Features

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Time appears to be running out for South African President Jacob Zuma. Six weeks after his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, replaced him as leader of the ruling African National Congress, the party’s top brass is due to meet in Cape Town on Wednesday to decide whether to force him from office. The crunch meeting of the National Executive Committee comes a day before Zuma was due to deliver the annual state-of-the-nation…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Investec Plc Chief Executive Officer Stephen Koseff and Managing Director Bernard Kantor will step down in October after 40 years of building a small leasing company in Johannesburg to one managing more than 154 billion pounds ($215 billion) in assets. Glynn Burger, group risk and finance director and also one of the “founding members” of Investec, will retire at the end of March next year, the Johannesburg- and London-based specialist bank and asset…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) – Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has a last-minute challenger in March’s presidential race — a staunch backer. Al-Ghad party chairman Mousa Moustafa Mousa, who founded a group that endorsed El-Sisi’s re-election bid, filed candidacy papers with the electoral commission just minutes before the 2 p.m. deadline on Monday, state-run Middle East News Agency reported. Mousa entered the race after others either withdrew or were disqualified. But his challenge won’t allay critics who say…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Yesterday I casually suggested that the ideal thing to turn into a smart contract on the blockchain is an interest-rate swap: It’s just a series of exchanges of money, with no need to do anything in the real world, so it is easy to encode in  computer instructions. But one reader correctly objected that the real meat of an interest-rate swap as a contract is its credit terms. An interest-rate swap is an unfunded way to get interest-rate…