Africa

1. S. Africa budget deadlock…
2. …and EU investment
3. Nigeria to invest in tech
4. Côte d’Ivoire’s opposition
5. Chad tops most polluted list
6. Weekend Reads

A new book about African myths and folktales.

South Africa budget in limbo

South Africa’s main political parties were locked in talks after the rejection of a revised budget left Africa’s largest economy in limbo. The spending plans had already been delayed by several weeks, an unprecedented move driven by disputes between the coalition government’s two biggest parties. The revised budget, presented on Wednesday, was sent back by the government’s second-biggest party as well as members of the opposition, despite it reducing the controversial proposed VAT hike that prompted last month’s postponement.

The deadlock, the nine-month-old ruling coalition’s biggest test yet, pushes the country into “uncharted waters,” the BBC wrote, further fracturing relations between the African National Congress and its main partner, the Democratic Alliance. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana put it another way, describing the delay as evidence of “a maturing and resilient democracy,” the Daily Maverick reported. Analysts at Morgan Stanley nevertheless expect the new budget to pass by the end of March, describing it as “a pragmatic way forward for [the] government to meet its social obligations and funding priorities” in a note, adding, however that the “tax increases may exert more pressure on growth than official estimates suggest.”

EU pledges $5B to S. Africa

The European Union announced a $5.1 billion investment package for South Africa as part of efforts to strengthen ties. The funds are intended to support the clean energy transition, vaccine manufacturing, and digital connectivity, the bloc said.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the investment on Thursday at a summit between the bloc’s leaders and their South African counterparts in Cape Town. She said the bloc wanted to support the growth of Africa’s most industrialized economy. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said his country’s “partnership” with the EU is based on “shared values and common interests.” The summit — the eighth of its kind — took place at a time when the EU and South Africa have both seen relations with the US deteriorate since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.

Nigeria to invest in tech

Nigeria’s government will establish a $40 million fund to invest in early-stage technology startups, as Abuja moves to bolster support for entrepreneurs who have long relied on private investors.

Half of the fund will come from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Japanese government’s overseas development assistance arm, with the remainder covered by a matching sum from the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, according to Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, who heads the country’s technology development agency. “We are going to sign the final agreement next month,” Abdullahi told Semafor.

The fund is part of Abuja’s commitment to invest in entrepreneurs under the 2022 Nigeria Startup Act. Nigeria had a thriving startup ecosystem even before the law was passed, raising above $2 billion between 2015 and 2022 — more than any other African country within the period.

The World Economy Summit 2025 will bring together US Cabinet officials, global finance ministers, central bankers, and over 200 CEOs of the world’s largest companies. The three-day summit will take place April 23–25, 2025, in Washington, DC, and will be the first of its kind since the new US administration took office. Featuring on-the-record conversations with top executives such as Calvin Butler, President and CEO, Exelon; Hassane El-Khoury, President and CEO, onsemi; Bob Frenzel, Chairman, President and CEO, Xcel Energy; Mario Harik, CEO, XPO; Joseph Hinrichs, President and CEO, CSX Corporation; and Scott Kirby, CEO, United Airlines; Toni Townes-Whitley, CEO, SAIC, the summit will advance dialogues that catalyze global growth and fortify resilience in an uncertain, shifting global economy.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Person of Interest: Tidjane Thiam

Tidjane Thiam, the former CEO of Credit Suisse, has traded a career in the upper echelons of global finance for a shot at leading Côte d’Ivoire, his country of birth. The 62-year-old was this week chosen to head a coalition of opposition parties in October’s presidential elections in which President Alassane Ouattara, 83, is expected to seek a fourth term.

Born into an elite political family — one relative was the first president of Côte d’Ivoire, another became Senegal’s prime minister — Thiam worked at the World Bank and McKinsey before heading British financial services firm Prudential and later, Credit Suisse. He was the first Black CEO at both institutions. Thiam was eventually ousted from Credit Suisse after a spying scandal, despite being cleared of wrongdoing in an internal investigation.

Now he’s vying for the highest office in Côte d’Ivoire, joining forces with more than a dozen other opposition parties to create the Coalition for Peaceful Change in Ivory Coast. “We are determined to do our utmost to ensure that peace reigns in Côte d’Ivoire, so that we can have inclusive elections,” he said.

Chad tops most polluted list

Chad was ranked the world’s most polluted country in 2024 in a new report. The Central African country recorded an annual average PM2.5 concentration — fine particulates known to be harmful to human health — more than 18 times above the World Health Organization’s guideline. Swiss air quality monitoring firm IQAir, which compiled the data, found that only seven countries met the WHO benchmark: Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Estonia, Grenada, Iceland, and New Zealand. “Africa’s air quality in 2024 remains a major public health crisis,” said the report, with five of the world’s 10 most polluted countries in the region. But data gaps are a major challenge. The continent is home to only 400 air quality monitoring stations — 0.6% of the global total: Nigerian megacity Lagos was notably absent from the report due to insufficient data.

— Preeti Jha

Weekend Reads

• Western inaction over Rwanda’s purported support for the M23 rebel incursion into DR Congo risks reigniting a regional war, argued writer Michela Wrong in Foreign Affairs. Unlike in 2012, when an earlier M23 advance was stymied by “stiff Western resistance,” this time around “donor countries have dithered over applying effective pressure” on Kigali, she wrote, leaving Rwandan President Paul Kagame to take advantage.

• A BBC team spent a week aboard a ship that fixes deepsea cable failures and helps keep Africa online. When millions of people from Lagos to Nairobi faced an internet blackout last year, it was the Léon Thévenin ship that reconnected them to the internet. More than 50 engineers and technicians crew the eight-story vessel, lowering remotely operated vehicles to the seabed to fix faulty cables.

• A newly discovered detention center in Sudan’s Khartoum state, allegedly used by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group, has raised calls for an investigation, The Guardian reported. Survivors have detailed harrowing accounts of torture at the site and hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered nearby. “Atrocity experts say the size of the makeshift burial site is unprecedented in terms of the ongoing Sudanese war,” the paper wrote. “So far, nothing has come close to matching its magnitude.”

• Both species of elephants in Africa — the forest elephant and the savanna elephant — have declined in the majority of survey sites in the last five decades, a new study found. The losses have been driven by ivory poaching. But there are lessons to be learned from the rising numbers of savanna elephants in Botswana and Zimbabwe, wrote a conservation biologist in The Conversation.

• US President Donald Trump’s threats to impose 100% tariffs on BRICS nations if they try to pivot away from the US dollar would be harmful all round, new analysis warned. “The action would result in slower growth and higher inflation than otherwise in the US and most of the targeted economies,” wrote two researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. With BRICS members posing “no serious threat to the dollar’s dominance,” they said, tariffs would be a “self-defeating response.”

A previous version of this chart mislabeled the data as representing the share of the select countries’ GDP per capita coming from USAID. It should have said the data represented the share of their official development assistance coming from the agency. Our apologies.

Business & Macro

🇲🇿 The US Export-Import Bank reapproved a $4.7 billion loan for a liquefied natural gas project by France’s TotalEnergies in Mozambique, one of Africa’s biggest energy investments, four years after work was paused due to militant attacks on site workers.

🇳🇬 Nigerian musicians doubled their earnings on Spotify to 58 billion Naira ($37 million) in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to Nairametrics, five times more than they made in 2022.

Climate & Energy

🇳🇬 British major Shell said it has completed the sale of its onshore oil company in Nigeria to Renaissance, a consortium of mostly local companies.

🇳🇬 The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, infrastructure-focused investment bank Africa50, and other partners agreed to raise a $500 million fund to invest in renewable energy projects in Nigeria.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇪🇹 🇪🇷 The African Union raised alarm over brewing tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, asking all parties to maintain “hard-won peace.”

🇸🇩 🇰🇪 Sudan suspended all imports from Kenya, the latest escalation in tensions between the two countries since Nairobi hosted a meeting for the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group.

🇨🇩 DR Congo and M23 rebels will begin peace talks in Luanda on Mar. 18, according to the Angolan government.

Tech & Deals

🇿🇦 The South African government raised its stake in retailer Woolworths to 20%, becoming the company’s largest shareholder.

🇪🇷 The African Development Bank Group and Eritrea signed an agreement for a $19.5 million grant for the rollout of mini-grids that will generate 12 megawatts of electricity in the country.

A new book offers a fresh perspective on African folktales with 50 stories from across the continent. In The Watkins Book of African Folklore, Cameroon-born folklorist Helen Nde explores creation myths, foundation legends, and stories of human relationships from countries including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Many of the tales were documented during colonial rule. In writing the book, Nde said she set out to answer what these stories could “offer present day Africans and humans in general.”

Jamie Dimon sharply criticized the top two proxy advisory firms, the little-known apparatuses that have become the target of business ire over their outsize influence and perceived political agendas, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami reported.

“Anyone who gives them money — shame on you,” Dimon said. The firms “should be gone and dead and done with.” Proxy advisory firms have made many powerful enemies, Goswami wrote, and forces appear to be aligning against them.

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— Alexis Akwagyiram, Preeti Jha, Alexander Onukwue, and Yinka Adegoke.