From Multipolarity to Analysis of Fraudulent Peace Deals: Pambazuka’s Return in 2025

The year 2025 presented Global Africa with opportunities to intensify its struggles and planning for emancipation and transformation of the conditions of African peoples spread across the world. The peoples of Global Africa have also endured onslaughts of imperialism and the resurgence of dictatorships and neo-fascisms in the Global North and Global South. 

Within these contesting opportunities and challenges, Pambazuka returned from a 5-year hiatus and has, since February, offered incisive and clinical assessments and contributions on events and debates, and articulated the necessary and transformative pathways for social justice in Africa. We were inspired and reinvigorated as we celebrated the one hundredth year of freedom fighters such as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Eusi Kwayana, Malcolm X, and the importance of the health of Global Africans. In one issue, the Global Pan-African Movement honoured Assata Shakur, the beloved freedom fighter and exiled Black liberation revolutionary activist who lived free and joined the ancestors free in Havana, Cuba.

Our long-time readers and contributors, new subscribers and audience have been central to the re-establishment of Pambazuka. The continuity in partnership will be a quintessential feature for the tasks required for accelerating the pace of reconstruction of Africa and the search for social justice in the world.

Pambazuka in 2025: Publication Themes and Ongoing Issues in Africa

The shifts from a unipolar to multipolar geopolitical space offered the world an opportunity to rethink geopolitical relationships and alignments in political and economic matters. The reassertions of sovereignty and rights to self-determination that characterised multipolarity have rattled the West in diverse ways but provided a context for increasing south-south cooperation and alliance, including ditching the dollar for other currencies and gold in international transactions.

Across Global Africa, in 2025, extractivism gained momentum with the growing quest for critical minerals and the new taste for lithium to power the energy transition needs of the West. The mineral question has been at the centre of wars and pushback against imperialistic onslaughts across Africa. The Rwandan-supported M23 war in the Congo has continued whilst attempts are being made to actualize an alternative Pan African future in the Sahel, where countries have demanded a greater share or more equitable control of resources mined in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger by imperialist-backed corporations.

Wars have continued and intensified from the DR Congo to Sudan, Libya, and Gaza. Military and armed militia appetite to take political power has also seen a resurgence from West Africa to Central Africa, and Syria.

Elections held across the continent have been mostly in name and characterized by heightened repression against political opposition and citizens. Fraudulent processes have been widespread and linked to calculated attempts to retain political power.  Citizens have been murdered in the name of quelling Gen Z protests that might spiral into calls for resignation of dictatorial rule, regardless of the gender at the helm of the coercive apparatus. From Cameroon to Tanzania, Togo, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau, elections have not only reflected low-intensity democracy but have also been undemocratic. In some cases, results are not alleged to have been overturned; the results are so exceptional to be true under the conditions within which ballots were cast, and where such conditions were minimal, results were withheld.

Peace Agreements

The year 2025 will be remembered as one where sham peace and ceasefire agreements have become endemic and internationally acceptable. The US-brokered peace agreement between Rwanda and the DRC, Gaza, and similar efforts in Sudan have been best described as fraudulent, as the war and underlying causes intensified after the signing of the agreements. These agreements have also provided spaces for more exploitation and enforcement of the America First strategy by giving access to the resources in the DR Congo and Sudan to the US and other so-called peace brokers from the Gulf. Ceasefires and peace agreements in 2025 have come to mean nothing more than the exchange of papers between warring factions, where flights are taken to host states, and the host's interests in African resources are guaranteed.

The Carnage in Sudan

In one issue, Pambazuka condemned the ongoing counter-revolutionary war in Sudan with an incisive article providing a critical analysis of its historicity and the way forward. Pambazuka News stands with the peoples of the Sudan who are finding new ways to struggle in the midst of the most devastating violence. The military barons in both the regular army and the RSF have been killing people, and it is only now, with satellite images, that we are seeing the extent of the slaughter.  The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have recaptured key targets like Bara and Al-Fashir—just weeks after claims of a peace agreement—resulting in mass killings, widespread displacement, and humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur. This brutal offensive highlights the international community’s troubling willingness to engage with RSF leaders—even as alleged war criminals—while civilians suffer, a stark display of neocolonial dynamics. What began as a revolutionary movement in 2019—driven by a coalition of workers, professionals, youth, and women demanding participation, justice, and economic freedom—has been systematically undermined by foreign-backed transitional governments. These regimes have empowered military elites and financial interests from the U.S., UAE, and France, sustaining exploitation of Sudan’s resources, consolidating security apparatus control, and frustrating civilian aspirations—all while transforming peace efforts into mechanisms that preserve power structures rather than deliver lasting justice and social peace.

And yet, in the midst of this carnage, the revolutionary spirits of the Sudanese peoples continue to inspire those who support the demilitarization and reconstruction of Africa.

On Gen Z Movements

Pambazuka celebrates the energies unleashed by the young people all over Africa, demanding social justice. Their tenacity and stamina in fighting dictatorship are now a new feature of the African political landscape. It is important, however, to remember the lessons of Tahrir Square and the aborted Egyptian revolutionary process. Youths organized around social media can easily be hijacked by the tools now available to big tech. It is urgent that these energies of the Gen Z forces be linked to the revival of the struggles of the working peoples in their day-to-day struggles for bread, peace, and justice.

To ensure revolutionary change, Gen Z activism must not be independent and confined to just young people going on the streets and harnessing digital spaces to press Gen Z-specific demands. It must be integrated into broader class struggles. In the absence of such a holistic approach to activism, Gen Z efforts could be co-opted by elite and external forces to secure anti-people ends.

On Coups in West Africa and ECOWAS

The year witnessed two coups in West Africa, one in Guinea-Bissau and another in Benin, in less than two weeks. While ECOWAS eagerly deployed troops to Benin, similar actions have not been seen in their disposition towards the Guinea-Bissau coup. Nigeria had even sent fighter jets to bomb the positions of the coup plotters in Benin, but the bloc did not attempt to resist the coup in Bissau.

France’s manipulation of ECOWAS’ actions and inactions is increasingly a concern to all forces seeking to end French imperialism and deliver democratic practices that will ensure social justice for Africans in the sub-region. In Guinea-Bissau, President Umaro Embalo had announced the coup himself and claimed he was under house arrest by forces alleged to be his loyalists, including figures such as General Horta Inta-A, the Transitional President, and Prime Minister Ilídio Vieira Té, who was Embalo’s Campaign Director for this year’s elections. The 28-member transitional government had a strong presence of Embalo’s loyalists. 

ECOWAS and other international observers had reported the 23 November polls in Guinea-Bissau as peaceful and orderly. Yet, the bloc refused to insist that the leaders of the staged coup allow the declaration of the results. Instead, it is recommending a short transition programme to be led by an inclusive government, whatever that means.

Attempts to Delegitimate Pan Africanism 

The 9^th Pan African Congress, held in Togo, demonstrated some drama that has been in the toolbox of efforts to appropriate Pan Africanism or delegitimise the demands of this practical, intellectual and ideological movement. That the event was held in Togo, with all the repressive and undemocratic activities of the Faure government, should be disturbing for Pan Africanists and associates seeking the well-being, unity and transformation of African peoples. Equally concerning is the role of Morocco, and the co-optation of well-meaning intellectuals, who were soon to find out by the end of the conference that they had been used to promote an agenda that was anything but Pan-African in substance. Those in line of duty will be wary of French facilitated celebrations and appropriation of Pan African efforts as the erstwhile colonizer struggles to maintain relevance in the sub-region.

Reconfigurations to control Africans through Data

The year’s highlights include the reconfiguration of the USA-EU relationships to reassert control over African lives, health data, biological specimens and other medical information about Africans. 

In this focus on data mining in Africa, Big Pharma is positioning itself to make the most profits from African biodata. The infamous Tuskegee experiments on African American lives (1932-1972) in the service of big pharma and biodata capitalism under the pretext of learning about untreated syphilis may no longer be needed if data is readily available and accessible from African governments who can ensure that biological materials and health data of Africans on the continents can be easily harnessed to make money or provide the basis for biomedical control of African bodies.

Four African countries are already participating in a health pact with the US, where African biodata promises a rich African data economy for American funds in the absence of USAID. Legal suits in Kenya have succeeded in halting the implementation of the health deal. Rwanda, Uganda and Liberia are yet to show any pushback and at least question what the Memorandum of Understanding under biodata sharing will mean for the privacy of health information, and weaponization of biological information. 

The Maiden Pambazuka Town Hall

Following the fraudulent elections and the deaths that followed the Cameroonian and Tanzanian elections, Pambazuka organized its first Global Town Hall on X that offered a Pan African perspective on the trend and forms of support and solidarity required to overcome the growing undemocratic practices.

Plans for 2026

We look forward to addressing persisting issues confronting the tasks for Global Africa’s reconstruction, emancipation and transformation, as well as the solidarities required for social justice across the world.

Expect insightful and incisive publications on social and cultural struggles in Global Africa, and articles that are rich in information and deep in analysis that will help mobilization efforts in advancing social change. 

There will be more Town Halls coming your way, and other social media activities that will provide our audience with insightful conversations on the way forward for global Africa and struggles aimed at securing human dignity.

We cherish our contributors and audience, and look forward to working courageously for a socially just Africa, as we are reminded by Maya Angelou: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to you all!

Pambazuka News Editors