| Case | Description |
|---|---|
| Case 1: The Ellis Mine — Who Owns a Discovery? | Background: In 1890, three Fante entrepreneurs — Joseph Ellis, Chief Joseph Biney, and accountant Joseph Brown — negotiated a mining concession in Ashanti territory,discovered a genuinely rich gold deposit, and operated it successfully for several years using modern extraction techniques. The Challenge: Developing the deposit at scale required capital the three founders could not raise independently, forcing a decision about whether and how to bring in outside investment without losing the value their own discovery and labor had already created. Key Decisions: The founders sold the concession to a London-connected merchant for a sum that, by most documented accounts, bore little relationship to the deposit’s actual value — a sale that occurred partly under legal pressure, following British colonial law that restricted mine ownership by indigenous Africans. Outcome: The acquired concession became Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, listed in London within two years at a valuation many multiples of what the original founders received, and the mine went on to produce tens of millions of ounces of gold over the following century. Discussion Questions: When does a legitimate capital-raising transaction cross into exploitation, particularly when one party operates under legal constraints the other does not face? What obligations, if any, persist toward original discoverers once a resource is developed at a scale they could never have achieved alone? |
| Case 2: Negotiating Under Duress — Firestone’s Liberian Concession | Background: In 1926, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company secured a 99-year lease over up to one million acres of Liberian land, at a rate of six cents per acre, accompanied by a loan that placed American financial officers in direct control of Liberia’s own government revenue. The Challenge: Liberia’s government, seeking to preserve national independence against surrounding European colonial pressure, needed foreign capital and diplomatic backing badly enough to accept terms it might otherwise never have agreed to. Key Decisions: Firestone’s founder personally inserted a loan clause into the agreement at the final stage of negotiation, later telling the US Congress that private financial leverage, backed by American diplomatic pressure, represented the best means of protecting his investment. Outcome: The arrangement gave a private American company effective oversight of a sovereign nation’s public finances for over two decades, while providing Liberia the diplomatic backing it sought against colonial encroachment. Discussion Questions: How should a negotiator evaluate the fairness of a deal when one party is negotiating from a position of genuine existential vulnerability? What is the appropriate limit on financial covenants a lender can impose on a sovereign borrower’s own governance? |
| Case 3: The 49 Percent Problem — Guinea’s Bauxite Joint Venture | Background: In 1963, Guinea’s government partnered with the Halco Mining consortium to develop the Boké bauxite deposits, structuring the joint venture so Guinea’s 49 percent ownership stake was issued specifically in exchange for granting mining rights, rather than a cash capital contribution. The Challenge: Guinea held one of the world’s richest mineral deposits but lacked the capital, technical expertise, and international market access needed to develop it independently, following the country’s difficult break from French colonial administration in 1958. Key Decisions: Guinea accepted a minority ownership structure in exchange for the infrastructure and market access a foreign consortium could provide, a structure that was later replicated in subsequent Guinean mining joint ventures with other foreign partners. Outcome: The mine became one of the world’s most productive bauxite operations, but Guinea’s minority ownership position meant the country captured a smaller share of the resulting value than its resource ownership alone might suggest, a pattern still shaping Guinea’s mining negotiations six decades later. Discussion Questions: Is trading resource ownership for infrastructure and market access an inherently fair exchange, or does it systematically undervalue the resource itself? What negotiating leverage, if any, did Guinea actually hold in 1963, and how might that leverage have changed over subsequent decades? |
| Case 4: A Triumph That Diluted Control — The Ashanti Goldfields-AngloGold Merger | Background: In 2004, Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, Ghana’s flagship gold mining company with over a century of continuous operation, merged with South Africa’s AngloGold, in a deal widely celebrated as the largest transaction of its kind on the African continent. The Challenge: Ghana’s government held only a minority stake in Ashanti Goldfields going into the merger, and needed to determine whether combining with a larger international mining group would strengthen or further dilute the country’s position in an asset built substantially on its own national resource wealth. Key Decisions: Ghana’s government approved the merger, and the resulting entity, AngloGold Ashanti, absorbed Ashanti’s operations, workforce, and international assets into a considerably larger corporate structure headquartered outside Ghana. Outcome: Ghana’s government retained no direct ownership stake in the resulting company, holding only a limited “free carrying” interest in specific Ghanaian mining subsidiaries, while the flagship Obuasi mine experienced years of declining productivity under the new ownership structure before eventually closing and later reopening. Discussion Questions: How should a host government evaluate whether a “landmark” merger genuinely serves national interests, versus simply consolidating an already-diminished ownership position into a larger, more distant corporate entity? What metrics, beyond deal size, actually measure whether a merger benefits the country whose resources underlie it? |
| Case 5: Credit Discrimination & Its Political Fallout — The African Continental Bank Crisis | Background: Colonial-era banks in British West Africa maintained documented lending practices that systematically excluded African entrepreneurs from credit access, prompting future Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe to found African Continental Bank in the 1940s specifically to address this gap. The Challenge: Azikiwe’s bank required substantial capital to operate at meaningful scale, and its growth became entangled with public money and Azikiwe’s own simultaneous political career as Premier of Nigeria’s Eastern Region. Key Decisions: A regional government finance corporation invested substantial public funds into the bank, and Azikiwe’s affiliated companies received loans on notably favorable terms, ultimately triggering a formal 1956 British colonial tribunal investigation. Outcome: The tribunal found genuine impropriety in Azikiwe’s handling of public and private financial interests, though it did not find corrupt personal motive, and the resulting political crisis directly delayed Nigeria’s own constitutional conference on the path to independence. Discussion Questions: How should a founder balance a genuinely mission-driven venture (correcting discriminatory credit access) against the conflicts of interest that arise when that same founder holds significant political power? What broader institutional failure — discriminatory colonial banking — created the conditions that made this specific crisis possible? |
| Case 6: When a Regulator Fines a Telecom $5.2 Billion — MTN Nigeria’s SIM Registration Penalty | Background: In October 2015, Nigeria’s Communications Commission fined MTN Nigeria, a subsidiary of South Africa’s MTN Group, $5.2 billion for failing to disconnect over five million unregistered SIM cards within a mandated deadline, citing national security concerns tied to unregistered mobile lines being used in criminal and terrorist activity. The Challenge: MTN needed to determine how to respond to a fine larger than the company’s own annual profit in Nigeria, in a market representing one of its most important sources of revenue globally, while navigating a regulatory relationship it needed to preserve long-term. Key Decisions: MTN initially contested the fine’s size and legal basis, eventually negotiating directly with Nigeria’s government over an extended period, ultimately settling for a substantially reduced payment paid in installments over several years. Outcome: MTN retained its Nigerian operating license and remained the country’s largest mobile network operator, though the episode significantly affected the company’s share price and highlighted the regulatory risk multinational telecoms face in large African markets with strategically important national security concerns attached to telecommunications infrastructure. Discussion Questions: How should a multinational company weigh contesting a regulatory penalty on legal merits against the relationship risk of adversarial confrontation with a government regulator in a critical market? What obligations does a telecom operator bear for national security concerns connected to its own network infrastructure? |
| Case 7: M-Pesa & the Market Nobody Else Was Building For | Background: In 2007, Kenyan mobile network operator Safaricom launched M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer service, specifically targeting the large share of Kenya’s population that lacked access to traditional banking infrastructure. The Challenge: Traditional banks had largely concluded that serving Kenya’s lower-income and rural population was not commercially viable given the cost of physical branch infrastructure relative to the small transaction sizes involved. Key Decisions: Safaricom built the service around its existing mobile network and a network of local agents rather than physical bank branches, allowing users to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money using basic mobile phones without requiring a traditional bank account at all. Outcome: M-Pesa achieved rapid, massive adoption, fundamentally reshaping financial inclusion in Kenya and becoming one of the most widely cited examples globally of mobile technology solving a genuine infrastructure gap that traditional financial institutions had left unaddressed. Discussion Questions: What made a telecommunications company, rather than a bank, the institution best positioned to solve this specific financial access problem? What lessons does M-Pesa’s success offer about identifying underserved markets that established incumbents have concluded are not worth serving? |
| Case 8: Steinhoff’s Accounting Collapse | Background: Steinhoff International, a South African-founded global furniture and retail conglomerate, saw its share price collapse by more than 90 percent within days in December 2017, following the sudden resignation of its CEO amid emerging accounting irregularities. The Challenge: Investigations subsequently found the company had engaged in a sustained pattern of fictitious and irregular transactions inflating profits over several years, requiring the company to determine how to survive as a functioning business while facing massive restated losses, shareholder litigation, and criminal investigations across multiple countries. Key Decisions: Steinhoff’s board pursued an extended, multi-year financial restructuring, divesting major assets and negotiating with creditors and shareholders to avoid full liquidation while the underlying fraud allegations were investigated. Outcome: Steinhoff survived in a substantially reduced form after several years of restructuring, though the scandal caused billions of dollars in losses for South African pension funds and institutional investors with significant exposure to the company. Discussion Questions: What governance failures allow a fraud of this scale to persist undetected for years across a company with operations spanning multiple continents and regulatory jurisdictions? How should institutional investors evaluate concentration risk when a single company represents a large share of a national pension system’s holdings? |
| Case 9: Rwanda’s Stand on Secondhand Clothing | Background: In 2016, Rwanda joined several East African Community members in announcing plans to phase out imports of secondhand clothing, specifically to protect and grow its own domestic textile manufacturing industry, raising tariffs substantially on used clothing imports. The Challenge: This policy directly conflicted with conditions attached to Rwanda’s duty-free access to the American market under AGOA, which required beneficiary countries not to erect new barriers to American trade and investment — creating a direct clash between industrial development policy and preferential trade access. Key Decisions: When the United States demanded Rwanda reverse the tariff increase or face suspension from AGOA’s apparel benefits, Rwanda’s government declined to reverse the policy, with President Paul Kagame stating directly that the country needed to build its own industries even at the cost of trade preferences. Outcome: The United States suspended Rwanda’s AGOA apparel benefits in 2018, while Rwanda’s government absorbed the resulting tax burden for its own exporters and continued pursuing its domestic textile industrialization policy regardless. Discussion Questions: How should a developing country weigh the value of preferential trade access against the industrial policy tools historically used by developed economies themselves to build domestic manufacturing capacity? What does this case reveal about the conditions attached to unilateral trade preference programs? |
| Case 10: Madagascar’s AGOA Collapse | Background: Following a 2009 coup, the United States removed Madagascar from AGOA eligibility, eliminating duty-free access for a country that had built its second-largest apparel export industry in Africa substantially around that exact preference. The Challenge: Madagascar’s export processing zone factories, employing tens of thousands of workers and supplying major American retailers, faced an immediate loss of competitiveness once standard tariffs applied, with no realistic ability to reroute that production domestically or to a comparable alternative market quickly. Key Decisions: Global apparel buyers largely shifted their sourcing away from Madagascar to other AGOA-eligible countries during the suspension period, while Madagascar’s own political transition eventually led to internationally observed elections that restored the country’s eligibility roughly five years later. Outcome: Exports collapsed by an estimated 70 percent, and tens of thousands of jobs were lost during the suspension period, illustrating how directly a single external trade policy decision can devastate an export-dependent industry built around one country’s own preferential access. Discussion Questions: How exposed should a country allow a major domestic industry to become to a single, externally controlled trade preference program? What responsibility, if any, does the country granting trade preferences bear for the economic disruption caused when it withdraws them over unrelated political conduct? |
| Case 11: Dangote Refinery & the Regulator That Changed Its Mind | Background: Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery, Africa’s largest single-train oil refinery, began displacing gasoline imports so rapidly that Nigeria’s own petroleum regulator suspended import licenses for major fuel marketers in early 2026, citing the refinery’s near-total domestic supply capability. The Challenge: Within months, the same regulator reversed course dramatically, attempting to shut the refinery down entirely over a separate dispute regarding the facility’s free trade zone status and the regulator’s own authority over its operations. Key Decisions: Dangote Refinery secured an emergency court injunction blocking the regulator’s shutdown attempt, and shortly afterward, the refinery itself began restricting fuel sales to marketers holding competing import licenses, using its own market position to pressure licensed competitors. Outcome: The dispute escalated into an ongoing, unresolved conflict between a dominant domestic producer and its own national regulator, with genuine market share and pricing implications for the broader Nigerian fuel supply chain still playing out. Discussion Questions: How should a regulator balance supporting a strategically important domestic industrial achievement against preventing that same achievement from becoming an unchecked market monopoly? What recourse should market competitors have when a dominant domestic producer uses supply access as competitive leverage? |
| Case 12: Niger’s Uranium Nationalization | Background: Niger’s military government moved to nationalize the Somaïr uranium mine in 2025, asserting operational control over a joint venture in which French company Orano held a 63.4 percent ownership stake, while Niger’s own government argued the company had extracted a disproportionate 86.3 percent share of total production over five decades. The Challenge: Orano pursued international arbitration seeking compensation and reinstated rights, while Niger’s government simultaneously filed a separate environmental lawsuit against the company and detained a local Orano representative, escalating the dispute across multiple legal fronts at once. Key Decisions: Niger’s government proceeded with nationalization despite the ongoing arbitration, framing the action explicitly around reclaiming “full sovereignty” over a resource historically dominated by its former colonial power, while offering to negotiate compensation for uranium extracted before the change in government. Outcome: The dispute remains unresolved as of the most recent reporting, having escalated well beyond a standard commercial disagreement into a multi-front legal and diplomatic confrontation between a sovereign state and a major foreign investor. Discussion Questions: What legal and practical options does a foreign investor genuinely have when a host government moves to nationalize an asset outside the terms of the original concession agreement? How should the historical context of a resource relationship (colonial-era origins, decades of extraction imbalance) factor into how a modern nationalization dispute should be resolved? |
| Case 13: Ghana’s Cocoa Financing Collapse | Background: Following Ghana’s 2022 sovereign debt default and subsequent debt restructuring, the country’s cocoa sector experienced a cascading financial crisis, ultimately breaking a 32-year tradition of annual syndicated bank loans that had financed cocoa purchases from farmers since 1992. The Challenge: Ghana’s cocoa regulator attempted an emergency self-financing model in place of the broken syndication, but mispriced forward contracts against a historic global price surge, resulting in a documented loss exceeding one billion dollars that would otherwise have benefited farmers. Key Decisions: The regulator subsequently defaulted on a separate bridge loan from Ghana’s own Ministry of Finance, and by 2026, Ghana’s government pursued a fundamental legislative overhaul of cocoa sector governance, mandating substantially increased domestic processing and guaranteeing farmers a fixed minimum share of export revenue. Outcome: Farmers went unpaid for consecutive seasons during the crisis, and licensed buying companies accumulated significant unpaid balances, while the eventual legislative reform represented Ghana’s most significant cocoa governance overhaul in four decades. Discussion Questions: How does a sovereign-level financial crisis transmit into specific downstream industry consequences years later, and what does this reveal about the interconnection between national fiscal credibility and sector-specific financing? What governance reforms genuinely address root causes versus simply reacting to the most recent crisis? |
| Case 14: The Tax Deal a Future Finance Minister Called “Badly Negotiated” | Background: In 2018, Ghana’s government approved a tax concession agreement with AngloGold Ashanti to fund the redevelopment of the historic Obuasi gold mine, granting the company an estimated $259 million in tax relief in exchange for a community development contribution of just $2 per ounce of gold extracted. The Challenge: Ghana’s opposition finance spokesperson at the time, Cassiel Ato Forson, publicly challenged the deal’s terms, arguing the government would lose “in excess of $300 million” through the arrangement — a critique made from outside government, well before Forson himself would later hold direct responsibility for negotiating Ghana’s resource sector policy. Key Decisions: The government proceeded with the deal despite this public criticism, and Forson’s later career trajectory brought him into the position of Ghana’s Finance Minister, where he would go on to implement substantial reforms across both the cocoa and mining sectors. Outcome: Obuasi’s operations experienced years of declining productivity and eventual closure following the deal, while Forson, once in office, pursued a considerably more assertive fiscal approach to mining sector reform, including new royalty structures and gold acquisition requirements. Discussion Questions: What does it reveal about a country’s policy consistency when the same individual moves from publicly criticizing a resource deal to later holding direct authority over similar negotiations? How should a government weigh the immediate investment incentive of tax concessions against the long-term revenue and community benefit tradeoffs those concessions represent? |
| Case 15: Guinea’s Bauxite Boom That Broke Its Own Prices | Background: Guinea controls roughly 70 percent of the entire global seaborne bauxite trade, and its exports surged 25 percent in a single year to reach 183 million metric tons in 2025 — a scale of dominance that, under conventional market logic, should have delivered strong pricing power. The Challenge: Instead, Guinea’s own unconstrained export growth caused global bauxite prices to collapse by approximately 50 percent within roughly a year, revealing that market share and pricing power are not automatically the same thing when growth outpaces demand. Key Decisions: Guinea’s government targeted a reduction in national bauxite output by approximately 50 million metric tons to restore pricing discipline, while simultaneously moving aggressively against foreign concession holders who had failed to deliver on separate promises to build local alumina refining capacity. Outcome: The policy’s success remained uncertain given genuine questions about whether export discipline could be enforced consistently across a producer base substantially dominated by Chinese state-affiliated mining entities with their own independent commercial incentives. Discussion Questions: Under what conditions can a dominant commodity producer’s own success in expanding market share actually undermine its own pricing power? What tools does a government genuinely have to enforce production discipline across an extraction sector it does not directly operate? |