Tigray Power Struggle Risks Ethiopia-Eritrea War

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Rwanda-backed M23 withdraws from Congo peace talks in Angola, U.S. expels South Africa’s ambassador, and a Chinese mine spill contaminates Zambia’s largest river.

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Renewed fighting in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region risks conflict with neighboring Eritrea. A power struggle within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) escalated last week when a dissident faction took over the main radio station in the regional capital, Mekelle, and seized Tigray’s second-largest city, Adigrat, in what regional officials called “an outright coup.”

Getachew Reda, the leader of Tigray’s interim administration, has accused the rival group—led by TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael—of working with the Eritrean government to reignite the region’s civil war and forcefully remove him from office.

Getachew, a former TPLF spokesman, replaced Debretsion as Tigray’s regional leader following a 2022 peace deal signed in Pretoria, South Africa, which ended a deadly two-year civil war between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF.

However, Eritrea—which fought alongside Ethiopia against their common enemy, the TPLF—was unhappy at being excluded from the agreement and is bent on permanently destroying the Tigrayan group.

Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF were once allies when fighting against Ethiopia’s communist Derg government in the 1990s, but after Eritrea became independent and a TPLF-led government came to power in Ethiopia, the two countries fought a brutal decadeslong border war, leading to lasting enmity.

Eritrean troops still occupy contested border areas seized when the 2020-22 war broke out in Tigray despite calls from the U.S. government and the U.N. to withdraw all Eritrean forces.

“In the case of possible invasion” by Ethiopia’s military, “the Eritrean government wants Tigray to serve as a buffer zone,” Getachew said. “This is taking Tigray into another phase of turmoil.”

Certain TPLF factions were also dissatisfied with the Pretoria agreement, which they believe sidelined them and obligated them to disarm, while TPLF officials who negotiated the deal secured roles in the interim ruling administration.

The paramilitary Tigray Defense Forces (TDF)—the faction that took control of Adigrat last week—had been neutral in the power tussle until last month, when it decisively backed Debretsion. According to Ethiopian newspaper the Reporter, some sources claim that Debretsion’s faction and the TDF could have come to an arrangement on maintaining control of lucrative illegal gold mining in Tigray.

Ethiopia lost sea access when Eritrea gained independence from the country in 1993, and Eritrean officials worry that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed may seek military action in his pursuit of a Red Sea port. Addis Ababa is engaged in Turkish-brokered talks with Somalia over sea access, having agreed to abandon a port deal with Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia.

Payton Knopf—a former U.S. deputy special envoy for the Horn of Africa during the Biden administration—and Alexander Rondos, a former European Union special representative for the Horn of Africa, wrote in Foreign Policy last week that the “speed and scale of mobilization and deployment on all sides—the Ethiopian federal army, Eritrea’s Defense Forces, and the TDF—suggests that conflict is imminent.”

The authors warn that a major conflict could pull in Sudan, which supplied the TDF during the Ethiopia-Tigray civil war. “It would destroy what is left of Sudan, destabilize Chad, and create a highway of instability connecting the Sahel to the Red Sea,” they wrote.

The last civil war resulted in an estimated 600,000 deaths, and most of those displaced by the war are still living in camps. Ethiopia was the largest African beneficiary of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2023, and the shuttering of the agency by the Trump administration has halted shipments of food to the roughly 2.4 million people in Tigray who rely on humanitarian aid for nutrition.

Ethiopia is also the third-biggest African host country for refugees, who are fleeing conflicts in places including Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia.

Wednesday, March 19: The 14th anniversary of a referendum on constitutional reforms following the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

South Africa releases inflation data for February.

Friday, March 21: Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah will be sworn in as Namibia’s first woman president.

Congo peace talks. Rwanda-backed M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo withdrew from peace talks that should have taken place Tuesday in Angola, citing European Union sanctions against its members.

Although Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi had long rejected direct talks with M23, he had confirmed his own participation. The EU sanctioned nine people on Monday, including M23 political leader Bertrand Bisimwa and Rwandan army commanders, over the conflict.

It also sanctioned the chief executive of Rwanda’s state mining agency as well as a gold refinery in Kigali. Meanwhile on Monday, Rwanda severed all diplomatic relations with former colonial power Belgium, which had called for EU sanctions against Kigali.

African leaders announced after a meeting last week a “phased withdrawal” of up to 3,000 troops from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi—troops that were sent to fight the insurgents under regional bloc the Southern African Development Community. At least 14 South African soldiers have been killed, and roughly 7,000 people have died in the fighting since January.

U.S. expels South African ambassador. The United States has declared South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata after he criticized President Donald Trump.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Rasool as a “race-baiting politician who hates America” in a post on X, and he linked to a report from the right-wing Breitbart news site about an online lecture that the ambassador gave that was hosted by South Africa’s Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. In his lecture, Rasool said that Trump was “mobilizing a supremacism.”

Rasool—who also previously served as ambassador in Washington from 2010 to 2015—has been highly critical of Israel in the past. Rasool was forcibly removed from his home in the District Six area of Cape Town as a child after it was declared a white-only area under the apartheid government.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement that his country remained committed to “a mutually beneficial relationship” with the United States. At the same time, it has refused to back down on its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

South Africa’s revised budget. In a vote last week, the coalition of South African parties that controls more than half of parliamentary seats again rejected the country’s budget over plans to increase the value-added tax from 15 percent to 16 percent within a two-year period.

South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana had initially proposed an increase to 17 percent, the proceeds from which would be used to fund health and energy projects. There was some good news for the coalition government, though, as European Union leaders announced a 4.7 billion euro ($5.1 billion) investment package during their first summit in the country since 2018, held on Thursday in Cape Town.

Trump’s Gaza plan. Washington and Israeli officials have approached East African governments—those of Sudan, Somalia, and its breakaway region of Somaliland—to explore resettling Palestinians from Gaza, the Associated Press reported. Somali and Somaliland officials said that they were not aware of such contact; meanwhile, Sudan’s military government said it had rejected the proposal. All three territories are beset by conflict. Aid groups say that Sudan is facing a famine of “historic proportions” amid the deadly civil war that began in April 2023.

Some experts believe that Somaliland, which has pushed for international recognition of its sovereignty for more than 30 years, could be persuaded on a Gaza resettlement plan in exchange for U.S. recognition. Somalia is also worried that a transactional Trump administration could soon terminate security ties, but accepting such an agreement risks destabilization from Islamist groups such as al-Shabab in both territories.

Chinese mine spill destroys river. Zambia’s largest river has been contaminated following an acid spill from a Chinese-owned copper mine, impacting millions of people who depend on it for drinking water and fishing. About 60 percent of Zambia’s 20 million people live in the Kafue River basin, and the river supplies drinking water to about 5 million people, including residents of the capital, Lusaka.

The acid leak occurred on Feb. 18 at a dam used by a mine run by Sino-Metals Leach, which is majority owned by state-run China Nonferrous Metals Industry Group. Dead fish have been washing up more than 60 miles downstream from the mine.

The Zambian Air Force dropped hundreds of tons of lime into the river to counterbalance the acid, but residents say that everything in the river is now “totally dead.” Zambian authorities said the spill has also destroyed crops along the river’s banks.

Chinese companies across Africa have faced backlash over allegations of environmental damage from mining, destructive logging, and commercial fishing activities.

Starlink soars in Nigeria. Elon Musk’s internet satellite company Starlink has become Nigeria’s second- largest broadband provider, according to new data released by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Starlink, which launched in Nigeria in January 2023, had more than 65,000 subscribers as of September 2024.

The biggest local provider, Spectranet, had a little more than 105,000 active subscribers in the same period, but experienced a decline of more than 8,000 users since December 2023. Due to limited broadband infrastructure, most Nigerians use their cellphone network provider to access the internet, hence the relatively low numbers.

Starlink has aggressively pushed into the broadband market in 19 African nations, but the company has faced criticism of an unfair advantage over local providers because it rarely invests in African network infrastructure or local employment. Starlink hasn’t received regulatory approval in South Africa, which requires at least 30 percent local ownership under its Black Economic Empowerment law.

• Stop the Next Ethiopia-Eritrea War Before It Begins by Payton Knopf and Alexander Rondos 
• Trump Is Undermining the Canadians Most Sympathetic to Him by Kevin Yin
• ‘He’ll Make Mincemeat of the Second-Raters in the Trump Team’ by Cameron Abadi and Adam Tooze

Smuggling Egyptian Relics. Thousands of precious artifacts were stolen during the January 2011 uprising that toppled the late former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Amani Ibrahim digs into how false ownership licenses are obtained to illegally sell stolen pieces—including pieces that ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paris’s Louvre Museum.

The dissolution of South Africa. Musk’s claims of a “white genocide” represent the “broader anxieties of a global elite struggling to maintain its privilege” in a country where affirmative action laws have not benefited Black people or redressed the historic injustices of apartheid, writes William Shoki in Africa is a Country. Shoki argues that the African National Congress’s inaction has left South Africa vulnerable to extremist narratives on both sides of the debate.

Trump travel ban. An internal memo obtained by the New York Times suggests that the Trump Administration is considering implementing a three-tiered travel ban that would affect 43 countries, including Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. During his first term, Trump issued an immigration ban on six African nations.