Next month, 32 national football sides will compete in the first-ever African hosted World Cup --- but they might be playing in half-empty stadiums. Over half of the 500,000 tickets allotted for South Africans remain unsold, with sales significantly slowing over the last month.

I don't know why this'd be a surprise. Less than four percent of South Africans earn nearly forty percent of total personal income. Another fifth makes up the "emerging middle class," leaving seventy-five percent of the country in the lower income tier. Almost half the country is in poverty, the economy is contracting, and income inequality is in fact getting worse. I'm guessing that most South Africans figured tickets would be a luxury they couldn't afford.

This announcement comes amid a slate of bad news: the World Health Organization warned tourists of an outbreak of Rift Valley fever only yesterday, and a tragic bus accident -- allegedly caused by the bus driver falling asleep at the wheel -- claimed 23 lives today.

Aside from the tickets fiasco, the Organising Committee claims that everything is ready for June 11th. This quote from spokesman Greg Fredericks, however, doesn't alleviate all concerns: "We certainly hope that the strike season will be over." That's not exactly the voice of confidence.

To correct the ticket problem, FIFA should either slash prices even further, or free them up for more foreign fans. They've earned some good press today when they announced that workers on the World Cup stadiums would receive free tickets to two matches. Empty stands at the World Cup would be the height of embarrassment.

To be fair, it would give a break to weary ears blasted by obnoxiously (and dangerously) loud vuvuzelas.

From the captain obvious department: a study in the latest issue of South Africa's Medical Journal claimed that vuvuzelas, the obnoxiously loud trumpet played at football matches in South Africa, can cause permanent hearing damage:

Participants in the stadium study were "exposed to high-intensity sound far exceeding the current legislated average exposure and peak exposure levels for occupational noise".

Tests on the 11 after the match showed a "significant" decrease in hearing sensitivity.

Worse, the study used stadiums that simulated the noise of only 30,000 people -- many of the crowds expected at World Cup matches are expected to be three times that amount.

If you watched last year's Confederations Cup, you're well aware how annoyingly ubuquitous vuvuzelas are in South African stadiums. (And if you didn't, you'll understand if you watch even a single minute of any World Cup match this summer.) 

Thankfully, a South African company is taking advantage of the obvious entreprenurial opportunity and marketing foam earplugs.

H/T Andrew Harding.

As a dislocated Brooklynite, I've been following the New Jersey Nets' faltering attempts to build a new stadium in my borough for years now -- my distaste for poor urban planning and eminent domain abuse only slightly outweighing my fantasy of one day seeing Lebron James play ten minutes away from where I grew up. The story has already drawn in an unlikely cast of characters including rapper Jay-Z and Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, but Robert Mugabe? Really?

The New York Post reports: 

Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, wants to know if companies controlled by Prokhorov in Zimbabwe violate federal rules that forbid American citizens and companies, and subsidiaries set up in the United States, from doing business with brutal strongman Robert Mugabe, his regime or associates.

Prokhorov's Renaissance Capital investment bank has interests in the Zimbabwean stock exchange, banks, a cellphone company, mining and a swanky, private big-game reserve. The company is intertwined with Onexim, the $25 billion Prokhorov-controlled investment fund behind the deal to bring the struggling NBA team to Brooklyn.

Pascrell said he will ask the Treasury Department, which oversees the sanctions, to investigate Onexim. In 2008, Onexim became a 50 percent owner of Renaissance Capital, which has been actively investing in Zimbabwe since 2007.

The Nets currently play in East Rutherford, New Jersey, located in Pascrell's district, so he's not exactly an impartial observer. On the other hand, the NBA has only itself to blame if this blows up into a scandal. Renaissance Capital hasn't exactly gone out of their way to hide their business ties to Zimbabwe: there's a Harare office listed on their website. 

The coup-in-progress in Guinea-Bissau mentioned in this morning's brief appears to have failed: 

The prime minister of Guinea-Bissau, Carlos Gomes Junior, has been released after being briefly detained by soldiers in an apparent coup attempt. Military music played on the radio, a telltale sign of a coup, during the incident. Gomes was released hours later as hundreds of people gathered in front of his office chanting "Never a coup d'etat in Guinea-Bissau."

The minister of territorial administration, Luis Sanca, said he and the prime minister were abducted by the soldiers at 8am and taken to the capital's main military camp, where they saw the head of the armed forces, Zamora Induta, also under guard. Sanca said the soldiers released him and Gomes at about 11 but were still holding the army chief.

"The prime minister has been freed and is meeting the president," said a family member, who asked not to be named. Mamadou Diao, the prime minister's press attache, confirmed the release.

It would be wishful thinking to hope that things will return to normal in Guinea-Bissau, an archetypal failing state and major drug transshipment point, but after a series of coups and assassinations over the last few years, it's good news that the government appears to have held on. Leaders of the West African regional body ECOWAS, having already suspended Guinea and Niger after recent coups, are probably breathing a sigh of relief as well. 

For those of you who don't subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you're missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works.

The question I'd like to highlight this week is:

Which of these three countries has the highest annual death rate?

a) Germany    b) Iraq    c) Kenya

(The photo above is of half-buried headstones at Arlington National Cemetery during last month's D.C.-area "snowpocalypse.")

Answer after the jump ...

Read on

An extraordinary paper on poverty reduction across Africa by Columbia's Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy shows:

• The proportion of Africans in poverty is declining
• The continent is due to reach its Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people living on $1 a day or less by 2015
• Income inequality is decreasing

My first thought was that the study might be so broad as to be misleading. Countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo have suffered from violent conflict and declines in GDP in the past decade; countries like South Africa haven't. It's a billion-person continent. It's hard, and in some ways useless, to generalize.

Thus, perhaps the most remarkable finding is that "poverty reduction... cannot be explained by a large country or even by a single set of countries." The authors note: "[P]overty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has, in the past, shown little interest in discussing the darker periods of French history. His summed up his attitude while visiting former colony Algeria two years ago, saying:

"Young people on either side of the Mediterranean are looking to the future more than the past and what they want are concrete things. They're not waiting for their leaders to simply drop everything and start mortifying themselves, or to beat their breasts, over the mistakes of the past because, in that case, there'd be lots to do on both sides."

But in the last two weeks there have been some signs that Sarkozy may be tentatively softening his relentlessly forward-facing outlook. Visiting Haiti last week to announce a debt cancellation package, Sarkozy had this to say about France's legacy of slavery, colonialism, and economic dominance over the country:

"Our presence did not leave good memories,'' Sarkozy conceded outside the still-standing French Embassy in downtown Port-au-Prince.

"The wounds of colonization, maybe the worst, [and] the conditions of our separation have some traces that are still alive in Haitian memories.''

Visiting Rwanda today, Sarkozy didn't exactly apologize for France's conduct during the 1994 genocide, but at least took note of his country's faults: 

"What happened here is unacceptable and what happened here forces the international community, including France, to reflect on the mistakes that prevented it from anticipating and stopping this terrible crime."

Asked what he felt those mistakes had been, the president cited a seriously flawed assessment of the situation in Rwanda as the genocide unfolded and a UN-mandated French military intervention that was "too late and undoubtedly too little".

But reflecting a thaw in relations, Sarkozy said he hoped the future would enable the two countries to "turn an extremely painful page" on a past fraught with mutual distrust. "Off the back of all these mistakes … we are going to try to build a bilateral relationship," he said.

Granted, this isn't much -- certainly less than the Rwandans were expecting and much weaker than the apologies Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan have made -- but it's a new style from Sarkozy, whose rhetoric has never exactly been known for its sensitivity. 

A brand new round of "El Qaeda" warnings from Antonio Maria Costa of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime still requires a pretty big intuitive leap:

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says "there is more than just spotty evidence" indicating a link between drug traffickers and terror groups.

"And before this becomes a very serious problem, it has to be dealt with and nipped in the bud," Costa said in an interview with The Associated Press, on the sidelines of a seven-nation drug summit in the Senegalese capital of Dakar.

Cocaine from South America has been moving through the West African coast for several years, and experts believe drugs are then parceled out to smugglers who move the cocaine north by boats and by road. One suspected smuggling route crosses portions of the Sahara desert controlled by insurgents. The cocaine-for-arms trade is especially worrying given the recent expansion of an al-Quaida-linked terror group, which was once based exclusively in Algeria but now has tentacles in Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

"There is plenty of evidence of a double flow. (Of) drugs moving, arriving into West Africa from across the Atlantic ... and the trading — exchange — of cocaine for arms," Costa said.

Costa did not say how extensive the cocaine-for-arms exchange was thought to be, or which countries were involved.

There seems to be an awful lot of hand-waving happening here. What we know is that drug smugglers are moving cocaine through West Africa, including regions where Al Qaeda linked militants also operate. This, in itself, may be cause for concern. But many, including prominent politicans, seem to be assuming that an established link exists when the only reported case of a suspected al Qaeda affiliate making a coke deal --again trotted out as evidence in this article -- was with someone who turned out to be a DEA agent. Until there's some more evidence, a little more cautious reporting might be in order.

In any event, if al Qaeda is getting into the cocaine business, it would seem to suggest that the organization is moving outside its core competency in order to raise money, and perhaps setting up more opportunities for authorities to infiltrate their networks.

 Until recently counter-terrorism officials weren't worried about jihadi pundits having much of an influence in the United States itself, where they believed that a higher degree of Muslim-American assimiliation, social mobility and economic well-being would act against such influences. It turns out however, that this isn't always the case.

In an article in New York Times Magazine, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Andrea Eliot profiles the captivating transformation of an all-American boy from Alabama, Omar Hammami, who is now fighting with Al Shabaab in Somalia.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like "sugar" and "darlin'." Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang "Away in a Manger" on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. "It felt cool just to be with him," his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. "You knew he was going to be a leader."

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world's most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

And there are some downright chilling portions of the article:

In a recent propaganda video viewed by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a soundtrack of jihadi rap plays in the background.

He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, "the American," and speaks to the camera with a cool, almost eerie confidence. "We're waiting for the enemy to come," Hammami whispers, a smile crossing his face. Later he vows, "We're going to kill all of them."

Getting native-born Americans to join the jihadist cause is a coup for groups like al Qaeda or al Shabaab. An American jihadi can increase a group's legitimacy, add appeal to radicalizing youth in Western countries and can teach foreign jihadis about American culture. Having an American passport also allows for freer travel.

Although Omar Hammami isn't the first American to reach the higher echelons of a radical Islamic organization (California native Adam Gadahn is a top spokesman for al Qaeda), Eliot's article is a uniquely in-depth look into the details of such a metamorphosis. It's definitely worth a full read.

After months of resistance against international pressure to overturn Uganda's now-notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Uganda's politicians seem to be pulling back. In early January, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni expressed concern that the bill was too harsh and on Jan. 12th noted:

"Because it is a foreign policy issue, it is not just our internal politics, and we must handle it in a way which does not compromise our principles but also takes into account our foreign policy interests."

The U.N. and the U.S. government, along with countries such as Britain, Canada and Sweden, have expressed their strong disapproval of the bill. Their displeasure has had an effect: during a January 19th cabinet meeting, the Ugandan government agreed to form a committee to amend the bill, with cabinet members citing the possibility of aid cuts by Western governments as a chief reason behind their reservations. The bill's author, MP David Bahati, held strong for a little longer. That is, until today when he expressed willingness to change some key clauses of the legislation.

Of course, none of this means that gay Ugandans will be getting a fair shake anytime soon -- especially when 95 percent of those surveyed in the country believe homosexuality should continue to be criminalized.

Although the U.S. government has condemned the bill, the American evangelical influences behind it are widely known. For example, Rick Warren, who advised most of the bill's leading supporters (such as Pastor Martin Ssempa), was barely ahead of Museveni in distancing himself from it. Also heavily circulated were the allegations by Jeff Sharlet that President Museveni, his ethics minister Nsamba Buturo and David Bahati, all have ties to U.S. politicians linked to The Family (a secretive evangelical organization with plenty of political influence).

Now, with human rights activists and journalists fully in the mix, friction over the bill has led to a proxy battle over the U.S.' cultural influence in the region.

In the the wake of last week's tragic attack on the Togolese soccer team at the Afrcia Cup of Nations tournament, Ethan Zuckerman provides some useful background on Cabinda, the fluke of a province where the attack took place: 

If the world’s media wasn’t busy asking itself, “Where the heck is Yemen?“, we’d probably be asking “Where’s Cabinda?” It’s not in Angola – at least, it’s not geographically contiguous with Angola – it’s a small enclave separated from Angola by a 60km wide strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo. About the size of Puerto Rico, it’s ethnically and linguistically separate from the rest of Angola – Cabindans speak Cabindês and French, rather than Portuguese. About 100,000 Cabindans live in Cabinda – twice as many live in exile in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville and DRCongo.

Oh, and Cabinda is very, very rich. Which is to say, it’s got 60% of Angola’s oil… and Angola is now the largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. (According to one history, Cabinda is part of Angola through Chevron’s support of Angolan MPLA forces in 1975.) As often happens in resource-rich nations, Cabinda doesn’t see much of that oil money, a major grievance of the Cabindan people. A recent agreement invests 10% of oil profits into Cabinda. That agreement helped the Angolan government achieve a ceasefire with some members of the FLEC – Forces for the Liberation of Cabinda.

At least one faction of FLEC – the Forces for the Liberation of the State of Cabinda-Military Position (FLEC-PM) – wasn’t on board with this plan. Their general secretary Rodrigues Mingas told the media that he’d warned Cup of Nations organizers not to hold matches in Cabinda, as his faction of FLEC considered themselves to be at war with Angolan forces. Mingas went on to apologize for the loss of Togolese life:

We didn’t specifically target the Togolese. It could have been Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana… Anything is possible,” he said. “We are at war, and it’s no holds barred.”

“We always regret the death of human beings but there are also thousands of Cabindans killed over 35 years,” he said.

Obviously, the attack by FLEC-PM on unarmed footballers is a horrific and disgusting act of terrorism. But it’s hard to imagine the Angolans screwing the situation up much more thoroughly. First, hosting matches in Cabinda was clearly a political decision designed to demonstrate Angola’s firm hold over this disputed territory. Colin Droniou, writing for the AFP, observes that police presence in Cabinda is currently higher than normal, but quips: “Normal in Cabinda means one soldier for every 10 residents.” Human Rights Watch reports that those military forces are routinely involved with the detention and torture of rebels. The Angolan government had to know that there was a risk of violence during the tournament, a risk they could have mitigated by moving matches out of Cabinda. One analyst calls the decision to host matches in Cabinda “stupid and tragic“.

Another example of an international event designed to highlight a country's, instead serving as a reminder of its flaws.  

A number of strange a contradictory reports have emerged about the Somali national who attempted to kill controverisal Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard with an axe in his home on New Year's Day, but it's becoming clear that someone dropped the ball in allowing the man to take up residency in Denmark.

One Danish paper is reporting that Danish intelligence services were aware that the man -- who has not been named because of privacy laws -- was held for seven weeks in Kenya in September for helping to plot an attack against U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. U.S. officials and the Danish embassy in Kenya have both denied the report and say the man was held for having incomplete travel documents.The Danish embassy says it was never made aware by Kenyan authorities that he had been suspected of terrorist activity:

However, while not acknowledging the Clinton plot, the Danish intelligence agency PET acknowledged the man's ties to African terrorist groups:

“The person arrested. has close links with the Somali terrorist organisation al-Shabaab as well as with the heads of al-Qaeda in East Africa,” the agency said in a statement.

“He is also suspected of being implicated in terrorist activities when he was in east Africa. The individual arrested has also been a member of a terrorist network implanted in Denmark that has been under surveillance by PET for a long time.”

The statement doesn't really say whether the individual himself was under observation or when they had become aware of his background before or after he was granted residency in Denmark. There will probably be a lot more investigation in the coming weeks of whether it was the Kenyans or the Danes who messed up. 

I generally think it's not fair to expect authorities to take every report of a potential security threat seriously, but this case as well as the U.S. plane bombing both highlight how much ground the international community needs to make up on intergovernmental intelligence sharing on terrorism suspects. I have to think that a concerted effort in this area should be a higher priority than new airport scanners or security procedures.  

Poor Nigeria. As if it didn't already have a terrible reputation, the alleged terror attempt by a 23-year-old Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab yesterday on a flight from Amsterdam to Detriot seals the deal. But as you're reading the news, a few caveats to remember: 

First, much of the information coming out about the suspect's origin comes from the Nigerian newspaper This Day.  While often a good source of initial information, this report probably shouldn't be taken as fact without other confirmation. The press in Nigeria, while vibrant, growing, and home to countless incredible journalists, has still been known to exagerate or assume at times. I have no reason to believe that is the case this time, but skepticism is warranted. 

Second, if the suspect does indeed come from a family of means, as his residence in London suggests (forgive a generalization, but anyone who is anyone in Nigeria has got a house in London), it says much about where the real terror "threat" is (and is not) coming from in Nigeria. Security analysts have been worrying about Nigeria since the Sept 11. attacks -- fearing that this about half-Muslim country of 140 million people would be a potential host to extremists. But at the end of the day, something that I've learned about Nigeria is that it takes money and connections to get things done. Just think back to the violence earlier this summer by the Boko Haram sect. The mostly-impoverished members of the group raised hell in the local context ... but that was it. Taking "jihad" international from Nigeria is still a long ways and a lot of financing off (if it is on the way at all).

Which brings me to one more point about extremism in Nigeria. Much of the religious violence that the country has seen in recent years has been less about religion and more about a country rife with corruption and wanting for institutions. When sharia law was introduced in the North earlier this decade, most analysts believe that it had more to do with a desire for the law -- any law -- to function. Since the secular government had failed for years, many sought refuge in the laws of religious fundamentalism.

And that brings us back to the alleged terrorist in questioning today. His grievances are different from these, one might imagine, since the lack of rule of law often works in favor of (rather than against) the elite. In short, what I'm trying to say is that there are two different phenomena going on here: mass dissatisfaction among many impoverished in the country's Muslim North, and the different brand of extremism that would incite a well-off 23-year-old to blow up a plane in Detroit. 

Finally, in the time that I've written this blog post, I have recieved several requests from news agencies and papers to help me connect them with reporters in Nigeria. An unfortunate reminder that the press in my former-resident country is drying up. And with each correspondent that leaves, it is trickier and trickier to piece together developments that unfold. For the last two years, editors have asked me why Nigeria matters. Case and point.

When the Eritrean national soccer team's plane returned home after a competition in Nairobi, only the coach was on board. The team's whereabouts are unknown. This isn't the first time the've pulled this though: 

Mr Musonye told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme it was the third time the Eritrean team had failed to return home after a tournament.

"The Eritrean federation have done their best to bring a team to the competition - unfortunately these boys had other ideas," he said.

"Definitely they are in Nairobi - we have so many Eritreans here - they must be somewhere."