Africa

🇺🇬 Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine was arrested on Thursday and placed under house arrest upon arriving from a trip abroad, his party said. The National Unity Platform (NUP) party’s secretary general alleged that Wine was “picked up by the regime operatives,” attaching a video in which Wine was seen being whisked away in a car by unidentified men. Ugandan police rejected the allegations, stating that Wine was “escorted” by the force to his home. It urged people to “disregard rumors of his arrest.” Wine lost the 2021 presidential election to the incumbent Yoweri Museveni and is his main political challenger ahead of the 2026 polls.

🇲🇱 Mali and Niger both struggled with insurgent attacks in recent days. Northern Tuareg rebels in Mali on Wednesday said they had seized the Malian army camp in Taoussa. The attack follows those on other military bases in northern and central Mali in recent weeks. There was no immediate comment from the army. The reports came after the neighboring Niger junta confirmed the killing of at least 29 soldiers in an ambush by insurgents near the country’s border with Mali on Monday, the deadliest attack since the army ousted elected president Mohamed Bazoum in a July coup.

🇿🇲 Zambia is set to restructure $6.3 billion in debt by the close of the IMF’s annual meeting next week in Marrakech, Morocco, Bloomberg reports. The southern African country — which in 2020 became the continent’s first nation to default on its sovereign debt in the pandemic era — had in June reached a deal-in-principle with creditors made up of 16 countries co-led by China and France. The agreement would see Zambia cutting interest rates to as low as 1% and only repaying the loans in 2043.

🇪🇹 The European Union has launched an aid program to support Ethiopia with 650 million euros ($683 million) from 2024 to 2027 in its effort to rebuild after its two-year civil war. The new aid comes nearly three years after the EU cut direct aid to the Horn of Africa nation in late 2020 after fighting broke out in the northern Tigray region. The EU commissioner for international partnerships said it was the “first concrete step” towards normalizing relations and building a mutually reinforcing partnership with Ethiopia.

The number of recorded cyberattacks that targeted Kenya in the last 12 months, according to the country’s communications regulator. “Of these attacks, 79% were a result of cyber criminals exploiting flaws and vulnerabilities in organizations’ internal controls,” the Communications Authority of Kenya said on Monday. By comparison, it said Kenya experienced 7.7 million cyberattacks in 2017. In June, the country suffered a major attack on the e-Citizen platform used to deliver government services. It caused system outages that left users unable to access a range of services from passport applications and driving license renewals to electricity payments.

Ruto’s problematic Big Tech promise

THE NEWS

A claim by Kenya’s President William Ruto’s that big tech firms Google, Intel and Apple want to hire 100,000 to 300,000 Kenyan online workers is eliciting sharp reactions, including a measure of public criticism.

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→ What’s the background to this? Ruto made the statement on Sunday, Oct. 1, shortly after leading a US-Kenya business roadshow in which he pitched the country to top US tech companies and investors in Silicon Valley. Those he met included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger, Alphabet’s chief financial officer Ruth Porat, and Microsoft’s chief operating officer Brad Smith.

US Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman, herself a former CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard, also played a key role in the roadshow, encouraging US tech companies to invest in the East African country. She described it as a gateway to the rest of the continent and talked up the country’s vibrant tech sector.

→ What’s the tech sector saying? Google’s head of communications and public affairs for Africa, Dorothy Ooko, told Semafor Africa the company is hiring engineers, designers and researchers to work in its product development center in Nairobi which was announced in April 2022 and is the company’s first center of its kind in Africa.

“The center is still looking for talented, creative people who can help solve difficult and important technical challenges,” Ooko said, adding: “We continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring.”

Ben Roberts, chief technology and innovation officer at Nairobi-based digital services company Liquid Intelligent Technologies, was among the executives who attended the US-Kenya business roadshow in Silicon Valley. He told Semafor Africa a handful of companies might not directly hire hundreds of thousands of Kenyan workers but “in order to achieve larger numbers of Kenyans being employed, we need the big tech firms to work with local partners.”

→ How have Ruto’s comments been received? The president’s critics, both in the opposition and general public, have accused him of repeatedly making unrealistic promises designed to gain a political advantage. That characterization has earned Ruto monikers such as “Mr. Six Months” in reference to unmet project timelines.

Online, many Kenyans have questioned Ruto’s statement and his administration’s ability to deliver the jobs. Local media reports have been skeptical — Citizen TV questioned how the jobs could be delivered given recent layoffs in big tech and the sheer number of new jobs promised by the president.

MARTIN’S VIEW

Few countries in Africa are as well positioned to attract big tech investment as Kenya. In the past year, Microsoft and Google both opened landmark development centers in Nairobi and began recruiting some of the country’s top tech talent.

The Silicon Valley roadshow had its benefits and undoubtedly boosted Kenya’s profile to tech investors at a time when the president can point to progress. However, it is unlikely that a few big tech companies will hire hundreds of thousands of Kenyan workers. While he might have been assured of increased big tech investment in Kenya during his Silicon Valley trip, the president might have been playing to the gallery with the promised job numbers. For perspective, Google’s total number of employees stood at just under 180,000 as of January 2023.

Such statements can be frustrating to the millions of Kenyan youth grappling with unemployment and the high cost of living. According to the most recent census data, 5.3 million, or 38..9% of young Kenyans, are unemployed.

“He promised youth jobs while campaigning but I’m not seeing them, the economy is bad,” John Macharia, a 29-year old developer in Nairobi, told Semafor Africa. “I hope more (big tech) jobs come but I’m not counting on it. Right now the cost of living is my biggest concern. He (Ruto) needs to address it.”

A key aspect of global conversations around the clean energy transition relates to the financial cost of pivoting production systems in developing countries from current facilities that depend on fossil fuels to solar and wind sources. Most of the investment in Africa so far has gone to the continent’s largest economies. South Africa’s share is almost as large as the combined total of the next three in the continent’s top five destinations for renewable energy investment. The $280 million received in 2021 by Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country which has the continent’s biggest economy, “does not reflect the country’s full potential,” according to the African Development Bank’s (AfDB) latest report. Nigeria’s gas-fired power plants are only able to generate and transmit 3.1 gigawatts of electricity and a demand gap of 12.6 gigawatts remains unfilled, the AfDB says. Private companies have in recent years started offering industrial and household modes of solar-based energy.

Zambia and DRC team up for fast route to Tanzania’s port

The presidents of Zambia, and DR Congo jointly held a ground-breaking ceremony on Tuesday (Oct. 3), to kick off the reconstruction of a 184 km (118 miles) road connecting both mining-focused countries to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia and his Congolese counterpart Felix Tshisekedi met at a site close to the Luapula river, along the border between their countries and over which a 345 meter (1,130 feet) bridge for the road will run.

The Kasomeno-Mwenda road project will be carried out by GED Africa, a company based in Mauritius, at a reported cost of $850 million. Commercial transporters from the Haut-Katanga province in the DRC, where mining is central to the economy, will see roundtrips to the port of Dar es Salaam reduced by approximately 500 km (320 miles) on the new road, GED said.

Zambia and the DRC have large reserves of minerals that are essential for the global clean energy transition. Copper, whose demand is projected to grow threefold by 2040, accounts for about 75% of Zambia’s export earnings. The DRC’s deposits of cobalt — a key element in lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles — surpass those in all other countries combined and constitute 70% of global production. However, neither country has fully taken advantage of the demand for either resource, partly owing to infrastructure deficiencies along the value chain.

A direct route to the port in Tanzania offers the promise of faster shipments of Zambian copper and Congolese cobalt to China, where the world’s dominant electric vehicle battery manufacturing hub requires a steady supply of both metals. But Tanzania’s gain could be at the expense of Angola and South Africa, whose ports of Lobito and Durban respectively are each seen as competitors for processing copper and cobalt exports from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region. Durban has been hobbled by inefficiencies at South Africa’s state logistics company Transnet that last week prompted the resignation of its CEO.

Laurent Bili is the French ambassador to the United States, a post he took up in May. Before that he was the ambassador to China. On Sept. 24, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would withdraw 1,500 troops and its ambassador from Niger after the new military junta and popular demonstrations both pushed for France’s departure.

Nigerian poet and novelist Lola Shoneyin was named as the recipient of the first ever Aficionado Award for improving the quality of international publishing. The award is in recognition of her work through the Aké Arts and Book Festival, which she founded in 2013. Since its inception, Aké has produced literary works featuring prominent African authors — and published in English, Yoruba, and French. It has also brought together writers, artists, poets and filmmakers from 29 African countries. Shoneyin will receive the award at a ceremony in Frankfurt, Germany, later this month.

• Can artificial intelligence turn every employee into a developer?
• London is considering a shake-up of its electricity grid. The U.S.’s massive climate law is an unexpected factor.
• How a rural New York district attorney is preparing to try Salman Rushdie’s alleged attacker.

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