South Africa is considering offering additional incentives to automakers to help cushion the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on cars, Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau said on Thursday, Reuters reported. "What we're currently considering is the possibility of expanding the automotive industry production plan so that we're able to mitigate the impact in our industry," Tau said in an interview with radio broadcaster Power FM.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation that could block International Monetary Fund support for some Central African countries, in an effort to guard billions of dollars that oil companies must set aside for environmental restoration, Reuters reported. The bill highlights a standoff between foreign investors on one side and Central African monetary authorities trying to enforce tighter capital controls on extractive industries to shore up depleted reserves on the other. Introduced by U.S.

A Nigerian court has adjourned a tax evasion case against Binance to April 30 to allow the local tax authority to respond to a request by the cryptocurrency exchange to annul an order for court documents to be served on it by email, a lawyer for Binance said on Monday, Reuters reported. The lawyer, Chukwuka Ikwuazom, asked the court to set aside the order because the tax authority did not obtain a leave from the court to serve court documents on Binance outside Nigeria. Binance does not have a physical office in Nigeria.

Ghana’s new central bank Governor Johnson Asiama showed his commitment to fighting inflation by unexpectedly raising the benchmark interest rate, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee lifted the policy rate to 28% from 27%, Asiama told reporters at a press briefing in Accra, the capital on Friday. None of the five economists in a Bloomberg survey expected an increase - the first since July 2023. It was Asiama’s first policy decision since replacing Ernest Addison as governor in February. The hike “is meant to re-anchor the disinflation process,” Asiama said.

Ethiopia has reached a deal with its official creditors to restructure $8.4 billion of international debt, a key milestone in the nation’s efforts to overhaul its loans and boost growth, Bloomberg News reported. The agreement with bilateral lenders under the G20 Common Framework, backed by an International Monetary Fund program, will slash debt service by $2.5 billion through 2028, its finance ministry said on Friday, without giving details of the terms. The deal will allow the country to spend more on “critical public investments,” the ministry said in a statement.

South Africa’s central bank paused its easing cycle while it assesses the impact US President Donald Trump’s trade policies may have on inflation, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee maintained the benchmark interest rate at 7.5%, Governor Lesetja Kganyago told reporters at a briefing north of Johannesburg on Thursday. That matched the median estimate of 21 economists in a Bloomberg survey, in which 14 predicted the hold and the rest expected a cut.

Ghana’s central bank said it’s in talks with domestic lenders on how they should tackle a rise in bad loans that in part stems from a government debt renegotiation, with one lender unable to recover as much as 81% of its total credit, Bloomberg News reported. The unidentified institution remains an outlier with the industry’s non-performing loans ratio standing at 21.8% of total credit at the end of 2024, but that’s still far above the 14.8% reported in December 2022, the month Ghana defaulted on most of its external debt, data on the Bank of Ghana’s website shows.

Nigeria’s central bank paused its steep campaign of monetary tightening, after an overhaul of the data used to calculate inflation showed it had significantly slowed, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee maintained the policy rate at 27.5%, Governor Olayemi Cardoso told reporters in Abuja, the capital on Thursday. Eight out of nine economists in a Bloomberg survey correctly predicted the decision. “The MPC noted with satisfaction recent macro economic developments,” Cardoso said, citing recent stability of the naira.

Over the last quarter century, Zimbabwe has failed to pay $21 billion in debt. Now, as the country struggles with the impact of a once-in-a-generation drought, ordinary Zimbabweans are paying the price, Bloomberg News reported. A prolonged hot and dry spell caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon has ravaged southern Africa, withering crops and leaving 26 million people across seven nations hungry, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Zimbabwe has been hardest hit, with the corn crop falling by more than two-thirds from previous years.

Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said the southern African nation needs to regain access to credit lines before it can adopt the ZiG as its sole currency, Bloomberg News reported. “We need a few things in place” before the nation can have a mono currency, including making progress on restructuring $21 billion in debt, Ncube said. The nation has been locked out of capital markets since 1999 after defaulting on its debt.