Category: Semafor

DR Congo will invest $100 million to create a paramilitary force to provide security at its mines, with funding provided by the US and United Arab Emirates. The investment will back a security drive that will see it hire 20,000 mining guards by 2028, Bloomberg reported. DR Congo, the world’s ...

A new digital atlas has collated crucial data on Africa’s wetlands, including their climate change mitigation potential, in a bid to protect one of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems. Since the 1970s more than a third of the world’s wetlands have disappeared, largely due to climate change and urbanization, at ...

Nigeria’s leading opposition politicians united in order to field one candidate to face President Bola Tinubu in January’s hotly contested general election. But, with only nine months until the poll in one of Africa’s biggest economies, it remains unclear who the main opposition candidate will be, or how and when ...

Alexis’s view The Iran war has shown the power of industrialization — just look at the impact of Aliko Dangote’s refinery. The conflict has highlighted Africa’s reliance on fuel imports and the knock-on-effect of higher prices and currency pressure. Dangote’s plant, which has shown how local processing can reduce the ...

Incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar alleged that his predecessor’s associates are fleeing the country with billions of dollars in assets. Viktor Orbán was defeated in a landslide this month. During his tenure, Hungary slid down rankings on democracy and corruption indices; reports suggest that vast amounts in state funds ...

The News South Africa is hoping to lure back engineers working abroad as part of a recruitment drive to ramp up nuclear power capacity and ultimately supply about a tenth of the nation’s electricity, the country’s most ambitious energy project in decades. The plan aims to attract skilled migrants and ...

The Scoop Burjeel Holdings postponed a planned $1.5 billion Islamic bond issue over the Iran war, pivoting from preparing to close the deal in London to ensuring its Gulf emergency rooms were well stocked in the early days of the conflict, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi-listed hospital group told ...

Most African governments are betting that the Iran shock will be short-lived. African leaders are hoping that modest policy tweaks will help them weather a crisis that has lifted oil prices, halted fertilizer supplies, and choked shipping traffic. That assumption is shaky, at best, and could prove very costly. Given ...

King Charles III arrives in Washington today with Britain hoping the royal touch can help ease increasingly strained relations with the US. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has infuriated US President Donald Trump by refusing to take part in the Iran war; in theory the state visit is unrelated, but ...

The Scoop The controlling investor in Letterboxd, the social platform for movie lovers that’s one of the few success stories in 2020s digital media, is looking to sell its stake in a company that plays a powerful and growing role in the global film business. The Canadian holding company Tiny ...