Nigeria has a new acting president today, after the country's parliament finally voted that the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, should stand in for Umaru Yar'Adua. The latter has been missing in action -- rumored dead or worse -- for several months now, leaving the country's leadership in disarray.

So who, exactly, is now leading Africa's most populous country? 

Much of what I learned about Nigeria's new acting president, Goodluck Jonathan, I learned in a six hour traffic jam on the one-lane, pothole-laden road between Port Harcourt and Yenagoa, the capital of Jonathan's home, Bayelsa. I was on my way there for an interview with someone in the "political" side of the Niger Delta rebel movement. But the rest of Nigeria -- literally the entire rest -- was on their way to Yenagoa for the funeral of Jonathan's father, who had just passed away. Governors from all 36 states, traditional leaders from the entire Delta region, and the President himself were all trying to dry in on that one, very busy, road. My run-down Honda didn't stand a chance against their imported 4-wheel drive luxury vehicles. I had a lot of time to ask my driver (and the other near-parked cars on the road) about Jonathan.

Despite the entire country flooding in for his father's funeral, the truth is that Goodluck Jonathan is not terribly well known in Nigeria as a politician. His father, who had just died when I was trapped on the road, was a humble man, not rumored to be terribly rich.  One man stuck with me on the road remembered that Jonathan senior was the kind of man who always remembered eveyone's name.

Jonathan the son, a zoologist, came to prominence by accident, when he was promoted from deputy governor to head man in Bayelsa state in 2005, when the incumbent was impeached. In 2007, then-presidential candidate Umaru Yar'Adua picked Jonathan as his running mate. Ostensibly, Jonathan's selection was more about regional politics than Jonathan himself: Nigeria's traditionally Muslim North was getting the Presidential bid, so the running mate needed to come from the South. The Niger Delta was an added perk, perhaps to show that Yar'Adua was serious about tackling the insurgency there. 

But the Niger Delta militants have never really liked Jonathan too much, or at least not lately. He never emerged as a powerful leader for the Niger Delta cause in Abuja. And in 2007, militants blew up his house in Bayelsa (not a very subtle hint.) Jonathan was partly responsible for leading the amnesty late last year that saw hundreds of rebels give up their guns. But now, all hints indicate that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) will pick up fighting where it left off. At the end of the day, it was Yar'Adua they must have made deals with.

Nor is the North too terribly fond of Jonathan. Many of the region's governor's resisted replacing Yar'Adua with his VP. Again, this is less about character as it is about whose turn it is to eat. Nigeria has a traditional, un-written pact to alternate presidents eight years for the North, and eight for the South. The North is still supposed to have five more years. Now, Northern governors are finding themselves having to deny rumors that they are plotting a coup. (Even when I was there in 2007 and 2008, those rumors were prevelant. Everyone knew that Yar'Adua was sick.)

All this is to say ... I've got no idea (nor does anyone, really) how Goodluck Jonathan is going to do in the hot seat. Up until now, his political career has been largely built on posturing -- his being from the right region at the right time. Now, he'll have to prove that he is more than just a regional man, while still placating the Niger Delta, where his "home constituency" will certainly expect patronage to begin to flow.

I won't be the first to say it today, but: Good luck, Jonathan. He'll surely need it.

Somalia has two big scourges these days: Islamist milititas the run most of the country (and are linked to al Qaeda) and piracy off the coast. (The combination yields a desperate humanitarian situation sandwiched in between.)

But what if the two scourges are linked? That was the  suggestion of the Kenyan Vice President Kalonzo Stephen Musyok, speaking at the New America Foundation today. "Piracy is another issue which I think has a  direct link with these extremist militant groups," he told the audience.

It's an odd idea at first. Al Shabaab has built its image on the harsh brand of Sharia that they hope to impose, and during the Islamic Courts government earlier this decade (of which al Shabaab was a part,) piracy was banned. 

Not anymore. Last December, a Canadian intelligence report indicated that Shabaab was in fact training pirates for their "duties." Further reporting from Jane's (summarized here) notes how taxes are levied on the pirates' booties. Yes, the pirates and the Islamists are definitely in cahoots.

One way they know that both are getting worse? "[I]n Nairobi today, property prices today are still rising, and we think this has a direct link with the piracy." In other words, all those wealthy pirates are buying up fancy homes. And they've got a lot of cash to spend.

Late last year, my colleague Blake Hounshell and I sat down with Anwar Ibrahim here in Washington, where he was attending a conference on inter-religious understanding. The Malaysian opposition leader (who is #32 one of our Top Global Thinkers of 2009) is today in a very different setting: the beginning of his trial for charges of sodomy that he says are politically motivated. Here are a few excerpts from that interview, including his thoughts on democracy, religion, and being an opposition figure.

FP: One criticism in the United States of the Muslim world is, people will say: the Muslim world is not addressing its own problems; The Muslim world is more likely to blame America for what is going on then to do soul searching about the state of discourse in Islam today. What is your response to that?

Anwar Ibrahim: I just answer, be equally responsible. You can't just erase a period of imperialism and colonialism. You have to deal, you can't erase, for example, the fault lines, the bad policies, the failed policies, the war in Iraq for example, and ambivalence you support dictators inside the top democracy. ...This night [in Malaysia], [there are] emails [circulating within] the national media, the government television network. They will  start a 5 to 7 minute campaign: Anwar is in the United States, he is a lackey of the Americans, he is pro-Jew. Period. And they go on with impunity, [as they have done] for the last 11 years. Because they want to deflect from the issue of repression, endemic corruption, destruction of the institutions of governance.

There is a difference. You [the United States] have Abu Ghraib and it is exposed -- and the media went to town. The atrocities in the Muslim world, in our prisons, [and I am] not talking about my personal experience, [are] all knitted up.

What we need is credible voice in the Muslim world, independent. Some liberal Muslims become so American in their views, so Western. I don't think you should do that. Americans need to appreciate the fact that I am a Muslim, there don't need to be apologies for that. But at the same time we must have the courage to address the inherent weaknesses within Muslim societies.

FP: When was it that you first decided this debate between religion was something you wanted to be a part of?

AI: In Malaysia, [this] is so critical. [It's] a multi racial country, a religious country. [There is a] Muslim majority of 55 percent, then Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians of various domination. I grew up being involved in the Muslim youth work, even when I was a student, engaging in this.  The Vatican supported the East Asian Christian Conference at the time and we started having these discussions. My initial work in the youth work when I was leading the Malaysia youth counsel which is an umbrella of all the Hindu youth and the Buddhist youth and the Christian youth. I benefited immensely ... we started engaging them. ... Then of course there was tolerance when we hosted a conference; they were mindful of the Hindus were strictly vegetarian or if the Christian organized, they were aware we did not eat pork or drink.

When I was I government the Muslim Christian dialogue was promoted, in fact I supported the program. There was a Muslim Christian center in Georgetown and we went to New Manila University. The majority of the Malaysians non-Muslims are not Christians but Confucianists, so we brought in Professor Tu Wei-ming one of the Chinese scholars of Confucianism from Harvard to come and tell us about Confucianism and we tell him about Islam. There is so much in common between Confucianism and Islam.

FP: How do you balance your life as a thinker and a politician?

AI: People do suggest that, but I quite disagree. Of course you simplify the arguments but the same arguments, the central thesis remains constant but the way you articulate it may differ. People say, Anwar you are opportunistic, how can you talk about Islam and the Quran here and then you talk about Shakespeare there and then quote Jefferson or Edmond Burke. I say it depends on the audience. [If] I go to a remote village, of course I talk about the Quran. In Kuala Lumpur ,and you quote T.S Eliot. If I quote the Quran all the time, to a group of lawyers, I am a mullah from somewhere.

[Some] think because I do court [Islamic votes] these days they think I am a Islamist. [But] you ask the question -- is it true, Anwar, that you are sound and consistent in your views and you are not actually a closet Islamist? I say, Why do you say that? [The] six years [I spent in] prison is not enough? And they say no, but you engage with the Islamists, and I said yes.

Al Shabaab, the Islamist militia wreaking havoc in Somalia, has long been rumored to be harboring al Qaeda ties. Some of the group's main leaders -- including several killed by U.S. drone strikes -- probably trained with the organization abroad. And stories about foreign fighters are surfacing in this East African country have become increasingly believable in recent months. But now it's official: In a statement issued by Shabaab and a smaller rebel group, Kamboni, the group proclaims: "We have agreed to join the international jihad of al Qaeda." It's the first time that Shabaab has explicitly given reference to such international terrorist credentials.

This is big news for anyone still trying to read the tea leaves on the Somali insurgency, not least becuase in all honesty, this is really no insurgency at all. It's a parallel government. On any day of the week, it would be easy to point to a map and argue that more of Somalia's territory is run by Shabaab and its allies control than by the Transitional Federal Government (despite rather optimistic claims to the contrary). So if Shabaab is the al Qaeda affiliate it claims to be, that means that Somalia is being de facto run by a terrorist group. Yikes.

I have to wonder if the United States really gets all of this. As the last decade of conflict has shown us, chaos -- a category in which Somalia has no competitors --  is perhaps the best predictor of 21st Century security ills. And from civil conflict to terrorism to refugees and the plight of disease, Somalia has it all. But it's precisely for that reason that the Somalia portfolio has been a hot potato within the U.S. government -- bouncing from agency to agency and advisor to advisor with no clear owner or no clear line. It's probably less that U.S. policymarkers are ignoring Somalia (as the African Union suggested this weekend) as they are overwhelmed. A fair excuse, but a dangerous one as well.

There's no two ways about it: The last year of foreign policy had more drama than a Scorsese epic and enough thrills to put Avatar to shame. From the fearsome battle in the Afghan hills to the U.S.-China love-hate relationship, and from the serious al Qaeda threats in Yemen to the hard-to-take-seriously pirates off the Somali coast, 2009 was arguably a much more interesting year for global politics than for movies. So with Oscar nominations due tomorrow, we're taking nominations for our own FP Oscars.

Who would you pick for the best actor of the year? Is President Barack Obama holding his own in an unfriendly world, or does the ubiquitous Brazilian President Lula deserve an Oscar? Is Muammar Qaddafi's persona just too good to be true, or do you prefer the smooth, suave diplomacy (and wacky domestic antics) of France's Nicolas Sarzoky?

You tell us what scandals, dramas, tragicomedies, and personal stories are your picks for the history books in 2009. Listed below are the categories and a few sample entries. Send your own nominations to Joshua.Keating@foreignpolicy.com or paste them in the comments below. May the best news win!

Best picture: What one story encapsulates the year?

Best drama: Spies, dissidents, treachery, and truth. Were the adrenaline-pumping protests following the Iran elections the most dramatic event? Or perhaps it was the long, drawn-out U.S. decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. If you have a humanitarian bent, the crises in Haiti, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan might come a heart-wrenching first.

Best comedy: If it isn't a tragedy, the dysfunction of the U.S. Congress is certainly good for a laugh. Then again, how about the Copenhagen Climate conference that ended in a collective shrug? Or the British MPs who used their expense accounts to buy fancy rugs and re-dig their backyard swimming pools?

Best romantic comedy: Gordon Brown requested meeting after meeting with the U.S. president; Obama just didn't have time. Brown gave him a romantic antique biography of Churchill, and Obama gave him a DVD box set. Let's just say the special relationship isn't all it used to be. But then again, there are other comedies in Europe these days ... Berlusconi anyone?

Best romantic drama: Unclear whether this should be a drama or a comedy, but the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladamir Putin certainly have a relationship worth noting -- as their press photographer has shown time and time again...

Best action: A U.S. ship is seized in the Gulf of Aden and devious pirates take the Maersk Alabama captive on the high seas, demanding a ransom for their deed. But lo and behold! A brave captain sacrifices his freedom to save his crew. And the U.S. whacks three pirates in the end, bringing everyone home safely! Phew!

Best special effects: Hmm, how about that missile launch in North Korea? It hit right on target: the Pacific Ocean.

Best director: Nicolas Sarkozy is a whirling dervish of diplomatic activity.

Best actor: Very few world leaders can also claim their own daily television shows -- and surprisingly humorous ones at that. "Alo Presidente" hasn't exactly skyrocketed Hugo Chavez to fame (his coup attempt back in the 1990s did that), but man has this guy mastered media in the Drudge Era.

Best actress: On a more serious note, few women leaders have been more powerful this year in asserting political freedom than Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. Or does Hillary Clinton have your vote? As one FP staffer put it, "she's the queen of 'the show must go on.'"

Best supporting actress: Is Carla Bruni the perfect companion for a perfectionist French president?

Best supporting actor: Let's be honest: One man whose entire year has been a story about other people's interests is the ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. For all his posturing and pontificating, he was never running the show.

Best costume: Libya's Muammar Qaddafi designs his own clothes.

Worst costume: Libya's Muammar Qaddafi designs his own clothes. You decide.

Lifetime achievement award: Fidel? Kim Jong Il? Mubarak? Most of the longest-lasting players on the world stage aren't particularly savory characters. Got someone better?

We'll post a full list of nominees based on your e-mails and comments on Monday, Feb. 8 and give you a chance to vote. The final winners will be announced at the end of the month. 

We promise to keep the musical numbers short.

Earlier this week, Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi, the son of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi,  sent a letter (excerpted below) to German Chancellor Angela Merkel regarding a recent gift from her country to Israel:

We read with great surprise news reports indicating that the German Government will support the State of Israel by offering gifts in the form of a sophisticated submarine and two Missile botas to be added to the five submarines which have already been provided to Israel, the price of which was paid by the German tax-payers.

...I do not think that tht German people who have suffered dictatorship, supression and terrorism either during the Nazis era or the commnist reign, which are well known to Her Excellency Dr. Angela Merkel agree to the money of tax-payers being spent to purchase offensive non-defense weapons and submarines ...I do not think that the Greman tax-payers seek the enhancement of the offensive capacity of the world's greatest human rights violating State in the world.

...today you are thoughtful towards Israel to atone for the mistakes of the past, but I assure you that one day you will be thoughtful towards us to atone for today's mistakes."

The letter has been fairly widely distributed to journalists. Saif is thought to be increasingly influtential in shaping Libya's foreign policy, though interestingly, he writes the letter on behalf of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation rather than his father's government.

Nine months ago when the power-sharing government in Zimbabwe came into office, I must admit that I was pretty darn skeptical that they could meet their hyper-inflation-cutting goals. After a complete economic collapse, inflation last year about this time had reached 230 million percent; GDP "growth" was negative in all senses of the word. It was in this nasty environment that the new finance minister, Tendai Biti, came along and began what few would argue is the hardest job in the world. 

Now less than a year later, he was in Washington to tally the progress (and damn, Milton Friedman would be proud...)

- Inflation is completely gone, thanks to the abolition of the Zimbabwean currency in favor of a basket of other notes (including the dollar and the South African Rand). The highest rate seen in 2009 was a slim 1 percent.

- The money supply has been cut by 1,000 percent  -- effectively decapitating a nasty forex trade that the money-printers were previously using to enrich themselves

- Capacity utilization in the economy is up from 4 percent to nearly 50 percent, with some industries, including food and beverages, as high as 95 percent.

- GDP growth this year was probably around 4 percent; Biti expects 6 percent in 2010. 

Of course, it's not all rosy. But just think about that for a second: the world's most free-fall economy -- the only one in history to see negative economic growth for a decade in which it was not at war -- today is almost normal. In fact, it has the largest stock exchange on the continent, capitalized at $4 billion. 

Biti has an interesting theory about this.  The collapse of the economy, he said today at a Freedom House event, was in fact the reason why President Robert Mugabe's government finally had to accept the power-sharing agreement in the first place. "Everything else they could deal with -- the opposition, they could beat us up," he said, "but you cannot implement violence against the economy."

Now that progress is being made, it's time for the equation to work the other way: "the cornerstone of any economic development is democracy." In Africa, he argued powerfully, "without democracy you cannot sustain the lives of the people." No matter how impossible the economy seemed, it's the politics that will still prove the harder task.

Over a week after the earthquake in Haiti, damage control is still the prevailing priority on the the ground. Journalist Kate Prengel, who just returned from Haiti, sends this dispatch to FP from the front line: 

The Place St. Anne in downtown Port au Prince has turned into an informal refugee camp for victims of last week's earthquake. The scene is one that is repeated throughout the city. Women are cooking in tin pots over a few sticks of charcoal. The sick and injured are lying on blankets under makeshift tents. Children are playing improvised soccer with a tennis ball.

As soon as I walk into the Place, a woman hurries up to me. "There is a man here, injured badly," she tells me in French. Her name is Lopdes, and she must be in her mid-thirties. I explain that I am not a doctor but a journalist, and a crowd of people gathers around to tell me about their situation.

"Nobody is helping us," one man says, and everyone nods their heads. They haven't seen any relief workers, and they certainly haven't received any food or water. Instead, they are making do with their own resources. After the earthquake demolished their houses, most of them were able to drag some of their rice, oil, or crackers out of the rubble. They all take a certain pride in the fact that they are now sharing what they have equally among themselves. "We are living communally," says Shelove Lindor, a thoughtful man in glasses. "We are helping one another."

At the same time, they are all acutely aware that their supplies will soon run out.

When I ask what they need, the replies are unanimous: food, drinking water, and medical supplies. Ghislaine Chajame, an energetic woman in an orange blouse, told me that she is a nurse and has been doing her best to tend to the injured. But she has no painkillers, no penicillin, and no real bandages. Like the others, she says she hasn't seen any relief workers since the earthquake hit.

Throughout Port au Prince, the situation seems to be the same: in the absence of any proper relief effort, ordinary Haitians are taking on the herculean task of finding food, water, and shelter. If there is any order in the city's chaos, it comes from the people themselves.

The national police, meanwhile, are nowhere to be seen. Here and there in the center of town I spot a white United Nations tank, driving along with its doors and windows shut. A few bulldozers are excavating rubble, but they are few and far between;. It's just as common to see two or three men take matters into their own hands and excavate as best they can with their own hammers. The American soldiers are all at the airport, managing an airlift of U.S. citizens back to Florida. And the French soldiers are mainly to be found in the leafy back hills, far from the devastation of the city itself.

All things considered, the city is remarkably calm. Self-appointed traffic controllers, in ragged clothes, direct cars through the clogged streets. In the rough, hilly neighborhood of Delmas, women sell carrots and okra brought in from the nearby countryside. It's not really an attractive scene; cut up chickens are starting to rot in the sun, and pigs are rooting around in the mud. The air, here and everywhere, stinks of sewage and dead bodies. But a certain order prevails. Residents have piled up their garbage in a ravine and are burning it because, one woman explains to me, "it could be bad for the health" to have so much garbage on the street. A little girl is rolling dough into long strands. "This is Creole pasta," she explains to me, smiling, as though there has been no earthquake and I am a tourist, soaking up local flavor.

It is anyone's guess how long this relative calm will last. Haitians are keenly aware that they cannot manage for long without international assistance. People have hung up signs in English, French, and Spanish, asking for help. One typical sign, a sheet hung across a Delmas alleyway, reads "Help us! We need foods, water, and medicaments."

Right now, Port au Prince is on a massive adrenaline high. The streets are swarming with people carrying bundles, foraging for food, and scavenging what they can from the city's wreckage. Basic survival demands an incredible amount of energy, and most of the people I spoke to are consumed with the immediate present. Nobody wanted to tell me about the earthquake, which already seemed like a remote event; everybody wanted to tell me about their need for food, water, and medicine.

It's striking that nobody seems to expect any help from their own government. Back in the center of town, I spoke to a group of men gathered outside the wreckage of the Palais National. Were they, I asked, waiting by the palace in the hopes that the president would come and speak to them? Were they expecting to hear from their leadership?

I was met with blank stares, and amusement. Finally someone explained to me politely that they had chosen that spot to gather in for geographical reasons: it's flat, and there are no nearby buildings which might collapse on you in case of an aftershock. "Our government is invisible," said David Oxygene. "They have abandoned us. They are not even giving us moral support."

The men around him agreed. Like everyone else, they also said they hadn't heard from the international community. But they had not yet given up hope. One man said he had heard news that a Dominican team of doctors had arrived. Other men had heard on the radio that the Cubans and Venezuelans were on their way. In one way or another, Haitians are waiting -- desperately -- for help. In the meantime, in one way or another, they are taking care of themselves.