There have been major developments over the past week in the African debt crisis. It appears that Angola and China reached a consensus on how to restructure the estimated $20 billion of loans that Luanda owes Beijing. This deal then paved the way for the IMF to come in with its own financial package for Angola. Meantime, Zambia announced that it will default on three Eurobond notes totaling around $3 billion, prompting an immediate downgrade of its credit rating.
Finally, it appears that Kenya’s embattled standard gauge railway (SGR) is reaching a breaking point. Kenya Railways is losing almost ten million dollars a month and it looks increasingly likely that the company will not be able to repay the Chinese creditors who financed and built the SGR.
Yinka Adegoke, Africa editor of the online financial news site Quartz, is closely following the unfolding debt crisis in Africa and China’s role in the situation. He joins Eric and Cobus from the Quartz newsroom in New York to discuss the financial crisis and how it’s impacting the broader China-Africa relationship.
