Africa

1. Somalia’s offer to US
2. US fails to fill Africa job
3. Africa’s growing 5G use
4. Ecobank’s bumper profits
5. Niger’s ‘forgotten’ president
6. Afrikaners look to US
7. Weekend Reads

How bone tools discovered in Tanzania are rewriting evolutionary history.

Somalia offers US ‘control’ over ports

Somalia has offered the US “exclusive operational control” over strategic ports on the Gulf of Aden in a bid to stop Washington recognizing breakaway regions in the troubled Horn of Africa nation. It made the offer despite not being in control of the sites.

In a Mar. 16 letter seen by Semafor, Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud offers US President Donald Trump “strategically positioned assets.” These could “bolster American engagement in the region, ensuring uninterrupted military and logistical access while preventing external competitors from establishing a presence in this critical corridor,” the letter said.

But the assets in question — the Berbera port and airbase, located in Somaliland, and the Bosaso port and airbase, in Puntland — are not under the control of Somalia. Mogadishu considers all of these locations part of its sovereign territory.

Somalia’s information minister did not respond to requests for an interview, and the Somali Embassy in the US did not immediately provide comment.

White House fails to fill Africa job

The White House’s attempt to appoint a senior Africa director has fallen apart for the third time, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Air Force Col. Jean-Philippe Peltier, a career intelligence officer who was born in Chad and raised across Francophone Africa, had been lined up for the top Africa role. But he will no longer be joining the White House, after failing to reach an agreement with the Trump administration on housing compensation, according to two of the sources. A White House spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

The White House’s previous candidates both had extensive US-Africa policy knowledge but were rejected by some in the right wing of the Republican Party for their previous stances on moderate issues such as environmental causes.

Helios sees Africa growth driven by 5G

Helios Towers, one of Africa’s largest telecoms infrastructure companies, is betting that a boom in 5G and AI technologies will drive significant revenue growth over the next five years. The London-listed company, which operates in eight African countries, leases towers to mobile phone companies serving 150 million customers. This month, it reported a 14% year-on-year increase in adjusted EBITDA, reaching $421 million in 2024.

The adoption of 4G and 5G provides users with faster internet speeds and the ability to use more data on everything from streaming services to banking applications. Helios Towers CEO Tom Greenwood told Semafor these advances, along with the increasingly widespread use of “hugely data consumptive” AI applications, was driving data use.

“The amount of data going through the mobile networks is exponentially growing, and that simply means you need a lot more antennae around a given location,” Greenwood said. “Antennas, for us, mean tenancies, which means revenues.”

Global telecoms industry body GSMA predicts mobile data traffic in sub-Saharan Africa will quadruple over the next five years.

Togo-based Ecobank reports record profit

Pan-African bank group Ecobank reported a 33% annual increase in profit before tax to a record sum of $658 million for 2024.

One of Africa’s largest banks, Ecobank operates in 33 countries and is headquartered in the Togolese capital Lome. Last year’s revenue growth of 18% to $2.1 billion was driven by increased recurring fee and commission income, “particularly from cross-border payments and trade,” the bank said. Those fees now make up a quarter of overall revenues. Deposits rose to $20.4 billion as the company’s base of consumer and commercial banking customers went up 9%.

Jeremy Awori, Ecobank Group’s CEO, attributed the $3 billion increase in deposits to “a strategic shift toward low-cost, stable current and savings accounts.”

— Alexander Onukwue

Niger’s ‘forgotten’ president

Niger’s democratically elected former President Mohamed Bazoum and his wife Hadiza have spent more than 20 months in detention by a military that seized power in 2023 and this week cemented its grip on the nation.

A former high school philosophy teacher who went on to become Niger’s interior minister, Bazoum represented a break with the past: His presidential inauguration in 2021 was hailed as the first peaceful democratic transition in the West African nation since it gained independence from France in 1960. But he was ousted only two years later as Niger followed in the footsteps of neighboring Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso in returning to military rule. On Wednesday, coup leader General Abdourahamane Tchiani was sworn in as Niger’s president for a “transitional” five years.

Bazoum’s supporters have launched a global campaign for the 65-year-old’s release as they worry he and his wife are being forgotten. “They’re being used as hostages, as human shields, for their captors, who actually rule from the same palace,” Jeffrey Smith, executive director of advocacy group Vanguard Africa, told Semafor, urging world leaders to call for their release.

Afrikaners look to US

The number of South Africans who have expressed interest in relocating to the US following President Donald Trump’s asylum offer to the country’s white citizens, according to the South African Chamber of Commerce in the US. In a February executive order, Trump said Afrikaners — the 2.7 million South Africans of mostly Dutch, French, and German descent — could be classified as refugees because they were “victims of unjust racial discrimination” and were being targeted under a new law seeking to address racial disparities in land ownership.

Trump adviser Elon Musk — who grew up in apartheid South Africa — alongside Afrikaner lobby groups like AfriForum, “have been pivotal in drumming up support” for these unsubstantiated claims, Imraan Buccus from the University of the Free State told Semafor. The resettlement proposal comes amid souring relations between Washington and Pretoria.

— Madeleine Wright

Weekend Reads

• Why did the price of eggs in Kenya double between 2022 and 2023? That’s the question a food systems expert explored in a post on Thin Ink. The answer lies in “an uncompetitive market,” wrote Carin Smaller, with Kenyan farmers hit by much higher poultry feed costs than their counterparts in similar markets such as Brazil and South Africa. In Kenya, four companies commanded more than 50% of commercial feed sales. Higher feed prices have driven up food prices, “affecting the wider economy.”

• Wealthy Africans face lower effective tax rates than average citizens, a researcher wrote in The Conversation, arguing that a few simple measures could boost revenue collection. For example, he suggested that more countries should create a dedicated office to keep track of high net-worth individuals’ assets — as the majority of anglophone African countries do for large companies in their territory. Another approach, he wrote, was launching voluntary disclosure programmes with associated tax amnesties.

• Nigeria’s once vibrant textile market has been decimated by cheap imports from China, DW reported. While Nigerian clothes makers have access to domestic cotton farms, they must procure key materials such as dyes or synthetic fibers from other countries. Their Chinese counterparts, by contrast, benefit from “an integrated supply chain,” the outlet noted. The depreciation of Nigeria’s naira has also driven up the cost of importing raw materials.

• Women in two Ghanaian towns are planting “diversion” trees as part of a forest restoration program to prevent shea trees being felled for firewood and charcoal, Mongabay reported. By planting other fast-growing tree species they are trying to protect the shea trees, which they depend upon for high-value commodities such as nuts and butter: Ghana is one of the largest exporters of shea nuts and shea butter in the world, the outlet noted, with the global market for shea butter estimated at $2.75 billion.

• There’s a growing appreciation for Somali food in London, wrote a Somali cook and writer in Vittles. It’s regularly praised by food bloggers and has become a particular favorite in “the halal food scene,” Halimo Hussain noted. Basto, a Somali-style spiced stew, and bariis and hilib, slow-cooked meat and rice, are among the dishes he tried at one restaurant in south London. Hussain also explains why whole bananas are often “a non-negotiable element” on a platter: Their sweetness “helps balance out the spice and brings a different texture and temperature to the dish.”

Business & Macro

🇲🇱 Mali expects to produce 55 metric tons of gold in 2025, nearly 6% more than it did last year, amid expectations that Canadian miner Barrick Gold will resume operations in the country, Reuters reported.

🌍 African Export-Import Bank broke ground on a $180 million Afreximbank African Trade Centre in Barbados, the first to be established by the bank outside Africa. It will be built in Bridgetown, Barbados’s capital.

Climate & Energy

🇳🇬 Nigeria’s state oil company NNPCL said it is “at the final stage” of enlisting on a stock exchange and is shopping for partners, including advisory firms and investment banks.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇱🇸 Prince Harry resigned from Sentebale, a charity he co-founded in Lesotho in his mother’s honor, after a dispute with its board chair over a resolution by trustees for her to step down.

🇳🇦 Namibia will require US visitors to the country to obtain a visa before arrival from April 1 this year.

Tech & Deals

🇰🇪 Kenyan digital lending startup Lipa Later entered administration this week following financial difficulties that left it unable to make payroll and pay suppliers.

🌍 Enza, a fintech company operating in Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, raised $6.75 million in a funding round from Algebra Ventures and Quona Capital.

Ancient humans used bone tools much earlier than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Nature. The discovery of 27 tools made from the bones of elephants and hippos in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge has been dated to 1.5 million years ago. The find “casts light on human evolution,” wrote Jackson Njau, a scientist who co-directed a research team at the site, in The Conversation, as up till now the earliest evidence of bone tool-making came from European sites dated 400,000 years ago. “It shows that our hominin ancestors were able to think about and make this technology a lot earlier than anyone realised.”

US President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies spell opportunity for some climate investors.

Trump’s push to drill more oil and gas and reduce reliance on clean power may be drawing the ire of climate activists and have helped Big Oil firms pivot back to what they are best at. But as fossil fuel giants shun even limited efforts at solar and wind, inflation fears keep interest rates steady, and Washington rhetoric chills the green-power sector, some investors see bargains to be picked up, Semafor’s Prashant Rao reported.

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