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Tuesday 09th of October 2018 |
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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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Welcome to Diani Beach Africa |
With a flawless, long stretch of white-sand beach hugged by lush forest and kissed by surfable waves, it's no wonder Diani Beach is so popular. This resort town scores points with a diverse crowd: party people, families, honeymooners, backpackers and water-sports enthusiasts.
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Did the Saudis Murder Jamal Khashoggi? @NewYorker Law & Politics |
The last time I spoke with Jamal Khashoggi, in August, he was worried about his life. The Saudi dissident, a fifty-nine-year-old former editor and government adviser, was convinced that the kingdom’s new leadership wanted to kill him. “Of course, they’d like to see me out of the picture,” he said. He’d said it to me before, but by then he had been in exile, in Washington, for more than a year, so I thought he was exaggerating the dangers. Maybe not. Khashoggi hasn’t been seen since he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on Tuesday, to get papers verifying his divorce so that he could remarry. His fiancée, who waited outside for eleven hours, said he never emerged.
Five days have passed, with no proof of life, and international human-rights groups now allege that Khashoggi has been abducted. On Sunday, Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, told Reuters that Turkey believes Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate, adding that fifteen Saudis were allegedly involved in Khashoggi’s disappearance. Erdoğan told reporters that his government is investigating the event. “Entries and exits into the embassy, airport transits, and all camera records are being looked at and followed,” he told reporters. “We want to swiftly get results.” The U.S. State Department also said it is closely following the case. A Turkish colleague of Khashoggi’s told journalists, on Sunday, that the Turkish government advised him to “make your funeral preparation.” Khashoggi had been killed “in a barbaric way” and then dismembered, Turan Kışlakçı, who heads the Turkish-Arab Media Association, told the Associated Press. Another report claimed that his body had been taken back to Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi has long been an important voice in the kingdom. I’ve known him for decades. He had been loyal to the royals, and, for many foreign journalists and experts, he was always a good place to start to understand the monarchy’s thinking. Khashoggi served as the editor of the Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan and headed a television station. But he became increasingly critical of the government and, in June, 2017, decided to leave. Even in exile, he still influenced the debate about the kingdom’s future, with almost 1.7 million followers on Twitter, a Global Opinions column in the Washington Post, and regular appearances on international television.
The bizarre mystery surrounding Khashoggi’s disappearance is part of a broader trend since the appointment, in June of last year, of the young Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is more commonly known by his initials, M.B.S. The thirty-three-year-old has pledged sweeping reforms, but his rule has been increasingly ruthless, with mass arrests of businessmen, and even other princes, and death sentences meted out, this year, to a women’s-rights activist and also to moderate clerics who have preached against extremism. “Above and beyond the persecution of activists, writers, clerics, scholars, and businessmen inside Saudi, where the Saudis could claim some kind of ‘process,’ the apparent kidnapping of Khashoggi is now a pattern of attacks where the Saudis don’t even make a pretense of legality,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, told me on Sunday.
The growing campaign of intimidation, she noted, includes the arrest, in May, of Loujain al-Hathloul, a women’s-rights activist who once ranked third among the Arab world’s hundred most powerful women—even as the kingdom said that it was opening up opportunities for women by allowing them to drive, an issue that Hathloul had championed. Another is what Whitson called the “goonish assault” on Ghanem al-Dosari, who is famed for his satirical YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family, by Saudi agents in London. Three Saudi princes have been abducted since King Salman, M.B.S.’s father, became king, in 2015, the BBC reported. Taken together, Whitson said, all of these acts “reflect the brazen, crude, Qaddafi-like nature of the Saudi crown prince, and, above all, his message to Saudis inside and outside the country: you better shut up. You are not safe. There is no law that can protect you.”
But experts on Saudi Arabia suspect a more ominous pattern. “The crocodile tears of the crown prince and other Saudi officials are probably for deception and prevarication,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A., Pentagon, and National Security Council staffer who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me. “The disappearance of Jamal fits with a pattern of crude intimidation and the silencing of criticism and dissent.”
In words that now haunt his own case, Khashoggi told me, in August, that the crown prince has “no tolerance or willingness to accommodate critics.” Although he is technically next in line to the throne, M.B.S. acts as the country’s de-facto leader, Khashoggi said, and has already become more autocratic than any of the previous six kings who have ruled since the death of Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, in 1953.
When we spoke last November, Khashoggi compared the Saudi monarchy to the Iranian theocracy. “M.B.S. is now becoming the supreme leader,” he said, a reference to Iran’s top authority, who has veto power over every branch of the government. Since his father became king, in 2015, M.B.S. has consolidated his hold on the five major sectors of power, serving as minister of defense, head of a new economic council, and chief of the royal court. “He is very autocratic and totally illiberal,” Khashoggi told me in August. “I worked for the government for four or five years. I never thought I’d be arrested, but then I thought I might. That’s why I left.” Khashoggi’s status became ever more precarious as his critiques of the monarchy sharpened in recent months.
Amnesty International called reports of Khashoggi’s assassination “an abysmal new low. Such an assassination within the grounds of the consulate, which is territory under Saudi Arabian jurisdiction, would amount to an extrajudicial execution. This case sends a shockwave among Saudi Arabian human rights defenders and dissidents everywhere, eroding any notion of seeking safe haven abroad.”
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Saudi economic problems are serious, but not necessarily disastrous. Law & Politics |
More destabilising for the Kingdom is the extent to which Saudi Arabia is now demonstrably operating beyond its real strength in the region as its its more adventurous foreign policy over the last three years backfires.
The list of failures is impressive: Saudi-led bombing in Yemen since 2015 has not defeated the Houthis, but it has produced the greatest manmade famine on earth; increased help for the Syrian armed opposition the same year provoked Russian military intervention and has brought President Bashar al-Assad close to victory; the quarrel with Qatar has weakened all the Gulf monarchies; confrontation with Iran is a conflict that can never be won.
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03-SEP-2018 :: Belle at the ball Law & Politics |
I remember a time my then 11 Year old daughter Layla attended the school disco and when I picked her up, her eyes glittered and she could scarcely stand still. I asked, ‘’Darling, how was it?’’ She said, “Daddy, I danced and I danced and I didn’t stop!’’ I wanted to pick her up, spin her as Jean Rhys wrote in her Novel ‘’Wide sargasso sea’’: Only the magic and the dream are true - all the rest’s a lie. And, “I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.”
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Here Are Some of Brazil Front-Runner Jair Bolsonaro's Most Incendiary Statements Emerging Markets |
Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain and seven-term lawmaker with a penchant for courting controversy, has become the embodiment of Brazil’s divided society. He posted a huge victory Sunday in the first round of presidential elections, setting him up to win the decisive second round in three weeks despite the fact 44 percent of Brazilians say there’s no way they’d ever vote for him. If you’re new to Brazil politics and trying to understand why Bolsonaro’s such a polarizing figure, here’s a sampling of some of the most controversial comments he’s made in recent years: June 2011 -- “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son,” Bolsonaro said in an interview with Playboy magazine. “I won’t be a hypocrite: I prefer a son to die in an accident than show up with a mustachioed guy. He’d be dead to me anyway.” October 2014 -- "She doesn’t deserve to be raped, because she’s very ugly,” Bolsonaro said in an interview with local media, referring to a fellow congresswoman. “She’s not my type. I would never rape her. I’m not a rapist, but if I were, I wouldn’t rape her because she doesn’t deserve it." April 2016 -- “For the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff [...] my vote is yes!” In Brazil’s Lower House of Congress, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote in favor of President Rousseff’s impeachment to the Army officer who oversaw torture for the dictatorship when she was imprisoned. April 2017 -- In describing his visit to a quilombo, as communities descended from escaped slaves are known, Bolsonaro characterized residents as fat, citing a unit of measurement reserved for livestock. “They don’t do anything!” he continued. “I don’t think they even serve for procreation anymore.” September 2018 -- “We’re going to execute the Workers’ Party members here!” Bolsonaro told a cheering crowd in Acre state, on the Venezuelan border, after pretending to fire a machine gun. “Let’s run those crooks out of Acre! Since they like Venezuela so much, they’ll need to go there!” Were there any doubt, Bolsonaro said in a radio interview Monday that, while he’s stopped using curse words, Brazilians shouldn’t expect him to become a “peace and love’’ candidate in the second round of the election.
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African nations' borrowing costs hit post write-off high @FinancialTimes Africa |
African countries are paying the highest average borrowing costs since a mass debt relief campaign wiped out a large chunk of what they owed, as a result of a surge of fresh capital-raising in recent years. Payments on external debt — borrowings owed to lenders outside the country — hit an average of 12 per cent of African governments’ revenues in 2017, according to research by financial pressure group the Jubilee Debt Campaign, the highest level since 2001. Increases in borrowings, falling commodity prices from mid-2014 and the strengthening dollar have all fuelled the increase, according to the researchers. By contrast, developed nations’ external debt cost averages 9.6 per cent of their government revenues, the campaign estimated. Tim Jones, a policy officer at the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “Debt problems are worsening on the African continent.” He called for greater transparency in African nations’ financing deals, saying that “we need new rules to make all lenders publicly disclose loans to governments at the time they are given”. “The IMF needs to stop responding to debt crises by giving loans which bail out other lenders, from China to western companies, incentivising them to continue lending recklessly,” he added. “Instead, lenders need to be made to restructure and reduce debts.” Since 2013, the median ratio of public debt to gross domestic product in low-income countries has risen 13 percentage points to hit 47 per cent in 2017, IMF researchers found. The heaviest cost for African countries comes from private lenders, the Jubilee Debt Campaign found. Nearly a third of African governments’ debt is owed to private creditors, but they account for 55 per cent of interest payments.
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One Domino that has suddenly tipped over is Zimbabwe. Africa |
Reuters reported that People again formed long queues to fill up their cars in the capital, with others panic-buying basic goods like cooking oil and sugar. There are $9.3 billion of Zollars in banks compared to $200 million in reserves, official data showed, a mis- match that creates a premium for the U.S. dollar and fans the black market.
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It now takes 2.8 bond notes to buy one U.S. dollar, which is the weakest exchange rate on record, according to the Zim Bollar Index, a local website Africa |
It now takes 2.8 bond notes to buy one U.S. dollar, which is the weakest exchange rate on record, according to the Zim Bollar Index, a local website. In early September the rate was 1.75. Bond notes represented the value of one greenback when they were first printed. The stock market is also signaling increased stress in the southern African nation’s financial system. The main equities index rose 8.7 percent last week to its highest since November, when the military ousted long-serving ruler Robert Mugabe, who oversaw the economy’s collapse. In Zimbabwe’s skewed markets, rising stock prices are a sign that foreign-currency shortages are worsening. Local traders pile into equities when bond notes depreciate and they fear inflation will accelerate. It’s a phenomenon that’s forced foreign investors including Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Allan Gray -- who can’t repatriate their money because of strict capital controls -- to write down the value of their assets. Zimbabweans have stocked up on goods after the authorities increased a tax on money transfers to 2 cents per dollar transacted, from a flat rate of 5 cents per transaction, at the beginning of the month. Vehicles formed long lines at fuel stations over the weekend, prompting the head of the national oil company to say there’s enough gasoline to last six months and the hoarding “is uncalled for.” On Sunday, the central bank said it was drawing down part of a $500 million credit line from the African Development Bank to pay for imports of fuel, electricity and wheat. The weakening of bond notes “is being caused by some people bent to dupe the public of their hard-earned income,” said John Mangudya, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. “The opportunists are manipulating foreign-currency parallel-market rates to cause unnecessary panic and despondency.”
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TV tax stirs Zambian fears over Chinese 'debt-trap' diplomacy @FT Africa |
Michael Muntemba says there is something odd about the levy he has to pay to watch state television in Zambia. “I’ve heard the rumours,” the clothes seller said in hushed tones. He pays less than a dollar a month in tax meant to support the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation. But the payment lies at the heart of accusations that Zambia has given up its sovereignty in return for $9.4bn of debt, up to one-third of it owed to China. Mr Muntemba’s suspicion, widely shared in Zambia, is that part of his K10 ($0.86) TV levy, which has more than doubled in a year, is being used to service a $273m loan taken by ZNBC, the state broadcaster, from China’s Exim Bank. The loan’s terms are opaque, but as alarm grows in Africa over Chinese “debt trap” diplomacy, the lack of transparency has put the Zambian government on the defensive amid rumours that public assets have been placed in hock to Beijing. “Borrowing is OK if you know where the money goes,” said Mr Muntemba. “But the government is not borrowing safely.” China has been ratcheting up its involvement in Africa for the past two decades and, more recently, has become a crucial lender to several African countries, including Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya — and copper-rich Zambia. While many African leaders have welcomed Beijing’s help, particularly in building infrastructure, there has been growing disquiet among civil society groups, which say Chinese loans come with strings attached, and finance corruption by local political leaders. Trade ties that involve China sending equipment and manufactured goods in return for African raw materials have also been compared with patterns prevalent during colonialism. In Zambia, the Exim Bank loan is backing a joint venture called TopStar between ZNBC and StarTimes, a private Beijing-based media group that owns 60 per cent of the new business and wants to use it to roll out a digital TV service. Activists say TopStar is ringfencing public revenue for its own purposes. Fumba Chama, a popular rapper who goes by the name Pilato and has criticised public borrowing in his lyrics, said: “ZNBC does not have a voice any more. They know it’s embarrassing. They know that they did a stupid deal.” Zengeni Simuchembu, an officer of the Alliance for Community Action, a local anti-corruption NGO, said: “It is effectively a takeover.” He added: “When I invest in a company, and I have 60 per cent, and then I actually control the revenue . . . I control how the company will run.” Zambia’s auditor-general echoed these concerns last year. He noted in a report that the loan backing TopStar had failed to specify what revenue was earmarked for ZNBC as opposed to paying off the debt. The report added that ZNBC failed to develop its own plan to repay the loan, the first interest instalment of which was missed when it came due last July. The controversy over the loan has left President Edgar Lungu and his ruling Patriotic Front facing pointed questions. Zambia’s debt has doubled in about half a decade and doubts are growing over its ability to pay it back. Mr Lungu has called concern over Chinese borrowing “reckless propaganda”. Beijing, he said, has funded much-needed infrastructure, including the digital switchover financed by the ZNBC loan. Critics of the ruling party counter that much infrastructure spending is laden with kickbacks used to dispense political patronage. Mr Lungu’s government denies the claims. Addressing parliament last month, Margaret Mwanakatwe, Zambia’s finance minister, said the government had not “pledged any public asset as collateral”. But investors have taken fright. Zambia’s US dollar sovereign bonds have plunged more this year than even Turkey’s or Argentina’s during the recent sell-off in emerging markets. Investors are also nervous about a further $5bn debt in the pipeline for Chinese infrastructure loans. While the finance ministry is indicating it will seek to slow down new borrowing, bondholders say they also want delays on repaying many Chinese loans. “We should be worried about Zambia’s complacency rather than a conspiracy,” said Gregory Smith, an analyst at Renaissance Capital. An Exim Bank loan is backing a joint venture called TopStar between ZNBC and StarTimes, a private Beijing-based media group © Joseph Cotterill/FT StarTimes’s ambitions extend far in Africa. Pang Xinxing, StarTimes’s founder, hosted leaders from Ghana, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and other countries during a China-Africa summit in Beijing last month. Mr Lungu was also there and his ministers praise StarTimes for bringing digital TV to remote villages. Commercial rivals to TopStar have also previously accused it of blocking the free-to-air digital TV signal in parts of the country. StarTimes did not respond to the FT’s request for comment on controversy over the TopStar loan. Mr Simuchembu said the rising TV levy makes it “difficult for citizens to survive” in a country where most get by on less than two dollars a day. But Mr Lungu’s government is less than tolerant of domestic dissent on the matter. While Chinese money might be welcome at the Zambian state broadcaster, Mr Chama, the rapper, is not. He was arrested earlier this year after ruling-party cadres deemed one song to be disrespectful of Mr Lungu. State agents still harass him, he said. “My stand on social issues inconveniences them. It’s not something they like to hear.” Mr Chama said frank disclosure and debate about the Chinese loans must be allowed in order for Zambia to resolve its debt. “China is not Father Christmas,” he said. “We should be brave enough to say that it is not free money.”
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A billion youths in Africa will be unemployable @mailandguardian's @AlikoDangote Africa |
If current trends continue, by 2050 about a third of Africa’s one billion youths will lack basic proficiency in maths, reading and other skills and subjects. Millions will be unemployable and unproductive. It costs about $400 a year to educate a school-age child in Africa. That is a fortune for a poor family struggling to make ends meet. But for governments in Africa and around the world, it is a small price to pay to train the creators of future prosperity. After all, as Nelson Mandela said: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
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Sudan Devalues Pound by 39% Amid Foreign-Currency Shortage Africa |
Sudan devalued its currency for the third time this year amid an acute shortage of foreign exchange. The announcement adds to a raft of measures the government is taking to tackle an economic crisis that’s triggered sporadic protests as the cost of living has surged. The central bank last week relinquished its role in setting the pound’s exchange rate, which is now being determined by an independent committee. The new rate was set at 47.5 pounds per dollar, compared with 29, according to a statement emailed Sunday by the Khartoum-based Sudan Union of Banks. The currency was devalued to 18 per dollar in January, from 6.70 previously, and then to a band of 28.50-31.50 the following month. January’s devaluation was part of budget measures enacted by the government to comply with International Monetary Fund recommendations aimed at reviving an economy still reeling from the loss of most of its oil when South Sudan seceded in 2011. Inflation in the North African nation accelerated to 67 percent in August.
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Five new Ebola cases confirmed in eastern Congo - health ministry Africa |
The current epidemic in Congo’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces has seen 140 confirmed cases since July, 108 of whom have died, according to the ministry’s daily bulletin, which has been reporting an average of one to two new confirmed cases per day in recent weeks. “The town of Beni has become the new focus point of the disease, registering the highest percentage of cases reported in recent weeks following community resistance of certain families,” it said in a statement.
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A New Chinese-Funded Railway In Kenya Sparks Debt-Trap Fears @NPR Kenyan Economy |
The Standard Gauge Railway station in Nairobi is easily the most impressive public building in Kenya. While a lot of Kenyan government buildings are drab and functional and date back to colonial days, this station is adventurous. It's all gray and modern. Geometric shapes form an abstract locomotive, and red neon announces the "Nairobi Terminus." The train runs 293 miles from Kenya's capital city to the port of Mombasa and back twice a day and represents the biggest infrastructure project since Kenya's independence 54 years ago. The Chinese financed it; a Chinese company built it; and the Chinese will operate it for many years to come. The project, which launched in the summer of 2017, has not only come to signify Kenya's ambitions, but also China's ambitions on the African continent. In the past decade, China has become the biggest lender to governments in Africa. The money has helped build ports, roads, bridges, airports and trains. But critics warn the loans are full of traps that could leave African countries in the lurch. Kenya alone owes $5.3 billion to China. China's $3.2 billion loan for the railway project is hard to ignore. At the entrance of every single rail car, an image of the Kenyan flag is flanked by one of the Chinese flag. Since the railway line opened for business, hundreds of thousands have taken trains to and from Mombasa, a strategically important port on the Indian Ocean. Riding in economy class from Nairobi, two strangers are having a spirited argument. "What we do not have transparency on is what really is the collateral," he says, "and the very scary case in point is Sri Lanka." At the end of last year, Sri Lanka found itself struggling to pay back its debt to China, so it handed China a strategic port on a 99-year lease. So what happens if Djibouti can't pay back its port? What happens if Kenya can't pay for its Standard Gauge Railway? Anzetse Were, a development economist, says the problem is we don't know. "As a public intellectual who analyzes the African and Kenyan economy on a weekly basis, at no point have I come across a document that I can say, 'Oh, so that's what the SGR is about,' " she says. The Chinese Embassy in Kenya denied NPR's request for an interview. But at a news conference in July, Chinese Ambassador Sun Baohong defended her country's involvement in the continent. "There is no debt trap with Africa," she said, adding that the continent has historically had a huge debt load. Were says these types of opaque deals work for many recipient governments — they let them build visible projects, which helps them win elections. And they can also be a source of income for corrupt politicians and their supporters. But for ordinary people, the opacity raises concerns, and lately in Kenya, there has been public outcry. "African governments may be happy with the opacity, but African publics are not," says Were. "And fundamentally, the sentiments on the ground [are] really going to inform how successful and how well received their initiatives are in the country as a whole."
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Kenya's floriculture industry earned more than $800 million in 2017. Kenyan Economy |
"On a daily basis we export 36,000 tons from this country," said Clement Tulezi, the CEO of Kenya Flower Council. "So we are moving into a place where we want to market ourselves better, we want to brand ourselves better as a country, and also brand the Kenyan flower."
"We are doing Beijing, we are doing Shanghai, and we are doing Guangzhou," said Irene Nkatha, the sales manager of Red Lands Roses. "We started with one shipment per week, now we are doing two to three shipments per week. The distance is short. It's only one day to go to Guangzhou, it's only two days to go to Beijing."
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