“Africa is paying too much to borrow.” With that opening line in the Financial Times, President Bola Tinubu challenged the global architecture of sovereign risk assessment. He argued that the so-called Africa premium reflects “the gap between how Africa is assessed and the reality of its economies” and that dismantling it is overdue.
From that diagnosis follows his proposed remedy: the creation of an African credit rating agency. The case is straightforward. The dominant agencies, he suggests, rely heavily on analyst discretion when judging
