Author: Esther Memeh

That’s the fun question. It’s the wrong one for this desk, though. In April, Aubrey Niederhoffer closed a $7.3 million seed round for Swoop, a payments-and-commerce app, and chose to run the entire experiment inside Eswatini before anywhere else on earth. Nobody on his cap table was betting on Eswatini’s banking system. But every one of them was quietly relying on it. That’s the part worth pulling apart. The Enabling Condition Start with the thing that never makes headlines because nothing happened. The Central Bank of Eswatini’s own MPCC statement confirms it held the discount rate at 6.75% at its…

Covering Egypt right now means living with whiplash. In one inbox, the state is quietly lining up roughly twenty asset sales — ports, land, stakes in state-owned firms — targeting $7.2 billion in privatization proceeds, per documents from the IMF’s seventh review, to keep the Fund happy and the debt load manageable. In the other, Global Paradigm, a licensed Egyptian consumer finance lender, has just been suspended by the Financial Regulatory Authority over loans allegedly registered against parents who never signed for them — for their kids’ school fees. The Sale I keep coming back to something from a legal…

It’s between the African Development Bank’s $1.78 billion country strategy for Namibia and a public warning delivered at a half-day Bank of Namibia seminar on Tuesday, 4 August 2026, titled “From Discovery to Development: Preparing Namibia’s Financial Sector for a Sustainable Oil and Gas Economy,” reported by Namibia Economist the following day. The message from that seminar: the domestic financial sector is not yet structured to finance the industry the AfDB strategy is meant to support. The FID Timeline Is Real Start with what’s confirmed. bp entered Namibia in April 2026, acquiring a 60% operating stake in offshore blocks in…