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.

Some of the best-paid people in this country—its lawmakers—are proposing an unusual measure: docking their own salaries, The Wall Street Journal reported. The volunteered pay cut is part of a new austerity descending on Africa’s top economy. Nigeria’s government makes most of its money from oil revenue, which has shrunk along with global energy prices. President Muhammadu Buhari came to office in May pledging to root out extravagant spending by a government that has grown accustomed to unchecked oil wealth.

Businesses avoid paying $200 billion annually in taxes by channeling their overseas’ investments through offshore financial hubs, a United Nations agency said Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The estimate by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is one of the first attempts by an international governmental organization to put a figure on tax avoidance by companies that record their profits in countries with low tax rates, regardless of where those profits are actually earned.

Uchumi Supermarkets Ltd., Kenya’s only publicly traded retailer, fired two top executives amid a forensic audit and announced plans to hire a management consultancy to review its business strategy. The stock slumped. Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ciano and Chief Financial Officer Chadwick Okumu were relieved of their duties, while Human Resources Manager Michael Kibe was suspended, Chairwoman Khadija Mire told reporters Monday in the capital, Nairobi.