![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/PAPSS-Mike-Ogbalu.jpg?resize=590%2C393&ssl=1\")
At first glance, the news out of Yaoundé, Cameroon, looked insignificant for integrated trade and investment across Africa, involving about 70 million people, or less than 5 percent of the continent’s population.
\n\n\n\nYet on closer inspection, the decision in early July 2026 by the Bank of Central African States to join the emerging Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, a long name for a shorter route, could be an intriguing catalyst for global investors, logistics operators and strategic planners.
\n\n\n\nKnown by its French initials, BEAC is one of Africa’s two regional central banks, issuing the Central African CFA franc across Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Oil production is a common denominator for five of these six countries – only CAR lacks crude. And only Equatorial Guinea escaped colonial French rule and speaks Spanish, imprinting “Banco de Los Estados de Africa Central” on the CFA banknote.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: In one move, the pan-African clearing network, commonly called PAPSS, grew its base of African markets by almost 30 percent, to 28 countries. Yvon Sana Bangui, governor of BEAC, said “the active involvement of the financial sector” is what gives PAPSS its clout and will enable faster and cheaper cross-border payments in central Africa. Transactions can settle in real time in local currencies without a non-African currency in the middle.
\n\n\n\nTo understand the weight of this development, look at how intra-African trade historically functioned. If a business in Douala, a coastal city in Cameroon, wanted to import cosmetics from Nigeria, the transaction probably couldn’t happen directly. The importer had to convert CFA francs into U.S. dollars or euros, send the funds through correspondent banks in New York or perhaps Paris, and convert those dollars or euros into Nigerian naira.
\n\n\n\nThis dollar detour across continents introduces fees, settlement delays, frustration and a strange dependence on offshore banks. A simple transaction across a shared border in Africa turns into a global financial expedition. Of course, there are workarounds, from smuggling goods to using gold to transacting in digital currencies.
\n\n\n\nIf your deal needs to travel a well-trod route, however, you might end up in America. One of those New York-based correspondent banks used for decades, Citibank, has argued that payment systems alone won’t boost trade flows if compatible financial rules and efficient payment infrastructure aren’t in place. Bad data moving slowly remains a risk.
\n\n\n\n“At the heart of the issue is the so-called last mile, the final stretch of a cross-border payment that too often bottlenecks due to incompatible financial systems, basic errors in payment data that go unchecked, or regulatory divergence between countries that delay or block transactions outright,” Citi said in a 2025 paper on cross-border African payments.
\n\n\n\nEswatini Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg, who chairs an African Union committee on finance and economic integration, recently said balancing “core principles” with national needs and ensuring payments integration works for people and business, not just institutions, are top challenges. “These are not abstract questions,” he told a meeting of central bankers and regulators in April 2026. “They will determine whether a trader in Eswatini can pay a supplier in Ghana.”
\n\n\n\nAfrican banks and other financial institutions with settlement accounts at a central bank are known as “direct participants” of PAPSS. They agree to a pre-funding arrangement to ensure money is available before the split-second crediting and debiting of accounts, according to PAPSS. An advanced messaging system offers visibility into the transaction path, while net settlement across all participating central banks occurs daily at 11:00 universal time.
\n\n\n\nMike Ogbalu, former CEO of Nigerian payment card Verve, has run PAPSS since 2021 after its creation by Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank, better known as Afreximbank. For an emblem, PAPSS adopted a stylized rendering of a cowrie shell – Africa’s ancient and widely accepted trade currency.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Pushing PAPSS into the heart of Africa may have broader impact. While Republic of Congo, CAR and Chad aren’t booming economies, these countries and others in the monetary union linked to BEAC cover an enormous geography. They act as a land bridge between east and west.
\n\n\n\nAn even bigger step would be adding the other CFA-issuing central bank, covering eight countries in West Africa, including Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal. An official of Dakar-based Central Bank of West African States said the institution plans to test PAPSS with more than 80 banks in its region, according to the Ecofin news agency.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: Douala, Cameroon, by Xavier Messina / Pexels)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The decision by the monetary authority for central Africa to join an emerging cross-border payments system may be a catalyst for investors and planners looking for broader trade within Africa.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443693],"tags":[57443827,57443829,57443828,57443732],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-tech","tag-cameroon","tag-chad","tag-congo","tag-trade","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/douala-by-messina-pexels.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/douala-by-messina-pexels.jpg?fit=1280%2C960&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Dollar detour derails in heart of Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
So far from mainland Africa that an airliner takes four hours to find this emerald speck in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius is tangled up in geopolitical disputes far beyond its control.
\n\n\n\nThe war in Iran and the Persian Gulf is already hurting – annual economic growth in Mauritius, one of Africa’s richest countries, is likely to slip below 3 percent for the first time since the pandemic – and could cause more pain. In a prolonged Middle East conflict, the economy “would be impacted significantly,” says a just-released International Monetary Fund staff analysis.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Mauritius is more than a destination for sunseekers. It is fast becoming a key financial gateway to Africa, especially from Asia. Major trade agreements with China and India have anchored its status as an entryway to the continent-wide free trade area. Ebene Cybercity draws companies focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain. And an international finance center enables investors and wealth managers to take advantage of streamlined corporate and tax frameworks.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Ebene-Cybercity-by-Landscope.jpg?resize=720%2C364&ssl=1\")
The latest arrival in Mauritius is the African Union-backed Africa Credit Rating Agency, meant to overcome what its champions see as an annoying and costly international bias in assessing African risks. The startup is setting up from an HQ in Mauritius. The AU said Mauritius was chosen because of its “strong governance standards, robust financial sector and commitment to regional integration and economic good governance.”
\n\n\n\nAfter hopes for peace blossomed in June 2026, Iran and the United States are trading fire once more around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital chokepoint for global energy supplies. Crude oil retreated below USD 100 a barrel to around USD 72 in early July yet is climbing again – orbiting USD 85 in mid-July. Iran’s July 18 attack on Jordan, which killed U.S. military personnel defending against drone and ballistic missile strikes, may rekindle global economic anxiety.
\n\n\n\nReduced tourism, higher oil prices and rising inflation would slash economic growth in the downside scenario envisioned by IMF staff due to a prolonged Iran war. The country’s public debt would balloon past 90 percent of GDP, considered a growth-crimping danger zone. That prediction is based on oil at USD 124 a barrel, close to the highest price crude reached during the most intense fighting in April 2026. Authorities in Mauritius “are considering multiple war‑related scenarios,” according to the IMF report, released in mid-July.
\n\n\n\nSince the May visit of an IMF team to confer with officials in Mauritius and size up the country’s situation, the IMF has trimmed its 2026 economic growth forecast for the island nation to 2.8 percent from 3.4 percent predicted in April.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Anahita-area-by-Sarah-Vingta-wikimedia.jpg?resize=720%2C290&ssl=1\")
Softening the blow from the Middle East are proposed British payments for 99 years to Mauritius for use of the strategic air base at Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands that Britain has agreed to turn over to Mauritius. Yet that flow of funds is in limbo due to U.S. objections. For six decades the archipelago has belonged to British Indian Ocean Territory while being open to use by U.S. long-range bombers from a runway on Diego Garcia. This island-as-base is within striking distance of Iran and Yemen.
\n\n\n\nThe payments in today’s money to Mauritius would add up to about GBP 3.4 billion, or roughly USD 4.5 billion, according to a U.K. parliamentary report. Under the treaty with Mauritius, Britain agreed to pay GBP 165 million (about USD 220 million) in each of the first three years of the arrangement, GBP 120 million (USD 160 million) annually for the next 10 years, and the same sum, adjusted for inflation, for the remaining years.
\n\n\n\nBritain also consented to pay GBP 40 million to capitalize a trust fund for Chagos islands residents and GBP 45 million a year for 25 years to Mauritius for economic development investments.
\n\n\n\n“On the upside, the ratification of the Chagos agreement would deliver a revenue windfall and allow for faster debt reduction,” the IMF staff said, “while an easing of geopolitical tensions could support a recovery in tourism and help lower inflation.”
\n\n\n\nAction options: With GDP per capita approaching USD 14,000, a jobless rate at 6 percent and low inflation, Mauritius has economic strength that most African policy makers crave. That adds up to resilience and still makes the island nation an appealing launch pad for ambitions on the African mainland. A visit to Mauritius can help assess incentives on offer and how to use them.
\n\n\n\nJust be prepared for geopolitical shifts in distant capitals. The U.S. State Department expressed support for Britain’s Chagos deal on February 17, 2026, before scheduled talks with officials in Mauritius. Yet on his social media feed the next day, President Donald Trump called the deal a “big mistake,” and reversed U.S. policy.
\n\n\n\nThat has scuttled the British handover for now amid fears that China may seize a foothold on these oceanic dots of territory. The United States has refused to amend a 1966 treaty with Britain that covers the islands, forcing U.K. officials to suspend action on enabling legislation for the Chagos accord, according to The Guardian newspaper.
\n\n\n\nRebeccah Heinrichs, an expert on strategic military deterrence at the Hudson Institute think tank, wrote earlier this year that “leasing the base while handing over sovereignty to a Chinese partner is courting trouble.” Heinrichs pointed to China’s loans to Mauritius and possible Chinese high-tech surveillance of the islands, including Diego Garcia.
\n\n\n\nAfter the shelving of the plan, Dhananjay Ramful, the Mauritian foreign minister, insisted that his government remained committed to the handover. “We will spare no effort to seize any diplomatic or legal avenue to complete the decolonization process,” he said, in comments at a conference in Mauritius reported by British newspapers. “This is a matter of justice.”
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: An iconic view of Mauritius rising from the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles from mainland Africa, by Dominik Ruhl / Pexels)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa's financial gateway in the distant Indian Ocean, and a tourism paradise, is facing economic trouble from the faraway conflict between Iran and the United States and its Gulf allies.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443706,57443777,57443825,57443671,57443702,57443826,57443684],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-fintech","tag-mauritius","tag-top","tag-tourism","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg?fit=1920%2C1250&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"War clouds Africa’s sunny money gateway\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
An East African country eager to escape fallout from deadly political unrest and embrace a pivotal role in critical minerals and Indian Ocean trade has unlocked a timely boost from the largest African development lender. It may signal that some governments are ready to do business again with Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan even as her government confronts possible far-reaching U.S. sanctions.
\n\n\n\nIn a five-year strategy for Tanzania quietly released on July 6, 2026, as the world was distracted by the World Cup and a NATO summit in Turkey, the African Development Bank proposed financial support including loans to Tanzania worth USD 1.9 billion between now and 2028 for transport and water and sanitation projects and to boost job creation in agribusiness and energy. An estimated USD 1.4 billion in co-financing from development partners will supplement the bank’s support.
\n\n\n\nTanzania has faced a global backlash for suppressing the country’s opposition and deploying security forces against protesting Tanzanians during and after elections in 2025 in which Hassan was declared the victor. An investigative commission said in April 2026 that at least 518 people were killed in election-related clashes yet refrained from assigning blame. Amnesty International has demanded the release of the panel’s report.
\n\n\n\nAs part of a petition in 2025 to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open a case, a South African NGO, the Madrid Bar Association, World Jurist Association and unidentified Tanzanian civil society activists accused the government of killing as many as 3,000 people, according to the South African newspaper Daily Maverick.
\n\n\n\nYet while offering its lending plan, the bank flagged the political risks of the moment and – unusual for its financing deals – intends to help strengthen civil society organizations and “deepen policy dialogue on governance reforms.”
\n\n\n\nWhile Tanzania is among Africa’s fastest growing economies, expanding about 6 percent a year with energy supplies, minerals to tap, and emerging trade and transport links into central Africa, the 2025 political shock threatens to do even more damage.
\n\n\n\nThe U.S. Senate is considering a bill that would require a comprehensive review of relations, including ties with China that put America at a disadvantage and, of more immediate peril to Hassan, the naming of senior government and ruling party officials linked to a range of abuses. The bill cites abductions and harassment of political foes, journalists and activists; religious repression; censorship and extrajudicial killings, all meant to keep Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) firmly in power.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: The proposed U.S. review could lead to visa revocations, aid cuts and a prohibition on asset transactions in the United States or involving U.S. persons under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Given the weight of the United States in the global financial system, such penalties could have much broader implications for Tanzania.
\n\n\n\nIntroduced by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and prominent Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, the bill describes the October 29, 2025, election as “fraudulent and illegitimate” and accuses Tanzanian security forces of killing hundreds of protesters. Moreover, the bill states, their actions “endangered the lives of United States citizens and tourists visiting the country.”
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Ted-Cruz.jpg?resize=720%2C813&ssl=1\")
On June 17, the Foreign Relations Committee advanced the bill with bipartisan support to the full Senate for consideration. The bill asserts that “it is in the national security interests of the United States to help counter democratic backsliding of key partner nations where the United States has supplied billions of dollars worth of investment, development, humanitarian assistance, and security partnerships.”
\n\n\n\nIn the weeks after the election, deployments of security personnel increased in urban areas in Tanzania, along with “warnings issued to businesses, restrictions imposed on fuel sales and surveillance of digital communications,” the UN Human Rights Commission has said, cautioning that these measures “risk inflaming public tension and significantly undermine the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and participation in public affairs.”
\n\n\n\nICC Deputy Prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang met with Tanzania’s foreign minister along with other African officials at the African Union summit in February 2026, according to an ICC statement. Without naming any countries or incidents, Niang said a “sense of impunity” around the world is fueling “atrocity crimes.”
\n\n\n\nIn May 2026, the U.S. State Department barred Tanzanian Police Force Senior Assistant Commissioner Faustine Jackson Mafwele from entering the United States based on what the State Department described as “credible information” he was involved in the detention, torture and sexual assault of Ugandan Agather Atuhaire and Kenyan Boniface Mwangi by police officials. The activists had traveled to Dar es Salaam to observe a court hearing linked to treason charges against opposition leader Tundu Lissu.
\n\n\n\nTanzania’s precarious situation is wrapped in a climate of fear at home and sensitivity outside the country. An executive with deep knowledge about Tanzania’s economy declined to comment out of concern those views might antagonize the government. The Senate measure would require the singling out of government officials implicated in “the use of transnational repression tactics that target foreign nationals, Tanzanian citizens, and diaspora members regionally and internationally.”
\n\n\n\nPolitical risks aren’t all that troubles Tanzania’s trajectory. “Tanzania’s overarching development challenge is limited competitiveness and slow structural transformation, reflected in low productivity, persistent poverty, inequality, and high youth unemployment,” the African Development Bank said in its strategy.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Tanzania-Kamala-Harris-edit-1024x780.jpg?resize=720%2C548&ssl=1\")
The United States has pointed to Tanzania’s mineral wealth as a driver of the African nation’s future prosperity and important to the supply chain for America and its allies. Gold, copper, iron ore, nickel, cobalt and silver are among Tanzania’s horde of valuable minerals. Graphite, important for electric vehicle batteries and renewable-energy storage, and niobium, used in superconducting magnets, are attracting investment.
\n\n\n\n“The transition to a low-carbon economy is creating unprecedented demand for critical minerals,” the president of the Institution of Engineers Tanzania, Asa Mwaipopo, told a meeting in June 2026 at the University of Dar es Salaam, according to the university. “Tanzania is well-positioned to benefit, but success will depend on how effectively we transform these resources into broader economic opportunities” and expand mineral prospecting.
\n\n\n\nThe Tanzanian government has shifted attention toward economic good news. Rished Bade, acting deputy permanent secretary of the Ministry of Finance, told a UN forum on development financing in April 2026 that Tanzania was creatively shaping “bankable projects pipelines” to meet local priorities, examining tax reforms and boosting international views of its potential. “Recent credit ratings reflect growing confidence in Tanzania’s economic trajectory,” Bade said.
\n\n\n\nAction options: If the U.S. sanctions legislation becomes law, President Donald Trump could impose penalties within seven months, meaning that 2027 may become a consequential year in relations with Tanzania – and for the country’s economic prospects.
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On a sun-streaked recent morning, Angola’s cavernous new international airport terminal outside the capital Luanda dozed. The footfalls of passengers echoed across Terminal B, about two football fields long and unadorned save for a few eateries and elegant kiosks loaded with artisanal baskets, leather goods, booze and carvings of a national symbol, the giant sable antelope. Waiting.
\n\n\n\nFrom time to time an Airbus A220, the 137-seat workhorse of refurbished TAAG Angola Airlines, pulled into a gate at Dr. António Agostinho Neto International Airport, named after the poet and revolutionary hero who served as Angola’s first president. The ambition represented by this USD 3 billion investment, built by a Chinese contractor and operated by Portugal’s Mota-Engil and a Luxembourg company, seemed clear: to create an air hub in southwestern Africa for tourists and investors somewhere over the horizon.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: From tourism to agriculture to the promise of the Lobito Corridor linking an Angolan port to central Africa, Angola is trying to build a future beyond oil, its most prized – and still lucrative – asset. The crowds have yet to show up. Angolan leaders are hunting for a boom across their country’s vast, enticing yet barely plowed arable land. Boosting the energy supply for industrial investment is also high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\n“We have resolutely decided to reduce our dependence on the oil sector and build an economy based on sectors with a strong multiplier effect,” including tourism, Angolan President João Lourenço told an investment forum in Luanda in mid-June 2026, according to Ver Angola, a news service.
\n\n\n\nLarger than Ethiopia and almost twice the size of Texas, oil-exporting Angola is land and water rich yet imported rice and other food worth USD 2 billion in 2023. Nutritious eating is in such short supply across Angola that four in 10 children under 5 years old suffer from malnutrition, according to the World Bank.
\n\n\n\nThose are jarring metrics for a country that pumps 1 million barrels of crude a day, mostly from offshore fields, and just received a brief windfall from a faraway war. The world oil price doubled, shooting up as high as USD 126 a barrel in April 2026 after Israel and the United States attacked Iran in February. (A shaky agreement between the United States and Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the world for Persian Gulf oil and gas, knocked prices down to around USD 72.) In 2025, oil accounted for 80 percent of Angola’s exports by value (natural gas contributed 10 percent and diamonds 5 percent) and 62 percent of government tax revenue.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angolan-Finance-Min-2026-edit-1024x739.jpg?resize=720%2C520&ssl=1\")
In recent months, investors jumped at the chance to buy Angola’s debt. The country raised USD 2.5 billion in a March 2026 Eurobond offering and 1.5 billion in May, with orders for both more than double the sum on offer. After the May bond sale, which bought out two existing Eurobonds, the Finance Ministry said investors had shown “confidence in the country’s macroeconomic trajectory and the consistency of its financial policy.”
\n\n\n\nMoney owed to Chinese banks has fallen, to USD 10 billion in 2025 – one-fifth of external debt – from almost USD 17 billion in 2020, and debt owed to the Chinese government has halved to USD 2 billion, according to a filing with the London Stock Exchange. Overall, Angola’s debt payments as a percentage of revenue declined to 71 percent in 2025 from 83 percent in 2024.
\n\n\n\nThe corruption cloud that has hovered over Angola for years has lifted somewhat under Lourenço. A government investigation uncovered billions of dollars in financial and real assets that high-level officials allegedly grabbed under a prior government, often stashing wealth abroad. Less spectacular graft persists. One in five Angolan businesses in a 2024 World Bank survey said they had received at least one request to pay a bribe.
\n\n\n\nTheft of oil revenue, capture of state-run enterprises and other abuses are targets of probes into officials and executives linked to long-time President José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in 2022. In 2024, Angola committed to work with the Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog, to crack down on money laundering.
\n\n\n\nSince Lourenço took office in 2017, Angola’s score in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index has improved to 32 from 19 on scale where 100 is squeaky clean and zero is abysmal. In national rankings, Angola sat two-thirds down the list (top is best) at 120th position in 2025, tied with El Salvador, the Philippines and Togo.
\n\n\n\nExerting more control over Angola’s destiny is on the agenda in Luanda under Lourenço, whose second term ends in 2027. On January 1, 2024, Angola left the Saudi Arabia-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, after a decision to reduce Angola’s production quota by 200,000 barrels a day, a 15 percent cut.
\n\n\n\nDepleting oil fields and limited investment in exploration has led to long-term decline in crude output. A decade ago, Angola produced as much as 1.8 million barrels a day, U.S. Energy Department data shows. A World Bank calculation forecasts a further drop of two-thirds in crude output by 2040. China buys most of Angola’s oil, prized as “sweet” for its low sulfur content.
\n\n\n\nInland, farming potential is finally getting attention. Besides vast arable land, Angola can draw on “favorable rainfall across large parts of the country, major river systems that can support irrigation, diverse agro-ecological zones, improving infrastructure and a relatively young farming population,” says Menghestab Haile, a former World Food Program director in southern Africa who is advising Angola’s minister of agriculture on a farming transformation.
\n\n\n\nThe AgroCorredores initiative wants to take advantage of the Lobito Corrido’s transport and logistics scale-up to connect productive agriculture areas to national and global markets and pump up rural economic growth, Haile says. Cutting post-harvest losses, improving the quality of crops, bringing more finance, energy and expertise to smallholder farmers and ultimately improving the food and feed available to Angolans are goals of the strategy.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-lake-from-air-APR2026.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1\")
AgroCorredores is engaging across the agribusiness system. It assigns farmer training and mobilizing cooperatives to the Institute for Agrarian Development, while putting the National Cereals Institute in charge of market readiness: post-harvest handling, modernizing warehouses, quality certification and aggregating crops for commercial buyers. Other entities focus on livestock, data analysis and financing.
\n\n\n\nAngola’s farmland, 59 million hectares or 145 million acres, is equivalent to the farmed area of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas, among America’s biggest agricultural states. Any harvested surplus could be shipped to the United States, South America or Europe from the port of Lobito that also serves as a future gateway for copper, cobalt and other minerals dug from central Africa. Lobito is intended to establish a U.S.- and European-backed minerals supply chain outside China’s control.
\n\n\n\nIn 2024, the Export-Import Bank of the United States approved a USD 1.6 billion loan for a project by Miami-based Sun Africa to build 65 solar mini-grids and energy storage in southern Angola that will also power water collection and cleaning.
\n\n\n\nThrough five decades of independence after rule by Portugal, geopolitics has shaped and shattered the country. A civil war that ran from 1975 to 2002 became a proxy battleground for the United States and Soviet Union, along with Cuba and South Africa. After the Cold War, a rising China entered the picture.
\n\n\n\nAs the Eurobond offering was going on sale in March, Finance Minister Vera Daves de Sousa was in China meeting with development banks and top Hong Kong officials about entry into its financial market, according to the Angolan Finance Ministry. In a buoyant meeting with former Brazilian leader and New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff in Shanghai, Daves de Sousa explored Angola’s possible membership in the multinational lender, an offshoot of the BRICS group led by China, India and Russia.
\n\n\n\nIn December 2025, Angola diversified its funding by raising its first money in the Japanese market – a 40 billion yen Samurai bond worth about USD 250 million.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-airport-cafe-APR2026.jpg?resize=720%2C517&ssl=1\")
While Angola’s oil and natural gas wealth invites investment, the U.S. Government cautioned last year that investing can be troublesome. “Companies face persistent bureaucracy, lack of transparency in procurement and licensing, and inconsistent regulatory enforcement,” the International Trade Administration wrote in a note on Angola. “Access to foreign exchange is limited, and restrictions on dividend repatriation continue to deter foreign investment.”
\n\n\n\nA World Bank survey in 2024 found that getting a construction-related permit took 51 days, almost double the sub-Saharan Africa wait, while on average a government payment on a contract took 151 days, almost three months longer.
\n\n\n\nTo deal with some of these risks, Angola is adopting a public-private partnership approach designed to speed up project approvals. Recent Angolan laws and decrees have created a legal structure and project preparation pipeline for PPPs, enabled tax incentives and security in repatriating profits, and opened renewable energy and transmission line projects to private investors, according to André Duarte Figueira, Angola lead in the Lisbon office of the international law firm DLA Piper. A World Bank-funded program run by the Angolan government, Diversifica Mais, is supporting the PPP scale-up.
\n\n\n\nFigueira thinks the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo’s model of choosing project partners mainly on financial strength could be adopted in Angola and attract institutional investors, investment funds, pension funds and family-wealth offices.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Lourenço touted his country’s allure at the international tourism investment summit, eager to put Angola on the map in a region of fierce competition from nearby Zambia, Namibia and South Africa. From 1,000 miles of coastline to rugged terrain and waterfalls inland, with a vast range of flora and fauna, Angola could appeal to beach lovers, hikers and wildlife enthusiasts alike. The European Union sees eco-tourism potential in Cameia National Park, a wilderness in eastern Angola.
\n\n\n\nJune also was a busy month for Angola Airlines. The airline named Jaime Miguel Ferreira Carneiro as CEO, started weekly service to Guangzhou, China, and said it received European Union approval to fly the widebody Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” into European airspace. Within Africa, flights to Nairobi and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire started in the past year, extending Angola’s reach.
\n\n\n\nThe long shadow that war and isolation cast over Angola is fading as a younger generation steps up to take on the country’s entrenched poverty amid riches. The emerging narrative is built on connections, in the air and across borders by railway as Lobito Corridor unfolds. Whether these pathways can take Angolans toward an era of broader opportunity and prosperity depends on a journey of renewal that’s just getting started.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A fully stocked kiosk called On the Way Home awaits future travelers at Angola’s new international airport outside Luanda. Afrologi photo by Edward DeMarco.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From tourism to agriculture to the promise of the Lobito Corridor linking an Angolan port to central Africa, Angola is trying to build a future beyond oil, its most prized – and still lucrative – asset. ","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443688,57443713,57443706,57443739,57443671,57443765],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-agribusiness","tag-angola","tag-china","tag-oilandgas","tag-top","tag-zambia","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-airport-shop-APR2026-rotated.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-airport-shop-APR2026-rotated.jpg?fit=4080%2C3060&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Angola plots a future beyond oil\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
You may view massive cuts in U.S. development and humanitarian aid to Africa as the end of America’s influence, yet Africa’s ties with the global superpower are far broader – and often little known.
\n\n\n\nMost people probably wouldn’t guess there are countries in Africa that do a billion dollars of trade in a month with the United States. Or that the United States is the second-largest shareholder, after Nigeria, in the continent’s largest development finance institution, the African Development Bank based in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, as our infographic shows, the 15 largest U.S. trade partners in Africa were a geographic mix that included North Africa, Nigeria and smaller, dynamic economies in West Africa and central African resource heavyweights Angola (oil) and Democratic Republic of Congo (copper, cobalt and more). Africa’s largest island nation, Madagascar, also made the top 15. Anchoring the trade picture as America’s top trade partner was South Africa, which sold USD 10.1 billion more in goods to the United States than it bought from America. The trade surge came as the Trump White House pressured the South African government with tariffs and accusations of fomenting racial strife.
\n\n\n\nAs America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1776, which fueled seven more years of war, the map of connections to Africa is changing. Investment is getting a bigger spotlight. Lobito Corridor, a railway, trade and investment route from central Africa to the Atlantic Ocean – first championed by President Joe Biden – is high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/America-in-Africa-infographic-FINAL-25JUN2026.jpg?resize=720%2C892&ssl=1\")
And development assistance hasn’t totally dried up. The two-decade, approximately USD 100 billion effort aimed at stopping the spread of HIV and helping Africans live with AIDS, known as PEPFAR, is transitioning into the America First Global Health program, which also addresses challenges such as maternal and child health and scaling up the public health workforce. (PEPFAR said it has saved more than 25 million lives in Africa.) To date, 22 countries in Africa have negotiated America First deals that include co-financing. Some of the MOUs have drawn a backlash due to demands for long-term health data and implied linkages to mineral resources.
\n\n\n\nMillennium Challenge, a U.S. initiative to finance roads and other infrastructure through country-led efforts, has scaled back yet is still active from Mozambique to West Africa. In Zambia, the USD 491 million Millennium program, known as a compact, is being reshaped to support Lobito. Road segments in North-Western and Copperbelt provinces, where the corridor will emerge, are being prioritized for upgrading.
\n\n\n\nWhile southern Africa gets increasing attention, Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is gaining a major diplomatic investment from America. An embassy-sized, USD 537 million consulate general is rising in the Eko Atlantic district of Lagos, one of the few major African cities that isn’t also a national capital. In Nigeria, that’s Abuja, about 500 miles away.
\n\n\n\nThomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the new nation, displayed an 1802 map of Africa in his famed Virginia home, Monticello. Much of the interior of Africa was conjecture, as the taking of Africans by the millions for enslavement on New World plantations – or on rich estates including Jefferson’s – imprinted coastal geography on the American mind.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Monticello_reflected-by-Matt-Kozlowski-CC-2.5.jpg?resize=720%2C496&ssl=1\")
Fast forward two centuries and the maps of Africa and America are intertwined. Africa’s global emissary, Ethiopian Airlines, got its start in the 1940s with help from America’s TWA and American pilots. Africa’s largest airline now flies to New York, Washington, Chicago and Atlanta, with Ethiopian pilots and flight attendants – backed by African managers and technicians.
\n\n\n\nU.S. airlines are slowly expanding direct air service – Delta Air Lines has started flying to Marrakech, Morocco, from Atlanta, the airline’s largest hub. That’s a fitting destination, given that Morocco was the first country – not only in Africa but in the world – to welcome arriving ships flying the American flag as vessels from a new nation.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A rendering of the new U.S. consulate general under construction in Lagos, by New York-based Ennead Architects.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As America celebrates the 250th birthday of its declared independence from Britain, the map of connections to Africa is changing. Massive aid cuts are reshaping ties around investment, travel and collaboration with major Africa-led initiatives.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443696,57443694],"tags":[57443708,57443722,57443719,57443671,57443732,57443684,57443765],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-societies","tag-ethiopia","tag-nigeria","tag-south-africa","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-united-states","tag-zambia","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Nigeria-Lagos-consulate-closeup-Ennead.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Nigeria-Lagos-consulate-closeup-Ennead.jpg?fit=1920%2C1081&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"America in Africa at 250\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Namibia is loaded with solar energy potential for the green hydrogen of the future and newfound offshore oil and natural gas, yet it’s the sparkle in the country’s Atlantic Ocean sands that is the source of worries today.
\n\n\n\nThe desert country’s mining-infused economy has hit a sluggish phase, constrained in part by “deep and prolonged weakness in the diamond sector,” according to a downbeat assessment issued June 11, 2026, by the International Monetary Fund. Namibia’s economy will expand 2.1 percent in 2026, half the rate recorded in 2023. The diamond trouble isn’t in Namibia itself, where the gems can be scooped from sands and seabed near the ocean’s edge.
\n\n\n\nRather, since the COVID-19 pandemic, laboratories in China, India and other countries are producing diamonds of extraordinary quality at far lower prices, sapping demand for the real thing as younger buyers make the switch. Namibia’s marine diamond miner, a joint venture between the government and gems powerhouse De Beers Group, is cutting production. The diamond mining industry could shrink almost 8 percent this year alone, the third consecutive year of decline, the country’s central bank has forecast. Diamond processing is also declining. As recently as 2023, diamond mining grew by almost 11 percent in Namibia.
\n\n\n\n“While Namibia has demonstrated resilience to global trade frictions, economic growth remains insufficient to meaningfully reduce unemployment, inequality, and poverty, which are key government objectives,” the IMF cautioned.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Diamonds are the biggest part of Namibia’s mining and quarrying industry, generating about 40 percent of economic output in that sector in 2025, central bank data shows. The output from Namibia’s marine diamond mining and 26 onshore mines for gold, uranium and other resources, concentrated in a belt running from near the port of Walvis Bay northeast toward Angola, is important to the nation’s economy and the government’s revenue.
\n\n\n\nThe industry paid 7.8 billion Namibian dollars in taxes and royalties in 2025, according to the Chamber of Mines of Namibia. That is equivalent to almost 10 percent of the 81 billion dollars (USD 4.9 billion) that Namibia’s revenue authority said it collected in the year to March 31, 2026.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-diamond-ship.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
Diamond production fell 5.6 percent in 2025 “due to deliberate production cuts by Debmarine Namibia, which was aimed at stabilizing global prices amid competition from laboratory grown diamonds,” the mining industry group said in its annual report. Meanwhile, uranium production climbed over 20 percent due to nuclear power demand, and two new uranium mining projects are on the drawing board.
\n\n\n\nGold, uranium and fish are other major exports for the country, whose 3 million people are fewer than the residents of the core city of Los Angeles in a land area about twice the size of California. The towering red dunes of the Namib Desert in the south and the wildlife of the Etosha National Park in the north draw tourists across a terrain reminiscent of the American Southwest.
\n\n\n\nAbundant solar and wind energy – and ocean water – could make Namibia a green hydrogen power in the 2030s. Meanwhile, deep-water oil and gas discoveries in the past four years by energy companies including TotalEnergies and Shell may amount to 11 billion barrels of crude and 2.2 trillion cubic feet of gas. The U.S. Government estimates that the fossil fuel finds could more than double Namibia’s economic output by 2040.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-Mines-Chamber-CEO-MAY2026-edit.jpg?resize=720%2C453&ssl=1\")
A 1908 discovery during Germany’s occupation of the region that would become Namibia in 1990 revealed “a vast alluvial diamond field” extending almost 200 miles northward from the Orange River, the boundary between Namibia and South Africa, according to a 2024 overview by the World Diamond Council. In the 1960s, geologists determined that the seabed near where the Orange empties into the Atlantic was “rich with high-quality gemstones,” the council said, and a Texas oilman pioneered the technique of vacuuming rough diamonds from the seafloor.
\n\n\n\nIn May 2026, the Chamber of Mines appointed a new CEO, Fabian Shaanika, as chief advocate for the industry. A geologist, banker and mining industry veteran, Shaanika was managing director of Kelp Blue, which produces a seaweed extract pitched as a fertilizer substitute for farmers. In Namibia’s mining industry, the ocean matters.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Namibia’s economic link to South Africa (the Namibian dollar and rand are at parity) and relationship to the emerging Lobito Corridor to the north may be decisive factors in deeper regional integration. The desert climate, wild ocean access and laid-back atmosphere already attract adventurous tourists and digital nomads.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Adding sand to push back the shoreline in the search for diamonds, by Namdeb.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Namibia's marine diamond riches face tough competition from gems made in labs in China and India, dulling prospects in a country poised to cash in on abundant oil, gas and solar energy.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443695,57443692],"tags":[57443823,57443716,57443740,57443726,57443739,57443822],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blue-green","category-economies","tag-gold","tag-green-economy","tag-mining","tag-namibia","tag-oilandgas","tag-uranium","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-ocean-diamond-mining-Namdeb-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-ocean-diamond-mining-Namdeb-edit.jpg?fit=2125%2C1596&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Namibia’s sea diamonds lose their dazzle\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Three decades ago, Africa started to clear out a pile of debt under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC). In an effort that began in 1996 and peaked in 2005, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank offered about USD 80 billion in debt relief to 33 African countries. That stoked economic growth and social improvements as borrowing costs siphoned off less money.
\n\n\n\nThe easing was worth about 1.5 percentage points of GDP between 2001 and 2015, according to the IMF. Yet debt still takes its toll in the 2020s, especially after emergency spending during the pandemic. Today you may cheer the high-flying growth rate of a favorite African economy, yet if that country is loaded with debt, it may struggle to stay aloft. Senegal and Zambia are in that situation. So are Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius and a few other countries.
\n\n\n\nSouth Africa is dealing with debt and low growth, yet also has advanced capital markets and sturdy assets like highways, airports and an industrial base on which to craft a rebound.
\n\n\n\nAcross sub-Saharan Africa, government debt is equal to 56 percent of GDP, according to IMF data. That’s manageable or elevated, yet not alarming, putting most countries in the “green” or “yellow” zone in our infographic.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Africa-Debt-to-GDP-infographic-MAY2026.png?resize=720%2C892&ssl=1\")
While Africa has a compelling growth story to tell in the years ahead, it must be ever vigilant about the nemesis that has clobbered its potential in the past: excessive borrowing at home and in international markets that crowds out funds needed to improve living conditions, infrastructure and economic opportunity.
\n\n\n\nAlthough China often faces accusations that its Belt and Road projects such as roads, railways and stadiums have chained Africa to unsustainable debt payments, other countries such as France and Japan also have loaned large sums to African governments.
The most debt-burdened economies are coping with loads approaching or exceeding 100 percent of their economic output. When debt rises to those levels, taking ever larger sums to meet payments, there may be far less money available for schools, public health, roads and other essential services. Economic survival, not investment for the future, becomes the focus for governments in that squeeze.
A “sharp pullback” in Chinese lending since 2021 due in part to defaults in Ghana and Zambia has led to an increase in domestic debt since 2022 in Africa, especially of longer duration, a trend “strongly influenced” by Egypt and South Africa, according to international researchers behind the African Debt Database.
\n\n\n\nEasing the debt load would help African governments and international investors focus on an even larger challenge: the coming population boom that will demand the creation of hundreds of millions of jobs and the health, education, roads, energy and other needs that will escalate with that wave.
Oil-exporting African countries are in better shape, with a 40.9 percent debt-to-GDP load. Extra government revenue from the oil price surge of the Iran war should help those economies. Crude oil touched USD 126 a barrel on April 30 and has since fallen to about USD 80 following a preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement in June 2026 to open the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint of the global oil trade.
Across Africa, governments are looking to more foundational moves to trim debt. That means expanding the base of taxpayers at home and spending more efficiently – to fend off fiscal disaster for good.
(Feature image: Kenya’s Chinese-built SGR rail line from Nairobi to the Indian Ocean coast, built with more than USD 3 billion in Export-Import Bank of China financing. Photo by TTC-Wikimedia)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three decades after historic debt relief arrived, hotspots of excessive borrowing from Kenya to Senegal threaten Africa's comeback story as domestic debt rises.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443744,57443821,57443679,57443719,57443765],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-debt","tag-infrastructure","tag-kenya","tag-south-africa","tag-zambia","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Kenya-SGR-TTC-Wikimedia-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Kenya-SGR-TTC-Wikimedia-edit.jpg?fit=1844%2C1181&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"In Africa’s debt picture, hotspots of risk\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
While the world focused on the Strait of Hormuz in early June 2026 as on-again, off-again talks between Iran and the United States struggled to reach a peace deal, Iran’s neighbor Turkey fixed its gaze in an entirely different direction.
\n\n\n\nNiger’s President Abdourahamane Tchiani arrived in Ankara for an official visit, welcomed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a 21-gun salute. Only three years ago, Niger hosted the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state, who praised the country’s fragile democracy, defense cooperation and work to socialize former combatants. A thousand U.S. military personnel operated a drone base to monitor an extremist Islamist insurgency in the Sahel.
\n\n\n\nThen came an August 2023 coup led by Tchiani that toppled the elected government and triggered the (orderly) American pullout from Niger after U.S. officials raised concerns about possible warming toward Iran and Russia. French forces exited, too. Tchiani chose Turkey for his first official, non-African visit, after a Turkish delegation landed in Niamey in 2024 to discuss deeper ties. Niger, a major producer of uranium, is trying to assert its authority over mining of the nuclear power fuel after decades of French-led operations.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Erdogan’s two-decade campaign to expand Turkish influence in Africa, a success story for Turkey’s global ambitions, has also helped Africa advance aspirations for connectivity and integration. Turkish Airlines began touching down across Africa. A Turkish contractor, Yapi Merkezi, dislodged a Chinese competitor to win a USD 3 billion contract to build Uganda’s modern rail link toward the Indian Ocean via Kenya. That same company is busy extending rail lines in Tanzania. Another Turkish company developed the financial center in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
\n\n\n\nErdogan said at a press conference with his Nigerien guest that “win-win principles” guide Africa policy. “We see these relations as long-term cooperations in a wide range of areas such as security, education, culture and transportation, not just trade and economy.”
\n\n\n\nDuring the visit, Niger and Turkey (or Türkiye, the Turkish version favored by the government) inked agreements spanning higher education, healthcare and joint management of a “friendship” hospital in Niger. That ticked the soft power box. Tchiani and his delegation also toured facilities of Roketsan, a rocket and missile maker that’s majority owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation. And Erdogan pledged military training and intelligence cooperation.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkey-Niger-prez-Ankara-04JUN2026.jpg?resize=720%2C510&ssl=1\")
The United States has felt the loss of its outpost in Niger. U.S. Africa Command leader General Dagvin Anderson told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-May 2026 that a diminished presence in Niger and elsewhere in Africa has led to an “intelligence black hole” for American military planners and allies. “In a crisis, we can always surge assets,” the general said, “but you cannot surge trust.”
\n\n\n\nOn January 30, 2026, the U.S. State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members in Niger due to the threat of terrorist violence and kidnappings. American personnel must travel in armored vehicles and cannot visit restaurants or open-air markets.
\n\n\n\nHowever, there are signs that the United States may boost its involvement in Niger once more. The U.S. Embassy has posted procurement notices for high-speed Internet and cafeteria services for “200+ employees who will be potential patrons” in the embassy eatery.
\n\n\n\nThe Niger delegation’s visit came as Turkey prepares for the fourth edition of an Africa “partnership summit,” the first in five years, to be held in Libya. With its 44 embassies (from 12 in 2002) hustling for business and influence across the continent, Turkey aims to push bilateral trade toward $50 billion a year, building on a foundation of drone exports, infrastructure, food products, consumer appliances and educational investments that appeal to African governments eager to diversify relations as great power agendas shift.
\n\n\n\nLibya functions “as a northern gateway to the African continent” for Turkey, according to Kaan Devecioglu of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Ankara. “The sphere of influence centered on Tripoli constitutes the starting point of a broader geopolitical corridor extending through Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt toward the Sahel” and embraces trade and logistics networks, along with diplomatic and security interests, Devecioglu said in an analysis published in June.
\n\n\n\nUnder the Ottoman Empire, Turks forged their own colonial saga in Africa yet today have brushed off that reputation and become one of China’s competitors on the continent – and a fresh face across France’s former colonial terrain. And in Britain’s old sphere, too: Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu made a state visit to Turkey in January.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkish-Airbus-A320-over-Bosphorus.jpg?resize=720%2C380&ssl=1\")
The public focus on Africa contrasts with Turkey’s low-key posture regarding the Iran war. Since the conflict pitting America and Israel against Iran erupted in late February, Turkey has operated on the margins of the crisis – at least visibly. State collapse in Iran could spill across Turkey’s borders in the form of refugees, unrest and diminished trade.
\n\n\n\nIn June, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan publicly urged the United States and Iran to halt a renewed wave of clashes and forge ahead with Pakistani-brokered peace negotiations. Turkey talks to both Washington and Tehran. Fidan and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the Iran conflict on May 22 during a NATO ministers meeting.
\n\n\n\nDisruptions in the oil-producing Persian Gulf have sharply increased fuel prices for airlines worldwide and may have contributed to a recent curbing of Turkish reach in Africa. Turkish Airlines has suspended service to several African destinations, including the Lusaka extension on a Dar es Salaam route, a planned twice weekly Monrovia, Liberia, stop on a flight to Accra and the Istanbul-Kinshasa-Luanda circular route, according to AeroRoutes. The changes were made quietly in updates to global flight schedules.
\n\n\n\nAction options: While Turkish trade with Africa remains a fraction of China’s trade flow, Turkish capabilities from tech to large-scale engineering to consumer goods make Turkey a viable alternative for deals and partnerships. A significant diplomatic and cultural footprint across Africa deepens connections.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid the conflict involving its neighbor Iran, Turkey is reaching out to Africa in a corridor from Libya to the Sahel, competing with China for trade, customers and influence.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443819,57443820,57443806,57443818,57443671,57443732,57443817],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-libya","tag-niger","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-turkey","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkey-Niger-leaders-Ankara-04JUN2026.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkey-Niger-leaders-Ankara-04JUN2026.jpg?fit=857%2C550&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Turkey shifts gaze toward Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
In a dramatic step that showed how war in the Middle East and rising oil prices are squeezing Africa, Malawi’s central bank sold 590 kilograms of gold (more than 18,000 troy ounces) from its reserves in April 2026 so the country could import fuel, fertilizer and medicine amid a severe foreign exchange shortage.
\n\n\n\nWhile that looked like a desperate move to raise about USD 78 million in a hurry, it was a win for artisanal mining in the country, which borders Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia. The Reserve Bank of Malawi bought the gold over time from local miners under a special program, a spokesman told the Nation newspaper. And the bank plans to replenish its reserves by buying more of the precious metal unearthed by Malawians. Across Africa, countries are looking to scrappy, local miners for gold, gems and minerals in high demand for green energy, AI and military uses.
\n\n\n\nAntoinette Kalinde, an expert on mining, processing, sourcing for markets and policy frameworks, recently completed a study for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Malawi on artisanal and small-scale mining as the country seeks to gain more value from this segment. Malawian President Peter Mutharika issued a ban on raw mineral exports shortly after taking office in October 2025.
\n\n\n\nEven in Malawi, there’s now a focus on big mining, with investments cropping up, one quite close to the capital Lilongwe. Some of these are for graphite, niobium, rare earths and other of these so-called critical minerals. Given these grand investments, you would think artisanal mining wouldn’t be getting much money and attention.
\n\n\n\nFor a long time, artisanal and small-scale mining was treated as an informal, marginal, even an illegal activity. But that framing is starting to shift for a few key reasons. First, the global demand for minerals, especially those linked to energy transition and technology, has made it impossible to ignore where the significant portion of supply is actually coming from. In many cases artisanal, small-scale mining – let’s call it ASM – is already contributing meaningfully to production, particularly in gold and gemstones.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Malawi-Mutharika-2026.jpg?resize=720%2C576&ssl=1\")
In Malawi, for example, with the Kasiya mine, we know that there have been artisanal miners mining rutile quartz, which is the basis of the rutile graphite mine that is being touted now. A lot of our actual knowledge of where gemstones are comes from artisanal miners. The government and the development partners are recognizing that ASM is not just a fringe sector, it’s a major rural employer. In Malawi alone the estimate is about 40,000 people directly involved in ASM activity, not to mention their dependents and the people who depend on that [mining] indirectly.
\n\n\n\nAre we talking about people who go out and do this in their spare time or during the weekend, because they’re also farming and doing other things, or are we talking about people doing this mining most of their working hours?
\n\n\n\nI would put those in two categories. You’ve got the gold miners who are mostly mining full-time, throughout the year. It’s a bit more difficult and more expensive in the dry season, depending on the area they are in. If the rivers are perennial, they have to rely on purchasing the water to do all the washing, and if the river is constant, they will mine all year round.
\n\n\n\nGemstones often occur in areas where people have farms. So those guys are likely to mine after planting season. During the rainy season they’ll do the mining side of things along the nearest streams as the gems roll to the lowest points and then after that there’s harvest and they’ll till and they’ll probably mine again before the rains start. But that depends on whether they would have purchased the land or have negotiated with the owners of the land.
\n\n\n\nAlso, there are cooperatives that have been mining for years. There are artisanal miners and then those miners, who are closer to small-scale toward medium-scale miners, who are more constant miners. Because of the large spectrum of ASM miners, the regulations don’t fit for everybody. This was reviewed and the Ministry of Mines has been formulating a national artisanal policy, which is currently in draft.
\n\n\n\nLet’s talk about your study for the government. What did you discover?
\n\n\n\nThe constraints on SMEs in the mining sector and what’s stopping them from growing – market access, financing and formalization. In market access, the smallest miners tend to stay at the mine because they don’t want other miners to take over. They will rely on middlemen to purchase from the mine and bring the gold or gems to the nearest market. The market is segmented by output capacity, popularity of mining area and capacity to purchase of the buyers. Therefore, those miners that produce small amounts sell pointers, that means zero point 1, point 2, point 3 grams.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PHOTO-2026-06-09-19-04-29-1.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
A middleman will come and buy that and aggregate to maybe a gram and several more grams. From the gram buyers then you get to the tens of grams, that’s another level of buyer as well. There’s a whole chain from the mine to, for example, the Malawi Reserve Bank minerals purchasing arm, the Export Development Fund or EDF, which is the resident buyer for gold and sapphires, rubies, aquamarines and a garnet type called rhodolite.
\n\n\n\nWill the bank hold those gemstones or get those polished and sold into the market, to monetize that asset?
\n\n\n\nThat’s the plan. They were collecting and I think they did take some to fairs but since the president’s directive on mandatory local beneficiation or local processing of raw materials and minerals, the central bank has now been put in a position where it has to organize polishing and cutting of those gemstones before they are sold.
\n\n\n\nHow much gold has the central bank purchased from these small miners?
\n\n\n\nIn the last couple years, it came to 530 kilograms. And that’s capturing not even 10 percent of potential output. The EDF said it bought from as few as eight of over 60 mining sites. The Reserve Bank actually pays about 103 percent of the world price. They pay a premium for gold just to make sure it doesn’t leave the country.
\n\n\n\nThat’s gold, but are these miners really involved with critical minerals? Artisanal miners are not mining copper, they’re not mining graphite, are they? Minerals going to the electric vehicle industry or solar and wind power, tech or other uses?
\n\n\n\nSome are mining graphite. You’ve got over 40,000 people in ASM in Malawi. Let’s say 5 percent of those 40,000 are mining rutile quartz. And that gives you about 2,000 people who are doing that activity. If they come out with five, 10 kilos a week, that aggregates to a lot, if they can be organized.
\n\n\n\nWhat are some of the financing constraints for these miners?
\n\n\n\nAlmost 90 percent of the artisanal miners studied have no access to formal financing. And that’s not because they didn’t have access to collateral, but because the financing model for banks doesn’t really fit the artisanal mining cycle. Also, they don’t meet a lot of requirements for bookkeeping.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Tanzania-ASM-miners-with-machinery-edit-1024x806.jpeg?resize=720%2C567&ssl=1\")
If miners were allowed to legally use machinery that can be used at the ASM level that is not considered too large but is also safe enough, it would encourage growth in the sector and possibly bookkeeping and bank lending cycle alignment. However, the current Mines and Minerals Act doesn’t allow ASM actors to use machinery larger than a jackhammer, it prohibits mechanized equipment. And there’s not enough information and technology on safe mining practices in schools and publicly available. We had quite a few accidents last year in different artisanal mining sites due to earth collapsing – cave-ins.
\n\n\n\nThe idea is to simplify licensing and align it to the realities of ASM on the ground and encourage the creation of strong cooperatives. Because the cooperatives actually provide a valuable monitoring aspect. The members keep each other in check in terms of environmental restoration requirements, even paybacks for the financing and the lending.
\n\n\n\nYou want something like Tanzania where you have trading hubs so that there are transparent markets and you can minimize the middlemen stretching from the mine to the sales place. These are sort of one-stop shops. They have all relevant government offices represented including the revenue authority, immigration, mines department, environmental agency.
\n\n\n\nEvery office involved in the mine sector is in one building. Anybody who wants to buy gold knows where to go. They know that they’re going to meet several miners who will be selling gold directly to buyers. As soon as that transaction happens, the gold authority – the Tanzania Mining Commission – takes their royalties, the Tanzania Revenue Authority takes their taxes. The levies are paid. The seller offloads his gold. It’s tested. It’s verified. The buyer buys gold in a safe environment. This enhances traceability [to the source amid supply-chain concerns about social and environmental impacts].
\n\n\n\nAre these changes happening elsewhere?
\n\n\n\nBurkina Faso is adopting a similar model. And then there are countries like Rwanda working strongly on cooperatives and increasing traceability of gold artisanal mining works. There’s an opportunity and there’s real potential for improvements in the sector – better regulation, facilitation, traceability and capture points for gold that would otherwise leave our borders illegally.
\n\n\n\nThis would allow for miners to earn more, for the government to collect more revenue and for the sector to become safer and more sustainable.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: AI-generated photo illustration of miner by Afrologi.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once seen as fringe and even illegal, African artisanal mining is surging as critical minerals demand climbs and central banks stash away more gold.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443716,57443816,57443740,57443730],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-green-economy","tag-malawi","tag-mining","tag-tanzania","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Artisanal-gold-photo-illustration-Nano-Banana.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Artisanal-gold-photo-illustration-Nano-Banana.jpg?fit=2549%2C1536&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Africa’s small miners dig into boom\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
It will be years before trains roll across the Angola border bound for the Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito after whistling through Zambian mining hubs from Copperbelt to neighboring North-Western Province. Yet the wheels are turning on one of Africa’s most-watched projects as action shifts from maps and conference chatter to engineering, land acquisition – and financing.
\n\n\n\nThe financial scale and human impact are starting to emerge for the 340-mile stretch of the Lobito Corridor in Zambia, the heart of the initiative. Development and construction of the rail line and purchase of rolling stock will cost USD 3 billion to 5 billion, a range that will narrow once engineering and procurement progresses, says the Nigeria-based developer, Africa Finance Corporation. Plans call for construction to wrap up in 2030.
\n\n\n\nAn environmental and social impact assessment filed with the Zambian Government by Africa Finance also reveals that Lobito could uproot almost 3,000 households, or roughly 14,000 people who live in the path of the rail and trade corridor.
\n\n\n\n“Overall, the project is more likely to proceed than not,” says Stephen Nduvi, a Kenyan public policy analyst focused on regional integration. “The key question is no longer whether the corridor has strategic relevance, but whether stakeholders can mobilize the capital and institutional coordination needed to translate political ambition into physical infrastructure.”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Lobito is a geopolitical, economic and social transformation project rolled into one. It’s also a major attempt at African integration often touted in speeches yet prolonged in practice. The United States, European Union and Italy have publicly committed to turn the Lobito concept into reality, chiefly to create an Atlantic-facing mineral supply chain outside China’s control while diversifying the regional economy.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia have agreed to create a master plan and joint investment platform to stir up moneyed interest.
\n\n\n\n“This platform will support transport and logistics infrastructure that directly links the corridor to industrial yards, production zones and processing hubs, while also crowding in investment in agribusiness, energy, urban development and small and medium-sized enterprises,” Zambia’s Ministry of Finance and National Planning said following a recent coordination meeting in Angola.
\n\n\n\nAt a Luanda forum in May 2026, the EU helped match investors with bankable projects in agribusiness and transport logistics within the Angolan section of the Lobito Corridor.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Finance aims to lock down financing by the end of 2027, according to Reuters. In a push toward that goal, the U.S. Government’s development finance arm is loaning Lobito Atlantic Railway USD 553 million while the Development Bank of Southern Africa adds about USD 200 million, for upgrades to the crucial rail operation to and from the Lobito port visited by President Joe Biden in 2024.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Lobito-Biden-with-Angola-Zam-DRC-leaders-DEC2024-by-Cameron-Smith-WH.jpg?resize=720%2C500&ssl=1\")
Of special interest to leaders in Angola, Zambia and the DRC, whose copper and cobalt mining region forms part of the corridor, is whether Lobito becomes more than a minerals and transport play and stimulates agriculture, renewable energy and exports. Zambian officials promote this “land-linked” approach as the way to unlock Lobito’s true value. Angola is stepping up efforts to increase farm output across its vast, arable land. The DRC is working on better mineral trade logistics.
\n\n\n\nMuch has changed in the past 18 months. A late 2024 journey across the entire Zambian route, from Chingola, a city in the epicenter of copper mining, to sleepy Mwinilunga District in the northwestern corner of the country, where a trickle of water in a forest births the Zambezi River, revealed widespread ignorance about Lobito.
\n\n\n\nMayors and planning teams recounted hearing about Lobito from the news and visits by officials from the capital Lusaka yet couldn’t say what they would contribute or how the corridor might reshape their communities. Along the Angola border, however, work was under way on a Lobito crossing point into a Zambian chiefdom. And early investors were snapping up parcels of farmland.
\n\n\n\nDisplacing residents is always a fraught issue, and Lobito’s brain trust is still working out how resettlement would be carried out across a geography spanning hundreds of miles. The project has budgeted USD 7 million for relocation and resettlement compensation, or about USD 2,400 per household, and USD 1.5 million for “livelihood restoration activities.” The social impact assessment pledges to follow international guidelines and set up a way for residents to file and resolve complaints.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema and his top ministers have talked up Lobito, whose hype could influence domestic politics. The president is up for re-election in August 2026, with voters sizing up the country’s economy after severe drought, an energy crunch and a debt crisis. International Monetary Fund forecasters say Zambia’s economy will grow more than 4 percent in 2026 for the first time since 2023.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-HH-at-Kaoma-road-groundbreaking-OCT2025.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
Lobito responds to the need for infrastructure that Zambians cited in a 2024 Afrobarometer survey when asked to list government priorities. Another Zambian wish: better health care, a source of international friction.
\n\n\n\nLobito is building speed just as relations between Zambia and the United States seem to be derailing. In a scathing departure speech on April 30, 2026, U.S. Ambassador Michael Gonzales accused Zambian government officials of tolerating widespread corruption, allowing billions of dollars of “dirty money” to flow to East Asia untaxed, and covering up the long-term health toll for Zambians from the collapse of a tailings dam at a Chinese copper mine. Gonzales said that accident spilled “carcinogenic heavy metals” into the Kafue River ecosystem, according to the text of his remarks.
\n\n\n\nThe Zambian government called the envoy’s assertions “deeply regrettable” and said stalled talks over a “critical minerals” agreement relate to “the insistence of preferential treatment of U.S. companies” over access to Zambia’s mineral wealth and making health aid conditional on a minerals deal. Gonzales grumbled that his team couldn’t get Zambian officials to pick up the phone.
\n\n\n\nU.S. diplomats have hammered out agreements with 20 other African countries for public health aid conditional on benchmarks for improved care, access to long-term health data and investments by those countries. The sharing of data has sparked a backlash in some countries, and Zambia said data demands are another sticking point.
\n\n\n\nGonzales accused Zambian governments of failing to invest USD 7 billion in American aid since 2000 to create durable health service delivery. “When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight,” he said, blaming Zambian leaders for looking away while “officials diverted government funds to their own pockets.”
\n\n\n\nAs America spars with Zambia, artificial intelligence has entered the Lobito picture. Jacob Helberg, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic affairs, told a congressional hearing that his office is reviewing how America’s Pax Silica partners, including Japan, South Korea, Britain and Israel, could bring “new technologies” into Lobito and other trade corridors, “delivering speed, scale and certainty” to global suppliers.
\n\n\n\nPax Silica is a U.S.-led initiative to build “the AI ecosystem of tomorrow” encompassing advanced manufacturing and “minerals that feed” the AI industry, according to the State Department.
\n\n\n\nA study released in May 2026 by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based watchdog that counts Zambia as a member, cautioned that many factors must align to achieve the Lobito vision. “The Corridor could support local content, supplier development and downstream processing, but outcomes will depend on governance and policy decisions,” along with electricity, financing, infrastructure and industrial capacity, EITI said.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-Lobito-DEC2024.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
In 2023, the Angolan arm of Portugal’s Mota-Engil Group won a 30-year concession to operate Lobito Atlantic Railway from Angola to the DRC. The greenfield Lobito rail line planned for Zambia will extend into Angola to connect to this line at Luacano.
\n\n\n\nA key issue is how much cargo these trains will carry. Estimates included in the Africa Finance assessment show that by 2041, about 859,000 tons of Zambian copper would travel on the route, less than a third of the country’s target output by the early 2030s. Zambian grain exports and petroleum imports are among other major volumes projected for Lobito.
\n\n\n\nBesides commercially viable freight volumes, Nduvi says, “coordination among the participating countries on customs procedures, regulations and railway operations will be critical to ensuring that the corridor functions as an integrated transport system.”
\n\n\n\nLobito faces competition from Namibia to the south. A road-and-rail route is being upgraded from Kolwezi in the DRC through Kalumbila District in Zambia, the hub of westward expansion of gold, copper and nickel mining, and onward to the Namibian port at Walvis Bay. That could cut transit times from mines to port from almost two weeks to five days. The Lobito rail option to Lobito from Kolwezi takes seven days.
\n\n\n\nTo revitalize the Namibia route, a USD 326 million partnership among the Zambian Government and companies including copper miner First Quantum Minerals is building a 230-mile toll road in western Zambia, from Mutanda in Kalumbila to Kaoma in Western Province. The Barotse Highway Limited Toll Concession seeks to improve a route that jolts drivers with potholes and stretches of rugged, hard-packed earth. An upgrade promises to smooth the region’s prospects.
\n\n\n\n“I could see what this would mean to our economy – growth and more growth” and jobs for young people, business opportunities, government revenue and even a less perilous journey for pregnant women racing to a clinic, President Hichilema said at the construction groundbreaking.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Investors interested in the Lobito Corridor should seek out Zambia’s district and provincial social and economic development plans (often posted online) to size up sectoral needs and government priorities along the route. Traditional leaders, or chiefs, influence land use and broader development in the region that Lobito will traverse. The chiefs’ affairs office in the North-Western Province administrative hub in Solwezi, Zambia, can help set up meetings with chiefdoms.
\n\n\n\n(Featured image: Barrick’s expanding Lumwana copper mine in Zambia’s North-Western Province.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lobito Corridor, Africa's closely watched, cross-border minerals-trade and investment effort outside China's orbit, is moving toward reality at a cost of as much as USD 5 billion in Zambia - and could displace thousands of people in its 340-mile path.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443713,57443712,57443794,57443740,57443671,57443684,57443765],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-angola","tag-drc","tag-lobito-corridor","tag-mining","tag-top","tag-united-states","tag-zambia","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-Lumwana-mine-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-Lumwana-mine-edit.jpg?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Lobito chugs toward reality\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
You may see rising global investment in Africa’s growth as the metric to care about, yet how well Africa itself captures that momentum may be more telling.
Some countries are hardly selling into Africa, while others, such as Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, are robust players. If you add imports to the export flows in this graphic, you find that two-way intra-African trade amounted to just 15.3 percent of total trade in 2024, according to the African Export-Import Bank.
South Africa is the biggest contributor, accounting for one-fifth of total trade on the continent. West Africa – lifted by strong performance from Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Nigeria – is the second-largest intra-African trading region, after southern Africa.
Countries are building more efficient border posts to move truck traffic through faster. And future trade corridors such as the planned linkage among the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Angola, named after the port of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean, represent pathways for more robust regional commerce.
Amid enthusiasm for the fledgling Africa free-trade area, the stark data shows that Africa has a long way to go in boosting commerce across borders. That’s a starting point – and an opportunity, with an estimated 1 billion more Africans arriving by mid-century.
(Feature image: A shipment of Kenyan tea heads to Ghana, home to the secretariat of the emerging African Continental Free Trade Area. Photo by AfCFTA.)
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/LI-Africa-Trading-with-Africa-infographic.jpg?resize=720%2C895&ssl=1\")
Africa trading with Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
On a recent visit to Zambia’s Nsumbu National Park, gazetted in 1972 along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika, I found myself in a conversation that felt simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary.
\n\n\n\nOur guide, Thandiwe Mweetwa, a wildlife biologist and landscape integration manager who had tracked lions in South Luangwa National Park hundreds of miles away when I was tracking carnivores in Liuwa Plain National Park far to the west near Angola, was leading my colleague and me through consultations with the Chomba Wa Kasaba community. These people have lived within the park’s boundaries not as an encroachment, but as a legal reality baked into the park’s founding: communities settled on the southern boundary along the Lufubu River.
\n\n\n\nAs we walked, the talk turned to coexistence, and Thandiwe drifted into a story from her South Luangwa years. Not long ago, she said, community members walking through the Nsefu sector to reach Mfuwe would pass lions resting in tree shade. The lions would watch as people dug into the sides of streams for drinking water, then, once the people had moved on, would use those same holes to drink. It is a story of quiet, unremarked coexistence: no drama, no tragedy, just two species navigating shared space across centuries of adaptation.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Africa’s biodiversity spills well beyond gazette lines, yet declaring new parks no longer happens by administrative stroke. How policy, finance and practice treat the landscapes, and the people, outside and within existing boundaries will decide whether the continent’s protected-area systems drive recovery or manage decline.
\n\n\n\nBetween independence in 1964 and the end of his presidency in 1991, Zambia’s founding leader Kenneth Kaunda declared or consolidated almost all the country’s 20 national parks, the backbone of one of Africa’s most significant conservation systems. His vision was inseparable from a broader political project for sovereignty, national identity and what he called Zambian humanism, the belief that development must be rooted in human dignity and communal values.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet the instrument he used, the hard-edged national park, inherited largely from colonial game reserve logic, carried within it a structural tension he perhaps did not fully resolve. Parks meant boundaries. Boundaries meant exclusions. Communities that had fished the Lufubu, hunted the Kafue floodplains, or settled the Lower Zambezi valley for generations found themselves, overnight, inside a legal category that criminalized their most basic livelihood acts.
\n\n\n\nIn Lower Zambezi National Park, where I worked from 2004 to 2010, you could still find places like so-called Old Village, where broken pottery lay half-buried and polished earth marked abandoned house floors, silent testimony to the people moved so that wildlife could remain.
\n\n\n\nThis is not, in hindsight, a repudiation of Kaunda’s vision. The conservation paradigm of his era, one shared by post-colonial leaders across Africa, saw protected areas as instruments of modernity, sovereignty and environmental stewardship. The tragedy is not that he drew lines. It is that the lines, once drawn, hardened in ways that neither he nor anyone else fully anticipated.
\n\n\n\nWe now live in a world where declaring a new national park is extraordinarily difficult, and probably should be. The legal architecture of free, prior and informed consent; environmental and social impact assessment; community rights frameworks; and scrutiny through bodies like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) means that the swift administrative stroke Kaunda could deploy in 1972 is simply no longer available.
\n\n\n\nThis is democratic progress, yet it surfaces a profound strategic problem: if formal protected-area expansion is largely off the table, how do we protect the biodiversity that exists outside, and critically, within park boundaries in a world of accelerating climate change and population growth?
\n\n\n\nMy field experience across landscapes such as the Liuwa Plains and Lower Zambezi tells a consistent story: parks are nodes, not systems. In Lower Zambezi, the agricultural expansion and deforestation-linked charcoal-making pressures rolling off the plateau do not stop at the park boundary. They reshape what is possible inside it.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-Lower-Zambezi-National-Park-elephants-edit-by-Global-Alliance-of-National-Parks.jpg?resize=720%2C426&ssl=1\")
In Liuwa, the wildebeest migration moves through a matrix of floodplains and seasonal grasslands that no gazette line can contain, and when the surrounding hydrology shifts or competing land uses intensify, the boundary does not hold the ecology in place. It merely marks where the pressure stops being managed. What happens outside the fence ultimately determines what survives inside it. If biodiversity finance, holistic approaches to human and animal welfare and other emerging frameworks are to be meaningful, they must govern landscape-level processes well beyond the gazette line, or they will always be managing decline rather than enabling recovery.
\n\n\n\nNsumbu’s Chisanse area, where the community is permitted to fish for a defined season each year, points toward a different logic entirely. It is not a park concession or a compromise. It is a recognition that human use and ecological health are not inherently in opposition, provided the terms of use are negotiated, monitored and adaptive.
\n\n\n\nThe same insight animated Kaunda’s later thinking. In May 1986, he personally launched the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project, Zambia’s first major experiment in returning meaningful management authority and benefit to communities living alongside wildlife. His government formally established the Administrative Management Design for Game Management Areas as national policy soon after. Together with Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program, started in 1989, these are widely regarded as the foundational communal-land natural resources management initiatives based in Southern Africa communities.
\n\n\n\nThe man who had declared Nsumbu in 1972 was, 14 years later, formally questioning the very logic of the hard boundary he had helped institutionalize. Kaunda understood, even then, that the boundary was a starting point, not a permanent solution.
\n\n\n\nWe are now at an inflection point that Kaunda could not have imagined yet might have welcomed. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022; the emergence of biodiversity, climate and sustainable finance; the rise of One Health approaches that treat human, animal and ecosystem wellbeing as inseparable; and the broader architecture of nature-based finance are attempting something fresh.
\n\n\n\nThese approaches try to make the relationship between nature and society legible, economically and ecologically. Rather than reducing nature to a commodity, they make visible the value that communities, landscapes and ecosystems generate and sustain.
\n\n\n\nThe recurring anthrax outbreaks among hippos in the Luangwa Valley, pathogens moving from concentrated dry-season pools through carcasses into scavengers, livestock and people, are reminders that ecological health, animal health and human health were never separate ledgers, even when our institutions treated them as such.
\n\n\n\nBiodiversity finance is the clearest test case. The risk, of course, is that it replicates the errors of the hard boundary in financial form, imposing external valuation frameworks on communities whose relationship with their landscape is not transactional, but relational, spiritual and generational.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-Lake-Tanganyika-village-by-Jassiel-Msoka-edited-1024x768.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
The Chomba Wa Kasaba community did not stay on the southern bank of the Lufubu because someone offered them a payment for ecosystem services. They stayed because it is home. The question, for biodiversity finance and for every framework that follows it, is whether it can reward stewardship that was never framed as stewardship, but simply as living.
\n\n\n\nThis is why the emerging generation of conservation practitioners, people like Thandiwe, working as landscape integration managers rather than simply wardens or ecologists, represents something important. The title itself is telling. Integration, not exclusion. Landscape, not park. The frame has shifted, even if the institutions have not fully caught up.
\n\n\n\nAs the world marks an international day for biodiversity, three weeks after Kenneth Kaunda Day in Zambia on April 28, his most durable conservation legacy is the question he ultimately could not answer: How do you protect nature in a way that also protects, and supports, the people who live with it?
\n\n\n\nAction options: Africa has better tools now than in Kaunda’s time. Community rights frameworks, adaptive management protocols, landscape-scale biodiversity monitoring and emerging finance mechanisms that can, in principle, channel resources to frontline stewards. What we have not yet resolved is the deeper political question: who gets paid for maintaining biodiversity, whose knowledge defines what is being maintained, and on whose terms is the relationship between people and parks renegotiated?
\n\n\n\nZambia’s protected-area network was built in a remarkable decade of post-independence confidence. Its future will be built, must be built, in a spirit of honest negotiation between that inheritance and the lived realities of the communities that have, in many cases, been its quiet custodians all along. The lions at the waterhole were not waiting for a management plan. They already had worked it out.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: A greater kudu runs across an airstrip in Zambia’s North Kafue National Park, where the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) is working to protect the country’s only black rhino population, by Daniel Rosengren / FZS.)
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So far from mainland Africa that an airliner takes four hours to find this emerald speck in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius is tangled up in geopolitical disputes far beyond its control.
\n\n\n\nThe war in Iran and the Persian Gulf is already hurting – annual economic growth in Mauritius, one of Africa’s richest countries, is likely to slip below 3 percent for the first time since the pandemic – and could cause more pain. In a prolonged Middle East conflict, the economy “would be impacted significantly,” says a just-released International Monetary Fund staff analysis.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Mauritius is more than a destination for sunseekers. It is fast becoming a key financial gateway to Africa, especially from Asia. Major trade agreements with China and India have anchored its status as an entryway to the continent-wide free trade area. Ebene Cybercity draws companies focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain. And an international finance center enables investors and wealth managers to take advantage of streamlined corporate and tax frameworks.
\n\n\n\nThe latest arrival in Mauritius is the African Union-backed Africa Credit Rating Agency, meant to overcome what its champions see as an annoying and costly international bias in assessing African risks. The startup is setting up from an HQ in Mauritius. The AU said Mauritius was chosen because of its “strong governance standards, robust financial sector and commitment to regional integration and economic good governance.”
\n\n\n\nAfter hopes for peace blossomed in June 2026, Iran and the United States are trading fire once more around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital chokepoint for global energy supplies. Crude oil retreated below USD 100 a barrel to around USD 72 in early July yet is climbing again – orbiting USD 85 in mid-July. Iran’s July 18 attack on Jordan, which killed U.S. military personnel defending against drone and ballistic missile strikes, may rekindle global economic anxiety.
\n\n\n\nReduced tourism, higher oil prices and rising inflation would slash economic growth in the downside scenario envisioned by IMF staff due to a prolonged Iran war. The country’s public debt would balloon past 90 percent of GDP, considered a growth-crimping danger zone. That prediction is based on oil at USD 124 a barrel, close to the highest price crude reached during the most intense fighting in April 2026. Authorities in Mauritius “are considering multiple war‑related scenarios,” according to the IMF report, released in mid-July.
\n\n\n\nSince the May visit of an IMF team to confer with officials in Mauritius and size up the country’s situation, the IMF has trimmed its 2026 economic growth forecast for the island nation to 2.8 percent from 3.4 percent predicted in April.
\n\n\n\nSoftening the blow from the Middle East are proposed British payments for 99 years to Mauritius for use of the strategic air base at Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands that Britain has agreed to turn over to Mauritius. Yet that flow of funds is in limbo due to U.S. objections. For six decades the archipelago has belonged to British Indian Ocean Territory while being open to use by U.S. long-range bombers from a runway on Diego Garcia. This island-as-base is within striking distance of Iran and Yemen.
\n\n\n\nThe payments in today’s money to Mauritius would add up to about GBP 3.4 billion, or roughly USD 4.5 billion, according to a U.K. parliamentary report. Under the treaty with Mauritius, Britain agreed to pay GBP 165 million (about USD 220 million) in each of the first three years of the arrangement, GBP 120 million (USD 160 million) annually for the next 10 years, and the same sum, adjusted for inflation, for the remaining years.
\n\n\n\nBritain also consented to pay GBP 40 million to capitalize a trust fund for Chagos islands residents and GBP 45 million a year for 25 years to Mauritius for economic development investments.
\n\n\n\n“On the upside, the ratification of the Chagos agreement would deliver a revenue windfall and allow for faster debt reduction,” the IMF staff said, “while an easing of geopolitical tensions could support a recovery in tourism and help lower inflation.”
\n\n\n\nAction options: With GDP per capita approaching USD 14,000, a jobless rate at 6 percent and low inflation, Mauritius has economic strength that most African policy makers crave. That adds up to resilience and still makes the island nation an appealing launch pad for ambitions on the African mainland. A visit to Mauritius can help assess incentives on offer and how to use them.
\n\n\n\nJust be prepared for geopolitical shifts in distant capitals. The U.S. State Department expressed support for Britain’s Chagos deal on February 17, 2026, before scheduled talks with officials in Mauritius. Yet on his social media feed the next day, President Donald Trump called the deal a “big mistake,” and reversed U.S. policy.
\n\n\n\nThat has scuttled the British handover for now amid fears that China may seize a foothold on these oceanic dots of territory. The United States has refused to amend a 1966 treaty with Britain that covers the islands, forcing U.K. officials to suspend action on enabling legislation for the Chagos accord, according to The Guardian newspaper.
\n\n\n\nRebeccah Heinrichs, an expert on strategic military deterrence at the Hudson Institute think tank, wrote earlier this year that “leasing the base while handing over sovereignty to a Chinese partner is courting trouble.” Heinrichs pointed to China’s loans to Mauritius and possible Chinese high-tech surveillance of the islands, including Diego Garcia.
\n\n\n\nAfter the shelving of the plan, Dhananjay Ramful, the Mauritian foreign minister, insisted that his government remained committed to the handover. “We will spare no effort to seize any diplomatic or legal avenue to complete the decolonization process,” he said, in comments at a conference in Mauritius reported by British newspapers. “This is a matter of justice.”
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: An iconic view of Mauritius rising from the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles from mainland Africa, by Dominik Ruhl / Pexels)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa's financial gateway in the distant Indian Ocean, and a tourism paradise, is facing economic trouble from the faraway conflict between Iran and the United States and its Gulf allies.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443706,57443777,57443825,57443671,57443702,57443826,57443684],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-fintech","tag-mauritius","tag-top","tag-tourism","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg?fit=1920%2C1250&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"War clouds Africa’s sunny money gateway\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
On a sun-streaked recent morning, Angola’s cavernous new international airport terminal outside the capital Luanda dozed. The footfalls of passengers echoed across Terminal B, about two football fields long and unadorned save for a few eateries and elegant kiosks loaded with artisanal baskets, leather goods, booze and carvings of a national symbol, the giant sable antelope. Waiting.
\n\n\n\nFrom time to time an Airbus A220, the 137-seat workhorse of refurbished TAAG Angola Airlines, pulled into a gate at Dr. António Agostinho Neto International Airport, named after the poet and revolutionary hero who served as Angola’s first president. The ambition represented by this USD 3 billion investment, built by a Chinese contractor and operated by Portugal’s Mota-Engil and a Luxembourg company, seemed clear: to create an air hub in southwestern Africa for tourists and investors somewhere over the horizon.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: From tourism to agriculture to the promise of the Lobito Corridor linking an Angolan port to central Africa, Angola is trying to build a future beyond oil, its most prized – and still lucrative – asset. The crowds have yet to show up. Angolan leaders are hunting for a boom across their country’s vast, enticing yet barely plowed arable land. Boosting the energy supply for industrial investment is also high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\n“We have resolutely decided to reduce our dependence on the oil sector and build an economy based on sectors with a strong multiplier effect,” including tourism, Angolan President João Lourenço told an investment forum in Luanda in mid-June 2026, according to Ver Angola, a news service.
\n\n\n\nLarger than Ethiopia and almost twice the size of Texas, oil-exporting Angola is land and water rich yet imported rice and other food worth USD 2 billion in 2023. Nutritious eating is in such short supply across Angola that four in 10 children under 5 years old suffer from malnutrition, according to the World Bank.
\n\n\n\nThose are jarring metrics for a country that pumps 1 million barrels of crude a day, mostly from offshore fields, and just received a brief windfall from a faraway war. The world oil price doubled, shooting up as high as USD 126 a barrel in April 2026 after Israel and the United States attacked Iran in February. (A shaky agreement between the United States and Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the world for Persian Gulf oil and gas, knocked prices down to around USD 72.) In 2025, oil accounted for 80 percent of Angola’s exports by value (natural gas contributed 10 percent and diamonds 5 percent) and 62 percent of government tax revenue.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, investors jumped at the chance to buy Angola’s debt. The country raised USD 2.5 billion in a March 2026 Eurobond offering and 1.5 billion in May, with orders for both more than double the sum on offer. After the May bond sale, which bought out two existing Eurobonds, the Finance Ministry said investors had shown “confidence in the country’s macroeconomic trajectory and the consistency of its financial policy.”
\n\n\n\nMoney owed to Chinese banks has fallen, to USD 10 billion in 2025 – one-fifth of external debt – from almost USD 17 billion in 2020, and debt owed to the Chinese government has halved to USD 2 billion, according to a filing with the London Stock Exchange. Overall, Angola’s debt payments as a percentage of revenue declined to 71 percent in 2025 from 83 percent in 2024.
\n\n\n\nThe corruption cloud that has hovered over Angola for years has lifted somewhat under Lourenço. A government investigation uncovered billions of dollars in financial and real assets that high-level officials allegedly grabbed under a prior government, often stashing wealth abroad. Less spectacular graft persists. One in five Angolan businesses in a 2024 World Bank survey said they had received at least one request to pay a bribe.
\n\n\n\nTheft of oil revenue, capture of state-run enterprises and other abuses are targets of probes into officials and executives linked to long-time President José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in 2022. In 2024, Angola committed to work with the Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog, to crack down on money laundering.
\n\n\n\nSince Lourenço took office in 2017, Angola’s score in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index has improved to 32 from 19 on scale where 100 is squeaky clean and zero is abysmal. In national rankings, Angola sat two-thirds down the list (top is best) at 120th position in 2025, tied with El Salvador, the Philippines and Togo.
\n\n\n\nExerting more control over Angola’s destiny is on the agenda in Luanda under Lourenço, whose second term ends in 2027. On January 1, 2024, Angola left the Saudi Arabia-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, after a decision to reduce Angola’s production quota by 200,000 barrels a day, a 15 percent cut.
\n\n\n\nDepleting oil fields and limited investment in exploration has led to long-term decline in crude output. A decade ago, Angola produced as much as 1.8 million barrels a day, U.S. Energy Department data shows. A World Bank calculation forecasts a further drop of two-thirds in crude output by 2040. China buys most of Angola’s oil, prized as “sweet” for its low sulfur content.
\n\n\n\nInland, farming potential is finally getting attention. Besides vast arable land, Angola can draw on “favorable rainfall across large parts of the country, major river systems that can support irrigation, diverse agro-ecological zones, improving infrastructure and a relatively young farming population,” says Menghestab Haile, a former World Food Program director in southern Africa who is advising Angola’s minister of agriculture on a farming transformation.
\n\n\n\nThe AgroCorredores initiative wants to take advantage of the Lobito Corrido’s transport and logistics scale-up to connect productive agriculture areas to national and global markets and pump up rural economic growth, Haile says. Cutting post-harvest losses, improving the quality of crops, bringing more finance, energy and expertise to smallholder farmers and ultimately improving the food and feed available to Angolans are goals of the strategy.
\n\n\n\nAgroCorredores is engaging across the agribusiness system. It assigns farmer training and mobilizing cooperatives to the Institute for Agrarian Development, while putting the National Cereals Institute in charge of market readiness: post-harvest handling, modernizing warehouses, quality certification and aggregating crops for commercial buyers. Other entities focus on livestock, data analysis and financing.
\n\n\n\nAngola’s farmland, 59 million hectares or 145 million acres, is equivalent to the farmed area of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas, among America’s biggest agricultural states. Any harvested surplus could be shipped to the United States, South America or Europe from the port of Lobito that also serves as a future gateway for copper, cobalt and other minerals dug from central Africa. Lobito is intended to establish a U.S.- and European-backed minerals supply chain outside China’s control.
\n\n\n\nIn 2024, the Export-Import Bank of the United States approved a USD 1.6 billion loan for a project by Miami-based Sun Africa to build 65 solar mini-grids and energy storage in southern Angola that will also power water collection and cleaning.
\n\n\n\nThrough five decades of independence after rule by Portugal, geopolitics has shaped and shattered the country. A civil war that ran from 1975 to 2002 became a proxy battleground for the United States and Soviet Union, along with Cuba and South Africa. After the Cold War, a rising China entered the picture.
\n\n\n\nAs the Eurobond offering was going on sale in March, Finance Minister Vera Daves de Sousa was in China meeting with development banks and top Hong Kong officials about entry into its financial market, according to the Angolan Finance Ministry. In a buoyant meeting with former Brazilian leader and New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff in Shanghai, Daves de Sousa explored Angola’s possible membership in the multinational lender, an offshoot of the BRICS group led by China, India and Russia.
\n\n\n\nIn December 2025, Angola diversified its funding by raising its first money in the Japanese market – a 40 billion yen Samurai bond worth about USD 250 million.
\n\n\n\nWhile Angola’s oil and natural gas wealth invites investment, the U.S. Government cautioned last year that investing can be troublesome. “Companies face persistent bureaucracy, lack of transparency in procurement and licensing, and inconsistent regulatory enforcement,” the International Trade Administration wrote in a note on Angola. “Access to foreign exchange is limited, and restrictions on dividend repatriation continue to deter foreign investment.”
\n\n\n\nA World Bank survey in 2024 found that getting a construction-related permit took 51 days, almost double the sub-Saharan Africa wait, while on average a government payment on a contract took 151 days, almost three months longer.
\n\n\n\nTo deal with some of these risks, Angola is adopting a public-private partnership approach designed to speed up project approvals. Recent Angolan laws and decrees have created a legal structure and project preparation pipeline for PPPs, enabled tax incentives and security in repatriating profits, and opened renewable energy and transmission line projects to private investors, according to André Duarte Figueira, Angola lead in the Lisbon office of the international law firm DLA Piper. A World Bank-funded program run by the Angolan government, Diversifica Mais, is supporting the PPP scale-up.
\n\n\n\nFigueira thinks the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo’s model of choosing project partners mainly on financial strength could be adopted in Angola and attract institutional investors, investment funds, pension funds and family-wealth offices.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Lourenço touted his country’s allure at the international tourism investment summit, eager to put Angola on the map in a region of fierce competition from nearby Zambia, Namibia and South Africa. From 1,000 miles of coastline to rugged terrain and waterfalls inland, with a vast range of flora and fauna, Angola could appeal to beach lovers, hikers and wildlife enthusiasts alike. The European Union sees eco-tourism potential in Cameia National Park, a wilderness in eastern Angola.
\n\n\n\nJune also was a busy month for Angola Airlines. The airline named Jaime Miguel Ferreira Carneiro as CEO, started weekly service to Guangzhou, China, and said it received European Union approval to fly the widebody Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” into European airspace. Within Africa, flights to Nairobi and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire started in the past year, extending Angola’s reach.
\n\n\n\nThe long shadow that war and isolation cast over Angola is fading as a younger generation steps up to take on the country’s entrenched poverty amid riches. The emerging narrative is built on connections, in the air and across borders by railway as Lobito Corridor unfolds. Whether these pathways can take Angolans toward an era of broader opportunity and prosperity depends on a journey of renewal that’s just getting started.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A fully stocked kiosk called On the Way Home awaits future travelers at Angola’s new international airport outside Luanda. Afrologi photo by Edward DeMarco.)
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You may view massive cuts in U.S. development and humanitarian aid to Africa as the end of America’s influence, yet Africa’s ties with the global superpower are far broader – and often little known.
\n\n\n\nMost people probably wouldn’t guess there are countries in Africa that do a billion dollars of trade in a month with the United States. Or that the United States is the second-largest shareholder, after Nigeria, in the continent’s largest development finance institution, the African Development Bank based in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, as our infographic shows, the 15 largest U.S. trade partners in Africa were a geographic mix that included North Africa, Nigeria and smaller, dynamic economies in West Africa and central African resource heavyweights Angola (oil) and Democratic Republic of Congo (copper, cobalt and more). Africa’s largest island nation, Madagascar, also made the top 15. Anchoring the trade picture as America’s top trade partner was South Africa, which sold USD 10.1 billion more in goods to the United States than it bought from America. The trade surge came as the Trump White House pressured the South African government with tariffs and accusations of fomenting racial strife.
\n\n\n\nAs America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1776, which fueled seven more years of war, the map of connections to Africa is changing. Investment is getting a bigger spotlight. Lobito Corridor, a railway, trade and investment route from central Africa to the Atlantic Ocean – first championed by President Joe Biden – is high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\nAnd development assistance hasn’t totally dried up. The two-decade, approximately USD 100 billion effort aimed at stopping the spread of HIV and helping Africans live with AIDS, known as PEPFAR, is transitioning into the America First Global Health program, which also addresses challenges such as maternal and child health and scaling up the public health workforce. (PEPFAR said it has saved more than 25 million lives in Africa.) To date, 22 countries in Africa have negotiated America First deals that include co-financing. Some of the MOUs have drawn a backlash due to demands for long-term health data and implied linkages to mineral resources.
\n\n\n\nMillennium Challenge, a U.S. initiative to finance roads and other infrastructure through country-led efforts, has scaled back yet is still active from Mozambique to West Africa. In Zambia, the USD 491 million Millennium program, known as a compact, is being reshaped to support Lobito. Road segments in North-Western and Copperbelt provinces, where the corridor will emerge, are being prioritized for upgrading.
\n\n\n\nWhile southern Africa gets increasing attention, Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is gaining a major diplomatic investment from America. An embassy-sized, USD 537 million consulate general is rising in the Eko Atlantic district of Lagos, one of the few major African cities that isn’t also a national capital. In Nigeria, that’s Abuja, about 500 miles away.
\n\n\n\nThomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the new nation, displayed an 1802 map of Africa in his famed Virginia home, Monticello. Much of the interior of Africa was conjecture, as the taking of Africans by the millions for enslavement on New World plantations – or on rich estates including Jefferson’s – imprinted coastal geography on the American mind.
\n\n\n\nFast forward two centuries and the maps of Africa and America are intertwined. Africa’s global emissary, Ethiopian Airlines, got its start in the 1940s with help from America’s TWA and American pilots. Africa’s largest airline now flies to New York, Washington, Chicago and Atlanta, with Ethiopian pilots and flight attendants – backed by African managers and technicians.
\n\n\n\nU.S. airlines are slowly expanding direct air service – Delta Air Lines has started flying to Marrakech, Morocco, from Atlanta, the airline’s largest hub. That’s a fitting destination, given that Morocco was the first country – not only in Africa but in the world – to welcome arriving ships flying the American flag as vessels from a new nation.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A rendering of the new U.S. consulate general under construction in Lagos, by New York-based Ennead Architects.)
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While the world focused on the Strait of Hormuz in early June 2026 as on-again, off-again talks between Iran and the United States struggled to reach a peace deal, Iran’s neighbor Turkey fixed its gaze in an entirely different direction.
\n\n\n\nNiger’s President Abdourahamane Tchiani arrived in Ankara for an official visit, welcomed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a 21-gun salute. Only three years ago, Niger hosted the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state, who praised the country’s fragile democracy, defense cooperation and work to socialize former combatants. A thousand U.S. military personnel operated a drone base to monitor an extremist Islamist insurgency in the Sahel.
\n\n\n\nThen came an August 2023 coup led by Tchiani that toppled the elected government and triggered the (orderly) American pullout from Niger after U.S. officials raised concerns about possible warming toward Iran and Russia. French forces exited, too. Tchiani chose Turkey for his first official, non-African visit, after a Turkish delegation landed in Niamey in 2024 to discuss deeper ties. Niger, a major producer of uranium, is trying to assert its authority over mining of the nuclear power fuel after decades of French-led operations.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Erdogan’s two-decade campaign to expand Turkish influence in Africa, a success story for Turkey’s global ambitions, has also helped Africa advance aspirations for connectivity and integration. Turkish Airlines began touching down across Africa. A Turkish contractor, Yapi Merkezi, dislodged a Chinese competitor to win a USD 3 billion contract to build Uganda’s modern rail link toward the Indian Ocean via Kenya. That same company is busy extending rail lines in Tanzania. Another Turkish company developed the financial center in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
\n\n\n\nErdogan said at a press conference with his Nigerien guest that “win-win principles” guide Africa policy. “We see these relations as long-term cooperations in a wide range of areas such as security, education, culture and transportation, not just trade and economy.”
\n\n\n\nDuring the visit, Niger and Turkey (or Türkiye, the Turkish version favored by the government) inked agreements spanning higher education, healthcare and joint management of a “friendship” hospital in Niger. That ticked the soft power box. Tchiani and his delegation also toured facilities of Roketsan, a rocket and missile maker that’s majority owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation. And Erdogan pledged military training and intelligence cooperation.
\n\n\n\nThe United States has felt the loss of its outpost in Niger. U.S. Africa Command leader General Dagvin Anderson told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-May 2026 that a diminished presence in Niger and elsewhere in Africa has led to an “intelligence black hole” for American military planners and allies. “In a crisis, we can always surge assets,” the general said, “but you cannot surge trust.”
\n\n\n\nOn January 30, 2026, the U.S. State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members in Niger due to the threat of terrorist violence and kidnappings. American personnel must travel in armored vehicles and cannot visit restaurants or open-air markets.
\n\n\n\nHowever, there are signs that the United States may boost its involvement in Niger once more. The U.S. Embassy has posted procurement notices for high-speed Internet and cafeteria services for “200+ employees who will be potential patrons” in the embassy eatery.
\n\n\n\nThe Niger delegation’s visit came as Turkey prepares for the fourth edition of an Africa “partnership summit,” the first in five years, to be held in Libya. With its 44 embassies (from 12 in 2002) hustling for business and influence across the continent, Turkey aims to push bilateral trade toward $50 billion a year, building on a foundation of drone exports, infrastructure, food products, consumer appliances and educational investments that appeal to African governments eager to diversify relations as great power agendas shift.
\n\n\n\nLibya functions “as a northern gateway to the African continent” for Turkey, according to Kaan Devecioglu of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Ankara. “The sphere of influence centered on Tripoli constitutes the starting point of a broader geopolitical corridor extending through Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt toward the Sahel” and embraces trade and logistics networks, along with diplomatic and security interests, Devecioglu said in an analysis published in June.
\n\n\n\nUnder the Ottoman Empire, Turks forged their own colonial saga in Africa yet today have brushed off that reputation and become one of China’s competitors on the continent – and a fresh face across France’s former colonial terrain. And in Britain’s old sphere, too: Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu made a state visit to Turkey in January.
\n\n\n\nThe public focus on Africa contrasts with Turkey’s low-key posture regarding the Iran war. Since the conflict pitting America and Israel against Iran erupted in late February, Turkey has operated on the margins of the crisis – at least visibly. State collapse in Iran could spill across Turkey’s borders in the form of refugees, unrest and diminished trade.
\n\n\n\nIn June, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan publicly urged the United States and Iran to halt a renewed wave of clashes and forge ahead with Pakistani-brokered peace negotiations. Turkey talks to both Washington and Tehran. Fidan and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the Iran conflict on May 22 during a NATO ministers meeting.
\n\n\n\nDisruptions in the oil-producing Persian Gulf have sharply increased fuel prices for airlines worldwide and may have contributed to a recent curbing of Turkish reach in Africa. Turkish Airlines has suspended service to several African destinations, including the Lusaka extension on a Dar es Salaam route, a planned twice weekly Monrovia, Liberia, stop on a flight to Accra and the Istanbul-Kinshasa-Luanda circular route, according to AeroRoutes. The changes were made quietly in updates to global flight schedules.
\n\n\n\nAction options: While Turkish trade with Africa remains a fraction of China’s trade flow, Turkish capabilities from tech to large-scale engineering to consumer goods make Turkey a viable alternative for deals and partnerships. A significant diplomatic and cultural footprint across Africa deepens connections.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid the conflict involving its neighbor Iran, Turkey is reaching out to Africa in a corridor from Libya to the Sahel, competing with China for trade, customers and influence.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443819,57443820,57443806,57443818,57443671,57443732,57443817],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-libya","tag-niger","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-turkey","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkey-Niger-leaders-Ankara-04JUN2026.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Turkey-Niger-leaders-Ankara-04JUN2026.jpg?fit=857%2C550&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Turkey shifts gaze toward Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
It will be years before trains roll across the Angola border bound for the Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito after whistling through Zambian mining hubs from Copperbelt to neighboring North-Western Province. Yet the wheels are turning on one of Africa’s most-watched projects as action shifts from maps and conference chatter to engineering, land acquisition – and financing.
\n\n\n\nThe financial scale and human impact are starting to emerge for the 340-mile stretch of the Lobito Corridor in Zambia, the heart of the initiative. Development and construction of the rail line and purchase of rolling stock will cost USD 3 billion to 5 billion, a range that will narrow once engineering and procurement progresses, says the Nigeria-based developer, Africa Finance Corporation. Plans call for construction to wrap up in 2030.
\n\n\n\nAn environmental and social impact assessment filed with the Zambian Government by Africa Finance also reveals that Lobito could uproot almost 3,000 households, or roughly 14,000 people who live in the path of the rail and trade corridor.
\n\n\n\n“Overall, the project is more likely to proceed than not,” says Stephen Nduvi, a Kenyan public policy analyst focused on regional integration. “The key question is no longer whether the corridor has strategic relevance, but whether stakeholders can mobilize the capital and institutional coordination needed to translate political ambition into physical infrastructure.”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Lobito is a geopolitical, economic and social transformation project rolled into one. It’s also a major attempt at African integration often touted in speeches yet prolonged in practice. The United States, European Union and Italy have publicly committed to turn the Lobito concept into reality, chiefly to create an Atlantic-facing mineral supply chain outside China’s control while diversifying the regional economy.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia have agreed to create a master plan and joint investment platform to stir up moneyed interest.
\n\n\n\n“This platform will support transport and logistics infrastructure that directly links the corridor to industrial yards, production zones and processing hubs, while also crowding in investment in agribusiness, energy, urban development and small and medium-sized enterprises,” Zambia’s Ministry of Finance and National Planning said following a recent coordination meeting in Angola.
\n\n\n\nAt a Luanda forum in May 2026, the EU helped match investors with bankable projects in agribusiness and transport logistics within the Angolan section of the Lobito Corridor.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Finance aims to lock down financing by the end of 2027, according to Reuters. In a push toward that goal, the U.S. Government’s development finance arm is loaning Lobito Atlantic Railway USD 553 million while the Development Bank of Southern Africa adds about USD 200 million, for upgrades to the crucial rail operation to and from the Lobito port visited by President Joe Biden in 2024.
\n\n\n\nOf special interest to leaders in Angola, Zambia and the DRC, whose copper and cobalt mining region forms part of the corridor, is whether Lobito becomes more than a minerals and transport play and stimulates agriculture, renewable energy and exports. Zambian officials promote this “land-linked” approach as the way to unlock Lobito’s true value. Angola is stepping up efforts to increase farm output across its vast, arable land. The DRC is working on better mineral trade logistics.
\n\n\n\nMuch has changed in the past 18 months. A late 2024 journey across the entire Zambian route, from Chingola, a city in the epicenter of copper mining, to sleepy Mwinilunga District in the northwestern corner of the country, where a trickle of water in a forest births the Zambezi River, revealed widespread ignorance about Lobito.
\n\n\n\nMayors and planning teams recounted hearing about Lobito from the news and visits by officials from the capital Lusaka yet couldn’t say what they would contribute or how the corridor might reshape their communities. Along the Angola border, however, work was under way on a Lobito crossing point into a Zambian chiefdom. And early investors were snapping up parcels of farmland.
\n\n\n\nDisplacing residents is always a fraught issue, and Lobito’s brain trust is still working out how resettlement would be carried out across a geography spanning hundreds of miles. The project has budgeted USD 7 million for relocation and resettlement compensation, or about USD 2,400 per household, and USD 1.5 million for “livelihood restoration activities.” The social impact assessment pledges to follow international guidelines and set up a way for residents to file and resolve complaints.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema and his top ministers have talked up Lobito, whose hype could influence domestic politics. The president is up for re-election in August 2026, with voters sizing up the country’s economy after severe drought, an energy crunch and a debt crisis. International Monetary Fund forecasters say Zambia’s economy will grow more than 4 percent in 2026 for the first time since 2023.
\n\n\n\nLobito responds to the need for infrastructure that Zambians cited in a 2024 Afrobarometer survey when asked to list government priorities. Another Zambian wish: better health care, a source of international friction.
\n\n\n\nLobito is building speed just as relations between Zambia and the United States seem to be derailing. In a scathing departure speech on April 30, 2026, U.S. Ambassador Michael Gonzales accused Zambian government officials of tolerating widespread corruption, allowing billions of dollars of “dirty money” to flow to East Asia untaxed, and covering up the long-term health toll for Zambians from the collapse of a tailings dam at a Chinese copper mine. Gonzales said that accident spilled “carcinogenic heavy metals” into the Kafue River ecosystem, according to the text of his remarks.
\n\n\n\nThe Zambian government called the envoy’s assertions “deeply regrettable” and said stalled talks over a “critical minerals” agreement relate to “the insistence of preferential treatment of U.S. companies” over access to Zambia’s mineral wealth and making health aid conditional on a minerals deal. Gonzales grumbled that his team couldn’t get Zambian officials to pick up the phone.
\n\n\n\nU.S. diplomats have hammered out agreements with 20 other African countries for public health aid conditional on benchmarks for improved care, access to long-term health data and investments by those countries. The sharing of data has sparked a backlash in some countries, and Zambia said data demands are another sticking point.
\n\n\n\nGonzales accused Zambian governments of failing to invest USD 7 billion in American aid since 2000 to create durable health service delivery. “When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight,” he said, blaming Zambian leaders for looking away while “officials diverted government funds to their own pockets.”
\n\n\n\nAs America spars with Zambia, artificial intelligence has entered the Lobito picture. Jacob Helberg, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic affairs, told a congressional hearing that his office is reviewing how America’s Pax Silica partners, including Japan, South Korea, Britain and Israel, could bring “new technologies” into Lobito and other trade corridors, “delivering speed, scale and certainty” to global suppliers.
\n\n\n\nPax Silica is a U.S.-led initiative to build “the AI ecosystem of tomorrow” encompassing advanced manufacturing and “minerals that feed” the AI industry, according to the State Department.
\n\n\n\nA study released in May 2026 by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based watchdog that counts Zambia as a member, cautioned that many factors must align to achieve the Lobito vision. “The Corridor could support local content, supplier development and downstream processing, but outcomes will depend on governance and policy decisions,” along with electricity, financing, infrastructure and industrial capacity, EITI said.
\n\n\n\nIn 2023, the Angolan arm of Portugal’s Mota-Engil Group won a 30-year concession to operate Lobito Atlantic Railway from Angola to the DRC. The greenfield Lobito rail line planned for Zambia will extend into Angola to connect to this line at Luacano.
\n\n\n\nA key issue is how much cargo these trains will carry. Estimates included in the Africa Finance assessment show that by 2041, about 859,000 tons of Zambian copper would travel on the route, less than a third of the country’s target output by the early 2030s. Zambian grain exports and petroleum imports are among other major volumes projected for Lobito.
\n\n\n\nBesides commercially viable freight volumes, Nduvi says, “coordination among the participating countries on customs procedures, regulations and railway operations will be critical to ensuring that the corridor functions as an integrated transport system.”
\n\n\n\nLobito faces competition from Namibia to the south. A road-and-rail route is being upgraded from Kolwezi in the DRC through Kalumbila District in Zambia, the hub of westward expansion of gold, copper and nickel mining, and onward to the Namibian port at Walvis Bay. That could cut transit times from mines to port from almost two weeks to five days. The Lobito rail option to Lobito from Kolwezi takes seven days.
\n\n\n\nTo revitalize the Namibia route, a USD 326 million partnership among the Zambian Government and companies including copper miner First Quantum Minerals is building a 230-mile toll road in western Zambia, from Mutanda in Kalumbila to Kaoma in Western Province. The Barotse Highway Limited Toll Concession seeks to improve a route that jolts drivers with potholes and stretches of rugged, hard-packed earth. An upgrade promises to smooth the region’s prospects.
\n\n\n\n“I could see what this would mean to our economy – growth and more growth” and jobs for young people, business opportunities, government revenue and even a less perilous journey for pregnant women racing to a clinic, President Hichilema said at the construction groundbreaking.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Investors interested in the Lobito Corridor should seek out Zambia’s district and provincial social and economic development plans (often posted online) to size up sectoral needs and government priorities along the route. Traditional leaders, or chiefs, influence land use and broader development in the region that Lobito will traverse. The chiefs’ affairs office in the North-Western Province administrative hub in Solwezi, Zambia, can help set up meetings with chiefdoms.
\n\n\n\n(Featured image: Barrick’s expanding Lumwana copper mine in Zambia’s North-Western Province.)
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Trevor Hublin was Benin country director for the U.S. Agency for International Development as field operations ended around the world last year. Romuald Wadagni, elected as president in April, will assume office on May 24, 2026. Ahead of his inauguration, the International Monetary Fund praised Benin’s “strong reform drive” and highlighted the “need to manage socio-political and security challenges” in the Ohio-sized nation of 15 million people.
\n\n\n\nWhat should we expect from Benin’s new leader Romuald Wadagni, educated at Harvard with years of experience at the international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, including in France, America and the Democratic Republic of Congo?
\n\n\n\nA lot of continuity with the outgoing government of President Patrice Talon. After all, Wadagni was Talon’s economy minister for his entire presidency, from 2016 to this year, and was the architect for Benin’s impressive economic reforms and economic growth, which is one of the highest in Africa, having achieved 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2025.
\n\n\n\nWhether we’re talking private or institutional investors, Benin has a very good track record in attracting foreign direct investment. And Wadagni knows how to do that through good macroeconomic management, through good fiscal restraint, ease of business policies. We should expect him to continue to have a heavy hand in steering the economy. Benin remains a poor country, ranked 173rd out of 193 countries and self-governing areas in the United Nations Human Development Index.
\n\n\n\nHe’s got work to do with poverty levels still at 36 percent. He needs to increase broad-based economic opportunity for Beninese citizens. I suspect that he will work hard to increase the productivity of the agricultural sector.
\n\n\n\nOn top of economic management and the focus on continued growth, he’s going to try to get on top of insecurity in the north of Benin, where he likely will have his biggest challenge. Because when we talk about insecurity at the hand of violent extremist groups coming from the Sahel region, Benin needs cooperation with the neighboring countries: Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Niger, yet only has the ability to coordinate effectively with Nigeria and has no communication, has broken off relations with its key neighbor Niger.
\n\n\n\nNevertheless, with the reinforced army presence up north, we should see more concerted action on his part to get on top of the high levels of violence at the community level – again, furthered by violent extremist groups – and stabilize the countryside as much as possible behind advances by the security forces, focusing on development needs.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-with-US-special-forces-2023-edit-1024x598.jpg?resize=720%2C420&ssl=1\")
Finally, will Wadagni loosen current severe restrictions on civil liberties on the political opposition and media in Benin? Over the past 12 years, the country has descended the ranks of democratic states and has become much more authoritarian, one party effectively leading the country and with civil liberties curtailed and key opposition politicians arrested by Talon. If Benin’s democratic environment remains closed, it could herald instability with the public in the future.
\n\n\n\nWadagni clearly thinks in terms bigger than Benin. Do you see him trying to scale up Benin’s ambitions or building regional economic connections?
\n\n\n\nYes. I expect him to come into the presidency with a bullish economic and investment agenda. What he is going to try to do and he has promised – you heard this on the campaign trail – is to maintain economic growth at 7 percent levels in the coming years. That would be an incredible achievement, putting Benin at the forefront of economic growth anywhere in Africa.
\n\n\n\nHe knows exactly what he’s going to need to do: Continue to build investor confidence, continue to raise, through foreign direct investment and through investor-friendly policies, investment in growth areas in the agriculture sector, in light industry, in tourism.
\n\n\n\nBenin is a small country. It’s only a $25 billion gross economy. So, he will need to continue to attract investment as well as favorable lending. And positively there, Benin’s got a great reputation through its sound macroeconomic management, including a budget deficit estimated at less than 3 percent of GDP in 2025. Fitch just gave Benin a B-plus credit rating and raised its outlook from stable to positive, which for lenders means Benin will be a good place to continue to lend to, and that will boost Wadagni’s forthcoming country development program.
\n\n\n\nThat program is going to focus heavily on infrastructure development, electrification, water and sanitation system development, port development, logistics – really trying to strengthen Benin’s reputation as a logistics hub for coastal West Africa. Benin actually has better macroeconomic financials than neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which has a much bigger economy.
\n\n\n\nHe’s going to try to focus on things like workforce development and to integrate young Beninese workers into new economic sectors that he hopes to stimulate, such as the digital sector, agroeconomic value chain and light industry.
\n\n\n\nBenin is Africa’s biggest cotton producer. What’s the impact of that on its economic choices and how the country’s politics work?
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, Benin did move up in terms of rankings in Africa to first place on total output in the cotton sector with a yield exceeding 630,000 tons. So that placed Benin ahead of its major competitor, which has been Mali. Benin’s magic in terms of cotton production has been to invest in the fundamentals of sustained growth year in, year out.
\n\n\n\nWhen we look at where Benin was a decade ago, the country produced about 150,000 tons a year of cotton. It has steadily increased yields through those years, which has been underpinned by several things: investment in mechanization, investment in seed quality, the governance of the sector, particularly in properly managing the territory and the farmable land for cotton.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-cotton-by-Cotton-Benin.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
What’s also making Benin special in cotton is that they are moving deliberately away from just production and farming into value addition and processing. In terms of metrics, in Benin over 12 percent of the total national output in cotton in the past year was being processed in textile facilities in Benin, particularly with the majority located in the country’s Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone, where cotton spinning and textile garment manufacturing happens.
\n\n\n\nNigeria showed off a big brother relationship with Benin by repelling a coup attempt last year. Did that action have bigger implications in terms of helping the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, restore policing of regional stability after the string of overthrows in the Sahel?
\n\n\n\nOn December 7, 2025, Benin was hit by a coup attempt. And at the time, there was a lot of fear that Benin would become another statistic, drawing on the coups that had happened in the Sahel region – Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – and elsewhere in the region over the past decade. And that didn’t happen. Benin activated ECOWAS’s response mechanisms and was able to get immediate military support from Nigeria in terms of decisive action in helping to thwart the coup attempt via aerial bombardments and air strikes. They got help from Nigeria, but they also got help from Côte d’Ivoire, another major regional power.
\n\n\n\nIt did show that ECOWAS was capable of standing up for its own member states in thwarting coup attempts and maintaining security. Again, this was not all as a result of Benin’s intervention. France was active during this crisis in terms of mobilizing support, particularly from Nigeria. But the thwarting of the coup has served to buttress a better degree of confidence in ECOWAS.
\n\n\n\nBenin’s military has suffered losses from the spillover of insurgent violence in the Sahel. Are the coastal states in West Africa still vulnerable or are we seeing any hopeful signs?
\n\n\n\n2025 marked the worst year in terms of violent attacks and civilian casualties in Benin. It is very linked to patterns of regional violence sponsored, fomented by violent Islamist extremist groups that have their bases primarily in Burkina Faso but also Nigeria and Niger. The main terrorist group that threatens Benin is al-Qaeda and its regional affiliate known as JNIM. For this terrorist group, Benin has really since 2019 been regarded as a point of transit for the flow of weapons and resources, sustaining their insurgency and terrorist activities in the wider region.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Pendjari-national-park-edit-1.jpg?resize=720%2C451&ssl=1\")
Benin forms the link between Nigeria in the east and Burkina Faso in the west. When we talk about illegal commerce – fuel smuggling, the smuggling of cattle or other black market economic sustainment methods – Benin occupies a very strategic place geographically and economically for al-Qaeda. That is why the two most northern departments, Alibori and Atakora, which abut two major national parks, find themselves in a tough position. For several years, that has served as a base area for insurgent groups to permit them to control the region between the Sahel and the northern parts of coastal West Africa.
\n\n\n\nAl-Qaeda has not recruited heavily from within Benin compared to other countries. They draw the majority of their fighters from Sahelian countries. They haven’t established a firm anchor in the communities yet, which gives the Beninese government opportunities to reestablish governance, control and state legitimacy.
\n\n\n\nWith France in retreat in West Africa, where does a country like Benin turn for support for economic guidance and capital for its development?
\n\n\n\nBenin is one of France’s closest allies anywhere in Africa, particularly in French-speaking West Africa. And that will continue during the presidency of Wadagni. He has long personal connections to France, he was educated in France, so he’s not going to change that relationship with France for support. Rather, what we’re going to see is continued work to diversify support for Benin. For example, Benin has courted investment and good relations with countries in the Middle East and the Islamic world.
\n\n\n\nAs well, we will see Benin continue to try to build relationships with the United States, other countries in Europe, and certainly among its neighbors such as Ghana, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nBased on your time in Benin, how would you advise investors to approach the country?
\n\n\n\nThis is a great country to invest in because of its sound macroeconomic fundamentals and its business-friendly environment. Your first stop as an investor is to contact the Beninese investment promotion agency, Agence de Promotion des Investissements et des Exportations (APIEX), which serves as a primary gateway for foreign investors. In Benin, to register a business really takes about one day now. Permitting is relatively easy. Approvals for licenses happen quickly.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-GDIZ-park.jpg?resize=720%2C514&ssl=1\")
The other thing that you should expect, especially for investors in agro-business sectors, is to become aware quickly of the country’s premier industrial free-trade zone, the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone. Since 2022, and under the leadership of Wadagni, Benin has set up a 1,600-hectare special economic zone to transform raw agricultural materials – particularly cotton, cashews and fruit – into value-added, refined and processed materials ready for export. The firm that manages the zone is known as Arise, and they have received high marks.
\n\n\n\nTourism is a big interest of the government, particularly in southern Benin, historical tourism along the coast. Benin now has many festivals celebrating its unique cultural heritage. New hotel resorts, including the first international five-star hotel chain with Sofitel hotels, have now opened in the capital city Cotonou. Business law is supported, and you have commercial courts in operation that facilitate adjudicating disputes. You’re going to have a very investor-friendly environment to take advantage of out there.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: Wadagni by Presidency of Benin.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romuald Wadagni, the new president of Africa's biggest cotton grower, will pursue a bold plan to diversify a surging economy, says an expert on Benin.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":1798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443688,57443810,57443742,57443722,57443811,57443671,57443812],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-agribusiness","tag-benin","tag-france","tag-nigeria","tag-ports","tag-top","tag-west-africa","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg?fit=765%2C478&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Benin readies a ‘bullish’ agenda\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Great reads can enrich your learning about economic and political change and investments and inform your travels across Africa. This curated list of essential nonfiction books on Africa will help you gain a deeper understanding of African societies and economies, crucial history and key heroes and villains. You’ll find best sellers possibly already on your shelf, yet also lesser known gems that deserve a bigger audience. Tell us about your favorites and other books that top your reading list and perhaps should sneak onto ours.
\n\n\n\nDark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). This is the ultimate road trip for the celebrated American travel writer, as he ventures across some of Africa’s most challenging terrain (including remote and rugged parts of Ethiopia I’ve traversed), navigates baffling cultures and bumps into fond memories from his youthful days as a teacher in Uganda. Follow it up with Theroux’s sequel sojourn from Cape Town, South Africa, to Luanda, Angola: The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Sharp, funny and full of insights, even for those of us who have spent years slogging across Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor, by Martin Meredith (Public Affairs, 2014). For thousands of years, outsiders have coveted Africa’s natural treasures, starting with gold, ivory and copper. Grain from North Africa fed the Romans. Humans, too, became a prize. Enslaved Africans by the millions crossed the Atlantic to produce sugar and cotton, building the economies of the New World while enriching Europeans. Meredith, a British journalist with long experience in Africa, offers an essential survey of its wealth and pursuers. This is a tale of adventurers, despots and thieves with themes alive in our time. (Pair this with Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (Public Affairs, 2005). The first half-century of Africa’s independence era is such a rollicking, scandalous and often mind-blowing saga of power-mongering outrages that you’ll think these tales must be fiction.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Great stories that will greatly inform your business and travel.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Mandela-at-ILC-in-1990-by-ILO-edit.jpg?resize=720%2C478&ssl=1\")
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela (Little Brown, 1994). A trip to South Africa’s Robben Island in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Town on Mandela’s 93rd birthday delivered an emotional high point in my early Africa travels. The island prison is where the activist-lawyer and other foes of apartheid, the system of racial separation imposed by white nationalists, spent years toiling in the blinding rays of a bleached-white quarry. Robben Island also became an informal political academy where South Africa’s multiracial, democratic future took shape. Mandela, freed in 1990 (I heard him speak in Atlanta a few months later, electrifying a packed stadium), became president in 1994 in South Africa’s first democratic election. This is the story of his journey from a fugitive to prisoner to inspiration of the world.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Understanding modern Africa’s transformative leader gives you talking points anywhere, especially in the “rainbow nation,” South Africa.
\n\n\n\nMonsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, by Robert Kaplan (Random House, 2010). If Kaplan is right, the 21st century will play out around the ocean that the past century mostly ignored. And it is very much an African ocean. From the East African coast to Oman, across to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and down into Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, in Kaplan’s telling, is the arena of every hope and danger. Africa is reconnecting to the Indian Ocean realm, reflected in the increasing political and economic interest of India and Indonesia in the growing markets of sub-Saharan Africa. Turn to Kaplan’s keen eye and immersive writing to understand how Africa fits into this epic shift.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Kaplan exposes crucial cultural connections to help you glimpse the future of Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, by Meave Leakey, with Samira Leakey (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). Africa birthed humanity, and the area around Lake Turkana in arid northern Kenya is where the evolutionary drama of our ancestors unfolded across a billion days. Few people know this terrain better than legendary paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey, who spent decades with husband Richard and Kenyan colleagues making landmark fossil discoveries. Starting from her arrival in 1965 as a young researcher, Leakey brings this enthralling quest to life in crisp and often deeply personal prose.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Sediments is a thrilling, informative journey into Africa’s role in human origins.
\n\n\n\nThe Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth, by Tom Burgis (Public Affairs, 2015). A new era is dawning for Africa’s mining powers such as Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo as global demand surges for green-energy mineral wealth, ranging from copper, cobalt and nickel to “rare earth” terbium and niobium, all destined for electric vehicles, wind turbines and even artificial intelligence. With skill, luck and responsible political will, the story could play out far better than Africa’s savage extractive exploits in the past century. Burgis, writing as a Financial Times correspondent in Africa, uncovers how transnational elites from mining companies to lawyers to African power brokers plundered impoverished countries suffering from the “resource curse” of abundant oil, gold and industrial minerals. (Also consider Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s Press, 2023) on the human suffering required to extract an essential metal for electric-vehicle batteries and other technologies.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Exposes what has gone on behind the curtain – and what needs to change.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Barrick-HH-expansion.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1\")
Unbowed: A Memoir, by Wangari Maathai (Turtleback Books, 2007). This Kenyan crusader was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. Maathai started an up-from-the-dirt campaign in 1977 called the Green Belt Movement to reverse deforestation and encourage rural women to plant trees and think about their lives and communities in ecological terms. Maathai, who died in 2011, saw tree planting as an expression of democracy, the rights of women and international solidarity. As the Nobel Committee put it: “She thinks globally and acts locally.”
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Maathai reveals the power of African women to shape social change.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Since 1940: The Past of the Present, by Frederick Cooper (Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2019). You need a benchmark modern history of Africa, and Cooper delivers. The American historian based at Columbia University chooses the Second World War as a more meaningful starting point for understanding contemporary Africa than the independence era two decades later. That makes sense, because the war stirred embers of change that ignited in the 1950s, when African political liberation gained ground. As battered colonial overlords Britain and France faltered, the U.S. began to grasp the reach of its postwar superpowers.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Enjoy an informed perspective on the years when American influence blossomed.
\n\n\n\nInside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter, by Zohra Drif (Just World Books, 2017). When France granted independence to almost all its African colonies in 1960, President Charles de Gaulle was still locked in a brutal war to keep Algeria. First published in French in 2013, this is the account of the young Algerians who fought the French, told from the perspective of Drif and her female comrades. Their resistance was portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. France’s defeat in Vietnam and the independence struggles of Tunisia, Morocco and Madagascar showed Drif and her politically aware friends in the 1950s that “France was not invincible.”
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Understand French colonialism in Africa through the eyes of Muslim women.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Battle-of-Algiers-Djamila-Bouazza-22-ans.jpg?resize=698%2C720&ssl=1\")
White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams (Public Affairs, 2021). The British academic sleuth reveals how U.S. covert action during the Cold War reconstituted colonial-style influence over nations including Congo after Britain, France and Belgium relinquished direct rule. White Malice is a sequel of sorts to Who Killed Hammarskjold?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa (Hurst and Co., 2011), Williams’ ground-breaking investigation into the weird and shocking death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammerskjold in a 1961 plane crash a few miles short of the airport in today’s Ndola, Zambia, then British-ruled Northern Rhodesia. The crash, which reeks of foul play, came during a diplomatic mission at the height of a Cold War standoff in mineral-rich, neighboring Congo and remains officially unsolved.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: While America promoted itself as a champion of African liberation and democracy, Cold Warriors had different ideas.
\n\n\n\nKing Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). This best seller has become the go-to account of colonial atrocities against Africans, focused on the devious plundering of Belgium’s King Leopold II. While the monarch portrayed himself as a benefactor of impoverished Africans, courageous European crusaders led by Edmund Morel, an English shipping-line employee of “nearly superhuman energy,” uncovered the truth: Leopold was enslaving the Congolese to steal rubber and ivory and killing millions in the quest. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold’s “Congo Free State” was an epicenter of horrors that, once exposed, galvanized a global response, including from celebrities of the day such as the American writer Mark Twain. Hochschild recovers this epic story for our time and conscience.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Hochschild humanizes a shocking and essential story with indelible portraits of the heroes and villains.
\n\n\n\nBorn in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard French (Liveright, 2021). The former New York Times correspondent recasts Africa from sideshow to the main stage of history during the past five centuries as the “Atlantic world” emerged. Among the fascinating accounts within is how the tiny island of Sao Tomé off the west-central African mainland near present-day Nigeria and Gabon served as Portugal’s testing ground for what would become the most consequential, lucrative and brutal economic model of that era: the enslavement of Africans to toil on sugar plantations in the Americas.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: French connects the historical dots and illuminates the path to today’s Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom, and Healing, by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah (Astra House, 2022). The self-described pan-African feminist author from Ghana introduces women seeking a joyful approach to sexual liberation while navigating a world of cultural traps. “African women grapple with the trauma of sexual abuse, and resist religious and patriarchal edicts in order to assert their sexual power and agency,” Sekyiamah writes. “They do this by questioning and resisting societal norms while creating new norms and narratives that allow them to be who they truly are.” Based on conversations with women from 31 countries and infused with the spirit of her blog, “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women,” here is modern Africa pulled from the shadows.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A revealing look at a profound social topic often treated as taboo.
\n\n\n\nDo Not Disturb, by Mikaela Wrong (Public Affairs, 2021). Post-genocide Rwanda has earned deserved acclaim for its push toward innovation and higher living standards. From drones ferrying blood supplies, to a satellite in space that monitors water and farming, and the African campus of a famed American engineering university, Carnegie Mellon, Rwanda impresses as a can-do nation. Less known is how the government led by Paul Kagame treats political foes and former colleagues deemed disloyal. Wrong, a journalist who has exposed corruption in Kenya and the last days of a kleptocratic dictator in Zaire (Congo), dissects the murder in South Africa of Rwanda’s exiled former spy chief. Along the way, Wrong endures a cyberattack and hides her laptop in a laundry basket out of fear for the long arm of Rwanda. (To understand Kagame’s vision for his country, see A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, by Stephen Kinzer (Trade Paper Press, 2008), a former New York Times correspondent.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Offers an unflinching view of the flip side of Rwanda’s much-hyped transformation.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Kenya-stamp-1963-Jomo-Kenyatta.jpeg?resize=582%2C490&ssl=1\")
Facing Mount Kenya, by Jomo Kenyatta (Vintage Books, 1965). Before he was Kenya’s independence leader and first president, Jomo Kenyatta studied anthropology in London under Bronislaw Malinowski, a giant in the field. This is Kenyatta’s classic account of his people, the Gikuyu (Kikuyu) who live around their spiritual totem, Kere-Nyaga, what today we call Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-tallest peak. Kenyatta, whose son Uhuru (Freedom) served as Kenya’s fourth president, offers one of the most readable and revealing portraits of an indigenous African culture before the arrival of Europeans. First published in 1938, this intimate guide explains how the Gikuyu managed land and governed themselves, conducted business and educated their children in knowledge of the world and social customs of the community, from family ties to the sex life of young people.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Absorb yourself in the rich heritage of Kenya’s most influential people.
\n\n\n\nWhat Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule, by Max Siollun (Hurst, 2021). That “Nigeria” was a name suggested in 1897 by Flora Shaw, a famous colonial-affairs newspaper editor in London, tells you something about the unnatural journey of this amalgam of a country, Africa’s most populous. (Shaw later married colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, who did much to assemble Nigeria’s uneasy cultural hodgepodge.) The British Empire’s violent rule and manipulation of African peoples is coming into focus thanks to deeply researched reappraisals of benign colonial portrayals. Siollun, an historian, adds to this fresh scholarship with an acclaimed look at the economic exploitation, indigenous resistance, and influence of missionaries in the 60 years or so that Britain lorded over this land. (You’ll also want to grab the excellent Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), a deep dive into history, power, ecology, social conflict and corruption.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: This nuanced Nigerian perspective gives you more to ponder than the society dramas pumped out by Nollywood.
\n\n\n\nDictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, by Paul Kenyon (Head of Zeus, 2018). A BBC documentary filmmaker captures bizarre tales of Africa’s post-colonial leaders in this lively account that the Financial Times called a “grimly fascinating” narrative. “Suddenly indigenous rulers were in control of the precious resources that had previously been in the hands of London, Madrid, Lisbon and Paris,” Kenyon writes. “Most were unprepared for governance.” The treasure was gold, diamonds, oil, copper and even cocoa, the key ingredient of chocolate. For each, Kenyon delves vividly into the situation “before the dictators,” then zeroes in on the countries implicated: for oil, he looks at Nigeria, Libya and Equatorial Guinea, a tiny, Spanish-speaking nation ruled by a single family, where the UN says 70 percent of people live in poverty.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: These stories from Africa’s era of official thievery surpass fiction.
\n\n\n\nThomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa, by Brian J. Peterson (Indiana University Press, 2021). Among the most fascinating leaders that Africa has produced in the past 50 years is Sankara, who came to power in 1983 in Upper Volta, a former French colony he renamed Burkina Faso, meaning “Land of Honest People.” Sankara pursued a radical, pro-poor agenda that supported the rights of women, replenished forests and demanded that officials reveal their finances. Peterson’s definitive account draws on diplomatic cables and interviews with more than 100 of Sankara’s friends, family members and comrades. Alas, Sankara met a fate that visited many African leaders in that period: violent overthrow – and death at age 37 at the hands of his friend Blaise Campaoré, who ruled for 27 years.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A standout biography of an African leader still revered across the continent.
\n\n\n\nBlack Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999). America’s harsh encounter with post-Cold War Africa begins in Somalia with the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. After victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Kuwait in 1991, America’s military descended into the madness of urban warfare with Somali warlords, amid an international peacekeeping operation meant to rescue Somalia from famine. The fierce clash killed 18 soldiers and more than 500 Somalis and made America skittish about committing forces elsewhere on the continent. Bowden’s intense account became an action movie in 2002 and won two Academy Awards.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A classic look at the limits of American power in unfamiliar places.
\n\n\n\nThe Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel, edited by Leonardo A. Villalon (Oxford University Press, 2021). Have you heard of the Sahel, yet aren’t quite sure what or where it is? Villalon, a University of Florida scholar of African studies, marshals a team of experts to tell you more than you ever dreamed about this semiarid, seductive and coup-prone region between the Sahara Desert and the tropical savannas to the south. Futurists see this area as full of potential in renewable energy, to name just one dream. Weighing in at 832 pages and 3.5 pounds (1.5 kilograms), with a triple-digit price to match, this feast of essays spans politics, climate-change impacts, governance challenges and social and cultural changes across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. Don’t set foot deep in the Sahel without it.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Heft this volume for insights into an opaque yet increasingly important region.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IMG_1414.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
Namib: The Archeology of an African Desert, by John Kinahan (University of Namibia Press, 2020). While not a conventional travel guide, this exceptional book is one you’ll want to tote around on trips to southwestern Africa or simply enjoy from your comfy chair. Kinahan deftly mixes science with scenery, painting a vivid picture of a million years of human endurance and connection in this desert domain. In this sense, Kinahan tells a universal story of resilience – one he knows well from decades of field research across this vast terrain. With stunning drawings of ancient rock art that complement his graceful though never confounding narrative, Kinahan has created a classic account of deep-time Africa.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Humans are incredible and here’s why.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These 21 essential nonfiction books on Africa will help you gain a deeper understanding of African societies and economies, crucial history and key heroes and villains. Curated for travelers, investors and entrepreneurs, these are the great reads on Africa.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696,57443694],"tags":[57443720,57443704,57443723,57443712,57443705,57443679,57443726,57443722,57443721,57443725,57443724,57443719,57443671],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","category-societies","tag-algeria","tag-books","tag-burkina-faso","tag-drc","tag-history","tag-kenya","tag-namibia","tag-nigeria","tag-rwanda","tag-sahel","tag-somalia","tag-south-africa","tag-top","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?fit=1024%2C768&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"21 best books on Africa for you\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
I would add The Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Olopade calls for a shift in our thinking about Africa, challenging us all to recognize that Africans have the best understanding of how to solve their own problems & create opportunity.
\n"},"link":"https://cms.afrologi.com/2025/08/09/africa-best-books/comment-page-1/#comment-17","type":"comment","author_avatar_urls":{"24":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c6727731749d09874f8e8c381238f50598cd7232098d2653f6490d5869c93977?s=24&d=identicon&r=g","48":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c6727731749d09874f8e8c381238f50598cd7232098d2653f6490d5869c93977?s=48&d=identicon&r=g","96":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c6727731749d09874f8e8c381238f50598cd7232098d2653f6490d5869c93977?s=96&d=identicon&r=g"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"post_type":"post","href":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/66"}]}}]],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"id":389,"date":"2025-08-06T21:25:13","slug":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-5","type":"attachment","link":"https://cms.afrologi.com/2025/08/09/africa-best-books/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-5/","title":{"rendered":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african"},"author":144169648,"featured_media":0,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https://wp.me/afpPOl-6h","caption":{"rendered":"excerpt"},"alt_text":"","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/png","media_details":{"width":1024,"height":768,"file":"2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png","filesize":1325031,"sizes":{"medium":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-300x225.png","width":300,"height":225,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?fit=300%2C225&ssl=1"},"thumbnail":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-150x150.png","width":150,"height":150,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1"},"medium_large":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-768x576.png","width":768,"height":576,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?fit=720%2C540&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-portrait-large":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-900x768.png","width":900,"height":768,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=900%2C768&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-landscape-medium":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-800x600.png","width":800,"height":600,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=800%2C600&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-portrait-medium":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-600x768.png","width":600,"height":768,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=600%2C768&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-square-medium":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-800x768.png","width":800,"height":768,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=800%2C768&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-landscape-intermediate":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-600x450.png","width":600,"height":450,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=600%2C450&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-portrait-intermediate":{"file":"please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4-450x600.png","width":450,"height":600,"virtual":true,"mime_type":"image/png","source_url":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?resize=450%2C600&ssl=1"},"newspack-article-block-square-intermediate":{"file"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first glance, the news out of Yaoundé, Cameroon, looked insignificant for integrated trade and investment across Africa, involving about 70 million people, or less than 5 percent of the continent’s population.
\n\n\n\nYet on closer inspection, the decision in early July 2026 by the Bank of Central African States to join the emerging Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, a long name for a shorter route, could be an intriguing catalyst for global investors, logistics operators and strategic planners.
\n\n\n\nKnown by its French initials, BEAC is one of Africa’s two regional central banks, issuing the Central African CFA franc across Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Oil production is a common denominator for five of these six countries – only CAR lacks crude. And only Equatorial Guinea escaped colonial French rule and speaks Spanish, imprinting “Banco de Los Estados de Africa Central” on the CFA banknote.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: In one move, the pan-African clearing network, commonly called PAPSS, grew its base of African markets by almost 30 percent, to 28 countries. Yvon Sana Bangui, governor of BEAC, said “the active involvement of the financial sector” is what gives PAPSS its clout and will enable faster and cheaper cross-border payments in central Africa. Transactions can settle in real time in local currencies without a non-African currency in the middle.
\n\n\n\nTo understand the weight of this development, look at how intra-African trade historically functioned. If a business in Douala, a coastal city in Cameroon, wanted to import cosmetics from Nigeria, the transaction probably couldn’t happen directly. The importer had to convert CFA francs into U.S. dollars or euros, send the funds through correspondent banks in New York or perhaps Paris, and convert those dollars or euros into Nigerian naira.
\n\n\n\nThis dollar detour across continents introduces fees, settlement delays, frustration and a strange dependence on offshore banks. A simple transaction across a shared border in Africa turns into a global financial expedition. Of course, there are workarounds, from smuggling goods to using gold to transacting in digital currencies.
\n\n\n\nIf your deal needs to travel a well-trod route, however, you might end up in America. One of those New York-based correspondent banks used for decades, Citibank, has argued that payment systems alone won’t boost trade flows if compatible financial rules and efficient payment infrastructure aren’t in place. Bad data moving slowly remains a risk.
\n\n\n\n“At the heart of the issue is the so-called last mile, the final stretch of a cross-border payment that too often bottlenecks due to incompatible financial systems, basic errors in payment data that go unchecked, or regulatory divergence between countries that delay or block transactions outright,” Citi said in a 2025 paper on cross-border African payments.
\n\n\n\nEswatini Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg, who chairs an African Union committee on finance and economic integration, recently said balancing “core principles” with national needs and ensuring payments integration works for people and business, not just institutions, are top challenges. “These are not abstract questions,” he told a meeting of central bankers and regulators in April 2026. “They will determine whether a trader in Eswatini can pay a supplier in Ghana.”
\n\n\n\nAfrican banks and other financial institutions with settlement accounts at a central bank are known as “direct participants” of PAPSS. They agree to a pre-funding arrangement to ensure money is available before the split-second crediting and debiting of accounts, according to PAPSS. An advanced messaging system offers visibility into the transaction path, while net settlement across all participating central banks occurs daily at 11:00 universal time.
\n\n\n\nMike Ogbalu, former CEO of Nigerian payment card Verve, has run PAPSS since 2021 after its creation by Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank, better known as Afreximbank. For an emblem, PAPSS adopted a stylized rendering of a cowrie shell – Africa’s ancient and widely accepted trade currency.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Pushing PAPSS into the heart of Africa may have broader impact. While Republic of Congo, CAR and Chad aren’t booming economies, these countries and others in the monetary union linked to BEAC cover an enormous geography. They act as a land bridge between east and west.
\n\n\n\nAn even bigger step would be adding the other CFA-issuing central bank, covering eight countries in West Africa, including Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal. An official of Dakar-based Central Bank of West African States said the institution plans to test PAPSS with more than 80 banks in its region, according to the Ecofin news agency.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: Douala, Cameroon, by Xavier Messina / Pexels)
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So far from mainland Africa that an airliner takes four hours to find this emerald speck in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius is tangled up in geopolitical disputes far beyond its control.
\n\n\n\nThe war in Iran and the Persian Gulf is already hurting – annual economic growth in Mauritius, one of Africa’s richest countries, is likely to slip below 3 percent for the first time since the pandemic – and could cause more pain. In a prolonged Middle East conflict, the economy “would be impacted significantly,” says a just-released International Monetary Fund staff analysis.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Mauritius is more than a destination for sunseekers. It is fast becoming a key financial gateway to Africa, especially from Asia. Major trade agreements with China and India have anchored its status as an entryway to the continent-wide free trade area. Ebene Cybercity draws companies focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain. And an international finance center enables investors and wealth managers to take advantage of streamlined corporate and tax frameworks.
\n\n\n\nThe latest arrival in Mauritius is the African Union-backed Africa Credit Rating Agency, meant to overcome what its champions see as an annoying and costly international bias in assessing African risks. The startup is setting up from an HQ in Mauritius. The AU said Mauritius was chosen because of its “strong governance standards, robust financial sector and commitment to regional integration and economic good governance.”
\n\n\n\nAfter hopes for peace blossomed in June 2026, Iran and the United States are trading fire once more around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital chokepoint for global energy supplies. Crude oil retreated below USD 100 a barrel to around USD 72 in early July yet is climbing again – orbiting USD 85 in mid-July. Iran’s July 18 attack on Jordan, which killed U.S. military personnel defending against drone and ballistic missile strikes, may rekindle global economic anxiety.
\n\n\n\nReduced tourism, higher oil prices and rising inflation would slash economic growth in the downside scenario envisioned by IMF staff due to a prolonged Iran war. The country’s public debt would balloon past 90 percent of GDP, considered a growth-crimping danger zone. That prediction is based on oil at USD 124 a barrel, close to the highest price crude reached during the most intense fighting in April 2026. Authorities in Mauritius “are considering multiple war‑related scenarios,” according to the IMF report, released in mid-July.
\n\n\n\nSince the May visit of an IMF team to confer with officials in Mauritius and size up the country’s situation, the IMF has trimmed its 2026 economic growth forecast for the island nation to 2.8 percent from 3.4 percent predicted in April.
\n\n\n\nSoftening the blow from the Middle East are proposed British payments for 99 years to Mauritius for use of the strategic air base at Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands that Britain has agreed to turn over to Mauritius. Yet that flow of funds is in limbo due to U.S. objections. For six decades the archipelago has belonged to British Indian Ocean Territory while being open to use by U.S. long-range bombers from a runway on Diego Garcia. This island-as-base is within striking distance of Iran and Yemen.
\n\n\n\nThe payments in today’s money to Mauritius would add up to about GBP 3.4 billion, or roughly USD 4.5 billion, according to a U.K. parliamentary report. Under the treaty with Mauritius, Britain agreed to pay GBP 165 million (about USD 220 million) in each of the first three years of the arrangement, GBP 120 million (USD 160 million) annually for the next 10 years, and the same sum, adjusted for inflation, for the remaining years.
\n\n\n\nBritain also consented to pay GBP 40 million to capitalize a trust fund for Chagos islands residents and GBP 45 million a year for 25 years to Mauritius for economic development investments.
\n\n\n\n“On the upside, the ratification of the Chagos agreement would deliver a revenue windfall and allow for faster debt reduction,” the IMF staff said, “while an easing of geopolitical tensions could support a recovery in tourism and help lower inflation.”
\n\n\n\nAction options: With GDP per capita approaching USD 14,000, a jobless rate at 6 percent and low inflation, Mauritius has economic strength that most African policy makers crave. That adds up to resilience and still makes the island nation an appealing launch pad for ambitions on the African mainland. A visit to Mauritius can help assess incentives on offer and how to use them.
\n\n\n\nJust be prepared for geopolitical shifts in distant capitals. The U.S. State Department expressed support for Britain’s Chagos deal on February 17, 2026, before scheduled talks with officials in Mauritius. Yet on his social media feed the next day, President Donald Trump called the deal a “big mistake,” and reversed U.S. policy.
\n\n\n\nThat has scuttled the British handover for now amid fears that China may seize a foothold on these oceanic dots of territory. The United States has refused to amend a 1966 treaty with Britain that covers the islands, forcing U.K. officials to suspend action on enabling legislation for the Chagos accord, according to The Guardian newspaper.
\n\n\n\nRebeccah Heinrichs, an expert on strategic military deterrence at the Hudson Institute think tank, wrote earlier this year that “leasing the base while handing over sovereignty to a Chinese partner is courting trouble.” Heinrichs pointed to China’s loans to Mauritius and possible Chinese high-tech surveillance of the islands, including Diego Garcia.
\n\n\n\nAfter the shelving of the plan, Dhananjay Ramful, the Mauritian foreign minister, insisted that his government remained committed to the handover. “We will spare no effort to seize any diplomatic or legal avenue to complete the decolonization process,” he said, in comments at a conference in Mauritius reported by British newspapers. “This is a matter of justice.”
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: An iconic view of Mauritius rising from the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles from mainland Africa, by Dominik Ruhl / Pexels)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa's financial gateway in the distant Indian Ocean, and a tourism paradise, is facing economic trouble from the faraway conflict between Iran and the United States and its Gulf allies.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443706,57443777,57443825,57443671,57443702,57443826,57443684],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-fintech","tag-mauritius","tag-top","tag-tourism","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mauritius-Pexels-by-Dominik-Ruhl.jpg?fit=1920%2C1250&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"War clouds Africa’s sunny money gateway\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
An East African country eager to escape fallout from deadly political unrest and embrace a pivotal role in critical minerals and Indian Ocean trade has unlocked a timely boost from the largest African development lender. It may signal that some governments are ready to do business again with Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan even as her government confronts possible far-reaching U.S. sanctions.
\n\n\n\nIn a five-year strategy for Tanzania quietly released on July 6, 2026, as the world was distracted by the World Cup and a NATO summit in Turkey, the African Development Bank proposed financial support including loans to Tanzania worth USD 1.9 billion between now and 2028 for transport and water and sanitation projects and to boost job creation in agribusiness and energy. An estimated USD 1.4 billion in co-financing from development partners will supplement the bank’s support.
\n\n\n\nTanzania has faced a global backlash for suppressing the country’s opposition and deploying security forces against protesting Tanzanians during and after elections in 2025 in which Hassan was declared the victor. An investigative commission said in April 2026 that at least 518 people were killed in election-related clashes yet refrained from assigning blame. Amnesty International has demanded the release of the panel’s report.
\n\n\n\nAs part of a petition in 2025 to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open a case, a South African NGO, the Madrid Bar Association, World Jurist Association and unidentified Tanzanian civil society activists accused the government of killing as many as 3,000 people, according to the South African newspaper Daily Maverick.
\n\n\n\nYet while offering its lending plan, the bank flagged the political risks of the moment and – unusual for its financing deals – intends to help strengthen civil society organizations and “deepen policy dialogue on governance reforms.”
\n\n\n\nWhile Tanzania is among Africa’s fastest growing economies, expanding about 6 percent a year with energy supplies, minerals to tap, and emerging trade and transport links into central Africa, the 2025 political shock threatens to do even more damage.
\n\n\n\nThe U.S. Senate is considering a bill that would require a comprehensive review of relations, including ties with China that put America at a disadvantage and, of more immediate peril to Hassan, the naming of senior government and ruling party officials linked to a range of abuses. The bill cites abductions and harassment of political foes, journalists and activists; religious repression; censorship and extrajudicial killings, all meant to keep Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) firmly in power.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: The proposed U.S. review could lead to visa revocations, aid cuts and a prohibition on asset transactions in the United States or involving U.S. persons under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Given the weight of the United States in the global financial system, such penalties could have much broader implications for Tanzania.
\n\n\n\nIntroduced by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and prominent Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, the bill describes the October 29, 2025, election as “fraudulent and illegitimate” and accuses Tanzanian security forces of killing hundreds of protesters. Moreover, the bill states, their actions “endangered the lives of United States citizens and tourists visiting the country.”
\n\n\n\nOn June 17, the Foreign Relations Committee advanced the bill with bipartisan support to the full Senate for consideration. The bill asserts that “it is in the national security interests of the United States to help counter democratic backsliding of key partner nations where the United States has supplied billions of dollars worth of investment, development, humanitarian assistance, and security partnerships.”
\n\n\n\nIn the weeks after the election, deployments of security personnel increased in urban areas in Tanzania, along with “warnings issued to businesses, restrictions imposed on fuel sales and surveillance of digital communications,” the UN Human Rights Commission has said, cautioning that these measures “risk inflaming public tension and significantly undermine the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and participation in public affairs.”
\n\n\n\nICC Deputy Prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang met with Tanzania’s foreign minister along with other African officials at the African Union summit in February 2026, according to an ICC statement. Without naming any countries or incidents, Niang said a “sense of impunity” around the world is fueling “atrocity crimes.”
\n\n\n\nIn May 2026, the U.S. State Department barred Tanzanian Police Force Senior Assistant Commissioner Faustine Jackson Mafwele from entering the United States based on what the State Department described as “credible information” he was involved in the detention, torture and sexual assault of Ugandan Agather Atuhaire and Kenyan Boniface Mwangi by police officials. The activists had traveled to Dar es Salaam to observe a court hearing linked to treason charges against opposition leader Tundu Lissu.
\n\n\n\nTanzania’s precarious situation is wrapped in a climate of fear at home and sensitivity outside the country. An executive with deep knowledge about Tanzania’s economy declined to comment out of concern those views might antagonize the government. The Senate measure would require the singling out of government officials implicated in “the use of transnational repression tactics that target foreign nationals, Tanzanian citizens, and diaspora members regionally and internationally.”
\n\n\n\nPolitical risks aren’t all that troubles Tanzania’s trajectory. “Tanzania’s overarching development challenge is limited competitiveness and slow structural transformation, reflected in low productivity, persistent poverty, inequality, and high youth unemployment,” the African Development Bank said in its strategy.
\n\n\n\nThe United States has pointed to Tanzania’s mineral wealth as a driver of the African nation’s future prosperity and important to the supply chain for America and its allies. Gold, copper, iron ore, nickel, cobalt and silver are among Tanzania’s horde of valuable minerals. Graphite, important for electric vehicle batteries and renewable-energy storage, and niobium, used in superconducting magnets, are attracting investment.
\n\n\n\n“The transition to a low-carbon economy is creating unprecedented demand for critical minerals,” the president of the Institution of Engineers Tanzania, Asa Mwaipopo, told a meeting in June 2026 at the University of Dar es Salaam, according to the university. “Tanzania is well-positioned to benefit, but success will depend on how effectively we transform these resources into broader economic opportunities” and expand mineral prospecting.
\n\n\n\nThe Tanzanian government has shifted attention toward economic good news. Rished Bade, acting deputy permanent secretary of the Ministry of Finance, told a UN forum on development financing in April 2026 that Tanzania was creatively shaping “bankable projects pipelines” to meet local priorities, examining tax reforms and boosting international views of its potential. “Recent credit ratings reflect growing confidence in Tanzania’s economic trajectory,” Bade said.
\n\n\n\nAction options: If the U.S. sanctions legislation becomes law, President Donald Trump could impose penalties within seven months, meaning that 2027 may become a consequential year in relations with Tanzania – and for the country’s economic prospects.
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Tanzania is among Africa’s fastest growing economies, with energy supplies, minerals to tap, and emerging trade and transport links into central Africa, the 2025 political shock threatens to do significant damage if U.S. sanctions come into force. ","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443824,57443788,57443679,57443730,57443684],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-critical-minerals","tag-election","tag-kenya","tag-tanzania","tag-united-states","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Tanzania-Hassan-via-X.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Tanzania-Hassan-via-X.jpg?fit=1024%2C760&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Embattled Tanzania gets a lifeline\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
On a sun-streaked recent morning, Angola’s cavernous new international airport terminal outside the capital Luanda dozed. The footfalls of passengers echoed across Terminal B, about two football fields long and unadorned save for a few eateries and elegant kiosks loaded with artisanal baskets, leather goods, booze and carvings of a national symbol, the giant sable antelope. Waiting.
\n\n\n\nFrom time to time an Airbus A220, the 137-seat workhorse of refurbished TAAG Angola Airlines, pulled into a gate at Dr. António Agostinho Neto International Airport, named after the poet and revolutionary hero who served as Angola’s first president. The ambition represented by this USD 3 billion investment, built by a Chinese contractor and operated by Portugal’s Mota-Engil and a Luxembourg company, seemed clear: to create an air hub in southwestern Africa for tourists and investors somewhere over the horizon.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: From tourism to agriculture to the promise of the Lobito Corridor linking an Angolan port to central Africa, Angola is trying to build a future beyond oil, its most prized – and still lucrative – asset. The crowds have yet to show up. Angolan leaders are hunting for a boom across their country’s vast, enticing yet barely plowed arable land. Boosting the energy supply for industrial investment is also high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\n“We have resolutely decided to reduce our dependence on the oil sector and build an economy based on sectors with a strong multiplier effect,” including tourism, Angolan President João Lourenço told an investment forum in Luanda in mid-June 2026, according to Ver Angola, a news service.
\n\n\n\nLarger than Ethiopia and almost twice the size of Texas, oil-exporting Angola is land and water rich yet imported rice and other food worth USD 2 billion in 2023. Nutritious eating is in such short supply across Angola that four in 10 children under 5 years old suffer from malnutrition, according to the World Bank.
\n\n\n\nThose are jarring metrics for a country that pumps 1 million barrels of crude a day, mostly from offshore fields, and just received a brief windfall from a faraway war. The world oil price doubled, shooting up as high as USD 126 a barrel in April 2026 after Israel and the United States attacked Iran in February. (A shaky agreement between the United States and Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the world for Persian Gulf oil and gas, knocked prices down to around USD 72.) In 2025, oil accounted for 80 percent of Angola’s exports by value (natural gas contributed 10 percent and diamonds 5 percent) and 62 percent of government tax revenue.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, investors jumped at the chance to buy Angola’s debt. The country raised USD 2.5 billion in a March 2026 Eurobond offering and 1.5 billion in May, with orders for both more than double the sum on offer. After the May bond sale, which bought out two existing Eurobonds, the Finance Ministry said investors had shown “confidence in the country’s macroeconomic trajectory and the consistency of its financial policy.”
\n\n\n\nMoney owed to Chinese banks has fallen, to USD 10 billion in 2025 – one-fifth of external debt – from almost USD 17 billion in 2020, and debt owed to the Chinese government has halved to USD 2 billion, according to a filing with the London Stock Exchange. Overall, Angola’s debt payments as a percentage of revenue declined to 71 percent in 2025 from 83 percent in 2024.
\n\n\n\nThe corruption cloud that has hovered over Angola for years has lifted somewhat under Lourenço. A government investigation uncovered billions of dollars in financial and real assets that high-level officials allegedly grabbed under a prior government, often stashing wealth abroad. Less spectacular graft persists. One in five Angolan businesses in a 2024 World Bank survey said they had received at least one request to pay a bribe.
\n\n\n\nTheft of oil revenue, capture of state-run enterprises and other abuses are targets of probes into officials and executives linked to long-time President José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in 2022. In 2024, Angola committed to work with the Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog, to crack down on money laundering.
\n\n\n\nSince Lourenço took office in 2017, Angola’s score in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index has improved to 32 from 19 on scale where 100 is squeaky clean and zero is abysmal. In national rankings, Angola sat two-thirds down the list (top is best) at 120th position in 2025, tied with El Salvador, the Philippines and Togo.
\n\n\n\nExerting more control over Angola’s destiny is on the agenda in Luanda under Lourenço, whose second term ends in 2027. On January 1, 2024, Angola left the Saudi Arabia-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, after a decision to reduce Angola’s production quota by 200,000 barrels a day, a 15 percent cut.
\n\n\n\nDepleting oil fields and limited investment in exploration has led to long-term decline in crude output. A decade ago, Angola produced as much as 1.8 million barrels a day, U.S. Energy Department data shows. A World Bank calculation forecasts a further drop of two-thirds in crude output by 2040. China buys most of Angola’s oil, prized as “sweet” for its low sulfur content.
\n\n\n\nInland, farming potential is finally getting attention. Besides vast arable land, Angola can draw on “favorable rainfall across large parts of the country, major river systems that can support irrigation, diverse agro-ecological zones, improving infrastructure and a relatively young farming population,” says Menghestab Haile, a former World Food Program director in southern Africa who is advising Angola’s minister of agriculture on a farming transformation.
\n\n\n\nThe AgroCorredores initiative wants to take advantage of the Lobito Corrido’s transport and logistics scale-up to connect productive agriculture areas to national and global markets and pump up rural economic growth, Haile says. Cutting post-harvest losses, improving the quality of crops, bringing more finance, energy and expertise to smallholder farmers and ultimately improving the food and feed available to Angolans are goals of the strategy.
\n\n\n\nAgroCorredores is engaging across the agribusiness system. It assigns farmer training and mobilizing cooperatives to the Institute for Agrarian Development, while putting the National Cereals Institute in charge of market readiness: post-harvest handling, modernizing warehouses, quality certification and aggregating crops for commercial buyers. Other entities focus on livestock, data analysis and financing.
\n\n\n\nAngola’s farmland, 59 million hectares or 145 million acres, is equivalent to the farmed area of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas, among America’s biggest agricultural states. Any harvested surplus could be shipped to the United States, South America or Europe from the port of Lobito that also serves as a future gateway for copper, cobalt and other minerals dug from central Africa. Lobito is intended to establish a U.S.- and European-backed minerals supply chain outside China’s control.
\n\n\n\nIn 2024, the Export-Import Bank of the United States approved a USD 1.6 billion loan for a project by Miami-based Sun Africa to build 65 solar mini-grids and energy storage in southern Angola that will also power water collection and cleaning.
\n\n\n\nThrough five decades of independence after rule by Portugal, geopolitics has shaped and shattered the country. A civil war that ran from 1975 to 2002 became a proxy battleground for the United States and Soviet Union, along with Cuba and South Africa. After the Cold War, a rising China entered the picture.
\n\n\n\nAs the Eurobond offering was going on sale in March, Finance Minister Vera Daves de Sousa was in China meeting with development banks and top Hong Kong officials about entry into its financial market, according to the Angolan Finance Ministry. In a buoyant meeting with former Brazilian leader and New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff in Shanghai, Daves de Sousa explored Angola’s possible membership in the multinational lender, an offshoot of the BRICS group led by China, India and Russia.
\n\n\n\nIn December 2025, Angola diversified its funding by raising its first money in the Japanese market – a 40 billion yen Samurai bond worth about USD 250 million.
\n\n\n\nWhile Angola’s oil and natural gas wealth invites investment, the U.S. Government cautioned last year that investing can be troublesome. “Companies face persistent bureaucracy, lack of transparency in procurement and licensing, and inconsistent regulatory enforcement,” the International Trade Administration wrote in a note on Angola. “Access to foreign exchange is limited, and restrictions on dividend repatriation continue to deter foreign investment.”
\n\n\n\nA World Bank survey in 2024 found that getting a construction-related permit took 51 days, almost double the sub-Saharan Africa wait, while on average a government payment on a contract took 151 days, almost three months longer.
\n\n\n\nTo deal with some of these risks, Angola is adopting a public-private partnership approach designed to speed up project approvals. Recent Angolan laws and decrees have created a legal structure and project preparation pipeline for PPPs, enabled tax incentives and security in repatriating profits, and opened renewable energy and transmission line projects to private investors, according to André Duarte Figueira, Angola lead in the Lisbon office of the international law firm DLA Piper. A World Bank-funded program run by the Angolan government, Diversifica Mais, is supporting the PPP scale-up.
\n\n\n\nFigueira thinks the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo’s model of choosing project partners mainly on financial strength could be adopted in Angola and attract institutional investors, investment funds, pension funds and family-wealth offices.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Lourenço touted his country’s allure at the international tourism investment summit, eager to put Angola on the map in a region of fierce competition from nearby Zambia, Namibia and South Africa. From 1,000 miles of coastline to rugged terrain and waterfalls inland, with a vast range of flora and fauna, Angola could appeal to beach lovers, hikers and wildlife enthusiasts alike. The European Union sees eco-tourism potential in Cameia National Park, a wilderness in eastern Angola.
\n\n\n\nJune also was a busy month for Angola Airlines. The airline named Jaime Miguel Ferreira Carneiro as CEO, started weekly service to Guangzhou, China, and said it received European Union approval to fly the widebody Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” into European airspace. Within Africa, flights to Nairobi and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire started in the past year, extending Angola’s reach.
\n\n\n\nThe long shadow that war and isolation cast over Angola is fading as a younger generation steps up to take on the country’s entrenched poverty amid riches. The emerging narrative is built on connections, in the air and across borders by railway as Lobito Corridor unfolds. Whether these pathways can take Angolans toward an era of broader opportunity and prosperity depends on a journey of renewal that’s just getting started.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A fully stocked kiosk called On the Way Home awaits future travelers at Angola’s new international airport outside Luanda. Afrologi photo by Edward DeMarco.)
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You may view massive cuts in U.S. development and humanitarian aid to Africa as the end of America’s influence, yet Africa’s ties with the global superpower are far broader – and often little known.
\n\n\n\nMost people probably wouldn’t guess there are countries in Africa that do a billion dollars of trade in a month with the United States. Or that the United States is the second-largest shareholder, after Nigeria, in the continent’s largest development finance institution, the African Development Bank based in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, as our infographic shows, the 15 largest U.S. trade partners in Africa were a geographic mix that included North Africa, Nigeria and smaller, dynamic economies in West Africa and central African resource heavyweights Angola (oil) and Democratic Republic of Congo (copper, cobalt and more). Africa’s largest island nation, Madagascar, also made the top 15. Anchoring the trade picture as America’s top trade partner was South Africa, which sold USD 10.1 billion more in goods to the United States than it bought from America. The trade surge came as the Trump White House pressured the South African government with tariffs and accusations of fomenting racial strife.
\n\n\n\nAs America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1776, which fueled seven more years of war, the map of connections to Africa is changing. Investment is getting a bigger spotlight. Lobito Corridor, a railway, trade and investment route from central Africa to the Atlantic Ocean – first championed by President Joe Biden – is high on the agenda.
\n\n\n\nAnd development assistance hasn’t totally dried up. The two-decade, approximately USD 100 billion effort aimed at stopping the spread of HIV and helping Africans live with AIDS, known as PEPFAR, is transitioning into the America First Global Health program, which also addresses challenges such as maternal and child health and scaling up the public health workforce. (PEPFAR said it has saved more than 25 million lives in Africa.) To date, 22 countries in Africa have negotiated America First deals that include co-financing. Some of the MOUs have drawn a backlash due to demands for long-term health data and implied linkages to mineral resources.
\n\n\n\nMillennium Challenge, a U.S. initiative to finance roads and other infrastructure through country-led efforts, has scaled back yet is still active from Mozambique to West Africa. In Zambia, the USD 491 million Millennium program, known as a compact, is being reshaped to support Lobito. Road segments in North-Western and Copperbelt provinces, where the corridor will emerge, are being prioritized for upgrading.
\n\n\n\nWhile southern Africa gets increasing attention, Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is gaining a major diplomatic investment from America. An embassy-sized, USD 537 million consulate general is rising in the Eko Atlantic district of Lagos, one of the few major African cities that isn’t also a national capital. In Nigeria, that’s Abuja, about 500 miles away.
\n\n\n\nThomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the new nation, displayed an 1802 map of Africa in his famed Virginia home, Monticello. Much of the interior of Africa was conjecture, as the taking of Africans by the millions for enslavement on New World plantations – or on rich estates including Jefferson’s – imprinted coastal geography on the American mind.
\n\n\n\nFast forward two centuries and the maps of Africa and America are intertwined. Africa’s global emissary, Ethiopian Airlines, got its start in the 1940s with help from America’s TWA and American pilots. Africa’s largest airline now flies to New York, Washington, Chicago and Atlanta, with Ethiopian pilots and flight attendants – backed by African managers and technicians.
\n\n\n\nU.S. airlines are slowly expanding direct air service – Delta Air Lines has started flying to Marrakech, Morocco, from Atlanta, the airline’s largest hub. That’s a fitting destination, given that Morocco was the first country – not only in Africa but in the world – to welcome arriving ships flying the American flag as vessels from a new nation.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: A rendering of the new U.S. consulate general under construction in Lagos, by New York-based Ennead Architects.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As America celebrates the 250th birthday of its declared independence from Britain, the map of connections to Africa is changing. Massive aid cuts are reshaping ties around investment, travel and collaboration with major Africa-led initiatives.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443696,57443694],"tags":[57443708,57443722,57443719,57443671,57443732,57443684,57443765],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-societies","tag-ethiopia","tag-nigeria","tag-south-africa","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-united-states","tag-zambia","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Nigeria-Lagos-consulate-closeup-Ennead.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Nigeria-Lagos-consulate-closeup-Ennead.jpg?fit=1920%2C1081&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"America in Africa at 250\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Namibia is loaded with solar energy potential for the green hydrogen of the future and newfound offshore oil and natural gas, yet it’s the sparkle in the country’s Atlantic Ocean sands that is the source of worries today.
\n\n\n\nThe desert country’s mining-infused economy has hit a sluggish phase, constrained in part by “deep and prolonged weakness in the diamond sector,” according to a downbeat assessment issued June 11, 2026, by the International Monetary Fund. Namibia’s economy will expand 2.1 percent in 2026, half the rate recorded in 2023. The diamond trouble isn’t in Namibia itself, where the gems can be scooped from sands and seabed near the ocean’s edge.
\n\n\n\nRather, since the COVID-19 pandemic, laboratories in China, India and other countries are producing diamonds of extraordinary quality at far lower prices, sapping demand for the real thing as younger buyers make the switch. Namibia’s marine diamond miner, a joint venture between the government and gems powerhouse De Beers Group, is cutting production. The diamond mining industry could shrink almost 8 percent this year alone, the third consecutive year of decline, the country’s central bank has forecast. Diamond processing is also declining. As recently as 2023, diamond mining grew by almost 11 percent in Namibia.
\n\n\n\n“While Namibia has demonstrated resilience to global trade frictions, economic growth remains insufficient to meaningfully reduce unemployment, inequality, and poverty, which are key government objectives,” the IMF cautioned.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Diamonds are the biggest part of Namibia’s mining and quarrying industry, generating about 40 percent of economic output in that sector in 2025, central bank data shows. The output from Namibia’s marine diamond mining and 26 onshore mines for gold, uranium and other resources, concentrated in a belt running from near the port of Walvis Bay northeast toward Angola, is important to the nation’s economy and the government’s revenue.
\n\n\n\nThe industry paid 7.8 billion Namibian dollars in taxes and royalties in 2025, according to the Chamber of Mines of Namibia. That is equivalent to almost 10 percent of the 81 billion dollars (USD 4.9 billion) that Namibia’s revenue authority said it collected in the year to March 31, 2026.
\n\n\n\nDiamond production fell 5.6 percent in 2025 “due to deliberate production cuts by Debmarine Namibia, which was aimed at stabilizing global prices amid competition from laboratory grown diamonds,” the mining industry group said in its annual report. Meanwhile, uranium production climbed over 20 percent due to nuclear power demand, and two new uranium mining projects are on the drawing board.
\n\n\n\nGold, uranium and fish are other major exports for the country, whose 3 million people are fewer than the residents of the core city of Los Angeles in a land area about twice the size of California. The towering red dunes of the Namib Desert in the south and the wildlife of the Etosha National Park in the north draw tourists across a terrain reminiscent of the American Southwest.
\n\n\n\nAbundant solar and wind energy – and ocean water – could make Namibia a green hydrogen power in the 2030s. Meanwhile, deep-water oil and gas discoveries in the past four years by energy companies including TotalEnergies and Shell may amount to 11 billion barrels of crude and 2.2 trillion cubic feet of gas. The U.S. Government estimates that the fossil fuel finds could more than double Namibia’s economic output by 2040.
\n\n\n\nA 1908 discovery during Germany’s occupation of the region that would become Namibia in 1990 revealed “a vast alluvial diamond field” extending almost 200 miles northward from the Orange River, the boundary between Namibia and South Africa, according to a 2024 overview by the World Diamond Council. In the 1960s, geologists determined that the seabed near where the Orange empties into the Atlantic was “rich with high-quality gemstones,” the council said, and a Texas oilman pioneered the technique of vacuuming rough diamonds from the seafloor.
\n\n\n\nIn May 2026, the Chamber of Mines appointed a new CEO, Fabian Shaanika, as chief advocate for the industry. A geologist, banker and mining industry veteran, Shaanika was managing director of Kelp Blue, which produces a seaweed extract pitched as a fertilizer substitute for farmers. In Namibia’s mining industry, the ocean matters.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Namibia’s economic link to South Africa (the Namibian dollar and rand are at parity) and relationship to the emerging Lobito Corridor to the north may be decisive factors in deeper regional integration. The desert climate, wild ocean access and laid-back atmosphere already attract adventurous tourists and digital nomads.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Adding sand to push back the shoreline in the search for diamonds, by Namdeb.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Namibia's marine diamond riches face tough competition from gems made in labs in China and India, dulling prospects in a country poised to cash in on abundant oil, gas and solar energy.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":2182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443695,57443692],"tags":[57443823,57443716,57443740,57443726,57443739,57443822],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-2172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blue-green","category-economies","tag-gold","tag-green-economy","tag-mining","tag-namibia","tag-oilandgas","tag-uranium","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-ocean-diamond-mining-Namdeb-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Namibia-ocean-diamond-mining-Namdeb-edit.jpg?fit=2125%2C1596&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Namibia’s sea diamonds lose their dazzle\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Three decades ago, Africa started to clear out a pile of debt under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC). In an effort that began in 1996 and peaked in 2005, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank offered about USD 80 billion in debt relief to 33 African countries. That stoked economic growth and social improvements as borrowing costs siphoned off less money.
\n\n\n\nThe easing was worth about 1.5 percentage points of GDP between 2001 and 2015, according to the IMF. Yet debt still takes its toll in the 2020s, especially after emergency spending during the pandemic. Today you may cheer the high-flying growth rate of a favorite African economy, yet if that country is loaded with debt, it may struggle to stay aloft. Senegal and Zambia are in that situation. So are Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius and a few other countries.
\n\n\n\nSouth Africa is dealing with debt and low growth, yet also has advanced capital markets and sturdy assets like highways, airports and an industrial base on which to craft a rebound.
\n\n\n\nAcross sub-Saharan Africa, government debt is equal to 56 percent of GDP, according to IMF data. That’s manageable or elevated, yet not alarming, putting most countries in the “green” or “yellow” zone in our infographic.
\n\n\n\nWhile Africa has a compelling growth story to tell in the years ahead, it must be ever vigilant about the nemesis that has clobbered its potential in the past: excessive borrowing at home and in international markets that crowds out funds needed to improve living conditions, infrastructure and economic opportunity.
\n\n\n\nAlthough China often faces accusations that its Belt and Road projects such as roads, railways and stadiums have chained Africa to unsustainable debt payments, other countries such as France and Japan also have loaned large sums to African governments.
The most debt-burdened economies are coping with loads approaching or exceeding 100 percent of their economic output. When debt rises to those levels, taking ever larger sums to meet payments, there may be far less money available for schools, public health, roads and other essential services. Economic survival, not investment for the future, becomes the focus for governments in that squeeze.
A “sharp pullback” in Chinese lending since 2021 due in part to defaults in Ghana and Zambia has led to an increase in domestic debt since 2022 in Africa, especially of longer duration, a trend “strongly influenced” by Egypt and South Africa, according to international researchers behind the African Debt Database.
\n\n\n\nEasing the debt load would help African governments and international investors focus on an even larger challenge: the coming population boom that will demand the creation of hundreds of millions of jobs and the health, education, roads, energy and other needs that will escalate with that wave.
Oil-exporting African countries are in better shape, with a 40.9 percent debt-to-GDP load. Extra government revenue from the oil price surge of the Iran war should help those economies. Crude oil touched USD 126 a barrel on April 30 and has since fallen to about USD 80 following a preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement in June 2026 to open the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint of the global oil trade.
Across Africa, governments are looking to more foundational moves to trim debt. That means expanding the base of taxpayers at home and spending more efficiently – to fend off fiscal disaster for good.
(Feature image: Kenya’s Chinese-built SGR rail line from Nairobi to the Indian Ocean coast, built with more than USD 3 billion in Export-Import Bank of China financing. Photo by TTC-Wikimedia)
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While the world focused on the Strait of Hormuz in early June 2026 as on-again, off-again talks between Iran and the United States struggled to reach a peace deal, Iran’s neighbor Turkey fixed its gaze in an entirely different direction.
\n\n\n\nNiger’s President Abdourahamane Tchiani arrived in Ankara for an official visit, welcomed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a 21-gun salute. Only three years ago, Niger hosted the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state, who praised the country’s fragile democracy, defense cooperation and work to socialize former combatants. A thousand U.S. military personnel operated a drone base to monitor an extremist Islamist insurgency in the Sahel.
\n\n\n\nThen came an August 2023 coup led by Tchiani that toppled the elected government and triggered the (orderly) American pullout from Niger after U.S. officials raised concerns about possible warming toward Iran and Russia. French forces exited, too. Tchiani chose Turkey for his first official, non-African visit, after a Turkish delegation landed in Niamey in 2024 to discuss deeper ties. Niger, a major producer of uranium, is trying to assert its authority over mining of the nuclear power fuel after decades of French-led operations.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Erdogan’s two-decade campaign to expand Turkish influence in Africa, a success story for Turkey’s global ambitions, has also helped Africa advance aspirations for connectivity and integration. Turkish Airlines began touching down across Africa. A Turkish contractor, Yapi Merkezi, dislodged a Chinese competitor to win a USD 3 billion contract to build Uganda’s modern rail link toward the Indian Ocean via Kenya. That same company is busy extending rail lines in Tanzania. Another Turkish company developed the financial center in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
\n\n\n\nErdogan said at a press conference with his Nigerien guest that “win-win principles” guide Africa policy. “We see these relations as long-term cooperations in a wide range of areas such as security, education, culture and transportation, not just trade and economy.”
\n\n\n\nDuring the visit, Niger and Turkey (or Türkiye, the Turkish version favored by the government) inked agreements spanning higher education, healthcare and joint management of a “friendship” hospital in Niger. That ticked the soft power box. Tchiani and his delegation also toured facilities of Roketsan, a rocket and missile maker that’s majority owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation. And Erdogan pledged military training and intelligence cooperation.
\n\n\n\nThe United States has felt the loss of its outpost in Niger. U.S. Africa Command leader General Dagvin Anderson told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-May 2026 that a diminished presence in Niger and elsewhere in Africa has led to an “intelligence black hole” for American military planners and allies. “In a crisis, we can always surge assets,” the general said, “but you cannot surge trust.”
\n\n\n\nOn January 30, 2026, the U.S. State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members in Niger due to the threat of terrorist violence and kidnappings. American personnel must travel in armored vehicles and cannot visit restaurants or open-air markets.
\n\n\n\nHowever, there are signs that the United States may boost its involvement in Niger once more. The U.S. Embassy has posted procurement notices for high-speed Internet and cafeteria services for “200+ employees who will be potential patrons” in the embassy eatery.
\n\n\n\nThe Niger delegation’s visit came as Turkey prepares for the fourth edition of an Africa “partnership summit,” the first in five years, to be held in Libya. With its 44 embassies (from 12 in 2002) hustling for business and influence across the continent, Turkey aims to push bilateral trade toward $50 billion a year, building on a foundation of drone exports, infrastructure, food products, consumer appliances and educational investments that appeal to African governments eager to diversify relations as great power agendas shift.
\n\n\n\nLibya functions “as a northern gateway to the African continent” for Turkey, according to Kaan Devecioglu of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Ankara. “The sphere of influence centered on Tripoli constitutes the starting point of a broader geopolitical corridor extending through Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt toward the Sahel” and embraces trade and logistics networks, along with diplomatic and security interests, Devecioglu said in an analysis published in June.
\n\n\n\nUnder the Ottoman Empire, Turks forged their own colonial saga in Africa yet today have brushed off that reputation and become one of China’s competitors on the continent – and a fresh face across France’s former colonial terrain. And in Britain’s old sphere, too: Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu made a state visit to Turkey in January.
\n\n\n\nThe public focus on Africa contrasts with Turkey’s low-key posture regarding the Iran war. Since the conflict pitting America and Israel against Iran erupted in late February, Turkey has operated on the margins of the crisis – at least visibly. State collapse in Iran could spill across Turkey’s borders in the form of refugees, unrest and diminished trade.
\n\n\n\nIn June, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan publicly urged the United States and Iran to halt a renewed wave of clashes and forge ahead with Pakistani-brokered peace negotiations. Turkey talks to both Washington and Tehran. Fidan and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the Iran conflict on May 22 during a NATO ministers meeting.
\n\n\n\nDisruptions in the oil-producing Persian Gulf have sharply increased fuel prices for airlines worldwide and may have contributed to a recent curbing of Turkish reach in Africa. Turkish Airlines has suspended service to several African destinations, including the Lusaka extension on a Dar es Salaam route, a planned twice weekly Monrovia, Liberia, stop on a flight to Accra and the Istanbul-Kinshasa-Luanda circular route, according to AeroRoutes. The changes were made quietly in updates to global flight schedules.
\n\n\n\nAction options: While Turkish trade with Africa remains a fraction of China’s trade flow, Turkish capabilities from tech to large-scale engineering to consumer goods make Turkey a viable alternative for deals and partnerships. A significant diplomatic and cultural footprint across Africa deepens connections.
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