JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Zambia's kwacha fell to a nine-month low against the dollar on Monday amid a global sell-off of emerging and frontier market assets that looks likely to put pressure on other African currencies if global growth stalls and commodity prices slump.
The currency of Africa's biggest copper producer shed nearly one percent against the dollar to 4,880, its lowest since December, with analysts pointing also to political nervousness ahead of September 20 elections and a sharp fall in copper prices.
"The kwacha is always very volatile around election time," said Coura Fall, a frontier Africa analyst at Citigroup in Johannesburg.
The price of copper, which accounts for 80 percent of the southern African country's export earnings, fell 8 percent last week in the run-up to S&P's credit downgrade of U.S. debt.
President Rupiah Banda and his Movement for Multiparty Democracy are favourites to win the presidential and parliamentary elections, although they face a strong challenge from opposition leader Michael Sata's Patriotic Front.
Charts showed the currency, which has traded in a 4,600-4,800 band for most of the last 12 months, was weaker than its 20-, 50- and 200-day exponential moving averages, suggesting a short-, medium- and long-term bearish trend.
Other frontier African units may come under similar pressure as investors and the world economy react to the deepening debt crises in Europe and the United States.
Units such as Nigeria's naira and Angola's kwanza have the benefit of being backed by the continent's biggest and second-biggest oil revenues respectively, but they are also susceptible to a slump in crude prices.
Nigeria's foreign exchange reserves, the basis for much of the faith in its currency, dropped to $32.55 billion last week from $33.54 on July 22.
"A fall in reserves to significantly below the psychologically important level of $30 billion could trigger some additional pressure on the naira," Barclays Capital said in a note.
In east Africa, the Kenyan and Ugandan shillings look vulnerable after posting drops of 15 percent and 12 percent respectively so far this year on the back of soaring inflation and questions about the fortitude of monetary policy.
The Kenyan shilling fell to another all-time low of 93.4 to the dollar on Monday, even though a prolonged slump in oil prices would bring some relief in the form of diminished demand for dollars from fuel importers.
Separately, Malawi's central bank devalued the kwacha by 10 percent against the dollar, although the new peg of 165 is still more than 10 percent stronger than a prevailing black market rate of 185.
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