Africa

Everton's Idrissa Gueye is sent off for striking team-mate Michael Keane during their Premier League victory at Manchester United.

Le Professeur James Robinson, co-lauréat du Prix Nobel d'économie 2024, est déjà à Cotonou dans le cadre des Journées Scientifiques de l'Economie Béninoise (JSEB) 2025.

Sous le thème « Institutions et Prospérité des Nations », les JSEB 2025 se tiendront à l'hôtel Golden Tulip-Le Diplomate les 27 et 28 novembre et offriront un espace unique de dialogue entre chercheurs, étudiants, décideurs et partenaires techniques.
L'événement bénéficie du soutien du PNUD, partenaire officiel avec la participation du Professeur James Robinson, co-lauréat du Prix Nobel d'économie 2024.

Économiste et politologue de renom, James Robinson dirige l'Institut Pearson à l'Université de Chicago et occupe la chaire Richard L. Pearson. Ses travaux, en collaboration avec Daron Acemoglu, ont révolutionné la compréhension des liens entre institutions politiques et prospérité des sociétés, notamment à travers le succès international de Why Nations Fail (Pourquoi les nations échouent).

Récompensé en 2024 par le Prix Nobel pour ses recherches sur le rôle des institutions dans le développement économique, le Professeur Robinson apportera à Cotonou une perspective unique sur les mécanismes qui façonnent le succès ou l'échec des nations. Sa présence à Cotonou illustre l'importance des JSEB comme plateforme incontournable pour penser et construire l'avenir économique du Bénin et de l'Afrique.

Le Tribunal de commerce de Cotonou a condamné, le 20 novembre 2025, la Société de Gestion des Marchés Autonomes (SOGEMA), en liquidation, à verser 2,7 millions de francs CFA à un informaticien.

Un prestataire informatique de la Société de Gestion des Marchés Autonomes (SOGEMA) lui réclamait 3.737.288 FCFA, correspondant au solde des prestations des années 2020 à 2024.
Au cœur du litige se trouve un contrat de prestation signé le 8 avril 2011, portant sur la maintenance d'un logiciel budgétaire et comptable développé pour la SOGEMA. Le contrat prévoyait une redevance annuelle de 900.000 FCFA hors taxes, payable par avance et renouvelée chaque année.

La SOGEMA aurait cessé de payer ses redevances depuis 2019, tout en continuant d'utiliser le logiciel et de solliciter des interventions techniques.

Le prestataire affirmait que « toutes les démarches amiables… sont restées vaines » malgré plusieurs correspondances adressées à la structure publique.

En défense, la SOGEMA assurait ne plus avoir bénéficié de prestations depuis longtemps et soutenait que la créance était prescrite. Elle affirmait que l'informaticien cherchait à « profiter de sa mise en liquidation et du remplacement de ses responsables » pour réclamer des sommes non fondées.

La SOGEMA ne reconnaissait qu'une dette de 1.150.169 FCFA, retrouvée dans ses archives. Elle conteste également l'absence de factures et de preuves de service fait pour les années litigieuses.

Pour le Tribunal de commerce de Cotonou, les créances issues d'un contrat de prestation de services entre commerçants se prescrivent par cinq ans, selon l'Acte uniforme de l'OHADA.

Le juge a relevé que plusieurs correspondances avaient été adressées à la SOGEMA entre 2022 et 2024. Ces diverses correspondances « opèrent une interruption du délai de prescription de sorte que l'action du demandeur demeure encore recevable ».

Le Tribunal a fixé les redevances dues à 2.700.000 FCFA, soit trois années de maintenance à 900.000 FCFA chacune. Il condamne la SOGEMA à verser cette somme à l'informaticien et rappelle que « la décision est de plein droit exécutoire par provision et sur minute », conformément aux règles applicables aux petites créances.

L'établissement public, en liquidation, est également condamné aux dépens, selon le jugement N°132/2025/CJ2-PC/S1/TCC du 20 novembre 2025.

M. M.

The authorities are trying to rescue more than 250 schoolchildren who were abducted by raiders on motorbikes.

The authorities are trying to rescue more than 250 schoolchildren who were abducted by raiders on motorbikes.

Die Berner Kantonspolizei hat in der Nacht auf Montag einen mutmasslichen Einbrecher an der Berner Aarestrasse dingfest gemacht. Ein Diensthund biss den Mann. Er wurde im Spital versorgt und dann festgenommen.

Monday 24 November 2025

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Police are investigating allegations that Jacob Zuma's daughter, Duduzile, lured men into fighting in Ukraine.

The Gambian government says it is hosting Tchiroma Bakary on humanitarian grounds.

These processes are all about people. We should never lose our humanity in the process. There should not be a ‘COP of the people’ pitted against a ‘COP of negotiators.’ We need to approach COP jointly as a conference of the people, by the people, and for people. —Yamide Dagnet, NRDC’s Senior Vice President, International

In today's edition: SEP withdrawal fight, Shein scandal, Data-for-AI training

Bienvenue dans l’édition de lundi de Rapporteur. Je suis Eddy Wax à Bruxelles, et Nicoletta Ionta est en route pour Strasbourg, si les grèves le permettent. Vous avez une information à nous communiquer ? Écrivez-nous à eddy.wax@euractiv.com et nicoletta.ionta@euractiv.com À savoir : L’Europe s’engage dans un nouveau plan de paix Appels à la diversification du […]

The post L’Europe ajoute des notes à la paix en Ukraine appeared first on Euractiv FR.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Credit: UN Photo/Gustavo Stephan
 
The Group of Twenty (G20) comprises 19 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkiye, United Kingdom and United States) and two regional bodies: the European Union and the African Union (as of 2023).
 
The G20 members represent around 85% of the global GDP, over 75% of the global trade, and about two-thirds of the world population. South Africa assumed the G20 presidency on December 1 2024 and will step down on November 30 2025. The next G20 summit will be hosted by the US in 2026.

By Theophilus Jong Yungong and Iolanda Fresnillo
YAOUNDE, Cameroon / BARCELONA, Spain, Nov 24 2025 (IPS)

When South Africa assumed the Presidency of the G20, debt sustainability was placed front and centre, with the promise to launch a Cost of Capital Commission. Many hoped that, with an African country at the helm, the G20 would finally deliver real solutions to the debt crisis gripping the Global South – particularly Africa.

A year later, the South African presidency drew to a close, and nothing has fundamentally changed. The G20 has once again failed, and it is time to look elsewhere for genuine solutions.

Africa’s debt crisis is deepening

Alarm bells have been ringing for years. Africa’s total debt stocks have more than doubled since 2021 to US$ 685.5 billion in 2023, driven in part by the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, with increasing cost of capital driving debt payments to record highs.
The African Leaders Debt Relief Initiative (ALDRI), spearheaded by eight former Heads of State, demands urgent debt relief, not as “charity” but as “an investment in a prosperous, stable, and sustainable future—for Africa and the global economy”.

While South Africa’s Presidency raised hopes for a change to real solutions by placing Africa’s debt crisis at the centre of the G20 agenda, the outcome has leaned towards more rhetoric than action.

The G20 has failed

If we want to find fair solutions to the increasing debt problems that plague African and other Global South countries, we should no longer expect forums like the G20 to deliver. They are dominated by creditors unlikely to reform a system that serves their own interests.

After four meetings of the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the G20, leading on its finance track, South Africa delivered in October a debt declaration. But it contained nothing new and did not provide any actionable commitments on what the G20 will do to solve the debt challenge.

Nothing was delivered either at last weekend’s G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg. No reform. No changes. Just a couple of reports, but no decisions at all. As the debt crisis worsens, the G20 remains paralysed and unable to agree even on minimum reforms of its own Common Framework.

This paralysis is structural. While it attempts to appear to be inclusive, the problem with the G20 is that it is not a truly multilateral and democratic institution, but an informal exclusive forum for dialogue among competing powers.

Geopolitical tensions, and particularly the US context, elevates the paralysis to another level. Since decisions are made by consensus, the result is always the minimum common denominator.

The failure of the Common Framework

Launched in late 2020, the G20 Common Framework, was meant to enable faster and fairer debt restructuring for low-income countries. Yet it continues to be highly inefficient. Restructuring processes are slow, debt reductions too shallow, and the sharing of responsibility between public and private creditors deeply unequal, as we’ve seen with Zambia.

Calls to reform the Common Framework have been reiterated by many governments and institutions, but the G20 was unable to deliver. The African Union, for instance, called for reforms including introducing a time-bound aspect, establishing a universally-accepted methodology for comparability of treatment, suspending debt payments during the whole debt restructuring process, expanding its eligibility criteria and establishing a legal mechanism to enforce compliance with restructuring agreements.

Yet it still seems that the G20 is not in the business of acting for the good of the people. Instead it continues to perpetuate creditor interests.

A better path exists: The United Nations

Fortunately, there is another path that provides the much-needed inclusive and democratic multilateral institutional framework to take the necessary reforms forward.

In July, UN Member States worldwide agreed, by consensus, to initiate an intergovernmental process to address the gaps in debt architecture. This process should lead to a UN framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, as supported by the African Union in the Lome Declaration on a Common Position on Africa’s Debt, and to establishing a multilateral sovereign debt resolution mechanism, long demanded by G77 countries.

In the same UN forum it was agreed to establish a borrowers platform, which “will offer debt-distressed countries a way to coordinate action and amplify their voice in the global financial system”.

This is not radical. As Ahunna Eziakonwa, Director of the Regional Bureau for Africa at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) put it recently, it is a “common sense and long overdue” process.

Yet, some creditor countries, including the European Union, are trying to derail the UN process, claiming it would duplicate G20 efforts. Siding with a status quo that is clearly not working is a political choice that condemns Africa and other Global South countries to greater poverty, inequality and climate destruction.

If rich countries are serious about supporting Africa and Global South countries to address the climate crisis and pursue sustainable development, they need to stop boycotting commitments agreed by consensus, and support the initiation of an intergovernmental process on debt architecture reform.

The G20 has reached its limits. The world cannot afford another decade of deadlock caused by the effectiveness of the Common Framework, while debt burdens soar. Now is the time to shift the centre of global debt governance.

Theophilus Jong Yungong is Interim Executive Director, African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD), and Iolanda Fresnillo is Policy and Advocacy Manager — Debt Justice, European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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BBC Africa Eye uncovers two so-called "juju" practitioners, who offer to obtain body parts for ritual purposes.

BBC Africa Eye uncovers two so-called "juju" practitioners, who offer to obtain body parts for ritual purposes.

Fixtures, results and scorecards from Sri Lanka's ODI tour of Pakistan, and the Twenty20 tri-series that follows which also involves Zimbabwe.

Fixtures, results and scorecards from Sri Lanka's ODI tour of Pakistan, and the Twenty20 tri-series that follows which also involves Zimbabwe.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says there is a "renewed commitment to multilateral co-operation".

The raid on a Christian school came amid a surge of attacks by armed groups in the African nation.

The kidnapping comes amid a surge of attacks by armed groups in the African nation.