Africa

🇸🇳 Senegal President Macky Sall said he will not seek re-election in 2024. Sall clarified his intentions in a speech late on Monday, ending months of speculation that he would pursue a third term. The West African country’s constitution limits presidents to serving two terms. Ahead of yesterday’s announcement, opposition leader Ousmane Sonko urged his supporters to be ready to take to the streets if the president said he would contest next February’s election. Uncertainty over Sall’s intentions have fueled unrest and violent protests in recent months.

🇧🇼 Botswana’s government and global mining giant De Beers agreed a new 10-year sales deal on rough diamonds produced by their Debswana joint venture. They also agreed a 25-year extension to its mining licenses under the agreement announced on Friday. They agreed that the state-owned Okavango Diamond Company would increase its sales stake to 30%, which would rise to 50% by the last year of the agreement. The deal “reflects the aspirations of the people of Botswana, [and] propels both Botswana and De Beers forward,” the two parties said in a statement.

🇿🇦 South Africa’s main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) and six other parties announced that they will hold talks aimed at forming a pact to unseat the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in elections next year. The group — which does not include the country’s third biggest party, the Economic Freedom Fighters — plans to hold talks on Aug. 16 and 17 to negotiate a pre-election agreement. Party leaders involved in the “moonshot coalition,” in a statement yesterday, said that coming elections presented an “unprecedented opportunity” to remove the ANC from government.

The value of the 120 deals signed during the third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo. The four-day event, which ended on Sunday, was held in Changsha, capital of the central Chinese province of Hunan. The value of the deals was lower than previous years and fell short of estimates that it would generate nearly twice that much, reported the South China Morning Post. However, Hunan’s deputy secretary general, Zhou Yixiang, said participation at this year’s event was the highest so far, with 1,700 overseas guests and more than 10,000 domestic visitors.

African countries are in a race to recover the Chinese tourist market

THE NEWS

NAIROBI — Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa are leading a charge by African countries to reinvigorate their post-pandemic tourism markets by targeting the Chinese travel market.

The three countries, along with Egypt, were among the first popular destinations for Chinese visitors after the Asian giant relaxed two-year-old pandemic rules to allow its citizens to travel for tourism in February. All three countries have been implementing long-term strategies — including resuming direct flights to China, relaxed e-visa requirements, direct marketing in China through embassies and travel agents — and investing heavily to woo Chinese tourists.

Kenya is expanding its focus to reach more Chinese visitors by marketing through travel agents, partnerships with airlines and tour operators, and social media platforms, according to John Chirchir, acting chief executive of Kenya Tourism Board. There’s a particular focus on WeChat, Mafengwo, Weibo, and Douyin, the China-based sister video channel to TikTok.

Chirchir said Kenya recorded 8,000 arrivals between January and April this year compared to just under 6,000 for the same period last year.

KNOW MORE

In 2022, Kenya earned $2.13 billion in income from tourism after a surge in visitors as COVID restrictions eased around the world, according to the tourism board. The ministry has forecast Kenya could recover to 2019 tourism numbers by 2024.

Similarly, South Africa has targeted job growth with the resumption of Chinese tourist activities in the country, said Nomasonto Ndlovu, chief operations officer of South Africa Tourism. She told Semafor Africa that with additional direct flights resuming from China to Johannesburg, for example, the country projects to receive around 8,000 Chinese tourists per month later this year. This would bring it back to 2019 levels when South Africa received 94,000 visitors from China.

MUCHIRA’S VIEW

African tourist markets are focused on the vast Chinese markets as part of a wider effort to overcome difficult economic environments. Jobs and foreign exchange earnings have yet to recover after the global pandemic, and many countries are grappling with extended economic downturns exacerbated by the fallout from Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although tourism usually accounts for less than 10% of GDP in most of the larger African economies, aside from Tanzania (17%), it punches above its weight as a contributor to foreign exchange earnings.

Local travel companies are taking it upon themselves to promote their countries on the ground in China rather than just hope for visitors. “That makes it possible to cast the net wider as we showcase Kenya’s tourist attractions,” said Darlene Anjimbi, a tour manager at Kenya China Travels and Tours.

Much of the long-term tourism business in Africa has traditionally targeted Europeans and North Americans in terms of everything from the types of entertainment offered to familiar languages and cuisine at hotels and on tours — and they still dominate in visitor numbers. In Kenya for instance, travelers from the United States alone accounted for over 12% of international visitors last year..

A big part of the attraction with Chinese tourists coming to Africa is the fact that it can resume being a fast-growing sector of the market even though it’s still small today. The potential is huge with hundreds of millions of middle class Chinese visitors eager to see the pyramids of Egypt and go on safaris in East and southern Africa.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Tapping into the Chinese travel market and increasing foreign exchange is less about the number of Chinese tourists who visit Kenya and more about their spending power, argues Peter Masila, a tourism lecturer at Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. He said the government should shift its focus from increasing visitor numbers and instead target well-heeled tourists with holiday packages tailored to their interests.

VIEW FROM TANZANIA

Tanzania’s tourism minister, Mohamed Mchengerwa, said in May the country needed “visitors from all over China to boost our tourism sector.” The country’s tourism board estimates that more than 45,000 Chinese tourists will visit by the end of the year. It would likely be less than 3% of the 1.5 million visitors Tanzania had last year who contributed to a tourism industry that accounts for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP and as much as a quarter of foreign exchange earnings.

NOTABLE

• Tanzania has been working on strategies to boost the number of its Chinese visitors, writes the South Morning China Post.

Since Ethiopia allowed non-banks to offer mobile money services in 2020, financial inclusion advocates have been watching Africa’s second most populous country closely. A study by GSMA, the mobile trade body, posits that if Ethiopia experiences high adoption rates of mobile money as seen elsewhere in the region, it could boost financial inclusion and lift as many as 700,000 people out of poverty and add $5.3 billion to the country’s GDP. Financial inclusion is defined here as having access to useful and affordable financial products and services such as savings, credit and insurance.

Ethiopia last week floated a tender for a second new telecommunications license, announced by its regulator. Kenya’s Safaricom, which launched its mobile network in Ethiopia last October, became the country’s first private operator since the liberalization of its telco industry. It is second only in market share to the state-owned Ethio Telecom.

South Africa sees Putin staying home for BRICS

JOHANNESBURG — South African officials are confident Russian President Vladimir Putin will miss the annual gathering of BRICS nations in Johannesburg next month amid security concerns in the wake of the abortive mutiny by the Wagner private army.

South Africa is hosting the 2023 annual summit of the group — comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — in late August, to which Putin is invited. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest in March for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. South Africa, as a member of the ICC, is officially obliged to enforce the warrant. Semafor Africa has previously reported that Pretoria would prefer Putin stayed away to prevent a diplomatic headache. It has proposed that he instead joins the proceedings virtually and a senior member of his government attends physically.

South African government officials say they are in regular contact with their Russian counterparts who have indicated that Putin is open to not attending in person. Two senior government officials told Semafor Africa this was particularly the case after the brief Wagner mutiny late last month because it showed Putin’s vulnerability at home.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Russian government was considering sending prominent figures such as former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy head of the Security Council, or Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

A third government official said Putin and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa held a bilateral meeting during a peace mission in June — around a week before the Wagner mutiny — during which the Russian president was said to be receptive to the idea of sending Medvedev or Lavrov rather than attending the BRICS summit himself.

“It’s a serendipitous moment for South Africa,” said Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue think tank in Pretoria. “It’s up to Putin to decide if he feels safe enough to travel for BRICS but it will be hard for him to control things if he leaves the palace and there’s a revolt again.”

— Sam Mkokeli

In Namibia giant kelp forests are being grown to help lock away planet-heating carbon dioxide. Kelp Blue, a Dutch startup, is piloting the project off the coast of Luderitz, a former diamond mining town in the south of the country. It “has the ideal conditions for cultivating macrocystis [commonly known as giant kelp]” according to the company. Giant kelp can grow up from the seabed to the surface, forming canopies of photosynthetic leaves which absorb carbon dioxide. The project will also involve the harvesting of some of the kelp to produce, among others, biodegradable food packaging, and biostimulants used to boost crop yields and build drought resilience.

• A major anti-racist project commissioned by Netflix in 2020 in the turmoil after George Floyd’s murder by police was quietly dropped earlier this year, reports Max Tani.
• Can the White House sell Bidenomics? Jordan Weissmann looked at the attempt to turn the U.S. president’s biggest political liability into an asset.
• Read our curated analysis of the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s student debt decision.

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