THOUGHT LEADERSHIP - The African Mirror

May

16

2026

Africa is not a data mine

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

GHANA has outrightly rejected a United States-backed health agreement over concerns about privacy, oversight and foreign access to sensitive national health data. According to reports, the deal would have allowed multiple US entities broad access to Ghana's health information systems as part of a wider funding arrangement tied to healthcare support. Ghanaian authorities raised concerns about sovereignty, consent and the lack of sufficient control over how citizens' data could be accessed and used. Ghana is not alone. Zimbabwe has reportedly rejected a similar arrangement, while Zambia has also raised objections rooted in privacy and data governance concerns. Across the continent,…

May

16

2026

By ONGAMA MTIMKA

Julius Malema: South Africa’s performative revolutionary is facing his biggest battle

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

JULIUS Malema, the leader of South Africa’s fourth-largest party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), is a divisive figure: loved by some, hated by others. Malema made headlines in April 2026 after a lower court found him guilty of illegal possession and discharge of a firearm and sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment. He is appealing the conviction and sentence. Within a few weeks, he made headlines again when the country’s Constitutional Court ruled in a case the EFF had brought before it. The case was about the alleged theft of a large sum of foreign currency from President Cyril Matamela…

May

13

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

Those who govern must listen: why power without wisdom is a path to ruin

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THERE is a particular species of political tragedy that is worse than the tragedy caused by enemies. It is the tragedy caused by leaders who had the wisdom of counsel at their disposal and set it aside in favour of factional comfort and institutional self-preservation. It is the tragedy of the avoidable. Thabo Mbeki's March 2023 letter to ANC Deputy President Paul Mashatile, sent to him in his capacity as Leader of Government Business, belongs in the canon of South African political documents that its recipients would prefer history to forget. It will not be forgotten. Not because Mbeki was…

May

12

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

The long game: How Ramaphosa’s review gambit could outlast his presidency

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THERE is a particular South African political art form - born of a constitutional democracy that is simultaneously robust and deeply contested - of turning a legal instrument into a clock. Cyril Ramaphosa, a man who has spent his political life reading rooms, calendars, and constitutional texts with unusual precision, appears to have reached, once again, for that art form. His announcement that he will review the findings of the Section 89 Independent Panel, chaired by retired Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo, is not the act of a president in panic. It is the move of a political survivor who understands,…

May

11

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

It’s hot at the top: Faye and Sonko open battle for Senegal’s soul – and its presidency

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

WHEN Bassirou Diomaye Faye walked out of Rebeuss Prison on 24 March 2024, just hours before polls opened on the day that would make him the youngest president in Senegalese history, few could have imagined that within two years he and his liberator, political godfather and now Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, would be locked in a contest that threatens to crack their shared revolution in two. On 8 May 2026, President Faye declined to sign into law electoral code amendments passed overwhelmingly by the ruling PASTEF-dominated National Assembly on 28 April - amendments crafted specifically to restore Sonko's eligibility to…

May

09

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

The Constitution’s reckoning: The man who built the law now faces its full force

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

ON 8 May 1996, a young Cyril Ramaphosa stood before the Constitutional Assembly in Cape Town and called South Africa’s newly minted supreme law “our new nation’s birth certificate.” The apartheid securocrats, he noted with evident wonder, were sitting next to the people they had once labelled terrorists. The gallery was full. The country was alive with the sense of something irreversible and magnificent having just happened. Mandela watched in silence from the podium as the chamber erupted into song. Exactly thirty years later, on the same calendar date, Ramaphosa - now the President of the Republic, the highest officer…

May

07

2026

By MAHIR AL-AWAMI

SULTANA طانة Queen of Pain and Pride

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

EDITOR'S NOTE: IN Arabic, Sultana means a woman of authority - a queen, a noble female ruler. The woman whose story follows was named Sultana by people who could not yet know the terrible regal weight the name would carry. She ruled nothing but the love of her children. She commanded nothing but her own endurance. And yet, in the geography of Libyan memory, she stands as tall as any sovereign who ever sat upon a throne. This narrative is told as a son's conversation with his mother - a conversation that has happened, in one form or another, in…

May

06

2026

By DR MATHEWS PHOSA

Reflections on Winnie Mandela, her legacy, and Netflix’s ‘The Trials of Winnie Mandela’

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

WATCHING Netflix's 'The Trials of Winnie Mandela' has brought back a cascade of memories - some joyful, some painful, all deeply personal. As someone who stood beside Mama Winnie in her darkest hours, who witnessed her strength when others abandoned her, I feel compelled to share what the cameras cannot fully capture: the woman I knew. Not the icon that history has made her, not the caricature that media outlets have painted, but Mama Winnie - a real person of extraordinary contradictions, fierce love, and unwavering commitment to our people. The Netflix series does important work in ensuring her story…

May

06

2026

By NORMAN SEMPIJJA and MOUHAMMED NDIAYE

Mali’s armed groups fill a government vacuum – addressing this is key to ending the violence

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

MALI has been in a state of political turmoil since 2012. That year saw a military coup as well as armed groups taking over the northern regions of the West African country. In the intervening years, efforts at establishing transitional governments have failed, culminating in the military junta dissolving and banning all political parties in May 2025. In addition, the country has seen waves of military interventions by outside players like France, the US, and, most recently, Russia. All have invested heavily in trying to contain the extremist threat in Mali. But groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State…

May

03

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

Grandma’s eyes and colours of the past

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THIS is a compelling narrative on how restoring faded photographs sent one Libyan journalist-photographer on an unexpected journey into the wounds of history - and the eyes of a grandmother he never stopped seeing.There is a photograph he cannot find. It does not exist - or if it ever did, it was lost to the same history that made it necessary. Yet Mahir al-Awami, journalist, photographer, and son of Libya, knows exactly what it would show: a woman with coloured eyes. Not brown. Not black. Something rarer - a warm, luminous hue that his family speaks of the way people…