Four opposition ministers are amongst Kenya's newly reformed cabinet. President William Ruto has invited them to be part of his national unity government as he scrambles to ease a crisis that forced him to sack almost his entire cabinet earlier this month. All four are leading figures in Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), the main party in the Azimio opposition coalition. Their inclusion is in response to weeks of youth-led, nationwide anti-government protests.
Also in this edition:
Food security in Africa is so precarious that one in five people on the continent regularly struggled to find enough to eat in 2023. A new report has raised the alarm about the effect that the rash of global crises over the last few years has had on rising levels of malnutrition in Africa. The Food and Agricultural Organisation reckons that globally about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished by 2030, and about half of them will be on the continent.
Finally, farmers who have relied on growing dates for centuries are seeing their livelihoods disappear before their eyes in Mauritania. Desertification has wiped away tens of thousands of the trees over the last few decades, and the communities that had sprung up around them have disappeared as well.
