Africa

1. Senegalese black gold
2. Worker satisfaction
3. Another Nigeria exit
4. Coalition talks
5. MultiChoice’s poor performance
6. Customer privacy

Also, how elephants communicate with each other.

Hello! Welcome to Semafor Africa, where we’re always keeping an eye on the African workforce, including our own. A new report out this week from Gallup digs into the State of the Global Workplace. It advises that there are huge concerns around mental health, stress, and general wellbeing in workplaces around the world. It estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy nearly $9 trillion a year — the equivalent of 9% of global GDP.

My main focus, unsurprisingly, was to understand Gallup’s findings in Africa. While it might seem obvious that the editor of an Africa-focused publication would zoom in on results from the continent, I’d argue that anyone trying to understand how the global workforce is evolving needs to do the same. With one in four people on the planet set to be African by 2050, the nature of work, advances in technology, and plain economic realities mean the need to work with Africans will happen much sooner than the middle of the century. We should all be paying attention to people in the region likely to produce a sizable chunk of the world’s future employees.

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Senegal becomes an oil producer

The number of barrels of oil per day expected to be produced by Senegal’s first offshore project, after Australian firm Woodside Energy begins extracting the fossil fuel from the Sangomar field. The company announced on Tuesday that it would be operating at the facility. The site, located about 100 kilometers south of the capital Dakar, has a storage capacity of 1.3 million barrels. The oil will supply the domestic market and be exported to Europe and Asia. The government hopes the project will generate billions of dollars to boost Senegal’s economy. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who in April said his government would conduct an audit of the oil, gas, and mining sectors, said profits will be “well managed.”

How African workers feel about their prospects

Workers in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely than those in other regions to be looking for a new job while also feeling that prospects in their own country are weak.

The findings were part of Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce 2024 report exploring how workers around the world responded to questions about their mental wellbeing, engagement at work, life prospects, daily stress, and much more. Workers in Mozambique were most positive about their future prospects. Their counterparts in Zimbabwe were the least positive of the respondents from more than 30 African countries. The survey also found that workers in Chad were the most likely to experience anger and sadness on a daily basis, while Liberian workers had the highest daily stress. Senegalese workers were the most engaged.

Guinness Nigeria sale puts spotlight on weak economy

LAGOS — The move by British drinks maker Diageo to sell its majority stake in Guinness Nigeria this week renewed fears that more Western conglomerates will flee Africa’s most populous country as inflationary pressure continues to cut consumer spending power.

Diageo will sell its 58% stake in Guinness Nigeria to Singaporean group Tolaram for about $70 million but will retain ownership of the Guinness brand. The sale follows a need for “a flexible and asset-light beer operating model,” Diageo said on Tuesday. It will continue to lead marketing strategy for Guinness Nigeria’s non-alcoholic malt drinks, alcoholic sodas, and beers including the flagship Guinness Stout, which has been sold in Nigeria for more than 70 years.

The deal comes on the back of the Nigerian company’s recent bumpy performance, as the naira weakened sharply against the dollar. Guinness Nigeria’s loss after tax exceeded 18 billion naira ($28 million) last year. A decade ago, its profit of 9.5 billion naira was worth over $58 million.

An inflation rate jump from 22% to 33% in the past year has crushed Nigerian incomes as many struggle to keep up with the sharp rises in prices of food and medicines. Beer makers have upped prices multiple times this year but still wrestle with rising costs.

South Africa’s parties are locked in last-ditch talks

South Africa’s leading political parties are in last-minute bargaining talks to establish a coalition government with less than 24 hours left before parliament meets to select a president.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its 30-year parliamentary majority in the May 29 general election, claiming only a 40% share of the votes. President Cyril Ramaphosa needs a simple majority of votes in parliament to secure another five-year term at the helm of Africa’s most industrialized economy.

The ANC’s potential partners had agreed on two rounds of meetings over the last week. But sources told Semafor Africa the process of agreeing deals to form a “national unity government” spanning the political spectrum had been slow, with no agreement on how partners would share cabinet positions.

The ANC has been wooing the main opposition Democratic Alliance — which won 22% of the votes — and other smaller parties, with whom it would share power. The DA, opposed by some ANC members who say it serves the interests of a privileged white minority, was the first opposition party to announce an interest in exploring a coalition.

It has not officially confirmed that it has agreed to a partnership. DA lawmaker candidate Werner Horn told Semafor Africa that a “skeleton” of cooperation with the ANC had been agreed but the “flesh” was yet to be finalized.

The DA’s arch foes, the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe Party, both populist parties that both broke away from the ANC, have been left out of the talks, according to two ANC sources and another from the EFF.

The conservative Inkatha Freedom Party, which has an ethnic Zulu base, on Wednesday said it was prepared to work with the ANC and DA in a coalition government.

— Sam Mkokeli in Johannesburg

African subscribers dump MultiChoice

Africa’s biggest pay TV company MultiChoice saw its active subscribers decline by 9% in 2023, as inflation and currency devaluation hit consumers’ pockets.

Macroeconomic pressures drove the South African company’s worst-ever performance as it faces a takeover by France’s Canal+. MultiChoice, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, lost 4.1 billion rand ($223 million) in the 2023 financial year. The group, in its annual results announced on Wednesday, disclosed that it lost 13% of active subscribers across its “Rest of Africa” business, which excludes South Africa.

Nigeria, Angola and Zambia posted the worst performances, the company said. The group incurred remittance losses of $59 million from Nigeria due to forex market volatility. But “the South African business was less bad, declining by only 5%,” the company said. It noted that ongoing power cuts, also known as load-shedding, contributed to the decline in South Africa as some subscribers were unwilling to continue paying for TV subscriptions they might not fully utilize.

An independent board formed by MultiChoice last week said an offer by shareholder Canal+ to take control of the group was “fair and reasonable,” paving the way for the deal’s completion. In April, the French firm made an offer of 35 billion rand ($1.9 billion), which valued the company at about 55 billion rand ($3 billion).

— Martin K.N Siele

Ethiopia’s Commercial Bank violated data privacy

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, the country’s largest financial institution, is grossly violating customer’s private data through its decision to “publish hundreds of names, account numbers, and photographs of people,” says a statement from the international digital rights group Access Now and Ethiopia’s Centre for Advancement of Rights and Democracy.

The statement, released yesterday, is in response to the bank’s recent name-and-shame strategy to recoup $14 million lost during a system glitch that allowed customers to withdraw unauthorized funds earlier in March. The bank released the information of customers after a deadline lapse during which the bank asked for the voluntary return of the money. Nearly 15,000 accounts were implicated in the transactions, including a few of the bank’s employees. Though the bank has managed to claim back more than 98% of the funds, it has yet to fully take down customers’ data.

A personal data protection law was approved by Ethiopia’s parliament in the weeks following the incident, and contains, “clear provisions on the legal basis for the processing of personal data which the CBE has failed to comply with,” said a statement from the organization.

According to the new law, the bank can be challenged on the grounds of unlawful transfer to a third party, which in this case is the public, said Befeqadu Hailu, executive director at the Center for Advancement of Rights and Democracy. “Posting these sensitive data of its customers also assumes their guilt,” he said. “Even when the police catch you red-handed in a crime, they have to take you to court, they don’t have the mandate to declare you guilty.”

Maya Misikir in Addis Ababa

Tech

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe has sought the input of cryptocurrency service providers as authorities draw up regulations for the sector in the country.

🇰🇪 TotalEnergies said it partnered with electric vehicles companies in Kenya — Ampersand, Roam, and Arc Ride — to roll out 13 charging stations in 2023.

🇸🇱 Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink went live in Sierra Leone, a year after being licensed to operate. It increases Starlink’s Africa footprint to nine countries.

🇰🇪 A Kenyan court declared void an order that mandated e-commerce logistics startup Wasoko to reverse its firing of nine employees.

Governance

🇨🇩 DR Congo’s first female prime minister, Judith Suminwa Tuluka, was sworn in on Wednesday. She promised to lay the groundwork for an “emerging Congo” by creating around 2.6 million jobs and lay out actions on security, economic diversification, and climate change.

🇸🇩 The US’s special envoy to Sudan on Tuesday said parts of the country are in famine, and the extent of extreme hunger remained unclear nearly 14 months into a war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia is set to increase spending by 21%, to 971.2 billion birr ($16.9 billion), in the fiscal year starting July, the finance minister told parliament. He said the government would plug the deficit through local and foreign borrowing.

Deals

🇳🇬 Nigeria’s state oil company signed an agreement with marine infrastructure developer Golar LNG for the deployment of a floating liquefied natural gas vessel off the coast of its oil-rich Niger Delta region. The facility is set to record its first gas production by 2027.

🇬🇳 Guinea signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia’s state-owned energy group Rosatom last week to explore the use of floating nuclear reactors to generate and supply electricity in the West African nation.

🌍 Africa-focused British investor Development Partners International sold its stake in International Facilities Services, a facility management group in Mozambique, Zambia, and the DRC.

African elephants are among the few wild animals that call each other and respond to individual names, a new study shows. Researchers followed Savanna elephants at Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park, observing which elephants called out and appeared to respond. They used machine learning to detect the use of “names” in recorded vocalizations in a sound library. The team then analyzed the audio data, predicting which elephant was responding to the inclusion of its name. Researchers tested their results by playing recordings to individual elephants who responded more energetically, with ears flapping and trunk lifted, to recordings that contained their names.

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— Yinka, Alexis, Alexander Onukwue, Martin Siele, Muchira Gachenge, and Jenna Moon