Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Ethiopia’s push for maritime access sparks renewed tensions with Eritrea, the military stages a coup in Guinea-Bissau, and Nigerians of all faiths face escalating violence.
Ethiopia-Eritrea Escalation
Ethiopian and Eritrean leaders have traded hostile rhetoric in recent weeks, triggering international fears of a fresh regional conflict. The latest round of tensions has largely been driven by landlocked Ethiopia’s demand for direct access to the Red Sea, which it has described as an “existential matter.”
Last month, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called for international “mediation” with Eritrea to restore this access, which he insisted is “inevitable.” Abiy and his officials have also floated the idea of taking Eritrea’s southern port of Assab by force. Ethiopia became a landlocked country in 1993, when Eritrea gained independence after a 30-year war.
Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel has argued that Ethiopian officials are attempting to “ignite an unjustified war” with this rhetoric.
Meanwhile, Ethiopian officials have accused Eritrea of colluding with a “hardliner faction” of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—the dominant political group in Ethiopia’s Tigray region for three decades—to renew a deadly civil war in northern Ethiopia, which raged from 2020 to 2022 and spread from Tigray to the Afar and Amhara regions.
In an Oct. 2 letter to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos accused Eritrea and rebel TPLF factions of “funding, mobilizing and directing armed groups” in Amhara.
Eritrea has rejected these claims, writing on X that Ethiopia’s letter to the U.N. is a “deceitful charade.”
Ethiopian-Eritrean relations have long been fraught. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF were once allies when fighting against Ethiopia’s communist government in the 1980s, but after Eritrea gained independence and a TPLF-led government came to power in Ethiopia, the two countries fought a brutal yearslong border war, with lasting mutual hostility.
The nations signed a peace deal in 2018—a move that earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize—and Eritrea fought alongside the Ethiopian Army during the Tigrayan civil war.
Isaias, however, was dissatisfied with a 2022 peace deal signed with the TPLF in Pretoria, South Africa—as were some TPLF factions, which felt they were sidelined and forced to disarm, while TPLF officials who negotiated the deal secured roles in Tigray’s interim regional administration.
Since then, Eritrea has reportedly mended ties with dissident TPLF factions. “The most powerful arm of the TPLF factions has begun to form a relationship with their former enemies during the two-year war: Eritrea,” Yohannes Woldemariam, a Horn of Africa analyst, told Foreign Policy.
The latest war of words has come as clashes resurge along the Tigray-Afar border. In recent weeks, Abiy has accused the TPLF of diverting its regional budget to militant activities. In turn, TPLF officials have alleged that Abiy’s government is limiting access to basic goods to “starve the people of Tigray and push them into revolt.” And officials in Afar have accused Tigrayan forces of crossing into their territory and seizing several villages.
Meanwhile, Eritrean troops still occupy areas on the Ethiopian border that they seized during the 2020-22 Tigray war, despite calls from the United States and U.N. for Eritrea to withdraw all its forces.
“Whatever the formula for de-escalation, the bottom line is that the Horn of Africa, and the world, cannot afford another Eritrea-Ethiopia war,” Michael Woldemariam and Abel Abate Demissie recently wrote in Foreign Policy.
Security experts are calling for renewed diplomacy from the African Union, South Africa, and the United States to stop a collapse of the Pretoria agreement. “The risk of renewed cycles of atrocities is all too real,” Human Rights Watch warned last week.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, Nov. 26: Local and regional elections are held in Namibia.
Thursday, Nov. 27: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development hosts the International Economic Forum on Africa in Paris.
What We’re Watching
Guinea-Bissau coup. The military in Guinea-Bissau said it had detained President Umaro Sissoco Embaló and taken control of the country for an “indefinite” period on Wednesday following Sunday’s disputed election.
Embaló, a former army general who entered office in 2020, and opposition candidate Fernando Dias both declared victory on Monday ahead of official results. On Wednesday, a group of army officers said on state TV that they had halted the electoral process, and residents in the capital of Bissau reported sounds of gunfire and said the military had set up checkpoints across the city.
The election sparked tensions even before this week. The main opposition party—the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which led the country’s independence from Portugal—was barred from running after the Supreme Court said it had submitted its documents late. Some factions of the military supported the PAIGC, and without its own candidate, the PAIGC backed leading opposition challenger Dias.
Guinea-Bissau has experienced a number of coups and attempted coups. The country’s opposition-dominated parliament has not been in session since 2023, when it was dissolved by Embaló after a coup attempt.
Violence in Nigeria. As U.S. President Donald Trump threatens military action to combat what he has framed as a persecution of Nigerian Christians, Nigerians of all faiths are facing rising violence amid a Nigerian army ill-equipped to deal with a toxic brew of attacks from Islamists, commercial gangs, and secessionists.
On Saturday, the Nigerian state of Niger ordered the indefinite closure of all schools after the abduction of 303 children and 12 teachers from a Catholic school, a few days after around 25 Muslim schoolgirls were kidnapped in neighboring Kebbi state.
That day, the federal government separately announced the closure of 41 schools under its control and increased patrols around forests in northern Nigeria, which are strongholds for terrorism networks.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, a high-ranking Nigerian officer, Brig. Gen. Musa Uba, who is Muslim, was executed by Islamic State West Africa Province militants, alongside four other Nigerian soldiers in northeastern Borno state. Gangs also attacked a church in Kwara state, killing at least two people, and a predominantly Muslim village in Zamfara state, killing three and abducting 64.
Between July 2024 and June 2025, almost 5,000 people were abducted across Nigeria, with criminal gangs getting more than $1.6 million in ransom payments, according to SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian risk firm. Nearly 35 million Nigerians could face severe hunger by the middle of next year due to insecurity affecting agriculture, the U.N. World Food Programme projected on Tuesday.
G-20 outcome. Amid a U.S. boycott, the G-20 declaration adopted in South Africa last weekend largely focused on issues opposed by U.S. officials, including climate change, gender equality, and global wealth inequality.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa made the unconventional move to issue the statement at the opening of the summit, rather than at its end. It has been backed by all G-20 members apart from the United States and Argentina, whose president, Javier Milei, is a Trump ally.
Officials in Pretoria told Bloomberg that they expect Trump to exclude South Africa from the bloc’s meetings next year when the United States holds the G-20 presidency.
What We’re Reading
African visual language. In It’s Nice That, Ugonna-Ora Owoh explores the intricacies of Nigerian typography, from a display font inspired by Yoruba traditional wrestling to lettering used at Festac ’77, the largest-ever pan-African festival.
“Contrary to what might be known, type design has always had a quiet but steady presence in Nigeria’s visual culture,” he writes. That tradition has risked being lost amid the ubiquitous use of Western fonts, but “a growing number of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft … [and] this is finding its way into global design conversations.”
The decline of the Rand Club. A Johannesburg institution once known as a hub for some of the world’s wealthiest white men has seen its fortunes dwindle alongside South Africa’s economy, Alexandra Wexler reports in the Wall Street Journal.
The Rand Club, which was founded in 1887 and once had novelist Rudyard Kipling as its guest, now struggles to stay afloat. “Its experiences, what it’s lived through as an institution, have mirrored what the city’s gone through, what the country’s gone through,” one club member told Wexler.