country after a recent uptick in activity by Shabaab Islamist militants. Also, Tunisia has received foreign aid to help battle #Covid-19. This as hospitals are overwhelmed and running out of oxygen. And, France 24 speaks to Christine Amisi, one of Africa's top doctors in the efforts to help rape survivors.

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