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Monday 25th of April 2016 |
Morning Africa |
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The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke |
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Dancing to Prince Africa |
We’re all excited But we don’t know why Maybe it’s ’cause We’re all gonna die And when we do What’s it all for? You better live now Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door
“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.” ― Alexander Pushkin
I still recall the wondrous moment When you appeared before my eyes, Just like a fleeting apparition, Just like pure beauty's distillation...” ― Alexander Pushkin
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The private entrance of the prince's weekend house in Riyadh. Photographer; Luca Locatelli for Bloomberg Businessweek Law & Politics |
To interview the deputy crown prince, you don’t check in with the receptionist. The perimeter begins at a downtown Riyadh hotel, awaiting the call from the office of palace protocol. The evening of March 30 is spent on standby; the word comes at 8:30 p.m. Three Mercedes-Benzes arrive. Even headed to an interview about thrift, there’s no escaping decadence: The cars appear brand-new, with seats wrapped in plastic and safety belts that have never been used.
The caravan heads to the royal compound in Irqah, a cluster of palaces surrounded by high white walls where the king and some of his relatives live, including Prince Mohammed. Armed guards, checkpoints, and metal detectors are all bypassed. No one even checks IDs
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Exclusive Interview: Seymour Hersh Dishes on Saudi Oil Money Bribes and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden Law & Politics |
Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.
KK: So you don’t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?
SH: The money was from the government … what the Saudis were doing, so I’ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven’t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That’s really a lot of money.
KK: For the Bin Laden compound?
SH: Yeah, in exchange for being quiet. The Paks traditionally have done security for both Saudi Arabia and UAE.
One of the things that comes across just in the current stories about all the travails we’re having about ISIS allegedly running all these terror teams in Brussels and in the suburbs of Paris… it’s very clear, ironically, that one of the things France and Belgium (and a lot of other countries) did was after the Syrian civil war began, if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’
So they actually pushed a lot of people to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas. And they would spend four or five months, come back and do organized crime and get in jail and next thing you know they’re killing people. There’s a real pattern there.
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So why is @POTUS even bothering coming to the Gulf? Does he have any friends left among the kings, emirs and princes Law & Politics |
The real problem is that – after years of fantasy in which, against all the evidence, the Americans persuaded themselves that the Saudis were a ‘force for moderation’ in the Middle East – the Obama administration has decided that Shiite Iran and the huge influence it exerts over the Shiite governments of Iraq and Syria (and over the Shiite Hizballah in Lebanon) is a better bet than the Sunni Salafists of Arabia. Hence the nuclear deal with Tehran’s new leaders, the end of sanctions against Iran and the slowly-dawning realisation among Sunnis that Washington is going to tolerate the continuation of Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Damascus.
Iran may, as it was under the Shah, become the policeman of the Gulf. The Saudis will have to share power with them. The US wants no more “free riders” (as Obama snottily described the Saudis) supporting Isis.
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Africa's Longest-Serving President Set to Extend 37-Year Rule @business Africa |
Equatorial Guinea's Obiang faces six opponents on Sunday Obiang captured 95% of vote in last presidential election
Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang, Africa’s longest-serving leader, is poised to extend his almost 37-year rule over the oil-rich nation in elections on Sunday that the opposition and observers say won’t be free.
Obiang, 73, will probably win by a landslide because he controls every aspect of the government and society, said John Bennett, the former U.S. ambassador to the West African nation from 1991 to 1994. Obiang captured more than 95 percent of the votes in the last election in 2009. He faces six opponents.
“He has managed to keep power in his hands,” said Bennett by phone from Springfield, Virginia. “The election is held at his whim and it’s a government by his whim.”
Freedom House ranked Equatorial Guinea as the 11th most oppressive country in the world, with a rating shared by countries like Syria, Somalia and North Korea, in its latest annual index. Obiang came to power in 1979 through a coup, overthrowing his uncle, and became president in elections three years later.
Crude exports account for 80 percent of gross domestic product and the price lull caused the economy to slump by 9.5 percent last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy will probably contract or barely grow for the medium term, it said.
Conclusions
"The oil is only for the Obiang family," said Moto by phone from Madrid. “No one can win this election but Obiang. He has made sure he was the winner before, the winner during and the winner after the election.”
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.@tomfriedman Out of Africa Africa |
But there is an even bigger abnormality in Ndiamaguene, a farming village of mud-brick homes and thatch-roof huts. The village chief gathered virtually everyone in his community to receive us, and they formed a welcoming circle of women in colorful prints and cheerful boys and girls with incandescent smiles, home from school for lunch. But the second you sit down with them you realize that something is wrong with this picture.
There are almost no young or middle-aged men in this village of 300. They’re gone.
It wasn’t disease. They’ve all hit the road. The village’s climate-hammered farmlands can no longer sustain them, and with so many kids — 42 percent of Senegal’s population is under 14 years old — there are too many mouths to feed from the declining yields. So the men have scattered to the four winds in search of any job that will pay them enough to live on and send some money back to their wives or parents.
This trend is repeating itself all across West Africa, which is why every month thousands of men try to migrate to Europe by boat, bus, foot or plane. Meanwhile, refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the same. Together, these two flows pose a huge challenge for the future of Europe.
Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one did me, that when you don’t have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don’t calculate the odds. You just go.
“We are mostly farmers, and we depend on farming, but it is not working now,” the village chief, Ndiougua Ndiaye, explained to me in Wolof, through a translator. After a series of on/off droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather patterns stabilized a bit, “until about 10 years ago,” the chief added. Then, the weather got really weird.
The rainy season used to always begin in June and run to October. Now the first rains might not start until August, then they stop for a while, leaving fields to dry out, and then they begin again. But they come back as torrential downpours that create floods. “So whatever you plant, the crops get spoiled,” the chief said. “You reap no profits.”
The chief, who gave his age as 70 but didn’t know for sure, could remember one thing for certain: When he was young he could walk out to his fields any time during the planting season “and your feet would sink into” the moist earth. “The soil was slippery and oily and it would stick to your legs and feet and you would have to scrape it off.” Now, he said, picking up a fistful of hot sand, the soil “is like a powder — it is not living anymore.”
The lucky few find ways to get smuggled into Spain or Germany, via Libya. Libya was like a cork on Africa, and when the U.S. and NATO toppled the Libyan dictator — but did not put troops on the ground to help secure a new order — they essentially uncorked Africa, creating a massive funnel through chaotic Libya to the Mediterranean coast.
Africa has always had migrants, but this time is different. There are so many more people and so much less natural capital — Lake Chad alone has lost 90 percent of its water — and with cellphones everyone can see a better world in Europe.
Gardens or walls? It’s really not a choice. We have to help them fix their gardens because no walls will keep them home.
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Mozambique's Key Rate at Four-Year High as Inflation Surges @business Africa |
Inflation accelerated to 12.2 percent in February compared with 2.2 percent six months earlier, according to the National Statistics Institute. The economy grew 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, compared with 4.6 percent a year earlier, the statistics office said in February.
The International Monetary Fund last week canceled a mission to the coal-producing nation after it discovered around $1 billion of undisclosed debt and said it changes the fund’s assessment of Mozambique’s macroeconomic outlook. Yields on $727 million of notes due in January 2023 climbed 169 basis points since April 13 to 14.36 percent.
The country is at “high risk” of debt distress and may have to repay $119 million it borrowed as part of a $286 million emergency facility signed with the Washington-based lender last year, according to Anne Fruhauf, senior vice president at Teneo Intelligence.
The metical has lost 38 percent against the dollar since the start of last year. The currency traded 1.6 percent stronger at 52,65 per dollar at 8:15 a.m. in Maputo.
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Mozambique comes clean on $1.35 bln of debt: IMF source Africa |
Mozambique has given the IMF an "avalanche of documents" and owned up to as much as $1.35 billion of undeclared sovereign borrowing that may have tipped it into an unsustainable debt trap, a Fund source said on Friday.
The borrowing is in addition to an $850 million 'tuna bond' issued in 2013 that had to be restructured last month because the war-scarred southeast African nation was struggling to meet repayments.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said last week it had got wind of more than $1 billion of undisclosed borrowing, although Finance Minister Adriano Maleiane dismissed the allegations and put it down to "some confusion".
Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario then led a delegation to the United States to see IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and explain the borrowing and patch up tattered relations with the international lender.
"We're confident that we're not going to find anything else," the IMF source told Reuters, adding that Rosario's visit had gone some way to mending relations. "But we can't just go back to where we were. That takes time."
Mozambique's debt situation was now "very close to unsustainability," the source added.
Proindicus, a state firm owned by the Ministries of Interior and Defence and the State Security and Intelligence Service, had been lent $504 million by Credit Suisse and $118 million by Russia's VTB, the source said.
According to a February 2013 Credit Suisse document obtained by Reuters, the money was to be spent on high-speed naval interceptors, radar stations, off-shore patrol vessels and aircraft. Credit Suisse has declined to comment on the document.
Another loan of $535 million went to Mozambique Asset Management, another state company set up to build a shipyard in the northern city of Pemba, the source said. Pemba is near vast off-shore natural gas fields being explored by Anadarko and Eni.
In addition, the Interior Ministry had borrowed $130-$200 million from an unidentified bilateral lender, the source added, without providing details.
The failure of Mozambique, Credit Suisse and VTB to disclose the extra borrowing during negotiations to reschedule the tuna bond has infuriated investors, some of whom have threatened to sue.
However, the IMF source urged them to be patient, saying that reigniting tensions would be more likely to trigger a serious default
Conclusions
In 2 Years from the #Africarising Darling to a Pariah.
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Burundi Sliding towards anarchy Economist Africa |
The most immediate problem is that people are beginning to starve. Insecurity has plunged the economy into a tailspin—GDP contracted by 7% in 2015, according to the IMF
This year, Joseph Kabila, Congo’s president, seems likely to try his own version of Mr Nkurunziza’s three-term gambit. The result could well be similar to what has happened in Burundi. And Congo is dramatically larger.
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Nigeria Economics Loses to Politics as Buhari Takes Naira Stand Africa |
“Changing his position would make him seem like a spineless leader,” said Manji Cheto, an analyst at Teneo, a global advisory firm, who predicts there won’t be a move on the currency until at least the second half of this year. “Buhari is seen as the man who will stand up to foreigners. He ran a campaign as a strongman, someone who would put Nigerian interests ahead of foreign ones.”
Buhari “just doesn’t get it,” Kato Mukuru, the London-based head of equity research at Exotix Partners LLP, said in an interview. “When he was last in power in the ’80s he was also told to devalue the currency. He refused until he was sent out in a coup. Clearly he didn’t do the same economics as I did. There comes a point where you need to understand that the whole country has already devalued.”
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Guinness Nigeria's Profit Tumbles During Economic Downturn Africa |
Guinness Nigeria Plc, the country’s second-biggest brewer, said profit fell 83 percent in the nine months through to the end of March during a downturn in Africa’s largest economy.
Earnings after tax were 864 million naira ($4.35 million) in the period, compared with 5.2 billion naira a year earlier, the local unit of Diageo Plc said in a statement on the Nigerian Stock Exchange’s website. Revenue dropped 18 percent to 69.6 billion naira.
While the company didn’t comment on its results, Nigeria has been hammered by oil prices falling 60 percent since mid-2014 to about $45 a barrel. The economy grew 2.8 percent last year, the slowest pace since 1999. The International Monetary Fund said last month it will probably drop further to 2.3 percent this year.
Guinness Nigeria’s shares fell 1.8 percent to 98 naira by 1:04 p.m. in Lagos, the commercial capital. The stock is down 42 percent since the start of 2015, compared with 28 percent for the Nigerian All Share Index. Nigerian Breweries Plc, the biggest beer maker and controlled by Heineken NV, has fallen 36 percent in that period.
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Price of tea rises at Mombasa auction as volumes decline @BD_Africa Africa |
On average a kilogramme of tea fetched Sh209, a 4.5 per cent rise on previous trading at the weekly auction.
The volumes offered for sale dropped from 5.9 million kilogrammes in the previous sale to 5.4 million kilos in last week’s sale.
“The week’s average price increased to Sh209 when compared to last week’s auction where it fetched Sh203,” said Edward Mudibo, managing director of the East African Tea Traders Association.
Mr Mudibo said that out of 147,839 packages (9,680,000 kilos) available for sale, 133,585 were sold with 9.64 per cent going unsold.
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25-APR-2016 :: @KCBGroup cuts to the @ChaseBankKenya @TheStarKenya Africa |
The news that Chase Bank would reopen this Wednesday under the management of KCB and that account holders would be able to access up to $10,000 of their deposits, is first and foremost a plain optimal outcome given the circumstances. It’s an outcome that is in the national interest (there were a lot of account holders who had been TKO’d (technical knock out) and from Wednesday they will be back in the game). The CEO of KCB (whom I consider a friend) is a catalytic leader who believes we are now in a catalytic moment, having KCB play a catalytic role, and might well be characterised as the consolidator-in-chief.
Secondly, Kenya should be proud that the solution is homegrown and being led by an indigenous regional champion. This is another important point. We have been arch proponents of a pan-African agenda and KCB fits neatly into that agenda. “We were also impressed by the indicated speed that they were willing to move with in reopening this bank, inspire confidence and even provide liquidity to the depositors,” the sourcetoldtheEastAfrican.KCBhas shown it is agile and that it can move with speed of thought and execution.
It represents a coming of age for the bank.Thereareplentyofinstancesof shareholder value destruction (and unfortunately this might well prove the case for shareholders at Chase), but this is not the case at KCB.
Rencap said: “It is important to highlight that KCB has simply been appointed as manager and none of its funds or capital will be committed to Chase during this period.”
KCB is the price-setter for any future transaction. KCB shareholders should surely be cheering the chairman, Ngeny Biwott, and the CEO, Joshua Oigara, at the AGM later in the week.
United States secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon during the Great Depression advised his President (Herbert Hoover) to “liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate... it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”
Momentarily, and I think this was why the inestimable Patrick Njoroge held his Sunday presser not too long ago – we were facing a whole-sale liquidation. We remain in the moment of consolidation but the Central Bank and KCB are confirming they have the wit and wherewithal to manage this process in an orderly and effective manner.
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N.S.E Today |
The Shilling remains locked at an 8 month high versus the Dollar and was last trading at 101.192. FX Reserves scored a Record all time high of $7.56b [4.92 months of import cover]. The Nairobi All Share retreated 1.30 points off a 20 month closing High to close at 146.25. The Nairobi NSE20 pushed 9.03 points higher to close at 4019.85. Equity Turnover was subdued and clocked just 214.466m for one of the slowest sessions of the Year.
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N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services |
Safaricom will report its Full Year Earnings 11th May 2016. I expect an All Time High Print ahead of that Release. Safaricom reached a 2016 closing high of 17.50 20th April. Safaricom eased back -0.88% on low ticket size [just 1.060m shares] to close at 16.95. The Ignition Key will turn imminently.
Kenya Airways edged -1.23% lower following on Fridays steep -7.95% slump to close at 4.00 a 2016 Low. Kenya Airways traded 2.16m shares. Talk of Government converting into Equity has hit the stock on concerns about further dilution.
Nation Media was high-ticked +5.95% to close at 178.00 and traded 300 shares only.
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N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
KCB Group CEO had a Tweetchat today answering Questions on the Chase Bank situation, which is very c21st and as expected of the ''Algorithmic'' Banker Joshua Oigara. Kenya Commercial Bank closed unchanged at 42.50 [0.58% below a 2016 closing High] and traded 674,100 shares. KCB sits in Pole Position at this moment of consolidation and the share price has yet to bake that fact into the price. I&M Bank limited [where CDC Group snaffled up a 10.68% stake this month, firmed +1.19% to regain a 2016 Closing High of 107.00 and traded 600,000 shares worth 64.5m. I&M is +7.00% Year To Date and reported a +23.545% acceleration in its FY 2015 Profit before income tax. Standard Chartered Bank which turned ex-bonus today retreated -10.44% to close at 223.00 on 9,200 shares of business. The Reaction is over-cooked.
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N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied |
Athi River Cement surged +5.38% to close at 34.25 that caps a +18.10% rebound this month. ARM traded 64,400 shares and Buyers are anticipating the imminent announcement of a strategic equity Investor.
KenGen eased -0.57% off a 2016 High to close at 8.65 and traded 125,500 shares. There were Buyers for 5x the volume traded today signalling corrections will be shallow. KenGen has rallied +21.83% in 2016 admittedly from a position of price of disequilibrium. KPLC traded +3.63% better to close at 11.40 and traded 46,800 shares.
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