Category: Politics

Zambia’s slow creep towards an official default is raising a lot of discussion about how to avoid this kind of crisis from spreading. Not surprisingly, much of this focus is falling on China, and rightly so. China’s insistence on handling successive troubled loans on an opaque case-by-case ...

Debt relief for the world's poorest countries was high on the agenda at this weekend's Group of 20 summit organized by Saudi Arabia. The conference ended on Sunday with what's become standard promises to expand its Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) and calls ...

The Group of 20 wrapped up yet another high-profile summit on Sunday that will once again disappoint anyone looking to the world's wealthiest countries for leadership in resolving the developing world's burgeoning debt crisis. The final communiqué basically repeated the same, ...

Zambia's default over the weekend on a portion of its Eurobond debt prompted renewed concerns about the lack of transparency in Chinese lending and whether weak governance systems in a number of African countries are up to the challenge of managing the burgeoning financial crisis.

In today’s China-Africa Daily Brief email newsletter we showcased an article by the analyst and former Liberian Public Works Minister, Gyude Moore, arguing that the pandemic-induced economic crisis will lock in Chinese influence in Africa for at least a decade. He argues ...

China and Africa will increasingly lean into one another in the decade ahead but for starkly different reasons, argues Gyude Moore in a provocative new column published today in African Business Magazine.  Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for ...

U.S. President Donald Trump is widely expected to enact a significant drawdown of U.S. forces in South Asia, the Mideast, and in Africa, before he leaves office next January, according to a report today in The New York Times.

It appears that China's censors have moved to restrict media coverage of the ongoing debt crisis in Zambia. A search of major news sites, the market-leading Baidu search engine, and the social media platform Weibo came back with no results related to current events unfolding in the ...

Hi Eric and Cobus, Being a Zambian living in Zambia, I've observed with interest your coverage of the looming credit default by Zambia on its debt repayments to bondholders. You've mostly looked at it in the context of the COVID-19 induced ...

BBC Africa journalist Jameisha Prescod produced a short, five-minute explainer on what Zambia can expect next, following its announcement that it would be unable to meet a Saturday repayment deadline on $3 billion of Eurobond notes owed to private investors. Prescod ...

In a somewhat odd bit of optics, two central players in Zambia's simmering economic crisis, President Edgar Lungu and Chinese ambassador Li Jie, were seen together on Friday inspecting a blueberry farm in Lusaka's Chongwe district. Neither seemed visibly concerned about ...

After a tumultuous 3.5 years, a wide array of African stakeholders are hoping for a "reset" in Washington's ties with the continent following the election of President-elect Joe Biden. Specifically, they're hoping the United States will re-engage multilateral institutions like the ...