Mark Boland, I want you to come in and tell us a little bit about Africa just in the context of the global economy, and maybe just tell people a little bit about what you do and how you spend your time, because you're analyzing economies that are growing in some cases much faster than developed economies, but they're growing
from a lower base. Yes, I mean that's the case I've previously mentioned, you know, talking to clients that for as sub South Africa as a whole, we're going to see quite a sharp slow down in growth from four to five evens up to seven percent over the past fifteen years to this year. It's not going to be that much more than maybe one to one and a
half percent. But this is not really reflective for subside Africa as a whole, because you just dominated the The aggregate GDP number is dominated by Nigeria, which is in recession, and South Africa, which has more or less zero growth this year in Angola, which there's not that much data out on Angola on a regular basis. So these are three economies that together account for sixty of g D two GDP, but only about of the population. So I mean the majority of African countries are still growing at
a relatively healthy clip. And that's especially the case for the for the smaller economies or the poorer economies that now catching up with the more development. Two parts number one, what slowed subs here Africa so short, so sharply in a nutshell, And what is driving the smaller economies to healthy growth rates at this point? Well, what's slowing the economies and Nigeria Angola is really a sort of deflation
of the commodity boom. The you know, the sharp rising oil price just bought brought in a lot of revenue which unfortunately was not invested in infrastructure, was not saved. So this kind of in a way almost automatically stimulates service demands and a little non tradeable sector and that is now dropping sharply. But there are in majority of countries actually benefit from lower ngury prices. It's a big, big import item. It's more money they can spend on
other items. So this is what you're seeing in Tanzania and other economies. That's the general story. I know that you wanted to talk a little bit about the economy of the Congo. Yes, this is a democratic Republic of Congo. Congo chin Kinshasa. So it's the third biggest country by population after Nigeria and Ethiopia, and a country that has a very troubled history, that had a civil war from the late nineties into the early two thous and that I mean, no one really knows how many people died.
It was, I mean three to five million, I mean a lot of them in starvation. Uh and it and it involved a lot of the neighboring countries around the Uganda and Amibia, Angola. And now it's heading up to elections later this year according to the constitution, but the government is holding out saying that they need to update the census to electoral role to hold these elections. And the opposition is is against this, saying this is just a stalling tactic to keep the current president, Joseph Kabila
in office. And now in the last few days this has turned violent in Kinshasa. I'm not sure what the latest death toll is. We're talking fifties sixty people. I mean, this is this is very tragic, but I think there's still a reason to be relatively optimistic and in the sense that we're not going to see a return to the kind of armed conflict that you had a decade ago. Alright, well, Mark bollow me. Thank you for joining us. So it's a treat to have you here in New York City.
Of course, Pim spent a lot of time yesterday at the Big Africa Summit at the Plaza Hotel here in New York City. We also think Helena should let Giva from our Bloomberg intelligence team here in New York. She also contributes to the Bloomberg brief on economics. I'm Kathleen Hayes along with Pim Fox, and this is Bloomberg. Then they