While many on the continent would like to see the inclusion of more teams from Africa, those in the footballing community are aware of the deficiencies.
Aaron Mokoena, who captained South Africa at the 2010 World Cup on home soil, said the continent must “fix” itself.
The former Blackburn Rovers and Portsmouth defender criticised countries whose stadiums were banned by FIFA and the Confederation of African Football (CAF) for not meeting key standards.
Security for spectators remained poor, and medical and technical facilities on the grounds were inferior.
“I think it’s important for Africa to have more teams at the World Cup because if we want African players to improve they need to test themselves against the best,” Mokoena told Al Jazeera.
“We need to fix our football before we can ask for more spots at the World Cup. It’s important for us to look into issues of infrastructure. It’s not good to have a national team going to play their home games away. And it’s not just one, two or three countries, several countries on the continent are in that position where they have to play their home games away [due to lack of infrastructure at home].
“Second thing we need to look at is development. If we are going to go to the World Cup with more teams, we have to develop our players. Invest well in development, so that the players can compete at the highest level.”
The World Cup aside, African players have long been “competing at the highest level” in some of Europe’s best leagues and are constantly among the best players in those teams, Mokoena noted.
Bayern Munich forward Sadio Mane who finished runners-up at the Ballon d’Or awards has emerged among the world’s best. The 30-year-old former Liverpool star will spearhead Senegal’s attack in Qatar, fresh from helping the Teranga Lions to Africa Cup of Nations glory earlier this year.
Continent Africa must fix itself for World Cup
Millions pledged at Africa adaptation acceleration event
UK pledged $230 million, the Netherlands $110 million, AfDB $12.5 billion, Germany to increase contribution to $6 billion by 2025
By Kingsley Ighobor
When Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was asked to make remarks at an event on Africa at the ongoing COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, she began by asking the jampacked audience to give a round of applause to Egypt and to Africa.
And then, holding her hands aloft to form a heart symbol, Ms. Georgieva declared: “We pledge our heart to Africa.”
She was speaking at the Accelerating Adaptation in Africa event where the lovefest continued with each statement by the world leaders or their representatives, including one by the British Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, who said he needed to make a public confession.
“My mother was from Sierra Leone,” he announced. “Please forgive me if I maintain a personal interest in Africa.” He said his country was just as keen on Africa’s development.
The event was not only about speeches; millions of dollars were pledged in support of the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP) – an Africa-led response initiative seeking to reduce climate change vulnerabilities through effective adaptation.
Pledges
The UK pledged £200 (about $230 million) and is to triple its overall climate adaptation funding from £500 million to £1.5 billion by 2025.
The Netherlands will provide AAAP with $110 million.
Germany will increase its climate contribution to $6 billion a year by 2025. Nearly half the funding will be for adaptation, including in Africa.
Presidents Macky Sall of Senegal (also African Union Chair), Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, William Ruto of Kenya, Andry Rajoelina of Madagascar, Hassan Sheikh Mohamed of Somalia, were at the event.
So were Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, among others.
The backdrop is Africa’s precarious climate change situation, worsened by the effects of the Ukraine conflict and COVID-19 pandemic.
The African Development Bank (AfDB) president, Akinwumi Adesina, reiterated the need for effective adaptation in Africa. Adequate financing for related projects was the recurring theme during the event.
Ms. Georgieva said “Without support, Africa will not reach its potential. Each one of us must stand up and be counted.”
Mr. Cleverly of the UK maintained: “We must deliver if Africa is to overcome climate change and fulfill its limitless potential.”
For Mr. Scholz, there was some urgency: He said “Time is running out” for industrialised countries to meet their climate finance commitment of $100 billion by 2025, adding that Africa was contributing only marginally to emissions.
Unified call
The African leaders were unified in their call for financial support. Currently, lamented President Sall, many African countries borrow to finance adaptation projects, citing Senegal’s electric train and bus projects costing $1.4 billion.
President Akufo-Addo (Ghana), as well as President Ruto (Kenya) said Africa needed rapid injection of adaptation financing.
It must be “adequate, timely and accessible in order to be effective,” said Mr. Ruto.
Assisting Africa to boost adaptation is a “moral imperative,” Mr. Adesina maintained.
It was a view shared by Patrick Verkooijen, CEO of the Global Centre on Adaptation, an international organization working to broker solutions to support for adaptation.
In addition to the many devastating climate change consequences, the AfDB boss lamented that some five million Africans were displaced.
“Africa is under siege; Africa cannot keep quiet. We are seeking a partnership,” said Mr. Adesina. He added: “World leaders need to hear our voices. Megawatts of words must translate into megawatts of financing for Africa.”
Africa’s financing requirements
While Africa needs $33 billion annually for adaptation, it currently receives about $6 billion, prompting African leaders to endorse the AAAP.
Under the AAAP’s auspices, the AfDB and the GCA hope to mobilise $25 billion to support interventions in food security, resilient infrastructure, youth entrepreneurship and job creation and innovative climate adaptation finance.
Mr. Adesina announced that the AfDB would provide $12.5 billion and called on Africa’s partners to assist with the remainder of $12.5 billion.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres backed Africa’s adaptation ambition, saying that investing in adaptation in Africa would benefit the rest of the world.
Mr. Guterres echoed his well-received COP27 opening remarks wherein he asked governments to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies and the money used to support “people struggling with rising food and energy prices and to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis.”
(Africa Renewal)
New sugar bid opens as former bid winner flops
Three companies show interest in the latest restricted bid for sugar procurement.
Despite the Ethiopian Sugar Industry Group highly anticipating the recently awarded bidder to deliver the sweet, the company has failed to come up with a performance bond, Capital has learnt.
About a week ago, the Ethiopian Sugar Industry Group re-floated yet another round of restricted international competitive bid to procure the strategic commodity after the recent bid winning company failed to deliver.
As per the information that Capital obtained, the highly anticipated sugar shipment failed to push through as a result of Millhouse International not being able to come up with a performance bond.
A week ago Weyo Roba, CEO of Ethiopian Sugar Industry Group, told Capital that he is optimistic that this time around the awarded company shall come up with its performance bond sooner rather than later. He said that if the company was to appear with the required procedure earlier, the bid would be pushed for another period.
In the recent bidding process that did not push through, Osirius Group, Millhouse International, and ED and F MAN had met the technical evaluation. The first two companies however did not have experience on similar biddings in Ethiopia.
While on the latest restricted bid that was opened on November 8 Osirius Group, Agrocorp International and ED and F MAN have come up with their technical and financial document, while as per the information Capital obtained, the group is evaluating the technical document prior to evaluating the financial papers. Similar to ED and F MAN, which is a UK based, commodity company, Agrocorp International of Singapore is not new to the Ethiopian market as it has participated on such kind of huge public procurements.
In this bid, the public enterprise has targeted to buy 200, 000 metric tons of sugar.
In the past bid that was opened a couple of weeks ago; as per its financial offer, with three letters of credit (LC) modality, Millhouse, a company from South Africa, offered LC at sight FOB USD 450 per ton and CFR USD 480, LC for 12 months USD 522 and USD 552 on FOB and CFR shipment modalities respectively. While for 18 months payment modality, it offered USD 561 and USD 591 of FOB and CFR respectively. Due to its lower bid in contrast to the rest, the company was awarded the bid.
Millhouse rates had wide gaps compared to the other bidders. For instance, Osirius and ED and F Man offer was FOB USD 545 and UDS 715 for LC at sight respectively.
For the new bid, the Industry Group invited interested bidders to come up with three alternative payment modality; LC at sight, and 12 and 24 months differed payments.
Experts suggested that the relevant body should be cautious with regards to new companies that do not have any track record in Ethiopia.
“Detailed understanding of companies before the award should be a norm. We have to learn from the previous unsuccessful procurement processes that have been seen in the wheat bid process about three years ago,” experts said.
The industry experts expressed their view citing that Millhouse failed not because of its inability to come up with the performance bond, “Nonetheless, it is actually difficult for the company to deliver the commodity with the rate that it offered.”
However, the CEO said that there were difficulties in connection to bank to bank relations for the company to come up with the performance guarantee.
For the past budget year, the Industrial Group did not buy the sweet from abroad, despite about three bids being floated.
Compared with early 2022, the sugar price globally has registered increments but experts said that the latest price would not be higher compared to the last bidding period.
Because of the failure of finalizing the international procurement, the enterprise, which also operates millers, is facing difficulties in meeting the local demand.
However, there are hopes that some of the huge sugar millers who halted operations owing to annual maintenance, which usually takes place in the rainy season, are now getting back to production which may ease the shortage.
Ethio telecom goes solo in integrating tele birr
Ethio Telecom continues to integrate its mobile money platform, tele birr, with financial institutions as the integration process between Ethio telecom and EthSwitch lags behind.
“As per the directive of the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), we have been on the process of integrating our system with Telebirr,” said Yilebes Addis, CEO of EthSwitch, adding, “As a financial institution telebirr can benefit from the interoperability of wallet, mobile, and internet banking that EthSwitch provides for financial institutions such as banks and micro finance institutions.”
However, it has been well over a year since the negotiations to onboard tele birr as part of Ethswitch took place, without tangible results to show for it.
Currently, Ethio Telecom is working with banks on its own with regards to interconnecting telebirr transactions.
As sources cite, even though there were discussions to integrate Ethio Telecom with the national switch operator, the telecommunications firm has now already built up interlinks with financial institution which is well established and sees no need of integrating at least for now.
However, under the ‘Licensing and Authorization of Payment System Operators Directive No. ONPS/02/2020’, EthSwitch is the only body that is allowed to provide the interoperability scheme between payment instrument issuers, be it telebirr or other financial firms.
Article nine sub article one of the directive likewise indicates that there shall be a single national switch operator.
The same article sub article 2 adds that EthSwitch SC shall be the national switch for card and instant retail payments and transfers.
As Yilebes explained, there are technical and legal criteria that payment instrument issuers should fulfill to which EthSwitch has tabled the same to Ethio Telecom. “One of the main criteria is regulatory requirement which has been fulfilled. However,we don’t know what issues have made it to take this long in terms of integration,”Yilebes elaborated.
EthSwitch’s interoperability enables transfers from bank account to bank account, wallet to wallet, wallet to bank account and from bank accounts to wallet using internet based and USSD channels as well as smart phone applications. Customers of banks, MFIs and e-money issuers with digital wallet, mobile and internet banking and accounts are also enabled to send funds from one institution to another.
Currently, Telebirr is integrated with more than 16 banks. In fact, it requires more than 80 interfaces, if wallet, mobile and internet banking operators prefer to interface individually. However if Tele joins links withEthSwitch, it can simply interface all of them with the single central switch of the operator.
“It is difficult to transfer from telebirr to CBE birr or others. But once they come onboard, all operators will be accessible with one account,” Yilebes said, adding, “Currently, other banks and MFIs are integrating on the platform. Foreign mobile money operators in the pipeline, including Safaricom, will also integrate.”
In May 2021, Ethio Telecom broke through the country’s financial bubble by availing telebirr; and has been making huge strides in the financial space by introducing the capabilities of mobile money.
The interoperability will allow telebirr to ease the transactions from banks to its platform and vice versa.
Financial companies are expected to buy 5 percent or 40 million birr of share from EthSwitch to become a member and if they are not capable of buying the 40 million birr share, they can also buy shares equal to their 5 percent of subscribed capital.
The digital cash system enables its 24.9 million users to access financial services including transferring money locally and making purchases online and at convenient stores.
Capital’s effort to get further comments from Ethio Telecom was unfruitful.
