Africa

1. Abuja open to crypto
2. Pipeline fallout in Nigeria
3. Female leader for Namibia…
4. …and the IOC
5. Sudan army retakes palace
6. China’s green agenda
7. Weekend Reads

The inaugural women’s wrestling division at an Ecowas tournament.

Nigeria still open to crypto

Nigeria remains open to cryptocurrency companies, its information minister told Semafor, even as the government pursues an $80 billion lawsuit against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Abuja filed the multibillion-dollar legal action against Binance last month over economic losses it says were caused by the firm’s operations in the country, months after it detained one of the company’s US staff members in a money laundering case. “This is part of the effort to strengthen our laws, not to cripple anybody. We are ensuring that no one comes and operates without regulation,” said Nigerian Information Minister Mohammed Idris. “There are other companies operating in the crypto sector in Nigeria, you don’t see them [facing charges].”

Idris added that the government was “really concerned” about the potential use of crypto in financing terrorism, money laundering, and tax evasion. Nigeria is second only to India on crypto adoption in the world, according to an index by data firm Chainalysis that weighs for population and purchasing power. Nigeria received approximately $59 billion in crypto transactions between July 2023 and June 2024, the firm said.

Nigeria’s pipeline crisis

A ruptured pipeline in Nigeria has sparked a political crisis, highlighting the challenge of increasing output — and revenues — in Africa’s biggest crude oil-exporting nation.

The Trans-Niger Pipeline in the southern state of Rivers has the capacity to carry 450,000 barrels of oil per day — about a third of the country’s output — from production fields to an export terminal. An initial assessment of the explosion along a section of the line by owner Renaissance Africa Energy, a consortium of four local companies and a foreign partner, blamed arson. Vandalism and theft along pipelines have been cited as reasons for the country’s failure to reap the rewards of high global oil prices in recent years.

Within a day of the incident, President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency and suspended the local governor, his deputy, and all state parliament lawmakers for six months — a deeply unusual move whose legality is now being questioned by lawyers, opposition politicians, and democracy activists.

Namibia’s first female president

Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was inaugurated as president of Namibia on Friday, making history as the country’s first female head of state.

The 72-year-old former vice president, sworn in on the nation’s 35th Independence Day, joins an exclusive club: The only other serving female president on the continent is Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan. And Nandi-Ndaitwah is one of only five women in Africa that have risen to presidential power through direct election. A handful of others have served as acting or interim presidents during periods of transition.

Nandi-Ndaitwah is a “trusted leader” and “party stalwart,” noted the BBC. She joined the ruling South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) party aged just 14, when it was still a liberation movement, undergoing arrest, detention, and later exile in the fight for independence, which Namibia finally won from apartheid South Africa in 1990. “I am there to serve the people of Namibia,” she said on Wednesday, as reported in The Namibian. “I am prepared.”

IOC picks first female president

Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe’s sports minister, was elected president of the International Olympic Committee, becoming the first woman and first African to lead sport’s top governing body.

“It is a signal that we are truly global,” the two-time Olympic swimming gold medalist said. Coventry decisively beat six male candidates, securing 49 of the 97 available votes. And at 41, she will become the youngest president in the IOC’s 130-year history when she is sworn into the role in June.

Coventry will face “a likely early test” in a meeting with US President Donald Trump to discuss the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the Associated Press noted: Several IOC members have expressed concerns over entry rules for athletes given Trump’s hardline border policies. When asked about the meeting she said: “I have been dealing with let’s say difficult,” taking a pause, “men in high positions since I was 20 years old. What I have learned is that communication will be key.”

Sudan army retakes palace

Sudan’s armed forces retook the presidential palace in Khartoum from the rival Rapid Support Forces, a strategic and symbolic victory in the country’s brutal civil war. The conflict erupted in April 2023 when the RSF paramilitary seized control of much of the capital. Both sides stand accused of human rights abuses, and count among their backers an array of powerful nations. The tide of the war appears to be shifting in favor of government forces, which have recently recaptured much of central Sudan. The violence has resulted in what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. “We can’t take any more of this war,” one Khartoum resident told The New York Times.

China pushes green energy overseas

China’s global infrastructure push, through its flagship Belt and Road Initiative, is increasingly being driven by investments in green technology in partner nations, including several in Africa.

Chinese manufacturers have mostly shipped clean-tech products abroad as commodities rather than as part of a wider project, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst of the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In comparison, their role in foreign coal plants comprises financing, engineering, and operation of the facilities. But that has been changing since 2023, when Beijing instructed the BRI to shift away from mega infrastructure projects to “small but beautiful” ones, such as solar plants in Africa.

Weekend Reads

• Saudi royals and East African leaders are profiting from a deadly trade in domestic workers, a New York Times investigation revealed. At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years, in an industry rife with unpaid wages, beatings, and sexual assault. “Powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving,” the paper wrote, reporting that members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers, while politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya also own staffing agencies.

• The treatment of a Nigerian woman senator who accused a top politician of sexual harassment has raised questions about gender equality in the socially conservative country. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan’s complaint was dismissed on procedural grounds and she was suspended for six months for alleged “unruly and disruptive” behavior during an unrelated Senate argument, The Guardian reported. Hundreds of women protested in Nigeria last week, holding placards saying “We are all Natasha,” But few think “Nigeria’s #MeToo moment has arrived,” the outlet wrote.

• A pro-Russia propaganda campaign using “ghost reporters” is spreading anti-France sentiment across West and Central Africa, an Al Jazeera investigation found. Fake personas have been used to write articles in more than a dozen African countries including Ghana, Mali, and Senegal. “Analysing the articles, a clear viewpoint comes across in almost all of them,” the outlet reported, “one that presents French influence in Africa as detrimental for the continent and the presence of Russian soldiers as beneficial.”

• South Africa’s sprawling military and security industry is influencing global geopolitical warfare, argued a journalist in Phenomenal World. Exploring the apartheid-era roots of both sectors, Ilham Rawoot wrote about how companies in the country, long an international hub for the creation of new weapons, are increasing investment in factories for munitions manufacturing. Most of the exported weapons go to Europe, with others sent to African countries and the Middle East.

YouTube is undeniably the dominant media platform of the moment — and not just for video. Last month, the company announced that podcasts now attract 1 billion viewers a month. This week, Ben and Max bring on YouTube CEO Neal Mohan to talk about how YouTube has become the epicenter of culture, how it’s thinking about podcasts and TV, and who Neal thinks the platform’s biggest competitor is. They also discuss why YouTube’s content policing guidelines have changed since 2020 and how he plans to manage its recent run-in with the FCC.

Business & Macro

🇿🇦 South Africa’s central bank kept its main rate unchanged to hedge against uncertainties stemming from US trade policy and the broader global economy.

🇨🇲 Restitution for Africa, a collective of NGOs in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo, alleged in a legal complaint that French businessman Vincent Bolloré and his ports company Bolloré Group engaged in money laundering in Africa.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia introduced a new tax on residents to create an Ethiopian Disaster Risk Response Fund, plugging the financing gap created by the end of USAID inflows into the country.

Climate & Energy

🇨🇮 Italian oil and gas company Eni increased its gas supply to Côte d’Ivoire’s electricity generation to 70 million cubic feet per day.

🇳🇬 The Dangote Refinery in Nigeria paused its sale of refined fuel to local distributors in the naira currency to “avoid a mismatch” between its dollar costs of buying crude oil and naira earnings.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇪🇹 Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said his country is not looking to start a war with its neighbor Eritrea over access to the Red Sea and wants to negotiate “to work together.”

🇷🇼 Rwanda received the head of world cycling’s backing to host the Road World Championships in Kigali this September, the event’s first presence in Africa, amid human rights concerns over its involvement in a war in DR Congo.

Tech & Deals

🌍 Sweden’s development fund Swedfund will invest €15 million ($16 million) in AfricInvest Small Cap Fund, a private equity fund focused on small business in Africa. The fund received a €10 million ($11 million) commitment from France’s Proparco earlier this year.

🇳🇬 Cash transactions in Nigeria dropped 59% in the decade up to 2024, according to data by payment technology company Worldpay, driven by increased adoption of digital payments.

Women competed at a major West African wrestling tournament for the first time. The annual competition, organized by regional bloc Ecowas, featured its first-ever women’s division earlier this month, drawing competitors from across the region. “Women know how to fight. We just had to be given a chance,″ Celine Bakayoko, a 33-year-old Ivorian fighter, told AFP during the three-day tournament at the National Stadium in Abuja. She began competing professionally in 2019 but has wrestled since childhood, adding that “for us, it’s not a sport, it’s an innate practice.”

Republicans are putting Trump’s court fights on the ballot in a pivotal Wisconsin court race, Semafor’s David Weigel reported.

“A liberal judge … wants to overrule the will of the President of the United States and the people who put him there,” Donald Trump Jr. said, tying the election to the president’s recent setbacks in court — a typically nonpartisan, low-turnout race, Wisconsin is testing each party’s theory of the case, and possibly providing a formula for future wins.

If you’re enjoying the Semafor Africa newsletter and finding it useful, please share with your family and friends. We’d love to have them aboard too.

Let’s make sure this email doesn’t end up in your junk folder by adding africa@semafor.com to your contacts. In Gmail you should drag this newsletter over to your ‘Primary’ tab.

You can reply to this email and send us your news tips, gossip, and good vibes.

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