Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Analysts weigh in on what Libya’s unified state budget means for the country’s future, rebel fighters double down on their offensive in Mali, and the Economic Community of West African States moves into its new Chinese-built headquarters in Nigeria.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Analysts weigh in on what Libya’s unified state budget means for the country’s future, rebel fighters double down on their offensive in Mali, and the Economic Community of West African States moves into its new Chinese-built headquarters in Nigeria.

Step Toward Reunification?

Libya’s rival administrations approved the country’s first unified state budget in more than a decade last month, sparking hopes of greater stability in a nation that has been sharply divided between two governments since 2014.

The April 11 agreement, which aims to reduce corruption and allocate enough money to the Libyan state-owned National Oil Corp. (NOC) to boost production, was brokered by Massad Boulos, U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior advisor for Arab and African affairs. Boulos described it on X “as part of a broader roadmap toward peace and national unification.”

Yet while the deal is a positive step, analysts told Foreign Policy that it is more of a restricted spending agreement and is unlikely to prompt broader unification anytime soon.

As Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told Foreign Policy, the budget isn’t underpinned by structural reforms or enforcement mechanisms. “The deal at this stage is more of a pinky promise,” Badi said.

Libya has faced an economic crisis since civil war broke out in 2011, with rising living costs, inconsistent oil revenue, and soaring public debt. Today, in the wake of the 2020 cease-fire, both administrations—the United Nations-recognized government based in the capital, Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and a rival faction in the east controlled by warlord Khalifa Haftar—contribute to rampant overspending.

“The most obvious symptoms of that [spending] has been the decline in the value of the Libyan dinar,” said Rhiannon Smith, the managing director of Libya-Analysis, a consultancy.

Boulos began negotiations with the rival governments last July, with the goal of fostering peace and advancing “commercial deals” for U.S. firms in Libya, a petrostate that exports the majority of........

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