Finance

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Nigeria is yet to receive supplies of 30 million coronavirus vaccines that it ordered and paid for, the country’s finance minister said Friday. “We have paid for vaccines, the supplies are not coming,” Minister of Finance Zainab Ahmed said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “The donations that have been pledged to us are trickling in.”  Africa’s most populous country has only been able to give the Covid-19 jabs to 4 million…

TUNIS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Tunisia’s president swore in a government with loyalists taking up key positions in the finance and the interior ministries, his latest step to reshape the country after suspending parliament more than two months ago. The moves come after President Kais Saied sacked the prime minister and suspended parliament in July, saying he acted to save the country from economic and political mismanagement. Opponents called it a coup. The political crisis has…

JOHANNEBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – South African business sentiment dropped to a one-year low in September as economic activity continued to be hamstrung by restrictions to curb the coronavirus pandemic and unease persisted following deadly riots in July. A confidence index compiled by the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry dropped to 91, from 91.9 in August, the group said Monday in an emailed statement. While that’s the lowest since September 2020, the…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – The pound is breaking the time-honored tradition that higher interest rates will mean a stronger currency, as growth and inflation fears take their toll.  U.K. two-year yields climbed this week to the highest since the start of the pandemic, buoyed by traders’ ramped-up expectations for Bank of England rate hikes in 2022. Yet the pound fell to a year-to-date low and suffered the most volatility since March — a sign that…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Africa’s biggest fund manager said its 70 billion-rand ($4.7 billion) unlisted assets division has been without a mandate to invest from its largest client since March, highlighting the dysfunction in the unit that drives investment in Black-owned businesses. The five-year agreement with the Government Employees Pension Fund, which accounts for 89% of the Public Investment Corp.’s total assets under management of 2.34 trillion rand lapsed on March 30 and has…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – A BP Plc executive told internal investigators he was concerned about the energy giant’s dealings with a Nigerian middleman and payments being discussed to secure lucrative contracts. The suspicions didn’t make it into the investigators’ final report, which emphasized that the 2017 deal never went through. But notes from their interviews show a senior executive at the company’s London headquarters was worried that proposed payments to an agent in…

LUSAKA (Capital Markets in Africa) – Zambia may owe Chinese creditors almost double the amount the government has previously disclosed, complicating restructuring negotiations, a study found.  The Johns Hopkins’ China Africa Research Initiative estimates the nation’s total liabilities to Chinese lenders at $6.6 billion and spread across at least 18 creditors, according to a report published Tuesday. That compares with an official figure of $3.4 billion. The finding doesn’t mean that Zambia’s total external public…