The race for South Africa’s top job is heating up. Seventeen months into his job as deputy president, it was assumed that Cyril Ramaphosa—a former trade unionist, also one of South Africa’s richest men—would easily slide into the top job in 2019 when president Jacob Zuma steps down.
Whether its Starbucks opening its first coffee store in sub-Saharan Africa next year, or fast-fashion retailer, H&M, opening its first African store in Cape Town, multinationals are lining up to cash in on the opportunities abound in Africa’s growing consumer goods market.
The world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), unveiled its $107 billion final offer to acquire the world’s second largest brewer, SABMiller.
Each year, over $30 billion in remittances is sent to sub-Saharan Africa by some 30 million African migrants living in the diaspora. The cash transfers help households pay for housing, healthcare and education, boost foreign reserves, and even compose a significant part of the GDP in some countries.
MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator, announced today (Nov. 9) that CEO Sifiso Dabengwa has resigned with immediate effect. Dabengwa’s resignation comes after Nigerian authorities fined the Johannesburg-based company $5.2 billion for flouting the country’s SIM registration laws.
Cape Town, South Africa
Amidst reports of the downturn in commodity prices and the effect of China’s slowdown on Africa, there’s another dent to the “Africa Rising” mantra: the rising levels of government debt in African countries.
FastJet has big ambitions for intra-Africa travel. To exploit Africa’s growing traveller base, the company wants to create “Africa’s first pan-continental airline” by offering quality low-cost flights without the “costly frills.”
Simulation is a great way to design a product for users who don’t share the same context as you do. This is what Facebook aims to drill through to its staff by slowing down the site for one hour on Tuesdays.
Last weekend, citizens in Congo-Brazzaville voted in a referendum to decide on whether the incumbent president, Denis Sassou Nguesso (pictured above), should be allowed to run for a third consecutive term at the next election in July 2016.
Nigeria’s sim card registration laws have dealt a heavy blow to Africa’s largest mobile network, MTN. In a notice sent out to its shareholders today, MTN confirmed that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) fined it $5.2 billion for failing to disconnect 5.1 million unregistered sim cards before the end of the August and September deadlines, as set by the NCC.
On Friday (Oct. 23), Mxit, the South African-born instant messaging service, once dubbed Africa’s largest social network, announced that it was giving up the battle to compete against other mobile messaging platforms.
After weeklong protests that completely shutdown South African universities and triggered violent suppression by police, students have succeeded in their cause: tuition fee increases for the 2016 academic year have been scrapped.
When the Lake Turkana Wind Farm opens in 2017—worth nearly $1 billion and boasting 365 wind turbines that will help generate approximately 15% of Kenya’s power—it will have the financial backing of Google.
CAPE TOWN—South African students took their fight against tuition fee increases to the country’s parliament today (Oct. 21), one week after the #Feesmustfall protests began at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and spread to 15 other universities across the country.
For Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, diplomacy is not an exercise in bland formalities—it is carefully choreographed and laden with symbolism and sartorial flair. So when 42 African heads of state meet with him next week Monday (Oct. 26) in New Delhi for the India-Africa Summit, they will be dressed in Modi’s signature sleeveless jacket—the desi waistcoat —a variant of the ”Nehru jacket” which was popularized by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister after independence.
On Monday (Oct. 19), students at three of South Africa’s top universities “shut down” their campuses with protests against fee increases for the 2016 academic year.
Guinea’s election—only its second democratic vote since independence from France in 1958—hasn’t been without controversy.
No one likes a freeloader. Ask Mteto Nyati, CEO of MTN South Africa—the second biggest mobile network in the country. Speaking to South Africa’s Fin24 on Oct. 13, Nyati said that over the top (OTT) operators like the popular messaging service, Whatsapp, are making gains without any investment.
Java House, an East African coffee chain with 36 stores in Kenya and Uganda, is planning to get bigger, and much more far-flung. CEO Kevin Ashley tells Reuters that the company plans to open 12 locations per year, and that in five years it will have “a major presence in most of the major urban centers of Africa,” with new outposts in Accra, Dar es Salaam, Kigali, Lagos, and Lusaka.
After battling for parole in August, Oscar Pistorius, the South African paralympic star who shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp three years ago, is finally set to leave prison for house arrest next Tuesday (Oct.20).
Executives at Anheuser Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, may be pleased with themselves for convincing SABMiller to agree—in principle—to the $106 billion takeover proposition. But back in South Africa, the birthplace of SABMiller, national treasury officials are worried about the implications of the takeover in tax revenue terms.
South Africa’s deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa—long seen as the most likely next successor to president Jacob Zuma—has seen his name caught up in another corporate tax dodging allegation, this time with Africa’s largest mobile phone company MTN.
Walter Palmer, the American dentist who killed Cecil the lion, will not be charged by Zimbabwean authorities as he had a permit to conduct the game hunt legally, Reuters reports.
