Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
If the events of the first fortnight of the year tell us anything, then 2025 will be full of surprises, some good fortune, and a basketful of heartbreaks.
On January 11, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud visited Ethiopia, marking a major step in improving strained relations between the two countries.
This visit was his first since a diplomatic agreement, known as the Ankara Declaration, was reached in December 2024, mediated by Turkey to resolve tensions over Ethiopia’s plan to build a naval base in the autonomous region of Somaliland.
In January 2024, landlocked Ethiopia agreed to a 50-year lease on a 20-kilometre strip of land on Somaliland’s Red Sea coast —which Somalia regards as its territory— for naval and commercial maritime use and access to the Berbera port.
Somaliland got a share of Ethiopian Airlines and a promise that Ethiopia would explore recognising it as a sovereign state. Hell broke loose; there were sounds of war drums.
On October 10, 2024, Ethiopian rivals Egypt and Eritrea met with Somalia in Asmara to forge an “axis” of resistance against Ethiopia.
It was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s first-ever visit to Asmara, and Egypt sent arms to Somalia in September. Mogadishu asked the African Union (AU) to replace 10,000 Ethiopian peacekeepers—the largest troop contributor to the UN-approved AU mission fighting the militant Somali group al Shabaab—with Egyptian troops.
The hatchet has been buried for now. Where might the next surprise come from? Around the long-running conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo?
Still in the Horn of Africa, according to the Addis Standard on Wednesday, Takele Uma, CEO of the Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway, announced that for the first time since the company’s operational launch in 2018, it achieved profitability in the last quarter of 2024.
You’d be tempted to think it was the Ethiopian Midas touch we see in Ethiopian Airlines, but there was a sting in the tail.
Takele said that the $4 billion, 750-kilometre electric railway that connects Addis Ababa to the port of Djibouti wasn’tpulling its full weight, as it were.
He revealed that only 15 out of 32 freight locomotives were operational. “The capacity should reach 6.3 million tonnes per year. Instead, we are currently operating at only 2.4 million tonnes per year,” representing a mere 38 per cent of the service’s full potential.
That sub-par performance revealed an embarrassing fact about African trade and production – we don’t do much of either. One indicator of that came from Africa Container Shipping (ACS), which noted that in some cases, out of four containers imported full into Africa, only one is exported full, implying that 75 per cent of containers return empty from Africa to Asia and other regions. Some pessimists estimate that 90 per cent of containers that ferry goods into the East African hinterland return empty.
From Kigali, this week came news from the Rwanda Mines, Petroleum, and Gas Board (RMB) about the discovery of 13 oil wells in Lake Kivu.
Further studies are required to determine the quantity of oil, but RMB’s CEO Francis Kamanzi was bullish: “Considering discoveries in neighbouring regions like Uganda, where oil was discovered in Lake Albert, which is believed to be part of the same rift valley stretching through Lake Kivu to Lake Tanganyika, there is confidence that oil exists,” he said.
The gods of natural resources have a wicked sense of humour. Rwanda will most likely be faced with accusations from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with which it already has strained relationships over the M23 military campaign in eastern DRC, claiming that every mineral Rwanda sells, including those it mines from its own territory, belongs to it, of stealing its oil.
Matters are not helped by the fact that Rwanda has over four rigs extracting methane gas from the floor of Lake Kivu, which it shares with DRC.
On the DRC side of the lake, there is nothing. Because gas moves freely underground, some Congolese nationalists have already accused Rwanda of siphoning off some of “their” methane.
In 2007, the Congolese and Ugandan armies faced off in the Lake Albert border region where Uganda struck oil. Because there is no clear demarcation of the border, and deposits run across the two countries’ borders, it sharpened a dispute over the ownership of the lake’s innocuous small Rukwanzi Island at its southern end.
From above the ground in Kenya came a heartbreaking story. A report in South Africa’s Independent Online reported how the drought in northern Kenya, one of the worst in decades, has forced households in the Maasai region to “make incredibly difficult decisions”.
Teenage girls as young as 13 are being sold by hard-pressed families for grass to feed cattle, “providing a frightening insight into the human toll of climate change”, the report said.
It concluded grimly that, “as many more African countries face the dire consequences of the climate crisis, the most vulnerable populations, children, mostly girls and women, will be the first to experience more violence”. The rains better come this year.
They might not come to Somalia, though. Early in the week, the World Economic Forum released its annual report titled "Global Risks Report 2025: Conflict, Environment and Disinformation Top Threats”.
The report says weather risk will collapse parts of the global economy, and in East Africa, it paints a perilous picture for Somalia. Part of Somalia, much of which is no longer farmable, will not support human life as temperatures soar, it said.
For all these stories, this wasn’t the end. It was the beginning and middle, and some could go boom in 2025.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans.” X (Twitter) @cobbo3
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