🔅 America's Blast from the Colonial Past: America's $10 Billion Angolan Railway
The Pitfalls of "Saving" Africa: Colonial Cosplay, Smokescreen Stoves, and Anti-LGBTIQ Globetrotters
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Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
Market Mondays
Year-to-Date Performance:
🟢 Johannesburg SE: 87,579.71 (+13.90%)
🟢 Nigerian SE: 98,458.68 (+31.68%)
🟢 Nairobi SE: 107.16 (+16.34%)
🟢 Ghana SE: 4,380.10 (+39.93%)
🟢 US S&P 500: 5,738.17 (+20.99%)
🟢 Shanghai Composite: 3,087.53 (+4.23%)
🇨🇳 China's central bank played economic Cupid, unveiling a major stimulus package to revive the country's flagging economy. The People's Bank of China lowered borrowing costs and increased lending, hoping to hit that elusive 5% growth target.
🇹🇿 Tanzania's mining regulator has a new golden rule for exporters: All mining firms and traders must now allocate at least 20% of their gold for sale to the central bank. The Bank of Tanzania is on a mission to diversify its foreign reserves and show the shilling who's boss.
🇿🇲 After the worst drought in living memory, Zambia is aiming for a sharp rebound in growth and a halved budget deficit in 2025.
🇸🇱 A $480-million five-year grant from a U.S. state development fund is set to provide reliable and affordable electricity to 4.6 million people in Sierra Leone. With only 30% of the population currently having access to electricity (dropping to less than 5% in rural areas), Sierra Leone is ready to light up the night.
🇰🇪 Kenya is on a borrowing spree, seeking a $1.5 billion loan from Abu Dhabi to fund its budget deficit. The loan will have an interest rate of about 8.2%, lower than the interest charged on the East African nation's sovereign bonds. The United Arab Emirates' Abu Dhabi has been playing fairy godmother to African countries in recent years, slowly building its influence.
🇺🇬 Uganda has flipped the switch on its largest electricity generation plant, a 600 megawatt (MW) power plant built on the River Nile. The $1.7 billion Karuma Hydropower Project, financed with a loan from China, has sharply raised Uganda's generation capacity to slightly above 2000 MW.
🌍 Airtel Africa has secured a $200 million sustainability-linked loan from the International Finance Corporation to bring high-speed mobile connectivity to more than 37 million subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa. The funds will be invested in three subsidiaries: DR Congo, Kenya, and Rwanda.
🇨🇩 The governor of South Kivu province in the DRC has given the green light for mining activities to resume in the region, but authorities will continue their investigation into the sector. The restive region, rich in minerals such as gold, copper, diamond, tin, tantalum, and cobalt, had its mining activities suspended in July to "restore order to mining operations." A preliminary investigation found more than 550 out of nearly 650 mining operators were working without proper authorizations.
🇱🇷 The IMF has approved an arrangement of about $210 million for Liberia, with an immediate disbursement of about $8 million.
🇸🇳 Senegal's government is calling for a financial investigation into the previous administration, accusing them of painting an unrealistic picture of the country's finances. Public debt and the budget deficit were reportedly higher than disclosed during President Macky Sall's last five-year term.
There you have it - a whirlwind tour of Africa's financial news.
*Data accurate as of the close of markets across the continent
Spotlight Stories
America's $10 Billion African Railways is Straight from a Colonial-Era Playbook
The US is investing $10 billion in a new railway in Angola called the Lobito Corridor. American officials are touting it as a game-changing project that will showcase "the American model of development" in Africa.
There's just one problem: this "model" looks like it's straight out of the 1950s colonial playbook.
The Lobito Corridor is essentially a 1,300 km straight line through the Angolan jungle, built to transport minerals from Congolese mines to a Chinese-built port on the coast. Its five measly stops suggest the goal is to avoid any meaningful contact with actual African people or economies.
As the author points out, if the US really wanted to boost development, they'd invest in the thriving, integrated economies of East Africa, home to over 500 million people.
But nope, apparently untouched rainforest and unprocessed mineral exports are the pinnacle of American economic imagination when it comes to Africa.
Meanwhile, just a short drive from the Lobito Corridor, China is investing in industrial parks, aluminum processing facilities, and infrastructure that will create thousands of jobs and billions in economic activity for Angola.
The difference is stark - one approach engages with Africa as an equal partner, the other still sees a continent of "zebras, giraffes, lions and people who are deemed to be worth less than the resources under their feet."
The Lobito Corridor shows that when it comes to Africa, American foreign policy is still stuck in an exploitative mindset. If the US wants to compete with China's influence on the continent, it needs to evolve its strategy beyond colonial-era extraction and start seeing Africans as humans with aspirations.
Follow this link to read more on why Nigerian investigative journalist, David Hundeyin, thinks that this project is straight out of a colonial-era playbook.
Like Many ‘Saviour’ Projects, a D.C. Body Claimed It Would Improve Lives with Cleaner Stoves. It Went Off The Rails
C-Quest Capital, a D.C.-based carbon credit producer, had a grand plan to save the planet and improve lives in Africa with their "revolutionary" cookstoves. However, as it turns out, their plan went up in smoke faster than a campfire in a windstorm.
C-Quest's clay and metal cookstoves were supposed to be the answer to deforestation and smoke pollution in Africa.
They were handed out for free, and the company claimed they were more efficient than traditional campfires. Sounds great, right?
Well, not so much. The stoves were so cheaply made that they couldn't withstand even a little rain.
And then there was the mysterious case of the disappearing stoves 🕵️♀️
C-Quest claimed on official paperwork that the stoves were being used by every household participating in the program.
However, when The Washington Post investigated (and where you can read more on this case), they found that most of the stoves in Sansão Muthemba, Mozambique, were either broken or not being used at all.
It seems that C-Quest was more interested in producing carbon credits at a low cost than actually ensuring their stoves were working properly and reducing emissions.
And in June, C-Quest made a startling public disclosure: their former CEO, Ken Newcombe, had allegedly committed "wrongdoing" that resulted in the over-issuance of "millions" of carbon credits.
The saga exposes some of the major flaws in the unregulated carbon credit system. Companies buy and sell these credits with little to no transparency, and those selling the credits have significant leeway in estimating the emissions savings.
It also exposes the sham that are many of these projects, supposedly set up to improve lives in Africa.
You can read more on this on The Washington Post’s website.
Leaked Emails Reveal Africa as 'Primary Target' of Anti-LGBTIQ Actors from US and Europe
Leaked emails reveal how Africa became a 'primary target' of anti-LGBTIQ actors from the US and Europe, who used disinformation and lobbying to influence gender debate on the continent, according to an investigation by openDemocracy.
Key findings include:
US and European groups and conservatives, including members of the Agenda Europe network, coordinated efforts to leverage Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory to push an anti-LGBTIQ agenda in Africa.
Sharon Slater of Family Watch International (FWI) urged Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to add a "conversion therapy" clause to the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) in 2023.
CitizenGO, a Spanish anti-rights group with an office in Kenya, campaigns against abortion, LGBTIQ+ rights, and sex education in Africa, including through a bus tour with anti-transgender messages.
Analysis of US tax returns shows that several US-based Agenda Europe member organizations, including FWI, Alliance Defending Freedom, Human Life International, and World Youth Alliance, spent a total of $2.9 million in Africa between 2015 and 2022.
The investigation highlights the lack of financial transparency laws or their poor enforcement in many African countries, which makes it difficult to accurately track the spending and influence of these anti-LGBTIQ groups on the continent.
To read the full investigation and dive deeper into the leaked emails and financial flows, check out the original article. And let us know what you think.
Food for Thought
“The way you bring up a child is the way it grows.”
— Tanzanian Proverb