Afreximbank Wants Angolan Firms to Own the Oil, Not Just Service It
$5.18 billion. That’s the figure Afreximbank put on the table this month to try to change who actually owns Angola’s oil and gas industry — not just who services it. For decades, the pattern has been depressingly familiar: international operators run the fields and pipelines, while local firms pick up service contracts on the margins. The pan-African trade bank wants to flip that script.
The figure emerged from a Local Content Development Forum the bank hosted in Luanda in early September, bringing together government institutions, local banks, indigenous companies and industry operators to map out how financing structures could expand Angolan participation across the petroleum value chain. The breakdown is specific: $2.5 billion earmarked for Lobito Oil, $1.4 billion for Amufert, $1 billion for state oil company Sonangol, and $280 million for Itracom.
Haytham Elmaayergi, Afreximbank’s Executive Vice President for its Global Trade Bank, framed the initiative as the next phase of a relationship the bank has built with Angola’s energy sector over several years — one that has already included a $1.75 billion receivables-backed facility for Sonangol earlier this year to support its working capital and crude trading operations. The shift now, he suggested, is from simply financing production to financing ownership: helping Angolan firms acquire assets, take on operating roles, and grow into companies capable of competing on their own footing rather than remaining perpetual subcontractors to multinational operators.
Why now? Angola has been trying to diversify its oil sector’s benefits for years, partly out of economic necessity — crude production has been sliding, dipping below one million barrels a day for the first time since March 2023 — and partly out of a broader continental push toward local content requirements that keep more value inside African economies rather than flowing out through foreign operators and service providers. Sonangol itself is juggling multiple financing tracks simultaneously, including a long-running search for capital to complete the delayed Lobito refinery, a project with a total price tag north of $6 billion.
The barriers to turning ambition into asset ownership are real and were candidly discussed at the forum: access to appropriately structured financing, the bankability of Angolan-led projects, execution capacity, and market access all featured as sticking points that indigenous firms face when trying to graduate from service contracts to equity stakes. Afreximbank’s pitch is that it can help structure deals that de-risk that transition for lenders while giving local companies a genuine ownership stake rather than a symbolic one.
If even a fraction of the $5.18 billion pipeline converts into actual transactions, it would mark a meaningful shift in who captures value from Angola’s oil and gas sector — moving beyond the service-contract model that has defined local participation for a generation, toward genuine equity and operatorship for Angolan companies like Lobito Oil, Amufert and Itracom, alongside the state’s own Sonangol.
Keyword: Afreximbank Angola oil gas
Tags: Angola, Afreximbank, oil and gas, local content, Sonangol
4. South Africa’s Struggling Municipalities Get a $1 Billion Lifeline
A burst pipe. A rolling blackout. A pile of uncollected rubbish. Ask most South Africans what worries them about local government and the answer usually involves one of those three. This week, the country’s eight largest metros got a concrete shot at fixing it, as the government signed a $1 billion loan agreement with the New Development Bank to overhaul the basic services that keep cities functioning.
The loan, structured with a 16-year maturity and a three-year grace period, will fund the government-led Metro Trading Services Reform Programme, targeting water supply, sanitation, electricity distribution and solid waste management across Johannesburg, Cape Town, Buffalo City, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Mangaung, Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane. Together, these eight metropolitan municipalities house more than 22 million people and generate over two-thirds of South Africa’s economic output, making their infrastructure problems a national economic issue rather than a purely local one.
What sets this financing apart from a straightforward infrastructure loan is its explicit link to reform. National Treasury structured the programme around improving the governance, financial sustainability and operational performance of municipal trading services — not just pouring concrete and laying pipe, but addressing the institutional dysfunction that has left many metros unable to collect revenue efficiently, maintain what they’ve already built, or plan credibly for the future. The NDB loan complements grant funding Treasury has separately committed, and was prepared in coordination with other development partners active in South Africa’s infrastructure sector, including the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Germany’s KfW and the French Development Agency.
The timing reflects years of mounting pressure. South African metros have struggled with ageing water and electricity infrastructure, billing systems that lose revenue to non-payment and inefficiency, and waste management services stretched thin by rapid urbanisation. The consequences have shown up in headline-grabbing crises — water outages in Johannesburg, sewage spills along KwaZulu-Natal’s coastline, and rolling difficulties in several metros’ ability to keep the lights on independent of national utility Eskom’s own troubles.
For businesses operating in these metros, reliable water and power are not abstract policy questions — they are operating costs and risk factors that show up directly on balance sheets. A credible, financed reform programme, if implemented well, offers the prospect of more predictable service delivery, which in turn matters for everything from manufacturing continuity to the viability of new investment in urban areas.
The New Development Bank, established in 2015 by the BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and since expanded to include additional members, has increasingly positioned itself as a source of patient, large-scale infrastructure capital for its member economies. This latest commitment is one of its largest single transactions in South Africa to date, and National Treasury has been explicit in framing it as a partnership aimed at building more financially sustainable, better-governed cities rather than a one-off cash injection.
Whether the reform ambitions embedded in the programme translate into fewer burst pipes and shorter blackouts will depend on execution at the municipal level — historically the hardest part of any such programme. But the financing, and the reform conditions attached to it, are now in place.