Africa

🇨🇩 DR Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi has called for the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO which has been in the country for nearly 25 years. During an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Tshisekedi said that the mission of some 15,000 peacekeepers “has not succeeded in confronting the rebellions and armed conflicts,” adding that it “is time for our country to take full control of its destiny.” The UN Security Council had approved a plan in 2020 to begin a phased withdrawal in December 2024. Still, the DR Congo asked the security organ to start the process in December this year when Tshisekedi is running for reelection.

🇿🇼 The European Union is suspending its $5 million aid to a UNDP-managed project supporting the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC). In a statement on Tuesday, the EU indicated that several international Electoral Observation Missions (EOMs) had raised concerns regarding the independence and transparency of ZEC during last month’s elections in which President Emmerson Mnangagwa was declared the winner. The main opposition Citizens Coalition for Change, led by Nelson Chamisa, also raised concerns over alleged manipulation of the outcome.

🇷🇼 Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said he will run for a fourth term in August 2024. He announced his plans during an interview with the French-language news outlet Jeune Afrique published online on Tuesday. “I am pleased with the confidence that Rwandans have placed in me. I will always serve them, as long as I can,” he said. President Kagame — the de facto leader of the East African landlocked country since the end of the 1994 genocide and its president since 2002 — oversaw a referendum in 2015 that introduced constitutional amendments allowing him to vie and stay in power until 2034. So far, only opposition Green Party leader Frank Habineza has announced his intention to run in 2024 against Kagame.

🇳🇬 The Nigerian naira hit a new record low on the parallel market on Wednesday owing to the dwindling supply of dollars from the country’s central bank, forcing buyers to turn to the street for the greenback. The naira was being exchanged at 970 per dollar on Wednesday, from 962 on Tuesday and 903 naira at the start of this month, according to forex operators in Lagos. In June, the central bank scrapped its multiple exchange rates regime and allowed the naira to trade freely against the dollar, prompting the currency’s official value to plummet by nearly 40%.

🇲🇿 Mozambique has received the green light from the UK Supreme Court to pursue $1.5 billion in damages in its long-running tuna bond fraud case. The court trial is set to begin on Oct. 3. The fraud case prompted the International Monetary Fund to cut budgetary support leading to a financial crisis in Mozambique. The southern Africa country is suing Credit Suisse — which arranged for the loans between 2012 and 2016 aimed at investment in maritime security projects and a state tuna fishery located in the capital Maputo. It is also suing Privinvest, a Gulf-based shipbuilder that supplied boats under the deal. Both companies have denied the claims.

The amount set to be spent on purchasing electric buses for Line 2 of Nairobi’s Bus Rapid Transit system in Kenya’s capital, in a deal inked between the Kenyan government and the United States’ Millennium Change Corporation (MCC) on Tuesday. President William Ruto, who witnessed the deal signing in New York, said the Kenya Urban Mobility and Growth Threshold Program would help ease congestion within the Nairobi Metropolitan Area, where over five million people do business daily.

Africa’s calls for a global finance revolution to drive climate investment

THE NEWS

NEW YORK — The global financial system must be overhauled for African countries to address climate challenges, the continent’s leaders have said — despite concerns that political upheavals may make potential investors wary.

African political and business leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) have stressed the need to drive investment to help the continent’s countries address the green energy transition, and therefore boost their economies, while also adapting to the extreme weather conditions.

Kenya’s President William Ruto, speaking at an UNGA side event earlier this week, said there was an inaccurate perception that investments in African countries are risky, unfairly holding back the flow of funds needed. Ruto said there was “a need to rethink, to reimagine and to reconfigure” the approach to financial markets.

Ruto said the building blocks of financial markets — such as credit rating agencies, sovereign debt analysis, and risk analysis — required a “rethink” and new approaches were needed to provide concessional finance.

Nigeria’s president also called for a change in approach to investment opportunities during his address to the General Assembly. “Continental efforts regarding climate change will register important victories if established economies were more forthcoming with public and private sector investment for Africa’s preferred initiative,” Bola Tinubu told delegates.

However, complaints about perceived risks come at a time when governance and rule of law is being scrutinized in West and Central Africa following a series of coups in the sub-region. Some African government officials and business leaders have expressed concerns behind closed doors that those flashpoints could potentially make the wider region unappealing to some investors.

KNOW MORE

African governments proposed reforms to international financial institutions to help fund climate change action, including new global taxes, in a document produced at the end of the three-day Africa Climate Summit in Kenya earlier this month. The Nairobi Declaration, as the plans are known, will form the basis of the negotiating position adopted by African countries at November’s COP28 summit.

ALEXIS’S VIEW

The ability of African countries to fund their shift to renewable energy and better prepare for the impact of changing weather patterns has global significance because the continent plays an outsized role in the world’s response to climate change. That’s due to the abundance of minerals needed for the green energy transition, such as metals used in electric vehicle batteries, and also demographics — the continent’s rapidly growing population will make it the workforce of the future. And as economic activity grows, so too will its emissions.

Despite the global benefits, it’s clear that African countries are having to campaign hard for changes to an international financial system that typically sees the continent’s nations as risky but didn’t see the red flags in U.S. lending practices ahead of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Underneath it all is a sense of frustration that the continent only contributes around 4% of global carbon emissions and has been hit hard by the effects of climate change — for example, in Libya’s recent floods and drought in the Horn of Africa.

There does seem to be a broad international acceptance that something needs to change. U.S. President Joe Biden, in his UNGA address, said though multilateral development banks were among the best tools to deliver “high-quality investment” in developing countries “reforming these institutions can be a game-changer”. And the diplomatic efforts we’ve seen from various countries to build ties with African nations suggest an understanding that advanced economies need the continent — and specifically its resources.

With African countries increasingly being given a voice to articulate their wishes, be it at the G20 or in the expanded BRICS bloc, and going into COP28 with a set of clearly articulated goals, it seems likely that some concessions will be made. History suggests the radical overhaul sought by Ruto and other leaders probably won’t happen anytime soon. However, piecemeal changes to improve access to finance for African countries that meet certain financial and political criteria do seem likely.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Amaka Anku, who heads the Africa practice at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, said the continent’s nations have a big role to play in changing risk perceptions, rather than merely relying on changes in global financial systems. “African countries have to do their part to streamline regulation requirements and border approvals, non-tariff barriers to trade and infrastructure — all those things you need to do to make an economy competitive,” she said. “That would help to attract investment.”

Both the number and size of Chinese loans to Africa have dropped significantly since peaking in 2016, according to new data from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. It estimates that from 2000 to 2022, 39 Chinese lenders made up to 1,243 loan commitments with a value of around $170.1 billion with 49 African governments and seven regional institutions. The commitments were across a wide range of sectors including energy, transportation and infrastructure. Angola was by far the largest recipient with 258 loans valued at $45 billion, or 26.5% of all the recorded Chinese loans to Africa.

Using AI to boost cancer care in Kenya and Nigeria

At a time when cancer-related deaths are on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa, Seattle-based startup Hurone AI is taking a new messaging app aimed at accelerating efficient care for cancer patients into Kenya and Nigeria after a year in Rwanda.

Hurone’s app is built around a direct messaging feature that uses artificial intelligence to generate calls to action on the doctor’s side based on information provided by the patient. The semi-automated dialogue is supposed to help create personalized treatment plans and increase timely attention for patients, especially in communities where available health facilities require long travel or do not have enough care professionals.

Hurone was one of 90 startups chosen by Amazon Web Services for its $40 million Health Equity Initiative in March 2022. The startup will offer the app to Jaramogi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, and Zenith Medical and Kidney Center in Nigeria’s capital Abuja.

Hurone will charge clients subscription fees for access to the messaging service. “It’s almost impossible to run a clinical AI project as a nonprofit. It requires lots of talent and money for things like cloud costs,” Kingsley Ndoh, the startup’s Nigeria-born founder told Semafor Africa.

Cancer deaths in Africa are projected to double by 2040 to 1 million from 2020 levels, according to a study last year by Lancet, the English medical journal. Breast, cervical, prostate, gastrointestinal and Kaposi sarcoma are the most prevalent cancers in Africa, said Miriam Mutebi, an oncologist and assistant professor at Nairobi’s Aga Khan University Hospital who participated in the study.

— Alexander Onukwue

Wawira Njiru leads Nairobi-based Food 4 Education which has designed a sustainable, climate-friendly blueprint for feeding 200,000 school children in Kenya daily and has ambitions to go Africa-wide.

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo sought to assure Nigerians that President Joe Biden’s primary interest in their country was to be a partner in strengthening its economy.

The Nigerian-born Adeyemo told an audience at the Lagos Business School on Monday that the U.S. believes an economically successful Nigeria is “important to the region, the continent, and the global economy.” After his stop at LBS he met executives from the banking and tech sectors in different sessions. He also had a tour of Ogidi Studios, a recording studio in Lagos.

“Many companies that operate in Africa are domiciled in the United States, pay taxes in America and plan to list their companies on the New York Stock Exchange. This is a fantastic opportunity for trade between Nigeria and America,” said Ola Brown, a Nigerian investor.

Read the full story for Alexander’s View and Room for Disagreement.

— Alexander Onukwue in Lagos

Abolitionist Quobna Ottobah’s permanent artwork commemorating the 250th anniversary of his baptism was unveiled on Wednesday at St James’s Church in Central London. Ottobah, born in present-day Ghana around 1757, was captured and sold into the transatlantic slave trade at 13 to plantation owners in Grenada in the southern Caribbean before being taken to London by a new enslaver in 1772. He was baptized as “John Stuart — a Black, aged 16 years” a year later. Ottobah is remembered as one of the first Black authors of anti-slavery books published in Britain, which called for the abolition of slavery and the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people. His paintings by the Trinidad-based artist Che Lovelace are the first permanent art commission to commemorate Quobna and honor his legacy.

• Israeli officials are working to persuade U.S. leaders that a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia could strengthen the U.S. well beyond the Middle East. One top Netanyahu aide said it could be a “reverse 9/11.”
• The UN’s climate summit was a bust. The plans world leaders laid out are “like trying to put out an inferno with a leaking hose.”
• An NSFW chatbot app has surged in popularity, but its sexual content spurred OpenAI to crack down. Now, it’s pitching investors on building its own large language model.

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Happy 63rd independence day to Mali 🇲🇱 on Friday (Sep 22 )!!

Correction: In Tuesday’s edition we misstated the name of an award given to a South Sudanese student. It is the Chegg.org Global Student Prize award.

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— Yinka, Alexis, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge