Search results

Selected filters:

General

Sector

Regions

Sort options

143 results found for your search

Free

One region seems above all others to stubbornly buck the positive political and economic trends recorded over two decades by African Energy: it comprises the six Communauté Economique et Monétaire de l’Afrique Centrale (Cemac) countries and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Events in the last month, including a failed coup in Gabon and contested elections in DRC, underline Central Africa’s chronic crisis of leadership. Such political behaviours are increasingly seen as an anachronism in a world structured by social media, as well as by older social bonds and traditional patterns of coercion by elites.

Cameroon | DR Congo | Chad | Central African Republic
Free

Less than a year from elections, numerous candidates are eyeing up the prize of taking over from President Muhammadu Buhari. 

Nigeria
Free

Questions of greater social equity and sustainable development, more stringent governance and controls over globalisation widely discussed in a world looking to emerge from coronavirus are all ideas that President John Magufuli has worked into Tanzania’s policy mix since taking office in November 2015. Magufuli has built up popular support with his assaults on international capital, donor interference and even Beijing and the burden of Chinese debt. However, Tanzania’s experience suggests that good ideas do not make for good policy if they are wrongly implemented.

Tanzania
Free

Leaked national electoral commission data showed Martin Fayulu had Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidency stolen from him in the 23 December poll won by Félix Tshisekedi Tshilombo. Ex-president Joseph Kabila Kabange’s candidate Emmanuel Shadary gained only 23.8% of the official vote – and unofficially much less – but politicians allied to now senator-for-life Kabila have since taken a dominant position in national and local government and parastatals.

DR Congo
Free

For a candidate who promised to “drain the swamp” and represent communities ground down by the depredations of big business, President-elect Donald Trump has done a good job of placing those he attacked before his election into positions of power. Investment bank Goldman Sachs has three former and current executives in key positions. Big Oil is represented not only by climate change sceptics, but in ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson it has one of its genuine stars at the helm of US foreign policy.

Free

The recent increase in oil prices will be especially welcomed by Central Africa’s small but dominant ruling elites. The stand-off over Gabon’s presidential election – with Jean Ping contesting the narrow victory announced for President Ali Bongo Ondimba, his former brother-in-law whom he served as foreign minister – is just the most recent manifestation of political turbulence in a region where vulnerable economies have been rendered even more fragile by the slump in the global commodities cycle. Suggestions that Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso and allies close to the presidency in Côte d’Ivoire might have supported Ping against Bongo point to the network of close contacts that still typifies the region’s murky politics.

Free

Egypt could have a future as a Mediterranean gas exporter. Rising debts owed by Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) and other post-revolution problems weigh on international oil companies, but IOCs and industry analysts are optimistic about the prospects for further hydrocarbons discoveries in the Nile Delta, Western Desert and other regions, reflected in the latest EGPC licensing round bidding.

Egypt
Free

Updated forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show global expansion weakening with the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) growing by an estimated 3.7% in 2018, and forecast at 3.5% in 2019 and 3.6% in 2020. The projections are downward revisions from October’s World Economic Outlook (WEO), in part reflecting the trade war between the United States and China. A tightening of the Chinese economy may be reflected in Beijing’s reappraisal of lending to sub-Saharan Africa.

Free

Royal Air Maroc’s daily flight from Casablanca to Conakry is packed as Guineans return home and business travellers arrive, including Moroccans meeting King Mohammed VI’s call to expand the kingdom’s commercial footprint south of the Sahara. The airline’s expansion to make Casablanca a major African transport hub is part of a wider strategy that has seen the big three Moroccan banks – Attijariwafa Bank, BMCE Bank of Africa and Banque Centrale Populaire (BCP) – buying up African assets, phosphate giant OCP Group investing in Ethiopia and Nigeria, and plans for a gas pipeline linking Nigeria to the Mediterranean coast.

Morocco
Free

It hardly rates on the scale of the drama that a courageous Tunisian population delivered to the world in ousting Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, but manoeuvrings by members of the former presidential circle to allow them to profit handsomely with little effort from the award of contracts for a gas-fired

Tunisia
Free

The passing of founding president Robert Gabriel Mugabe is another step in the rites of passage towards what over 15m Zimbabweans hope will eventually become a secure and sustainable economy and society. However, the 95-year-old autocrat’s death offers no solutions for reversing economic decline or for easing political tensions, as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) calls for mass protests to remove President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government.

Zimbabwe
Free

Efforts to establish a national unity government, agreed in principle by negotiators on 17 December, are foundering. United Nations Security Council resolution 2259, which endorsed the political agreement brokered by UN Support Mission in Libya chief Martin Kobler, gave a nine-member Presidency Council (currently based in Tunis) 30 days to form an administration and gain the ratification of the rival House of Representatives (HoR) and General National Congress. These two bodies will eventually become the parliament and State Council.

Libya
Free

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement that the Department for International Development (DfID) would merge with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in September is more than an institutional rearrangement of the international relations machinery in post-Brexit Global Britain. The move has been long promised, and Johnson says it will strengthen the United Kingdom’s ability to project itself abroad as a force for good.

Free

Opposition from local authorities to UK private equity investor Actis’ planned takeover of French operator Veolia Environnement’s electricity, water and sanitation concessions in Morocco may be explained in part by a shift in political and popular opinion away from privately financed projects and concessions back to a greater role for local politicians and the state. Morocco is not alone in this: public/private partnership models that give public bodies, and the politicians who lead them, more control are increasingly in vogue.

Ghana | Rwanda | Ethiopia | Morocco
Free

American and European businesses will remain key players across the continent, but their dominance is in retreat. The full effects of the global financial crisis have taken years to reveal themselves – not least in the impact of stagnant wages and widening social divisions on the politics of western economies – but have been reflected in western banks pulling back, in some places to be replaced by Moroccan and South African institutions.

Morocco