Africa

🇸🇳 Senegal could become the first African country to host the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) next year. UFC’s chief operating officer, Lawrence Epstein, said an event on the continent had been under consideration for many years. “The first thing we look for is an arena that suits our size requirements,” he told BBC Sport Africa. “Dakar is leading because they have one of the larger arenas in sub-Saharan Africa and a lot of events have already gone there with success.” The Dakar Arena, 19 miles outside Senegal’s capital city has a capacity of 15,000, making it a strong contender for the UFC event.

🇬🇳 Writers, readers and publishers from across the continent gathered this week in Guinea’s capital Conakry for the 15th edition of the “72 Hours of the Book” festival. The annual three-day event, which was held from April 23 to 26, celebrates the country’s literary heritage. The event has been a focal point for advocacy around literacy in a country where the World Bank estimates that more than half of the population are unable to read or write.

🇸🇨 The Seychelles is exploring ways to ensure more local workers get jobs in its tourism sector. Sylvestre Radegonde, the tourism minister, pushed for these changes in a meeting between his officials in his government department and hotel managers. Senior positions in large establishments are often taken by expatriate workers, said Radegonde. The minister said localization of posts is important “as we not only need more Seychellois in hotels but we want to keep them there,” the Seychelles state news agency reports.

The rise of Nigerian owners of European football clubs

THE SCENE

On a recent Sunday in April, hundreds of vuvuzela-trumpeting spectators turned out to cheer on Sporting Lagos, a football team founded last year by Shola Akinlade, the 36-year-old chief executive of Nigerian payments company Paystack.

The party atmosphere created by the team’s victory is becoming one of a set of carefully curated features of the nascent club’s customer experience, one the club plans to normalize with the help of an acquisition made 3,000 miles away from home.

In March, Sporting said it bought Aarhus Fremad, a 76-year-old side based in Denmark’s second-largest city. It said the deal will help it “learn from a community-focused club with similar values’ and provide a path to “European exposure” for its best players.

KNOW MORE

Akinlade, who sold Paystack to Stripe for $200 million in 2020, is one of a handful of Nigerian-born entrepreneurs who have set their sights on getting a foothold in the ownership stakes of European football.

Remo Stars, another club with roots in Lagos, is owned by a sports gambling and airline businessman Kunle Soname who bought Portuguese club C.D. Feirense in 2015 (top photo). The second tier side has been involved in deals that take Nigerian talent to the European stage including Peter Etebo, for whom English club Stoke City paid 7.2 million euros ($8 million) in 2018.

Dozy Mmobuosi, a 43-year old UK-based Nigerian entrepreneur, has been very public about his interest in buying Sheffield United, one of the world’s oldest clubs.

Africa’s wealthiest man, cement magnate Aliko Dangote, has been the most high profile example of Nigerian business leaders trying to buy access to the European football market. He has repeatedly stated his interest in buying Arsenal, the London-based English Premier League club. For now though, the billionaire’s interest appears to be in France, where he is reportedly in talks to take over second tier side Valenciennes, in the north of the country.

ALEXANDER’S VIEW

African football clubs could force a paradigm shift in the sport’s power dynamics through their ownership of stakes in European teams. Through those stakes, they are strengthening their bargaining power with the sport’s global elite. Over time, that may help to redress a lopsided dynamic that often leaves African clubs and local agents as the price-taker in the multibillion-dollar market of player transfers.

European clubs regularly send scouts to Africa seeking bargains for developing players. But instead of cashing in at the first offer, clubs like Remo and Sporting stand to maximize return on investment when their young players pass through associated “half-way houses” abroad, says Osasu Obayiuwana, an African sports journalist and football governance expert. The sister European clubs could provide facilities that accelerate African players’ development.

It’s a persuasive model where most African leagues are failing to provide clubs with varied revenue streams from gate fees, television rights or merchandising. In Nigeria, for example, notable clubs are owned by state governments and the playing staff serves at the pleasure of the incumbent governor who may not prioritize sports investment. In January 2022, players of Heartland FC staged protests over 11 months of unpaid salaries while wearing their jerseys and flip flops.

Private clubs understandably aim for less embarrassment and more commercial success. In the Sporting Lagos case, operators drawn from Nigeria’s startup and sports business worlds run admin and business development, attracting partnerships with brands like Pepsi and a renewable one year deal with Klasha, a venture-capital-backed fintech startup, to be the club’s jersey sponsor. Representatives for Sporting and Klasha declined to say how much the deal is worth.

In Sheffield, meanwhile, Mmobuosi continues to pursue his interest in the club that gained promotion to the English Premier League last week. He refuted reports that his interest had cooled, disclosing a $9 million payment he said has already been made to the company that owns Sheffield United as part of the acquisition process. Back in Nigeria, Mmobuosi is championing an initiative to invite private investment in the local league.

THE VIEW FROM GHANA
Tom Vernon took ownership of FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark in 2015. He bought it for Right to Dream, an academy he started years earlier in Ghana’s capital, Accra. Since that takeover, Nordsjaelland has generated over $76 million in fees received from other European clubs for its players, according to Forbes.

One such player is Mohammed Kudus, a 22-year-old who joined Right to Dream aged 12, moved to Denmark later, and now plays for Ajax Amsterdam, the most successful football club in the Netherlands. Kudus scored two goals at the last World Cup in Qatar and is attracting interest from Europe’s top clubs.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) last year announced a new club competition with $100 million in prize money for 24 of the continent’s top teams, in a bid to drive more revenue and increase interest in local leagues.

CAF’s president Patrice Motsepe, a South African mining billionaire who also owns a football club in his country but not in Europe, billed the proposed “Africa Super League” as a project that would “change the face of African football as we know it in terms of investment, exposure and marketing overall.” It is a view of the business of African club football that says teams can enjoy commercial success by more investment in the game on the continent.

NOTABLE

• African states are yet to get into the business of buying European clubs as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have done. But Rwanda notably signed a £10 million-per-year sponsorship deal to appear on the sleeve of Arsenal’s jersey in 2018. A similar ambition by South Africa to sponsor Tottenham, another English club, has not worked out.

Comic Republic, the Lagos-based digital comic book publisher, has inked a deal with Hollywood TV studio UCP to produce a slate of TV series based on its Vanguard Universe.

The project will be executive produced by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and his Mad Massive Entertainment team. Hinds is best known as a writer for Jordan Peele’s Twilight Series and the TV series adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s award-winning novel Who Fears Death?

Comic Republic, founded 10 years ago, has long had readers in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world, with about a third in Nigeria.

“I believe that the perception of our continent is better shaped when more people can look to African heroes as icons,” said Comic Republic founder Jide Martin in a statement. “We were patient to ensure that we found the right partners to take the story to the places we couldn’t and, most importantly, do justice to the culture it emanates from.”

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a Ghanaian-British novelist, poet and broadcaster. His debut novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, was a bestseller in Germany and won two prestigious prizes in France for translated fiction. He was awarded Ghana’s National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy in 2007. His latest novel, Azúcar, will be published on June 8 by Peepal Tree Press.

💡What inspires you to write? I grew up with two languages. My first, Ga, is tonal; I was always fascinated by the meanings English words had as Ga homophones. It made me receptive to the possibilities of language and I’ve never stopped playing since. Beyond that, writing is a key element of my conversation with the world, it’s one of the ways I make sense of things.

💡Which African literary scenes have caught your imagination recently? You know what I really love? I love the way that online and small print run journals have transformed opportunities for emerging writers of the continent. It’s transnational in its effects; initiatives like Jalada, Tampered Press, Bakwa, Doek, Brittle Paper, Afrolivresque, Johannesburg Review of Books, Kalahari Review, and Lolwe have transformed the way African writers are received by the world.

💡If you could recommend one piece of work by an African writer, what would it be? The book that really transformed my perspective is So Long a Letter, by Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. I recommend it to as many people as possible. It’s essentially a letter written by a widow to her childhood friend. I first read it at the age of 12 or 13 and it revealed to me over several readings, the expressive authenticity that comes from speaking within a specific experiential vocabulary.

💡What excites you in Ghana’s artistic scene? The visual art scene in Ghana is next level at the moment. At present, there are possibly a dozen major international exhibitions by Ghanaian visual artists running. Its roots are partly in a new embrace of underlying West African approaches to art making, and partly very intentional initiatives such as those of the Nuku photography and the blaxTARLINES art collectives.

Curators such as Akworkor Thompson and Essé Dabla-Attikpo have played their part too. I’m excited about the possible collaborations that might go beyond visual art, but also the institution building of artists like Ibrahim Mahama who has built the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art.

— Alexis Akwagyiram

Our editor-in-chief Ben Smith details the inside story of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. Pre-order his book here.

Read an excerpt about Buzzfeed’s fateful decision — backed by Ben — to turn down a Disney acquisition in 2013, as well as Ben’s account of his decision to publish the Trump-Russia dossier in 2017.

Chapati is the traveler’s food in East Africa’s street kiosks. There are many theories on the origins of the flatbread. But, whoever the claimants are, the universal truth that holds for chapati devotees is that it’s easy to prepare.

Chapati has become a staple food for many and can be found in food kiosks in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and across the sub-region. The bread, made with wheat flour, has its origins in the Indus Civilization — the earliest urban civilization in India.

In Tanzania, Indian migrants who arrived as laborers introduced chapati to the country’s list of dishes, and it soon became part of Tanzania’s food culture. It’s often served with an array of side dishes: beef, legumes, vegetables, or even tea.

— Muchira Gachenge

• Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is on an African tour visiting Egypt, Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique. (starting April 29)
• This year’s Ibrahim Governance Weekend, an annual event organized by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, is underway in Nairobi, Kenya. It will run until Sunday. (April 30)
• The annual African Tech Week conference takes place in Cape Town. (May 2-5)

If you’re enjoying the Semafor Africa newsletter and finding it useful, please share with your family, friends, favorite footballers and your local chapati vendors. 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, street food recommendations and good vibes.

— Yinka, Alexis, Marché Arends, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge