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Monday 18th of November 2019 |
18-NOV-2019 :: The Lotos-Eaters and the UK Election Africa |
The United Kingdom European Union membership referendum took place in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar on 23 June 2016. The Result was 17,410,742 votes [51.9%] for Leave and 16,141,241 votes [48.1%] for Remain. The Pound crashed. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned by July that Year. PM Theresa May stepped in but threw in the Towel three years later and now Boris Johnson is Prime Minister and leading the Charge towards an election on Tuesday 12th December where Boris is seeking a decisive Mandate against Jeremy Corbyn.
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
The Lotos-eaters is a Poem by Lord Tennyson
In ''The Lotos-Eaters'', The Brother Mariners lose themselves
''There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls''
and it certainly is as if the the mighty United Kingdom has lost itself in a Brexit reverie for more than three years now just like those Mariners did in ''The Lotos-Eaters'' The cold blade of logic has been blunted by information warfare struggles.
The US officer assigned to the deputy chief of staff (Intelligence), charged with defining the future of warfare, wrote “One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.” This information warfare will not be couched in the rationale of geopolitics, the author suggests in the US army war college quarterly 1997. but will be “spawned” - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw emotions. “Hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions, rather than strategy - will set the terms of [information warfare] struggles”.
So here we are. Both Protagonists Boris and Jeremy are promising Heaven on Earth.
“It would be optimistic to assume that the previously cohesive, predictable approach to legislation and policymaking in the UK will return once Brexit is no longer a contentious issue, however that is achieved,” the ratings agency Moodys said. Moody’s said Britain’s 1.8 trillion pounds ($2.30 trillion) of public debt - more than 80% of annual economic output - risked rising again and the economy could be “more susceptible to shocks than previously assumed.” Both of the main political parties have promised big spending increases ahead of next month’s election.
“In the current political climate, Moody’s sees no meaningful pressure for debt-reducing fiscal policies,” the ratings agency said.
Moody’s said the “increasing inertia and, at times, paralysis that has characterized the Brexit-era policymaking process” showed how the UK’s institutional framework has diminished. Moody’s, which stripped the country of its AAA rating in 2013 and downgraded it again in 2017, said it was lowering the outlook on Britain’s current Aa2 rating to negative from stable, meaning the rating could be cut again.
This is a ''Never-Neverland'' World.
Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are in the Lead in most of the Polls and the Brexiteer Nigel Farage has seemingly stood down with no doubt promises of a Peerage. Jeremy Corbyn is however a formidable Campaigner and You will recall Theresa May was a Shoe-in supposedly. Of course, Corbyn's economic policies are a Nicolas Maduro redux and if he shuts down all the Public Schools [which, of course, are private] in a fit of pique, International money which in fact put the Great in Great Britain will fly off in a blink of an eye. And on top of all that You have Donald Trump turning up a day or so before the election just in time to give Corbyn an almighty boost because in reality the UK electorate see Trump as an ''Oaf'' Meanwhile, lurking behind the curtain stage left are the likes of US businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri [who] has accused Boris Johnson of brutally casting her aside “like some one-night stand” and leaving her “heartbroken” since he became prime minister and the controversy over their four-year relationship became public.
“I’ve kept your secrets, and I’ve been your friend. And I don’t understand why you’ve blocked me and ignored me as if I was some fleeting one-night stand or some girl that you picked up at a bar because I wasn’t - and you know that. And I’m terribly heartbroken by the way that you have cast me aside like I am some gremlin ... He should know me well enough to know who I am ... Shame on him for not answering the phone.”
The Pound has risen from multi years lows like a Phoenix and has room to rally further specially if Bojo builds a big lead. UK Gilts are a Sell.
Everything pivots on whether there is a clean and clear outcome. Its very fluid and another hung Parliament is not to be ruled out especially if Corbyn re ignites a ''Youthquake''
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Johnson's Conservatives lead Labour by 10-17 percentage points, four polls published on Saturday show @Reuters. Africa |
A YouGov poll showed support for the Conservatives stood at 45%, the highest level since 2017, compared with Labour on 28%, unchanged. The pro-European Union Liberal Democrats were on 15%, and the Brexit Party was on 4% unchanged. A separate poll for SavantaComRes also said support for Johnson’s Conservatives was the highest since 2017 with his party on 41% with Labour on 33%. The Conservatives have a 16-point lead over Labour, according to an opinion poll published by Opinium Research. A poll by the Mail on Sunday said Johnson’s party had a 15-point lead over Labour.
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Jennifer Arcuri: 'I've kept Johnson's secrets - now he's cast me aside like a one-night stand' @guardian Africa |
The US businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri has accused Boris Johnson of brutally casting her aside “like some one-night stand” and leaving her “heartbroken” since he became prime minister and the controversy over their four-year relationship became public. In an outspoken interview with ITV’s Exposure, to be broadcast on Sunday, the tech entrepreneur also tells the journalist John Ware that Boris Johnson has refused to take her phone calls at Downing Street and has cut her off before she could initiate a conversation. Addressing her words directly to the prime minister, who actively championed her business interests during his time at City Hall while failing to declare their friendship, Arcuri says: “I’ve been nothing but loyal, faithful, supportive, and a true confidante of yours. “I’ve kept your secrets, and I’ve been your friend. And I don’t understand why you’ve blocked me and ignored me as if I was some fleeting one-night stand or some girl that you picked up at a bar because I wasn’t - and you know that. And I’m terribly heartbroken by the way that you have cast me aside like I am some gremlin ... He should know me well enough to know who I am ... Shame on him for not answering the phone.” While Arcuri refuses to divulge the nature of their relationship she is clear that they were very close for several years. She tells Ware in the programme When Boris Met Jennifer that she wishes he had declared their friendship and been above board about it to avoid the resulting humiliation. She says it was clear that the prime minister was “worried” about making the relationship public because of all the questions that would be asked. Referring to one recent call to Johnson, she says: “He heard my voice. And I knew it was him. And he hung up. He said ‘Yes, hello’ and I simply asked: ‘Why did you block me?’ I wasn’t calling to cause problems, I merely just wanted a simple ... acknowledgement for what had happened.” On another occasion, shortly after Johnson became prime minister, Arcuri says she was very keen to speak to him because she had heard that reporters were contacting her friends. “When I expressed the interest to want to speak to him, I was told: ‘There are bigger things at stake’, and I was brushed off as if I was one of Kennedy’s girlfriends showing up to his White House switchboard, you know, here to do my, you know, calling. And I felt so disgusted and humiliated that I was told: ‘Bigger things are at stake; never mind you, he’s too busy for you’.” Arcuri said that, when she tried his personal phone on yet another occasion, she was summarily passed to someone who spoke to her in a language she believed to be Chinese.
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THE MAN WHO SOLVED THE MARKET By Gregory Zuckerman @nytimes @opinion_joe H/T @hervegogo Africa |
There are few books in the investing world as well known as Burton Malkiel’s “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” First published in 1973, it has never been out of print, and is now in its 12th edition. Its thesis is that “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.” To put it another way, the market is so efficient that even professional investors have little chance of beating it on a regular basis. If there’s one reason index funds, which replicate the performance of market indexes like the S&P 500, now hold $4.3 trillion (yes, trillion) in assets, it’s that millions of investors have come to realize that the “efficient market hypothesis” Malkiel popularized is essentially correct. Emphasis on “essentially.” Jim Simons is not a blindfolded monkey. A former code-breaker for the United States government and a brilliant mathematician, Simons founded the most successful investment firm the world has ever seen. As Gregory Zuckerman notes in “The Man Who Solved the Market,” even Warren Buffett’s track record — 20.5 percent annualized returns since 1965 — doesn’t approach Simons’s average of 39 percent gains over a three-decade span. And that’s after his company has taken a 5 percent management fee and 44 percent of the profits. The question has always been: How does Simons do it? We know that his firm, Renaissance Technologies, helped pioneer quantitative investing, relying on complex computer programs rather than human judgment, to make trading decisions. But we don’t know much else. The 81-year-old Simons can be engaging in person, with a wry sense of humor (he may also be the last man in America who still smokes in his office). But on the subject of his investing success, he is secretive to the point of paranoia. Employees sign ironclad nondisclosure agreements, and are told to avoid media appearances and industry conferences. Zuckerman, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, says he became fixated with cracking the Simons code. And though he doesn’t entirely succeed, he divulges much more than anyone has before. More important, despite the tendency to dot his book with such daunting phrases as “combinatorial game theory” and “stochastic equations,” he tells a surprisingly captivating story. It turns out that a firm like Renaissance, filled with nerdy academics trying to solve the market’s secrets, is way more interesting than your typical greed-is-good hedge fund. Simons first began investing as a young man after receiving $5,000 as a wedding gift. He was a commodities speculator for a short time; watching soybean futures soar “was kind of a rush,” he told Zuckerman. But within a few years, he and several colleagues were thinking seriously about how they might create a computerized stock trading system that could search — and I’m quoting Zuckerman here — “for a small number of ‘macroscopic variables’ capable of predicting the market’s short-term behavior.” In 1978, Simons left Stony Brook University, where he had built its math department into one of the best in the country, to start the firm that we now know as Renaissance Technologies. The story Zuckerman tells is about how Simons and the mathematicians and programmers he surrounded himself with found those variables. They collected incredible amounts of historical data — not just about stocks and bonds, but about currencies, commodities, weather patterns and all sorts of market-moving events. They made plenty of missteps along the way. But in time, they had gathered so much data — and had computers powerful enough to ingest that data — that the machines found profitable correlations no human could ever suss out, much less understand. Zuckerman does a fine job of bringing not just Simons to life but most of the other “quants” who played key roles in creating Renaissance’s system. For the politically inclined, one of the most interesting was the firm’s former co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, the conservative billionaire who funded Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerman portrays Mercer as “a peculiar but largely benign figure within the company” who liked to zing his liberal colleagues, but mostly kept his own counsel. When his role in conservative politics caused an outcry, Simons felt he had to ask his longtime partner to step down as co-C.E.O. But even though Simons himself was a liberal, he wasn’t happy about it. “He’s a nice guy,” Zuckerman quotes Simons telling a friend. “He’s allowed to use his money as he wishes.”When you get right down to it, Simons makes money because human behavior will never be completely “efficient.” Those short-term anomalies Simons — and other quants — unearth exist because humans have always acted emotionally. “I think the market is reasonably close to efficient,” another well-known quant, Clifford Asness, once told me, “but there are a lot of little inefficiencies.” Those little inefficiencies are what emotionless computers take advantage of. Renaissance just happens to be better at finding them than any other firm.
Home Thoughts
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The Lotos-eaters BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Africa |
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them, And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
They sat them down upon the yellow sand, Between the sun and moon upon the shore; And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. Then some one said, "We will return no more"; And all at once they sang, "Our island home Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."
There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep."
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The Story of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, The Dreamachine and von Bartha Widewalls Africa |
In 1970, a particular exhibition space opened in Basel. Galerie von Bartha was entirely focused on hosting and presenting radical artistic practices conducted by the proponents of Concrete and Kinetic art. Gradually, the gallery started representing various artists, and regardless of the art market tendencies it remained interested in the legacy of the historically significant movements, those which defied the representational canons. Von Bartha organized other non-exhibition programs, and one of them seems especially important today. In 1979, the art dealer Carl Laszlo hosted the iconic writer William S. Burroughs and his peer, an important author himself, Brion Gysin. The invitation marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Burroughs’ legendary book Naked Lunch, which he read at the event, shocking the Basel society. At the same time, the two men found Miklos von Bartha, the gallery owner, who turned out to be the perfect individual to finally construct The Dreamachine with, a special kind of an optical device conceptualized by Gysin. To revisit the iconic reading and the influence it made on the local art scene, and to unravel the dialog between the founding fathers of the Beat movement and the gallerist, Galerie Von Bartha is hosting a proper retrospective focused on the individual and mutual work by Gysin and Burroughs, including original construction plans and prototypes of The Dreamachine, archival photographs along with the works by other Beatniks. Around the mid-1940s, William S. Burroughs met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In New York, gradually he became a drug addict and moved to Mexico where he wrote his first novel Junkie and shot his wife Joan Vollmer. Burroughs was convicted of homicide in absentia and was given a two-year suspended sentence. He then traveled through a few South American countries to explore a drug called yage for which he believed to provide the user telepathic abilities. Between 1958 and 1959, the author wrote Naked Lunch while staying at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris with his collaborator and friend Brion Gysin, who initially acted as a Surrealist painter until he opened a bar in Morocco and started writing. It was in Tangier that William S. Burroughs got introduced by the cut-up technique invented by Gysin (who found it by accident in the Dadaist legacy), and that is how he developed Naked Lunch. Gysin emphasized their collaboration: William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room No. 15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958… Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another than occupied with editing the monster manuscript… Naked Lunch appeared and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked his habit with Apomorphine and flew off to London to see Dr. Dent, who had first turned him on to the cure. While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters’ techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as “First Cut-Ups” in Minutes to Go. As a result of mutual admiration, in the early 1960s Brion Gysin designed the first Dreamachine, a flicker device aimed to expand the viewer’s perception, with the help of mathematician Ian Sommerville. This kinetic art object is an actual cylinder made of a perforated paper tube illuminated from the inside by light bulbs and placed on a turntable rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. The holes in the tube were produced according to a special pattern developed by Gysin. The observer is exposed to Dreamachine at eye level with their eyes closed, and if the object is constructed properly, it emits light waves (between 8 and 13 Hz), electrical oscillations present in the human brain while relaxing. The observer experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids (an effect similar when traveling as a passenger in a car or bus), while the patterns gradually appear as shapes and symbols in a swirl. And so, The Dreamachine achieves a sort of a hypnagogic state and aims to expand one’s perception. Although the experience itself may be intense, one can stop it just by opening their eyes. Looking from the contemporary stance, The Dreamachine was the result of the constant exchange of the two artists who shared an interest in the marginal, the obscene, the occult and the otherworldly. The way they searched to overcome the limitations of the human mind, and revolutionize the thinking process and therefore the society, makes Burroughs and Gysin unprecedented figures in a broader context of culture and humanities.
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Here we go round the prickly pear Africa |
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning.
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Hollow Men T.S. ELIOT
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In 1530 Humayun, Babur's beloved eldest son and heir-apparent, was stricken by a fever. Despite the best efforts of the royal physicians, his condition steadily worsened Africa |
Driven to despair, Babur consulted a man of religion who told him that the remedy “was to give in alms the most valuable thing one had and to seek cure from God.” Babur is said to have replied thus: “I am the most valuable thing that Humayun possesses; than me he has no better thing; I shall make myself a sacrifice for him. May God the Creator accept it.” Humayun possessed a priceless diamond, they said, which could be sold and the proceeds given to the poor... Babur would not hear of it. “What value has worldly wealth?” Babur is quoted to have said. “And how can it be a redemption for Humayun? I myself shall be his sacrifice.” He walked three times around Humayun’s bed, praying: “O God! If a life may be exchanged for a life, I who am Babur, I give my life and my being for a Humayun.” A few minutes later, he cried: “We have borne it away, we have borne it away.”And sure enough, from that moment Babur began to sicken, while Humayun grew slowly well. Babur died near Agra on December 21, 1530. He left orders for his body to be buried in Kabul.
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"Everywhere She Went Turned Bad," Says Man with Six Bankruptcies @BorowitzReport Law & Politics |
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a blistering tweet on Friday, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was accused of leaving a trail of destruction by a man with six bankruptcies and multiple business failures. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” wrote the man, who ran the now defunct United States Football League into the ground and paid twenty-five million dollars to settle fraud charges against a fake university bearing his name. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” tweeted the man, whose lengthy roster of bankruptcies includes the Trump Taj Mahal (1991), Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (1992), the Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Castle Hotel and Casino (1992), Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (2004), and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009). “Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her,” continued the man, who founded such business fiascoes as the Trump Shuttle airline, Trump Vodka, and Trump Steaks. At the House of Representatives, Representative Devin Nunes vigorously defended the man’s controversial tweets. “He is calling out someone for creating disasters everywhere she goes, and no one is more qualified to talk about that than he is,” Nunes said.
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From Beirut to Baghdad and now in Tehran, Shiraz, Ahvaz, and all across Iran, the earth is shaking underneath the mullahs. With these crimes, #IranProtests #Iran @Maryam_Rajavi Law & Politics |
From Beirut to Baghdad and now in Tehran, Shiraz, Ahvaz, and all across Iran, the earth is shaking underneath the mullahs. With these crimes, the mullahs cannot evade from certain downfall. #IranProtests #Iran
Conclusions
its very Maryam Rajavi MEK and Pompeo
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THE XINJIANG PAPERS 'Absolutely No Mercy': Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims @nytimes Law & Politics |
The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family? “They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.” The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years. Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet. President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.” The internment camps in Xinjiang expanded rapidly after the appointment in August 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealous new party boss for the region. He distributed Mr. Xi’s speeches to justify the campaign and exhorted officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions. Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment. The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say. “If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.” “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.” “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.” “We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.” He likened Islamic extremism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.” “The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Mr. Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to Xinjiang. “People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.” In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.” While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi said that was not enough. He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities. “The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Mr. Xi told the leadership conference on Xinjiang policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market Ensuring stability in Xinjiang would require a sweeping campaign of surveillance and intelligence gathering to root out resistance in Uighur society, Mr. Xi argued. He said new technology must be part of the solution, foreshadowing the party’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in Xinjiang. But he also emphasized old-fashioned methods, such as neighborhood informants, and urged officials to study how Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks. “The struggle against terror and to safeguard stability is a protracted war, and also a war of offense,” Mr. Chen said in a speech to the regional leadership in October 2017 that was among the leaked papers. He and other party leaders ordered a quasi-military organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, to accelerate efforts to settle the area with more Han Chinese, the documents show. When the mass detentions began, Mr. Wang did as he was told at first and appeared to embrace the task with zeal. He built two sprawling new detention facilities, including one as big as 50 basketball courts, and herded 20,000 people into them. He sharply increased funding for the security forces in 2017, more than doubling spending on outlays such as checkpoints and surveillance to 1.37 billion renminbi, or about $180 million. And he lined up party members for a rally in a public square and urged them to press the fight against terrorists. “Wipe them out completely,” he said. “Destroy them root and branch.”
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05-MAR-2018 :: China has unveiled a Digital Panopticon in Xinjiang Law & Politics |
Dissent is measured and snuffed out very quickly in China. China has unveiled a Digital Panopticon in Xinjiang where a combination of data from video surveillance, face and license plate recognition, mobile device locations, and official records to identify targets for detention. Xinjiang is surely a precursor for how the CCCP will manage dissent. The actions in Xinjiang are part of the regional authorities’ ongoing “strike-hard” campaign, and of Xi’s “stability maintenance” and “enduring peace” drive in the region. Authorities say the campaign targets “terrorist elements,” but it is in practice far broader, and encompasses anyone suspected of political disloyalty.
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Jeffrey Epstein wasn't trafficking women - and he didn't kill himself, brother says @MiamiHerald Law & Politics |
Mark Epstein gets angry when he is asked probing questions about his brother. He curses, insists the questions aren’t relevant and sometimes slams down the phone. Mostly, he defends his older brother, Jeffrey Epstein, insisting he wasn’t a sex trafficker at all. “He was innocent and, until proven guilty, you are entitled to bail in America,’’ said Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s only sibling, next of kin and likely heir to his brother’s estimated $500 million fortune. Mark Epstein is talking, but only because he believes that his 66-year-old brother was killed, and he is challenging both the Department of Justice and New York City’s chief medical examiner. Baden, 85, and another noted forensic pathologist who reviewed Baden’s findings, Dr. Cyril Wecht, 88, have both concluded that Jeffrey Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with manual strangulation than hanging. Epstein was found in his cell, allegedly on his knees, with a sheet fashioned into a ligature around his neck, about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10. Baden said Epstein had been dead for several hours, and his body should have not been moved. Emergency personnel however, transported him from the federal jail in downtown Manhattan to the hospital, Baden said. Baden was present at the autopsy, which was conducted the next day by medical examiner Kristin Roman. Both he and Roman agreed that the cause and manner of death were not clear, so she designated it pending further investigation, Baden said. But just five days later, on Aug. 16, Sampson changed the cause of death to suicide by hanging. Epstein had three fractures on the left and right side of his larynx, Baden said, and the chance of someone breaking three bones in their neck as a result of a low-velocity self-inflicted hanging, while not unheard of, is rare. While damage to that bone is more common in cases of strangulation, medical experts have also said it is more easily damaged in older people like Epstein. “It is amazing how much information you can get by interviewing the prisoners in the nearby cell. Would the FBI have interviewed them if they thought it was a suicide?” Mark Epstein, while not providing details, believes that there were people who wanted his brother dead, and he is concerned that his own life, and the lives of other people, may be in jeopardy because federal authorities have not fully probed the circumstances under which his brother died. “Jeffrey knew a lot of stuff about a lot of people,’’ Mark Epstein said. Jeffrey Epstein began cultivating important clients as a trader on Wall Street, his brother said. He said his brother was a math whiz while growing up in Brooklyn and was accepted to and attended Cooper Union, the renowned New York art, architecture and engineering school where Mark, also a Cooper Union alum, would later serve a rocky tenure as chairman of the board of trustees. “People are calling Jeffrey a college dropout and make him out to be a really bad character. But my brother went to Cooper Union and it’s hard to get in there. He didn’t drop out. He didn’t need a degree, he was really good at math and he didn’t let not having a degree hold him back.’’ Because Cooper Union did not have a mathematics major, Mark said his brother applied to and was accepted into New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. But ultimately Jeffrey accepted a low-level floor trader job with Bear Stearns, and decided to apply his mathematical skills to the options market. “He got involved with Wall Street when it was the Wild West,’’ Mark Epstein said. “When we were young men he came home one day and he said that if the general public knew what was taking place on Wall Street, there would be a revolution. People would be appalled at how corrupt it was.’’ Jeffrey Epstein did leave Bear Stearns, abruptly, causing speculation that he had been under investigation for a securities violation. Their parents, Seymour and Pauline, were married in 1952 and remained together until his father’s death in 1991 at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where he was undergoing treatment for a heart condition, Mark said. Mark said they were both close to their father, a laborer and maintenance worker for the New York City Parks Department, and to their mother, who worked as a secretary for an insurance company. FBI investigators, for example, haven’t questioned Epstein’s former cellmate, Nick Tartaglione, an ex-New York cop awaiting trial, accused of four murders. Mark said that his brother claimed that Tartaglione had assaulted him. “This is all conspiracy nonsense,’’ said Bruce A. Barket, Tartaglione’s attorney. “Remember this is not a one-cell cockamamie prison, this is a federal prison in downtown New York City that housed John Gotti and El Chapo [the drug Mexico lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman]. To accept all these as facts is unbelievable.’’ Baden said the only piece of evidence they have seen of the death scene is a photograph, presumably taken by prison officials, of the cell after Epstein was removed.
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The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier @man_integrated Law & Politics |
Control of key landmasses enables logistical operations at scale. The US has one of the most important. China wants it. More than 1,700 km from the nearest mainland (India), Diego Garcia is the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago. Originally discovered by the French in 1790, the British took control in the 1800's. For NATO countries, it is an indispensible piece of the global puzzle. DG is a unique installation. Boasting runways long enough to land/launch even the massive B-52 Stratofortress bomber, robust naval resupply infrastructure, and one of three US Air Force GEODSS optical space surveillance systems, DG serves multiple roles. The location, infrastructure, and natural resources make DG a partially self-sustaining asset squarely in the middle of China's territorial ambitions. Recall, China is using #BeltandRoad to control logistics assets stretching from China to Europe.
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Bond Market's Fate Hangs in Balance Before Trade-War Crunch Time @YahooFinance International Trade |
Treasury investors just got one week closer to locking in their best annual performance since 2011. The reflation wager that had 10-year yields on the brink of eclipsing 2% for the first time in months faltered last week. Investors’ frustration with the pace of progress in trade negotiations was a key reason bond buyers emerged. But signs of economic weakness in China, Japan and Europe were also at work, and evidence of still-muted U.S. inflation added to the mix. For the world’s biggest debt market, a lot may hinge on the next few weeks, and whether the U.S. and China can reach a trade agreement. The Trump administration is signaling that talks over a first phase of a broad deal are in the final stages. But the Dec. 15 deadline for the next round of tariffs is fast approaching. With an accord, Treasuries’ roughly 7% return in 2019 could shrivel and prove the bond bears right. But a breakdown could pave the way for yields to tumble anew. “The path of least resistance for Treasury yields is higher, but critically it’s also dependent on a trade resolution,” Gene Tannuzzo, deputy global head of fixed income at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The trade standoff is “the biggest elephant in the room.” After peaking at a three-month high of 1.97% on Nov. 7, benchmark 10-year Treasury yields have tumbled back to 1.83%, even after Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Friday that a deal will get done “in all likelihood.” U.S. and Chinese negotiators held “constructive discussions” in a phone call Saturday to address core concerns of phase one of the trade deal. Meanwhile, comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell last week left traders’ expecting around a quarter-point of easing next year. He signaled satisfaction with the current policy stance but noted that risks remain. With the week ahead largely devoid of top-tier economic data, bond-market volatility could be subdued, according to BMO Capital Markets rates strategist Jon Hill. “The pendulum had swung so far toward, ‘The Fed’s achieved a soft landing, everything’s awesome,’” Hill said. “That got ahead of itself,” and any disappointment on trade could see yields fall back toward 1.5%. The 10-year yield’s low this year, of 1.43%, came in early September, when new tariffs went into effect and worries intensified that trade friction was sending the global economy into a tailspin. For BMO, Treasuries’ sensitivity to expectations for the world economy is evident in their strong correlation with the performance of China’s currency. As Treasury yields sank this week, the yuan posted its biggest slide since September, weakening to about 7 per dollar. BMO estimates that the offshore yuan would need to strengthen to 6.93 per dollar for 10-year yields to touch 2%. The correlation “shows the importance of global, not just domestic, growth in setting the clearing level of U.S. rates,” Hill said. In the eyes of Morgan Stanley strategist Matthew Hornbach, the U.S. would have to remove tariffs it imposed in September for 10-year yields to breach 2%. “If we do get a trade deal and there’s a rollback of the September tariffs, we’re very likely going higher in yields,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “If not, we’re very likely going lower.”
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13-AUG-2019 :: The Feedback Loop Phenomenon Emerging Markets |
China has exerted the power of pull over a vast swathe of the world over the last two decades. We can call it the China, Asia, EM and Frontier markets feedback loop. This feedback loop has been largely a positive one for the last two decades. With the Yuan now in retreat [and in a precise response to Trump], this will surely exert serious downside pressure on those countries in the Feed- back Loop. The Purest Proxy for the China, Asia, EM and Frontier markets feedback loop phenomenon is the South African Rand aka the ZAR.
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@jpmorgan Chase & Co.'s widely used index of emerging market foreign exchange is close to plumbing a new low @bopinion @johnauthers Emerging Markets |
The latest IIF data show why this is such a concern. The amount of dollar-denominated debt issued in emerging markets has shot up in recent years, in an understandable attempt to take advantage of low rates. Dollar-denominated debt swamps euro- and yen-denominated debt. Outside China, non-bank borrowers in other emerging markets have racked up foreign currency debt (mostly in dollars) equivalent to more than 20% of GDP. This is higher than on the eve of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. Put in a different perspective, emerging markets now take a far bigger share of total global debt than they did even before the Asian crisis. Tightening liquidity in emerging markets, along with a strong dollar and weak emerging currencies, therefore combine to spell potential serious problems, particularly if the trade war cannot be steered to a safe conclusion.
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Russia's shadow presence in Africa: Wagner group mercenaries in at least 20 countries aim to turn continent into strategic hub @dailymaverick Africa |
The “godfather” and funder of Wagner Group is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St Petersburg-based oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” who has led Russia’s push into Africa over the past three years, moving into a vacuum left in part by the United States’ waning interest in the continent. Russia is now the largest supplier of weapons to Africa; it has military co-operation agreements and deals for military and police training with more than half of African nations; and a series of nuclear technology deals with Egypt, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda and Zambia. Technically, mercenary activity is illegal in Russia and while the Kremlin has consistently publicly denied any links, Wagner Group functions as an undeclared branch of the Russian military. Apart from being involved in hard combat, Wagner Group provides weapons training, supports police and civilian intelligence services and provides security protection for Russian personnel. A former KGB operative now based in the West described Wagner’s meteoric rise in Africa as one of the most successful GRU (Russian military intelligence) operations of all time. In June 2019, The Guardian revealed that documents obtained from the Dossier Center, supported by the dissident Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, indicated that Prigozhin is behind a covert mission to amplify Russian influence in Africa. The documents show extensive Prigozhin-linked operations and the Kremlin plotted to turn Africa into a strategic hub to displace US and European powers. One of the goals is to see off “pro-western” uprisings — an apparent reference to combating opposition movements. The documents show “the Company” taking credit for the election of Madagascar’s new president Andry Rajoelina and that Russia had produced and distributed the island’s biggest newspaper. Wagner also advised Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on how to crush opposition protests in Khartoum, but the company has still been able to maintain its relationship with the new administration brought into power as a result of those protests. The rapid success of the Wagner enterprise has also opened the way for a second generation of Russian private military companies. Two new companies, Patriot and Sew Security Services, have begun operations in Africa during the past year. The gruesome death of at least seven Russian fighters from the Wagner group at the hands of insurgents in northern Mozambique on October 31, 2019 has brought new scrutiny to the existence of thousands of Russian mercenaries in more than a dozen African countries. Wagner’s activities — the full extent of which would shock many Africans — were not high on the official agenda as Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted 43 African heads of state at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in an exhibition of Russian soft power in October. Wagner is commanded by Dmitry Utkin who in 2016 received a medal for bravery from the Kremlin. It was investigative journalist Denis Krortkov, who had been tracking Utkin for years, who spotted Utkin at the ceremony on a social media post. Writing in 2016, journalist Aleksandr Gostev said that Putin’s awarding of the medal to Utkin provided “the clearest indication yet of the key role paramilitary mercenary formations have played in Russian foreign policy”. Utkin’s nom de guerre is “Vagner” allegedly due to his “affection for the attributes and ideology” of Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist regime and its beloved composer Wagner. BuzzFeed journalist Mike Giglio, writing in April 2019, quoted Stephen Blank, who has researched the Wagner group for the US Army War College, saying the mercenary outfit had been funded “at times via outsize state contracts directed to Prigozhin-owned companies, for services such as catering at military bases. “At other times, Wagner has funded itself via deals with foreign governments. In the Central African Republic, it is compensated for training the presidential guard and receives a percentage of profits from the gold and diamond mines it guards.” Wagner has a similar arrangement in Syria, where it takes a cut from the operations of oil and natural gas fields. Wagner’s shadowy war makes it difficult to determine the group’s exact activities. It is only when it is swept up in news events such as in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, or more recently Libya, that its activities come to light. Attempts at scrutiny have been complicated by the suspicious deaths of three members of a Russian television team, the veteran Orkan Djemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko, in the Central African Republic in 2018, who were ambushed while making a documentary on Wagner. From what can be gleaned from sources on the ground — and the scant open source information that is available — Wagner is present in at least 20 African countries. On 31 October Facebook suspended three networks of Russian accounts tied to Prigozhin that it claimed were influencing operations hiding behind fake identities that had “meddled in the domestic politics of eight African countries” — CAR, Congo Brazzaville, Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Cameroon and Ivory Coast. In 2016, Wagner expanded into the Middle East in support of Russia’s mission to shore up Syrian President Bashar al Assad and combat ISIS, where they were used as shock troops and sustained heavy casualties in the two battles for Palmyra and at the hands of US airpower when they attempted to capture the Conoco natural gas plant at Deir al-Zour in February 2018. Unconfirmed reports indicated that several hundred Wagner paramilitaries were killed in the fighting. Hence the jubilation expressed by Wagner paramilitaries when they took over the abandoned US base at Manbij in North-East Syria in October, after US President Donald Trump moved US troops out of the area (while continuing to station US troops to protect the oil plant). Though US Africa Command maintains one of the largest drone complexes in the world in Djibouti, and has built a new complex in Agadez in Niger, the US under Donald Trump has demonstrated little enthusiasm for Africa. In Libya, where Wagner forces are fighting in support of the rebel General Khalifa Haftar, US special forces based in Misrata withdrew from the country earlier in 2019 when the war erupted outside Tripoli. Wagner first emerged in 2014 as part of the force that annexed Crimea from Ukraine and then as part of Russia’s undercover support for the separatist war in Ukraine’s Donbass region. A private military force, not wearing official Russian uniforms, offered plausible deniability for a military campaign that was never officially acknowledged by the Kremlin. Wagner’s first African adventure was in the Central African Republic where it took on the Islamist Seleka rebels and the group has built on this relationship to such an extent that the Special Security Adviser to the CAR presidency is Valery Zakharov, a Russian national and a Putin insider. Wagner’s rationale for its operations in Africa is that it is helping defeat terrorists, Islamist insurgents and transnational criminals that are destabilising the continent. This is cleverly the same rationale that the US’s Africa Command (Africom) has used in its engagement in Africa: though Africom talks about building the capacity of African armies to defeat these forces. What differentiates Wagner and makes them so valuable is their willingness to fight on the frontlines: Wagner forces are fighting in Mali, Libya, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Sudan. There are unconfirmed reports of more than 1,000 mercenaries in Congo Brazzaville and 2,700 troops stationed on Russian warships off the coast of Mozambique. Wagner’s ability to come in on the back of Russian military agreements has given it an extraordinary reach. Unofficially, Wagner personnel are in more than 20 African countries, a number that is growing. With Nigeria on the verge of signing a military assistance deal, the post-Zuma South Africa is the most important hold-out. But Wagner has offices in most of the neighbouring states, including Botswana, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Mozambique and Lesotho. As an ostensibly private commercial company, Wagner is following the example set by the original “diamond dogs of war”, the South African PMC Executive Outcomes (EO), and trading military support for mining deals, especially when the host country can’t afford the bills. In the 1990s EO helped the government of Sierra Leone beat back the threat from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in exchange for a stake in the country’s diamond fields. Eeben Barlow, the brains behind EO, gave a briefing on his unique business model to the St Petersburg economic forum in June 2010, at which members of the Russian general staff were present. EO had major successes in Sierra Leone and Angola (against Unita) — and its successor SSTIP helped the Nigerian army dismantle the Boko Haram caliphate in north-east Nigeria in 2015. But the international community, including the US, opposed the spread of mercenary armies, and EO was forced out or largely blocked from other engagements. The United Nations Mercenary Convention holds that the recruitment, training, use and financing of mercenaries is a violation of international law. The outrage at EO’s interventions by NGOs and well-meaning others in the West has not been matched in the international response to Wagner. Like EO, where the troops were veterans of southern Africa’s wars, many of Wagner’s fighters are battle-hardened veterans of the Chechen wars, and now Ukraine and Syria. Like EO, Wagner appears to be securing mining concessions, such as those acquired in the CAR, and a Wagner-related company called M Invest Ltd has acquired mining rights in Sudan. However, unlike EO, which flew the flag of no country, Wagner functions as an undeclared branch of the Russian military. A detailed investigation of Wagner in The Atlantic magazine said: “It’s fighters fly to Syria on Russian military aircraft, receive treatment in Russian military hospitals, work alongside regular Russian forces in operations, and are awarded Russian military medals signed personally by Vladimir Putin.” Wagner can do things that the Russian military cannot as it operates in a world of smoke and mirrors. Sean McFate, a former US paratrooper and author of The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder, says: “Shadow wars are a certain type of war where plausible deniability eclipses firepower in terms of effectiveness. Think about how Russia was in Crimea. “In older war tactics, when they would put their heel on another state, they’d send in the tanks. Now, in 2019, that’s not how they do it. They have military backup, but they use covert and clandestine means. They use special forces, they use mercenaries, they use proxies, they use propaganda — things that give them plausible deniability. They manufacture the fog of war and then exploit it for victory.” Russia’s embrace of Africa is a superb irony because the Kremlin is providing covert support to far-right nationalists and anti-immigration racists in Europe and in the US it helped elect Trump. Prigozhin was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2017 for his hand in the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm that was a key part of the GRU effort to help Trump win the US election in 2016. Russia’s push is “strategic” and not about Africa as such but, as Putin has made abundantly clear, about winning an undeclared war against the West, especially the US and France. This raises the prospect of Africa once again becoming the site of great power competition that it was during the Cold War. The net outcome could be a massive militarisation of the continent — and future indebtedness to Russia as African countries buy up expensive weapons systems and nuclear energy plants. In Cameroon, where Wagner is advising in the battle against Boko Haram, the Russians have sold anti-aircraft weapons that will have little effect in fighting terrorism. In April, Angola purchased expensive Sukhoi SU-30 fighter jets vastly superior to any combat aircraft currently operating in southern Africa and expressed interest in purchasing Russian S400 missile systems with its highly developed electronic and software equipment capable of mobile electronic snooping. About 200 Wagner men are involved in protecting Russian military intelligence officials at the Pico Basilé island spy base in Equatorial Guinea. This base allows for the interception of signals from almost all of the west coast of Africa. Over recent years the base has been significantly enlarged. So far Russia’s military scramble for Africa has happened on the cheap. China spent hundreds of billions of dollars building its influence in Africa through infrastructure projects and boosting economic ties, but has a very light military footprint and no equivalent of Wagner. Chinese mining operations at Tenke Fugurume in the Democratic Republic of Congo are protected by American mercenary Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group. Prince, whose now-defunct Blackwater security company was the most notorious private military contractor operating in Iraq during the war and was responsible for the Nisour Square massacre, is also involved in Mozambique and South Sudan, and appears to be Wagner’s main competition on the continent. But though Prince has connections to the Trump administration where his sister Betsy de Vos is Education Secretary, and was himself investigated by Robert Mueller for trying to create a backchannel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin via Seychelles, he appears to be mercenary in the true meaning of the word. He works with the Chinese, the Russians and, it is rumoured, the big oil companies in Mozambique. And he lacks the kind of big impact that has put Wagner on the map in such a spectacular way. Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin? Just like the Gupta family scaled giddy financial heights in South Africa through contracts with Jacob Zuma’s government, Yevgeny Prigozhin amassed his power and his fortune through a catering contract with the Kremlin. Prigozhin grew up in Leningrad, Putin’s home city. He later served a nine-year prison sentence on charges of robbery and on his release branched out into the catering business. This led to his nickname “Putin’s chef” after this former hotdog seller who later opened an elite restaurant. In 2001 Putin, accompanied by Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori, popped in for a meal. Putin was so impressed he contracted Prigozhin to cater for his 51st birthday party in 2003. After his encounter with Putin, Prigozhin secured lucrative contracts to supply food to the Russian army and schoolchildren which soon secured him a place at the table of Russia’s oligarchs — obscenely wealthy, politically connected “businessmen” who enjoy a close relationship with the Kremlin. It was Russia’s oligarchs who enabled Putin’s rise to power. Later Putin suggested they give up their political power and some of their fortune in exchange for “safety, security and continued prosperity”, as Masha Gessen wrote for the New York Times in 2014. Some, like media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, refused and were forced into exile. Prigozhin’s rise has been described by opposition leader Alexei Navalny as “a parable of Russia under Putin”
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28-OCT-2019 :: From Russia with Love Africa |
I would argue Putin’s timing is exquisite and optimal and his Model has an exponential ROI. Russia’s clout on African soil runs on many tracks, and its expansion is geared primarily towards hybrid activities. In Moscow’s offer for Africa are mercenaries, military equipment, mining investments, nuclear power plants, and railway connections. Andrew Korybko writes Moscow invaluably fills the much-needed niche of providing its partners there with “Democratic Security”, or in other words, the cost-effective and low-commitment capabilities needed to thwart colour revolutions and resolve unconventional Wars (collectively referred to as Hybrid War). To simplify, Russia’s “political technologists” have reportedly devised bespoke solutions for confronting incipient and ongoing color revolutions, just like its private military contractors (PMCs) have supposedly done the same when it comes to ending insurgencies. Once we look through the Optics of two nuclear-capable supersonic bombers belonging to the Russian Air Force landing in Pretoria for the aircraft’s first-ever landing on the African continent and, according to an embassy official, only the second country in which it has made a public appearance outside of Russia. The first was Venezuela. Then we need to see this move for what it is. It is meaningful. Where Xi is fed up and speaks about the ‘’The End of Vanity’’ because the ROI [outside commodities and telecoms for China] is negative, Putin has created a hybrid model with an exponential ROI. I would imagine he is on speed dial.
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Big Saturday Read: Two Years After the Coup - The Economy (Part 2) @Wamagaisa Africa |
For all the shortcomings of his two year old administration, Emmerson Mnangagwa might have been excused by many Zimbabweans and might have been glorified as a hero, had he performed a Houdini Act on the economy. True, the coup that catapulted Mnangagwa into power in November 2017 took place against the backdrop of an on-going and long-running economic quagmire. But he came in with great verve and a show of undaunted spirit. He spoke a lot and promised much and in doing so, raised great expectations. He touted it as “the new dispensation” and promised to do things differently from the old regime. However, his performance in the two years after the coup has been flaccid at best. It has been a much ado about nothing affair which has sunk the country into serious economic and political doldrums. In any event, he lacks the licence to divorce himself from the deep-rooted causes of that economic collapse, having been Mugabe’s top lieutenant and chief enforcer since independence in 1980. It would not be unfair to say that if Mugabe was the architect of the economic collapse, Mnangagwa was more than a handyman. Two years on, Zimbabwe is still in dire-straits, a ready example in many an economics class of how not to run an economy. Some locals say things are worse than when he arrived but even if that might be marked as an exaggeration, the mere fact that he is being compared to his predecessor is damning enough. The only way after Mugabe should have been upwards. But under Mnangagwa Zimbabwe has failed to defy the economics version of the law of gravity.
The indicators are not good. Although the government suspended official year-on-year inflation data, the IMF put it at 300% in August 2019 and independent observers say it’s over 400%. There has been no improvement on the employment front with more than 90% of the working population unemployed. Companies continue to close down while other have been forced to scale down operations. Loss-making public enterprises are still draining the national coffers. The majority have crossed over to the informal sector. More than 60% of the population is in need of food aid, thanks in part to natural disasters but largely to poor agricultural policies. There have been serious shortages or increase in the prices of basics including fuel, electricity, bread and cooking oil. Wages have fallen well below inflation. There have also been continued cash shortages. Civil servants have been striking with doctors and teachers leading the pack. Hospitals are dysfunctional and some say there’s a slow genocide taking place with thousands dying of curable ailments. Instead of working to find an amicable solution, the government claims to have fired doctors. But just as they did under the Mugabe regime, when they experience as much as a cough, senior ministers hop on the plane and fly to South Africa or overseas for medical treatment. There is virtually no incentive on their part as public officers to ensure that the healthcare system is fit for purpose. More of these indicators are examined in greater detail in this article. Young Zimbabweans are tired and exasperated. There is an overwhelming air of hopelessness. They go to college and graduate. Mnangagwa, as Chancellor of all state universities attends every graduation ceremony to cap them. It is doubtful that the irony registers in his mind as he attends these ceremonies, that the majority will be transitioning into redundancy, thanks to the parlous economic conditions. If there is an opportunity to leave, the average young Zimbabwean will grab it without hesitation.
Already a big problem in the past, public debt has increased over the two year period. The Finance Minister admits in his latest budget statement, that public debt is “unsustainably high, due to the accumulation of arrears, as well as expansion of domestic debt”. The Minister admits that without alternative sources of funding, the government has over-relied on domestic sources of financing which has resulted in rising domestic debt. “Since 2017, there has been a huge increase in domestic debt,” says Ncube. In the previous budget, Ncube told the nation that from December 2017 the government had gone on a borrowing spree from the central bank. Its overdraft facility at the RBZ rose from US$1.4 billion in December 2017 to US$2.5 billion in September 2018. In just 10 months the regime had taken US$1.1 billion from the central bank. According to the 2019 budget statement, lending to government from the RBZ rose by US$1.11 billion between January and September 2018. The new Mnangagwa administration had gone on spree of issuing Treasury Bills after the coup - most probably to fund their election campaign. Civil society watchdogs like ZIMCODD believe the public debt is understated and they have called for a comprehensive audit so that a true picture is revealed. For example, this year the government took over the US$1.2 billion legacy debt from commercial banks. This includes debts owed to foreign airlines for airfares which the banks didn’t repatriate in foreign currency due to shortages. This foreign currency crunch and inability to repatriate profits has also dissuaded investors from the country. However, in attempts to water down the severity of the problem, Ncube says domestic debt has been reined in since the end of 2018. He attributes this to, among other things, what he calls “zero recourse to RBZ financing including the overdraft facility”. In other words, he says that the government has not borrowed from the central bank. This claim is hard to sustain given that in the same budget statement he also discloses that the government issued Treasury Bills in 2019 to cover a ZWL$318 million cash advance and a ZWL$2.9 billion overdraft both from the RBZ. Even if the claim is that some of the TBs were for restructuring existing obligations it would still be misleading to claim that there is zero financing from the central bank. The enormous foreign debt that has stood for years is still unpaid and is growing due to interest and penalties. It now stands at US$8 billion according to the latest budget statement. More than 60% of this debt is owed to bilateral creditors, with the remainder due to multilateral creditors such as the World Bank and African Development Bank. The bulk of foreign debt consists of arrears in principal, interest and penalties. These arrears prevent Zimbabwe from accessing lines of credit. As Ncube admits in the latest budget statement, “the external arrears prevent the country from accessing new financing from the IFIs, traditional bilateral and commercial creditors”. Effectively, Zimbabwe is caught up in a debt trap. The country has made token payments to the IFIs, says Ncube, in an effort to demonstrate commitment to re-engagement to the creditors. However, this tokenism is a pointless exercise, akin to pouring money down the drain when it could be used to alleviate the plight of the poor. The creditors are not impressed by the tokenism. Zimbabwe needs to attend to major reforms that will rehabilitate its political brand. Creditors are reluctant to be seen as if they are condoning a recalcitrant regime.
A country with no friends? The Mnangagwa regime might have used the goodwill and support it enjoyed in the early months to find a benefactor willing to support it with bridge financing to clear its arrears and unlock credit lines. That could have provided a huge boost. This is how Myanmar was able to clear about US$6 billion of its debts in 2013 with the help of Japan. The help from Japan to pay off loans to IFIs and bilateral creditors helped to unlock funds from those institutions while facilitating debt cancellations. The Mnangagwa regime did not have the fortune of its counterparts in Myanmar. It is not clear why none of the regime’s allies came to its aid. For so long referred to by ZANU PF as an “all-weather friend”, China balked at the request for US$2 billion support. Not even China had confidence in the new regime, despite the rhetoric. It had refused Mugabe’s requests a few years earlier. China does support a limited amount of projects including the rehabilitation of the Hwange Thermal Power Station and the expansion of the airport in Harare. It is also building the new parliament building in Mt Hampden. These sweeteners serve to maintain a relationship, but they cannot obscure the fact that China refused to offer the much-needed package in respect of which the Mnangagwa regime was desperate. Mnannagwa's allies in the region are happy to offer him moral support. When it comes to real economic assistance, they are nowhere to be seen. When Zimbabwe defaulted on its energy bills to South Africa and Mozambique, they simply stopped supplying electricity, plunging their neighbour into darkness. Debt forgiveness for a neighbour in distress? No. It's strictly business.
Currency conundrum The currency issue is probably the biggest and most visible indicator of Zimbabwe’s predicament. When Mnangagwa became president in November 2017, Zimbabwe had a multi-currency system, which had been adopted since 2009 after losing the local currency to record-breaking hyperinflation. However, a year earlier, Zimbabwe had introduced a surrogate currency, called the bond note, which it said was equal to the US dollar. The one to one equivalence was, of course, a command fiction which only the government maintained. The Mnangagwa regime has now officially abandoned the multi currency regime and introduced mono-currency with the official return of the Zimbabwe Dollar on 24 June 2019. A few months earlier in February 2019, the government had semi-liberalised the exchange rate, making the RTGS Dollar legal tender and abandoning the pretence that the surrogate currency was equivalent to the US Dollar. This attempt to push the maker towards the RTGS Dollar in a multi-currency environment failed, leading to the hasty introduction of the Zimbabwe Dollar in June. The net effect is that the local currency has lost enormous value against the US Dollar - more than 80% - from what it was worth at the time of the coup. Therefore, whereas the surrogate currency was 1:1 with the US Dollar in November ember 2017, it is now 1:15 on the official Interbank Market and 1:20 on the parallel market. The problem is that while the local currency lost value against the US Dollar, prices of goods and services had already risen as if they were pegged to the US Dollar. Furthermore, workers’ wages and pensions were not adjusted to keep at pace with the currency changes. What changed was the prefix to the figures, not the figures themselves. Until this month, pensioners were still getting a measly $ZWL80. The new monthly pension announced by NSSA may have risen by 150% but at ZWL$200 (or US$13) it remains a pittance. A bag of Compound “D” fertiliser costs ZWL$400 which means a pensioner who is farming must wait two months to buy a single bag. Given these ridiculously low figures, it’s not surprising that Zimbabweans cannot take the Finance Minister seriously when he announces that he has made a surplus. It means absolutely nothing to them. Likewise, it is hardly surprising when some make adverse comparisons between Mnangagwa and his predecessor. Consequently, workers and pensioners who were already complaining under Mugabe in November 2017 are still impoverished under the Mnangagwa regime, with no respite in sight. This is why the public healthcare system is at a standstill and a serious administration would have declared a state of disaster.
The Professor’s Great Currency Gamble
Mthuli Ncube knew he was taking a great gamble when he abolished the multi-currency regime and announced the new Zimbabwe Dollar as the sole legal tender on 24 June 2019. Writing in the Financial Times, on 20 August 2019, Ncube described the return of the Zimbabwe Dollar as a “simple economic and geopolitical necessity”. The multi-currency regime had been “a tourniquet, not a cure” he said arguing that while it brought stability it had eroded the country’s competitiveness on the export market where regional currencies were weaker than the US Dollar. However, “plenty of foreign exchange is required to stabilise the introduction of a new currency and leaven inevitable inflation” the Finance Minister conceded before adding, “Zimbabwe’s reserves could not be described as abundant”. He indicated that Zimbabwe had no prospect of getting foreign currency. “A fresh tranche of foreign exchange in the required volume and time frame was impossible, he admitted. The choice was between “short-term turbulence now or greater anguish later”, suggesting that the government was under severe pressure to introduce the currency. Indeed, attempts in February 2019 to rescue the situation by liberalising foreign currency trading and designating the RTGS as the preferred currency had failed to yield the desired outcome. “Change has to be driven more forcefully” write Ncube, justifying the legal intervention designating the Zimbabwe Dollar as the sole legal tender and banning the US dollar and other currencies for local trading but also reaffirn=ming the command approach to the economy. However, as with all currencies, the fate of the Zimbabwe Dollar lies in its ability to inspire confidence and belief in the market. As Yuval Harare has pointed out a currency is a myth; a figment of the imagination which depends on the extent to which it is believed. Its value holds if a significant number of persons believe in it. The old Zimbabwe Dollar became extinct because the market lost faith in it. Market actors could no longer believe in it as a medium of exchange. The great test for the new Zimbabwe Dollar is whether it succeeds where its predecessor failed. Already the market refused to believe the government’s original order that the Zimbabwe Dollar was equal to the US Dollar. This is why it is hovering between 15 and 20 Zimbabwe Dollars to 1 US Dollar. It might hold if the market believes in it, or it will fall further. In this regard, the experience of the RTGS Dollar between February and June 2019 is worth learning from. Ncube said the government was forced into a hasty intervention by introducing the Zimbabwe Dollar as the sole legal tender after realising that the RTGS Dollar was failing to establish itself as the currency of exchange and instead the market was re-dollarising. But there is no guarantee that the market will not self-dollarise even with the command Zimbabwe Dollar. After all, when dollarisation was adopted in 2009, it was not because the government ordered it. Rather the market had already self-dollarised and the government simply followed the market. The authorities will hope that the Zimbabwe Dollar does not spiral out of control as happened to the old Zimbabwe Dollar in 2008. If it does, Mnangagwa would have taken Zimbabweans back to the dark place where his predecessor and mentor took them a decade ago. It is sobering to think that this striking feat cannot be ruled out.
Forex blues In this regard, the perennial shortage of foreign currency remains problematic. In November 2017, Zimbabwe was short of foreign currency. The forex crunch begun years earlier and it prompted the government to introduce bond notes touted variously as an export incentive and to reduce cash shortages. The cash shortages had begun at the tail end of 2013, the same year that ZANU PF retained power exclusively following a controversial general election which ended the Inclusive Government. The Inclusive Government had ushered in a period of relative stability on the economic front. But while Zimbabwe was spending foreign currency, it was not generating enough of it. There was capital flight after the 2013 elections and the demand of foreign currency outstripped supply. In the end long queues formed at banks which could only give very low amounts at a time. In 2017 the situation was dire with shortages of fuel and basic goods becoming more common. The new administration was expected to make things better, with renewed hopes of foreign direct investment and new lines of credit. However, none of that has happened leaving the country severely impoverished of foreign exchange sources. It has had to rely on earnings from tobacco and gold exports as well as remittances from the Diaspora. The government’s policies in the gold sector have been counter-productive, as the Finance Minister has admitted this week. He told a business event that Zimbabwe was losing 30 to 34 tonnes of gold to South Africa through smuggling. He also conceded that illegal exporters were avoiding the formal system because of punitive rules which force them to surrender a large part of their export revenues. The government was warned that the parallel market would flourish because of its tough rules, but it did not listen. Now it's counting the cost. The problem is for too long the little foreign currency that came was abused by political and business elites. They took advantage of access to the central bank, getting forex at 1:1 and making profits on the black market or selling goods at higher prices that did not record the implicit subsidies they were getting. The central bank had a Foreign Currency Allocation Committee, which gave cheap foreign currency on a preferential basis to a select group of importers on the basis that they were importing essential commodities such as fuel, grain, cooking oil and electricity. These subsidies were not always reflected in the prices charged by these importers and producers. It was a racket which made a few elites wealthy in a sea of poverty. The facility has since been removed for fuel importers. In the 2020 budget the Finance Minister has undertaken to end the subsidies for grain importers. However, there will still be subsidies ostensibly to protect consumers from the rise in prices that will follow the marketisation of grain imports. Whether these subsidies will make a difference in the racketeering among elites is debatable.
Overspending
A major problem during the Mugabe era was unbudgeted spending by the government. This lack of fiscal discipline has been the government’s major undoing. This meant the government breached its own budget limits and ministries and spent beyond their lawful appropriations. Only later would they seek condonation from Parliament. There is currently a Financial Adjustments Bill, by which government intends to seek condonation for systemic bouts of overspending since 2015. Interestingly, there was more overspending in 2017 (US$4.5 billion) and 2018 (US$3.5 billion) - the period covered by the Mnangagwa regime than prior years (US$25 million in 2015 and US$1.5 billion in 2016). It’s already clear that the government spent more than it had budgeted for in 2019. The Finance Minister says in his latest budget statement, “In 2019, spending outside the Budget and macro-economic shocks disrupted attainment of the TSP targets. Refraining from unbudgeted activities and borrowing from the Central Bank will, therefore, constitute a key obligation for both Treasury and the Central Bank Authorities from 2020.” This is the same thing he promised in the last budget statement, which means the government is not living up to its undertakings. The truth is that old habits die hard. These are the same personnel who ran government departments during the Mugabe era. They have continued to behave as they did during that period regardless of Ncube’s exhortations. It doesn’t help that Mnangagwa has defaulted on his promise of having a small government by which he sought to distinguish himself from his predecessor. However, his government has expanded over the two years. After initially trimming the number of deputy ministers, he has added new ones, repudiating his earlier undertakings. Deputy Ministers are not essential in a bureaucracy that already has a Permanent Secretary who operates as the CEO of a Ministry. They do not even sit in Cabinet in place of their Minister when he or she is absent. The roles have been used as instruments of patronage; a classic case of Jobs of the Boys, thereby broadening the President’s sphere of loyalists and acolytes but at public expense.
Command Agriculture Scam
Zimbabwe was once regarded as the breadbasket of the region. This was because it had a vibrant agricultural sector both in the commercial and subsistence sectors. The country’s rainfall pattern has always been erratic but the commercial sector has harnessed rainwater in times of plenty, building dams and investing in irrigation infrastructure. This infrastructure was also affected during the chaotic land reform programme and efforts to rebuild it have been marred by corruption. For example, the Auditor General revealed that a company called Solutions Motors was given more than a million dollars to supply irrigation equipment and vehicles for the Department of Irrigation. The company did not deliver half the goods. This type of corruption is systemic and one of the major factors of the Mnangagwa regime’s failure to turn the economy around. More importantly, however, is that the agricultural support program implemented by the government since 2016 has been nothing short of a disaster. Launched as Command Agriculture, Mnangagwa immediately claimed it as his flagship program, well before the coup. But it turned out to be a great scam. Sakunda Holdings was presented as the funding partner of the program but in reality it was no more than a conduit for public funds from the government. The government paid Sakunda which sourced inputs and distributed them to the farmers via the Grain Marketing Board. The reality was that Sakunda was no more than a middleman but as the AG found out the systems were so compromised that there was a conflict of interest and no way of monitoring whether Sakunda was complying with its obligations. When senior civil servants in the Ministry of Finance were questioned by the Public Accounts Committee to account for huge payments to so-called suppliers under Command Agriculture, they professed ignorance. To his credit, the Finance Minister saw early on that Command Agriculture was a scam that could not be sustained. His objections are encapsulated in the following words from his latest budget statement, “The current financing model for agriculture places an unfair share of the burden on Government ... The model has created opportunities for arbitrage, leakages and corruption, presenting a risk to macro-stability and the Budget.” Ncube’s problem from the start of his tenure was that Command Agriculture was his boss’ flagship programme. Now he had the daunting task of telling him that it was a financially disastrous programme. He has been sniping at it over the past year. But he has not succeeded in getting rid of it altogether. He has a new name for it: Smart Agriculture, a term that had pride of place in their political rivals MDC Alliance’s manifesto. He says some state and private banks have agreed to give loans to farmers, with the government standing as guarantor. Given the high default rates under the previous guise of the program, it is more than likely that the government guarantee will be called. This means the government is still effectively funding the programme. A public guarantee of debts by the government after all counts as public debt.
Corruption Corruption was a major problem in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and as we have already seen it is economically costly because of the leakages and the expenses it adds to the cost of doing business for investors as they are forced to pay unlawful rent to rent-seekers within the state system. We have seen how corrupt dealings in the gold sector are depriving the country of huge potential revenues that could be used to deliver public services. When Mnangagwa took power, he promised to fight it. However, as with most things under the regime, the undertaking was based on deception. Two years into the regime, there have been no major scalps. Instead, the regime has perfected the technique of “Catch and Release”, whereby they arrest a big name, keep them in custody for a few days before releasing them on bail. Even if they are convicted at the Magistrates Court, they eventually get bail pending appeal and the cases appear to get forgotten. In a few cases, unfortunate ones like Prisca Mupfumira, are sacrificed and made to stay in remand prison for a few months. Then she got bail. The matter is then held in abeyance until it’s forgotten. Or technicalities are raised and she escapes the charges. If parts of the justice system itself are not corrupt, they are plagued by incompetence. This has become so frequent under the Mnangagwa regime that people no longer take notice whenever there is a high-profile arrest. They know in advance how it’s going to end. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Earlier this year Mnangagwa appointed a new anti-corruption commission. The old one appointed during the Mugabe era had been fired last year on grounds that it was failing to fulfil its mandate. The new ZACC began with great verve but despite a few high-profile arrests there has been no discernible progress. The AG produced an excellent report with a vast number of potential cases of corruption. It remains to be seen whether ZACC has taken up any of these leads to investigate and build solid cases for prosecution. Before the new ZACC, Mnangagwa had appointed an anti-corruption prosecution unit which he placed in his office. The inappropriateness of setting up an anti-corruption prosecution unit in the president’s office was highlighted at the time. So far there is no evidence of fruits of this unit. In the first few months of his presidency, Mnangagwa launched an amnesty program whereby he extended amnesty to those who had allegedly externalised vast amounts of money. He promised to name and shame offenders. After building up great expectations, the outcome was a damp squib. He also announced a new asset disclosure requirements for Cabinet Ministers and senior public officers. The fact that it would be secret was highlighted as a weakness. In the end, after the burial noise, nothing was heard of the asset register. All this posturing is not new. When Mugabe was the leader, ZANU PF had a Leadership Code which imposed strict ethical requirements on Ministers and senior party leaders. Built on socialist principles, they were only allowed limited amounts of property. It was even included as a term in the Unity Accord which brought ZANU PF and PF ZAPU together as one party. However, it was not even worth the paper it was written on. They all went on a spree of property accumulation, often by foul means. So when Mnangagwa makes big promises on ethical leadership and anti-corruption, they are just that: promises, but without substance.
The Missing Link
Mthuli Ncube is hopeful the economy will attain a 3% growth by the end of 2020, up from -6.5% at the end of this year. Then again, when he presented his maiden budget in 2018 his projected economic growth in 2019 was an ambitious 3.1%. What went wrong for the Mnangagwa administration? Most of what went wrong has already been examined in this article - policy weaknesses and inconsistencies, poor exports, foreign currency crunch, egregious corruption and isolation. Natural disasters such as drought and Cyclone Idai exacerbated an already dysfunctional system. But for all his efforts on the economic front, Mthuli Ncube has had no control over the political factors that are critical to Zimbabwe’s revival. He thinks strengthening the Ease of Doing Business reforms will help to improve Zimbabwe as an investment destination. In this regard he is concerned with technical reforms. The big elephant in the room however is political reforms. There is a school of thought which focuses narrowly on economic aspects, believing that the economic challenges can be resolved internally within the discipline using economic tools. If the economists are given space and they are allowed to deploy their tools, things will get better whatever the politics. Another school of thought suggests that the endeavours of economists will come to nought unless the politics is sorted. The notion of de-linking economics from politics in Zimbabwe’s context is unwise. Brand Zimbabwe is politically damaged. The process of debt resolution which is critical to Zimbabwe’s ability to access credit markets cannot be successful unless Zimbabwe’s political brand is fixed and rehabilitated. The IFIs and bilateral creditors to whom we owe arrears won’t negotiate with a regime whose political brand is tainted. The abysmal human rights record, covered in the last BSR is a cause for concern. They don’t want to be seen as enabling a brutal and unrepentant regime. Likewise, the response of IFIs and commercial creditors will take a cue from the reaction of the international community to the re-engagement agenda. In this regard, the Mnangagwa’s re-engagement agenda has so far been a dismal failure. The poor conduct of the elections might have been forgiven. But the killing of civilians on 1 August 2018 and again in January 2019 did irreparable damage to the regime. The regime could have diluted the use of excessive force by taking decisive action against offenders. It has refused to do that. But even the Kgalema Motlanthe Commission which was set up after the August killings has so far proved to be a deception. Its long list of recommendations has not been implemented. This failure to hold perpetrators to account does nothing to improve the regime’s reputation. Even the sanctions issue, a favourite scapegoat of the regime, could be resolved by investing more efforts in the area of political reforms. The Finance Minister reveals in the latest budget that the biggest "development partners" are the US, UK and the EU, in that order. There is room for re-engagement, but the regime has yet to learn that grandstanding in international relations does not pay dividends. The importance of re-engagement cannot be overstated. It would help to unlock the gates of negotiating the burdensome public debt. Without resolution of the public debt issue, it will be impossible to access lines of credit that are necessary to kick-start activity in a number of areas of the economy. Mnangagwa had a great opportunity and much goodwill when he arrived on the scene, his shortcomings notwithstanding. That he squandered it all at the altar of political expediency is hard to explain because it is the political equivalent of self-immolation. His invitation to the great gathering of capitalist barons and financiers at Davos a few weeks after the coup was an invitation to treat; itself a signal of the over-excitement and hype that gripped an audience beyond Zimbabwe's borders. He had just toppled one of the world’s most notorious leaders and he was enjoying the limelight. His supporters sold him to the world as "pragmatic" and "business savvy". If they were selling products on the market, they would have been guilty of fraud and mis-selling. Even as early as Davos, he got overwhelmed by the occasion and created seeds of doubt instead of optimism. The overall performance in the two years since the coup: a lot of bluster, an abundance of rhetoric, so many promises, but ultimately no substance and reluctance to be change agents. Those who were hopeful are grossly disheartened while those who foresaw disaster find no comfort in saying we told you so. Prospects? The absence of competence makes it improbable.
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Uganda Resubmits China Loan Request for $2.3 Billion Railway @business Africa |
Uganda resubmitted a loan request to China for a 271-kilometer (168-mile) railway linking its capital, Kampala, with the Kenyan border after re-negotiating the contract price and improving security. The government of East Africa’s third-biggest economy submitted the application to the Export Import Bank of China in September to provide 85% of the project cost, Perez Wamburu, coordinator of the Standard Gauge Railway Project, said by email. The project cost was cut by $26 million. The initial loan request was delayed after the lender sought a comprehensive feasibility study, which has since been submitted, the coordinator said. An additional link was added from Kampala to the nearby Bukasa port on Lake Victoria as well as fencing for the entire railway route to protect it from vandalism. The spur to Lake Victoria, which the country shares with Tanzania and Kenya, is set to handle imports and exports via the neighboring countries. Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan agreed in 2014 to build standard gauge railways in their territories as part of a regional plan to cut transportation costs. “Kenya and Uganda continue to discuss harmonization of construction timelines and construction is expected to resume once the outstanding issues are addressed,” Wamburu said. Uganda has already acquired 126 kilometers of the corridor for the Malaba-Kampala SGR with land acquisition for the route expected to be concluded by June 2022, the official said.
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14-OCT-2019 :: Xi Jinping "The End of Vanity" which I characterised at the time as a "a substantive linguistic recasting of China Africa by Xi Jinping" Africa |
I recall #FOCAC2018 and the famous photograph where all the Chinese officials had a pen and paper and not one African official was taking notes. Had they been taking notes they would have heard Xi Jinping specifically speak of ‘’The End of Vanity’’ which I characterised at the time as a ‘’a substantive linguistic recasting of China Africa by Xi Jinping’’ I only recently discovered Ecclesiastes and clearly Xi was ahead of me in this regard. Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 2 Vanity[a] of vanities, says the Preacher 2 Vani- ty[a] of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 11 There is no remembrance of former things,[c] nor will there be any re- membrance of later things[d] yet to be among those who come after.
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@Huawei's pitch to African mayors: 'Our cameras will make you safe' @mailandguardian @simonallison Africa |
Sean Liu begins his pitch with a feel-good story. After he graduated from university in 2003, his first job was in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. It was a rough town, he recalls; the kind of place where motorcycle thieves could snatch your belongings at any moment, and children could be kidnapped and never seen again. Shenzhen is safe now, according to Liu. Kidnappings still happen, of course, but now the outcome is different. In fact, Liu was watching Chinese news recently and there was a clip about a child who had been abducted and taken hundreds of kilometres away, into another province all together. It took just 15 minutes for police to identify the kidnapper, and just 24 hours to track him down and rescue the child. “Why?” Liu asks, before proceeding to answer his own question. “In Shenzhen there’s about two million video cameras in one city. The population is about 20-million people. It’s not only the camera, but also the artificial intelligence behind it on the cloud. So everybody in Shenzhen city, you have any behaviour it could be recorded.” Liu, a senior marketing executive at Chinese tech firm Huawei, is in Mombasa, at an exclusive gathering of African mayors and local government officials. There are officials present from all over the continent, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somaliland, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The conference — organised by the Brenthurst Foundation, a Johannesburg-based think-tank and lobby group — is academic in nature, and it is not entirely clear why Huawei has been given an exclusive slot to pitch its vision for the future of African cities. It is a vision that revolves around surveillance, artificial intelligence and 5G communication networks, creating a world where your every movement is tracked, recorded and searchable. Liu cannot get over the wonder of this new technology. Last time he visited Shenzhen’s data management centre, his face was scanned and suddenly the screen in front of him was full of photos. “Photos of what?” he asks. Another rhetorical question, which he answers: photos of himself, taken everywhere he had been in the city over the past six months. “I think this is a very encouraging story for African countries,” Liu concludes. Christo Abrahams is Liu’s partner, and tags in at this point. This unlikely pair of travelling salesmen — Liu is tall and thin, and Abrahams is less tall and less thin — have distinct roles. Liu paints the big picture; Abrahams is the details guy. Abrahams is new to Huawei — he was previously chief technology architect at South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency — but no less enthusiastic for it. “It’s game-changing technology,” he says, as he loads up slides that outline exactly how Huawei’s Smart City infrastructure can revolutionise urban management. Smart water meters, smart electricity meters, smart street lighting, smart traffic monitoring — all underpinned by cloud computing that brings all the data together on a single platform, seamlessly managed by artificial intelligence. But the most important advance of them all, Abrahams intones solemnly, is in security. “This area around public safety is very important. We drive a philosophy where we say ‘safe city first, before smart city’. Because if it’s not safe, no one will invest there.” Abrahams cites the example of one town in Kenya where Huawei launched a trial project, installing high-definition surveillance cameras and training police to use it. “The crime rate was lowered by 46%!” Abrahams exclaims. When asked, neither Liu nor Abrahams could tell the Mail & Guardian the name of the Kenyan town in question. When it comes to the technology behind Huawei’s Smart Cities project, not everyone tells such uplifting stories. In Xinjiang, in western China, human rights groups have carefully documented how widespread surveillance, coupled with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, has been used to suppress members of the Uighur minority. Human Rights Watch describes this technology as “algorithms of repression”. An estimated one million Uighurs have been arbitrarily detained in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang since 2017, and subjected to ill-treatment and sometimes torture. Outside the camps, severe restrictions have been placed on the Uighur population’s freedom of movement and expression. Technological solutions, such as cameras and smartphone apps that monitor movement, have been used to enforce these restrictions. The Diplomat explains: “What began as a traffic monitoring system quickly morphed into a political tool with facial recognition technologies constantly feeding information gathered from all possible surfaces in China. The consequences of these cyber nightmares are well documented in Xinjiang, where millions of CCTV systems track the whereabouts of citizens, while a politically motivated algorithm, the social credit system, works alongside to restrict physical mobility in an instant.” It is not just in China that Huawei has attracted controversy. The United States has repeatedly accused the company of building “backdoors” into its technology that would allow the Chinese government to access data; and it has been accused of evading international sanctions to supply Iran. For African countries, an especially relevant example is in Ecuador, an early adopter of the Smart Cities technology in 2011. As The New York Times reported, footage from the 4 300 cameras that were installed goes directly to the police, and “to the country’s feared domestic intelligence agency, which under the previous president, Rafael Correa, had a lengthy track record of following, intimidating and attacking political opponents”. These are issues that Huawei’s salesmen would prefer not to dwell on, although it is not difficult to see the potential for abuse in the technology they want to sell to African cities and governments. After their pitch, Liu declines to be interviewed, but Abrahams is happy to chat — and the more he chats, the more Orwellian he sounds. “You want to get the perpetrator but he’s wearing a mask? How are you going to get him?” he asks. “These recognition algorithms check what clothes you’re wearing, what shoes are on your feet. It actually checks your gait, because everybody’s gait is unique. “They think it’s just your fingerprints or retina but everybody has a unique gait. All those algorithms are working together to identify you. “The nice part of that is your past now catches up with you. They can take a side image of you and render your whole face, and run it through the camera system, and they will know where you were the last two weeks. “Which mall, where you were, in what car you were driving, who is always with you at the mall. They do all those associations through artificial intelligence. “Human beings can’t process that amount of data, but give it to that system. I can tell you, you will be blown away by the power of artificial intelligence. You must see the algorithms this company has, where AIs are developing the next generation AIs, without humans.” Our conversation is interrupted by the queue of local government officials wanting to speak to Huawei’s representatives. The pitch appears to have worked. “I found your presentation very interesting,” said one official from Somaliland. “This big data, and smart cities, and that stuff. It’s the stuff we need to do in Africa.”
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Harmonisation pushes up intra-East African Community trade over 10% @NewTimesRwanda Africa |
Intra-regional trade within the East African Community (EAC) bloc rose by 10.3 per cent last year, courtesy of harmonisation of cross-border rules and procedures. “Reforms taken under the Customs Union has also boosted intra-regional trade,” Christophe Bazivamo, EAC deputy secretary general responsible for productive and social sectors, said in Arusha November 11. He said intra-EAC trade catapulted to $3.2 billion last year from $2.7 billion in 2016 and $2.9 billion in 2017. They cite the operationalisation of the EAC Single Customs Territory (SCT), the Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) and One Stop Border Post (OSBP) and their respective rules and regulations as having a multiplier effect on the ease of doing business in the region. Alongside with these is enhanced customs operations inter-connectivity in the region which has seen the introduction of Electronic Cargo Tracking System to monitor the movement of traded goods across the region. He noted that after 20 years of integration process, the intra-EAC trade was as low as 12 per cent “whereas trade with other nations is 90 per cent”.
Kenya
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