The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network brings to you an update of African sovereign debt news and updates on events and happenings on and about Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network brings to you an update of African sovereign debt news and updates on events and happenings on and about Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network brings to you an update of African sovereign debt news and updates on events and happenings on and about Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

This opinion piece aims to ascertain the extent to which the new Bank of Namibia Act 1 of 2020 (the Act) imports the neoliberal rules of central banking and it also assesses the level of departure, if any, from the conventional central bank mandates couched in law. The piece further highlights the domestication of the rules of the Central Bank Model Law adopted by the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law.

The ailing financial sector in Ghana necessitated an immediate pragmatic response to realign and reposition the financial sector back to its glory days. Depositors’ monies are mostly squandered or bolted with by directors and managers of financial institutions in Ghana. The recent clean-up in the financial sector has awakened uproars from some Ghanaians, notable amongst them are the customers of the affected financial institutions. While some vowed to boycott the 2020 elections, others instituted a civil action in court on the grounds of negligence against the central bank. It will be intriguing to know the legal principles for adjudicating this matter in the high court, whether private law principles under tort law (on the basis of which the customers have sued BoG), or public law principles under administrative law (which seems more appropriate for a public body). With the extent of insolvency, licensing irregularities and insufficient minimum capital requirements among financial institutions, the greatest fatherly role played by BoG was not to spare the rod to spoil the child in its quest to salvage the financial sector.

Towards the end of 2020, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), through its African Trade Policy Centre (ATPC), launched a training and research initiative on “Digital trade regulatory integration in Africa”, focusing on 11 pilot countries. Based on their background and expertise in the area, researchers from Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia were selected to build two databases, for each of countries of focus, on various measures related to digital services trade regulations and digital trade integration, respectively.

For the first time in its history, the biennial conference of the Asian Society of International Law is to be held online. The conference will be held from 24 to 28 May 2021 (plenary conference*) and the PhD Students Workshop will be on 20 to 21 May 2021.

Africa’s regional central banks, and the projects of monetary coordination and monetary union they oversee, arise directly out of treaty frameworks. These frameworks provide vital opportunities for calibrating these policy objectives in the form of legal and institutional design. The goal must be to ascertain the components of a progressive, pro-development approach that will seek to balance the objective of financial stability with the objective of maintaining sufficient macroeconomic policy space, and the objective of central bank independence with the objective of accountability to the public interest.