Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu presses on with military reforms ahead of 2027 elections, Africa’s richest man launches the continent’s biggest-ever initial public offering, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo plans to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Spending Spree

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has appointed Maj. Gen. Ibikunle Ajose as the new top army commander for the northeast, the epicenter of the country’s Islamist insurgency, after the previous leader spent less than two years in the role. The move is the latest in a series of military reforms ahead of January’s general elections, in which insecurity will be high on the list of voters’ concerns.

Ajose’s appointment was part of a bigger reshuffling last week that involved 15 top generals. These redeployments, along with a major hike in military spending, are key to the government’s wider plan to stabilize bellwether regions before Nigerians head to the polls.

Tinubu is seeking a second term as the candidate for the All Progressives Congress party and will face the same main challengers he came up against in 2023: former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who is running under the African Democratic Congress (ADC), and former Anambra state Gov. Peter Obi, with the Nigeria Democratic Congress.

This year, Abubakar and Obi initially joined forces to unseat Tinubu under an ADC-led opposition coalition, but the alliance fractured due to their competing ambitions. Observers are looking to see whether Obi in particular, who came in third in 2023, can translate the unprecedented backing he garnered from young Nigerian urbanites in the last election into rural support.

Importantly, the public is paying close attention to how candidates intend to address widespread violence and kidnappings for ransom. A mass kidnapping of schoolchildren in Tinubu’s political heartland in the southwestern state of Oyo in May magnified the issue.

More than 7,800 people were kidnapped in Nigeria between July 2025 and June 2026—a 66 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new report from risk advisory firm SBM Intelligence. Over that period, kidnappers received some $5.8 million in ransom money, three times that of the previous year. Boko Haram collected 90 percent of those payments, mainly from mass abductions.

The insecurity has ripple effects across the country. For instance, many farmers have been unable to access their lands due to the threat of kidnappings, leading to food shortages and hunger, especially in the north.

The “security question in Nigeria is closely connected to the economic one: An attack that closes a road, displaces farmers, or shuts a market very quickly becomes an issue of household income and food prices,” said Sekinat Ojeniyi of Africa Practice, a global risk advisory firm.

On the campaign trail, Abubakar has pledged to end insecurity within one year if elected. His plan centers on cross-border military collaboration with Sahel nations and providing jobs for young people drawn to extremism. Obi has also promised to fix insecurity in one term through youth poverty alleviation and education. “You cannot create widespread poverty and expect peace,” Obi told Nigerian broadcaster Channels Television.

Tinubu’s government, meanwhile, is injecting unprecedented amounts of money into defense in an attempt to address the issue. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Nigeria’s military expenditure surged 55 percent year-on-year to $2.1 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to double this year.

With this money, Tinubu approved salary increases for members of the military last month. The massive investment also supports the largest expansion of the Nigerian military since the country’s civil war in the late 1960s. In July, Tinubu approved the creation of four new army divisions with a planned recruitment of 28,000 additional personnel by December.

A new bill passed by Nigeria’s National Assembly in June would also allow states to establish their own police forces, putting less pressure on the federal police to secure dense forested communities that have become hideouts for extremists.

“The government’s emphasis on manpower and personnel welfare makes sense, but more personnel and better pay do not automatically translate into greater security,” Ojeniyi said. “Kidnapping networks are highly adaptive and operate across state and local government boundaries, while the police, military, and intelligence agencies do not always have the same visibility or operational reach.”

Meanwhile, many Nigerian and U.S. political observers have commended Tinubu for his handling of tensions with Washington, which has transformed the Trump administration’s divisive rhetoric about supposed Christian persecution in Nigeria into security cooperation.

Beginning late last year, the United States deployed troops to assist with counterterrorism operations. (Most U.S. troops withdrew in July.) Although U.S. strikes in northeastern Nigeria in May killed a senior Islamic State leader, the mass abductions have continued. More than 600 people were taken from Nigeria’s north-central Niger state last month in an attack on a mosque.

Although many Nigerians welcome his new security reforms, Tinubu will likely be judged on whether these last-gasp efforts a few months ahead of elections can stem the violence.

The Week Ahead

Wednesday, Sept. 16: The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a nomination hearing on ambassadors to Benin, Gabon, Kenya, and Togo.

Wednesday, Sept. 16, to Thursday, Sept. 17: Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet in Geneva to discuss monitoring their cease-fire.

Wednesday, Sept. 23: Morocco holds general elections.

What We’re Watching

Historic IPO. Africa’s richest person, Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote, launched the continent’s biggest-ever initial public offering on Monday, floating 4.1 billion shares in his $20 billion oil refinery on the outskirts of Lagos on the Nigerian Exchange.

The rush to buy shares briefly crashed many Nigerian investment apps. The move is expected to raise about $1.6 billion, which will fund Dangote’s expansion projects across Africa. Dangote Industries said it will use the investment to double production capacity, deliver refined products across the continent, and build another refinery in Kenya.

The public offer closes on Oct. 13, and Dangote is reportedly eyeing a secondary New York listing in the future.

Sahrawi citizenship. The Spanish parliament’s lower house approved a bill granting citizenship to Sahrawis born before 1977, when Madrid administered ​Western Sahara. The legislation will now go to Spain’s Senate. It marks the latest escalation of tensions with Morocco after thousands of migrants entered Spain’s African exclave of Ceuta from Morocco in late July.

Rabat claims sovereignty over Ceuta and Western Sahara, and it has occupied about 80 percent of the latter’s territory since the 1970s. More than 170,000 Sahrawi refugees live in camps in Algeria, which hosts the Polisario Front, a group fighting for Sahrawi independence.

U.S. tech bid. The United States will lend nearly $100 million to Africell, the only mainstream U.S.-owned mobile network operator in Africa, as part of broader strategic investments to counter China in the region. Africell operates in Angola, Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone.

The loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank is part of Washington’s efforts to counter the expansion of China’s Huawei company in Africa. But the United States has a long way to go: Chinese firms are now baked into the continent’s tech infrastructure. For example, the three major smartphone brands in Africa—Tecno, Itel, and Infinix—are manufactured by China’s Transsion and have dominated the market for nearly two decades.

Congo-Israel ties. Congo has revived plans to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem following President Felix Tshisekedi’s visit to the country earlier this month. Analysts consider the move an attempt to both court Israeli security support and get the United States to exert more pressure on Rwanda to stop backing the M23 rebel group in eastern Congo.

Tshisekedi previously told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2023 that Congo would move the embassy, three years after Tshisekedi announced that he would appoint its first ambassador to Israel in more than two decades.

Meanwhile, Tshisekedi faces mounting calls in Congo to resign over his attempts to implement constitutional reforms that could pave the way for a third term in office.

This Week in Health

The United States has announced that it will no longer fund Namibia’s HIV program after a final $45 million disbursement for the 2027 fiscal year, ending more than two decades of aid through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has provided around $1.1 billion to Namibia since it was launched under President George W. Bush in 2003.

The withdrawal follows Namibia’s refusal to give the United States unrestricted access to genetic data and pathogens, which it could then share with private companies and organizations without oversight from the Namibian government as part of Trump’s America First Global Health Strategy. Namibian officials cited concerns over sovereignty, national law, and patient privacy.

Since pulling out of the World Health Organization in January, the Trump administration has pursued deals that would provide commercial access to African nations’ health data. So far, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have rejected such deals, while at least 19 nations, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, have agreed to them.

“We need to reserve our data, and no one has the right to get a sovereign state to be used for other things, except for the World Health Organization cabinet,” former Namibian Health Minister Richard Kamwi said in August.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• How to Survive in a World Without Rules by Hal Brands
• Top Signs You’re Heading for a Quagmire by Stephen M. Walt
• The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order by Charles A. Kupchan

What We’re Reading

Al-Shabab’s win. In Foreign Policy, Mohamed Gabobe reports from Mogadishu on how the U.S. withdrawal of support for the African Union peacekeeping mission in the country has severely jeopardized the remaining forces’ capacity to counter the Islamist group al-Shabab.

The two-decade military intervention’s failure to quash al-Shabab—which has “has retaken nearly all the territory that it lost in a 2022-2023 Somali army campaign,” Gabobe writes—partly informed Washington’s decision. There “is no one other nation that can fill the United States’ void,” he adds.

What’s in a map? On Sept. 4, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a Togo-sponsored resolution to replace the traditional Mercator map with one that better represents Africa’s true size. Only the United States voted against it.

In Foreign Policy, Howard W. French argues that this is just the latest example of the West being behind in understanding not just Africa’s geographic size but also its demographic weight.

“Just as drawing up maps in ways that graphically diminish Africa does nothing to reduce Africa’s true dimensions, actively shunning African migrants will do nothing to change the hard demographic realities that will radically shape our collective future,” he writes.