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The Africa Confidential Blog
ANGOLA: The freeing of detained financiers sends mixed signals on the President's corruption fight
Patrick Smith
This week we look at a surprising legal deal in Luanda, the
power crisis that could shape South Africa's
elections, how politics and climate change worsened the Mozambique disaster, a personal post-election battle in Nigeria and the unravelling of Kenya's tax treaty with Mauritius.
ANGOLA: The freeing of detained financiers sends mixed
signals on President Lourenço's corruption fight
A deal which resulted in the release of Quantum Global
CEO Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais, a Swiss-Angolan financier, from custody on 22 March in exchange for US$3.5 billion of
funds claimed by Fundo Soberano de Angola (sovereign wealth
fund) has prompted fierce debate in Luanda. Two days later José
Filomeno 'Zenú' dos Santos, son of the former president, José
Eduardo dos Santos, was also released.
Some in Luanda are speculating that these developments,
combined with the reappointment of Isabel dos Santos,
billionaire daughter of the former president, to the board of Unitel,
the biggest telecoms company in Angola, suggest that President João
Lourenço's promised fight to retrieve over $20bn of fugitive
capital may be running out of steam.
Both Zenú dos Santos and De Morais were detained last October
after Angolan investigators said they had found serious malfeasance in
the management of the sovereign wealth fund. Until his dismissal
earlier last year, Zenú dos Santos was chair of the fund, and De Morais
played a leading role in managing its investment strategy.
Now, the government says it has control of 'all financial and
non-financial' assets belonging to the fund. That includes some $2.35bn
of financial assets held in banks in London and Port Louis, Mauritius,
and $1bn in property and mineral assets. De Morais says he is innocent
of all wrongdoing and that the government has dropped all criminal
charges against him. Anti-corruption campaigners are complaining about
the lack of transparency in the process and are demanding to see full
accounting for the assets of the fund and a detailed explanation for
the government's about-turn.
MOZAMBIQUE/MALAWI/ZIMBABWE: How climate change, bad
politics and corruption worsened Cyclone Idai
'No-one in the region and in the world could predict a
disaster of this size,' Mozambique's Land and Environment Minister Celso
Correia said on 23 March. He was referring to Cyclone Idai
which is reckoned to have taken 750 lives already and displaced over a
million people.
Up to a point he was right. The last catastrophic storm to hit
the region was in 2000, when the combination of strong civil society
groups, more effective government agencies in Mozambique and a heroic
role by the South African National Defence Force, rescued tens of
thousands of marooned people.
This time, the response from the Mozambique government,
weakened by the scandal over the $2bn in secret loans, has been slower
and less coordinated. International agencies were also slower out of
the blocks.
But the devastation of the five tropical storms making
landfall in the form of Cyclone Idai have been compounded by neglect of
infrastructure, the lack of flood defences, of dykes, of effective
drainage systems in low-lying cities and towns such as Beira in central
Mozambique, which has seen the worst of the crisis.
As the rains subside, emergency workers have to restore
electricity and water and prevent an outbreak of cholera. More than
100,000 people are living in camps.
There is a longer-term lesson. Massive funding for climate
resilience and mitigation was at the heart of the Paris climate change
agreement in 2015. Although Africa is the continent most affected by
the depredations of extreme weather, drought and desertification, it is
not in the forefront of international attention on climate change. At
least the destruction wrought by Cyclone Idai should concentrate minds
on the need for a far more determined mitigation and protection
strategy.
SOUTH AFRICA: The Eskom crisis is forcing President
Ramaphosa into tough choices
How to tackle the crisis engulfing Eskom, the debt-laden
state power-company, is at the heart of President Cyril
Ramaphosa's calculations ahead of the 8 May election.
Fixing Eskom is the most urgent policy task facing the African National
Congress government.
A new report by Goldman Sachs calculates that if the Eskom
programme of rolling power cuts and load-shedding continues, it could
lop off as much as 0.9% from South Africa's GDP this year. That means
cutting growth to about 1%, less than the birth rate.
Ramaphosa and his tough-talking finance minister Tito
Mboweni want to change Eskom by unbundling the component parts
of the colossal company into transmission, generation and distribution
units. Hobbled by commitments to build uneconomic coal-fired power
stations, Eskom owes over $30bn.
On Saturday (23 March) Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi
Maimane described Eskom's plight as a 'national crisis', and
lamented the economic damage caused by the power cuts. He pins all the
blame on the ANC.
But Ramaphosa has responded with caution. He can't ignore the
effects of the Eskom crisis but he has said nothing about how planned
cost-cutting will affect its employees. Some talk of a third of the
workforce being made redundant.
Ramaphosa knows that if his government starts any radical
surgery to Eskom before the elections, it could cost him the backing of
his support base in the trade unions. With ex-President Jacob
Zuma plotting a comeback to the leadership, that is a risk he
can't afford to run.
NIGERIA: Presidential challenger Atiku's electoral
petition gets personal
The accusations in Atiku Abubakar's
petition alleging that the 23 February presidential election was stolen
range from accusing the electoral commission of inflating the ruling
All Progressives Congress's scores and deflating the People's
Democratic Party's to claiming that the schools which President Muhammadu
Buhari claims to have attended did not exist at the time.
Over the next week, the PDP promises to produce copies of
tally sheets showing faults in the collation process and contradictions
in the electoral commission's own figures. A High Court ruling on 22
March overturning the ruling APC's victory in the governorship
elections in Osun state has given the opposition a tactical boost.
KENYA/MAURITIUS: The taxman cometh – in Nairobi and
Port Louis
Many internationally-minded Kenyans were surprised when
the Nairobi High Court ruled on 18 March that the country's Double
Taxation Agreement (DTA) with Mauritius was unconstitutional, declaring
it null and void.
The ruling cited the failure by the National Assembly to
ratify the DTA. It could trigger a judicial review of DTAs across
Africa. Few have been subjected to close scrutiny in national
parliaments.
Hundreds of DTAs between African states and their European and
south east Asian counterparts are being re-negotiated. With some
exceptions, such as Rwanda and Tanzania,
few governments have tried to strike a tough bargain. That could
still change amid the growing popularity of nationalist economic
strategies.
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