IN 2008, after months of delays, the Zambian government finally gave in to public pressure to capture a greater share of profits from the commodity boom by introducing a windfall tax on minerals, raising mining royalties and hiking corporate taxes. The measures, which came into effect in the April 2008 national budget, raised the effective [...]

OFFICIAL discussions about how to manage traffic and people through Africa’s busiest border post — Beitbridge — have been going on for at least a decade. And yet, every major holiday begets horror stories about the experience of trying to move through this border crossing. This past Christmas season was no exception. In fact, with [...]

SABMILLER ’s two main competitors in Nigeria, Guinness and Heineken, make nearly as much in that market as SA’s brewing giant makes in 24 other African countries, excluding SA. This startling fact was disclosed by an SABMiller Africa executive at a recent SA-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce event. He maintains that for all the challenges of [...]

Business Day / Published: 26 October 2009 A GREEN revolution, like any other revolution, takes real leadership; it requires an acknowledgement that food production is a life-and-death matter, a Vietnamese academic told an agricultural conference I attended in Hanoi last week. Feeding a nation was not possible without a clear and decisive strategy, he said. [...]

Published on Business Day Newspaper: 12 October 2009 Most people would not be able to find Guinea on a map – until the recent slaughter and rape of dozens of people in the streets of the capital, that is. As the horror was splashed across the world’s media, the rulers of this West African nation [...]

Published: 2009/09/28 06:28:29 AM RETURNING to his country after an absence of more than a decade, a Nigerian friend said what had caught his eye first was the fact that Lagos had streetlights — and they worked. The streetlight project, which brings some light to a city of 15-million people, is one of the Lagos [...]

Business Day / Published 20 July 2009 ZIMBABWE is currently swamped by investor conferences. The perception of rich pickings at rock-bottom prices and the search for new capital by the public and private sectors have raised the business profile of a country no one wanted to visit a year ago. And despite the flaws of [...]

New Statesman / Published 23 July 2009 The close relationship between South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, and the country’s powerful trade unions had the private sector and investors worried. Would the payback for union support of his campaign, which helped sweep him to victory in April, be a leap to the left for a [...]

Business Day newspaper / Published 17 August 2009 When President Mwai Kibaki first came to power in Kenya in 2003 he put out an arrest warrant for the chief justice, among many other public officials, in a bid to stamp out a cancer that had taken hold of the country. One of his first legislative [...]

Business Day newspaper / Published 31 August 2009 NIGERIAN society is reeling from the unprecedented corporate drama playing out before it, watching as the country’s blue-chip business elite is hauled before anticorruption officials in the media spotlight. The banking crisis, which has seen the Central Bank of Nigeria firing the CEOs of five banks — [...]