Category: Southern Africa

South Africa’s Standard Bank said on Monday it had lost 300 million rand ($19 million) in a card fraud incident in Japan, after the perpetrators used counterfeit cards to withdraw cash from automatic teller machines. The bank said its South African operations suffered the losses, not its customers, and that the authorities had been alerted,…

Johannesburg – A lack of readily available radio frequency spectrum is hobbling South Africa’s national broadband hopes, says mobile network Vodacom. South Africa’s government has been slow in implementing its digital broadcast migration project which is targeted at opening frequencies for faster mobile internet services such as 4G. Government only started distributing a few thousand…

A report into the 2014 collapse of South Africa’s biggest unsecured lender African Bank Investments (Abil) laid the blame squarely on management, saying they negligently chased after growth while lacking banking experience. The central bank launched the investigation shortly after the collapse to determine if the lender, which was rescued in a $1.6 billion bailout,…

Hopes for positive economic growth in the country this year have been dealt a devastating blow with the release of StatSA’s figure for mining production for the month of March, which saw volumes declining by 18% year-on-year. While the public holidays that occurred late in the month would have contributed to this number, the magnitude…

A nephew of South African President Jacob Zuma, a grandson of Nelson Mandela and three of their business partners had their case dismissed by the Supreme Court of Appeal Thursday after an earlier ruling held them responsible for the destruction of gold-mining assets near Johannesburg, labor union Solidarity said. Khulubuse Zuma and Zondwa Mandela had…

Zimbabweans are worried that central bank plans to circulate local bank notes to ease dollar shortages could open the door to rampant printing of cash as happened in 2008 when inflation hit 500 billion percent, wiping out savings and pensions. Since January 2009, the southern African country has used foreign currencies, including the US dollar,…

South Africa will connect 7,000 megawatts (MW) of renewable power to its grid by mid this year when the first 47 projects become fully operational, the energy minister said on Wednesday. Africa’s most industrialised country has turned to solar and wind power to plug electricity shortages, Tina Joemat-Pettersson told parliament. She also reiterated that the…

Botswana will target an average economic growth rate of 4.4 percent in the next six years under a medium-term socio economic framework from 3.8 percent currently, the finance minister said on Monday. But the targeted growth rate will not be enough to address the southern African country’s development challenges, which include poverty, income inequality and…

Cash-strapped Angola, which is in talks for International Monetary Fund assistance as it grapples with low global prices for crude said on Monday it needed $29 billion for energy and water projects to meet development targets by 2025. “If we don’t build this infrastructure, nothing will be developed,” water and energy minister Joao Baptista Borges…