Operating since 2006, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is the outcome of a long-fought battle by civil society activists to create a judicial body that will protect the rights of Africa’s most vulnerable citizens. Its standing and legitimacy, however, is coming under increasing attack by the continent’s selfish leaders.

Over the past week, the assaults, torture and arrests of women activists and critics in Africa — in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Egypt — shine a spotlight on an epidemic with roots much deeper than the novel coronavirus.

In Burundi, there are many unresolved concerns a day before a major election. Nevertheless, citizens head to the polls, with hope and a sense of fear, to end the often bloody and violent regime of Pierre Nkurunziza.

What is needed in Zimbabwe today, now more than ever, is a cohesive and peaceful resistance to counter the state repression that is being forcefully implemented by President Mnangagwa with the aid of Western lobby and PR firms.

The coronavirus pandemic has provided authoritarian leaders across Africa an ironclad excuse to tighten their grips on power, all while the world’s attention in diverted.

As leaders in the rest of the world, including our immediate neighbors, were advocating social distancing, our president was encouraging mass religious congregations as an antidote to the coronavirus. This represented only the beginning of the farce now unfolding in Tanzania.

What matters is that our dignity and our rights be respected during this time, no matter what. And that our sense of solidarity and of being in this all together lives in.

After narrowly winning the now cancelled election of 2019, incumbent President Peter Mutharika – who has been routinely called out for increasing repression in the country – is preparing to rig another vote in his favor.

One year from today, on 20 March 2021, citizens in the Republic of Congo will again head to the polls. We implore world powers, and global activists and citizens alike, to help elevate critical pro-democracy voices. Do not allow another fundamentally marred election take place.

Dictatorships are bad for public health, both within their borders and globally. Effective solutions demand the free flow of information, democratic accountability and open dialogue between citizens and their rulers, as well as honesty and cooperation among global counterparts.

In Zimbabwe, human rights abuses, arrests, and disappearances of opposition members and supporters continue under President Emmerson Mnangagwa, with an uptick in state violence. This reality is at extreme odds with the “new Zimbabwe” that the president and his regime had promised after seizing power in late 2017.

A momentous court decision on the validity of the May 2019 election results is due in several days. Regardless of the verdict, Malawi will need the efforts of everyone, no matter their political affiliation, to roll up their sleeves and help to build a new and more democratic country.

Much of the news emanating from The Gambia over the past several days has been grim. However, the latest events are best viewed as the foreseeable growing pains for a nascent democracy, one that has only recently emerged from the clutches of one of the most brutal dictatorships ever known to have existed.

If anyone was skeptical about Faure Gnassingbe’s intent to leave or to stay in power in Togo, the answer came on Tuesday, January 7 when he once again “humbly accepted” the nomination of his ruling party.

The International Monetary Fund would be wise to break with past precedent and make clear whose side it truly stands on: the suffering people of Equatorial Guinea or its retrograde dictator.

In current day Zambia, it seems like the Lungu government is arming itself against the people, amid growing resentment over bad governance, corruption and lack of basic services. Zambians have been left to wonder what happened to their country that not too long ago was touted as an emerging democracy.

After changing the constitution in October 2015, and presiding over a deeply flawed election in March 2016, the old kleptocrat, President Denis Sassou Nguesso, remains faithful to old Maoist ideology: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

President Guelleh, one of the longest-ruling leaders in Africa, has become increasingly suspicious of his opponents at home, as well as journalists and human rights defenders who are seen as threats to his power. This is why he has once again violently targeted the country's main opposition party.

Since coming to power in 2015, President John Magufuli has remade Tanzania’s politics, its economy and society which has been breathtaking in scope and brutal in its execution. Magufuli has declared war on Tanzania’s multiparty democracy and term limits may be the next to go.

A good test for the health of a democracy is whether leaders leave office when the law says their time is up. In Guinea, this notion is being put to a severe test by President Alpha Condé and his efforts to stay in power past his constitutional mandate, which expires in October 2020.