Michael Peel

Nigeria’s​ general election, which takes place on 14 February, is expected to be the most closely contested for 35 years or more. President Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP) are riding on the back of a decade of decent economic growth and there is evidence of better governance in some areas. Jonathan’s supporters claim that if he wins a second term...

The sense of lives ruined for no purpose is pervasive in Liberia, a country colonised by freed US slaves, cultivated as a strategic anti-Communist American interest in Africa and largely ignored by the West during a post-Cold War decade in which its name became a byword for brutality. I first had a glimpse of Monrovia’s ruined infrastructure, along with the wretched refugee camps near...

Early in May I fly from Lagos to Abuja as part of a group of foreign journalists travelling to interview President Obasanjo, who has just announced that he intends to stand for re-election. Abuja, home to Nigeria’s political elite, was conceived just over a quarter of a century ago. A settlement of big hotels and uncompleted construction projects, it has little of Lagos’s...