Africa's Week In Brief
Week of 6 - 10 March, 2023
Dear Africa Brief,
Hoping all our readers celebrated International Women’s Day on Wednesday, March 8th.
Here is your Africa Brief.
TL;DR:
Ghana launched the world’s largest education outcomes fund ($30million) with the explicit mission to get 70,000 out-of-school children back into the classroom. The project spans some 600 primary schools (Devex)
President William Ruto of Kenya publicly criticized the country’s supreme court for ruling that same sex couples may form an association (The Standard)
Microsoft’s Airband Initiative partners with Liquid Intelligent Technologies to bring internet coverage to an additional 20 million Africans (Microsoft)
President Macron slipped up in his visit to the Congo. Congolese President Tshisekedi in a press conference rebuked France’s leader, in his presence, saying: “Look at us differently, considering us partners and not with a paternalistic gaze” (Foreign Policy)
US Nominee for the World Bank’s top job, Ajay Banga, is on a whirlwind tour of Africa to drum up support for his candidacy. Banga secured support from the African Development Bank, a key ally in his bid for the Presidency (Twitter)
What I am listening to: The Rachman Review. Every week, Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist, meets decision-makers and thinkers who shape world affairs. Last week he met with Bill Gates and spoke on his philanthropic efforts to keep global development goals alive amid rising geopolitical tensions. Gates spoke with elegance and insight on Africa’s ongoing agricultural revolution and the need to double down on investments in this space to feed the world’s fastest growing continent.
w/o 6 March - 10 March 2023
Graphic of the Week
*Credit: China Africa Research Initiative
Context: China is slowing down its Belt and Road Initiative investments across the world, the effects will be most profound on the African continent where China invested where others would not. Many African states remain in acute debt to Beijing. Expect a new world in which Chinese foreign investment is both leaner and more pennywise, and keep an eye on the consequences of this new approach.
Business & Finance in Africa
Tanzania’s government approved the sale of nearly 20,000 tons of graphite to Tesla from two local mining companies, Uranex Tanzania and Magnis Technologies Tanzania. Tanzania is increasingly friendly to western powers and their flagship companies — securing critical mineral supply chains is a key mission of the current US govt.
Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled that a botched replacement of the country’s bank notes was illegal, reasoning that the government had not given people sufficient time to exchange old notes for the new (Reuters).
Following its placement on FAFT’s grey list (a list for countries with slack finance law and enforcement), South Africa’s Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana said he is confident that the country will be off the naughty list by mid-2024 (Moneyweb). Let's wait and see — typically it's hard to get on the list and even harder to get off it. The consequences of being on the list include reduced FDI.
Cairo-based fintech MNT-Halan, a digital wallets service provider and micro-lender, joins Crunchbase’s unicorn list. MNT-Halan has 1.3 million monthly active users with more than 5 million customers in Egypt. The company will expand into MENA this year.
Finally, the World Bank paused bailout talks with Tunisia after the country’s President went on a xenophobic rant against migrants from west Africa. The World Bank in a statement said: “Public commentary that stokes…racist violence is completely unacceptable.”
China in Africa
*Credit: China Africa Research Initiative
China’s reopening following nearly 3 years of COVID-induced lockdown promises a domestic economic growth uptick of about 5% this year. Good news for African states is that China’s reopening is likely to result in increased demand for African commodities. On the downside, greater demand is a key driver of inflation — putting central banks under more pressure to put the inflationary genie back in its bottle.
Climate in Africa
Cyclone Freddy hammered Southern Africa. Some 163,300 Mozambicans are putting their lives back together after rainfall and flooding destroyed homes, crops, and livelihoods.
Democracy in Africa
Nigeria elected Bola Tinubu as its new President. Tellingly, the Nigeria government-elect has the mandate of some 25 million voters out of a registered 87 million. Despite poor turnout, the election was the closest race in decades. Unfortunately the elections were undermined by allegations of ballot-snatching and violent incidents at polls. Technology used to transmit results also failed on the day (BBC).
*Credit: Foreign Policy
Related to our story on Tunisia in the Business & Finance section, the Ivory Coast and Guinea dispatched aircraft to bring home hundreds of their citizens from the country after its president, Kais Saied, pushed replacement theory and accused them and other migrants from sub-Saharan Africa of bringing crime to the country.
Health in Africa
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa was tapped to lead fundraising for the newly created Africa Epidemics Fund, established in February 2022, to provide financial assistance to African countries preparing for or responding to disease threats. The President distinguished myself as an effective manager of Africa’s vaccine procurement in the depths of the pandemic. According to Devex, the fund has not yet adopted a governance framework nor started providing financial assistance to countries, but the fund already has high hopes attached to it.
Check out another fascinating visual story produced by Devex on preparations for future Ebola outbreaks in the region.
EU in Africa
The European Union said on Saturday it was setting up a "humanitarian air bridge" to the eastern Congolese city of Goma and releasing over some ~$50 million for aid for people affected by the ongoing conflict there. The small gesture didn’t seem to please Congo’s Congolese President Tshisekedi.
Zimbabweans head to the polls this year for an ‘only in name’ democratic election. Ahead of the vote the EU resolved to extend the two remaining sanctions measures against Zimbabwe and welcomed a planned invitation to observe this year’s elections.
Peace and Security in Africa
Burkina Faso has instituted curfews to restrain an ongoing insurgency. Curfews will now take place between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. in an effort to support the army in its work along the regional border with Mali. Such is the scale of the problem that 40% of Burkina Faso’s territory is no longer controlled by the government. Since 2015, more than 2 million people have fled their homes (Foreign Policy).
Meanwhile in Somalia, Al-Shabab (a terrorist group operating across the Horn of Africa and linked to al-Qaeda) recaptured a base that it had lost in the south — the recapture follows a Somali government offensive against the group (Reuters).
Tech and Society in Africa
Africa has to date been considered a welcome destination for big tech, with either lenient or absent data and tech regulations. Now, TechCrunch reports that several competition watchdogs in Africa plan to collectively interrogate the market conduct of global digital firms, putting big tech firms like Google and Meta, which have faced investigations and remedial action in other jurisdictions, on alert.
The planned investigations of large tech companies follow a decision by the regulators in Kenya, Egypt, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Gambia and Zambia last month to set up a working group for collaboration over concerns related to competition and consumer welfare in Africa.
This is surely another headache (maybe even a migraine) for big tech firms already battling regulators in both Europe and America.
US in Africa
Richard Stengel, ghostwriter of Mandela’s A Long Walk To Freedom, in an interview with Time claims that the United States believed Mandela was under the control of Moscow and would aid the Soviet Union in threatening South Africa and its strategic value, measured in its rich deposits of uranium and gold. His views are corroborated by declassified CIA files showing that the agency was tracking Mandela in 1961 and 1962, i.e. immediately before his arrest. Mandela was arrested the year after Congolese independence hero and democratically-elected leader Patrice Lumumba—whom the CIA viewed as a Soviet sympathizer—was assassinated. Such was the significance of Lumumba’s death that Belgian author Ludo De Witte called it the “most important [impactful] assassination of the 20th century.”
Warmly,
Joshua