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Macro Thoughts

As she sits quietly waiting, it seems the toil & tribulations of a
Prime Minister is deeply etched for all to see.

U.K. PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal was rejected once again by
Parliament, throwing the country deeper into political crisis and
raising the prospect that the divorce will be delayed or even
reversed. Pound remains >$1.30.

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.”
My mind looped back to my Layla was because Financial Times’s David
Pilling asked me about Theresa May’s visit to Africa.

Home Thoughts

The confusions about the Taliban movement are perhaps em- bodied most
strikingly in a single man: Mullah Muhammad Omar. The group’s
notorious supreme leader came to the world’s attention first for
demolishing his country’s giant Buddha statues, and then for his
refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden in the wake of the September 11th
attacks.
Upon the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he effectively
vanished, becoming one of the most wanted men in the world, along with
bin Laden. The U.S. placed a ten mil- lion-dollar bounty on his head,
but was unable to find him.
“Mullah Omar is gone, but he is alive with us, and we are fighting in
his name and in his spirit.”
The story that emerges is that the U.S., and almost everyone else, had
it wrong. After 2001, Mullah Omar never stepped foot in Pakistan,
instead opting to hide in his native land— and for eight years, lived
just a few miles from a major U.S. Forward Operating Base that housed
thousands of soldiers.
he remained the Taliban’s spiritual lodestar, a fact that may seem
puzzling to outsiders but becomes sensible when we consider his appeal
in terms of the type of ascetic, Sufi-inspired religiosity common in
the southern Afghan heartlands.
This type of charisma was based not on eloquence or fiery soundbites,
but rather by cultivating the perception of an otherworldly, selfless,
guileless persona that seemed to many Talibs the antidote to the
corrupted materialism around them. The contrast to the worldly Osama
bin Laden could not be greater.
I’ve pieced together Mullah Omar’s life after 2001. He never lived in
Pakistan. Instead, he spent the remainder of his life in a pair of
small villages in the remote, mountainous province of Zabul.
“If we spoke, we spoke very softly,” Jabbar Omari said. “We put
pillows and straw against the door, so nobody could hear us.” Once,
Jabbar Omari asked Mullah Omar if he missed his family, and he simply
shook his head.
He offered to bring his son Yaqub to visit, but Mullah Omar refused.
Another time, Jabbar Omari remarked to his companion, “Look at us. We
cannot go anywhere.” Mullah Omar only replied, “It is a bless- ing
from God that we can be here.”
There wasn’t much for Jabbar Omari to do except to prepare the meals
and clean dishes. Mullah Omar preferred to eat and pray alone, and
occasionally, even cooked for himself.
Often, the two men would only interact when washing their hands and
feet in the kitchen before prayer. He didn’t talk much, and had
stopped articulating any wishes or ambitions, Jabbar Om- ari said.
He only asked for his supply of henna, which he regu- larly used to
color his graying beard, and naswar, the local to- bacco that he often
put behind his lower lip.
He only interacted with the host family in Siuray, when he paid the
two brothers Pakistani rupees for their help in buying groceries.“He
loved being alone,” Jabbar Omari told me.
Sometimes, Mullah Omar recorded Quranic verses on an old Nokia
telephone he kept so he could listen to them later.
He used the phone, which had no SIM card, for that purpose alone.
“Mullah Omar refused to make calls,” Jabbar Omari told me. “He didn’t
want to be discovered.”
In early 2013, Mullah Omar fell ill. He started coughing and vomiting
and told Jabbar Omari that he would not recover.
Jabbar Omari made shurwa soup, one of his favorite dishes, to to try
to re-energize him, but he could no longer eat. T
o Jab- bar Omari, Mullah Omar seemed to have resigned himself to his
fate. When Jabbar Omari insisted on getting a doctor, he refused.
According to Zargay, Ustaz offered to drive Mullah Omar to hospitals
in Pakistan, but he declined.
On April 23, 2013, Mullah Omar passed away. That day, Jabbar Omari
told me, the hot, dry lands of southern Afghanistan experienced
something he’d never seen before: a hail storm.
I assumed it was hagiographic bluster, but later I found a U.S. army
publication referring to that day: “More than 80 Task Force Falcon
helicopters were damaged when a sudden unprecedented hailstorm hit
Kandahar Airfield April 23, where nearly half of the brigade’s
helicopters were parked.”
As far as we know, Mullah Omar never attempted to actively rally his
own troops after the fall of the Taliban. Nor did he ever attempt to
admonish the Taliban for their own crimes against civilians.
Instead, he simply removed himself from the practical world.
Ironically, this appears to have served the in- terests of both the
Taliban and the United States.
The Taliban utilized him to unify and cohere a disjointed movement,
while the U.S. policy in Afghanistan was linked ultimately to the idea
that Mullah Omar and bin Laden were in league together.
In this way, Mullah Omar’s importance lay in what he represented to
both sides, not in what he actually did.

VOA: Do you know that the US has announced a war on terrorism?

Omar: I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the
other is that of Bush. The promise of God is that my land is vast. If
you start a journey on God's path, you can reside anywhere on this
earth and will be protected... The promise of Bush is that there is no
place on earth where you can hide that I cannot find you. We will see
which one of these two promises is fulfilled.

Flag bearers from all 53 Commonwealth countries will process their
flags during the service.
🇬🇧🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿🇿🇦🇮🇳🇵🇰🇱🇰🇬🇭🇲🇾🇳🇬🇨🇾🇸🇱🇹🇿🇯🇲🇹🇹🇺🇬🇰🇪🇲🇼🇲🇹🇿🇲🇬🇲🇸🇬🇬🇾🇧🇼🇱🇸🇧🇧🇲🇺🇸🇿🇳🇷🇼🇸🇹🇴🇧🇩🇫🇯🇬🇩🇧🇸🇸🇨🇵🇬🇹🇻🇸🇧🇱🇨🇩🇲🇻🇨🇰🇮🇧🇿🇻🇺🇰🇳🇦🇬🇳🇦🇧🇳🇲🇿🇨🇲🇷🇼
–
https://twitter.com/wabbey/status/1105114209682116609

Commonwealth’s Secretary General Patricia Scotland ‘’the Commonwealth
is one third of humanity''
I blinked when I saw the raw data, that there are 2.4b of us and that
in fact the Commonwealth is bigger than Facebook.
 Today the vast majority of us in the Commonwealth are ‘’born free’’
and whilst I appreciate Emmanuel Macron’s comment;
‘’I don’t want to belong to a ge- neration of sleepwalkers which has
forgotten its own past and which refuses to face up to the problems of
its own present’’
Our Reality is a new and fresh one. The richness of the Commonwealth
Tapestry is in fact found in our common Literature.
Think of Writers like Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman
Rushdie all of whom notwithstanding their ethnic and geographical
particularity, were dealing with issues that touched on all of us; an
experience of cultural confusion, linguistic and physical dislocation,
a reassertion of self consciousness and a search for identity.
The freshly minted Commonwealth Youth Ambassador Prince Harry said
“60% of the Commonwealth is under the age of 30 and at 1.4 billion
strong, it is you who are going to change the world.”
Prince Harry added : “You are the most optimistic, connected
generation the world has ever known”.
Once we used to send Aerograms [Does anyone recall them?] across the
Commonwealth and Today the Mobile Phone has dissolved the distances
and connected us all practically in real time.
Martin Sutherland, the De La Rue CEO said ‘’There are 2.4 billion
people in the #commonwealth and we need to tap into it, that’s a
massive talent pool. De La Rue are doing this but all businesses can
do more’
Interestingly, De la Rue has been operating at the Coal-Face of this
Commonwealth Economy for quite a while.
According to the raw data, the Commonwealth boasts a combined Gross
National Income of $10.7 trillion and this is expected to rise to $14
trillion by 2020.

Yang, in case you haven’t heard of her yet, is a Florida businesswoman
whose family owns a chain of massage parlors that, as The Miami Herald
put it, “have gained a reputation for offering sexual services.”
Last month, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a
close friend of and donor to Trump, was charged with two counts of
soliciting prostitution at a spa Yang founded, Orchids of Asia
On Friday, The Herald reported that Yang attended a Super Bowl party
at Trump’s West Palm Beach country club, where the president was
cheering on Kraft’s team. It turns out that Yang was something of a
regular in MAGA-land, posing for selfies with Trump, his adult sons,
Kellyanne Conway and others. According to The Herald, she and her
relatives donated $42,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee
and more than $16,000 to Trump’s campaign. Last February, she was
invited to the White House for an event put on by Trump’s
Asian-American and Pacific Islander Initiative, an advisory
commission.
Both Mother Jones and The Herald found evidence that Yang, who
emigrated from China, ran a business, GY US Investments, selling
Chinese executives access to Trump, his family and Republican
officials. According to Mother Jones, she claimed to have gotten her
clients into the most recent New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago resort. The Herald reported that Yang arranged for a group
of Chinese businessmen to attend a Trump fund-raising event in 2017 in
Manhattan at which tickets, which foreigners can’t legally pay for,
started at $2,700. Her Chinese-language website, which appears to have
been  taken down, said she was hosting a conference at Mar-a-Lago
later this month; Trump’s sister was listed as the guest speaker.
Both Mother Jones and The Herald found evidence that Yang, who
emigrated from China, ran a business, GY US Investments, selling
Chinese executives access to Trump, his family and Republican
officials. According to Mother Jones, she claimed to have gotten her
clients into the most recent New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago resort. The Herald reported that Yang arranged for a group
of Chinese businessmen to attend a Trump fund-raising event in 2017 in
Manhattan at which tickets, which foreigners can’t legally pay for,
started at $2,700. Her Chinese-language website, which appears to have
been  taken down, said she was hosting a conference at Mar-a-Lago
later this month; Trump’s sister was listed as the guest speaker.
As Prescott points out, when Trump met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
of Japan at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, a club member snapped photos as the
two men discussed a North Korean missile launch. “If you were
interested in information about how the president is conducting the
public business while at the club, there are a number of routes in,”
Prescott said.

Euro 1.1283
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Japan Yen 111.37
Swiss Franc 1.0080
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Aussie 0.7056
India Rupee 69.715
South Korea Won 1132.76
Brazil Real 3.8127
Egypt Pound 17.45
South Africa Rand 14.3791

Emerging Markets

Frontier Markets

The collapsing regime of Algerian autocrat Abdelaziz Bouteflika is a
warning to dictators everywhere. If you want to keep your job, live in
obscene wealth and deny your citizens basic freedoms, don’t let your
economy swirl down the toilet. The people tend to get agitated when
they’re out of work as the rich get richer.
Mr. Bouteflika, 82, Algeria’s President since 1999 and a veteran of
the country’s 1954-62 war of independence against France, had a nice
run until 2014, when oil prices collapsed.
On Monday, he reversed his decision to seek a fifth term as president.
His resignation was triggered by weeks of mass protests as millions of
young Algerians took to the streets, demanding the departure of their
incapacitated leader – he had a severe stroke in 2013 – and an
overhaul of the political system to give them a voice and a realistic
shot at nabbing some of the country’s dwindling riches for themselves.
It’s no accident that Mr. Bouteflika and his inner circle of political
cronies and army generals came under extreme political pressure in
recent years. The Algerian economy, while not technically in
recession, was no longer creating jobs for its young people even as
the elite hung onto their wealth or got even richer.
It would not have been lost on Algeria’s youth that the Arab Spring
revolutions began in the no-hope centre of neighbouring Tunisia, when
an impoverished vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on
fire. Tunisia erupted in protests and, a month later, Tunisia’s
dictator fled the country as the uprisings began to roll through Libya
and Egypt.
The Algerian economy is a one-product wonder – energy. A member of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Algeria is utterly
dependent on oil and natural gas.
It is OPEC’s ninth-biggest oil producer, the world’s sixth-largest gas
producer and the third-largest supplier of gas to the European Union,
which covets Algeria’s role as a counterbalance to Russian gas
exports.
The country’s energy exports funded lavish state spending in the past
decade, when oil prices peaked at US$147 a barrel and Algeria’s
treasury overflowed with dollars.
For Mr. Bouteflika, the handouts were a socio-economic necessity. They
helped to buy peace and goodwill after a near-decade of civil war,
when as many as 200,000 Algerians died in the savage battles between
the state’s military forces and Islamic militias.
The spending accelerated in 2011, when Mr. Bouteflika’s regime,
fearing that the Arab Spring uprisings would light up Algeria’s
streets, as they did in Tunis, Tripoli and Cairo, opened the spending
spigots (Saudi Arabia did the same).
The government got away with its financially reckless plan until the
oil crash of 2014 and 2015, which sent prices plummeting from US$110
to less than US$40. Suddenly, Algeria was facing an economic crisis.
The crisis was made doubly worse because Mr. Bouteflika and his
economically illiterate and reform-allergic ministers had failed to
diversify the economy away from energy, or rein in the bloated
bureaucracy and fight the corruption and nepotism that allowed Mr.
Bouteflika’s cronies and generals to live like princes.
When the regime found it impossible to keep the spending intact, it
cut budgets. At the same time, it launched an expansionary monetary
policy – money printing – which stoked inflation and crimped buying
power.
It was Algeria’s youth who suffered the most as job creation went
nowhere. Their jobless rate is estimated at 29 per cent, well more
than double the national average.
The statistic is alarming when you consider that Algeria has a very
young population – 70 per cent are under the age of 30.
For years, the anger and frustration among young Algerians has been
building; rage set in last month, when Mr. Bouteflika, who Algerians
consider the “living dead” – he has almost never been seen in public
since his stroke six years ago – announced he would seek a fifth term
as president. It took three weeks of protests to shut him down.
Next door, little Tunisia is going through a similar youth crisis.
While the country has embraced democracy and can boast thriving
civil-society organizations and genuine press freedom, its youth are
losing hope for a bright future, as they are in Algeria.
Tunisian youth unemployment is 30 per cent and 50 per cent or more in
the interior parts of the country, where grinding poverty is rife, to
the point some families are going hungry.
The number of self-immolations – successful and attempted – has been
estimated at 2,300 since the 2011 revolution. They are a dramatic and
tragic form of protest and most of the self-immolations are done in
public.
Sudan’s autocratic regime may be the next victim of a failing economy.
Since January, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, another aging tyrant
– he’s subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal
Court – has faced a flurry of anti-government protests.
Sudan’s economy is close to collapse and fuel and bread shortages are
common. The economy is suffering from runaway inflation and youth
unemployment is similar to Tunisia’s and Algeria’s.
This will not end well for Mr. al-Bashir, as it didn’t end well for
Mr. Bouteflika. Dictators can get away with extreme bad behaviour as
long as their economies produce jobs and wealth for their citizens.
When they don’t, watch out. Many of Africa’s jobless youth want
democracy; most want a decent living and seem to be willing to take to
the streets to get it.

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’.

Dollar versus Rand 6 Month Chart INO 14.3673
https://quotes.ino.com/charting/index.html?s=FOREX_USDZAR&t=f&a=&w=&v=d12

Egypt Pound versus The Dollar Chart INO 17.425
https://quotes.ino.com/charting/index.html?s=FOREX_USDEGP&t=f&a=&w=&v=d12

Egypt EGX30 Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CASE:IND

Nigeria All Share Bloomberg -0.37% 2019
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/NGSEINDX:IND

Ghana's currency in the last few minutes has just become the cheapest
in Africa - (at GHS5.745/$) - based on our real effective exchange
rate model. Despite a current account covered by FDI and double-digit
interest rates #cedi

Jumia has filed to launch its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange,
documents from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show.
The intended IPO is a landmark first for e-commerce and tech
businesses on the continent. It could also mark a possible exit by
Rocket Internet, Jumia’s German parent company, divesting its
remaining 28% stake in the company.
Specifics on the IPO details, such as timeline of the listing and
share price, are expected to be determined in coming weeks. But it is
widely expected Jumia will be Africa’s first tech unicorn—a venture
funded company valued at more than $1 billion. It will trade under as
JMIA on the NYSE.
As part of its pitch to shareholders, Jumia cites itself as “the only
e-commerce business successfully operating across multiple regions in
Africa” with four million active customers of December last year.
That status is the result of a reshuffling as several of Rocket
Internet’s African online businesses across food delivery, real
estate, hotel and flight bookings were reorganized under the Jumia
brand in 2016—the same year it reached a billion-dollar valuation
after an $83 million investment from insurance company AXA for an 8%
stake.
It also notes its add-on services including Jumia Logistics, its
product delivery arm, and Jumia Pay, its payments solution, as added
assets.
But its SEC filing documents also show the company’s pan-African model
has so far seen hundreds of millions of dollars in losses mounting
each year by far exceeding revenue the company has been able to
generate.
As of Dec. 31 2018, the filings show the company has accumulated
losses of nearly $1 billion.
Last year Jumia’s losses widened to $195.2 million on revenue of just
$149.6 million. The company, which operates in 14 African countries
including Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt, is also burning through
cash with negative operating cash flows of $159.2 million.
As part of its “Risk Factors” for potential investors it cites the
continued losses as a lack of guarantee that it will “achieve or
sustain profitability” or “pay any cash dividends” in the foreseeable
future.
The company also claims competition and “more aggressive pricing
policies” from rivals including South Africa’s Takealot and Egypt’s
Souq.com could negatively impact its business.

E-commerce and home-based deliveries have changed the world from
London to China. I am certain the same disruption is headed our way
and that a lot of commercial real-estate will be legacy assets. The
millenials with their avocado-eating and cryptocurrency trading ways
are just as likely to be African as they are European or American.

Past French presidents have arrived in office promising to move
France’s African policy beyond its focus on propping up former
colonies. Each one has gotten dragged back in.
Emmanuel Macron’s three-day trip to Africa this week is meant to boost
trade with Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries that were never
controlled by France. Still, the trip takes place against a backdrop
of deepening French military involvement across West Africa, where
France has been battling militants since 2013, and recent airstrikes
in Chad to support President Idriss Deby. Former colony Djibouti, the
third country he’s visiting, hosts France’s largest foreign military
base.

Nairobi All Share Bloomberg +10.48% 2019
http://www.BLOOMBERG.COM/quote/NSEASI:IND

Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg +1.84% 2019
http://j.mp/ajuMHJ

Every Listed Share can be interrogated here
http://www.rich.co.ke/rcdata/nsestocks.php

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.”

Cement consumption declined for the second consecutive year, down 4.7%
y/y to 5.5M tons. Notably, cement production declined faster at 8.5%
y/y to 5.6M tons as a number of cement firms faced production
difficulties occasioned by slow ramping up of new capacities, working
capital challenges and plant break downs due to inadequate
maintenance.