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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. |
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Howard Waring French (born October 14, 1957) is an American journalist, author, and photographer, as well as professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Africa |
His latest book is Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power (Knopf, March 2017). His most recent work for The New York Times was centered on China where he was the paper's Shanghai bureau chief, from 2003 to 2008. French was New York Times bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America from 1990 to 1994; he covered Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and numerous other countries. He was one of the newspaper's first black correspondents.[1] From 1994 to 1998, French covered West and Central Africa for the Times, reporting on wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Central Africa, with particular attention to the fall of the longtime dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko. From 1998 to 2003, French was Tokyo Bureau Chief for the Times, covering Japan and the Koreas. In addition to his native English, French speaks Mandarin, French, and Portuguese.[2] He became Tokyo bureau chief for the Times in 1999, after a year studying Japanese at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. He has written for The New York Review of Books and also contributed frequently to The Atlantic and to "The Guardian Longreads".
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Why Africa can't catch a break: Malaria, ebola, and Gen. Butt Naked. Africa |
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa By Howard French Knopf, $25.00
Early in his rambles through West Africa as a correspondent for The New York Times, Howard French arrived in Lagos, the steamy financial capital of Nigeria. The most populous nation in Africa had just been taken over by Gen. Sani Abacha, a sinister figure who concealed his eyes behind dark sunglasses and who had a predilection for ordering" Mafia-style hits against political opponents. Nigeria's promise had long since been frittered away by a succession of corrupt military dictators and civilian rulers, but under Abacha, who seized power in 1993, the thievery had become ever more brazen. Within minutes of his arrival, French was set upon by both a rapacious immigration official and a soldier who demanded his passport and threatened him with arrest. Then the reporter's Nigerian "fixer," David, stepped in, rebuking the assailants and holding firm even as the soldier raised his gun. As the soldier beat a retreat, David offered French some cogent counsel. "You must never fear those people," he says. "If you do, you are finished."
It is a piece of advice that French had repeatedly to fall back on in the course of his four years as the Timed roving bureau chief based in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. A Continent for the Taking: The Traged and Hope of Africa, his vivid, disquieting memoir of those times, conjures up a succession of flailed states in which the shakedown is a way of life, destitute soldiers terrorize civilians at will, and the slightest display of weakness becomes an invitation for predation. In chapter after evocative chapter, he chronicles the murderous kleptocracy of Abacha in Nigeria, the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), the drug-and-diamond-fueled carnage in Liberia, and the epic fall of Zairian dictator Mobutu. It's depressing, Hobbesian stuff. Yet in sharp contrast to Out of America, Keith Richburg's bitingly pessimistic account of his years as an African- American correspondent covering the Rwandan genocide and clan warfare in Somalia, French, also an African American, sees Africa as a continent still dense with possibility. The tug of war between ordinary citizens yearning for democracy and ruthless leaders determined to squelch those aspirations is one of the driving themes behind French's book. So, too, is the often-destructive role played by the United States, which, as lie documents, propped up the worst of these dictators and demagogues, then often stood by as their nations disintegrated around them.
To illustrate his case, French zeroes in on Liberia, America's unloved stepchild, a malarial backwater founded by freed American slaves before the Civil War. Tensions between the Americo-Liberian elite and native Liberians rose to boil just as Liberia--valued by the United States as a source of rubber and a listening post--dropped off the American radar screen at the end of the Cold War. In the aftermath of the 1990 assassination of President Samuel Doe, the semiliterate dictator propped up by the Reagan administration, U.S. Marines waited off shore while "churches full of huddling people became scenes of unimaginable [ethnic] slaughter," French writes. Meanwhile, Charles Taylor rampaged through the countryside with his Small Boys Units--child soldiers fueled by drugs and blind loyalty to the surrogate father-figure they called "Pappy." Unwilling to commit troops anywhere in Africa after the Somalia debacle, the Clinton administration sloughed off the peacekeeping burden on ECOMOG, the corrupt Nigerian-dominated pan-African force that eagerly joined the tribal militias in the looting of Monrovia in 1996. An all too familiar scene ensured: U.S. military helicopters rescued expatriates, leaving Liberia's civilians at the mercy of warlords such as Gen. Butt Naked, who "doused himself in a potion made from cane juice that he swore protected him from bullets."
French's most enthralling chapters detail the dramatic final days of Mobutu Sese Seko, the astonishingly corrupt Zairian dictator backed for decades by the United States while he drove his country to destitution. French brilliantly captures the fin de siede whirl of Kinshasa, the muggy Congolese capital on the Congo River, moving to the electric beat of soukous music and the entrepreneurial hustle of its desperate masses. In 1996, Rwandan troops invaded the country to empty Hutu refugee camps that had become staging grounds for a reprise of the genocide, and Mobutu's end game began. French's reporting is at its best here, as he chronicles the unlikely rise of Rwaada's front man Laurent Kabila and the horrific string of revenge killings against Hum refugees carried out by Rwandan Tutsi troops as they swept toward Kinshasa. "Those forests in the east have witnessed some real horrors," French is told by an American diplomat in Kisangani, "but luckily for the Tutsi, trees can't talk." Yet as French reports, the Clinton administration--motivated in part by guilt over its failure to halt the genocide--turned a blind eye to Rwanda's excesses. U.S. ambassador to Zaire Danid Simpson "reduced the Hum problem to a simple formula: 'they are the bad guys,"' French writes. He concludes with Mobutu's ignominious departure from Kinshasa, and the arrival of Kabila, another U.S.-backed despot who reveals himself to be as thuggish and corrupt as his predecessor.
French's engagement with the continent goes far deeper than most Africa-based correspondents. His father was a physician who moved the family from the United States to Core d'Ivoire, to take a job running rural clinics for the World Health Organization, and French spent four years covering Africa as a young stringer in the early 1980s. He met his first African girlfriend, an emigree from Mall, on the dance floor at an Abidjan night club, and a trip to her birthplace brought him in touch with the past glories of the continent. (He would later marry a woman from the Cote d'Ivoire.) He writes with wide of a continent that produced Timbuktu, the great mosque of Djenne, and the Ashanti Kingdom--a proto-nation state with defined boundaries, a central government, a police force, an army, and a national language. And throughout the book, he ponders the reasons for the long decline into violence and destitution. Looking for answers, French offers fresh and thoughtful takes on the usual suspects: the legacy of centuries of slavery, brutal colonial exploitation, and the failure of colonial masters to leave behind any working institutions. Huge, potentially rich countries like Zaire and Nigeria were done in, he writes, by "the confusion sown by arbitrary borders, by the abrupt and haphazard imposition of alien political systems, by deliberate Western destabilization and finally by the economic turmoil that logically ensued."
French makes a strong case for all of these factors. At the same time, however, he is too willing to let Africans themselves off the hook. The ruinous depredations of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, for example, the horrors perpetrated by Charles Taylor in Liheria mid Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone can't all be laid at the doorstep of European slave merchants and colonizers.
Africa's ruinous civil wars and ethnic strife also reflect a total failure of the political class, of elites who view government office as an opportunity for personal gain, of rulers who owe their primary allegiance to clan or tribe.
French faults the United States for failing to impose an oil boycott on Nigeria during the brutal rule by Abacha. But the failure of African leaders to speak out boldly against the tyrants in their midst--witness the stubborn refusal of South Africa's Thabo Mbeki to isolate Mugabe economically and politically--also helps to legitimize these thugs and demagogues.
Not all of Africa's rulers seem determined to lead their countries to ruin. In Mali, French meets President Alpha Oumar Konare, the country's first popularly elected leader, a noted archaeologist determined to safeguard both the country's fragile democratic institutions and its rich cultural heritage. Yet staggering under massive international debt--the legacy of Konate's dictatorial predecessors--the president and his allies wonder how long they can maintain popular support. "We service our country's debt on time every month, never missing a penny, and all the time, the people are getting poorer and poorer," says Amadou Toumani Toure, the founder of Malian democracy and a successor to Konare. French also finds fragile hope in the yearnings for democracy and entrepreneurial energy of Africa's beleaguered citizens. "Our dreams are the dreams of people everywhere, aren't they?" he is asked by a former copper mine manager in East Kasai who survived Mobutu-directed ethnic pogroms in Luhumbashi, Congo. Now he's returned home to build a virtual independent entity in this neglected corner of his nation. "We want to be able to turn on the lights and read to our children at night. We want affordable cement so that we can build houses for our families ... If we had our own state we could take charge of that. But who can wait?" On a misruled continent that seems to be sinking ever closer to a war of all against all, the resourcefulness of its people may offer the best hope for renewal.
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[The End of] Halcyon Days @TheStarKenya Africa |
Wikipedia has an article on: halcyon days and it reads thus, From Latin Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx. When her husband died in a shipwreck, Alcyone threw herself into the sea whereupon the gods transformed them both into halcyon birds (kingfishers). When Alcyone made her nest on the beach, waves threatened to destroy it. Aeolus restrained his winds and kept them calm during seven days in each year, so she could lay her eggs. These became known as the “halcyon days,” when storms do not occur. Today, the term is used to denote a past period that is being remembered for being happy and/or successfuL
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Africa |
The conundrum for those who wish to bet on the End of the World is this, however. What would be the point? The World would have ended.
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WB Yeats' The Second Coming Africa |
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand;- Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Home Thoughts
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India's @narendramodi set to return to power with a bigger majority, exit polls show @Reuters Law & Politics |
Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is projected to win anything between 339-365 seats in the 545-member lower house of parliament with the Congress party-led opposition alliance at a distant 77 to 108, India Today Axis exit poll showed. To rule, a party needs to win 272 seats. Modi’s alliance won 336 seats in the 2014 election. The exit polls showed that he not only held to this base in the northern Hindi belt but also breached the east where regional groups traditionally held sway. Only the south largely resisted the Hindu nationalist surge, except for Karnataka, home to software capital Bengaluru. Counting of votes recorded in hundreds of thousands of computerised machines will begin early on Thursday and results are expected by noon.
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US-China trade war: who will blink first? @FinancialTimes Law & Politics |
On Thursday morning, as Walmart delivered a stark warning that Donald Trump’s widening trade war with China would lead to higher prices for American consumers, John Flynn stood in front of one of the US retailer’s stores in Virginia defiantly defending the US president. “I think he’s doing the right thing, America is becoming very dependent on stuff from China,” said Mr Flynn, a 55-year-old real estate agent who grew up in the steel country of western Pennsylvania. “If prices go up, prices go up. It’s going to hurt them [the Chinese] in the long run too. So it’s just a matter of who blinks first,” he said, as he stepped into his Honda Accord. When the US this week launched an attack on Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, by placing it on an export blacklist that could severely damage its business, it further raised fears of an enduring confrontation. “This represents a material escalation in tensions with the Chinese government. We have truly crossed the Rubicon,” Chris Krueger, an analyst at Cowen Washington Research Group, said following the Huawei announcement. “The Kissinger consensus is dead and China is a strategic rival. Full stop.” Mr Trump’s bet is that the American economy, with unemployment at half-century lows and US gross domestic product expanding at an annualised 3.2 per cent in the first quarter of the year, can withstand the pain from the trade war with China. The blow to China would be greater if all of its exports to the US are taxed at 25 per cent, in part. Whereas the US exported $120bn of goods to China last year, China is far more reliant on the US, shipping $540bn of goods to the US. The hit in 2020 to Chinese GDP, which has already shown some weakness in recent months, would be 1.3 per cent under this scenario, says Greg Daco, chief US economist of Oxford Economics.
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WB Yeats' The Second Coming Law & Politics |
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand;- Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
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Crude Oil Futures in New York rose as much as 1.7%, following a 1.8% gain last week Commodities |
Oil started the week strongly after Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ members signaled intentions to keep supplies constrained for the rest of the year, while U.S. tensions with Iran ratcheted up as President Donald Trump threatened the country in a tweet. Futures in New York rose as much as 1.7%, following a 1.8% gain last week. Saudi energy minister Khalid Al-Falih urged members of the alliance meeting in Jeddah to “stay the course” on output cuts. Meanwhile, just weeks after the U.S. increased sanctions pressure on Iranian crude exports, Trump tweeted “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.” West Texas Intermediate crude for June delivery rose as much as $1.05 to $63.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange and traded at $63.60 at 12:26 p.m. in Singapore. The contract added 1.8% last week, the biggest weekly increase since early April. The contract expires after end of trading Tuesday. The more actively traded July contract rose to as high as $63.96. Brent for July settlement rose $1.02 cents to $73.23 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The contract added 2.3% last week. The global crude benchmark traded at a $9.46 premium to WTI for the same month.
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Veteran Lawyer Says Emerging-Market Debt Is Headed for Trouble @business Emerging Markets |
For developing countries facing down creditors, Lee Buchheit was the cavalry. During his 43-year career at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, the quick-witted restructuring lawyer gained a reputation for shattering investors’ dreams of sky-high returns. Buchheit, 68, brought arcane legal terms such as collective action clauses and asset protection orders into modern debt markets. He deployed the former to spur a settlement for Greece, enabling a supermajority of creditors to forge an agreement that was binding on all bondholders. Buchheit applied the latter in Iraq to force U.S. investors to divest from local assets. Now retired from Cleary, the Pittsburgh native has a frightening prognosis for the coming decade: He foresees the biggest string of defaults since the early 1980s. He blames the rise of bullet bonds, noncallable debt instruments that pay back the entire principal at the final maturity date. In an interview, Buchheit spoke about what he’s learned over his career and the restructurings he sees on the horizon.
BEN BARTENSTEIN: How did you get involved in the debt restructuring business?
LEE BUCHHEIT: I realized that my long-term survival in the legal profession would require me to find a practice area that would offer a degree of continual intellectual refreshment. The sovereign practice does that. Each country is different. Not just in their financial condition but also in their culture, geopolitical leverage, and internal politics.
BB: Tell me about your suitcase.
LB: Well, I’d be on the road 50 to 60 percent of the time. The suitcase is always packed. My first rule is never check a bag. Then you’re not hostage to the airlines if they cancel or delay the flight. For me it’s usually three shirts, three ties, underwear, socks, a shaving kit, and cuff links. Then I have a lot of sleeping pills, and caffeine in the morning.
BB: What’s one of your biggest lessons from the field?
LB: When I first got involved with the Philippines in the 1980s, Ferdinand Marcos was still in power, and I watched Cory Aquino’s rise to power. That was quite exhilarating. There was also a lesson. The problem I found—I went through that in the Philippines and when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was overthrown—is the people who’ve been suffering under some regime assume that once the son of a bitch is gone, everything will get better right away. Of course, the higher those expectations, the more painful it is when they crash down. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can cure all the ills in a society.
BB: What’s the problem with bullet bonds?
LB: When we moved into the bond era in the 1990s, the market actually preferred trading bullet maturities, maturing 5, 10, or 100 years out. When that date comes, the country may not have access to the market at an interest rate it can afford. Risks are aggravated if borrowing was done during a commodity boom. It’s like having a pal who’s on a diet, and just before they take a bite of their chocolate éclair, you say, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” You borrow today, and the liability goes on the hips.
BB: Who’s most at risk?
LB: I’m worried about the 20 or so countries that never before came to international bond markets and were able to issue inaugural bonds this past decade. In sub-Saharan Africa you see a number of countries that will have problems, particularly if interest rates continue to rise or a withdrawal of quantitative easing pulls liquidity out of the market.
BB: How do politics contribute to this problem?
LB: That’s always been a characteristic of sovereign finance. The people who borrow are rarely the ones who pay it back. Then you have the obvious tension when there’s a government in place and a great crisis. The opposition wants to see the government fall on its face. A finance minister from an African country once came to me before defaulting. This was a preemptive restructuring. When I finished meeting with him, I said, “Let me express my admiration for dealing with a problem that’s inevitable, but you’re doing it earlier.” And he said, “Son, we don’t have an election for another eight months. Don’t you think if I could hand this bag of garbage to the next administration I would do it? But we won’t last eight months.” The domestic politics make this job so fun.
BB: What role do investors play?
LB: Well, a modern bond investor doesn’t normally expect to be there when the debt matures either. Investors can say, “I’ll buy the bond with a bullet maturity, and when that day comes, when they refinance it, I don’t expect to be there. I’ll have sold it.” The one trait shared by every hedge fund investor is they know they’re smarter than everyone else. They’ll say, “I can perceive the early warning signs of trouble and sell to some other poor devil.”
BB: So what’s your outlook now?
LB: Another bout of emerging-market sovereign debt problems may be in the offing. Interest rates have come up from their historic lows. QE programs are being wound down. The commodity boom is well off its highs. A lot of debt, both corporate and sovereign, was put on the books during the sunny days.
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Zimbabwe's economy 'pronounced dead', set to contract 20 percent in 2019 @SputnikInt Africa |
Our economy is now dysfunctional and literally dead. We have a real crisis in this country," Tinashe Eric Muzamhindo of the Women's University of Africa in Zimbabwe said. "We are experiencing so many problems such as fuel, prices are skyrocketing, corruption etc. To be quite honest corruption has destroyed this country". Zimbabwe's GDP, however, rose 4 percent last year, but the nation's inflation rate accelerated from 20.85 percent in October 2018 to 75.86 percent last month, according to official reports. Meanwhile, according to Zimbabwe's Treasury, the economy is set to actually contract by 20 percent in dollar terms this year — as out-of-control inflation is threatening to erase the gains made by remaining functioning sectors.
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AB InBev's Zimbabwe Head Sees Long Winter Ahead as Demand Slumps @markets. Africa |
Delta Corp., Zimbabwe’s biggest company by market value, is bracing for cash-strapped consumers to spend less on its beverages in the months ahead. The manufacturer of Zambezi Lager beer and Coca-Cola Co. sodas is already grappling with foreign-exchange shortages that are crimping its ability to procure raw materials and service debt. Demand for its products is also being constrained by an inflation rate at 75.9% -- the highest in a decade. The company will seek the assistance of Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, which has a 40% stake in Delta, to obtain inputs for its beer business, Chief Executive Officer Pearson Gowero said in an interview in the capital, Harare. There’s little Delta can do to stoke demand, he said. “We are in for a very long winter,” Gowero said. Zimbabwe’s government is struggling to revive an economy wrecked by the misrule of former President Robert Mugabe. Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube told lawmakers on Wednesday output will be hampered this year by a drought that’s curbed hydropower output, leading to regular outages, and shortages of gasoline. The International Monetary Fund forecast last month that Zimbabwe’s economy will shrink 5.2% this year, its first contraction since 2008. Delta this week reported a 62% increase in annual profit, as revenue grew 26%. It achieved the results despite its soda division being “virtually closed” in the fourth quarter of 2018 because of a shortage of raw materials. “The reduced disposable income and difficult operating environment has resulted in subdued trading at the front end of the new year,” it said.
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Saudi Arabia Deposits $250 Million Into Sudan's Central Bank Africa |
Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it deposited $250 million with the Sudanese central bank, according to a statement from the kingdom's ministry of finance. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged to send $3 billion worth of aid to Sudan, after mass protests led to the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir last month. The move will strengthen Sudan's "financial position, alleviate pressure on the Sudanese pound and achieve more stability in the exchange rate,' the statement said.
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Africa |
“The first thing I need to do is to cultivate and create confidence in Malawian people that their taxes are not going to be stolen. The second thing I need to do is to bring back confidence from those partners that are helping us that their people’s taxes are not going to be stolen and misused.” Chakwera, who heads the Malawi Congress Party, is in a tight race against incumbent President Peter Mutharika, 78, and his deputy Saulos Chilima, 46. In total, seven candidates are vying for the presidency and 6.59 million people have registered to vote in the southern African producer of burley tobacco and tea, widely known for the white-sand beaches of the expansive Lake Malawi. Chilima quit the ruling Democratic Progressive Party last year in protest at what he said was rampant nepotism, cronyism and corruption. While he set up a rival party, the United Transformation Movement, Mutharika couldn’t fire him as vice president because he was directly elected. Chakwera’s campaign received a boost last week, when Joyce Banda, who led Malawi from 2012 to 2014, quit the race and endorsed him. Mutharika won the first-past-the-post 2014 election with 1.9 million votes, while Chakwera got 1.46 million and Banda 1.06 million. The MCP draws most of its support from central Malawi, while Banda’s People’s Party is backed in the eastern region.
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20-MAY-2019 :: The "Kachumbari bond" Kenyan Economy |
Its not often that the Annals of Gastronomy and Finance meet unlike in the days of yore when I traded the French markets and Sherveen used to put me up in a suite in The Meurice and we would both quaff some very fine wine [Chateau Margaux to be precise] at the Jules Verne restaurant which was half way up the Eiffel Tower.
Kenya sold $2.1b of ''“Kachumbari'' Eurobonds last week. Its not clear where the naming impulse came from but for clarity's sake, Kachumbari is a fresh tomato and onion salad dish that is popular in the cuisines of East Africa. It is an uncooked salad dish consisting of chopped tomatoes, onions, and chili peppers. The Swahili word kachumbari originated from the Indian word cachumber. Therefore, I approve of the appellation because it speaks with some subtlety to an Indian Ocean heritage and in a circular manner brings us to Andrew Korybko's point that
The "Indian Ocean Region" is expected to become the geostrategic center of gravity and that Kenya is not only a land based Transit State but also a Gateway to the Indian Ocean Economy.
Linguistics and Gastronomy aside Kenya sold $900 million seven-year bonds priced at 7% and $1.2b 12-year paper at 8%. These rates were achieved without the IMF's Precautionary Facility. The pricing was much lower than the initial pricing thoughts of 7.5% and 8.5%. Investors placed bids for a total $9.5 billion.
It would be churlish not to recognise this as frankly an outstanding Outcome especially when you consider the International backdrop. The Tariff War has intensified and the worry is that the curve continues to accelerate. Emerging and Frontier markets are shivering as they start to factor in the China - Emerging and Frontier Markets [Add Germany to that mix] Feedback loop Phenomenon. If China sneezes a whole lot of Countries are going to get a very serious bout of influenza. Interestingly, In our case, we are relatively immune to this phenomenon because China is not a Big Taker [Avocado hopes aside] of our Exports. Therefore, when you contextualise the Bond I find myself agreeing with Vinita Kotedia, macro-strategist for sub-Saharan Africa at EFG-Hermes who said
“It’s a very favorable rate given that Kenya hasn’t finalized an agreement with the IMF, It looks like investors were more focused on the credibility of debt issues out of Kenya, and they aren’t too worried.”
“There’s a broad consensus and agreement that Kenya does not face a balance of payments crisis similar to a country like Zambia,” Qureishi said [Bloomberg]
What is clear to me is that There is a significant perception Gap between what International Investors are seeing and the domestic perspective.
The proceeds will be used to fund infrastructure projects, general budgetary spending and refinance part or all of a $750 million dollar bond that will mature on June 24, the ministry said. Net New Money is $1.35b. How this is now deployed is crucial.
What was also interesting is that Both tenors of the new bond will be amortized at $300 million and $400 million respectively for the 7- and 12-year tenors annually in the last three years to maturity in order to avoid a surge in repayments, the Treasury said in the statement. This is a welcome more sophisticated nuance from the Treasury because it significantly reduces the ''bunching effect'' risk [the bullet repayment risk] and I am sure went some way to boosting the price.
BondHolders the World over are known as ''Vigilantes'' So what do they see? that we are not seeing? They see 51m Kenyans [Future TaxPayers, of course] , good quality human capital [evidenced in the ever rising remittance curve which is exactly the monetisation of human capital] and a wide-open Opportunity.
When I first arrived on the Trading Floor at Credit Suisse First Boston, every desk station had a Sun Microsystems computer and the Big Swingers had three in fact. Vinod Khosla who was one of the Founders of Sun Microsystems and bagged more than a $1b said this
''The Future is not seen in the Rear View Mirror''
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