Engineering News | Columnist | Tara O’Connor

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Tara O’Connor

O’Connor is MD of the pan-African consulting firm Africa Risk Consulting. She is a University of Cape Town graduate and has spent 25 years assessing Africa’s political and business environment – Tara@africariskconsulting.com

Islamist militants a big nightmare for Sahel Alliance

By: Tara O’Connor 25th October 2024 In little over two years, military rule in West Africa’s three mining rich territories – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – has resulted in a sharp deterioration in the political, economic and security environment. Insecurity and uncertainty have now spread to infect the once stable, secure and... →

China-Africa chill just hype

27th September 2024 The recently concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, China, demonstrated that the Asian country’s relations with Africa are stronger and more robust than many had framed them to be. China’s President Xi Jinping reiterated this message in his FOCAC keynote speech, stating... →

Christopher Edyegu, China expert at Africa Risk Consulting

Wins and trials at Olympics

By: Tara O’Connor 30th August 2024 There’s nothing like being at an Olympic event to really savour it – to measure it, to cherish it and to ‘feel it’. I was lucky enough to have tickets for the Stade de France track and field. ‘Feeling it’ is astounding. The seamlessness of the city, police and Olympic authority’s organisation... →

West Africa’s junta bloc

By: Tara O’Connor 26th July 2024 The transition is almost complete. Three of West Africa’s new military dictatorships – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – have ended their security cooperation with the West, shifted their security allegiances to Russia and cemented their hold on power by ratifying the Alliance des États du Sahel... →

Africa’s abundance

By: Tara O’Connor 28th June 2024 If you haven’t got an Africa strategy, you haven’t got a strategy. That was the message I sought to convey to the exuberantly bright minds of the University of Strathclyde Business School postgraduates last week. A simple vox pop – what do you think when you think of Africa – brought a... →

Islamist violence continues to threaten desperately needed Moz LNG projects

By: Tara O’Connor 24th May 2024 Islamist extremist attacks on Macomia, in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, come just as the country’s political elite gets into gear for October’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections. The May 10 attacks and earlier ones show that the Southern African Development Community (SADC)... →

What’s holding back Tanzania’s recovery?

By: Creamer Media Reporter 26th April 2024 What’s holding back Tanzania’s economic recovery? The World Bank states that Tanzania has benefited from “strong macro fundamentals” and emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting global financial turmoil in a strong position. However, the East African country’s economic recovery remains... →

Fiona Grant - Consultant at Africa Risk Consulting

Shoddy episode in Senegal’s democratic history

By: Tara O’Connor 29th March 2024 The news on March if of Ousmane Sonko’s release from prison, paving the way for a strong opposition showing in Presidential elections that were held on March 24, unleashed spontaneous celebrations in Dakar, with young supporters singing in Wolof : “We have missed you, Sonko!” The release – as... →

Kenya’s economy rebounds but ‘hustlers’ don’t feel it

By: Tara O’Connor 23rd February 2024 Arriving in Kenya from South Africa, the business visitor immediately feels the benefit of Kenya’s long-term incremental and consistent improvements in the business operating environment. This is most visible in its investments in infrastructure, which have the private sector at its heart, but... →

Truth behind Burkina coups

By: Tara O’Connor 26th January 2024 Would Thomas Sankara be turning in his grave at the events occurring in the country he renamed Burkina Faso – the land of uncorruptible people? Sankara, the intellectual powerhouse of post-independence pan-Africanism, launched a range of sweeping reforms, removing extreme powers from traditional... →

High drama awaits Africa in 2024

By: Tara O’Connor 15th December 2023 If all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players with their exits and their entrances, Africa is headed for high drama – a heart-stopping and pulse-racing 2024. The backdrop is arguably the most volatile international environment that the world has seen in a century,... →

Sudan and the ring of fire

By: Tara O’Connor 24th November 2023 With war between Israel and Palestine, centred on Gaza, the ring of fire that has engulfed the Sahel now appears to reach up to encircle the Mediterranean, stretching as far as Jordan, with Egypt serving as the only buffer. This as Sudan’s rebels, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in early November... →

Tanzania’s Hassan takes art of the reshuffle to new highs

By: Tara O’Connor 27th October 2023 Attacks in Israel, its counterattacks in Gaza and the war in Ukraine have sent global tensions to highs not seen for a generation or more. This, combined with a rush of military coups in West Africa that will consign the Sahel to a decade or more of instability, insecurity and decline, has led to... →

Latest coups bring to an end three decades of slow but consistent democratisation

By: Tara O’Connor 22nd September 2023 The cries of “contagion”, “epidemic” have died down after Gabon became the latest in a string of countries to suffer a military takeover. As the Sahelian dust begins to settle, we see that this string of coups brings to an end two long-standing trends and points to a new direction. First, it ends... →

Niger coup completes Africa’s band of instability

By: Tara O’Connor 25th August 2023 The military coup that has taken place in Niger completes a band of malleable instability that now stretches from the port at Conakry in Guinea, in West Africa, to Sudan’s Port Sudan, in East Africa. Between Conakry and Sudan are linked a band of Sahelian countries that are newly under military... →

Zambia shows what a strong leadership can do

By: Tara O’Connor 21st July 2023 Scanning global international news can be relentlessly depressing as the world faces multilayered transitions. Firstly, from a largely bipolar world that a colleague cruelly named “the West and the rest” to a multicountry one where “the rest” or the “global South” challenges the relevance of... →

Promise of democracy eludes many in Nigeria . . . but things are moving again

By: Tara O’Connor 23rd June 2023 As I sat down to write a column on Nigeria on 12 June, I had a flashback to ‘The June 12’ – the name Nigerians gave to the country’s failed first post-Cold War attempt to restore democratic rule. The then head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida, had promised to step down from power after... →

France urges EU to designate Wagner as a terrorist entity

By: Tara O’Connor 26th May 2023 France’s Parliament has unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution encouraging the European Union (EU) to designate Russian paramilitary company the Wagner Group as a terrorist organisation. The resolution would allow the EU to freeze Wagner’s assets and those of its members and bar European... →

Covid-19, spending, debt: now for the hangover

By: Tara O’Connor 28th April 2023 The publication in April of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) global growth report makes for sobering reading. Much of Africa has a massive hangover after the institution encouraged a heady – almost wanton – splurging of cash as a first line of defence against the impact of lockdown and,... →

Kenya: a green powerhouse

By: Tara O’Connor 24th March 2023 A Nairobi-based friend and business colleague reminisced with me last week about how representatives of then Eskom International beat a path to his door in the late 1990s with promises of how Eskom was going to light up the whole continent. They assured him Kenya didn’t need to develop its... →

Corruption in Zim’s use of almost $1bn from IMF

By: Tara O’Connor 24th February 2023 Elections are fast approaching in Zimbabwe, giving rise to popular expectations and international hopes for change but equally to a blatant increase in government corruption from the last remaining sources of official funding. Is this uptick in the misuse of official funds a sign that the ruling... →

A lot at stake in Nigerian poll

By: Tara O’Connor 27th January 2023 It is hard to overstate the importance of Nigeria’s February elections. The country’s security, social, economic and business environments are in a parlous state. The army has lost control of northern and north-eastern borders to Islamist extremists, including Boko Haram, its allies and its... →

Overarching threats and opportunities in 2023

By: Tara O’Connor 16th December 2022 As most of sub-Saharan businesses race towards the end-of-year close and the prospect of a summer or festival break, it is time to reflect on yet another year hurtling by at breakneck speed. Why does it seem so? Across Africa, the greatest disruptor of all – climate change – seemed to step up... →

Glencore – Africa’s textbook case of corruption supply side

By: Tara O’Connor 18th November 2022 Diversified commodity trading and mining multinational Glencore has taken up tenth place in global corruption’s hall of shame. In the first week of November, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) ordered Glencore Energy UK, the UK subsidiary of the Switzerland-headquartered giant, to pay... →

Zambia’s new dawn might just be a lasting new dawn

By: Tara O’Connor 21st October 2022 Surveying Africa for the latest trends can be dispiriting. West Africa has been sucked into the mire of a fresh round of military coups d’état as Russia extends its neocolonial project to the continent. In East Africa, the uneasy truce between Tigrayan rebels and Ethiopia’s national army has... →

Impact of Russia-Ukraine conflict on Africa

By: Tara O’Connor 23rd September 2022 The success of the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive, the routing of Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the recapture of key eastern cities and surrounds of Kharkov and Izyum may prove to be a game changer in a war that has had a significant retrogressive effect on politics and business... →

Kenya’s election heralds a change in leadership

By: Tara O’Connor 26th August 2022 When a UK politician known equally for her religion as for her politics said of her own party leader that “there’s something of the night about him”, it stuck. The same could be said of William Samoei arap Ruto, whose election as Kenya’s President was confirmed by the country’s Independent... →

The Sudan-Russia nexus

By: Tara O’Connor 22nd July 2022 Sudan’s Islamist-led military is seeking to consolidate its control of the country, assumed in an October 25, 2021, coup d’état, through deception, extreme violence, abduction, suppression and grand-scale corruption. Islamists who first seized power in 1989 and, under the then junta leader, Omar... →

Upcoming elections a test for Kenya’s new Constitution

By: Tara O’Connor 24th June 2022 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same – comes to mind when casting a casual eye over Kenya’s August Presidential and Parliamentary elections. Since the end of the one-party State in 1991, Kenyan elections have served to rotate power between... →

Elon Musk promises a return to social media Wild West

By: Tara O’Connor 20th May 2022 Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema is famous for his expert use of social media platforms. His opponents taunted him as the President only on social media – until the quiet crowds of his young social media-active followers lined up to give him a landslide victory last year. Inspired,... →

Nigeria’s oligarchs face pressure as Presidential candidates emerge

By: Tara O’Connor 22nd April 2022 As international businesses scurry to close off any links to Russia’s sanctioned political and oligarch class, some of Nigeria’s politicians and would-be politicians may start to feel a little uncomfortable. Nigeria’s domestic politics is often every much as brutal as Russia’s, with a history of... →

Russia in Africa

By: Tara O’Connor 25th March 2022 “You can focus on the details of contracts and modelling in risk management but it’s the big events – like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – that can literally wipe out your balance sheet.” These words of an Africa infrastructure investment professional who sits on several companies’ risk management... →

Ethiopian leader pushing ahead with economic reforms, despite the armed conflict in Tigray

By: Tara O’Connor 18th February 2022 I recently received a horrifying message from a friend in Guinea-Bissau. She had narrowly escaped death while working in the Presidency during the failed coup on February 1. “When the shooting started, I had gone to the bathroom and managed to escape that way – but two of my colleagues died. It’s... →

New Omicron variant takes volatility and uncertainty to new levels

By: Tara O’Connor 10th December 2021 The end of the year is traditionally when we muse about the year gone by as we look to the one ahead. This is difficult at the best of times, but the Covid-19 pandemic has taken volatility and uncertainty to new levels. For Southern Africa, all indicators were pointing towards 2022 as the year... →

Angola – taking on the oligarch-kleptocrats

By: Tara O’Connor 19th November 2021 As Angola takes on the oligarch-kleptocrats and makes meaningful reforms, investors start to notice, but is it too late to woo voters? Rio Tinto’s signing in early October of a diamond mining investment contract for Angola’s major Chiri kimberlite concession, in Lunda Sul, is a vote of confidence... →

From Francafrique to France-Africa

By: Tara O’Connor 22nd October 2021 That France’s special relationship with Frenching-speaking nations, known as Françafrique, is undergoing a fundamental transformation would not have been obvious at the 28th Afrique-France Summit, in Montpellier, earlier this month. Nothing of any great import happened at the summit, which has... →

Of prisons and Presidencies

By: Tara O’Connor 24th September 2021 What links a military coup in the ‘wildest west’ of West Africa and the less media-glamorous landslide election victory in Zambia? West Africa has turned back the regional political clock to the 1970s and 1980s, when every few months some junior officer with political ambitions would oust the... →

The corrupt’s horizons are narrowing

By: Tara O’Connor 20th August 2021 Do three significant events in the subregion signify a trend? First, although the trial of South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma, may have been postponed to September 9, the so-called Arms Deal corruption trial, along with that of French arms company Thales, is likely to go ahead. This,... →

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