Africa

Djibouti made its formal debut as a player in renewable energy with the launch on Sunday of its first-ever wind farm. The $122 million Red Sea Power project, which will provide 60 megawatts from a farm near Lake Goubet, will be followed by an additional 45 MW planned by its original consortium of investors. They are led by Lagos-based Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), FMO, the Dutch development bank, Climate Fund Managers and Djibouti-based Great Horn Investment Holding.

The Horn of Africa country of 1.1 million people currently has a total capacity of 123 MW, much of which is generated by imported fossil fuel or hydrogen-generated power from neighbor Ethiopia.

Wind power is one of the least exploited renewable energy options in Africa. In 2021, PwC estimated that African countries have only tapped 0.01% of a potential 59,000 gigawatts. Scientists say that plenty of locations across the continent have areas with wind speeds exceeding 6 metres per second, the minimum speed needed to efficiently operate wind turbines. Some of the continent’s biggest wind farms are at Lake Turkana in Kenya (310 MW), Tarfaya (301 MW) in Morocco, and Ras Ghareb in Egypt (262.5 MW).

A Kenyan-based “clean cookstove” manufacturer is making a long-term bet that more than 80% of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban dwellers will be connected to the electrical grid by 2030 — despite the current low levels of penetration.

In order to win over some of the 600 million people who are already connected, Nairobi’s BURN is rolling out what it claims is Africa’s first locally designed and assembled modern electric and pressure cookers. The new e-cookers, installed with Internet of Things sensors for real-time energy consumption monitoring, are designed to reduce carbon emissions and indoor pollution.

The company said it plans to roll out electric stove launches to five more African countries before the end of the year. It is also offering a “pay as you cook” financing option, which allows users to pay in small amounts via their mobile phones. Meanwhile Kenya Power, the East African country’s national electricity company, said it is targeting an increase in the use of electric cooking to more than 500,000 homes over the next three years from around 90,000 households now — or 1% of its electricity customers. Around 80% of Kenya’s energy is renewable, led by geothermal, hydroelectric, and wind.

— Muchira Gachenge in Nairobi

The orange-brown clay-like finish on the walls of the Abiyo mosque in the Ibeju Lekki suburb of Lagos is part of a widening conversation about developing a unique language for Nigerian architecture. Designed by Adeyemo Shokunbi, owner of Lagos-based firm PatrickWaheed Design Consulting, the building’s walls are coated with a laterite tyrolean technique. It uses a carefully measured blend of the naturally occurring reddish clay material found in the topsoil of tropical climates, with specific quantities of cement and sharp sand. The mixture is held together with a polyvinyl acetate binder to ensure rainwater doesn’t wash off the finish and that the shine remains consistent through seasons.

Shokunbi told ArchDaily the technique, which is inspired by traditional Yoruba mud buildings, creates not just an aesthetically pleasing structure but also helps keep the building at an optimal temperature for indoor activities, reducing the need for artificial energy. The Abijo mosque is one step in Shokunbi’s goal of finding “new and innovative ways of using locally-sourced materials to construct our architecture,” translating inspiration from traditional architecture into urban building projects.

— Alexander Onukwue in Lagos

Remembering Amilcar Cabral

As the people of Guinea Bissau celebrate the 49th anniversary of their independence today, we revisit the life of Amilcar Cabral, the anti-colonial revolutionary leader. Cabral, who was born in Bissau to Cape Verdean parents, was one of few Africans to attend university in Portugal in the 1950s where he trained as an agronomist. He founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC) soon after returning to the West African country to work for the colonial administration. It soon became an armed independence movement backed by Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, taking on the Portuguese from 1963 to 1974 in the ultimately successful Guinea Bissau War of Independence.

In December 2022, Jacobin magazine described the conflict as one that “transformed the face of world politics” in part by contributing to the end of white settler rule in southern Africa and democratic upheaval in Portugal itself.

🇿🇦 Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of South Africa’s Inkatha Freedom Party, died this weekend at the age of 95. His long legacy in the country’s apartheid-era freedom struggles and post-apartheid politics generated a wide range of opinions about his impact. President Cyril Ramaphosa described him as an “outstanding leader”. During apartheid, Buthelezi campaigned alongside the African National Congress (ANC) for Nelson Mandela’s release but disagreed with the ANC on armed struggle and international sanctions which he believed would hurt Black South Africans. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian praised him as an accomplished orator, historian and custodian of Zulu tradition and culture, but also noted he was “perhaps one of the most contradictory figures in South African politics.”

🇰🇪 Tuskys was one of East Africa’s largest supermarket chains with around 65 stores in Kenya and Uganda but over the last few months court filings have revealed its once-envied rapid expansion narrative was something of a mirage, as Brian Wasuna reports for Nation newspaper. It got so bad in mid-2020, when Tuskys owed millions of dollars to suppliers and landlords, that some unpaid staffers literally took matters into their own hands by helping themselves to stock and cash from the till.

🇸🇳 Contemporary African filmmakers — including the late Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembene — who emerged after independence have largely focused on undoing colonial perspectives that portray Africa as uncivilized and colonizers as saviors. Ana Carbajosa writes in African Arguments that while the Eurocentric depiction of the image of Africa as uncivilized is being corrected and a call for reappropriation of the African narrative amplified, there is still a long way to go in audiovisual restitution.

🌍 Energy planning and management is key to ensuring that climate-related risks are averted as the world shifts towards net zero, writes Giacomo Falchetta in The Conversation. He notes that hydropower — currently Africa’s largest source of renewable energy — depends on water availability and could be affected by extreme weather events like droughts and floods. He concludes that power system planners must “work with a robust framework that accounts for the inter-dependencies between hydropower, water availability and climate change in sub-Saharan Africa.”

🇰🇪 Kenya offered to send a United Nations-backed police mission to Haiti this year following a plea by its interim prime minister to the international community last October to send an armed force to fight armed gangs. However, critics have expressed fears of foreign intervention and mistrust of Kenyan forces over their graft and human rights abuses record. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the United States have amplified the plea to help restore order in the Caribbean nation.

🗓️ More than 300 investors from over 35 countries will gather in Kenya for the Africa VC Summit 2023. The summit aims to promote cross-border investments in burgeoning tech markets worldwide. (Sep. 10-13).

🗓️ The Africa Crime Prevention Forum will bring senior government officials and industry experts from across the region to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, to discuss security collaborations. (Sep. 12-13).

🗓️ Nigerian separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu will ask the Supreme Court to release him from detention nearly a year after a lower court quashed terrorism charges against him. The Nigerian government appealed against the Court of Appeal’s decision to free the founder of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) but has kept him in custody. (Sep. 14)

🗓️ Macondo Literary Festival will bring together authors from across Africa. The festival will take place at the Kenya National Theatre, Nairobi. (Sep. 15-17)

• African countries are losing their edge in the race for critical minerals. Mineral production investment fell to $470 million in 2022.
• America’s top CEOs of America promised a more egalitarian approach to business. Four years later, CEO pay is up, ESG ratings have barely budged, and companies still spend billions on buybacks.
• Polls keep showing Biden and Trump tied. Here’s why Democrat pollsters and strategists say they’re not panicking yet.
• After many schools rushed to ban ChatGPT, some professors now say they’re not worried about it — while others are teaching with it.

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.

Happy 49th Independence Day to the people of Guinea Bissau 🇬🇼!

You can reply to this email and send us your news tips, gossip, street food recommendations and good vibes.

— Yinka, Alexis Akwagyiram, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge.