Africa

Zambia’s official creditor committee plans to sign a memorandum of understanding to restructure $6.3 billion of debt by the close of the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting next week, Bloomberg News reported. The nation’s dollar bonds rallied. The government has made slow progress in talks since June, when it reached a deal-in-principle with the committee co-led by China and France. The agreement would see the interest rates cut to as low as 1% and the loans only repaid in 2043, with a 40% reduction in net-present value of the debt.

South Africa's overall mining profits slipped by more than $5 billion in the last financial year, while the country that was once the world's largest gold producer might have less than 30 years of a viable gold industry left without renewed investment, according to a new report by big four auditing firm PwC, the Associated Press reported. The report released Tuesday also estimated that South Africa's iron ore mining industry may only last 13 more years without further commitment from companies to identify, pursue and extract new deposits.

A Kenyan parliamentary panel called on the country's information technology regulator on Monday to shut down the operations of cryptocurrency project Worldcoin within the country until more stringent regulations are put in place, Reuters reported. The government suspended the project in early August following privacy objections over its scanning of users' irises in exchange for a digital ID to create a new "identity and financial network". Worldcoin was rolled out in various countries around the world by Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

When Olayemi Cardoso takes full control of Nigeria‘s central bank this week, his biggest challenges will be to restore its credibility after eight years of mismanagement, boost confidence in Africa’s worst-performing currency and slow an inflation rate that’s among the highest on the continent, Bloomberg News reported. Since taking office in May, President Bola Tinubu has instituted a raft of new policies — scrapping a $10 billion annual fuel subsidy and liberalizing the foreign-exchange market. The reforms were much-needed, but crippled an economy long on its knees.

South Africa’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged, while signaling that borrowing costs are likely to stay higher for longer because of persistent inflation risks, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee maintained the rate at a 14-year high of 8.25% for a second consecutive meeting, Governor Lesetja Kganyago said at a briefing north of Johannesburg on Thursday. That matched the median estimate of 26 economists in a Bloomberg survey. “The job of tackling inflation is not yet done,” Kganyago said. “Risks remain.

Cryptocurrency usage is growing in Nigeria as Africa's largest economy grapples with a weakening currency and soaring inflation, New York-based blockchain research firm Chainalysis said in a report on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Nigeria's volume of crypto transactions grew 9% year-over-year to $56.7 billion between July 2022 and June 2023. In Uganda, crypto use is smaller but growing fast, rising 245% to $1.6 billion in the same period, while its use in Kenya fell more than a half to $8.4 billion, the report said.

African leaders called for wide-ranging debt relief and a flood of climate finance to help the continent boost its electricity generation from renewable sources almost sixfold by 2030, Bloomberg News reported. In a declaration signed by leaders at the inaugural Africa Climate Summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, they called for the tenor of sovereign loans to be extended, debt pauses when climate disasters strike and a 10-year grace period on interest payments.

Ghana agreed to terms to swap about $4 billion of domestic debt, taking another step toward meeting its obligations under an International Monetary Fund bailout, Bloomberg News reported. The results imply Ghana achieved about 95% target under the latest three debt exchange deals. The country’s Eurobond maturing in 2032 declined by 0.2 cents on Wednesday to 43.7 cents on the dollar. Notes maturing in 2051 dropped by a similar amount to 42 cents on the dollar.

Kenya’s central bank reopened a sale of treasury bonds offered last week in a move aimed at keeping a lid on financing costs after investors demanded higher yields, Bloomberg News reported. The Central Bank of Kenya said Tuesday it would seek to raise 21 billion shillings ($145.4 million) from a tap sale of the two-year and five-year treasury bonds sold on Aug. 16. The auction comes after the central bank pushed back at investors demanding higher yields at its auction last week as it allotted only 19 billion shillings out of 53 billion shillings tendered for its debt sale.

Kenya is in talks with the World Bank and European Union to ramp up its “Hustler Fund” project that is already providing cheap credit to more than 20 million of the country’s poor, Bloomberg News reported. A top government official said the World Bank was discussing backing that could amount to as much as 20 billion shillings ($139 million), including via an existing program to support small enterprises. Combined with investments from the Treasury, this could leverage lending of 200 billion shillings over the next five years.