Features

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — China’s ambassador to Washington called for an end to the “blame game” over the coronavirus, in the country’s most high-profile response since U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his criticism of Beijing. Ambassador Cui Tiankai said in a column published in the Washington Post that allegations blaming China for the outbreak’s spread risked “decoupling” the world’s two largest economies. Increased suspicions also threatened to hurt U.S.-China cooperation to fight the disease and restart the…

ABIDJAN (Capital Markets in Africa) — Ivory Coast arrested fourteen soldiers and five civilians for preparing a coup, an alleged crime for which presidential hopeful Guillaume Soro is also wanted, according to the public prosecutor. Soro, 47, was last week convicted and sentenced in absentia to 20 years in jail for embezzlement of public funds and money laundering, but still faces a charge of endangering state security. He was accused in December of plotting a coup after…

DAR ES SALAAM (Capital Markets in Africa) — Tanzania suspended the head of the national medical laboratory, a day after President John Magufuli questioned its coronavirus case figures and said the outbreak isn’t as bad as reported. The removal of Nyambura Moremi, director of the National Health Laboratory Quality Assurance and Training Centre, comes amid mounting criticism of Magufuli’s response to the pandemic. The 60-year-old leader has refused to impose a lockdown and allowed churches…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – The delayed implementation of an African free-trade agreement is a missed opportunity as the pact offers “probably the best form of stimulus” for the continent to overcome the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an enterprise that liaises between business and the African Union. “We, unfortunately, don’t have the ability to play with quantitative easing and the exercise of printing money,” Paulo Gomes, the vice president of the…

LUANDA (Capital Markets in Africa) — Africell, a London-based telecommunications company, will go ahead with a final offer for Angola’s fourth mobile license even as the African nation struggles with the worst recession since the end of a civil war in 2002. The company will submit the application by May 1, according to Chief Investment Officer Ian Paterson. The Angolan government, which last month picked it as the only candidate for the 15-year mobile license, will have…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — Joe Biden is trying to win over progressives by courting the movement’s leaders and backing their calls for significant increases in pandemic relief, yet faces an uphill fight to convince skeptics on the left he won’t abandon working people in favor of Wall Street. Since the economic crisis began with the coronavirus pandemic, he has shifted some of his stances leftward, calling for trillions of dollars more in…

NAIROBI (Capital Markets in Africa) — How much more calamity can East Africa take? Already struggling with the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and a Biblical scourge of locusts, the region is now being lashed by exceptionally heavy rainfall, with floods that threaten life and livelihood from Ethiopia to Tanzania, and all parts in between. For the continent’s most economically vibrant region, the trifecta of tribulations may well add up to a fourth: food…