The superb blog 0735

Public policy reporting is often treated like a side dish in business journalism, something to skim after the market numbers and before the opinion page. That mistake can cost real money. Across African markets, policy is not background noise. It is the weather, the terrain, and sometimes the bridge that either holds or collapses under a fast-moving deal. For business leaders and investors trying to understand risk, spot openings early, and avoid expensive blind spots, poli

Tax policy rarely sets hearts racing. It arrives in dense bills, budget speeches, and technical notes that seem built to drain the color from a room. Yet out on the ground, where businesses keep paper ledgers under shop counters and market traders count small notes before dawn, tax reform is never abstract. It shapes whether clinics get stocked, whether roads survive the rainy season, whether teachers are paid on time, and whether citizens feel the state as a partner, a pre

Cities reveal a continent’s ambitions in concrete, cables, drains, bus lanes, and street markets. You can read policy papers for months, but one dawn drive from the edge of Nairobi into the central business district, or an evening walk through Accra after a heavy rain, will teach you more about infrastructure finance than a shelf of reports. Roads tell the story. So do water pipes, half-finished flyovers, minibus depots, substations, fiber routes, and the informal settlemen

There is a particular kind of reporting that only makes sense when your boots are dusty, your notebook is full of crossed-out figures, and every tidy theory has already collided with real life. Climate, energy, and development are like that. They do not sit still for neat slogans. They do not obey the moral clarity that activists, governments, investors, and even journalists sometimes crave. In much of Africa, these questions are not abstract policy puzzles. They are the da

Election season in Africa has a smell to it. Dust on campaign roads. Fresh paint on party offices. Loudspeakers tied to old pickups. Security convoys pushing through market streets. Radio hosts stretching interviews long past the scheduled slot because listeners keep calling in. You can feel the country talking to itself. That conversation is never only about who wins. It is also about whether the state can keep promises, whether contracts will be honored, whether a farm

Africa’s industrial story has never lacked ambition. What it has often lacked is connective tissue, the practical machinery that turns ambition into factories, payrolls, supplier networks, export contracts, and durable know-how. That is where manufacturing corridors enter the picture. They are not glamorous on first glance. A corridor can sound like a line on a planner’s map, a bureaucrat’s phrase, a consultant’s sketch in a slide deck. Yet when they are designed well, manu

There is a certain kind of story that never arrives shouting. It does not break with sirens. It does not trend in the first hour. It rarely comes with dramatic footage or a minister standing at a podium, promising a new dawn. More often, it slips into public view in the shape of a dry circular, a budget annex, a procurement adjustment, a tax note, a central bank memo, a customs directive, a parliamentary amendment, or a line buried halfway down a regulatory filing. To th

Africa rewards the impatient observer with a lesson in humility. You land in Lagos expecting one story and get five before lunch. You arrive in Kigali thinking the future will look polished and orderly, then discover that speed, improvisation, and grit matter just as much as planning. In Nairobi, code and capital move quickly, but so do traffic jams, power costs, and the hard arithmetic of scaling a business across borders. The continent is often discussed as if it were a s