Africa

🇯🇵 Zambia, DR Congo, and Namibia are in advanced negotiations with the Japanese government to expand exploration and develop supply chains for rare minerals, including cobalt, copper, zinc, nickel, and lithium available in the three countries. Japan is moving to counter Chinese influence in the continent’s mining industry and diversify its mineral sources to enhance economic security. Japan’s minister for economy, trade, and industry Yasutoshi Nishimura said on Tuesday that he would visit the three countries, along with Angola and Madagascar, this month. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi is this week on tour in South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia to build up support for reviving the terminated Black Sea grain deal among African countries with close ties to Russia. He met up with his South African counterpart Naledi Pandor on Tuesday.

🇸🇳 The Senegalese government on Monday banned the main opposition Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (Pastef) party. Interior minister Antoine Félix Diome alleged that its leaders have frequently called on its supporters to take part in insurrectionary movements. The opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was also imprisoned to await trial on new criminal charges. Sonko has been accused of calling for insurrection, conspiring against the state, and threatening national security. The government also restricted internet services and the social media player TikTok, citing “dissemination of hateful and subversive messages on social networks.”

🇰🇪 Kenya said it is willing to deploy 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police to restore order. It follows an appeal by Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry last October for the deployment of a specialized armed force to address insecurity, gang violence and a humanitarian emergency in the Caribbean nation. Both the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed Kenya’s response to serve as the lead nation for a multinational force in Haiti. But Haitian civil society groups have widely opposed such a move citing past problems caused by foreign intervention.

🇨🇩 Funding for a major copper-cobalt project in DR Congo is now in doubt after its key backer, commodities trader Trafigura Group, was forced to seek new investment. The project is said to be developed by Chemsaf, a Trafigura partner. However, it has run into difficulties and costs have overrun, exacerbated by the fall in global cobalt prices, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter. The funding was for the construction of a mine and processing plant at Mutoshi and another processing plant in Lubumbashi. Trafigura is said to be seeking an additional $200 million to $300 million to help complete the project.

The money Nigeria has saved in the eight weeks since ending its fuel subsidy program, according to President Bola Tinubu in an address on Monday. Tinubu scrapped the scheme that he said “only benefited smugglers and fraudsters” and which the previous administration said cost $10 billion last year. But the pump price of petrol has nearly trebled across Nigeria since the subsidy ended, triggering anxieties being expressed today in the form of cost-of-living protest marches by hundreds of residents and worker unions in the capital Abuja and other parts of the country.

Electric motorbike startups jostle for advantage in Africa’s nascent EV sector

THE SCOOP

Startups providing electric motorcycles and batteries are setting up new plants, raising capital and competing for government partnerships in a bid to lead Africa’s drive into a $21 billion electric vehicle future.

Spiro, a company with about 9,400 motorcycles in Benin, Togo and Rwanda, will sign a $63 million debt financing agreement this week with French bank Société Générale and London-based financier GuarantCo.

The funds will be used to import more bikes and batteries from Spiro’s China-based EV maker Horwin, CEO Jules Samain told Semafor Africa. Spiro had raised $65 million in equity from investors including the Africa Transformation and Industrialization Fund, an Abu Dhabi company.

Some of that money is funding two electric motorcycle assembly and battery manufacturing plants being built in Benin and Togo and scheduled to open in 2024, Samain said.

ALEXANDER’S VIEW

The multimillion-dollar moves by Spiro and Roam add color to data that suggests Africa’s electric vehicle market, estimated to reach $21.4 billion in value by 2027 from under $12 billion two years ago, will be dominated by two-wheelers.

Of the nearly 5 million EVs that will be sold in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda by 2040, at least 80% will be motorcycles, a 2022 Shell Foundation report analyzed by McKinsey said.

Some EV businesses in Africa offer other vehicle types like mass transit buses, as BasiGo does in Kenya and Roam plans to roll out there next month. But motorcycles are often effective means of public transportation in many African cities, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in major cities like Kampala and Kigali. Even in Lagos where the government’s 2020 ban was premised on safety and security concerns, residents still depend on motorcycles to navigate thin muddy roads in difficult-to-access suburbs. Food delivery services and leading online retailer Jumia mostly use motorcycles for fulfillment.

The challenge for electric bike startups, however, is to affordably sell a product that costs significantly more than what it hopes to replace. Spiro’s cheaper $1,500 model is at least twice the price of a new petrol-powered motorcycle in Nigeria. One sales strategy that borrows from a popular playbook in East Africa is to allow users to pay over time. Roam has a deal with M-Kopa, a company whose pay-as-you-use technology enables Kenyans to own solar energy products and smartphones, to be its financing partner for customers who wish to buy electric motorbikes.

But partnerships with governments keen on renewable energy transition could be pivotal. In Uganda, Spiro entered an agreement in March with the government to make 140,000 of its bikes and 3,000 battery swap stations available within five years. The company is set to formalize a similar agreement with the Kenyan government in the coming weeks, Samain told Semafor Africa.

Read the full version of this story here including the View from Abuja

Kenyan regulators clamp down on WorldCoin

Kenya’s interior ministry on Wednesday suspended data collection activities by cryptocurrency project WorldCoin following concerns about data privacy and potential security risks. The interior minister, Kithure Kindiki, said various security and financial regulators had started investigations to “establish the authenticity and legality” of WorldCoin’s operations. He said the suspension would remain in effect until the government ruled out all security risks to enforce “the safety and protection of the data being harvested,” and determine how the harvesters intend to use the data.

Founded by OpenAi CEO Sam Altman in 2019, WorldCoin officially launched last week in 34 countries where it has registered more than 2 million people by scanning their eyes to collect biometric data. It says on its website that biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb scanning device (pictured) and then permanently deleted, and that it was not linked to an individual’s personal information.

As of Tuesday, more than 300,000 Kenyans were reported to have signed up for WorldCoin in exchange for free WorldCoin tokens (WLD) worth about 7,700 Kenyan shillings ($55). Police officers stopped thousands who had flocked to the Kenyatta International Conference Center in the capital Nairobi to sign up for WorldCoin, citing security concerns.

The Office of the Data Commissioner had earlier urged the public to remain vigilant and be careful about the data they shared as the commission engaged WorldCoin to ensure compliance with the law. The securities regulator also noted that WorldCoin “is not regulated in Kenya.”

— Muchira Gachenge in Nairobi

Eric Osiakwan is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Angel Africa List and Angel Fair Africa in 2013 to build an Africa-wide network of early stage investors in local startups. In December the organization will be marking its 10th anniversary in East London, South Africa.

South Africa’s loadshedding optimism was short lived

THE NEWS

South Africa seemed to be on the verge of bringing its power crisis to an end but outages are now lasting longer again after shrinking for months. Experts now warn any improvements were unrelated to reforms aimed at generating more power to end the blackouts strangling Africa’s most advanced economy.

“We will resolve loadshedding,” the electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, told reporters at a media briefing in early July, referring to the planned outages used to ration power for the past 15 years. “I think that we will resolve it much quicker than we had anticipated,” he said.

His remarks came days after the cabinet announced that energy availability had risen to nearly 70%, up from all time lows of around 50% a few months earlier. Many communities reported that outages were typically lasting around two hours rather than around 12 hours in some cases.

But, around a month since the minister’s comments and data showing higher energy availability, the length of loadshedding periods has increased as South Africa entered its winter months and experienced a cold front that saw snowfall in Johannesburg for the first time in more than a decade.

Tshepo Kgadima, one of the energy analysts who said the apparent improvements had been overstated, told Semafor Africa the idea that Eskom’s performance was getting better was based on a “misconception” about the level of demand.

JAN’S VIEW

Despite the recent improvements — however big or small — more still needs to be done to steer South Africa away from its aging coal-fired power stations and towards renewable energy solutions such as solar and wind. One of the biggest hurdles to this at the moment is the lack of political will.

Ramokgopa, the energy minister, last week bemoaned the recent closure of the coal-fired Komati power station in Mpumalanga, a province to the north of Johannesburg. “If I had my way, we’d go and restart Komati,” said Ramokgopa.

Other ministers and politicians have previously expressed resistance to initiatives that would help steer South Africa clear of the power crisis. That resistance to change is exacerbated by the mismanagement and corruption that has undermined Eskom for years.

— Jan Bornman in Johannesburg

Read a full version of this story including a View from South Africa’s One Percent here

Novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀‘s second novel, “A Spell of Good Things,” is among the 13 books long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize, making her the fifth Nigerian-born author to be nominated for the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. The judges praised the novel as a powerful and staggering read, which examines class and desire to transcend present challenges in modern Nigeria. The novel is set in contemporary Nigeria and explores the precarity of the class divide, warning of the failure to address socioeconomic challenges in the community by the haves. The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the author of a novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The judges said a six-book shortlist will be released next month, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on Nov. 26. Adébáyọ̀ would be the second Nigerian-born winner after Ben Okri and would take home a £50,000 ($64,000) prize.

• Big investors are banding together to fight Wall Street fees and chip away at the power held by the finance titans that manage their money.
• Warner Bros. apologized for embracing “insensitive” Barbenheimer memes after the studio’s Japanese counterpart called the behavior “extremely regrettable.”
• The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign is shaping as the first election of the age of fragmentation, with no single dominant platform for candidates to reach voters.

If you’re enjoying the Semafor Africa newsletter and finding it useful, please share with your family, and friends. We’d love to have them aboard.

Wishing the people of Niger a safe and happy 63rd independence day tomorrow 🇳🇪 (Aug. 3)

Also wishing the people of Burkina Faso a safe and happy 63rd independence day on Saturday 🇧🇫 (Aug. 5).

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, and good vibes.

— Yinka, Alexis, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge