Africa

🇿🇦 The 15th BRICS Summit — organized by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — will be held in-person next month in South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa told journalists on Sunday. This is in spite of concerns around an arrest warrant issued in March for Russian President Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court connected to the invasion of Ukraine. “All of us are committed to having a summit where we will be able to eyeball each other,” Ramaphosa said. Earlier, reports emerged that South Africa was considering hosting the meeting entirely online to avoid the Russian leader from participating in person.

🇬🇦 Gabon’s President Ali Bongo will run again in the Aug. 26 presidential elections to extend his 14-year rule, the leader announced in a Facebook video on Sunday. Bongo’s family has run the oil-rich country for 56 years. He secured his second term as president in 2016, after a disputed election which triggered protests country-wide. In April this year, the country’s parliament voted to reduce the president’s term from seven to five years in a move that Bongo’s opponents criticized. Currently, there are no constitutional term limits in Gabon.

🇹🇿 Tanzanian mining firm Lifezone Metals publicly listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday in its first initial public offering. Lifezone Metals’ chief executive Chris Showalter said that the flagship Kabanga Project, which is at exploration stage, offers one of the largest and highest-quality undeveloped nickel deposits in the world. He added that the company stands to produce materials needed for active lithium-ion batteries as the demand for electric vehicles rises worldwide.

🌍 The Kremlin is willing to let Wagner Group keep some of its operations in Africa, including those in the Central African Republic (CAR), reported Bloomberg which cited two sources. The future of the private army in Africa, where it has extensive business networks in some nations, remains uncertain. It comes as Sky News reported that 400 Wagner employees left the capital, Bangui, last week after refusing to sign new contracts with Russia’s ministry of defense. “If Russia has no agreement anymore with Wagner it will send us a new contingent,” said an advisor to the president.

The period of Sudan’s airspace closure given the latest extension to July 31 by its civil aviation authority. Embroiled in fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Sudan closed its airspace on April 15. The extension to the end of July comes amidst warnings by United Nations chief Antonio Guterres that the prolonged battle risks transforming into a full blown civil war after an airstrike killed 22 people on Saturday. Egypt is set to host a meeting of Sudan’s neighboring countries this coming Thursday in a bid to broker a lasting resolution. A number of temporary ceasefires have been ineffective.

Ethiopia’s social media shutdowns threaten its digital economy

THE NEWS

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia wants to build an open digital economy, but it’s also indefinitely blocking major social media platforms for unspecified security reasons.

Since February, when the Horn of Africa nation banned Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Telegram and YouTube, its struggling economy has lost more than $140 million, according to estimates by Center for Advancement of Rights and Democracy (CARD Ethiopia), which has campaigned for the end of the restrictions.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government raised hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees from telecoms investors and other financial institutions keen to gain entry to the once completely closed Ethiopian economy, home to Africa’s second largest population. This month it announced a new license to bring in a third phone company to the country and approved a mobile money license last month for Kenyan phone company Safaricom.

But investment in the digital economy hasn’t followed. In the last few years — as ethnic tensions spiked, leading to local unrest, then regional conflict, and eventual civil war in 2021 — the government has targeted activity on social media platforms, led by Facebook as one of areas of concern.

“The perception that we shut down the internet is something that the digital investor would never take a risk on,” said Addis Alemayehou, a local startup investor.

KNOW MORE

Social media use has grown quickly in Ethiopia and is dominated by Facebook, with nearly 7 million monthly users.

The latest shutdowns of social networking sites are part of a long pattern of limiting or completely blocking internet use for a variety of reasons, including during national exams to prevent cheating, anti-government protests, international gatherings and conflicts, most recently in the Tigray region, which saw a shutdown that lasted for almost two years.

SAMUEL’S VIEW

The frequent internet interruptions hurt Ethiopians trying to do everything from paying bills to watching YouTube videos. And that’s been noticed by international investors contemplating a bet on the massive growth potential of a huge, long-underdeveloped digital market.

The country’s Digital Ethiopia 2025 strategy, which launched in 2020, was meant to market the nation to investors in areas of telecommunication and aviation as a way to liberalize the economy.

In 2021, as civil strife escalated in northern Ethiopia, Kenya’s Safaricom became the first international investor to enter the telecom sector, ending a state monopoly. But it offered only $850 million for a 15-year license, a fraction of what was anticipated from the Ethiopian government amid lukewarm interest from other bidders.

“For Ethiopia, the service sector has a significant contribution to the economy, even more than the manufacturing sector,” Fassil Gebretsadik, an investor, told Semafor. “Internet interruptions kill the prospect of growth and would be a challenge to attract more investors to it.”

This year, the government is offering a second telecommunications license — but that, too, is expected to reap disappointing bid amounts. It also licensed Safaricom to start operating its signature mobile payment system, M-Pesa. But with frequent internet interruptions, sustaining the mobile payment service could be a tall order.

THE VIEW FROM ADDIS INFLUENCERS

Many young Ethiopians turned to virtual private networks — allowing them to look like they were logging in from Europe or North America — to circumvent Ethiopia’s social media restrictions, creating a business boost for some local social media influencers.

A popular young YouTuber, who asked to remain anonymous, said his income has jumped since the beginning of the year. “I was worried about the internet blockade in the beginning, fearing it would impact my business. I now earn upwards of $20,000 a month, more than three times what I was earning last week,” he said.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Abiy, during his address to parliament last week, said the continuing suspension of social media is due to civil unrest and the distribution of misinformation that threatens national stability and cohesion.

Foreign direct investment into Africa dropped by 44% to $45 billion last year after hitting a record $80 billion in 2021, according to UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2023. The biggest subregional fall of 84% was seen in southern Africa, where flows returned to normal levels after an “anomalous peak” in 2021 caused by “large corporate reconfiguration” in South Africa, the subregion’s largest economy. The West Africa subregion was impacted by its largest economy Nigeria which showed negative FDI flows of -$187 million due to equity divestments and by Ghana where inflows fell by 39% to $1.5 billion. North Africa’s inflows were boosted by Egypt which saw FDI more than double to $11 billion thanks to an increase in cross-border merger and acquisition activity.

On a visit to Cameroon last week, 24-year-old French football superstar Kylian Mbappe was welcomed with much excitement from the airport and through the streets of Yaounde and later Douala. Mbappe, whose father is Cameroonian, is the subject of fervent pre-season gossip over whether he will leave his club Paris Saint-Germain but visiting his fatherland seemed a useful getaway. He was pictured playing five-a-side football with locals, and spending time with celebrities like mixed martial artist Francis Ngannou and former NBA player Joakim Noah. But a broader sense of Mbappe’s visit is in the light of a wave of European players of African descent increasing their familiarity with the continent, from the Dutch player Memphis Depay holidaying in Ghana a year ago to English star Bukayo Saka doing the same in Nigeria in June.

• Semafor held its World At Work Summit in which speakers debated topics of critical importance to both leaders and employees.
• Independent Russian journalists are working from exile in Latvia, trying their best to cover the war in Ukraine and get information out through Telegram and YouTube.
• Western nations should invite African and Latin American countries to join an existing group for mineral-rich nations to head off the creation of new green energy cartels.

🇸🇹Happy 48th Independence Day to São Tomé and Príncipe!

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