Zambia will cancel or downsize project loans worth about $5 billion as the nation tries to rein in runaway external debt that’s been increasing its risk of default, Bloomberg News reported. The government has about $7 billion in pipeline external debt -- loans contracted but not yet disbursed -- and plans to slash this to about $2 billion, Finance Minister Bwalya Ng’andu said on Wednesday.

Ghana is seeking to prosecute a former finance minister, industry regulator and deputy central bank governor in a bid to stamp out alleged collusion with company executives that helped contribute to the West African nation’s biggest banking crisis, Bloomberg News reported. The former officials are being charged along with nine other banking executives on charges ranging from money laundering to defrauding depositors in the aftermath of a three-year industry clean-up -- the costs of which could escalate to 20 billion cedis ($3.7 billion).

Squabbling between South Africa’s government and the state-owned airline’s bankruptcy administrator is threatening its chances of survival, Investec Ltd.’s chief executive officer said. President Cyril Ramaphosa in December placed debt-ridden South African Airways in business rescue, a local form of bankruptcy protection, Bloomberg News reported. Over the past few days, there’s been a flurry of conflicting messages from the government and the business-rescue practitioners, leaving investors and customers unclear about whether the carrier has a future.

Mozambique on Monday withdrew appeals against a South African court decision not to extradite its former finance minister, Manuel Chang, wanted in relation to a $2 billion debt scandal that plunged his country’s economy into crisis, Reuters reported. Chang, who denies wrongdoing, was arrested in South Africa in December at the request of the United States while Mozambique also requested his extradition, sparking a legal battle over where he should be sent.

A proposal by South Africa’s biggest labor-union federation to rescue debt-stricken Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. with government workers’ pensions would amount to little more than a shifting of contingent liabilities, according to BNP Paribas South Africa, Bloomberg News reported. The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ proposal that state institutions including the Public Investment Corp.

Ghana plans to use as much as $1 billion of the Eurobonds it sold last week to help restructure the country’s obligations to independent power producers, said Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta. The West African country is in talks to re-negotiate supply deals with the power companies known as IPPs, Bloomberg News reported. The currently take-or-pay agreements mean the government is billed even for unused electricity. “We are going to put about $1 billion aside from the proceeds of the Eurobond to look at how we resolve those IPP issues,” Ofori-Atta said in a broadcast on Joy FM.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Friday that his government did not agree with plans to cut some of struggling South African Airways’ (SAA) domestic routes, plunging rescue efforts for the cash-strapped carrier into uncertainty, Reuters reported. State-owned SAA entered a form of bankruptcy protection in December and is fighting for its survival. Specialists appointed to try to rescue SAA said on Thursday that SAA would cease flights to Durban, East London and Port Elizabeth from Feb.

Proposals to reorganize the 454 billion rand of debt ($30.7 billion) owed by South Africa’s state-owned power company are days away from completion, according to an official who’s overseen their formulation, Bloomberg News reported. The company’s Eurobond yields fell by the most since June.

Ghana’s efforts to raise domestic revenue are beginning to bear fruit and will help the country to be less dependent on debt, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said a day after the nation sold $3 billion in Eurobonds, Bloomberg News reported. West Africa’s second-biggest economy received about $15 billion in offers for the debt issuance that included a tranche of sub-Saharan Africa’s longest-yet Eurobond with an average life of 40 years. The sale would increase Ghana’s debt burden, which the International Monetary Fund estimated was 63% of gross domestic product at the end of 2019.

RT Briscoe (Nigeria) Plc is finalising arrangements to raise new capital to pay its burgeoning debts and improve working capital as the automobile company struggles to stave off insolvency, The Nation reported. In a regulatory filing at the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), the board of the company stated that it was finalising arrangements for an open-ended actively managed fund to raise funds from the capital market. The net proceeds of the fund raising will be used to settle existing liabilities and increase working capital.