John Smelcer

Jeannette Ilunga, Africa Works, LUSAKA | Friday 28 November, 2025 — The energy trading market in Southern Africa is under threat, not from technical failure or financial collapse, but from politics and perception. Public sentiment has turned hostile toward traders who are seen as profiting from crisis without owning assets or building infrastructure. Politicians respond […]

Technology group Wärtsilä has renewed its operation and maintenance agreement with Tasiast Mauritanie Limited S.A., a subsidiary of Canada’s Kinross Gold Corporation, extending its role at the Mauritanian gold mine for a further three years. The agreement, booked in the second quarter of 2025, will ensure the continued reliable and safe operation of the site’s […]

Jeannette Ilunga, Africa Works, LUSAKA | Friday 28 November, 2025 — Energy traders are not middlemen extracting rent from desperate utilities. They are aggregators performing functions that no single entity in Southern Africa’s fragmented power markets can manage alone—guaranteeing supply when generation fails, guaranteeing payment when utilities default, and balancing grids that were never designed […]

The Cazombo Photovoltaic Park in Angola, which will supply green energy to more than 136,000 people, has a production capacity of 25.40 MWp and batteries with a storage capacity of 75.26 MWh MCA has just energised Africa’s largest off-grid renewable energy photovoltaic park in Angola. This is the country’s first autonomous (off-grid) system with a […]

Jeannette Ilunga, Africa Works, LUSAKA | Friday 28 November, 2025 — The sovereign guarantee is dead. Across Southern Africa, the financing structure that powered a generation of electricity projects has collapsed under utility insolvency and government debt distress. Yet new power plants are still getting built and financed. The money is flowing through an entirely […]

Jeannette Ilunga, Africa Works, LUSAKA | Friday 28 November 2025 — Zambia’s mines are racing toward a power crunch: by 2031 they’ll need up to three new gigawatts of electricity, yet the investors who could build it are still holding out for a mythical “zero-risk” guarantee. Hydropower has buckled, load shedding has become routine, and […]

Mozel Chimuka, Agora Village, AfricaWorks | LUSAKA, 27 November 2025 — Eight or nine out of every ten reasons a power project fails in Zambia and Zimbabwe trace back to a single word: financing. For decades, the answer was always the same—foreign currency is unavailable, terms are not bankable, utilities will not guarantee payment, and […]

Gerald Hamuyayi, Lusaka, Saturday, 29 November, 2025 – The payments arrive like clockwork, every month, on schedule, in full. Yet the project remains classified as unbankable. International financiers examine balance sheets from state utilities and recoil, deploying risk premiums that make commercial lending impossible. Meanwhile, independent power producers across Zimbabwe and Zambia operate profitably, receive […]