Somalia President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed reshuffled key security officials including the army chief, a move authorities said is part of a new strategy to quell a wave of attacks by al-Qaeda-affiliated militants. - Bloomberg
Alice Hunt Friend writes: The Defense Department is considering adjustments to its North and West Africa posture in response to a fatal ambush on a U.S. special operations forces team in Niger last fall. Without some historical context, it is difficult to assess if these adjustments reflect substantial changes in U.S. presence, and how they might affect U.S. Africa policy in the future. - Center for Strategic and International Studies
The result of Dr Abiy’s appointment as Prime Minister is that the strategic framework in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea regions has begun to undergo its most profound change since the coup against Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1974, during the Cold War. The changes to the regional balance caused by the 1974 coup, as well as the impact to the security of global trade routes, were lost in the global swirl of the Cold War. As a re-sult, the importance of that event is only now beginning to become evident as we see the rapid return to a core strategic framework which had existed for most of the past 2,500 years. The long-term impact of that 1974 coup is now starting to be reversed, or returned to “normalcy”. It was not surprising then that Dr Abiy said on June 1, 2018: “We should build our naval force capacity in the future.” He had already taken key initiatives with regard to neighboring states in the region; this signaled his intention to return Ethiopia to its maritime mission. ...
Dr Abiy’s reforms already show the promise of further economic growth and stability, and it should be expected that this process would soon receive the fillip of restoration of the vital foundation for economic growth: the return of private property ownership, cou-pled with the time-consuming challenge of reforming the bureaucracy. He will find con-siderable resistance among many of the old socialists and marxists of the various fac-tions of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) Coalition Gov-ernment. At home, Dr Abiy, a Protestant Christian and former Muslim, and of both Oromo and Amhara parentage, has moved quickly to reinstate the teaching of Ethiopian history, banned when the pro-Soviet Dergue seized power in 1974, and to restore respect for Ethiopia’s two-and-a-half millennia of Solomonic lineage, tying the country to its roots in the union of King Solomon of Israel and Queen Makeda of Saba (the Queen of Sheba).