|
Tuesday 25th of September 2018 |
Morning Africa |
Register and its all Free.
If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke |
read more |
|
12-SEP-2016 :: Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice Africa |
If volatility spikes, positions are going to be reduced en masse. Or to put it another way and to borrow the lyrics from the Eagles Hotel California:
Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice And she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device” Last thing I remember, I was Running for the door I had to find the passage back To the place I was before “Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave! “ What is clear is that we are at the fag-end of this party.
Conclusions
It took a long time to unwind but unwind it will
|
read more |
|
Explore Elsa's home turf 20 best things to do in Kenya @CNNTravel @CNN Africa |
One of Elsa's successors at the Meru National Park. Kenya's famous feline was immortalized by Joy Adamson's 1960 book Born Free and the blockbuster movie that followed. The orphaned lioness was raised by Adamson and her husband in a part of the remote Kenya bush that's now Meru National Park. The Adamson camp was just below a rock outcrop now called Elsa's Kopje (+254 730 127 000), while her grave lies about an hour away on the north bank of the Ura River.
|
read more |
|
The Labour Party wants to ride a Brexit wave to power. It's just can't agree how via @bopinion Law & Politics |
With less than six months to go until the U.K. leaves the European Union, Labour seems to have grasped the reality that the Conservative Party’s crisis over Brexit presents the biggest opportunity the party has seen in nearly a decade to retake power. But that might mean overcoming Labour’s own Brexit divisions and encouraging the very chaos it claims to want to avoid.
Corbyn has been under pressure — from unions, Labour constituencies and campaigners — to push for a new vote on Brexit. After a five-hour debate Sunday, Labour delegates managed to agree on a motion that will be put to the conference for a vote on Tuesday. It reads: “If we cannot get a general election, Labour must support all options remaining on the table, including campaigning for a public vote.” You can see the hesitation in the wording.
|
read more |
|
09-JUL-2018 :: Tariff wars, who blinks first? Law & Politics |
James Dean was an iconic American actor, who tapped into the universal yearning and angst of nearly every adolescent human being with a raw connection that has surely not been surpassed since. In one of his most consequential films, Rebel without a Cause, two players (read, teenage boys) decide to settle a dispute (read, teenage girl) by way of near-death experiences. Each speeds an automobile towards a cliff. A simple rule governs the challenge: the first to jump out of his automo- bile is the chicken and, by universally accepted social convention, concedes the object in dispute. The second to jump is victorious, and, depending on context, becomes gang leader, prom king, etc.
|
read more |
|
Here comes the 30-year trade war @asiatimesonline Law & Politics |
Alibaba’s Jack Ma has warned that the ongoing US-China trade war could last at least 20 years. As we’ll see, it’s actually more like 30 – up to 2049, the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Steve Bannon always boasted that President Trump was bound to conduct a “sophisticated form of economic warfare” to confront China The logic underpinning the warfare is that if you squeeze the Chinese economy hard enough Beijing will submit and “play by the rules.” The Trump administration plan – which is, in fact, trade deficit hawk Peter Navarro’s plan – has three basic targets: Displace China from the heart of global supply chains. Force companies to source elsewhere in the Global South all the components necessary for manufacturing their products. Force multinational corporations to stop doing business in China. The overarching concept is that unending confrontation with China is bound to scare companies/investors away. There’s no evidence South Korean or German conglomerates, for instance, would withdraw from the vast Chinese market and/or production facilities. What’s certain is that Beijing, as confirmed by a rash of editorials in Chinese state media, will not just play defense. Beijing sees the trade war as “protracted.” A Commercial Cold War 2.0 atmosphere is now in effect but China is fighting the ideological war on two fronts. At home, Beijing is using strong language to define its position against the US but taking a significantly softer approach in the international arena.
|
read more |
|
How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump @NewYorker Law & Politics |
Donald Trump has adopted many contradictory positions since taking office, but he has been unwavering on one point: that Russia played no role in putting him in the Oval Office. Trump dismisses the idea that Russian interference affected the outcome of the 2016 election, calling it a “made-up story,” “ridiculous,” and “a hoax.” He finds the subject so threatening to his legitimacy that—according to The Perfect Weapon,” a recent book on cyber sabotage by David Sanger, of the Times—aides say he refuses even to discuss it. In public, Trump has characterized all efforts to investigate the foreign attacks on American democracy during the campaign as a “witch hunt”; in March, he insisted that “the Russians had no impact on our votes whatsoever.”
Speaking for himself, however, he told me that “it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t turn the election.”
Ordinarily, Congress would aggressively examine an electoral controversy of this magnitude, but the official investigations in the House and the Senate, led by Republicans, have been too stymied by partisanship to address the ultimate question of whether Trump’s victory was legitimate. Although the Senate hearings are still under way, the Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr, a Republican, has already declared, “What we cannot do, however, is calculate the impact that foreign meddling and social media had on this election.”
Even the Clinton campaign has stopped short of attributing its loss to the Russians. Joel Benenson, the campaign’s pollster, told me that “a global power is fucking with our elections,” and that “every American should be outraged, whether it changed the outcome or not.” But did the meddling alter the outcome? “How will we ever know?” he said. “We probably won’t, until some Russians involved in it are actually prosecuted—or some Republican, in a moment of conscience, talks.”
Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.
The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”
Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”
Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”
Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump. Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”
Before the hearings, Facebook’s chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, had maintained that the amount of Russian content that had been disseminated on social media was too small to matter. But evidence presented to the Senate committee revealed that material generated by the Kremlin had reached a hundred and twenty-six million American Facebook users, leading Senator Dianne Feinstein to call the cyberattack “cataclysmic.”
House Democrats later released not only the ads but also their “targeting data”—the demographics and the geographic locations of users receiving them—which indicated to Jamieson “whom the Russians were going for.” Among other things, she could discern that the Russians had tried “to minimize the vote of African-Americans.” Bogus Kremlin-sponsored ads that had circulated online—including one depicting a black woman in front of an “african-americans for hillary” sign—had urged voters to tweet or text rather than vote, or to “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”
Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and targeted constituencies that he needed to reach. She noted that Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his personal equivalent of the Vietcong. Russian trolls pretended to have the same religious convictions as targeted users, and often promoted Biblical memes, including one that showed Clinton as Satan, with budding horns, arm-wrestling with Jesus, alongside the message “ ‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” One Instagram post, portraying Clinton as uncaring about the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, depicted a young American widow resting her head on a flag-draped coffin. Another post displayed contrasting images of a thin homeless veteran and a heavyset, swarthy man wearing an “undocumented unafraid unapologetic” T-shirt, and asked why “this veteran gets nothing” and “this illegal gets everything.” It concluded, “Like and share if you think this is a disgrace.” On Election Day, according to CNN exit polls, Trump, despite his political baggage, outperformed Clinton by twenty-six points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.
In her Post article, Jamieson wrote that it was “hard to know” if Russian propaganda and dirty tricks—including the steady release of hacked e-mails, starting with Democratic National Committee correspondence that was leaked just before the Party’s convention—had made a decisive difference in 2016. Nevertheless, she argued, the “wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation “increases the likelihood” that it “changed the outcome.”
During the second debate, on October 9th, before 66.5 million viewers, one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private negotiating stances. The point was scarcely novel, but the debate question—which took her words out of context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally—made Clinton sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited “Lincoln” in order to defend the statement, Trump pounced.
“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks—Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”
The fact-checking organization PolitiFact later concluded that Trump had incorrectly characterized Clinton’s speech, but the damage had been done. Jamieson’s research indicated that viewers who watched the second and third debates subsequently saw Clinton as less forthright, and Trump as more forthright. Among people who did not watch the debates, Clinton’s reputation was not damaged in this way. During the weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers. In “Cyberwar,” Jamieson writes, “The stolen goods lent credibility” to “those moderator queries.”
As Jamieson reviewed the record further, she concluded that the Russian hackers had also been alarmingly successful in reframing the American political narrative in the crucial period leading up to the second debate. On Friday, October 7th, two days before it took place, three major stories landed in rapid succession. At 12:40 p.m., the Obama Administration released a stunning statement, by the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence, accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election through hacking. This seemed certain to dominate the weekend news, but at 4:03 p.m. the Washington Post published a report, by David Fahrenthold, on an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump, on a hot mike, boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Then, less than half an hour later, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of e-mails that Russian hackers had stolen from Podesta’s account. The tranche contained some two thousand messages, along with excerpts from the paid speeches that Clinton had tried to conceal, including those that would be mentioned in the subsequent debates. (Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has denied working with the Russian government, but he manifestly despises Clinton, and, in a leaked Twitter direct message, he said that in the 2016 election “it would be much better for GOP to win.”)
If the WikiLeaks release was a Russian-backed effort to rescue Trump’s candidacy by generating a scandal to counterbalance the “Access Hollywood” tape and the intelligence report on Russian interference, Jamieson writes, it worked splendidly. The intelligence community’s report faded from the headlines; that Sunday morning, none of its authors were invited on any major talk show. Instead, the programs breathlessly discussed the “pussy” tape and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails, which were portrayed as more or less exposing both candidates as liars. Jamieson notes, “Instead of asking how we could know that the Russians were behind the hacking, the October 9 Sunday show moderators asked what effect the disclosures would have on the candidates’ respective campaigns and what the tape and speech segments revealed about the private versus public selves of the contenders.” If not for WikiLeaks, she writes, the media discourse in those crucial days likely would have remained locked on two topics advantageous to Clinton: Russian election subversion and Trump’s treatment of women.
Jamieson also argues that, in most hotly contested elections, the candidates blunt each other’s messages, which results in fairly balanced media coverage. In 2016, she believes, Russia’s involvement upset this equilibrium. She asks readers to imagine how different the 2016 election might have been if Trump’s campaign had also been hacked, disgorging the e-mails of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Among other things, this would have exposed correspondence about the notorious June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and Trump’s payoffs to a pornographic actress and to a Playboy model. Documents that Trump has kept concealed, such as his tax returns, also might have come to light. Instead, Jamieson writes, throughout the autumn of 2016 a steady stream of content stolen from the Clinton campaign—which the press generally described as coming from WikiLeaks, rather than from Russia—“reweighted the news environment in Trump’s favor.”
As Jamieson dug further into Russia’s discourse saboteurs, she decided that she had the makings of a book. Most discussions about the 2016 election results, she believed, had been misguidedly framed around the question of whether the Russians had “changed votes directly.” There wasn’t evidence for this. Instead, she suspected, the Russians had “influenced who voted, or didn’t vote, and that could have changed the outcome.”
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” adding, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me. Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.
|
read more |
|
A new book suggests that Russian interference "very likely" won Donald Trump the 2016 presidential election @thedailybeast Law & Politics |
A new book suggests that Russian interference “very likely” won Donald Trump the 2016 presidential election, largely by convincing on-the-fence voters in battleground states to either switch their vote or not vote at all. The New Yorker reports Monday that Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, analyzes polling data alongside Russian interference tactics and concludes that all other things being equal, Trump wouldn’t be president without help from Russian hackers. The book, written by University of Pennsylvania Prof. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, highlights the role of the WikiLeaks email dump, noting that the messages provided by Russian hackers that were released just ahead of the second presidential debate allowed Trump, the media, and debate monitors alike to take Hillary Clinton’s words out of context and paint her as untrustworthy. Hall also emphasizes that the email dumps obscured news that would have been more favorable to Clinton, including Obama’s announcement of Russia’s attempt to hack the election, and Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes. Furthermore, she notes Russian agents stole internal voter data from the Clinton campaign and used it to target voters who were waffling on voting for her. “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers,” Hall told The New Yorker. “I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
|
read more |
|
05-DEC-2016:: "We have a deviate, Tomahawk." Law & Politics |
“We have a deviate, Tomahawk.” “We copy. There’s a voice.” “We have gross oscillation here.” “ There’s some interference. I have gone redundant but I’m not sure it’s helping.” “We are clearing an outframe to locate source.” “ Thank you, Colorado.” From feeding hot-house conspiracy frenzy on line (‘’a constant state of destabilised perception’’), timely and judicious doses of @wikileaks leaks which drained @HillaryClinton’s bona fides & her turn-out and motivated Trump’s, what we have witnessed is remarkable and noteworthy.
|
read more |
|
Commentary: Hedge funds, smelling Brexit blood, circle sterling @ReutersJamie International Trade |
Funds and speculators have been growing increasingly bearish on the pound since April, when it traded above $1.42. Their aggressive selling helped to drive it below $1.27 last month.
They have increased their net short position in sterling in the latest week to 79,258 contracts, according to the latest Commodity Futures Trading Commission figures from U.S. futures exchanges. That’s a $6.51 billion bet against the pound.
But those figures are for the week ending Sept. 18. That was Tuesday, before the European Union summit in Salzburg on Thursday, which laid bare the chasm between Britain and the EU on Brexit.
|
read more |
|
Futures in London were little changed after a 3.1 percent advance Monday. Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. and Trafigura Group expect the return of $100 a barrel last seen in 2014 due to a potential loss in Iranian supply. Commodities |
Bank of America Corp. joined JPMorgan Chase & Co. in predicting higher prices. Adding to positive sentiment are forecasts for a decline in U.S. stockpiles.
“OPEC gave a clear answer to Trump, who criticized the group for pushing for higher prices -- they obviously refused to submit,” said Satoru Yoshida, a commodity analyst at Rakuten Securities Inc. in Tokyo. “While the escalation of the U.S.-China trade war is a negative factor, it’s overshadowed by OPEC’s bullish comment.”
Brent for November settlement traded at $81.45 a barrel on the ICE Futures Europe exchange, up 25 cents, at 11:59 a.m. in Tokyo. The contract climbed $2.40 to $81.20 on Monday. The global benchmark traded at a $9.16 premium to West Texas Intermediate for the same month.
WTI for November delivery traded at $72.29 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 21 cents. The contract climbed $1.30 to $72.08 on Monday. Total volume traded was about 45 percent below the 100-day average.
|
read more |
|
The new scramble for Africa @FinancialTimes's @davidpilling Africa |
A Turkish company is generating part of Ghana’s power supply. Another one just this month finished a flashy new terminal at the country’s international airport. A Philippine utility is about to take over running the Electricity Company of Ghana, the largest distributor in west Africa. Even Ghana’s biggest flyover, named after liberation hero Kwame Nkrumah, was built by Brazilians.
Ghana, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world this year, is a tiny microcosm of forces that are radically reshaping Africa’s interaction with the world. A new group of outside powers — from China to Brazil and from Russia to Turkey — is gaining a commercial and strategic foothold across a vast continent that was, until recently, dominated by former European colonial powers and the US.
In what some have called a “new scramble for Africa”, these non-western nations are sniffing out commercial opportunities and seeking to project themselves in a difficult but dynamic part of the world. While China has been taking the lead over the past decade, a host of other countries has begun to follow its path.
Whether it is states from the Gulf and the Middle East jockeying for influence in the Horn of Africa, Chinese companies locking up cobalt assets vital for electric cars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or India replacing the US as the biggest importer of Nigerian crude, all over Africa new participants are making their presence felt.
Africans, understandably, object to the idea of a “scramble”, with its connotations of the 19th century, when European powers squabbled for a slice of what Leopold II of Belgium called this “magnifique gateau Africain”. Instead, many regard wider interest in their continent as a golden opportunity to catalyse a different phase of development by breaking away from what they regard as the paternalistic — or downright extractive — relationships they had with traditional powers.
Carlos Lopes, a development economist from Guinea-Bissau, says he has yet to meet an African leader who is not animated by the new possibilities opening up in an era that might be termed “post-post-colonial”.
“It gives Africans much more room to manoeuvre,” he says. “The level of ambition from leaders has gone up very much in response to these incentives to do more with infrastructure and financing and to dare defy western pressure. They are finding it very exciting.”
The changing patterns of engagement — which have led Washington and Europe to reassess their stance towards the continent — are reflected in trade. China supplanted the US as Africa’s biggest trading partner back in 2009. Last year, China-Africa trade was $170bn, off its 2014 peak but still nearly 20 times higher than at the start of the millennium. By contrast, US trade with sub-Saharan Africa was just $39bn.
Where China has led, others have followed. From a lower base, several countries have seen their exposure to Africa rise dramatically. Africa-India trade jumped more than 10-fold from $7.2bn in 2001 to $78bn in 2014 — making India Africa’s fourth biggest trading partner, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Between 2006 and 2016, the Brookings Institution calculates, African imports from Russia and Turkey rose 142 per cent and 192 per cent respectively.China has invested about $125bn in African countries in the decade to 2016, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative at Washington’s Johns Hopkins University. This month, some 40 African leaders travelled to Beijing to hear President Xi Jinping pledge $60bn more over the next three years.
Washington is watching this growing influence with alarm. Last year, China opened its first overseas military base in the tiny country of Djibouti, adding to the presence of the US and others. Djibouti, now heavily indebted to China, is a prime example of what some US critics have labelled “debt diplomacy”, in which Beijing is said to be parlaying loans into political influence. China has also been accused of using debt to take over entitiesin Zambia, including the national power utility.
This August, several US senators wrote to Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, accusing Beijing of “weaponising capital” in Africa, as well as Asia, by using debt to create an economic world order in China’s image.
The growing sense that the US is losing influence on the continent helps explain President Donald Trump’s decision to back a big expansion of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a private sector focused development agency whose lending limit is to be more than doubled to $60bn. Legislation, which has bipartisan support, has already passed the House but is waiting Senate approval.Backers of the so-called Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development (BUILD) Act explicitly link it to national security and China’s growing influence in Africa.
Kwasi Prempeh, executive director of the Center for Democratic Development in Accra, says Washington is still too focused on threats in Africa and not enough on opportunities. “The US continues to be a player, but it’s caught in the post-Iraq era,” he says. “Its policy is driven by the ‘securocrats’.”
Europe, too, has been slow to see Africa’s potential, say critics, and is only now trying to respond to the advances made by other countries.
Last month, Theresa May, the British prime minister, danced through a three-nation tour of Africa to drum up post-Brexit business and to assert Britain’s relevance. Because of the historical presence of UK-listed companies on the continent, including large interests in oil and mining, Britain is still the second-biggest investor in Africa in stock terms. It also remains a big aid donor. But what many drew from Mrs May’s visit — which, incredibly, included the first by a British prime minister to Kenya for 30 years — was how diplomatically disengaged London has become.“Poor Mrs May really has a lot of catching up to do,” says Mark Malloch Brown, a British diplomat and former deputy UN secretary-general under Kofi Annan. In the early 2000s, he says, “We started hearing complaints about what China was doing in Africa, grumbling from the British and the Americans. But, my God, they have created a competitive spur to the rest.”
There are signs that, belatedly, Europe is waking up to the diplomatic and commercial challenge. Last year, Germany launched what it called a “Marshall Plan with Africa”, pledging public money to companies investing on the continent. “We are going to create more security for ourselves and we will put an end to trafficking,” said German chancellor Angela Merkel, launching a scheme that has been slow to get off the ground.
“They are responding to a domestic constituency agitated about the influx of migrants,” says Mr Prempeh. “They’re thinking: ‘If we can get these countries to be economically viable, either through direct investment or aid, then maybe we can stem the flow’.” He points to a commitment by Volkswagen to assemble 5,000 cars in Ghana as an example of such efforts.Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, has also sought to articulate a new vision for the continent. Stressing that he was born after African states had won their independence, he has urged a relationship shorn of colonial baggage. He has also stressed the commercial opportunities for French companies, including small and medium-sized ones, in the English and Portuguese-speaking parts of the continent, as well as in their traditional francophone stamping ground.
But, like Ms Merkel, Mr Macron’s motives for greater engagement are tinged with alarm. In a speech last December in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, he warned of dangers that, he said, “could irreversibly sweep away Africa’s stability, and also Europe’s stability”.
Whether driven by fear or a sense of commercial and diplomatic opportunity, the wider variety of actors has presented African leaders with greater choice. “This has allowed for competition in a way we never had it before,” says Vera Songwe, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
Part of the rising interest is opportunistic. “At the end of the cold war, the west very much withdrew and stopped asserting its interest in Africa,” says Howard French, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and an expert on Africa. “It has taken all this time for the vacuum that this created to draw in a panoply of new players. China is the most obviously important, but Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Turkey, Brazil, Russia and the Gulf states have all been drawn in,” he says. “I think something important is going on.”In spite of Africa’s well-documented problems, companies with a cheaper cost base than European or American rivals can often turn a good profit. “The Turkish decided years ago they wanted to do more business in Africa,” says Edward Effah, chairman of Ghana’s Fidelity Bank. “They opened embassies, opened up export-credit facilities and started more flights,” he says, referring to Turkish Airlines, which now operates routes to more than 40 African cities.
Many businesses also see longer-term commercial prospects in the African demographics that are causing concern over migration in European capitals. From 2018 to 2035, the UN predicts that the world’s 10 fastest-growing cities will all be African. With a median age of just 19, the continent’s population is expected to double to more than 2bn by 2050 and to double again by the end of the century.
Even without a big improvement in living standards, the increase in numbers virtually guarantees robust growth for decades. And some African countries are showing signs of gaining economic momentum. Of the world’s top 10 fastest-growing economies this year according to the World Bank, six are in Africa, including Ethiopia, a country of 105m people where China, Turkey and the Gulf states are all active.
Several countries, including Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to break out of dependence on European markets, have seen the logic of greater engagement. Mr Erdogan has visited 23 African nations since he became leader in 2003.
Just this June, the United Arab Emirates provided Ethiopia with $3bn in aid and investments, helping to avert a foreign currency crisis. A month later, Saudi Arabia promised President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa $10bn of investment, mainly in the power sector.
Russia, hugely influential on the continent during the cold war, is reasserting itself, striking military co-operation deals with the DRC, Ethiopia, Central African Republic and Mozambique, and agreeing arms sales to Nigeria and Angola. “We are well behind everyone, but it’s temporary,” Evgeny Korendyasov, a former ambassador to several African countries, told the Financial Times.
All this new attention, whether motivated by fear of immigration or terrorism or by commercial logic, is providing Africa with new opportunities, enabling governments to shop around for deals and play one suitor off against another.
But there are pitfalls too. Civil society groups across Africa are seeking to keep their leaders in check, accusing many of cutting corrupt deals that are lucrative for them but bad for the country. Loans from China and other new arrivals often lack transparency, say critics, and the projects they finance cannot always make sufficient returns to pay back the underlying debt.
Ms Songwe stresses the importance of striking good deals and sharing experience across the continent. She also says the move towards a continental free trade area, signed in principle this year, will strengthen Africa’s hand by creating the economic scale hampered by the Balkanisation of the continent.
“I would like to think that we on the continent know what we want and how we want it,” she says, dismissing the idea of a scramble. “Scramble sounds like the Wild West, but I don’t believe the continent is in the Wild West phase any more. We have moved towards clarity of purpose and objectives.”
|
read more |
|
Ethiopia is a rarity in Africa. It has existed in a coherent form for more than 2,000 years and largely escaped European colonisation @Stratfor Africa |
East Africa has three power cores: the Nile River Basin, the Kenyan Highlands and the Ethiopian Highlands. The Ethiopian Highlands — which run roughly from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to the center of modern-day Ethiopia in the capital of Addis Ababa, continuing along the Great Rift Valley — have been crucial to Ethiopia's development.
In the modern era, the loss of the coastal province of Eritrea stripped Ethiopia of its access to the sea, increasing the costs of imports and exports and making port access a priority for the country's leaders. Ethiopia has come to rely on tiny Djibouti, which has harnessed its strategic position on the Bab el-Mandeb strait to great effect, to transport some 95 percent of its imports and exports, an arrangement that exposes its large and growing market to supply chain risk.
Abiy is a new kind of Ethiopian leader: He is young compared to his predecessors, at 42 years old; he is also a member of the Oromo ethnic group, which has played a prominent role in protests since 2016, and a former military officer. And after the previous administration, backed by ethnic Tigray hard-liners, strove to crack down on dissent, Abiy is reaching out to different ethnic groups, ending draconian security measures, and promising free and fair elections in the years ahead. So far, rebel groups and other dissidents have warmed to his overtures, though Ethiopia's internal cohesion problems persist.
Abiy's efforts are notable for their speed, but his strategies for stabilizing his country and the region still follow Ethiopia's core imperatives. The prime minister, for example, has focused on normalizing relations between Ethiopia and its nemesis, Eritrea, in support of his country's need for port access. In fact, his government has also increased its stakes in ports in nearby Djibouti, Sudan and Somaliland — a semiautonomous region of Somalia — and promised to forge stronger ties with Somalia itself, all in the name of improved supply chain connectivity.
|
read more |
|
Africa |
PM Abiy Ahmed met with a delegation from IMF who are here for the annual “Article IV Consultations.” The #IMF team presented their findings on the economic & financial developments in #Ethiopia. PM Abiy noted sustaining Ethiopia’s rapid & stable growth is his utmost priority.
|
read more |
|
Beijing's Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces @ForeignPolicy Africa |
Daily life in China is gated by security technology, from the body scanners and X-ray machines at every urban metro station to the demand for ID numbers on social media platforms so that dangerous speech can be traced and punished. Technologies once seen as potentially empowering the public have become tools for an increasingly dictatorial government—tools that Beijing is now determined to sell to the developing world.
Many parts of Africa are now essentially reliant on Chinese companies for their telecoms and digital services. Transsion Holdings, a Shenzhen-based company, was the No. 1 smartphone company in Africa in 2017. ZTE, a Chinese telecoms giant, provides the infrastructure for the Ethiopian government to monitor its citizens’ communications. Hikvision, the world’s leading surveillance camera manufacturer, has just opened an office in Johannesburg.
The latest is CloudWalk Technology, a Guangzhou-based start-up that has signed a deal with the Zimbabwean government to provide a mass facial recognition program. The agreement is currently on hold until Zimbabwe’s elections on July 30. But if it goes through, it will enable Zimbabwe, a country with a bleak record on human rights, to replicate parts of the surveillance infrastructure that have made freedoms so limited in China. And by gaining access to a population with a racial mix far different from China’s, CloudWalk will be better able to train racial biases out of its facial recognition systems—a problem that has beleaguered facial recognition companies around the world and which could give China a vital edge.
The deal between CloudWalk and the Zimbabwean government will not cover just CCTV cameras. According to a report in the Chinese state newspaper Science and Technology Daily, smart financial systems, airport, railway, and bus station security, and a national facial database will all be part of the project. The deal—along with dozens of other cooperation agreements between Harare and Chinese technology and biotech firms—was signed in April. Like every other foreign deal done by a Chinese firm of late, it has been wrapped into China’s increasingly all-encompassing Belt and Road Initiative
The CloudWalk deal is the first Chinese AI project in Africa. Google is opening its first Africa AI research center in Ghana this year, but Eric Olander, founder of the China Africa Project—a podcast and online resource that examines the relationship between China and Africa—noted that many Western companies “aren’t willing to make that step that the Chinese are willing to do. … [The Chinese] are willing to make an investment in a market as volatile as Zimbabwe, where companies from other countries are not.”
|
read more |
|
Angola Arrests Ex-President's Son on $500 Million Transfer, Fund @BBGAfrica Africa |
Angola’s state prosecutor placed Jose Filomeno dos Santos, the son of former Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, under preventive detention, according to a statement by the prosecutor’s office on Monday. Jose Filomeno is accused of taking part in the illegal transfer abroad of $500 million and for crimes related to his management of Angola’s sovereign wealth fund. Jose Filomeno’s friend and business partner, Jean Claude Bastos de Morais, also was arrested, the state prosecutor said. Both men are accused of crimes including corruption, money laundering and the misappropriation of funds. The arrest of Jose Filomeno, who was previously untouchable, marks the first time the son of former President Dos Santos has been detained. Angolan President Joao Lourenco, who replaced Dos Santos at the helm of Africa’s second-biggest oil producer a year ago, has put fighting graft at the center of his policies. Angolan authorities last week arrested former Transport Minister Augusto da Silva Tomas for embezzlement and the misappropriation of funds, state-owned Televisao Publica de Angola reported on Sept. 21, citing a statement from the state prosecutor. Jose Filomeno’s lawyer, Benja Satula, was unreachable on his mobile phone.
|
read more |
|
Randgold and @BarrickGold agree $18bn gold mining deal @fastFT Africa |
Canada’s Barrick Gold is to combine with Randgold Resources, its UK-listed rival, in an $18bn deal that will create the world’s biggest gold miner. The new company will produce more than 6.5m ounces of gold a year, eclipsing its nearest competitor, US-listed Newmont. The group will be listed in Toronto and New York, meaning that London will lose its biggest gold stock. Randgold shareholders will own 33.4 per cent of the combined company, with the rest controlled by investors in Toronto-based Barrick. The all-share agreed deal values each Randgold share at around £49, its closing price on Friday night. On Monday morning the shares opened up 3.8 per cent at £51.12. Barrick is offering 6.128 of its shares for each Randgold share and has agreed to a $300m break fee. Shares in Barrick closed at C$13.52 on Friday. John Thornton, former Goldman Sachs executive and executive chairman of Barrick, will keep his role and direct company strategy. The company will be run day to day by Randgold chief executive Mark Bristow. Mr Thornton said the combination of Barrick and Randgold would bring together the world’s largest collection of ‘Tier One’ gold assets. “Our overriding measure of success will be the returns we generate and not the number of ounces we produce, balancing boldness and prudence to deliver consistent and growing returns to our fellow owners, a truly simple but radical and achievable concept,” he said. Shares in Barrick have dropped 25 per cent amid criticism of its strategy, while Randgold has fallen 34 per cent as it has struggled with a number of operational issues, including a strike at one of its biggest mines. That is a worse performance than the gold price, which is down by 9 per cent year-to-date to $1,206 a troy ounce, hit by a stronger US dollar.
|
read more |
|
Food insecurity rising in Africa Africa |
A third of all people living in sub-Saharan Africa face severe food insecurity. They do not have enough money, or the resources to grow food, and regularly go for more than a day without food. The bad news is the situation is getting worse. Of the just under a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, 230-million were undernourished last year, an increase of 10-million from 2016. That’s also an increase of 25-million since 2014. That’s according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Its State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report has become an annual marker of how the world is dealing with feeding its nearly eight billion people. The 2018 edition, released last week, makes for grim reading.
|
read more |
|
Madatali Chatur puts Sh76bn estate on the block - @dailynation Kenyan Economy |
With a fortune that runs into billions of shillings, his decision to sell all his Kenyan properties, estimated to be worth Sh76.99 billion, must have caught everyone by surprise — but not those who know him. “He was not getting well with some government people,” a source who knows him told us without getting into details. Whether he has seen warning signs ahead in the real estate market or he is escaping from uncertainty is not clear. Some pundits see this dramatic decision as either a vote of no confidence in the economy or a feeling that he can no longer survive the changing political atmosphere. For over three decades, Mr Chatur built an enviable empire with several properties on hundreds of acres spread across the country, which he claims, rose from an electronic shop that he opened in River Road, Nairobi, in 1977.
|
read more |
|
|
|
|