|
Thursday 27th of June 2019 |
Morning Africa |
Register and its all Free.
If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke
Macro Thoughts |
read more |
|
Fernando A. Flores's "Tears of the Trufflepig" @LAReviewofBooks Africa |
Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas is Fernando A. Flores’s first book, a collection of stories set largely in the fictionalized micro-universe that was the Rio Grande Valley punk and art scene of the 1990s. Readers who’ve outlasted their tour through the disaffected halls of any number of punk subcultures will find themselves massaging each bruise, precious as a badge, earned at an all-ages show, a house party, a dubiously legal warehouse. The writing was lyrical and exuded a preternaturally cool charisma. There’s genuine affection in these stories, for the characters, their lives, and the world that surrounds them. In short, the collection announced a new talent, buzzing with all the promise of a three-piece garage band. The fine people at the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation agreed and awarded Flores a grant in order to complete his debut novel, the book that would become Tears of the Trufflepig. Where Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas was hyper-specific, insular, and deeply personal in the way that most first books often are, Tears of the Trufflepig takes all the verve and wit of Death and uses it in the employ of something much more ambitious and much, much stranger. In film parlance, Trufflepig is something of a two-hander — the tale of two men, winding their way through a labyrinthine conspiracy. Esteban Bellacosa, ostensibly our protagonist, is a laconic repo-man charged with recovering lost construction equipment. Paco Herbert is a Czech journalist tasked with writing a story about black market dinners for the extravagantly wealthy. The two men weave in and out of each other’s plots until the story’s countless themes and curiosities are braided together and it’s nearly impossible to unravel them from each other. Now, about the plot. Drugs have been made legal, so the cartels have taken to trafficking “filtered” animals, bio-engineered exotics brought back from extinction and served at black market dinners for the incredibly rich and extraordinarily vacuous. The death (by filtered ostrich, no less) of El Gordo Pacheco, the leader of the world’s most powerful cartel, has led to a global turf war for control of the filtering syndicates. Australia, Helsinki, Tangiers, New Hampshire: They all want in. Enter Leone McMasters, the silver-mustached head of McM Imports, a shadowy multinational corporation. Think Pynchon’s Golden Fang. Think Monsanto. Also, there is a thriving black market for the shrunken heads of the Aranaña Indians, a fictional tribe of indigenous people at the heart of Trufflepig’s mystery. Having been vanished for over 400 years, their sudden reappearance portends something. Perhaps it’s doom, but perhaps it’s nothing at all, simply the passing of time. Still, tokens of their existence have led to a Möbius strip of tragedy, “with Indians now killing other Indians for their heads, because they are left out on the margins of the modern world and have few recourses to feed their families.” Also, 18 colossal Olmec heads have been stolen by thieves, and this, it seems, is the last straw. Protests have broken out all over Mexico: “After years of gruesome violence and widespread fear, it seemed people were finally fed up and unafraid to confront the impunity in the country’s municipal and federal governments, which had gradually been hijacked by the syndicates.” Also, there is not one but two walls separating the United States from Mexico, with a third on its way. Border Protectors, a specialized military unit, patrols every inch of it. Phantom Recruits, an underground network of spies and “Robin Hoods,” wages a shadow war against the forces of corruption and injustice. In this kind of story, you can expect to find a Border Protector who is secretly a Phantom Recruit, much as you can expect to find a police chief working on behalf of McM Imports. Against all this, Bellacosa needs to recover the Mano de Chango, a 7900 Rig excavator that went missing from an McM construction site, and Herbert needs to infiltrate a dinner featuring filtered animals, see it for himself, and expose it. Lay it bare. Consequences be damned. If this all seems like too much, it’s probably because it is. Does the mystery tie together? Every single stitch of it? I’m not entirely sure that it does, but that isn’t the point either. The plot lines in Trufflepig are funhouse mirrors, reflecting the horrors of both our history and our headlines. The narco plot with cartels generating living, breathing, biological miracles for the sole purpose of exploitation, echoes colonialism’s shadow. The shrunken heads plot, where the heads of the Aranaña are highly sought-after tokens of taste and sophistication, echoes imperialism’s blood. But it’s the narrative that delights. When so much fiction feels like elegant dioramas, like masterfully crafted ships in bottles, Trufflepig feels organic and amorphous, like some biological organism, shape-shifting its way through the literary landscape, leaving a thin ribbon of goo in its wake. The plot is beside the point. There is a world to be discovered here. In Trufflepig, Flores takes the well-worn, time-honored tradition of the psychedelic-sci-fi-punk-western-horror-noir and turns it on its ear. The psychological, the spiritual, and the political all intertwine in a cicatrix pattern, one stitch pinning the other into place. Trufflepig is a narcocorrido for the Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s Roberto Bolaño and Gloria Anzaldúa dropping acid and staring into the desert sun. It’s a metaphysical detective story about genocide, corruption, and families. References are layered over top of one another, like concert flyers on a light post. Pomade and pyramids. Caldo de res and the cosmos. Coyotes and the south Texas moon. The language is propulsive the way a jet engine is propulsive, a landspeeder screaming across the desert of today’s headlines, the pilot’s lips flapping in the wind behind him. The images are totemic in nature, and Flores pushes them past their natural breaking point to find something beautiful and unsettling waiting just beyond the other side. A man walks like a spider missing two legs. A pyramid appears beneath the surface of a frozen lake. Nighttime crawls out of the tailpipes of zooming automobiles. Silence stares down like a gargoyle. A pig, with green skin and a pair of wings, is spirited away like a stolen car radio. This is to say that, while Trufflepig is many things, what it is not is a river rock of a novel, a smooth stone polished to perfection by the soft gurgling of peer-review workshops. It is more like the freshly charred husk of a tree, severed sui generis, and still smoking from a lightning strike. But make no mistake: there is a familiar scaffolding holding the narrative in place. Bellacosa is the classic pulp noir protagonist — right down to the tragic loss of his daughter and wife — who finds his way into a mind-bending conspiracy, with a secondary character, in this case, a journalist, leading him through a very specific vision of Hell. The setting is the US-Mexico border, and Bellacosa, like every noir lead before him, flits easily between the two countries, between the various strata of society, between the levels of class and wealth he encounters. In fact, so much of Trufflepig takes place in this liminal space that the novel would have you believe the border between nations to be as permeable as the border between the flesh and the spirit, between the desert dust of the real world and the deep psychic communion of the subconscious. But when Bellacosa is brought face-to-face with the titular trufflepig, a hooved-animal, barrel-shaped like a pig, with wings and a beak and green, shimmering skin, he soon realizes that this is no ordinary once-extinct species filtered back into existence. This is Huixtepeltinicopatl, “el cerdo de los sueños,” a spirit animal once worshipped by the Aranaña people, a god. And here’s where things get weird. To say anymore would be to spoil one of the most thrilling debut novels in recent history. Tears of the Trufflepig is funny and thrilling and tragic. Loose and sometimes unwieldy, yes, but also mesmerizing and ambitious. It might not suit everyone’s tastes, but neither does Galápagos Gumbo. And let’s face it: you’re already seated at the table.
|
read more |
|
Africa |
The Lion Man is a masterpiece. Sculpted with great originality, virtuosity and technical skill from mammoth ivory, this 40,000-year-old image is 31 centimetres tall. It has the head of a cave lion with a partly human body. He stands upright, perhaps on tiptoes, legs apart and arms to the sides of a slender, cat-like body with strong shoulders like the hips and thighs of a lion. His gaze, like his stance, is powerful and directed at the viewer. The details of his face show he is attentive, he is watching and he is listening. He is powerful, mysterious and from a world beyond ordinary nature. He is the oldest known representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolises ideas about the supernatural.
|
read more |
|
"You're working really hard to keep up with a system that is constantly experimenting on you." Africa |
I recently got the internet in my apartment fixed, and my technician had an unusual request. I’d get an automated call after he left asking me how satisfied I was with the service, he explained, and he wanted me to rate him 9 out of 10. I asked why, and he said there was a glitch with the system that recorded any 10 rating as a 1, and it was important for him to keep his rating up. Since then, a couple of people have told me that technicians working for the company have been making this exact request for at least two years. A representative for Spectrum, my internet provider, said they were worrying over nothing. The company had moved away from the 10-point rating system, he said, adding that customer feedback isn't “tied to individual technicians’ compensation.” But even if the Spectrum glitch exists only in the lore of cable repairmen, the anxiety it's causing them is telling. Increasingly, workers are impacted by automated decision-making systems, which also affects people who read the news, or apply for loans, or shop in stores. It only makes sense that they’d try to bend those systems to their advantage. Attempting to manipulate mysterious automated systems is a common feature of modern life. Just ask any search engine optimist, Instagram influencer, or foreign intelligence agency. There exist at least two separate academic papers with the title “Folk Theories of Social Feeds,” detailing how Facebook users divine what its algorithm wants them try to use those theories to their advantage. People with algorithms for bosses have particular incentive to push back. Last month, a local television station in Washington covered Uber drivers who conspire to turn off their apps simultaneously in order to trick its system into raising prices. The segment showed drivers standing in a parking lot while a group of organizers yelled to everyone when to shut their phones off, then turn them back on. “When we find out what’s the highest surge, that’s when we say, ‘Everybody on,’ and everybody gets paid what we think we should be getting paid,” explained one of the orchestrators. Alex Rosenblat, the author of Uberland, told me that these acts of digital disobedience are essentially futile in the long run. Technology centralizes power and information in a way that overwhelms mere humans. “You might think you’re manipulating the system,” she says, but in reality “you’re working really hard to keep up with a system that is constantly experimenting on you.” Compared to pricing algorithms, customer ratings of the type that worried my repairman should be fairly straightforward. Presumably it’s just a matter of gathering data and calculating an average. But online ratings are a questionable way to judge people even if the data they’re based on are pristine—and they probably aren't. Academics have shown that customer ratings reflect racial biases. Complaints about a product or service can be interpreted as commentary about the person who provided it, rather than the service itself. And companies like Uber require drivers to maintain such high ratings that, in effect, any review that isn’t maximally ecstatic is a request for punitive measures. Drew Franklin, who has worked as a field technician for Verizon in Washington, D.C. since 2017, said the customer review system is a source of near-constant stress. His customers get a five-question phone survey after each visit, as well as a chance to leave a message elaborating on their experiences. Franklin, who also ran unsuccessfully for D.C.’s district council in 2016, has looked at his own reviews, and says the sentiment in the messages periodically conflicts with the numbered scores from the survey. If the survey scores are low, his boss is automatically alerted. “If you get a bad review and they look into it, maybe it’s frivolous,” Franklin says. “But your score is your score.”
|
read more |
|
For whom the bell tolls a poem (No man is an island) by John Donne Africa |
No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.
|
read more |
|
The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with U.S. President Richard Nixon's foreign policy. Law & Politics |
He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response. In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli had argued that sometimes it is "a very wise thing to simulate madness" (Discourses on Livy, book 3, chapter 2). Although in Nixon's Vietnam War, Kimball argues that Nixon arrived at the strategy independently, as a result of practical experience and observation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's handling of the Korean War.[1][2] In his 1962 book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, futurist Herman Kahn argued that to "look a little crazy" might be an effective way to induce an adversary to stand down.[3] Nixon's Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote that Nixon had confided to him: I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.[4] In October 1969, the Nixon administration indicated to the Soviet Union that "the madman was loose" when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population), and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days.[5] The administration employed the "madman strategy" to force the North Vietnamese government to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War.[6] In July 1969, according to a recently-declassified CIA report, President Nixon may have suggested to South Vietnamese President Thieu that the two paths he was considering were either a nuclear weapons option or setting up a coalition government.
|
read more |
|
09-JUL-2018 :: Tariff wars, who blinks first? Law & Politics |
昨天習近平在中共政治局會議上說:“各種動搖黨的根基的危險無處不在,小管湧會淪為大塌方。” @wangdan1989 https://twitter.com/wangdan1989/status/1143717857538256896
這真是一個奇妙的世界:從西方學者到中國老百姓,都對中共很有信心,認為其統治穩定。只有共產黨自己,倒是天天緊張,隨時覺得會“塌方”。 有理性的人,會相信誰的判斷呢?
"The dangers of shaking the party's roots are everywhere, and small tube surges can be reduced to a landslide," Xi said at a meeting of the Communist Party's Politburo yesterday. This is a wonderful world: from Western scholars to ordinary Chinese people, the Chinese Communist Party is very confident that its rule is stable. Only the Communist Party itself, but every day nervous, feel that will "collapse". Who scans a reasonable person to believe?
|
read more |
|
Avocado fans seeking a break from record prices are set to be disappointed. Commodities |
Prices of the dark-green fatty fruit, featured on nearly half of U.S. menus and used in everything from toast to tacos and salads, are expected to continue rising until Mexican farmers begin harvesting later this summer. The price of Hass avocados from Michoacan, the heartland of the Latin American nation’s output, jumped about 7% to a record 650 pesos for a 10-kilogram box on Wednesday, according to government data based on daily surveys in Mexico City’s Central de Abastos, the capital’s bustling wholesale-produce market. AvoPrice, a platform to monitor prices in real time, recorded a rate of more than 100 pesos per kilogram on Wednesday for avocados bought directly from Michoacan growers. The market has surged the most in at least a decade this year due to rising trade and border tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, the biggest avocado producer and America’s No. 1 supplier. A smaller crop in California has also helped the advance. “It’s the shortage,” Michoacan-based producer Humberto Solorzano said of the higher prices. “The current season is ending this week and the new season begins next week.” What’s more, the early signs from avocado trees that are just blooming have not been promising, said Solorzano, who is also a founding member of AvoPrice. Without a futures contract, the avocado market can be relatively opaque. Supplies should remain relatively tight until mid-July, said David Magana, vice president and senior analyst at Rabobank in California. “We will see higher prices for the next two to three weeks,” he said by phone.
|
read more |
|
Simply outstanding @Reuters Report Twin attacks threaten new Ethiopian government's reforms @ReutersAfrica Africa |
BAHIR DAR, Ethiopia (Reuters) - The Baklaba and Cake cafe was heaving with customers when truck-loads of heavily armed men in fatigues rolled up across the road outside the local government headquarters in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. The men, some carrying two Kalashnikov assault rifles, stormed the building, sending customers enjoying a Saturday afternoon coffee in the cafe diving for cover, witnesses said. Within moments, the assailants had shot dead Amhara’s president, an aide and fatally wounded the state’s attorney general. Hours later, 325 km (200 miles) to the south in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, gunshots rang out behind the high gray walls of a red-roofed villa as the military’s chief of staff and a retired general were slain by a bodyguard. The attacks, described by the government as part of a coup attempt in Amhara, highlight the dangers Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed faces as he rolls out ambitious reforms in Africa’s second most populous nation - a regional powerhouse whose economic boom is now threatened by deepening ethnic and regional fissures. Since Abiy came to power in April 2018, attention abroad has focused on the rapid political, economic and diplomatic changes he has been introducing in one of the continent’s most closed and repressive countries.
“The world out there wanted to believe the fairy tale. They became obsessed with their own narrative,” said Tamrat Giorgis, the managing editor of the Addis Fortune, a privately-owned English-language newspaper. “But that doesn’t chime with what is happening on the ground. It is much more complex and scary.”
Abiy has loosened the iron grip the central authorities held over a deeply fractured nation, freeing imprisoned opposition leaders, rebels and journalists, lifting bans on some political parties and sealing a peace deal with arch-enemy Eritrea. His plans to partially privatize some state enterprises have piqued the interest of foreign multinationals hoping to profit from market of 100 million people, and should breathe life into the debt-laden economy. But the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), itself a coalition of four ethnically-based parties, faces strident challenges from newly emboldened regional powerbrokers demanding more influence and territory. Ethnic violence has killed hundreds of people. That, and a severe drought, means some 2.4 million people are currently displaced in Ethiopia, the United Nations says.
“Abiy’s reforms removed the lid on many accumulated grievances,” said Rashid Abdi, an independent Horn of Africa analyst. “Making the transition to a more open society is always dangerous.”
Abiy’s response to his biggest challenge yet will not only define his leadership but could determine whether Ethiopia will sustain its decade-long boom, or spiral into the violence that has plagued neighboring Somalia and South Sudan. Former intelligence officer Abiy, son of a Muslim father and Christian mother, is from Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, who spearheaded years of anti-government protests that eventually drove his predecessor to resign last year. Abiy has the right profile to reassure several disgruntled sections of Ethiopian society, analysts say. But the divisions Abiy must bridge in Amhara and elsewhere are old and deep. Asamnew Tsige, the rogue general accused of orchestrating Saturday’s violence, often invoked them.
“Five hundred years ago, we faced a similar test,” Asamnew told graduating Amhara Special Forces this month, referring to the historical expansion of Oromo people into Amhara.
The history of Amhara, which has provided Ethiopia with its national language, is a source of pride for many who belong to the country’s second largest ethnic group. Some there resent the fact the previous federal government was dominated by Tigrayans who make up about 6% of the population - and now the prime minister is an Oromo. Border disputes simmer with neighboring Oromia and Tigray.
Asamnew fanned those flames when he was released last year after nearly a decade in prison for a previous coup attempt. The regional government named him head of security to placate his hard-line base. He began recruiting for a new state-sanctioned militia and called on the Amhara people to arm themselves.
Seven Amhara leaders, including acting regional president Lake Ayalew, had gathered for a meeting in Bahir Dar, Amhara’s regional capital, when gunmen tried to burst in at 4 p.m. “They struggled to open the door,” Lake told Amhara Mass Media Agency. Three officials ran for an exit but were gunned down, he said. The rest hid. Guards and attackers exchanged fire. The attorney general was badly wounded. “We tried to tie up his wounds with a curtain. The other two were already dead,” said Lake. After the hit squad killed the state officials, fighting broke out at the police station - now peppered with bullet holes - and the local EPRDF headquarters, witnesses and Asemahagh Aseres, a regional government spokesman, said. Asemahagh said Asamnew’s new militia had appealed for others to join their putsch but had been rebuffed. The gunfire ended about five hours later, after federal reinforcements arrived by helicopter, the witnesses said. Dozens of people died in the fighting, and the security forces killed Asamnew in a shootout on Monday, near Bahir Dar, Asemahagh said. For days, regional state-run television ran rolling coverage commemorating the three murdered officials.
But on the streets, some suspected an official conspiracy, accusing federal authorities of orchestrating events to remove a popular and powerful regional leader. “The federal government doesn’t want a strong leader here. The general was mobilizing the youth at the regional level, and they didn’t like it,” said a young man at a street cafe, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons.
The National Movement of Amhara - an increasingly popular ethnocentric party founded last year and a rival to the Amhara party in the EPRDF coalition - condemned the killings but queried the government’s narrative.
“At this moment we can’t say whether there was a coup,” Christian Tadele, spokesman for the new party, told Reuters. “First, we need an independent enquiry ... The federal government is trying to use this incident to control the security apparatus of the region.”
In Ethiopia’s bustling capital, there was little sympathy for the coup plotters. A country-wide internet blackout remained in force but the city had returned to normal with battered blue and white taxis clogging the streets.
“This is a fascist, heinous assassination crime that no one can expect to happen in the 21st century,” said Addis Ababa resident Berhanu Bekele. On Tuesday, a weeping Abiy led hundreds of soldiers, officials and relatives, many dressed in black and sobbing, in a commemoration for Chief of Staff General Seare Mekonnen and the retired general in the capital. Near Seare’s house in Addis Ababa, federal police crammed into a tiny hair salon to watch the ceremony live on television. Tears welled up in their eyes and several shook their heads as the cameras panned to Seare’s flag-draped coffin. Seare was killed by a recently appointed bodyguard, but reinforcements coming to his rescue sustained heavy fire from at least two gunmen, one security officer involved said. One gunman escaped in a waiting car but the bodyguard was arrested. Wounded in the foot, he then shot himself in the neck in an apparent suicide attempt, the officer said. Ethiopian officials said the killings in the capital were designed to distract and divide the military as it tackled the coup attempt in Amhara. After the ceremony in Addis Ababa, the bodies of the two slain generals were flown north to their native Tigray for burial. Bitter crowds mourned them at a memorial on Wednesday. Already angry over the loss of influence Tigrayans enjoyed under the previous administration, many chanted “Abiy is a traitor” and “Abiy resign”.
“I am angry against Abiy because he is too soft and full of rhetoric,” said 19-year-old college student Selam Asmelash. A reckoning may be coming. Elections are due next year, although no date has been set - and weapons have been pouring in from countries including Sudan and South Sudan, said Justine Fleischner, an arms expert with UK-based Conflict Armament Research. The weapons fuel armed gangs, menacing travelers and disrupting transport networks. Police said in June they had seized nearly 11,000 weapons and almost 120,000 rounds of ammunition in the capital over the last nine months. “People are sick of the insecurity. If (Abiy) doesn’t do something now, people might think he is too weak to govern,” said a foreign businessman based in Addis Ababa. One of the biggest risks is that the splits in society could break the ruling coalition - or the military, said Gerard Prunier, an academic who has written extensively about Ethiopia. The EPRDF’s ethnically based parties must respond to the demands of their constituents or lose support to hardliners, so the government is increasingly losing its ability to place friendly faces in top regional positions, Prunier said. “The EPRDF is the only tool that the prime minister has to govern - and it is not a reliable tool.”
|
read more |
|
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) THE SECOND COMING Africa |
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 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. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
|
read more |
|
Africa |
Conclusions
The near term events will surely alert Investors to risks which had been previously overwhelmed by Prime Minister Abiy's sheer force of personality and his velocity. Having announced his economic Pivot 90 days into his term, recent developments particularly around the Telecom Sector indicated he was ready to go much further much faster than even the boldest Commentator had imagined. The cross cutting political undercurrents are multi-sided and the seriousness is reflected in the number of IDPs. To Date Investors have given the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. This might be a popping over the Radar moment for political risk. The Final worry is around bandwidth in the PM's Office and whether the Office can risk manage the Politics and simultaneously fast track the much needed economic reform program.
|
read more |
|
People Are Dying From @Eskom_SA's Pollution in South Africa @business Africa |
On the right side of the main street of the dilapidated village east of Johannesburg is a fenced-off electricity substation with a red sign warning of pollutants. On the left, a power plant belches emissions from burning coal into the air. Both are owned by Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., South Africa’s state-run utility. Pullens Hope has doomed Rita Phoku’s family, she says. For decades, she lived between a storage site for Eskom’s burnt-coal waste and a coal-mine complex. Four of her five children suffer from asthma and other respiratory illnesses, while her 23-year-old daughter, Prudence, died of cancer of the lungs and respiratory tract. Her sister, who lived nearby, suffered repeated miscarriages and died of respiratory illness. All told, Phoku says, she has lost as many as nine family members to respiratory-related diseases. She blames Eskom, which owns 12 coal-fired power plants in Mpumalanga province, in which Pullens Hope lies. They are in a belt of 90 miles by 110 miles that accounts for most of South Africa’s electricity production. Air pollution in the biggest towns in Mpumalanga is regularly higher than that in Beijing and Jakarta, two of the most polluted cities in the world, according to AirVisual, an air-quality monitoring app. “There’s no point being angry at anyone because when you keep complaining, you’re labeled as a person who just wants to start conflict,” said Phoku, 55, standing on the dirt lot where she cooks food on an open fire in a dirt lot to sell to workers as they pass by. “My children are still getting sick and all I can do is take out money so they can go to the doctor.” The environmental group Greenpeace, using satellite data, said that between June and August last year the area suffered the worst nitrogen dioxide power plant pollution on Earth. In a separate study, it said emissions such as sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and mercury were causing deaths from respiratory disease, strokes and heart attacks even beyond Mpumalanga, including in greater Johannesburg, a metropolis of 10 million people lying to the east. That study and one produced by another environmental group, estimate that more than 2,000 South Africans die prematurely from power plant pollution. China, which has a population more than 20 times greater than South Africa, suffered 3,153 “excess” deaths from coal plants in 2011, according to a study published by the American Chemical Society in 2017.
|
read more |
|
Local-currency bonds have handed investors a 23% return this year, five times the emerging-market average. And the Egyptian pound's 7.3% gain against the dollar is the most globally after Russia's ruble. @business Africa |
Demand has been strong in large part because of a three-year IMF loan deal worth $12 billion that expires later in 2019. President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s administration wants to replace it with a non-financial agreement so that the IMF continues supporting structural reforms. That could help sustain portfolio flows to a country that already has the advantage of being unscathed by the U.S.-China trade war relative to most other emerging markets, according to Cairo-based investment bank EFG-Hermes. “Egypt makes for a very good trade,” said Mohamed Abu Basha, EFG’s head of macroeconomic analysis. “I don’t think many investors were very worried about the government backtracking on reforms, but signing the deal would act as further reassurance and can guarantee a consistent stream of inflows and lower borrowing costs.” The average yield on Egypt’s local debt has fallen 214 basis points to a one-year low of 16.4% since the end of 2018, according to Bloomberg Barclays indexes. It remains about the highest among major emerging nations, behind only Argentina and Turkey. Gains in the Egyptian currency have come despite the central bank’s surprise rate cut in February, though a dovish tilt from U.S. and European monetary officials helped. Citigroup Inc. and Societe General SA have recommended that fixed-income clients stick with the Egyptian trade, citing real yields of roughly 5% and the pound’s resilience. Carry traders who borrowed dollars to invest in Egyptian local debt would have made returns of 15% so far this year. Marie Salem of FFA Private Bank said Egypt may get another boost if U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to attract $50 billion of investment for the Palestinian territories and its neighbors succeeds. Egypt is meant to receive $9.1 billion under the initiative, though Palestinian leaders have rejected it and El-Sisi’s government only sent a deputy finance minister to its launch in Bahrain this week. “With all the enhancement and support that Egypt is getting from the IMF and the U.S., and the efforts of the regulators, the pound has maintained its stability for the past year and we expect it to strengthen,” said Salem, Dubai-based director of capital markets at FFA.
|
read more |
|
Kenya Cancels Environment License of $2 Billion Coal-Power Plant @bpolitics @herbling Kenyan Economy |
A Kenyan tribunal canceled an environment license for a planned $2 billion coal-power plant near the coastal town of Lamu, saying the developers hadn’t consulted the community. “There was an outright disregard on the need to carry out public participation,” Chairman of the National Environment Tribunal Mohammed Balala said Wednesday in the capital, Nairobi. The developers will have to conduct a new environmental study and involve the public if they want to proceed with the project, Balala said. “Amu Power has taken note of the concerns raised in the ruling,” the developer said in an emailed statement without giving further details. The 1,050 megawatt project is 51% owned by Centum Investment Co. and backed by General Electric Co.’s Ultra-Supercritical Clean Coal Technology. The coal plant is part of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s strategy to increase electricity output to power the East African nation’s industrialization agenda and create jobs. Save Lamu, a community organization, among other petitioners asked the tribunal to cancel the EIA license awarded to the project in 2016 because the plant is likely to have a negative impact on human and marine life. The petitioners said the developers didn’t consult the community during the study. “This is a win for the environment and for the people,” Dudley Ochiel, a lawyer representing Save Lamu told reporters after the ruling.
|
read more |
|
|
|
|