Credit Suisse Group AG Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam says it is “madness” for African nations to rely on loans in foreign currencies to fund vital infrastructure including roads, power and clean water, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lenders in African nations must instead find domestic savings to invest in local projects, said the Ivory Coast-born banker who took charge of Zurich-based Credit Suisse in June. Mr.

As if being kicked out of one of the world’s biggest emerging-market bond indexes isn’t enough, Nigeria now faces the risk of its credit rating falling further into junk, Bloomberg News reported today. Standard & Poor’s, which rates Africa’s largest oil producer four levels below investment grade at B+ with a stable outlook, releases a review of its assessment on Sept. 18. A week later, it’s the turn of Fitch Ratings, which has Nigeria at BB-, one level above S&P, with a negative outlook.

South Africa’s central bank governor has given warning about emerging market turbulence if volatility over the Chinese economy continues, but has ruled out any intervention to prop up a weak rand. The South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) surprised analysts on Monday when it released a statement on currency volatility, saying it “may consider becoming involved in foreign exchange markets to ensure orderly market conditions”.

Bad news from China has sparked a firestorm in the developing countries that feed its vast industrial machine, leaving a swath of economies with few good ways to escape a crunch, The Wall Street Journal reported. In Indonesia, coal once bound for China is piled up in port. In South Africa, mines that fed China’s voracious demand for metals are firing workers. In financial markets, investors have responded by pulling out. On Monday, the currencies of Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and other commodity exporters tumbled to multiyear lows against the U.S. dollar.

The shock waves from China’s surprise yuan devaluation are ricocheting through African economies, sending currencies tumbling and stoking anxiety that the continent’s biggest trading partner might be losing its appetite for everything from oil to wine, The Wall Street Journal reported. In South Africa, the rand hit a 14-year low of 12.94 to the dollar on Monday, extending a 2% drop since Aug. 10 and a 12% slide this year.

The Nigerian government has resorted to chopping down trees lining the streets of its capital to thwart black market money changers, one of a range of unorthodox measures it is deploying to defend its weakening currency, the Financial Times reported. On an August morning in Abuja, a labourer who said he was hired by the city government cut branches from a towering tree with a chainsaw. Nearby other workers hacked away at smaller trees with machetes.

Evraz Highveld Steel and Vanadium has a "reasonable prospect" of recovering despite closing operations and possibly cutting jobs, the South African steelmaker's business rescue team said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The company, which last week pulled the plug on its South African iron operations, citing a lack of working capital and saying at the time it planned to stop its steel plant, has been in business rescue proceedings for three months to protect it from creditors.

The collapse in commodity prices and the rise of the African middle class has flipped the fortune trends of the continent's richest people. "The go-go years of African billionaires whose wealth has been built around oil is over," said Martyn Davies, CEO of Johannesburg, South Africa-based investment research firm, Frontier Advisory. "We have placed far too much emphasis on a handful of people making significant capital through distorted-priced resources.

Zambia is planning its largest sale of debt as the copper-rich country seeks to plug a yawning gap in government finances, the Financial Times reported. The southern African nation is planning to raise over $1bn this week and is expected to pay a higher rate than it has for previous issues as investors adopt a more cautious approach to buying emerging and frontier market debt.

Ghana’s president has blamed the country’s economic malaise on government overspending just as the bottom fell out of the market for its main commodity exports, the Financial Times reported. In a reversal of fortunes that provides a cautionary tale for other natural resource-dependent emerging nations, John Mahama said “wage overruns” — a reference to public sector salaries that accounted for 72 per cent of government expenditure in 2012 — and huge energy subsidy bills fuelled the fiscal deficits that crippled Ghana’s economy.