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Kenyan workers prepare clothes for export at the New Wide Garment Export Processing Zone (EPZ) factory operating under the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), in Kitengela, Kajiado County, Kenya, on September 19, 2025.
Is the US set to terminate a 33-country trade deal?
The African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade pact that allows many products from 32 sub-Saharan African states to have free access to US markets, is set to expire in less than a week.
The White House still hasn’t said whether it will renew it.
First signed in 2000 by then-US President Bill Clinton, who saw it as a way to spread democratic ideals in parts of Africa, the deal hasn’t always lived up to expectations. Trade between the countries involved did initially rise, but has since dropped. For most of the countries involved, exports under AGOA account for less than 1% of GDP.
“AGOA’s highly imperfect. It’s a trade regime, and some countries have clearly done better than others,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Witney Schneidman, who was involved in passing and implementing AGOA, told GZERO. “But it needs to be strengthened, not killed.”
Which African nations are the main beneficiaries? South Africa has been by far the biggest beneficiary in terms of raw numbers, exporting nearly $56 billion in non-petroleum products under AGOA from 2001-2022 – specifically, car manufacturers based in South Africa have benefitted immensely. Renewing AGOA was a big reason why South African President Cyril Ramaphosa travelled to Washington in May. Nigeria, the next biggest partner, exported $11.2 billion under AGOA in that timeframe.
As a proportion of output, the country most reliant on AGOA is one that reportedly “nobody has ever heard of”: Lesotho. This landlocked country in southern Africa has built a significant textiles and garments sector on the back of AGOA, such that exports under the trade agreement account for 10% of its total GDP. An end to AGOA, on top of the 15% tariffs implemented at the start of August, would devastate the country’s two million people.
“Lesotho is the biggest beneficiary today, with the least alternative to fill the economic gap,” Ronald Osumba, a political strategist who once ran to be Kenya’s vice president, told GZERO.
For other countries, the importance of AGOA revealed itself when they were no longer included in the pact. Ethiopia was suspended from the pact in 2022 over “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” during the Tigray War. Exports to the United States have plummeted since, several firms have left the country, and over ten thousand jobs are now gone. It was even worse for Madagascar when it was temporarily suspended from the pact in 2010: its GDP dropped 11%.
So what’s in AGOA for the US? Put simply, counterbalancing China and Russia.
“Africa is shifting east,” said Osumba. “China and Russia are having more influence on the continent today than any other time.” Renewing AGOA could help the US balance that influence.
Why does it matter? AGOA nations hold a sizable chunk of the world’s rare-earth minerals. Five of the top 15 sources of rare-earth minerals worldwide are in AGOA. In particular, the Democratic Republic of the Congo produces over 70% of the world’s cobalt, a mineral that is needed for the production of electric minerals. If AGOA isn’t extended, Osumba warned, Washington’s access to these critical minerals could be curtailed.
“There’s a concern there for the US in terms of access to natural resources.”
For Schneidman, it’s not just access to critical minerals: It’s also about leaving business opportunities on the table. He argued that, when it comes to using “trade over aid,” the Trump administration isn’t putting its money where its mouth is, vacating the area to its own detriment.
What’s stopping the US from renewing? US President Donald Trump’s general approach to trade and tariffs provides some hints. He is unafraid to use levies as a way to punish countries who he believes distort markets – the high levies he placed on countries including Brazil, China, India, and South Africa are a testament to this. AGOA grants members states tariff-free to US markets, but doesn’t give American firms anything in return, so it’s possible that Trump sees this as unfair. Plus, his “America First” foreign policy suggests he doesn’t share Clinton’s desire for democracy to spread worldwide.
But Frank Matsaert, an African trade & infrastructure expert at the Tony Blair Institute, believes the punt on AGOA renewal goes beyond this: he believes there’s an information gap.
“They’re not as aware of the potential effects of not renewing it,” Matsaert told GZERO. “If AGOA isn’t renewed, that could threaten $42 billion of bilateral trade.”
Is there any chance of a last minute change? Osumba isn’t hopeful.
“If it was to be done, this conversation should have already started a long time ago.”
Matsaert, meanwhile, retains some hope, providing that someone tells the US president the value of AGOA to his nation.
“This has had a big, positive impact on Africa. It could continue to have a positive impact, particularly at a time when the US is trying to diversify its supply chains,” said Matsaert. “The US consumer benefits, Africa benefits. Why not extend this?”
Supporters of coalition parties PDCI (Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire) and PPA-CI (African People's Party of Cote d'Ivoire) march to protest the removal of their leaders names, Tidjane Thiam and Laurent Gbagbo, from the electoral list calling for an inclusive and peaceful election in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, August 9, 2025.
Africa’s age gap: Young nations, old rulers, big problems
Africa is one of the youngest regions on earth, with a median age of just 19.7 in 2020 – more than ten years less than any other continent. Yet several of its most powerful leaders are in their 70s and 80s – and they’re refusing to cede power, despite growing opposition to their rule.
In recent days, thousands have protested in Ivory Coast, after the country’s electoral commission barred opposition leaders from October’s election, in which President Alassane Ouattara, 83, is seeking a fourth term. Challengers were also recently excluded in upcoming elections in Cameroon, paving the way for 92-year-old President Paul Biya to win an eighth seven-year term, and possibly rule until age 100.
The gerontocracy generation. A study of elections during the period 2018-2021 found that, out of 28 African countries that went to the polls, only one – Ethiopia – chose a president or prime minister who was under the age of 50. Nineteen of the 28 winners were over 60, and as of late 2024, eleven were over 70.
They include 82-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, in power for 45 years, and Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo, 79, who has led for 40 years. The second oldest, 83-year-old Nangolo Mbumba of Namibia, did relinquish power in late 2024, only to hand it to a 72-year old successor, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah.
In May 2025, the West African nation of Togo made headlines after President Faure Gnassingbé, 59, rewrote the constitution to give himself a term-limit-free role as president of the country’s council of ministers, leaving the country’s actual president, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tove, as little more than a figurehead. Critics, and protesters in the streets, viewed this as a “constitutional coup” meant to indefinitely extend the Gnassingbé family’s 60-year grip on power.
And looking ahead, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, 73, is already backed by his party for elections slated for 2027, while Liberian President Joseph Boakai, 80, is attempting to complete his reform agenda in a country still recovering from civil war.
What’s the political impact?
Critics say the age gap between voters and leaders is a recipe for unrest, repression, and revolution. They point to examples such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, elected again in 2013 at the age of 89, who was deposed in a coup four years later. What’s more, when long-entrenched leaders approach the end of their reign, intense and sometimes violent succession battles often break out, frequently within presidential families. Simply put, governance can become brittle when leaders never leave.
All of this could complicate the region’s ability to grapple with a range of pressing issues, including militancy, jihadist violence, a wave of coups, and intensifying external competition and meddling.
And there is a further concern: the erosion or abuse of nominally democratic institutions is fueling disillusionment with the idea of democracy itself. Although polling across African countries still show a strong majority in favor of democracy and against one-man rule, that support has flagged in recent years, while acceptance of military rule has crept up. When citizens increasingly equate democracy with gerontocracy, those trends make sense.
Fleeing office workers run from the scene of an active shooter in Midtown Manhattan, Monday, June 28, 2025, in New York City.
Hard Numbers: Shooter kills four in New York skyscraper, Deadly floods in China, Abducted Nigerians killed after ransom payment sent & More
4: A gunman killed four people, including a police officer, at a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper in New York City on Monday. The shooter, identified as Shane Tamura, was armed with an M4 assault rifle when he entered the building, which is home to the headquarters of the National Football League (NFL) and other corporations. Tamura was carrying a note claiming that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy – a degenerative brain disease common among football players – because of the NFL.
38: At least 38 people are dead after days of heavy rains and flooding in Northern China, prompting President Xi Jinping to initiate “all-out” search and rescue efforts on Monday. The extreme weather has also led officials to evacuate 80,000 residents from Beijing, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
35: Nigerian gunmen killed at least 35 hostages despite receiving a ransom payment of 50 million naira ($32,600) for the release of 56 people that they had abducted from a village in northern Nigeria. Mass kidnappings are commonplace in Africa’s most populous country, and there has been a spate of them in the first half of 2025 (read more here).
1: In a bid to better control online information and protect “moral and ethical values”, Kyrgyzstan’s government has decreed that all internet traffic will be handled by one state monopoly. As part of the move, the small Central Asian nation has also banned online “skin flicks” (sorry for the archaic term, readers, but we’ve got spam filters to beat!)
13: After a case that lasted 13 years, a Colombian lower court judge found former President Álvaro Uribe guilty of bribery on Monday, in what was the first major criminal conviction of an ex-leader in Colombia. The conservative Uribe, who led the country from 2002 to 2010, will likely appeal the ruling, meaning the case is far from over.
Members of the Bangladesh Army and the fire service start rescue operations after a Bangladesh Air Force F7 aircraft crashed into a building of Milestone College in Dhaka's Uttara around 1:30 pm on July 21, 2025 in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Hard Numbers: Bangladesh military jet crashes into school, Argentina’s economy contracts again, Texas Republicans get to gerrymandering, & More
31: A Bangladesh Air Force plane crashed onto a school campus in the country’s capital Dhaka on Monday, following a reported mechanical failure, killing at least 31 people. Most of the victims were children. The plane was a Chinese-made fighter jet called the F-7 BGI that aimed to replicate the design of the Russian MiG.
100: Around 100 mostly US and European organizations were compromised in a far-reaching cyber attack campaign targeting Microsoft SharePoint servers over the past few days, including federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies. While the attacker has yet to be identified, Google has said Chinese-backed hackers were behind at least one of the attacks.
-0.1: Argentina’s economy contracted 0.1% in May, marking the third time this year that it has shrunk. Falling wages and rising unemployment depressed demand, leading to the drop. Although President Javier Milei has won plaudits for bringing down inflation with his “chainsaw” approach to spending, the sputtering economy could hurt him ahead of midterm legislative elections in October.
38: Texas Republicans are moving forward with a plan to redraw the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts in a bid to win more US House seats. This kind of gerrymandering is usually done only in the wake of the decennial Census. The move, pushed by president Trump, comes with both legal and political risks, which may explain why Texas Gov. Greg Abbot (R) was initially reluctant to greenlight the plan.
30%: Nigeria’s GDP in 2024 jumped by 30% after Africa’s most populous nation recalibrated its statistical models Previous GDP calculations omitted the country's digital services industry, pension funds, and the informal labour market, which employs most citizens.
1: School’s out for summer, and the US House is following suit tomorrow night, after Speaker Mike Johnson announced he will shut down the lower chamber one day early. The reason: he didn’t want to put up a vote on whether to release all the files related to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s case.
Nigerian Army soldiers patrol near the scene after a deadly gunmen attack in Yelwata, Benue State, Nigeria, on June 16, 2025.
What’s behind a surge of violence in Africa’s most populous country?
Earlier this month, Nigeria’s human rights agency reported that the country suffered more killings by insurgents and bandits in the first half of 2025 alone than in all of 2024.
That level of violence in Africa’s most populous country – and a major oil producer at that – should raise alarm bells. But experts from the country caution that there are a few ways to look at this data, which has only been kept consistently since 2024 to begin with.
First, the patterns of violence in Nigeria are shifting. For years, the largest threat in the country was the jihadist group Boko Haram and its various offshoots, which terrorized the northern reaches of the country with killings and kidnappings. But Nigeria’s security services have steadily ground them down, according to Amaka Anku, a Nigeria expert at Eurasia Group.
“Boko Haram is pretty much non-existent,” she says. “ISWAP [a local ISIS offshoot] does a few things, but that’s not the majority of where [the violence is coming from].”
So who are the perpetrators?
In fact, much of the recent increase is the result instead of violence in the central states between farmers and herders, as settled cultivators and nomadic cattle shepherds fight over valuable resources of land and water.
“A lot of what’s driven the number up is the killings in Benue state” says Anku, referring to the central Nigerian state where much of this type of violence is concentrated. Of the 606 killings reported in June by the country’s human rights agency, roughly 200 were in Benue alone.
Climate change is one of the underlying factors for the violence. The desertification of once-fertile areas of northern Nigeria has pushed herders south toward the central parts of the country – like Benue – which have seen longer rainy seasons. This has put them in conflict with farmers. There is a sectarian overlay as well: herders are typically Muslim, while farmers are usually Christian.
But there may also be a statistical anomaly in the numbers.
2024 was the first year that this data was kept, and that happened to be the first full calendar year of President Bola Tinubu’s premiership. He won power in part on a promise to rein in violence. To achieve this, the government launched a fresh security crackdown, while some state governments have even explored doing deals directly with criminal groups.
“Sometimes, the government is trying to negotiate with the bandits,” Aliyu Dahiru, a Nigerian journalist who reports for Human Angle, told GZERO. “It will give them money and say, ‘OK, let’s negotiate. You’ll stop attacking this particular location and we are going to stop attacking you.”
There’s just one problem, per Dahiru: there is no single leader of all Nigeria’s violent groups. The government may strike a deal with a head honcho, or the military may even kill one, but more groups will just spring up in their stead, says Dahiru, and the cycle continues.
“While you’re attacking [one] group, another one is getting more sophisticated, attacking more villages,” says Dahiru. “Before you know it, it’s a typical issue in that region.”
As a result, the uptick in 2025 may in fact be a reversion to the mean after a particularly successful year rather than an unprecedented spike.
Will this hurt Tinubu politically? The next election is just over 18 months away, and the most pressing problem for the president right now isn’t security, but rather skyrocketing inflation. Nonetheless, if current trends continue, violence could well become a defining electoral issue again , says Anku, meaning Tinubu will have to confront the problem again very soon.
“It ends up getting a lot more attention closer to an election, because you can whip up a lot of fear over it, right?”
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson walks back to office, as Republican lawmakers struggle to pass U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping spending and tax bill, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 3, 2025.
What We're Watching: House folds on Trump bill, Beijing lashes out at US-Vietnam deal, Nigerian opposition unites
House holdouts bluff then fold on Trump’s budget bill
The US House is set to pass President Donald Trump’s epic tax-and-spending bill any minute now. Some eleventh hour House Republicans holdouts had signaled that they would oppose the broadly unpopular bill because it boosts the national debt by trillions while threatening to leave millions without health insurance, but they quickly fell in line after under direct pressure from Trump. The imminent final passage of the bill will fulfil Trump’s wish to have the landmark legislation on his desk by the Fourth of July holiday.
US-Vietnam trade deal angers Beijing
The US and Vietnam struck a preliminary trade deal to lower their bilateral tariffs yesterday, and China is not happy about it. Why? Because as part of the deal the US will heavily tariff any goods that pass through Vietnam from another country en-route to the US. That’s a direct swipe at Beijing, which does this frequently to skirt high US tariffs. China’s commerce ministry said it “firmly opposes any party striking a deal at the expense of Chinese interests” and threatened “countermeasures.”
Nigeria sees huge political shakeup as opposition leaders join forces
In one of the biggest shake ups since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigeria’s two main opposition leaders – Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi – have joined forces to try to oust President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 election. In the 2023 election, they won a combined 54% of the vote compared to Tinubu’s 37%, meaning a common front could win. The big question: Which of these two political heavyweights will agree to play second fiddle to the other when it comes time to pick a presidential candidate?Belarussian dissident Syarhei Tsikhanouski hugs his wife, Belarussian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, after he was released from prison, in this screengrab taken from a social media video released on June 21, 2025.
HARD NUMBERS: Belarus frees dissident, Farmers kidnap Colombian soldiers, Damascus church attacked, & More
5: Belarussian dissident Siarhei Tsikhanouski, husband of the de-facto opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was freed on Saturday after spending more than five years in jail. US special envoy Keith Kellogg reportedly helped foster the deal. GZERO recently interviewed Tsikhanouskaya here.
57: Colombian farmers in the southwestern region of Valle del Cauca have kidnapped 57 government soldiers. Authorities say the farmers were pressured by local rebel factions that have rejected the 2016 peace deal with the government. For more on rising political violence in Colombia, see our recent piece here.
25: At least 25 were killed in a suicide bombing at a church Damascus, Syria, amplifying concerns about sectarian violence under the government of former-jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, who overthrew the Assad regime in December. Syria’s interior minister said the attacker was affiliated with Islamic State – the group itself has not claimed credit.
12: A suspected female suicide bomber killed at least 12 people at a fish market in Borno state in northeast Nigeria on Friday night. Borno is the center point of Boko Haram’s insurgency movement – an insurgency that has been going on for 16 years.
1.8%: War, huh, what is it good for? The Israeli stock market, evidently. The country’s main index reached record highs on Sunday after rising 1.8% following the US attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Since Israel began wider airstrikes on Iran last week, the index is up a total of nearly 8%.
Men are seen on a farm in Makurdi, Benue, Nigeria November 29, 2018.
HARD NUMBERS: Attack in northern Nigeria, Toilet stolen from Churchill’s home, and more…
100: At least 100 people were killed in an attack on a village by armed cattle herders in the north of Nigeria. The region has long been plagued by overlapping ethnic and sectarian tensions, as well as land use conflicts between nomadic herders and settled farmers.
13: Niger’s armed forces killed 13 insurgents during raids of jihadist-controlled gold mines near its western border with Burkina Faso. The Liptako-Gourma region in the Sahel – which includes parts of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger – has become an epicenter of extremist violence in recent years, as Al Qaeda and ISIS linked groups compete for control.
7: Saudi Arabia has executed a blogger who was jailed for seven years on treason and terrorism charges. Press freedom groups say the charges against Turki Al-Jasser, who had accused the government of corruption via an anonymous X account, were trumped up.
15: The Catholic Church will soon have a gamer saint. Nicknamed “God’s influencer,” Carlos Acutis – who died from leukemia at 15 – will become the first millennial to be canonized this September. The Italian teenager was known for building websites documenting Eucharistic Miracles and his love of Halo, Super Mario and Pokémon.
6: Two men were arrested for stealing a $6.4 million golden toilet from an exhibition at Winston Churchill’s birthplace. The 18-carat toilet – designed by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan – was part of an contemporary art exhibition at Blenheim Palace.