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Tuesday 12th of March 2019 |
Morning Africa |
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Macro Thoughts |
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PM @theresa_may will give @UKParliament a 'meaningful' Brexit vote on Tuesday: spokesman @Reuters Africa |
British Prime Minister Theresa May will hold the so-called a meaningful vote on her Brexit deal on Tuesday as planned, her spokesman said after media reports that she could downgrade the status of the vote. The spokesman said the government’s motion which will be debated and voted on would be published later on Monday. “It will be a meaningful vote,” the spokesman told reporters after being asked what the vote on Tuesday would entail - whether it would be on the Brexit deal as it stands or on a hoped-for deal that includes limitations to the so-called Irish backstop that have not as yet been agreed in Brussels.
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Africa |
The gains have seen sterling become the best-performing Group-of-10 currency this year as the prospects of a resolution to the tortuous Brexit progress have improved as the March 29 deadline approaches. The pound traded at $1.3218 as of 11:25 a.m. in Singapore.
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12-MAR-2019 :: Roadtrip to Garissa Africa |
Bruce Lee the Kung Fu King said
''Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no Frontier''
Jack Kerouac who wrote The book ''On the Road'' in which the Protagonists, Sal Paradise, and his friend Dean Moriarty criss cross America and Dean said
“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.' 'Where we going, man?' 'I don't know but we gotta go.”
Well My Friend Abdullahi Sheikh had been telling me we should go on a Road Trip to Garissa and considerably beyond. The Northern Frontier District has always had a hold on my imagination. Abdullahi said we'll go with Simba Guleid [Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC) CEO] and the former Deputy Chief Kadhi, Rashid Ali Soyan. I thought to myself if I am going to see what's going on up close and personal, I couldn't go with a better and more connected crew. We drove 366 Kms from Nairobi to Garissa, put down our bags and drove another 200 kms close to the Daadab Refugee Camp. The last 70 kms were off road. We arrived at a Village called Saldig. I drank fresh camel milk and ate an evidently recently slaughtered Goat. It was a very beautiful experience. I have read many books about various Explorers who spent their time with Pastoralists and Nomads and they always write a graciousness and an old world courtliness with which you are received which is something you don't find anymore. I watched the sunset, and we arrived back at 9pm and on our return leg we probably passed about 5 vehicles.
Garissa definitely had a Buzz and a spring in its step. I tend to find statistics can tell you so much but kicking the tyres tells you much more. Are People busy or are there many Folks standing about not doing anything. How busy are the Motorcycle Folks? On all counts, Garissa has the Big Momentum. Of course, if you look at the statistics, Isiolo Samburu Lamu Marsabit Tana River Mandera Wajir Garissa West Pokot are the Counties that are lagging. In fact, all these Counties constitute about 2.5% of the Total County GDP.
Abdullahi said to me ''Each Camel costs about 100,000/='' He added there are about 650,000 camels in Garissa County and 2.5m in the Northern Frontier District.
I said ''Thats $650m'' I have not drilled into this but it would be interesting to know how the Livestock Economy fits into our GDP methodology. The Point is There is a low base Effect and its a consequence of marginalisation. It is worth also pointing out that 18 of the 20 most affected Countries by Climate Change are in Africa and the Horn of Africa is seen as the epicentre. Forage is being dried out and reduced and its not clear to me that the ground can support much more of a livestock economy. Therefore, these economies in the North will have to pivot some.
Simba said to me ''Devolution has brought much needed liquidity.''
As I stood in that village on the edge of the Kenyan Frontier and listened carefully to these Folks, I kept thinking these are resilient People. We know appreciate that Human Capital is the most valuable Capital of all.
The Horn of Africa has been characterised as an ungoverned space. Ungoverned spaces are defined as zones that lay beyond the reaches of the central government. The prevailing view holds that the more remote they are, the more vulnerable they become to the lure of violent radicalization and extremism. Prime Minister Abiy is keen to exploit the Gas in the Ogaden. If he seeks with regional Leadership to seriously stabilise [and not just pacify] the Somali-speaking part of the Horn [Somalia, Ethiopia] then I predict the Horn will exert a meaningful ''Pull'' Effect on this part of Kenya. It is worth noting that US Airstrikes in Somalia have however flown off the charts.
“People need to pay attention to the fact that there is this massive war going on,” said Brittany Brown [NY Times]. The United States estimates that the Shabab has about 5,000 to 7,000 fighters in Somalia, but the group’s ranks are fluid. A State Department official, citing interviews from Shabab deserters, said that the number of hard-core ideologues may be as few as 500.
“It could be there is some well-thought-out strategy behind all of this,” Mr. Schwartz added, “but I really doubt it.”
“We go after the network when the network presents itself, whether a single node or a concentration,” he said. “We’ve developed intelligence and are sussing out the relationship between the leadership and those being led; between those being led and those being trained or recruited or massed for an attack.” “We understand the network better than we have in years past,” General Olson said.
This pacification or is it a decapitation strategy has not borne results.
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Garissa Africa |
Garissa is located at 0°27′25″S 39°39′30″E. The Tana River, which rises in Mount Kenya East of Nyeri, flows through the Garissa. Most of Garissa's inhabitants are ethnic Somali.[2] These are further sub-divided into clans, with the Ogaden sub-clan of the Somali Darod especially well represented. There are also a small number of other minority ethnic groups, commonly referred to as corner tribes. Livestock production is a significant part of the town's economy. Garissa has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification BSh). Garissa's landscape is mostly arid, desert terrain. The city lies along the Tana River, and has a very warm/hot climate due to the low elevation and distance from cooler coastal areas. The daytime temperature typically rises above 33 °C (91 °F) every day, but cools down every night (see chart below).
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How the giraffe got its neck: @NewYorker Africa |
It’s difficult to know what to make of the giraffe. It shuffles like a camel (right legs forward, then left legs) but runs like a rabbit (hind legs forward, then front legs). Its distinctive aroma repulses many ticks but enchants certain people. It bellows, hisses, and moans in the wild, and in captivity it hums in the dark. It naps with its head aloft but sleeps like a swan, with its head on its haunches. Had Aristotle ever seen a giraffe, he might have said that it was the product of an interspecies dalliance at the watering hole, which he thought of as a kind of zoological swingers’ club—a place where “bastard animals are born to heterogeneous pairs.” Centuries of further guesswork failed to clarify the giraffe’s essential nature. Simone Sigoli, a Renaissance traveller, wrote that it had the body of an ostrich, only with fine white wool instead of feathers, and that it ate bread. “It is quite a deformed thing to see,” he concluded. Sigoli’s contemporary Sir John Mandeville (likely the pseudonym of a travel-averse plagiarist) described the “gerfaunts” of Arabia as deer-rumped horses. For the eunuch general Zheng He, who brought a giraffe home to Beijing, in 1415, it was a mythical qílín incarnate. Not until the seventeenth century did the English, who fixated on the giraffe’s camel-ish shape and leopard-ish coloring, stop calling it a camelopard. Today, of course, we recognize the giraffe as a distinct species, though the misapprehensions of the past endure in the animal’s Linnaean name: Giraffa camelopardalis.
And then there’s that neck. Why is it so long? Unlike the swan and the ostrich, which have a surplus of neck bones, the giraffe has seven cervical vertebrae, the standard count for a mammal. But each one is eleven inches in length. A human’s entire spine, by comparison, is about two feet from top to bottom, not much longer than a giraffe’s tongue. (Fynes Moryson, a Scotsman who went to Constantinople in 1597, was distressed to find that the giraffe in the palace menagerie there was able to plant “familiar kisses” on him from great range.) The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck held that a giraffe was merely an antelope whose progenitors had strained their necks toward higher and higher branches for food. Charles Darwin gave barely a thought to the neck problem—it didn’t appear in his magnum opus, “On the Origin of Species,” until the sixth edition—but he favored a similar, if more scientifically rigorous, explanation. In periods of drought, he suggested, when all the other animals on the savannah were scrounging at eye level, Giraffa sprouted the evolutionary equivalent of an EZ Reacher, which gave it access to a private larder in the succulent crowns of the acacia trees, a privilege it passed on to its offspring. “It seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe,” Darwin wrote, echoing Lamarck. The theory was accepted as gospel for decades, until researchers noticed two problems. First, no other quadrupeds underwent such a conversion: the giraffe remained the lankiest thing around. And second, the animal grazed with its neck horizontal about half the time, feeding on the same bushes and shrubs as everyone else. (As Edgar Williams notes in his book “Giraffe,” the animal is a born topiarist, “giving a manicured appearance to the savannah.”)
Another popular theory involved sexual selection. To establish social dominance, male giraffes engage in a practice known as necking, swinging their heads at each other and trying to score a hit with their ossicones, the horn-like growths on their skulls. (Afterward they make up, sometimes quite bawdily.) For the neck to be a primarily sexual characteristic, it would need to be larger in males than in females, like a fiddler crab’s fiddle claw—but it isn’t. Although males are indeed taller and heavier than females, the sexes’ necks are proportional. Yet another theory, less widely accepted than the first two, posits that the giraffe’s long neck is compensation for its long legs. (You try bending down to drink on those things.) The neck’s true provenance is perhaps some combination of these theories. As Darwin wrote, “The preservation of each species can rarely be determined by any one advantage, but by the union of all, great and small.”
A new paper, published today in the journal Nature Communications, addresses the issue from a genetic perspective. The lead authors of the study—Morris Agaba, of the Nelson Mandela African Institute for Science and Technology, in Tanzania; and Douglas Cavener, of Pennsylvania State University—seem less interested in why the giraffe’s neck is so long than in how and when it got that way, a question they investigate by comparing the giraffe’s genome to that of its closest living relative, the okapi. At first glance, the family resemblance is easy to miss. Okapis dwell in the lush equatorial forests of the Congo, and were not discovered by Western zoologists until the Victorian era. They are normal-necked and about the size of a small horse, with the coloring of a chocolate Labrador on top and zebrine stripes around their legs. And yet nearly a fifth of the proteins that their genes encode are identical to those of giraffes. (Another similarity: both animals are cloven-hoofed cud-chewers, which makes their meat kosher.) Agaba, Cavener, and their colleagues estimate that the two species diverged about eleven and a half million years ago, fairly recently on the evolutionary time scale. By cross-referencing the animals’ genomes, the researchers were able to focus on seventy giraffe genes that show unique signs of adaptation. Fully two-thirds of these DNA snippets control aspects of development and physiology.
Consider, for a moment, the biomechanical quandaries involved in being a giraffe. To get blood from your heart to your brain, a vertical distance of at least six feet, requires blood pressure two and a half times higher than a human’s. Every time you bend down for a drink, spreading your front legs a little in order to get lower, the blood rushes to your head and you risk stroke. Every time you straighten up, the blood rushes back and you risk fainting. And when you’re standing, gravity causes fluid to pool in your lower extremities, which makes them swell. The giraffe manages these handicaps with a suite of anatomical innovations. Its heart is “turbocharged,” according to Agaba and Cavener, small in proportion to the animal’s over-all size but with tremendously thick walls. The veins, arteries, and capillaries are rugged, too, behaving as a kind of dampening system to prevent the blood from sloshing around willy-nilly. And the giraffe’s skin, tough and tight-fitting, performs the same task as a compression stocking. (The Victorian explorer Henry Stanley had to melt down his zinc canteens to make bullets hard enough to penetrate the giraffe’s hide.) The adaptations are also neurological. A giraffe’s left laryngeal nerve, for instance, which controls the muscles in its voice box, must wind some fifteen feet through the neck, even though the distance between the brain and larynx is only about six inches as the crow flies. And, if the prospect of swallowing food down such a long neck is startling, recall that giraffes are ruminants, and that whatever goes down must also come up. Their esophageal muscles are correspondingly strong.
The seventy genes that Agaba and Cavener’s group examined doubtless play a role in many of these adaptations, regulating which regions of the embryonic giraffe’s skeleton expand and how much, and instructing the developing vascular and nervous systems how to compensate. In fact, the paper’s authors suggest that the giraffe’s stature and its physiology may have co-evolved, with each growth spurt accompanied by, say, sturdier blood vessels or thicker skin. The team is unveiling a new initiative, the Giraffe Genome Project, to continue their inquiries. In the meantime, the camel-like, rabbit-like, swan-like, ostrich-like giraffe will remain one of nature’s curiosities, its neck swaying faintly as it shuffles across the savannah.
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Law & Politics |
The Chavez Revolution was always a rebellion in the Superpower’s back yard and the machine was eventually going to bring it to heel by hook or by crook.
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Pentagon warns of 'grave consequences' should Turkey buy Russian missile system Law & Politics |
“They will not get the F-35s if they take the S-400,” he added, later indicating the potential Patriot sale would also be blocked. The comments came a few days after U.S. European Command head Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said it would be his best military advice to bar Turkey from getting the F-35, should the country continue on the path of procuring the S-400. On March 6, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told local television channels that not only will Turkey stick to its S-400 acquisition plans, but it might also seek the more advanced S-500 in the future. "We signed a deal with Russia for the purchase of S-400, and will start co-production. It’s done,” Erdoğan said, according to local translations. “There can never be a turning back. This would not be ethical, it would be immoral. Nobody should ask us to lick up what we spat. Later, we may work with S-500s.”
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Kim Jong Un is showing signs he might fire his first rocket in 15 months. Long-time observers suspect he is bluffing. @business Law & Politics |
Two days after Kim’s summit with U.S. President Donald Trump broke down over sanctions relief and disarmament steps last month, satellite images showed that North Korea was rebuilding a long-range rocket site it recently dismantled. The activity suggests that the country could be preparing to launch a missile or satellite that would push back against Trump while providing valuable data to improve his weapons capability.
“It is a big gamble,” said Jenny Town, managing editor for the North Korea-focused 38 North website. “If North Korea does launch a satellite, it could derail all of North Korea’s diplomatic goodwill built up over the past year.”
Any launch would be the first since Kim fired off an intercontinental ballistic missile in November 2017 capable of reaching any U.S. city and declared his weapons program complete. Just prepping a potential launch site sends a pointed message to Trump, who has repeatedly cited Kim’s decision to refrain from weapons tests to justify his controversial decision to engage the North Korean leader one on one.
“North Korea’s message is that doing a deal with it and easing sanctions are the best way to stop its provocations.”
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18 SEP 17 :: "A screaming comes across the sky" North Korea. @TheStarKenya Law & Politics |
Gravity’s Rainbow is a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon which is about the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the “Schwarzgerät” (black device), slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000”. As the world watches PyongYang, I cannot help wondering if Kim Jong-Un has read Pynchon which speaks of “A screaming comes across the sky” and North Korea.
“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -guessed and refused to believe -that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.’’
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Ruling with one foot in the grave @mailandguardian @simonallison Africa |
On the morning of April 5, in his official residence in Lilongwe, President Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi had a fatal heart attack. That was not the end of his presidency, however. Even as his corpse decomposed, he would go on to govern for two more days while his staff pretended that everything was just fine. Mutharika’s death was unexpected, and so, as his would-be successors fought among themselves, his administration insisted that he was still alive until they were blue in the face. Not, admittedly, as blue as poor Mutharika himself, whose body was flown to a hospital in South Africa for “medical treatment” in a desperate attempt to keep up the facade. It was only on the morning of April 7 that his death was officially confirmed, and the vice-president allowed to assume power — and only after a pointed intervention from South African diplomats, who threatened to break the news themselves. The Mutharika incident — let’s call it “Weekend at Bingu’s” — is the only documented example of an African president literally ruling from beyond the grave. But others have at least one foot in it, fatally compromising their ability to do their jobs. Right now, in Algeria, 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is seeking his fifth term. He has been in charge since 1999. But he was paralysed after a stroke in 2013 and has not spoken in public since then. Most observers believe he is too ill to wield real power. Video footage and photographs of the president, showing a wizened, decrepit man with barely the strength to sign his own name, support this diagnosis. Algerians agree, judging by the tens of thousands of people who have braved the brutal response from state security forces to demonstrate, calling for Bouteflika to step down before next year’s election. In response, Bouteflika — or the generals pulling his strings — has promised to leave office within a year of being elected. That’s assuming his body holds out for that long. Another president who appears to be governing from his deathbed is Gabon’s Ali Bongo, who had a stroke in Saudi Arabia in October. He has returned home just twice since then, choosing to convalesce in Morocco instead. Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari made the same call when he became ill with an undisclosed illness, seeking medical attention in the United Kingdom. Buhari had to hand over power to his vice-president for months at a time during his first term in office. In the absence of official information, speculation about the president’s health grew so wild that a rumour gained traction that Buhari had died and been replaced by a body double — a man named Jubril from Sudan. Although the Nigerian government likes to pretend its presidents are healthy when they are not, the opposite applies to terror groups: since 2009, security forces have repeatedly announced the death of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, only for him to turn up later in mocking YouTube videos. It is not hard to find other presidents who remained in power despite being obviously unfit to do so. The frail, nonagenarian Robert Mugabe would fall asleep at summits and stumble down stairs before being whisked to Singapore for mysterious medical treatments. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia disappeared from public view a month before he died, leaving it to his hapless spokespeople to deny there was a problem. In Guinea, Lansana Conté threatened journalists who dared mention his poor health, only to prove them all right by dying without a succession plan. Just a day after Conté’s death, the military seized power in a coup d’état. Being president is a physically demanding job. If Bingu wa Mutharika and Abdelaziz Bouteflika can teach us anything, it is that the concept of “fitness to hold office” should be taken as literally as possible.
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10 NOV 14 ::Ouagadougou's Signal to Sub-Sahara Africa Africa |
What’s clear is that a very young, very informed and very connected African youth demographic [many characterise this as a ‘demographic dividend’] – which for Beautiful Blaise turned into a demographic terminator – is set to alter the existing equilibrium between the rulers and the subjects, and a re-balancing has begun. We need to ask ourselves; how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1,000, 10,000? This is anotherpoint: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent can’t go. Where that threshold lies will be discovered in the throes of the event. Therefore, the preeminent point to note is that protests in Burkina Faso achieved escape velocity. Overthrowing incumbents is all about acceleration, momentum and speed best characterised by the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’.
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Ghana to Meet Investors This Week to Test Eurobond Demand @markets Africa |
Ghana will meet investors later this week to gauge appetite for its proposed sale of as much as $3 billion in Eurobonds, according to two people familiar with the matter. Officials will organize meetings in Boston, New York and London from Wednesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. If the feedback is favorable it may lead to an immediate issuance, but the ministry will return at a later date if price demands are too high, the people said. West Africa’s second-biggest economy needs $2 billion in foreign-currency debt to help finance its 2019 budget and will take on an additional $1 billion if it’s able to secure loans or securities at lower rates than it’s paying for existing liabilities. The country is going to the market at a time when the cedi is trading at a record low and is this year’s worst performer among 140 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta didn’t immediately answer a call for comment on the investor meetings. In a separate call earlier on Monday, Ofori-Atta said difficult budget demands were behind Ghana’s application for a $750 million bridge loan, even though the offshore bond sale would be imminent. The Finance Ministry presented a proposal for a syndicated facility to lawmakers last week. The short-term loan will be repaid as soon as the bond sale has been finalized. “First-quarter demands are quite challenging,” Ofori-Atta said. “The banks agreed to the bridge financing arrangement to help us meet our needs during the period.” Ghana is exiting a bailout program under the International Monetary Fund, with a final review due by April 4. The country entered the deal in 2015 when chronic budget overruns and a currency crisis caused inflation and its debt obligations to soar.
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04-MAR-2019 :: Meanwhile the Kenya Shilling crossed the psychologically important 100.00 mark last week Africa |
Meanwhile the Kenya Shilling crossed the psychologically important 100.00 mark last week. We underestimate the regional safe haven status of the currency and I have noticed that these downside moves in the Tanzanian Shilling are being mirrored by the strengthening of the Kenya Shilling. The GOK appears to be inclining towards heavier issuance in the Kenya Shilling with a tax Free Infrastructure Bond slated for sale. If this is the thinking, then I expect the Shilling to strengthen further as Kenya taps offshore funds. The Charts signal a move as far as 92.00 but that might be too bold.
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28-JAN-2019 :: A move below a 100.00 would catch a lot of people off-guard. Kenyan Economy |
Every January every year every forecast about the shilling predicts a 10%-15% devaluation. Its mind boggling. The key levers with regard to the shilling are the price of fuel [We have to write a cheque every month], inward Remittances [flew off the chart last year and its not clear to me if that bump will turn out to be ‘’amnesty’’ affected] and I think we underestimate the regional ‘’safe-haven’’ status that the Kenya Shilling has earned. A move below a 100.00 would catch a lot of people off-guard.
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