Search results

General Abdel-Fattah Burhan’s 25 October coup to depose his government partner (and key western ally) Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok dismantled their carefully crafted civilian-military Transitional Council two years into its three-year term. It brought crowds onto the streets and consternation to Sudan’s friends in Washington, Paris and the region – although the empowering of the military/security elite is a less troubling prospect for authoritarian stakeholders such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia.

Considerable attention is being paid to Angola’s 24 August general election, as President João Lourenço and his ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) party line up against a strong challenge from a revitalised União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (Unita).

With sky-high prices apparently a thing of the past, the outlook is gloomy for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters, even in the most lucrative markets, such as Japan. With a predicted supply glut running into the next decade and price pressures accentuated by the fast-emerging spot market (for more on this see African Energy’s sister publication Gulf States News http://www.gsn-online.com/amid-shifting-global-gas-supply-gulf-states-emerge-as-their-own-best-market) only a few major projects are still expected to go ahead worldwide. In Africa, these include Eni’s Zohr field in Egypt and developments in Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin (as well as its smaller, more southerly fields supplying South Africa).

Autocratic Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno may not be a leader to suit everybody’s taste, but his deployment of troops against Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants – as against jihadists in Mali two years ago – has confirmed his reputation as a regional leader who understands the need to counter a threat proactively. By comparison, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan does not come out well: with his forces seen as ineffective, if not part of the problem, in countering Boko Haram, the ‘accidental president’ has kept a low profile as north-eastern states have borne the brunt of jihadist assaults.

Supporters of a revamped Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) believe that, this time, the outcome for legislation to reform Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the hydrocarbons sector will be different from past disappointments, when vested interests stalled efforts to overhaul an underperforming and opaque sector. Senate president Ahmad Lawan on 29 September committed the bicameral National Assembly to pass legislation to make the industry more effective and efficient. After years of delay,“we will break that jinx and see to the passage of the bill”, Lawan promised. The Senate on 30 September approved the a 239-page draft PIB’s first reading, opening the way for more hearings.

A collision of interests over two of Africa’s most high-profile national mega-projects – Egypt’s planned El Dabaa nuclear plant and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) – illustrates that grand schemes come with heavy geopolitical as well as financial costs, and that all the players have to calculate their interests carefully in a volatile region.

What’s not to like for investors in President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s Egypt? The government’s International Monetary Fund-supported reform programme has greatly improved macroeconomic conditions; Egypt was a rare economy that reported some growth in Covid-plagued 2020, despite a huge downturn in tourism and other key revenue-earners. Its commitment to accelerating infrastructure development has sucked funds into global-scale solar and wind power programmes.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has won plaudits for his public determination to clean up South African governance, as underlined by his suspension of African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Ace Magashule. This clean-up has been supported by governance-focused civil society and media, and independent-minded members of the judiciary, but as African Energy’s South Africa power report pointed out, public confidence remains dangerously low after the ‘state capture’ years – and this negative environment is impacting across the economy.

A realignment of global alliances is ever more apparent as the first anniversary of Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine approaches and global power and wealth seem to concentrate in ever fewer hands. This has been seen in the solidarity among members of the Opec+ oil exporters’ alliance, in which long western-aligned Saudi Arabia and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia remain the driving forces.

Commercial and industrial (C&I) power has experienced a tremendous boom in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), as companies look for alternatives to failing state utilities, not least in the continent’s largest economies South Africa and Nigeria.

Establishing a reliable financial framework for building cross-border power interconnections may be the single most effective way to improve electrification across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet bureaucratic impediments are holding up progress at an important scheme, the Southern Africa Power Pool (Sapp)’s Regional Transmission Infrastructure Financing Facility (RTIFF), which could implement its first projects in two to three years – with the right support.

Even before the new Middle East war shattered comfortable assumptions about regional security, the global economic climate remained hostile to many heavily-indebted and financially stressed governments, and to populations who have struggled to live with fallout from the pandemic and Ukraine war, which has included painful levels of inflation and costly currency volatility. African Energy offers a few pointers towards another difficult year ahead, as the IMF issues its annual appraisals of the global outlook and regional economic performance, and the Israel-Palestine conflict returns to centre stage in an increasingly polarised world.

The chances of long-awaited LNG schemes moving ahead have been bolstered by Rwanda’s expanded commitment to battling the northern Cabo Delgado province’s enduring Islamist insurgency on behalf of the Maputo government, a move very much in the interests of the international majors planning multi-billion dollar projects. Many other problems remain to be resolved as Mozambique prepares for President Nyusi to stand down in October – in an election where the ruling Frelimo party’s candidate will be Daniel Chapo, whose outsider status points to further splits in the ruling elite.

It is more than a whisper: international institutions and private equity (PE) investors are again exploring major hydroelectric power (HEP) deals, after years during which environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns made big dams a problematic issue for development finance institutions (DFI) and other potential investors.