Shuffled 2025-17

This week:

🇳🇵 Nepal: After Parliament was prorogued at the start of April without having passed the long-awaited Education Bill, teachers went on strike, closing almost thirty-thousand schools. Now, after almost a month of the Prime Minister refusing to engage, and their protests being mainly met by police violence, Education Minister, Bidya Bhattarai, herself a former teacher, has resigned. Of course, this is entirely unconnected to any of the above, and purely down to health reasons.

The Minister of State for Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, Purna Bahadur Tamang, is also out as a result of having publicly criticised the government for firing Kulman Ghising as the head of the Electricity Authority. Ghising had been widely popular for having solved the long-running problems that had left much of the country without power for up to sixteen hours a day, and his dismissal had led to large protests. Tamang initially refused to resign, saying he was appointed to the position by his party, not the Prime Minister, forcing the PM to formally sack him. 

🇸🇴 Somalia: After fending off an attempt by 189 MPs last year to impeach him for corruption and intimidation, and then messing up relationships with a bunch of allies, including Turkey and Ethiopia, Foreign Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi’s recent fight with the African Union seems to been the final straw in his coffin, as this week he was replaced by Abdisalam Abdi Ali. Of course, as a close friend of the President, Fiqi couldn’t be cut loose entirely; instead he was shunted over to a position where he could presumably cause less chaos: erm, Minister of Defence. To make room for him there, Jibril Abdirashid Haji has been boosted up to Second Deputy Prime Minister.     

🇵🇸 Palestine: Hussein al-Sheikh, the Secretary General of the PLO, has been appointed as the new Vice President of the State of Palestine. This is a newly created position, so there’s no corresponding departure, though this is widely seen as a pre-emptive move to stave off any vacuum should Mahmoud Abbas become so.

Follow-up:

🇧🇷 Brazil: A couple of weeks ago we watched Communications Minister Juscelino Filho resign to spend more time with his lawyers. Pedro Lucas was due to take over, but after huddling with his party, decided it would be more prudent to stay in parliament instead. So Frederico de Siqueira Filho, president of Telebras (the former state-owned phone monopoly), has now been drafted into the role. 

Catch-up:

🇫🇰 Falklands: At the start of April Andrea Clausen took over as the new Chief Executive. I wasn’t sure whether to include this, as this is essentially a publicly-advertised fixed-term civil service job, but the office-holder does automatically become a member of both the Executive Council and the Legislative Assembly, and Clausen is not only the first woman, but also the first Islander in the role (her predecessors skew very-heavily English local council officer), so there’s the undercurrents of something potentially interesting here. (And there’s been so little else to report this week¹ , that the tenuousity threshold may be a bit more stretchy than usual.)

Next week:

Gabon, South Korea, Sudan, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Yemen, and more.

1  As always, and especially in weeks with partic’larly poor pickin’s, there are probably stories I’ve missed. If you know of any, please do let me know.