Solar power producer Sun King targets triple growth in Nigeria

A Kenya-based solar power company is banking on using an $80 million loan from the World Bank’s private investment arm to meet its target of tripling sales in the world’s most electricity-deprived country within the next few years.

For nearly two decades, Sun King has sold solar-powered electronics to African households and small businesses with unreliable connections to grids, spreading full product payment over up to two years. Its kits are made in China and are now available in 11 African countries, including Nigeria where it has sold 2 million kits mostly within the last three years, founder and chief executive officer T. Patrick Walsh told Semafor.

Nigeria is where Sun King sees “the lowest rates of non-payment” for its products and is its fastest-growing market, Walsh said. Having concluded a deal this month for an $80 million loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and a Nigerian bank, the company plans to rapidly scale up.

“We are probably going to grow in Nigeria by at least a factor of 3 from where we are today,” Walsh told Semafor. Tanzania, Malawi, and Togo are other markets where Sun King expects growth to speed up, he said.

Despite its vast stores of natural gas, Nigeria has the highest number of electricity-deprived people of any country in the world, according to the World Bank and International Energy Agency. Sun King is aiming to reach the nearly 90 million Nigerians estimated to be without electricity.

Its operation relies on 9,000 agents whose job it is to physically reach potential customers living mostly outside of Lagos and the capital city Abuja. A network of 85 walk-in outlets act as touch points for after sales support.

The company is replicating a model that has served it in Kenya, where an estimated one in five households use a solar product. On a continent where more than half a billion people are without electricity — prompting international efforts like the Mission 300 agenda to provide 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa electricity access by 2030 — Walsh is convinced that “the pathway for people to get their first connection is through solar.”

Solar-based electricity remains a pricey proposition for many in Africa. The upfront cost of setting up panels, batteries, and an inverter to provide half-a-day of power for a Nigerian household can be up to $4,000, which could make the service out of reach for a minimum wage earner.

Sun King learned early that its services were “not going to scale without access to finance for the end customer,” its CEO said. Offering a payment plan spread over a year has made it easier for customers to buy products, but affordability remains the company’s “biggest challenge to getting these products out there,” he said.

Walsh believes they have produced evidence of demand and adoption to secure multimillion-dollar financing deals, like the one with the IFC. In 2021, the company received a $75 million loan to expand operations in Kenya from a group of lenders including South Africa’s Standard Bank, and British International Investment, the UK’s development financier.

The loans are denominated in the local currencies, naira and Kenyan shillings, in each case. It helps the company hedge against foreign exchange volatility that makes it unfavorable to fund local currency assets with foreign currency debt, said chief financial officer Krishna Swaroop.

“We cannot solve macro-economic instability, but local currency financing makes our business stable in order to continue working and expanding,” he said.

By Alexander Onukwue, Semafor

U.S. court dismisses $58 million Nigeria lawsuit in victory for Shell

Law firm Haynes Boone defended The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC), now known as Renaissance Africa Energy Company (RAEC), against a $58 million lawsuit, securing a complete dismissal in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Nigerian contractor Forstech Technical Nigeria Limited sued SPDC under the Alien Tort Claims Act (Case: 1:24-cv-07629), claiming SPDC owed over $58 million in processing fees related to a contract between Forstech and the Bayelsa State government.

The court dismissed the suit for lack of personal jurisdiction. The court found that the claims, which focused entirely on conduct in Nigeria, lacked a sufficient connection to New York to establish jurisdiction.

Haynes Boone Associate Rebecca Schwarz led the litigation team and crafted the successful motion to dismiss. Litigation Partner Michael Mazzone and Appellate Partner Mark Trachtenberg provided additional support.

“We’re proud to have secured a clean dismissal for our client,” Schwarz said. “The court's analysis reinforces important jurisdictional boundaries that prevent U.S. courts from becoming a forum for every international business dispute.”

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‘Difficult choices’: aid cuts threaten effort to reduce maternal deaths in Nigeria

At a UN-run antenatal clinic in a camp for people displaced by Boko Haram, the colours stand out like the bellies of the pregnant women. Abayas in neon green, dark brown and shades of yellow graze against the purple and white uniforms of nurses attending to them in the beige-orange halls of the maternal healthcare facility.

Within the clinic in Maiduguri in north-east Nigeria, midwives and nurses are handing out free emergency home delivery kits, “dignity kits” for sexual abuse survivors and reusable sanitary pads to curb exploitation of young girls who cannot afford them.

A dozen women sit on a mat in the corridor, awaiting the start of a session on reproductive health and doing their best to stay focused in the unwavering 42C heat. Among them is Yangana Mohammed, a smiling 32-year-old mother of seven who knits bama caps for a living.

“I like that the services are free,” she said, holding a yellow medical card while waiting to change her birth control implant. “I’m really glad for this clinic.”

Five years ago, when Mohammed fled jihadist violence in her home town of Gom, she had never heard of family planning. In Muna, a settlement with a couple of thousand residents, down from more than 17,000 at the peak of the insurgency, she found the clinic. It was suggested by her husband, a volunteer for the local vigilante group backed by the state in fighting jihadists, after her last delivery two years ago.

A kilometre away, Aisha, a 25-year-old mother of two, waits her turn at a state-run facility supported by Unicef. Her husband previously barred her from attending antenatal classes, worried that discussing an unborn child with outsiders could harm the foetus. But after losing so much blood in her last pregnancy that five bags had to be transfused into her veins, he quickly changed his mind.

Experts say more resources are needed to sustain such success stories in a region struggling with high maternal mortality, child marriage and female genital mutilation rates. UN global data for 2023, the most recent available, shows that Nigeria recorded 75,000 maternal deaths that year – nearly a third of the total worldwide.

Many of those cases are among north-east Nigeria’s estimated 45 million people. Ritgak Tilley-Gyado, an Abuja-based senior health specialist at the World Bank, said disparities were fuelled by inequities in health systems and socioeconomic and sociocultural status across the country.

“As a result, a woman in the north-east of the country is 10 times more likely to die from childbirth than her counterpart in the south-west … [with] a systems approach that tugs on the right levers, we can turn these abysmal numbers around and improve the wellbeing of mothers,” she said.

The rampant acute malnutrition in the region has worsened things, said Trond Jensen, the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in Maiduguri.

“At many of [our] stabilisation centres for severely acute malnourished children, the mothers are very young … the risk of maternal mortality increases when you start having children very young and you have inadequate birth spacing, which then leads to complications,” he said.

Across the region, basic infrastructure has been strained or destroyed by a 15-year insurgency spearheaded by Boko Haram and its splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s federal health budget can hardly match the scale of assistance needed: USAID contributions surpassed Nigeria’s federal allocations for health between 2022 and 2024. In many remote areas cut off by jihadist violence, there is little or no access to health services, forcing nonprofits to sometimes use helicopters to deliver emergency relief.

Aid workers are scrambling to deliver more successes with fewer resources.

For 2024, the UN’s humanitarian response plan of $927m was only half funded. There are fears about bigger funding gaps for this year’s plan since the dismantling of USAID, which paid for 60% of all humanitarian programmes in north-east Nigeria last year. Other donors including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands have also cut down their aid packages or are planning to, in the biggest reshaping of foreign aid in recent history.

“Unfortunately … that has meant that, for instance, 70% of health facilities that we are providing assistance through have been impacted,” said Jensen.

Some providers of humanitarian services are in a state of near panic about the approaching lean season – the period between harvests – which is usually from June to September.

“We have just short of 5 million people who are in need of food assistance … I think the latest estimate is that 23,000 children will be at risk of dying this lean season,” said Jensen, whose agency has begun rigorous cost-cutting and is asking donors to “fund our local partners directly, because that reduces transaction costs”.

“We have to make extremely difficult choices,” he said.

At the clinic, Mohammed has no idea of the behind-the-scenes struggle to keep the free services in place.

“From the knowledge the women here teach me, I pass on [advice about puberty and personal hygiene] to Hafsa, my 16-year-old daughter, who is like my friend,” says Mohammed, who hopes the clinic is around long enough for her daughter to use it.

By Eromo Egbejule, The Guardian

Nigeria's fierce political rivals share joke at pope's inaugural mass

 

Fierce Nigerian political rivals Peter Obi and President Bola Tinubu were seen laughing and joking at Pope Leo XIV's inaugural mass in Rome.

Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress defeated Obi of the Labour Party in the heated and tightly contested 2023 presidential election - a victory Obi challenged at the Supreme Court without success.

The pair's supporters have expressed bitter rivalry towards each other over the years, both on social media and on the streets, with some physical clashes occurring prior to the elections.

Tinubu and Obi are expected to go head-to-head again in less than two years' time as Nigeria prepares for another election in 2027.

Photos of the meeting were shared by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga on social media, who recounted what transpired when Obi and a former governor greeted the Nigerian president after seeing him at the event.

"Mr President, welcome to our church, and thank you for honouring the Pope with your presence," said former Ekiti state governor Kayode Fayemi.

Both Obi and Fayemi are Catholics, while Tinubu is Muslim.

However, President Tinubu responded: "I should be the one welcoming you and Peter. I'm the head of the Nigerian delegation."

The president's response elicited laughter from Obi, who agreed.

"Yes, indeed. We are members of your delegation," Obi said.

Despite the memorable encounter, Obi did not mention it in his long post on X about his visit to the Vatican.

Alkassim Hussain, a member of Nigeria's House of Representatives, told the BBC that the light-hearted meeting was good for the country's politics and should help reduce tension.

"They portrayed a good image of the country and that's how politics should be played - without bitterness.

"I hope supporters of both Tinubu and Obi can see that after elections and court cases, then it is all about the country and how everyone can join hands together to grow it," he noted.

Tinubu won the 2023 elections after the opposition was split between the Labour Party and the Peoples Democratic Party.

There is speculation that the two parties could form a coalition in 2027 to challenge Tinubu, who is expected to seek a second term.

Elections are often marred by violence in Nigeria, with hundreds of people losing their lives since the country's return to democracy in 1999.

By Mansur Abubakar, BBC

Nigeria's first film in Cannes lineup explores masculinity, family dynamics

CANNES, France, May 19 (Reuters) - With "My Father's Shadow," Nigeria's first film in the Cannes Film Festival's official selection, director Akinola Davies Jr. wanted to create something deeply personal, he told Reuters.

The film had to mean "something to me, to him (my brother), to my family, to our community, I guess to masculinity in general," said Davies about the film competing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard category that he wrote with his brother, Wale.

Davies' first feature takes place over one day in 1993, when two brothers' absent father, played by "Gangs of London" star Sope Dirisu, shows up unannounced and takes them to Lagos.

Their father is there to try to recoup some money owed from his employer as the country is on edge after the outcome of the first elections in a decade under military rule is annulled.

Newcomers and real-life brothers Godwin Egbo, 11 at the time of filming, and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, then 8, play the young siblings in the semi-autobiographical film that's been picked up for distribution by streamer Mubi.

"Nigeria was going through a time where there was a lot of enthusiasm for this idea of a statesman who was going to lead us to potential," similar to the boys' relationship with their father, said Davies, who was raised between London and Lagos.

"Both things being so sort of strong and dominant, but equally super vulnerable and super fragile - I think the tension sort of played off each other really well," said Davies.

Dirisu, a British actor born to Nigerian parents, said that the film made him take a deeper look at what it means to be a father as well as how Nigeria fits into his personal identity.

"There were a lot of things I had to interrogate for the role, but it was exciting," the actor told Reuters.

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Davies' film is one of several strong contenders competing in Un Certain Regard this year, with actors Harrison Dickinson, Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson also in the race with their directorial debuts.

The Guardian gave "My Father's Shadow" four out of five stars, calling it a "subtle and intelligent coming-of-age tale" while industry publication IndieWire gave the "beautifully remembered drama" the grade of B+.

Davies hopes the movie's inclusion at Cannes will pave the way for more African films at the festival.
"African stories are out there," he told Reuters, but they need to be able to get to festivals like Cannes to be seen.

When there's willingness from other areas of the world, and points of access, however, those films can come through, he said.

Hanna Rantala and Miranda Murray, Reuters