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

Be careful what you wish for . . .

By: Tara O’Connor 23rd July 2021 In this opinion piece, African Risk Consulting's Tara O’Connor and Raphael Korber-Hoffman review recent security developments across the African continent Two events pointing to a significant shift in pan-African security policy – and notably the battle against international Islamist extremist... →

Mining the DRC: after losing some battles, Tshisekedi is winning the war

By: Tara O’Connor 25th June 2021 Political transitions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) do not happen too often. When they do, they are invariably violent, and the consequences of external intervention or internal electoral manipulation and corruption. But now, just as copper prices shoot up, the DRC looks to be... →

Kazungula: crossing into a new trade age

By: Tara O’Connor 21st May 2021 In aimless surfing on Twitter a couple of days ago, up popped a picture of the new Kazungula crossing. The name resonates: Kazungula. One of my earliest memories of the Kazungula was of my family stuck on a rusty pontoon in the middle of the Zambezi river between Zambia and Botswana as bullets... →

It’s time to dare to plan anew

By: Tara O’Connor 16th April 2021 A year ago, in the face of the first Covid-19 death in Egypt, I wrote that the time for governments to act was immediately and that the time for corporates to plan for a pandemic was yesterday. The arrival on the continent of millions of doses of vaccines marks a significant change in the... →

After the dust settles: Uganda post elections

By: Tara O’Connor 19th March 2021 In this opinion piece, Africa Risk Consulting’s Tara O’Connor and Fiona Grant assess the post-election picture in Uganda, where long-serving President Yoweri Museveni won a sixth term at the helm and his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) once again secured a huge Parliamentary majority... →

Brexit: Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right! Stuck . . .

By: Tara O’Connor 19th February 2021 The most significant casualties of Brexit are the 112 000 British people who have lost their lives to Covid-19. It was the greatest misfortune of all that they should have fallen prey to a deadly virus under a newly elected populist Prime Minister atop a government of Ministers who were selected... →

Of death, debt and democracy

By: Tara O’Connor 11th December 2020 As the first year of the plague closes out, a second year threatens a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Africa has seen fewer infections and deaths, but the virus has had other lasting consequences. The effect on political stability has been acute in several countries, and acute and... →

Nigeria: things fall apart

By: Tara O’Connor 30th October 2020 When I think of Nigeria at 60, I cannot shed the image of a waking giant tied down by a myriad of criss-crossed ropes, and at the end of each rope a member of Nigeria’s elite, too many of whom are corrupt, thieving and ineffectual politicians. As this important anniversary approached, the economy... →

Zambia’s Zuma moment

By: Tara O’Connor 18th September 2020 Something in the stars must have misaligned in 2016 to set the political world off kilter and bring in its wake the wanton destruction that is populism. In the UK it brought Brexit, in the US it paved the way for Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In Zambia, the 2016 elections saw Edgar... →

A stubborn political quartet again risk it all

By: Tara O’Connor 21st August 2020 Tara O’Connor and Leonard Mbulle-Nziege investigate Côte d’Ivoire’s critical October Presidential elections, in which the incumbent, Alassane Outtara, will be seeking a third term in office Its official: incumbent President Alassane Ouattara will stand for election for a third term in a move that... →

UK’s DFID is brought to heel as nationalism gains ground

By: Tara O’Connor 17th July 2020 Poor Zambia. What did it do to deserve such unwanted attention to be misspoken of in such a manner – and in the so-called mother of all Parliaments? UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in mid-June that the rock star department of British foreign policy, the Department for International... →

The beat goes on . . .

By: Tara O’Connor 12th June 2020 As South Africans emerge blinking into the winter sunlight, they do so to a ‘new normal’, including an emerging new order. Great plagues throughout history have accelerated fundamental changes that have a long-lasting, often multigenerational, impact. One accelerator is the global tilt towards... →

What a difference a day makes . . .

By: Tara O’Connor 1st May 2020 As we move into a fourth week of formal lockdown and as every day merges into the next and weeks roll into each other, only punctuated by a food box delivery, I am nevertheless struck daily by the speed at which Covid-19 has wrought havoc from east to west, north and south. Just over two months... →

The time to plan for Covid-19 was yesterday

By: Tara O’Connor 20th March 2020 Just as the going was getting good again, Africa faces another triple whammy: the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), a fresh global economic crash and plummeting oil prices. The deadly Covid-19, which has been spreading throughout the world since its first outbreak in December in Wuhan, China,... →

Au revoir CFA franc, bonjour l’eco!

By: Tara O’Connor 21st February 2020 As competition grows to gain influence across Africa, the most significant change to the traditional relationship between France and its former West African colonies will take place in June this year. The common currency, the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc, which has been in place... →

Goodbye the two-teens, hello the two-twenties!

By: Tara O’Connor 17th January 2020 Saying goodbye to another decade is always emotional, but it is also a time to refresh, revisit strategies and plan new ones “to boldly go”. Across Africa, the trend of the past decade and what will define the ‘twenties’ is what former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf described as “triple... →

2019: year of peaceful, patient popular power

By: Tara O’Connor 13th December 2019 As Southern African business closes off the year in a frenzy of foreshortened deadlines before racing to the door for the summer holiday, there is barely time to reflect on the year gone by. And what a political year it has been. Who can forget May’s most powerful image of a young Sudanese woman... →

Buhari: destructive force in the Nigerian economy

By: Tara O’Connor 29th November 2019 "I have come to realise that Nigeria is not going to shape the investment future of West Africa, let alone Africa”, laments my lunch guest. “Especially when you compare it WITH what is happening in other countries, like Senegal, Kenya . . . where so much is going on. Every time I land at Lagos... →

Ethiopian Prime Minister, marathon runner do country proud

By: Tara O’Connor 25th October 2019 Once in a generation comes a political leader who has the confidence, the power and the political will to transform the lives of millions. And once in a lifetime comes an individual with the power and determination to inspire millions to individual excellence. That they both come from the Horn... →

It’s time to give Angola reforms the benefit of the doubt

By: Tara O’Connor 20th September 2019 As the death of the region’s leading liberation leader, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, focuses attention on his poor legacy, other liberation leader transitions are thrown into relief. One such transition is Angola’s. Like Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, Angola’s new President, João Lourenço, who came to... →

Mozambique peace deal paves the way for unprecedented investment

By: Tara O’Connor 23rd August 2019 What is the risk of civil war in Mozambique? That was the question a would-be international investor asked us to address recently. While this very question used to be my weekly diet as an analyst during the mid- to late 1990s – usually relating to West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea countries – it is... →

The last kick of a dying horse

By: Tara O’Connor 19th July 2019 If you want political analysis of Zimbabwe – ask an Uber driver. In Cape Town earlier this year, I meet the same Uber driver twice. Typically overqualified, having been a buyer and manager for a retailer, Zimbabwe’s sharply deteriorating economy drove him to South Africa to drive for a living.... →

Morocco’s ‘democracy’ back in the spotlight as Jasmine Spring resurges

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 21st June 2019 A … As protesters desert Khartoum after Sudanese security forces attack a civilian protest camp, killing several, and as military attitudes in Algeria harden ahead of elections on July 4, a resurgent Arab Spring has put Morocco’s political reforms back in the spotlight. →

Kenya’s election open season

By: Tara O’Connor 24th May 2019 As dust settles on South Africa’s elections and business looks to President Cyril Ramaphosa to restore the economy, Kenyan business worries as the political elite starts kicking up dust well in advance of the 2022 Presidential polls. At stake is Kenya’s booming economy, the powerhouse of the East... →

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