Africa

The week for us on the Africa team started with a blockbuster scoop from Sam Mkokeli in Johannesburg on the early findings of a probe into what really happened with the alleged arms dealing on a Russian ship docked at a naval base near Cape Town…Indeed Russia and Ukraine might be casting a wider net for weaponry. For Semafor’s The Agenda video series, our colleague Tanya Lukyanova explains why Ukraine is running out of ammunition. It’s linked not just to issues with cost but also major problems with supply chains.

In Lagos, a few in the tech community got to welcome OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who’s on a 17-country tour to stay ahead of global AI regulation. We explained why Africa’s biggest city is all important in that quest. Staying with AI, Semafor Tech editor Reed Albergotti landed a scoop on the latest wave of funding into generative AI startups that will save hours of paperwork for the legal industry.

Justice Malala is an award-winning South African journalist, television host, political commentator, and newspaper columnist for South Africa’s Financial Mail and TimesLive. He’s also a regular contributor to the UK’s Guardian newspaper. His new book, The Plot To Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation, tells the story of how South Africa’s post-apartheid transition nearly collapsed after the murder of Chris Hani, then head of the African National Congress’s armed wing and leader of the South African Communist Party.

💡 Why was it important to write a book about the week of Chris Hani's death now?

Hani’s assassination by a white supremacist on April 10, 1993 set off a crisis on top of an ongoing polycrisis in South Africa. Mandela had been out after 27 years’ imprisonment for three years and the democracy talks were proceeding slowly. Four thousand people were dying every year due to political violence. In that week, Mandela and others had to show extraordinary leadership to frustrate the right wing’s attempts to spark a race war while calming down Black citizens angered by Hani’s murder.

💡 You seem to suggest this is the week when Nelson Mandela really became South Africa’s president, is that fair?

The triumph of democracy over apartheid in South Africa was never guaranteed. There was huge resistance, even by 1993, to the establishment of a truly non-racial democracy. In the week I chronicle, what became clear was that without Mandela’s leadership and a Black government’s ascendancy South Africa would implode. [Then President] FW de Klerk’s attempts to establish some kind of veto power over a new government crumbled. Mandela wrung out an election date and a transition agreement from him. White minority rule died that week. Mandela, and the people, won.

💡 Is the tension between South Africa’s “born frees” and those who were already of age under apartheid understandable or justifiable?

It is understandable, but most of the criticism of Mandela and the democracy negotiators is unjustified. Youth unemployment in South Africa is at abominable levels and it is the most unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank. South Africa’s leaders after 2009 have failed young people spectacularly.

💡 Does today’s South Africa understand its place in the world or in Africa?

No. The last time South Africa knew and could articulate its place in the world was in the mid-2000s when [former presidents] Thabo Mbeki and Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo united large chunks of the continent around what was called the ‘African Renaissance’. This was a practical, purposeful, Africa-led and focused program of political and economic reforms that saw major victories being scored. The South Africa of today does not know what it stands for or what it wants to achieve. It dances when Vladimir Putin says so, and associates itself with dictators across the globe. Mandela and Hani are turning in their graves.

💡 Which writers inspire you to write books?

I recommend all books by JM Coetzee from the 1980s and 1990s for the beauty of the writing. I wish everyone could read Askari, Jacob Dlamini’s incredible book about the violence of the apartheid state. It’s a classic.

💡 Where are you most at peace in South Africa?

The most peaceful and beautiful place in the world is a virtually unknown, hard-to-reach, wilderness retreat on a mountain top in Limpopo, South Africa. Leshiba Wilderness is wondrous, has been used by presidents to write and be alone, and I hate myself for even telling you about it.

💡 Springboks or Bafana Bafana?

Are you mad? I worked in Lagos in the early 2000s and the only time I really ever feel alive is when the two greatest football teams in the world, Ghana and Nigeria, face each other. Super Eagles forever. Bafana Bafana puts me to sleep.

— Yinka

Read and share a slightly longer version of this interview here.

The Dangote Refinery, commissioned last Monday by Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote, is so massive that it is three times the size of Victoria Island, an upscale district in Lagos. Nearly 40 miles from the city center, the $18.5 billion refinery is unique, not just for its sheer scale but for being the largest single-train plant of its kind in the world.

‘Single-train’ here means that all of the 650,000 barrels of oil it is capable of processing can run through the plant’s sole crude distillation unit (licensed from the U.S. firm UOP) to produce gasoline, kerosene and other petroleum by-products. This differs from the Jamnagar Refinery in India, owned by the billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, which, while being the world’s largest refinery by daily output, has more than one distillation unit.

Supported by a 435 MW power plant capable of serving five states near Lagos, the advantage of Dangote’s single-train plant is the potential it offers for significant cost savings and higher margins. This is all good in theory. The risk is that nothing gets produced if there’s a major breakdown in a single-train system.

— Alexander Onukwue from Ibeju-Lekki

Sierra Leone mourned the loss of its iconic centuries-old ‘Cotton Tree’ located in the center of its capital city Freetown. The tree was felled by a heavy rain storm leaving only the base of its giant trunk still in place. The Cotton Tree was actually a kapok tree that first gained significance way back in 1792 when Freetown was founded by a group of formerly enslaved African Americans. There are historical records of formerly enslaved people gathering under the tree to pray. President Julius Maada Bio said there was "no stronger symbol of our national story than the Cotton Tree, a physical embodiment of where we come from as a country."

Freetown Media Centre shared aerial photos with us of how they remember the tree and what the city looks like now without it.

🌍 As they invest billions of dollars into everything from undersea cables to expanding their software platforms, it’s important we understand U.S. tech giants need African consumers more than they’re willing to admit. In an essay, Nate D.F. Allen and Nanjira Sambuli explain how Silicon Valley’s behemoths have not made the effort to really understand what it is that African markets and their consumers actually want. “The most persistent challenge facing Big Tech firms in Africa is their ignorance of and disregard for Africans’ preferences and needs,” the authors write, comparing them to what Chinese firms like Transsion have been able to do in the handset sector.

🇳🇬 No other president has wasted the huge reservoir of goodwill they had at inauguration into the office like Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has done over the last eight years, argues Ebenezer Obadare in an essay for the Council of Foreign Relations. Obadare lists Buhari’s long list of failures including a worsening economy, rising insecurity, divisive ethnic favoritism, increased corruption, and general incompetence. “Buhari failed simply because he lacked the wherewithal to govern,” he writes. “For one thing, if he had anything resembling a coherent economic vision, he never once articulated it.”

🌍 The fight against infectious diseases in Africa has often been hampered by a lack of a continent-wide capacity to generate and share critical data on the pathogens in time to inform public-health decisions. However, this could be set to change as African scientists coordinated by the Africa Centres for Disease Control  — in collaboration with several African public health institutions — are working to develop a continental platform for pathogen genomic data management and sharing. The platform has been in the works since 2020.

The Ethiopian potato sandwich, locally known as Ertib, has claimed a prominent spot on street corners in Addis Ababa and many other major cities across the Horn of Africa nation.

Ertib is a relatively recent addition to Ethiopia’s culinary scene which has gained popularity over the last decade. While a myriad of potato-based dishes exist in Ethiopian cuisine, the ingenuity of chefs in Addis has been instrumental in the rise of this popular local fast food which only takes about 15 minutes to prepare. The primary ingredients are bread, potato chips, hot spices, green pepper, and caramelized onions. For the equivalent of around $1 you get a generous portion of seasoned potatoes sandwiched between the bread slices with a little ketchup, depending on your taste.

— Kaleab Girma in Addis Ababa

• Nigeria’s president-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be sworn in tomorrow after being declared the winner of the February 25 election. Several dignitaries, including a presidential delegation from the United States, are expected to attend the inauguration. (May 29)
• GITEX Africa: One Africa Digital Summit will bring together tech leaders and entrepreneurs from across 80 countries. The three-day event will take place in Marrakech, Morocco. (May 31 - June 2)
• The second session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent will take place at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The forum is intended to improve the lives of people of African descent that also serves as an advisory body to the Human Rights Council. (May 30 - June 2)

If you’re enjoying the Semafor Africa newsletter and finding it useful, please share with your family and friends. We’d love to have them aboard, too.

Let’s make sure this email doesn’t end up in your junk folder by adding africa@semafor.com to your contacts. In Gmail you should drag this newsletter over to your ‘Primary’ tab.

You can reply to this email and send us your news tips, gossip, street food recommendations and good vibes.

— Yinka, Alexis Akwagyiram, Marché Arends, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge