Finance

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Bumper coffee harvests were supposed to fuel Burundi’s recovery from three years of political upheaval. Tell that to Jean Ntungiyabandi, one local farmer who’s just called it quits. The tiny East African nation, which counts Starbucks Corp. among its customers and gets at least 80 percent of its foreign exchange from coffee, wants to double output by 2023. But delays in local payments are squeezing its 60,000 small-scale producers, complicating…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – Under the rule of the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha more than 20 years ago, a handful of high-ranking government officials looted billions of dollars from the country’s coffers. Now the Nigerian government is demanding some of its money back — from JPMorgan Chase. In a British court, lawyers for the country are suing a subsidiary of the largest United States bank, charging that it enabled corrupt former officials to…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in  Africa) – Nigeria plans to spend $20 billion on infrastructure over the next 10 years and will introduce an infrastructure bond in 2019 as Africa’s biggest oil producer seeks to address challenges in revenue generation. “Our target is that we’d like to see infrastructure spending increase to the $10- to $20-billion range over the next 5 to 10 years because we think that’s the level of our need,” Okechukwu Enelamah, the minister…

ACCRA (Capital Markets in Africa) – Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo pledged that the government will maintain fiscal discipline following the completion of a four-year bailout program with the International Monetary Fund. West Africa’s second-biggest economy last week passed the final review of an almost $1 billion extended credit-facility program that it entered into in April 2015 when a currency crisis caused inflation to soar and debt to become unaffordable. During the course of the program, the fiscal deficit has…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Argentina is eyeing its first major new mining project in two decades, nudged forward by President Mauricio Macri’s market-oriented policies. But there’s no guarantee he’ll be around to take credit. Argentina’s economy is tanking with the central bank hiking interest rates to ease inflation and save the peso, the worst-performing currency in emerging markets. That could put Macri on shaky ground as he heads toward a presidential election in October where he could…

LUSAKA (Capital Markets in Africa) – Zambia’s state-owned electricity provider has applied to the energy regulator for tariff increases that will see some prices more than triple as it seeks to return to profit. For commercial users, Zesco Ltd. has requested to raise charges to 1.85 kwacha per kilowatt-hour ($0.15) from 0.52 kwacha, it said in a statement on its website. For the biggest users, Zesco asked to increase tariffs to 0.36 kwacha per kilowatt-hour, from…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Nigerian business mogul Tony Elumelu plans to invest as much as $2.5 billion in power projects across Africa’s electricity-starved biggest oil producer. The chairman of United Bank for Africa Plc and Transnational Corporation of Nigeria Plc will make the investments through a subsidiary, Transcorp Power Ltd., to help boost power supply in the West African nation, he said in a March 22 interview. He declined to give details on the time frame. Africa’s most populous…