Africa

1. Tinubu says ‘emergency’ over
2. Tensions around Ethiopia grow
3. AfDB eyes finance gap
4. Zambia enforces mining laws
5. US to resume deportations
6. Transsion plans IPO

Weekend Reads and a documentary examines exploitation in Kenya’s tea heartlands

At about 5am on Monday, 23-year-old Boitumelo Nhlanzi left home in Thembisa for work. She never arrived. She was shot dead in what police call an apparent robbery, the 12th woman found dead in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, since July. The night before, gunmen attacked two drinking venues near Johannesburg and Cape Town, killing at least 27 people. By one count, this year’s mass shooting toll now stands at 196.

None of these victims fit the story Washington tells about South Africa. Since 2025, the Trump administration has run a fast-tracked refugee program for Afrikaners on the claim that white South Africans, farmers above all, face racial persecution. The implication is that farm murders are the country’s defining crime.

To be sure, farm attacks are real, often savage, and rural communities deserve better policing than they get. But the numbers point elsewhere: Of the nearly 24,000 murders recorded last year, police counted 29 farmers. The police do not record victims by race, but in a majority Black country with violence clustered in the townships, the map tells you who is dying. South Africa is a crime scene. Its victims are Black, mostly poor, and rarely on farms.

The threat to Black South Africans is being laid out, week after week, in a Pretoria public hearing room. The Madlanga Commission, a judicial inquiry set up after a senior police commander alleged last year that criminality and political interference had penetrated the justice system, has now sat for more than 180 days.

This is also an economic emergency. It may sound crude to put it this way, but investors do not price the murder rate in isolation. They price the state’s capacity to enforce contracts, protect supply routes, and keep a worker alive on her morning commute.

Washington, for its part, could continue to focus on a small subset of victims whose plight carries political resonance at home, or simply look at the data. A government genuinely moved by South Africans dying violently would build a very different program from the one it has. That the Trump administration has not, tells you the program was never about the dead.

Tinubu declares ‘emergency’ over

Nigeria will shift its economic policy goal from administering “emergency treatment” to delivering shared prosperity, President Bola Tinubu said, pitching himself as the best person to address welfare concerns ahead of crunch elections in January.

Tinubu’s three-year overhaul of Nigeria’s economy has dramatically raised living and operational costs for households and businesses. The removal of a fuel subsidy scheme in particular has raised petrol prices over five-fold since 2023. But “the emergency treatment is over,” Tinubu said on Thursday in an Independence Day address, adding that “the foundation has been repaired.” Tinubu will face familiar opponents Atiku Abubakar — who has pledged to reinstate fuel subsidies — and Peter Obi in a repeat of the last presidential election.

Nigeria’s economy has grown steadily in recent quarters. However, the country’s debt burden has risen by 20% to $54.5 billion under Tinubu, who this week extended the timeline for implementing last year’s budget, underscoring a loose fiscal framework that could complicate debt servicing plans.

— Alexander Onukwue

AU urges restraint as Ethiopia tensions grow

The African Union urged Ethiopia and its neighbors to exercise restraint as growing tensions threaten to destabilize the region. Addis Ababa has accused Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan of supporting armed ‌opposition groups that have fought Ethiopia’s federal troops in the northern Tigray region since last week. The three countries deny the accusation.

The AU Commission on Thursday called on the countries to “address their differences through ​established diplomatic channels and peaceful dialogue.” It issued the statement after Eritrea severed diplomatic ties with Ethiopia in response to Addis Ababa’s decision to close its embassy in Asmara and declare 10 Eritrean diplomats persona non grata.

Tensions over control of the contested Tigray region have grown in recent months. The latest clashes mark the biggest outbreak of violence since the 2020-2022 conflict in the northern region that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Experts fear renewed fighting could quickly spill into a wider conflict across the Horn of Africa, potentially further destabilizing shipping in the Red Sea, which has been hit by the Iran war: Eritrea has more than 2,000 km of coastline.

— Alexis Akwagyiram

AfDB in talks to plug financing gap

The African Development Bank is holding talks with financiers, with the aim of finding ways to mobilize around $4 trillion in untapped domestic capital to fund the continent’s development needs, its president said. Sidi Ould ‌Tah said the goal was to plug a development financing gap estimated to be worth $400 billion a year.

Tah told the S&P emerging markets conference in London that the multilateral lender was working to improve coordination between Africa-based pension funds, banks, and capital markets to enable more local financing through better “risk allocation.”

Tah, who took the helm of the continent’s largest development lender in September last year, said the AfDB will launch an initiative to help African countries to better prepare for credit ratings because “opacity in some markets creates this notion of high risk, which leads to high cost of borrowing.” He said the bank would work with governments to prepare data to improve transparency. African policymakers have long said Western institutions’ influence over risk perceptions have led to unfairly high funding costs.

— Alexis Akwagyiram

Zambia presses Gulf investors on local rules

Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema used his first trip abroad since his re-election last month to tell Gulf investors to fully comply with the country’s local procurement rules, he said. Zambia is Africa’s second-largest producer of copper, whose prices have soared as demand rises for metals used in electric vehicles and power grids. Hichilema’s stance matches that of regional rivals who are trying to use the scramble for critical minerals to drive economic development.

Regulations introduced a year ago require mines to source a higher share of core goods and services locally. During his trip, Hichilema met Ali Rashed Alrashdi, CEO of an Abu Dhabi-based owner of Mopani mine, one of Zambia’s oldest copper mines. In a Facebook post, he urged Mopani to raise output as Zambia pushes to more than triple copper output to 3 million tonnes by 2030. Critics say the drive to buy local goods can inflate costs where domestic suppliers lack capacity, opening the door to middlemen who resell imports.

During the visit, Zambia signed six non-binding agreements worth $2.14 billion with UAE investors, covering healthcare, renewable energy, logistics, and technology.

— Tiisetso Motsoeneng

Trump to resume third-country deportations

Immigration advocates in the US are grappling with the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Trump administration to move forward with third-country deportations. The Trump administration has signed deals with various countries to accept deported migrants, around a dozen of them in Africa. Burundi was the latest to announce it will accept migrants.

The Supreme Court’s order this week lifted a ruling requiring migrants receive notice of — and the chance to challenge — their deportation to countries where they have no personal ties. It means the policy will stay in place for months before a final ruling. The arrangements have drawn mounting scrutiny, most recently after migrants deported to Equatorial Guinea were held at gunpoint and beaten.

European governments are seeking to copy the approach: Italy and Greece are among EU states in talks to send migrants to Rwanda and other “return hubs” in Africa.

— Adrian Elimian

Transsion plans Hong Kong IPO

Transsion Holdings, the biggest seller of phones in Africa, is eyeing a $500 million initial public offering in Hong Kong as the firm seeks to raise money to develop a new generation of AI-enhanced devices. Shenzhen-based Transsion dominates the African market across its three major smartphone brands: Infinix, itel, and Tecno, holding a 53% market share by revenue in 2025, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan. The company plans to issue up to 132 million ordinary shares after receiving approval from Chinese regulators. The Hong Kong filing comes after its public debut on the Shanghai STAR Market in 2019, though its shares have dropped by nearly 20% since the start of the year to a market valuation of around $9.4 billion. Its revenue rose by 30% in the first months of the year, while net profit jumped 13% to $194 million.

— Paige Bruton

• How can a country govern itself when it doesn’t know who it’s governing? Population estimates put Nigeria’s population somewhere between 180 million and 250 million — a huge difference in what is understood to be Africa’s most populous nation, Dawn Chinagorom-Abiakalam writes in The Republic. The last official government census was conducted in 2006, and yet this data and other estimates are used to shape taxation rates, infrastructure development, funding allocations for schools, hospitals, and transport. “Nigeria’s government operates in statistical darkness,” Chinagorom-Abiakalam writes.

• As Benin and Senegal seek to shift their textile industries from raw exports to finished products, the CFA franc’s link to the euro — set by the European Central Bank rather than local conditions — is undercutting their ambitions, writes Hannah Rae Armstrong for Now Voyager. Touring a booming industrial zone in Benin and Senegal’s long-stalled Domitexka factory, Armstrong traces how currency, colonial-era supply chains, and austerity have shaped two constrained paths toward reindustrialization.

• The UN’s high-profile rejection of the Mercator map in favor of a map that better reflects the size of Africa is not the only example of cartography impacting viewers’ political perception of a place, Daniel Waktola writes for The Conversation. In Ethiopia, inflated maps used by the government, as well as members of certain ethnic groups, have not only led to false information, but to conflict around disputed territories. Around 100,000 people died in the Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998-2000, largely waged over the disputed border town of Badme, Waktola writes. We must fight “maptivism” with better cartographic literacy, he argues.

• When rebel soldiers stormed the Nigerien capital Niamey in August, General Abdourahamane Tiani’s military junta looked set to be deposed, writes Taiwo Hassan in Foreign Policy. That was until Africa Corps, the Russian paramilitary organization, came to the general’s aid. Niger’s capital became the latest battleground in Russia’s encroaching influence on Africa’s Sahel region. African dictators’ reliance on Russia, which is driven by a distaste for partnering with former colonizing nations in the West, provides an opportunity for Moscow to exchange its military support for the Sahel’s valuable mineral assets.

Business & Macro

🇿🇦 South African manufacturing sentiment improved in September, following three months of contraction.

🇲🇿 Mozambique’s central bank left its policy rate unchanged at 9.25% for the fourth consecutive meeting, after it said inflation concerns remain high.

Climate & Energy

🇳🇬 Nigerian investor Tony Elumelu bought another 6 million shares in Seplat Energy, months before he is set to become chairman of the oil and gas producer.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇺🇲 🇸🇩 A US ceasefire proposal for the civil war in Sudan could see the country split into a Libya-style partition, a top adviser to Sudan’s ‌army-led authorities told Reuters.

🇸🇱 The EU suspended $20 million in aid to Sierra Leone after Freetown refused to arrest and extradite Dutch drug kingpin Jos Leijdekkers.

Tech & Deals

🇰🇪 Satlyt, a Silicon Valley and Nairobi-based startup, raised $8 million in seed funding to develop software that turns satellites into virtual AI data centers.

🇬🇭 Ghana awarded 5G spectrum and a license to Telecel Group after the government ended the exclusive rights of a state-backed provider.

Kenya’s $1.6 billion tea industry relies on thousands of local workers whose ancestral land was seized by British colonial authorities to establish large-scale plantations.  Kikuyu Land, a new documentary by Andrew Harrison Brown and investigative journalist Bea Wangondu, traces how colonial exploitation evolved into today’s corporate control, which leaves many living under similar conditions. The film follows Mr Mungai, a pastor and activist, who has spent decades fighting to reclaim his family’s land, as well as local plantation workers who describe abuses that, they say, have largely been concealed by management. The Guardian called the film a “sobering” examination of a “system of inequality” left by colonial control and urged tea lovers worldwide to take a cold, hard look at where their product comes from.