Features

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in  Africa) — South Africa will be hard-pressed to realize its ambitions of attracting 1 trillion rand ($61 billion) of private investment in infrastructure if its past record is anything to go by. The investment drive began two years ago and is a key component of an economic blueprint unveiled by President Cyril Ramaphosa last week that aims to revive the coronavirus-battered economy. It envisions the government spending 100 billion rand on infrastructure, an…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail on Monday night, boasting at a rally in Florida that he felt “so powerful” after his recovery from Covid-19 that he wanted to walk into the audience and “kiss everyone.” “I am so energized by your prayers and humbled by your support,” Trump said at the outdoor rally at the Orlando Sanford International Airport, where there was little social distancing…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Economists like to think of themselves as mathematicians — or, if feeling momentarily humbler, as physicists. This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, however, seem to conceive of themselves more as engineers. Like Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who won the prize in 2012, Paul Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson are specialists in “market design,” a field which, as Roth wrote in a famous paper, calls for…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — In the runup to Guinea’s elections on Oct. 18, voters are grappling with a familiar-sounding problem: disinformation and a lack of transparency over who’s providing the news they’re getting. In the U.S., similar complaints led to a crackdown on campaigns such as those staged by Russia during the 2016 presidential vote, won by Donald Trump. This election cycle, Facebook has banned new political ads in the week before Election Day on…

The Africa Energy Forum 2020 joins forces with the African Utility Week and POWERGEN Africa and Oil & Gas Council’s Africa Assembly this October to host a ‘Digital Africa Energy Festival’ – the largest ever energy event for the African continent.  A month-long digital platform featuring a vast array of content & networking offerings, delivering critical information at a time when the industry needs it most.  Learn more: https://bit.ly/3gRSUKk #DEF2020 #aef20 https://youtu.be/c5f_vuwEBak

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — World Trade Organization members selected two final candidates — Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and South Korea’s Yoo Myung-hee– to advance to the final round in the race to lead the Geneva-based trade body, according to people familiar with the matter. By advancing two women to the final round of the selection process, the WTO will likely have the first female director-general in its 25-year history. Okonjo-Iweala served two stints as…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) — Ministers have blamed technical blunders after almost 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases became lost in their various aged computer systems.  The fiasco occurred when an Excel spreadsheet, used in outdated software being employed by Public Health England (PHE), was unable to cope with high numbers of cases.  As a result – and as infection numbers soared – thousands of positive cases were automatically thrown off the database when they should have been…