by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 24, 2025 | Intellectual
Producing nations are usually handed the same advice: do not intervene, let the market clear. On 24 February the Democratic Republic of Congo did the opposite. It suspended cobalt exports for four months to reduce oversupply and lift prices, treating its concentration...
by The Fikiria Desk | Apr 20, 2023 | Intellectual
The instinct across Africa is to copy what works. When one country announces an AI strategy, a dozen ministries reach for the template. But strategy is not a document to be photocopied; it is a set of assumptions about a specific place. Rwanda’s national...
by The Fikiria Desk | Apr 19, 2023 | Intellectual
The most valuable output of the Tenke Fungurume dispute may not be the copper and cobalt now cleared to ship, but the template it leaves behind. For nearly a year a state miner held a world-scale operation to account over how its wealth was shared, and today CMOC and...
by The Fikiria Desk | Dec 19, 2022 | Intellectual
Djibouti is often described as a country that has turned its position into a strategy, and the description is accurate enough to be worth interrogating. A small state with limited domestic market has built national income out of being the place things must pass...
by The Fikiria Desk | Oct 6, 2022 | Intellectual
A launch is an event; a model is a claim about how the world can be arranged. On 6 October 2022, Safaricom Ethiopia began commercial service, and the more durable question beneath the switch-on is intellectual: what strategic model is actually being tested here, and...