A note on specificity
Why Alaune237 will name the port, the commodity, the margin, and the year — rather than writing about "Africa" in the abstract.
A lot of what passes for coverage of African business is written at a level of abstraction that makes it useless to anyone trying to make a decision. “Africa is a growth market.” “Infrastructure is a challenge.” “Regulatory environments vary.” None of those sentences change what you do on a Tuesday.
The alternative is specificity. Specificity means naming the port, the commodity, the year, the margin, the counterparty, the licence. It means saying Douala rather than Central Africa, cocoa rather than agricultural products, CEMAC rather than the region. It means giving the reader enough to check your claim against their own information — and enough to disagree with, if they have reason to.
This sounds obvious. It is not how much of the existing literature is written, and there is a reason. Specificity is risky. A generalisation cannot be wrong in a way that costs anyone anything. A specific claim — that a specific margin on a specific shipment through a specific port changed by a specific amount in a specific quarter — can be wrong, and can be contradicted by a reader who has the numbers. That possibility is what makes specificity worth doing.
The publication’s commitment, as far as it extends at launch, is this: we will try to name things. When we cannot name them because a source will be compromised, we will say so, and we will say what we cannot say. When we make a specific claim, we will cite where it came from. When we are making an argument rather than reporting a fact, the piece will say so — ideally in the first paragraph.
None of this guarantees we will be right. It makes the question of whether we are right answerable. That seems like a reasonable bar for a publication that expects its readers to treat it as useful.