Raye Nyerere 
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery IPO opened Nigeria’s capital market to retail investors in a way that has not happened before: a fully digital subscription process, built with diaspora and international access in mind from the start. But “digital” does not mean “frictionless.” Between BVN requirements, crypto network mismatches, and the gap between what a platform … Read more
A Lagos seller opens an Instagram page, posts a product, and takes her first order within the hour. She has an online business now. What she does not have yet is a clear answer to three questions: what did it actually cost her to get here, what does every naira collected really keep after payment … Read more
If you’re reading this from a rented apartment in a city where the rent went up again this year, you already know the arithmetic. The paycheck lands, the bills clear it out, and the gap between “working hard” and “getting ahead” doesn’t close no matter how many extra hours you put in. For a lot … Read more
Land at Kigali International Airport on any given morning and the first thing you notice isn’t the hills, though there are a thousand of them rolling toward every horizon. It’s the quiet. No horns. No litter blowing across the tarmac road into the city center. A traffic officer waves a line of motorcycle taxis through … Read more
A trader in Kitwe pays her mobile money withdrawal fee without a second thought, files VAT the way she has for years, and quotes freelance clients the same rate she’s always quoted. None of that math is current anymore. Between January and mid-2026, Zambia quietly rewrote the rules on four fronts at once: mobile money … Read more
A security firm in Nairobi budgeted May and June payroll at the old rates, waiting to see whether President Ruto’s Labour Day announcement would actually become law before changing anything. It was the right instinct and the wrong bet. The Regulation of Wages (General) (Amendment) Order 2026 was gazetted on 26 June, backdated to 1 … Read more
A payroll officer at a mid-sized logistics firm in Lagos ran January 2026 the same way she had run every month for six years: gross salary, minus the Consolidated Relief Allowance, minus pension, then the old bands from 7 to 24 percent. Every payslip that month was wrong. Nigeria’s tax law changed on 1 January … Read more
At a Nairobi packhouse in Murang’a, a cold-chain manager checks the temperature log on a crate of Hass avocados bound for a market Kenya has never shipped to directly. For years, “export” meant Rotterdam, Dubai, or, more recently, Shanghai. It never meant Kingston. That changed on July 13, 2026, when Kenya’s first-ever resident High Commissioner, … Read more
At Abossey Okai, Accra’s spare parts district, a trader unpacks a container that left Guangzhou six weeks earlier: brake pads, filters, bearings, wiring harnesses, enough stock to supply a dozen mechanics for a month. He priced the deal off his supplier’s invoice. He is about to learn that invoice was never the real number. Importing … Read more
At Wakulima Market in Nairobi, a tomato trader watches roughly a third of her crates lose value before she can sell them, not because buyers aren’t there, but because the tomatoes were never cooled after harvest. This is not a personal failure. It is the default outcome of farming without storage infrastructure across most of … Read more