Features

ABIDJAN (Capital Markets in Africa) – The leader of Ivory Coast’s second-biggest political party is taking an anti-foreigner stance as campaigning for next year’s presidential elections gears up, sparking concerns of a return to the divisive politics that fueled almost a decade of conflict in the world’s top cocoa grower. Former President Henri Konan Bedie, who first emphasized the difference between “real” Ivorians and migrants in the 1990s, accused President Alassane Ouattara’s administration of favoring members of…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Health-care companies have missed out on the best first-half for South Africa’s stock market since 2007. An index of South African hospital operators and pharmaceutical companies has slumped 21% this year, the worst performance of any Johannesburg sector with more than three members, and lagging behind the 10% gain for the benchmark gauge. Analysts and investors blame the weak local economy, which contracted by the most in a decade in the…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – South Africa’s telecommunications operators were given a boost on Thursday when the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, indicated a long-awaited auction of new broadband spectrum could take place within the next month. Vodacom Group Ltd. and MTN Group Ltd., the country’s two biggest mobile-phone providers, have long been demanding the opportunity to bid for new spectrum to extend high-speed internet to new customers and increase data revenue. The constrained nature of the market…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Anadarko Petroleum Corp. approved a $25 billion liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique that could help transform the economy of one of the world’s poorest countries. Chief Executive Officer Al Walker signed off on what he called the biggest ever foreign investment in Africa. Anadarko sees potential for Mozambique to become one of the largest LNG suppliers in the world, and the project — expected to export the fuel to countries in Asia and…

KINSHASA (Capital Markets in Africa)  – When a foreign investor with multimillion-dollar projects across Africa was told the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo wanted to see him, he booked a suite at one of the country’s top hotels. After six days of waiting, he left. Since Felix Tshisekedi took the helm of the world’s biggest cobalt producer almost five months ago, private planes jam the main airport in Kinshasa, the capital, and hotel lobbies teem…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) – Mohamed Mursi, a bespectacled Muslim Brotherhood foot-soldier elevated from obscurity to become Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, has died. He was 67. Incarcerated since his ouster in 2013, Mursi collapsed and died during a trial that sought to cast elements of the popular revolt that brought him to power as a foreign conspiracy. His death in a court room, defending his record, symbolized the grubby end of the…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – The African Energy Chamber (EnergyChamber.org) rejects the accusations made by the recent BBC Panorama program on Senegal and believes this case is about a sinister rush to judgment, an obsession to taint a reform-driven President and the oil industry at any cost and by any means, and certainly without an understanding of the facts and how the oil industry works. It is important that in this rush to judgment,…