Mozambique increased minimum pay levels for workers including government employees, even as the International Monetary Fund urged the country to keep its wage bill under control amid a debt crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Public workers’ minimum wages will rise by 21 percent, Labor Minister Vitoria Diogo said Tuesday after a cabinet meeting in the capital, Maputo. The increase is higher than that for employees in the private sector including banking, construction and manufacturing, and slightly less than inflation, which accelerated to 21.57 percent in March.

Ratings agency Fitch is likely to follow rival Standard & Poor’s and cut South Africa’s sovereign credit rating to below investment-grade, analysts said, an outcome that would underscore worries about political uncertainty and prompt a further sell-off in assets, the Irish Times reported. The ratings agency was considering its position as thousands of South Africans took to the streets on Friday to urge President Jacob Zuma to step down after a turbulent week in the wake of his firing of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan.

Mozambique’s attorney-general asked the country’s banks to provide details of former President Armando Guebuza’s accounts as part of an audit of $2 billion of previously undisclosed government loans, Bloomberg News reported. The office requested the information about Guebuza and 17 other individuals and an institution for the period January 2012 to December 2016, according to a letter sent to the country’s banks and obtained by Bloomberg.

Nigeria's state-owned AMCON has recovered 681.5 billion naira ($2.2 bln) over the past six years from debtors in the form of cash, properties and shares, it said on Monday. The Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) was set up in 2010 to absorb banking sector-wide non-performing loans in exchange for government bonds, after the central bank rescued nine weak lenders from collapse in 2009, Reuters reported. Read more.

“An indebted Africa cannot be a rising Africa,” Akinwumi Adesina, head of the African Development Bank, told a gathering of the region’s heads of state, senior ministers and leading financiers last year. That warning is acquiring greater weight as government debt burdens tick up in many African countries on the back of a rising dollar, low commodity prices, rapid borrowing during the low interest rate era and sliding currencies, the Financial Times reported. The problem is not unique to Africa.

Mozambique missed a $119 million payment due Tuesday on a loan Credit Suisse Group AG arranged, the second debt repayment the government failed to make in as many months, Bloomberg News reported. The $622 million facility was taken out by state-owned ProIndicus and was supposed to fund the purchase of boats and radar systems to protect the country’s Indian Ocean coastline, where companies including Italy’s Eni SpA and U.S.-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. have large offshore gas reserves. Credit Suisse on Tuesday declined to comment on its financing of Mozambique.

Slumping cocoa prices are testing to the limit top producer Ivory Coast’s efforts to ensure stability for farmers, heightening risks for the domestic economy and world markets, Bloomberg News reported. Authorities have warned they’ll have to cut payments to growers. That follows a wave of defaults by local exporters who’d bet on higher prices, costing the government more than $300 million and pushing cocoa futures even lower.

A seasoned economist in Ghana likens his country to a plane perpetually trundling down the runway, never quite taking off. Extend the metaphor along the coast, and Nigeria’s economy, the largest in Africa in dollar terms before the collapse in world oil prices, has been grounded, the Financial Times reported. In the throes of its first recession in 25 years, inflation is soaring, factories closing and the fabled middle class has been retreating to the place from which it only recently re-emerged.

Mozambique will seek to negotiate a restructuring of part of its debt, its prime minister said on Wednesday. The southern African nation is struggling to repay loans of more than $2 billion that were not approved by parliament or disclosed publicly, Reuters reported. "We will negotiate with the creditors to restructure these debts," said Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario, adding that the nation wants to honour its debts "in a balanced way", the state news agency reported.

Barclays Bank of Kenya will focus on growing its non-interest income after a jump in bad debts and a government cap on lending rates cut its 2016 pretax profit by 10 percent, it said on Wednesday. The cap on lending rates, introduced last September, was expected to squeeze margins and profits at Kenyan banks, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The cap limits commercial bank lending rates at 400 basis points above the central bank rate, which stands at 10 percent. The government brought in the cap because it said lending rates were too high.