Articles
12 published · RSS-
Analysis · Africa
The Congo's Cobalt Export Ban Looks Like a Sovereignty Move. Its Own Design Says Otherwise.
This analysis examines whether the DRC’s cobalt export restrictions represent genuine resource sovereignty or primarily expanded regulatory control. It argues that the 2025 quota system largely preserved the dominance of foreign-owned producers because its base allocation relied on historical export shares. While the state gained greater discretion over export rights in 2026, the clearest fiscal benefit still comes through existing mining royalties, rather than a substantial redistribution of cobalt rents.
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Analysis · Africa
The Lobito Corridor Isn't an Alternative to China's Railway. It's China's Railway, Re-engineered for a Western Strategic Era.
The Lobito Corridor is widely described as the West's infrastructure answer to China in Africa's critical minerals race. This analysis finds a more precise pattern: the railway's physical core was rebuilt by Chinese financing and contractors between 2006 and 2015, and what the United States, the European Union and regional development banks have financed since 2022 is the operating concession and modernization of that existing line, not a newly built alternative. The one genuinely new piece, a Zambia-Angola extension, has fallen behind its own timeline, while China has already signed a comparable concession to modernize its own competing corridor.
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Analysis · Africa
The Sahel Didn't Replace France. It Unbundled It.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are often described as having swapped France for Russia. The record shows something narrower: the security layer of France's presence was replaced quickly, through Wagner and Turkish drones, while the development finance, monetary architecture and institutional access that came with it were not replaced at comparable scale by anyone.
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Analysis · Africa
The G20 Common Framework Fixed Who Sits at the Table. It Never Fixed the Clock.
The Common Framework brought China and the Paris Club into one restructuring process for the first time. It left the timeline open-ended, and the IMF and World Bank have since called the missing standstill and deadline design gaps. The delay, not the generosity of each settlement, has been its most underpriced cost.
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Analysis · Russia & Eurasia
The Price Cap Didn't Stop Russian Oil. It Created a Toll Booth.
The price cap was meant to cut Russia's revenue while keeping its oil on the market. Its enforcement built a parallel shipping system whose costs are shared unevenly by exporters, shipowners, insurers, traders and refiners.
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Analysis · Africa
The UAE Doesn't Buy Africa's Goods. It Buys the Gates.
Emirati influence in Africa is better measured by position than by pledges: ports, gold markets and farmland place the UAE at the points where African goods change jurisdiction or form.
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Analysis · Africa
Egypt Didn't Fix Its Foreign Currency Problem. It Rented a Solution.
The $35 billion Ras El-Hekma deal with the UAE, not structural reform alone, most immediately eased Egypt's foreign-exchange crisis, arriving just as Houthi attacks collapsed Suez Canal revenue.
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Analysis · Africa
The Global South's Financial Alternative Isn't the One With BRICS on the Door
Africa's most consequential break from dependence on external financial intermediaries is not the BRICS-led New Development Bank, but the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, a homegrown initiative moving money across African currencies without routing it through a third one.
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Analysis · Africa
Why Gold Can Buy Political Distance and Garments Cannot
South Africa and Lesotho share a currency and a customs union, and absorbed the same American trade shock. The difference between their outcomes is not primarily about politics. It is about what each country sells, and how much of the value of those exports survives when the buyer changes.
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Analysis · Africa
Nigeria's Rating Upgrade Is Partly a War Dividend
Nigeria's sovereign credit rating upgrade is being presented as proof that three years of painful reform have finally paid off. Some of it has. But part of the improvement traces back to an oil price spike tied to a war Nigeria did not start.
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Analysis · Africa
Mozambique's LNG Restart Is a Fiscal Bet on Timing
Mozambique's delayed LNG restart could bring major gas revenues into state coffers just as a global supply wave reshapes prices, buyer leverage and the value of that revenue.
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Analysis · Africa
Mozambique's Mining Law Is a Fiscal Bet on Resource Sovereignty
Mozambique's 15% state mining stake could increase public control over mineral resources, but its success will depend on whether the country can attract the investment needed to turn that stake into actual revenue.
