Category: Southern Africa

South African power utility Eskom will this week issue a request for proposals to add 9,600 megawatts of nuclear power to the national grid, acting chief executive Matshela Koko said on Tuesday. Koko was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a court case in Cape Town where environmentalists and clean energy activists are challenging…

Improved electricity supply, an easing drought and a depreciation of the rand currency are underpinning a recovery in the South African economy, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Monday. Gordhan’s comments echo the view of analysts who in a Reuters poll published last week forecast that rising commodity prices would also provide a fillip to…

South Africa continues to depend on resident and nonresident purchases of rand denominated local currency debt to finance its fiscal and external deficits. Its financing needs have risen beyond our previous expectations, with general government debt set to increase by an average of 4.9% of GDP over 2016-2018, to reach gross debt of 54% of…

Angola’s state-owned oil firm Sonangol will not pay the government any dividends this year, its chief executive said, as crude revenues plunge in Africa’s second-largest producer. Sonangol is an important source of revenue for the government, but the firm has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in debts and has deferred payments to its suppliers…

South Africa’s is making little progress in turning around the economy as political wrangling delays the implementation of reforms, raising the risk of a credit downgrade to sub-investment grade, S&P Global Ratings said on Thursday. “If things deteriorate further it becomes difficult to continue believing that government can implement the things they say want to…

South Africa measures favourably in most indices bar economic growth, which the Treasury has forecast will be 0.5 percent this year, a Moody’s representative said on Tuesday. “South Africa is doing relatively well in a lot of the indices when you strip out growth … and when we look at a sovereign rating you’ve got…

CAPE TOWN Nov 1 (Reuters) – Mozambique, which has vast offshore gas reserves, will hold its sixth round of oil and gas licensing round late in 2017 or in 2018, a government official told an industry conference on Tuesday. Augusto Macuvele, a senior official with Mozambique’s National Petroleum Institute, provided few details about the rounds in…