Africa Business News

Twitter has announced that its Africa headquarters will be in Ghana.The company's co-founder Jack Dorsey made the announcement on Twitter:African technology commentators may have bet on Twitter choosing Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa as all three countries have more established tech hubs.Mr Dorsey in his Twitter blog however said that Ghana’s recent appointment to host the secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area aligns with their overarching goal to establish a presence in the region that will support their efforts to improve and tailor service across Africa.

Somalia’s Lower House of Parliament has voted to approve a bill to extend President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo’s term in office by two years.The controversial special election bill was overwhelmingly approved by 149 members. It needs to be approved by the upper chamber before becoming law.Mr Farmajo welcomed the passing of the bill in the lower chamber, adding that after two years the Somali people will finally be able to elect their own president.Opposition candidates and some of the regional state leaders however have rejected the resolution.Former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre, who is now part of an opposition coalition, said the country is in crisis and urged the international community to urgently intervene.

The head of the World Trade Organization says a meeting this week to tackle glaring inequity in COVID-19 vaccine allocation will be attended by major manufacturers and look at solutions such as firing up idle or under-used manufacturing plants in Africa and Asia.Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says the April 14 meeting will bring together vaccine makers from the United States, China and Russia, ministers from wealthy and developing countries, and banking officials to discuss vaccine export restrictions, scaling up manufacturing and a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 drugs and shots.She says the vaccine inequity is glaring and they have the technology in the world to save lives.

Members of the National Association of Resident Doctors have asked the Federal Government to honour its agreement with the union.They warned that should the government fail to honour its agreement in the next four weeks, they would be forced to declare another indefinite nationwide industrial action.President of NARD, Dr Uyilawa Okhuaihesuyi, gave the warning on behalf of his colleagues.He says they have been given a leap of faith to believe in the system and hope and pray that the system does not fail them.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan has advocated the need for legislation that will prevent the courts from declaring a winner in an election.Jonathan insisted that the situation where the judiciary is allowed to declare winners in an election, because of electoral fraud should not be abhorred, as it is undemocratic.He explained that the ballot papers should be the only means of choosing political leaders, adding that when a politician or the electoral system is found wanting, the courts should only be made to order for a re-run and not to declare a winner.He noted that in Nigeria where politicians induced voters with money and foodstuff on election day, such action is a criminal offence in other African countries.

President Muhammadu Buhari welcomed the beginning of Muslims’ holy month of Ramadan, which marks the commencement of 30 days of fasting.President Buhari prayed to Allah to accept the sacrifices and increase the unity, solidarity, peace and prosperity of the nation.He urged Muslims in the country to exercise patience and tolerance and reject voices that seek to divide the nation.He also urged all citizens to show compassion to the millions of the less endowed and remember those that have been displaced by conflict in their charity and prayers in this important period.

Australia has abandoned its target of vaccinating nearly all the country’s 26 million people against COVID-19 by the end of 2021 after medical authorities changed their advice on vaccine use for the under-50s.Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Australia would not set any new target for administering all first doses.Morrison says the Government has also not set, nor has any plans to set any new targets for completing the first doses.Australia’s vaccination programme was built about the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but regulators adopted a more cautionary approach after a tiny number of cases of rare blood clots were found mainly among younger people who received the jab.Medical authorities last week recommended those under the age of 50 have the Pfizer BioNTech shot instead.

Bangladesh has announced plans to ban all international and domestic flights for a week from Wednesday, coinciding with yet another lockdown to counter a spike in novel coronavirus infections.The Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh says all international passenger flights to and from Bangladesh will remain suspended from April 14 to 20.The CAAB’s Air Vice Marshal M Mafidur Rahman says more than 500 flights will be cancelled because of the ban.The aviation authority says domestic passenger flights and chartered helicopter flights are included in the suspension, while some exceptions may be made for medical evacuations, humanitarian relief and cargo flights.The authorities imposed a ban on air passengers from Europe and 12 other countries on April 3. Passenger flight operations on domestic routes were suspended on April 5.

US President Joe Biden welcomed a last-minute agreement ending a trade dispute between two South Korean electric-vehicle battery makers that he said represented a win for American workers and the American auto industry.The companies in a joint agreement say under the last-minute resolution of the trade-secrets dispute, SK Innovation will provide LG Energy Solution with a total of $1.8 billion and an undisclosed royalty.It says they had agreed to withdraw all pending trade disputes in both South Korea and the United States and to not assert new claims for 10 years.They have decided to settle and to compete in an amicable way, all for the future of the US and South Korean electric-vehicle battery industries.

A real-world data study in Israel found that the coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent through its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer-reviewed.The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease.It matched age and gender, among other characteristics.The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel’s largest healthcare provider, Clalit.The researchers say the vaccine is less effective against the South African variant, compared with the original coronavirus and a variant first identified in Britain that has come to comprise nearly all COVID-19 cases in Israel.