China is believed to spend billions of dollars to boost its international image, but it has yet to see a marked return on its investment in soft power.

Western media coverage of Chinese initiatives in Africa focuses on trade and investment, resource extraction, the presence of “Chinese boots on the ground,” especially with respect to UN peacekeepers…

Last week’s announcement by Inuwa Kashifu Abdullahi, the director general of Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), that the government had reversed its Twitter ban after seven months has gone virtually unnoticed. If the Buhari government expected Twitter users and small businesses hurt by the original ban to be falling over themselves in gratitude, all it got was something bordering on a collective shrug of the shoulders.