South African Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius was released on bail this morning following the shooting death of his girlfriend, and the cable news networks devoted the vast majority of their coverage to the hearing. CNN alone spent 192 minutes in total on the story between 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM, broadcasting for three hours without a single commercial break. The network maintained a constant box on the side of its screen alerting viewers to the imminent bail hearing.

And while the Pistorius case has scandalous appeal, there are other real important news stories in Africa that the networks routinely ignore. Here are just five things happening on the African continent that have nothing to do with the Olympian’s trial:

1. U.S. sending troops to Niger.

President Obama announced in a letter to Congress that he will be deploying 100 troops to Niger, to help aid in the ongoing operations against Islamists in Mali. According to the Associated Press report on the letter, the troops will be armed “for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security,” and focus on “intelligence sharing.” This is the second such deployment that Obama has made in recent years; 100 military advisers were sent to Uganda in 2011 to aid in the hunt for wanted war-criminal Joseph Kony.

Transference of military resources to the African continent has become a hallmark of Obama’s foreign and counter-terrorism policies, as groups like Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, al-Shabaab, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have taken on more threatening postures towards U.S. interests. The United States and Niger recently signed an agreement that would allow for the opening of a base for unmanned aircraft — or drones — to be piloted for surveillance purposes.

2. There’s a war in Mali.

The fighting in Mali continues apace, despite French claims that they will begin withdrawing troops in the coming weeks. France intervened in the fight between the Malian government and several rebel groups in January, sending U.S. and European allies scrambling to provide support for the operations. While almost all towns in Mali’s north have been retaken by the government, low-levels of fighting flare up periodically.

Complicating matters are claims of atrocities — mostly in the form of “reprisal killings — committed by the Malian Army against minorities. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has already launched an investigation into potential war-crimes committed during the course of the last year’s fighting,

3. Sales of elephant ivory are fueling terrorism.

The poaching of elephants and rhinos for their ivory is a real security threat to the United States according to a State Department official. Robert Hormats — who serves as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Enviroment — gave an interview with AllAfrica.com, in which he agreed that ivory counts as a ‘conflict resource.’ Organized groups, like al-Shabaab and the janjaweed militia in Sudan, kill large numbers of animals, sell off the ivory illegally, and use the purchases to buy more weapons for themselves.

The majority of that ivory is being sold to China, as much as 70 percent as reported by the New York Times.

4. Africa’s economic boom.

“Seven of the ten fastest growing countries are on the African continent,” Secretary of State John Kerry declared Wednesday, in his first major speech since taking on the role. Each of those seven countries — Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia, and Nigeria — had projected growth rates of 8 percent or more in 2011 according to the International Monetary Fund. In comparison, last year the U.S. economy grew by around 2 percent. By 2030, the continent is set to boast a middle-class majority for the first time, as poverty drops. All of that growth may not correspond to happiness though — as The Economist points out, not many of the fastest growing economies currently rank among the best places to live.

5. Elections looming in Kenya.

2007’s Presidential elections in Kenya led to the death of thousands as neighbors clashed over the outcome of a disputed vote. Only the diplomatic intervention of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan helped stanch the flow of blood at the time, prompting serious concerns over the pending March 4 elections. This year’s coming elections – in which one of those running have been indicted by the ICC for helping promote violence in 2007 – have the potential to launch another violent struggle between ethnic groups in the East African country. President Obama has already issued a video statement to the people of Kenya ahead of the first round of voting, urging calm and faith in the democratic process. Meanwhile, the State Department’s Conflict and Stabilization Operations Bureau has been working for months with the local government to prevent another outpouring of violence.

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera criticized a claim made by Republicans that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is partly responsible for the attacks that killed four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11 this year because of her experience with the terror bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 14 years ago.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) lobbed the criticism on Wednesday saying that the Benghazi attack “echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998,” and that Rice “was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases the ambassadors begged for additional security.”

But Rivera, who said he covered the attack in Kenya at the time, said that assessment is off the mark:

RIVERA: I think though to blame Susan Rice is kind of like blaming FEMA for 9/11. There is an undersecretary of state who is in charge of facilities and that is the group that deemed the terrorist threat there to be medium: it really wasn’t Susan Rice. It’s like scapegoating Susan is the affliction that’s sweeping Washington right now.

Watch Geraldo’s remarks here:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) joined in the new attack shortly after Collins’ statement, telling MSNBC that Rice needed to answer “questions” about her role in protecting the embassies. But two officials from a board that Huffington Post says investigated the 1998 terrorist bombings said that Rice had nothing to do with embassy security at the time. One official said, “I don’t remember any inference or allegation that Susan Rice had been negligent.” Yesterday, Mother Jones tracked down the State Department Accountability Review Board’s reports of both bombings and came to a similar conclusion:

“The reports noted numerous security failures and oversights that preceded the bombings. But they don’t back up Collins’ characterization. Neither mentions Rice, who was a policy person who would not be in charge of embassy or security operations. The report on the Tanzania attack says nothing about the US ambassador there begging for additional security. It notes that “the security systems and security procedures” at the embassy “were in accord with, and in some ways exceeded, Department of State standards for overseas posts assessed as having a ‘low’ threat rating for political violence and terrorism.”

Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have been trying to deligitimize Rice in anticipation of her Secretary of State nomination and the attempt to link the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings to Benghazi and Rice is just the latest baseless salvo.

Collins said she asked about the 1998 embassy bombings in her meeting with Rice this week but was disappointed that Rice said “she wasn’t expecting a question on that and that she would have to refresh her memory and go back and think about it.” Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that Rice wasn’t prepared for the question, as the topic has nothing to do with her role in disseminating the intelligence community’s talking points on Benghazi.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said on Wednesday that she would have a hard time supporting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State because she is concerned about Rice’s credibility in the aftermath of presenting what turned out to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Sept. 11 Benghazi terror attacks. Yet, Collins was not at all concerned about President Bush’s decision to nominate Condoleezza Rice as the nation’s top diplomat, despite her role in presenting false information that provided the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Appearing on CNN, Collins hammered home various GOP talking points about concerns that Rice may have acted overly political in providing an overview of the Obama administration’s knowledge in the aftermath of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and said that damaged Rice’s credibility to be the top State Department official:

COLLINS: It’s important that the secretary of state enjoy credibility around the world with Congress and here in our country as well. And I am concerned that Susan Rice’s credibility may have been damaged by the misinformation that was presented that day. That’s one reason, as I said, that I wish she had just told the White House no, you should send a political person to be on those Sunday shows.

Watch it:

Collins’ statements throughout the day on Wednesday, on CNN and elsewhere, leave several questions unanswered. The first is why the focus on a nominee’s judgement is so much more important now than in 2004 and 2005. Shortly after President Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice to be the next Secretary of State in November, 2004, Collins praised the move, saying Bush “made a very good choice.” Collins, in turn, voted for her confirmation along with almost all of her Republican colleagues.

Condoleezza Rice had spent many months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq convincing the public of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program presented to the United States, including famously stating that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her statements led the U.S. into a war in Iraq that will end up costing the U.S. trillions of dollars and leaving tens of thousands dead or wounded. We knew by the time Condoleezza Rice was nominated that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Another question to ask is why Rice’s name is now being brought up in relation to a set of Embassy bombings from 14 years ago. Collins earlier on Wednesday said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department.”
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Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s landmark incursion into Somalia last October and ongoing military operations present some important opportunities and disquieting potential pitfalls for establishing lasting security in a region controlled by the al Qaeda-linked jihadi group al-Shabaab.

The nearly three-month long intervention is the Kenyan army’s first-ever offensive across its borders. The commotion after Kenyan soldiers crossed over into Somalia and, reportedly, then sought approval from the Somalia’s transitional federal government compounded questions about the army’s experience. It also accentuated concerns about upsetting the fragile arrangements that have enabled Kenya to, for the most part, avoid being a target of Shabaab’s deadly attacks.

But beyond the viability of the military campaign to rout a brutal militant group that has employed devastating insurgency tactics against peacekeepers and soldiers more familiar with the terrain, the question of what comes next looms even larger.

“Intervention strategies that plan the war but not the peace will fail,” Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus warned in a policy paper published last Friday by the Enough Project.

“Indifference to or wishful thinking about the crafting of a post-intervention political order guarantees disorder, and can leave both the occupied country and the intervening power worse off than before.”

The stakes of the military operation against Shabaab this time around cannot be overstated. If the current campaign fails to dramatically undercut −− if not wholly defeat−− Shabaab, the situation will be even worse, as a longtime Somalia watcher here remarked to Enough recently: “Shabaab will look invincible.”

The responsibility for coming up with the post-intervention plan lies squarely with Somali leaders and authorities but will require strong diplomatic efforts and coordination by international partners, wrote Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College. In particular, non-Somali actors must press for a governing plan that does not see the potential prizes of the operation against Shabaab −− most significantly, the lucrative and hotly contested port city of Kismayo −− divvied up along clan lines. Menkhaus explained: Read more