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19-APR-2020 :: The End of Vanity China Africa Win Win Africa |
And the entire China Africa relationship has been an extraordinary exercise in Narrative Framing and linguistic control, accompanied by a chorus of Party Hacks chirruping Hosannas at every turn amplifying largely meaningless feel good Phrases artfully placed in the mouths of our Politicians and our Newspapers. It is remarkable. 4/12 Curiosamente, esse período marcou uma das piores décadas para esse mercado na história. É incontestável a contradição entre esses números, presumivelmente mais apurados, e os números “criados” pelo próprio governo comunista Chinês. 4/12 Interestingly, this period marked one of the worst decades for this market in history. The contradiction between these numbers, presumably more accurate, and the numbers “created” by the Chinese communist government is undeniable.
Home Thoughts
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The Way we live now #COVID19 Africa |
''You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.” Don DeLillo wrote "Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live."
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'Utter disaster': Manaus fills mass graves as Covid-19 hits the Amazon @guardian Africa |
Day and night, the dead are delivered into the tawny Amazonian earth – the latest victims of a devastating pandemic now reaching deep into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. On Sunday 140 bodies were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of Amazonas state. On Saturday, 98. Normally the figure would be closer to 30 – but these are no longer normal times. “It’s madness – just madness,” said Gilson de Freitas, a 30-year-old maintenance man whose mother, Rosemeire Rodrigues Silva, was one of 136 people buried there last Tuesday as local morticians set yet another grim daily record. Freitas – who believes his mother contracted Covid-19 after being admitted to hospital following a stroke – recalled watching in despair as her remains were lowered into a muddy trench alongside perhaps 20 other coffins. “They were just dumped there like dogs,” he said. “What are our lives worth now? Nothing.” The city’s mayor, Arthur Virgílio, pleaded for urgent international help. “We aren’t in a state of emergency – we’re well beyond that. We are in a state of utter disaster … like a country that is at war – and has lost,” he said. “It’s tragic surrealism ... I can’t stop thinking about Gabriel García Márquez when I think about the situation Manaus is facing.” The coronavirus appears to have reached this isolated, riverside metropolis of more than 2 million people on 11 March, imported by a 49-year-old woman who had flown in from London. Six weeks later it is taking a terrible toll, with gravediggers so overworked that two men were this week forced to bury their own father. “Manaus is in a race against time to avoid becoming the Brazilian version of Guayaquil,” one local newspaper, A Crítica, warned last week in reference to the Ecuadorian city where bodies have been left rotting in the streets and thousands are feared to have died. With more than 100 people dying each day and Manaus’s overwhelmed authorities performing nighttime burials, many fear it is already too late. City officials say they expect to bury up to 4,500 people in the next month alone. Funeral homes have warned they will run out of wooden coffins by this weekend. In Parque Tarumã – Manaus’s biggest cemetery – excavators have carved out mass graves called “trincheiras” – trenches – in which the dead were being stacked in three-high piles until a revolt from mourning families saw the practice halted. “It’s chaos in there,” said Freitas, whose 58-year-old mother was consigned to the trenches last week. “She spent her whole life working … she paid all of her taxes. She deserved more. We all do.” Edmar Barros, a local photographer who has been documenting the burials, said he had never seen anything similar. “It’s absurd what is happening here,” he said. “It’s a situation of just devastating sadness.” Emergency and health services in Manaus are also buckling under the strain, with ambulances roaming for up to three hours in search of hospitals with space to admit the patients they have collected. Gruesome video footage has emerged from hospitals showing corridors lined with corpses shrouded in body bags and sheets. Another video shows an unconscious patient with his head wrapped inside a ventilator hood improvised from a large plastic bag. “There’s a shortage of mechanical ventilators, of oxygen, of staff, of stretchers. Everything is lacking,” said Dr Domício Magalhães Filho, the technical director of the ambulance service, Samu. Experts and officials say multiple factors explain the intensity of the catastrophe affecting the Amazon region’s biggest city. One is that the coronavirus epidemic has struck at the tail end of the rainy season, when respiratory illnesses are rife and hospitals already stretched. Another is that Manaus’s chronically underfunded health service was poorly equipped and understaffed even before medical workers began contracting Covid-19 themselves. But many also blame corruption and the government’s failure to effectively implement containment measures once Covid-19 was detected. Only on 23 March – 10 days after the first case was confirmed – did the state governor declare a state of emergency, ordering all non-essential businesses to close. “We took too long to ask people to stay at home,” said Leonardo Steiner, the archbishop of Manaus, which is a four-hour flight north of São Paulo. Even now, with the death toll soaring, social distancing is being flouted in some areas on the city’s outskirts, with huge queues outside banks and locals refusing to wear masks or remain at home. Emergency and health services in Manaus are also buckling under the strain, with ambulances roaming for up to three hours in search of hospitals with space to admit the patients they have collected. “It comes from China, doesn’t it?” he said vaguely on Tuesday as President Bolsonaro sparked outrage by shrugging his shoulders at the country’s dead. “All of us are afraid because we don’t know what tomorrow might bring,” Freitas said. “Today we’re alive. Tomorrow we just don’t know.”
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Zeqway Clarke was in the back pew in the upstairs chapel at the Andrew D. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn when he chanced to gaze under the coffin and see what looked like a bare foot @thedailybeast Africa |
“You could see it,” he later told The Daily Beast. “You could actually look under the casket and see it. I asked somebody else, ‘Is that a foot?’” Clarke was there on April 9 with his wife and daughters and a small number of relatives in masks and gloves, bidding farewell to her grandfather, 88-year-old Francois Jules. The pastor continued conducting the service as Clarke gazed at what was indeed a bare foot visible beneath the hem of the cloth backdrop closing off the front of the room. At the end of the service, Clarke went up for a final parting moment with Jules, a military veteran and retired graveyard security guard, who was recovering from a stroke in Kings County Hospital when he was fatally struck by COVID-19. Clarke used the moment by the coffin to raise his cellphone above the cord on which the backdrop hung. “I stuck the phone up and took a picture,” the 39-year-old entrepreneur recalled. He did not see the result until he returned to his seat and checked his phone. “It was just bodies, bodies on the floor, people on top of each other,” he said. The picture, which he later shared with The Daily Beast, showed at least eight bodies had been left haphazardly on the floor. They were only partly covered by sheets or quilts and appeared to be unclothed. Three of the faces were visible. “Horrified,” Clarke said of his reaction. Twenty days later, the whole city was horrified when police responded to complaints of a foul odor coming from two trucks parked in front of this same funeral home. They discovered dozens of bodies decomposing inside. The owner, 41-year-old Andrew Cleckley, told police that he had been unable to get cemeteries and crematories to accept enough bodies to keep his facility from overflowing. “I am out of space,” he was quoted telling The New York Times. “Bodies are coming out of our ears.” Clarke lives in the neighborhood, and he had walked past the funeral home with his daughters, aged 15 and 16, as the pandemic was intensifying. He noticed that the usual hearse and men in suits and ties had been replaced by rental trucks and men in work clothes. “It looked like they just picked up some winos off the street: ‘Yo, we’ll give you some money,’” Clarke recalled. “I said to my kids, ‘It looks like they’re bringing these bodies in U-Haul trucks.’ It looked like they were bringing in more and more bodies and the place is not even that big.” He noted to himself that there was no air conditioning in the chapel. “Not cool,” he said in more than one sense. “In regular room temperature like that, what’s going to happen?” As he and his family resumed sheltering in place, Clarke considered reporting to the authorities what he had photographed. “[But] there was so much going on with the pandemic, social distancing, I figured it hell or high water to get in contact with somebody,” he recalled. He decided just to post the photographic evidence on Facebook. Some commenters noted that funeral homes were overwhelmed. Most comments were unalloyed outrage. Then came the discovery of the decomposing bodies in the trucks outside the funeral home. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams responded to the scene. He later said that much the same is happening throughout New York as the usual progression from hospital and morgue to funeral parlor to cemetery and crematorium has backed up.
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Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program #COVID19 The Daily Telegraph Australia Law & Politics |
China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion. The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China. It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine. It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is not the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19. As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern. It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated. Its major themes include the “deadly denial of human-to-human transmission”, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and “bleaching of wildlife market stalls”, along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine. Key figures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology team, who feature in the government dossier, were either trained or employed in the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they conducted foundational research on deadly pathogens in live bats, including SARS, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This partnership continues to this day, according to the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite concerns the research is too risky. Politicians in the Morrison government are speaking out about the national security and biosecurity concerns of this relationship as the controversial research into bat-related viruses now comes into sharp focus amid the investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK. In Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, not far from the now infamous Wuhan wet market, Dr Shi and her team work in high-protective gear in level-three and level-four bio-containment laboratories studying deadly bat-derived coronaviruses. At least one of the estimated 50 virus samples Dr Shi has in her laboratory is a 96 per cent genetic match to COVID-19. When Dr Shi heard the news about the outbreak of a new pneumonia-like virus, she spoke about the sleepless nights she suffered worrying whether it was her lab that was responsible for the outbreak. As she told Scientific American magazine in an article published this week: “Could they have come from our lab?” Since her initial fears, Dr Shi has satisfied herself the genetic sequence of COVID-19 did not match any her lab was studying. Yet, given the extent of the People’s Republic of China’s lies, obfuscations and angry refusal to allow any investigation into the origin of the outbreak, her laboratory is now being closely looked at by international intelligence agencies. The Australian government’s position is that the virus most likely originated in the Wuhan wet market but that there is a remote possibility — a 5 per cent chance — it accidentally leaked from a laboratory. The US’s position, according to reports this week, is that it is more likely the virus leaked from a laboratory but it could also have come from a wet market that trades and slaughters wild animals, where other diseases including the H5N1 avian flu and SARS originated. It notes a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers, including Dr Shi, who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19. The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species. Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help. The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting. “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote. You have to be a scientist to understand it, but below is the line that the governments’ research paper references from the study. “To examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein — from the RsSHCO14-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats — in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone,” the study states. One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.” A few years later, in March 2019, Dr Shi and her team, including Peng Zhou, who worked in Australia for five years, published a review titled Bat Coronaviruses in China in the medical journal Viruses, where they wrote that they “aim to predict virus hot spots and their cross-species transmission potential”, describing it as a matter of “urgency to study bat coronaviruses in China to understand their potential of causing another outbreak. Their review stated: “It is highly likely that future SARS or MERS like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.” It examined which proteins were “important for interspecies transmission”. Despite intelligence probes into whether her laboratory may have been responsible for the outbreak, Dr Shi is not hitting pause on her research, which she argues is more important than ever in preventing a pandemic. She plans to head a national project to systemically sample viruses in bat caves, with estimates that there are more than 5000 coronavirus strains “waiting to be discovered in bats globally”. “Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she told Scientific American. “We must find them before they find us.” Dr Shi, the director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, spent time in Australia as a visiting scientist for three months from February 22 to May 21, 2006, where she worked at the CSIRO’s top-level Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which has recently been renamed. The CSIRO would not comment on what work she undertook during her time here, but an archived and translated biography on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website states that she was working with the SARS virus. “The SARS virus antibodies and genes were tested in the State Key Laboratory of Virology in Wuhan and the Animal Health Research Laboratory in Geelong, Australia,” it states. The Telegraph has obtained two photographs of her working at the CSIRO laboratories, including in the level-four lab, in 2006. Dr Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou — now the head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — spent three years at the bio-containment facility Australian Animal Health Laboratory between 2011 and 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO from 2009-2010. During this time, Dr Zhou arranged for wild-caught bats to be transported alive by air from Queensland to the lab in Victoria where they were euthanised for dissection and studied for deadly viruses. Dr Linfa Wang, while an Honorary Professor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2005 and 2011, also worked in the CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader in Virology between 2008 and 2011. Federal Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson said it was “very concerning” that Chinese scientists had been conducting research into bat viruses at the CSIRO in Geelong, Victoria, in jointly funded projects between the Australian and Chinese governments. “We need to exercise extreme care with any research projects involving foreign nationals which may compromise our national security or biosecurity,” she said. While the US has cut all funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the CSIRO would not respond to questions about whether it is still collaborating with it, saying only that it collaborates with research organisations from around the world to prevent diseases. “As with all partners, CSIRO undertakes due diligence and takes security very seriously,” a spokesman said. “CSIRO undertakes all research in accordance with strict biosecurity and legislative requirements.” The US withdrew funding from controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses in October 2014, concerned it could lead to a global pandemic. The pause on funding for 21 “gain of function” studies was then lifted in December 2017. Despite the concerns, the CSIRO continued to partner and fund research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The CSIRO refused to respond to questions from The Saturday Telegraph about how much money went into joint research collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Science and its Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan Institute still lists the CSIRO as a partner while the US has cut ties since the coronavirus outbreak. The argument is whether it is worth developing these viruses to anticipate and prevent a pandemic when a leak of the virus could also cause one. Debate in the scientific community is heated. There have also been serious concerns about a lack of adequate safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when dealing with deadly viruses. A ‘‘Sensitive but Unclassified’’ cable, dated January 19, 2018, obtained by The Washington Post, revealed that US embassy scientists and diplomats in Beijing visited the laboratory and sent warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety practices and management weaknesses as it conducted research on coronaviruses from bats. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated. Scientific consensus is that the virus came from a wetmarket. But the US’s top spy agency confirmed on the record for the first time yesterday that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident at a Wuhan laboratory. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acting director Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in a laboratory. “The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” he said. “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to US national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” Despite Mr Grenell’s statement and scientific consensus that the virus was not created in a laboratory, based on its genome sequence the governments’ research paper obtained by The Telegraph notes a study that claims it was created. South China University of Technology researchers published a study on February 6 that concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazards laboratories”. “The paper is soon withdrawn because it ‘was not supported by direct proofs’, according to author Botao Xiano,” the dossier noted, continuing to point out that: ‘“No scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings’, scholar Yanzhong Huang wrote on March 5.” The Saturday Telegraph does not claim that the South China University of Technology study is credible, only that it has been included in this government research paper produced as part of the case against China. The paper obtained by The Saturday Telegraph speaks about “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and points to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”. It paints a picture of how the Chinese government deliberately covered up the coronavirus by silencing doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine. The US, along with other countries, has repeatedly demanded a live virus sample from the first batch of coronavirus cases. This is understood to have not been forthcoming despite its vital importance in developing a vaccine while potentially providing an indication of where the virus originated. Out of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who have reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticising the response of Chinese authorities, no case is more intriguing and worrying than that of Huang Yan Ling. A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the South China Morning Post reported rumours swirling on Chinese social media that she was the first to be diagnosed with the disease and was “patient zero”. Then came her reported disappearance, with her biography and image deleted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website. On February 16 the institute denied she was patient zero and said she was alive and well, but there has been no proof of life since then, fanning speculation. On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.” On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected. It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease. Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.” A tweet from the Global Times on January 2 states: “Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumours about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS.” This had the intended effect of silencing other doctors who may have been inclined to speak out. So the truth about the outbreak in China has remained shrouded in secrecy, with President Xi Jinping aggressively rejecting global calls for an inquiry. The dossier is damning of China’s constant denials about the outbreak. “Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,” it states. “The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.” The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” In the paper, the Western governments are pushing back at what they call an “assault on international transparency”. “As EU diplomats prepare a report on the pandemic, PRC successfully presses Brussels to strike language on PRC disinformation,” it states. “As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.” Chair of Australia’s Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security Andrew Hastie said after the cover-up and disinformation campaign from China, the world needed transparency and an inquiry. “So many Australians have been damaged by the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Chinese government, and if we truly are as close as Beijing suggests we are then we need answers about how this all started,” he said. KEY DATES IN COVID COVER-UP November 9, 2015: Wuhan Institute of Virology publish a study revealing they created a new virus in the lab from SARS-CoV. December 6, 2019 Five days after a man linked to Wuhan’s seafood market presented pneumonia-like symptoms, his wife contracts it, suggesting human to human transmission. December 27 China’s health authorities told a novel disease, then affecting some 180 patients, was caused by a new coronavirus. December 26-30 Evidence of new virus emerges from Wuhan patient data. December 31 Chinese internet authorities begin censoring terms from social media such as Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia. January 1, 2020 Eight Wuhan doctors who warned about new virus are detained and condemned. January 3 China’s top health authority issues a gag order. January 5 Wuhan Municipal Health Commission stops releasing daily updates on new cases. Continues until January 18. January 10 PRC official Wang Guangfa says outbreak “under control” and mostly a “mild condition”. January 12 Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s lab in Shanghai is closed by authorities for “rectification”, one day after it shares genomic sequence data with the world for the first time. January 14 PRC National Health Commission chief Ma Xiaowei privately warns colleagues the virus is likely to develop into a major public health event. January 24 Officials in Beijing prevent the Wuhan Institute of Virology from sharing sample isolates with the University of Texas. February 6 China’s internet watchdog tightens controls on social media platforms. February 9 Citizen-journalist and local businessman Fang Bin disappears. April 17 Wuhan belatedly raises its official fatalities by 1290.
Conclusions
Whether it was a Leak or deliberate - The World Wide Propagation was deliberate and an act of War
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Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2 Law & Politics |
To date we have identified fourteen mutations in Spike that are accumulating. Mutations are considered in a broader phylogenetic context, geographically, and over time, to provide an early warning system to reveal mutations that may confer selective advantages in transmission or resistance to interventions. The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form. Also, we present evidence of recombination between locally circulating strains, indicative of multiple strain infections. SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to SARS-CoV; the two viruses share ~79% sequence identity (Lu et al., 2020) and both use angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) as their cellular receptor (Hoffmann et al., 2020; Li et al., 2005; Wrapp et al., 2020), however the SARS-CoV-2 S-protein has a10-20-fold higher affinity for ACE2 than the corresponding S-protein of SARS-CoV (Wrapp et al., 2020). D614G is increasing in frequency at an alarming rate, indicating a fitness advantage relative to the original Wuhan strain that enables more rapid spread. S943P is located in the fusion core region, and is of particular interest as it is spreading via recombination. The combination of these three mutations forms the basis for the clade that soon emerged in Europe (Fig. 1). By the time of our second report in mid-March, D614G was being tracked at the GISAID due to its high frequency, and referred to as the “G” clade; it was present in 29% of the global samples, but was still found almost exclusively in Europe. In Europe, where the G614 first began its expansion, the D614 and G614 forms were co- circulating early in the epidemic, with D614 more common in most sampled countries, the exceptions being Italy and Switzerland (Fig. 2A). Through March, G614 became increasingly common throughout Europe, and by April it dominated contemporary sampling (Fig. 2 and 3). In North America, infections were initiated and established across the continent by the original D614 form, but in early March, the G614 was introduced into both Canada and the USA, and by the end of March it had become the dominant form in both nations. Asian samples were completely dominated by the original Wuhan D614 form through mid-March, but by mid-March in Asian countries outside of China, the G614 form was clearly established and expanding (Figs 2 and 3). The status of the D614G mutation in China remains unclear, as very few Chinese sequences in GISAID were sampled after March 1 his approach revealed that viruses bearing the mutation Spike D614G are replacing the original Wuhan form of the virus rapidly and repeatedly across the globe (Fig. 2-3). We do not know what is driving this selective sweep, nor for that matter if it is indeed due the modified Spike and not one of the other two accompanying mutations that share the GISAID “G-clade” haplotype.
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The drop in worldwide oil consumption in April has been put as high as 35 million barrels a day World Currencies |
Who knows what the new normal for oil demand will be once Covid-19 is firmly in the rear view mirror? Not me, that's for sure. But it is likely to be lower than it was in 2019, and it could be that way for many years. That’s going to create overcapacity throughout the oil supply chain and weigh on prices. While signs are emerging that we might have passed the worst of this historic oil demand rout, they’re very tentative. No one is predicting a swift recovery to where we were before the pandemic struck. Some, including Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s chief executive officer, Ben van Beurden, suggest that oil demand may never recover fully. Citigroup analysts don’t see jet fuel consumption back at last year’s level until well into 2022, and they’re at the optimistic end of the spectrum. Boeing’s CEO suggests passenger traffic might not get back to 2019 levels for three years, and even when the flying public does return, airlines will use their newest and most efficient planes to carry them, as my colleagues Liam Denning and Brooke Sutherland note here. So let’s make a guess about the loss in future demand, and let’s make a fairly small one. Let’s assume it’s about 5 million barrels a day. That doesn’t sound like too much; it’s about 5% of last year’s global oil demand. The drop in worldwide oil consumption in April has been put as high as 35 million barrels a day, and forecasts estimate 2020 oil use will be about 10 million barrels a day (or 10%) lower than in 2019.
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06-APR-2020 : The Way we live now World Currencies |
What I do know is this. Regime implosion is coming to the Oil Producers and Trump can game the price a little more sure but its a pointless exercise. Demand has cratered and a return to a hyper connected 100m barrels per day world is not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Putin will survive because he prepared for this moment. Others are as good as terminated.
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22-MAR-2020 :: COVID-19 and a Rolling Sudden Stop #COVID19 World Currencies |
We are moving from a World of Hyper Connectedness to a World of Quarantine. A complete Quarantine is the only way to vaccine this c21st World of ours #Coronavirus "has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we've been worried about." - @BillGates The Price of Crude Oil is perfectly correlated to the #COVID19 Sudden Stop
Commodities
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the China EM Frontier Feedback Loop Phenomenon. #COVID19 Emerging Markets |
This Phenomenon was positive for the last two decades but has now undergone a Trend reversal. The ZAR is the purest proxy for this Phenomenon. African Countries heavily dependent on China being the main Taker are also at the bleeding edge of this Phenomenon. This Pressure Point will not ease soon but will continue to intensify
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21-OCT-2019 :: "The New Economy of Anger" Emerging Markets |
Paul Virilio pronounced in his book Speed and Politics, “The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words, a producer of speed.’’
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China's expensive bet on Africa has failed @NAR Africa |
Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. China's commercial activities in Africa, such as investments, infrastructure projects and bank lending, have long attracted scrutiny and criticism. Critics have accused Beijing of practicing a new form of economic colonialism to gain control of the continent's valuable natural resources by luring unsuspecting African nations into so-called debt traps. While this perspective dominates the narrative about Beijing's economic ties with Africa, it likely exaggerates Chinese strategic foresight and overlooks the pitfalls of China's big bet on the continent. As the prices of oil, copper and minerals found in Africa have plunged in the global economic meltdown, the prospects for China-funded projects look bleak. China is facing growing pressure to forgive the tens of billions of dollars of loans it has made to African countries since the early 2000s. The mistreatment of African residents in China during the outbreak has fueled cries of racism and prompted diplomatic protests against Beijing. Even the crown jewel of China's economic engagement with Africa, the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure program, is at risk. The coronavirus has dealt a body blow to the Chinese economy, with its economic output falling 6.8% in the first quarter. It is doubtful that Beijing will have the resources to fund the BRI in the future. One telltale sign is the absence of references in the communiques of recent Politburo meetings of the Chinese Communist Party to BRI as a priority. In retrospect, the unraveling of China's Africa project should not come as a surprise. Beijing's strategy has been based on flawed assumptions and was executed at the wrong moment. Chinese leaders see Africa mainly as a source of natural resources. China's fast-paced growth since the early 1990s has generated a voracious demand for oil and subsoil minerals, and Africa appeared a perfect fit since dominant multinationals had a weak hold on the continent and Beijing could easily outbid them to gain equity stakes in mines and oil fields. For unknown reasons, the Chinese government believed that, as an equity holder and creditor, it could better ensure secure access to critical raw materials there. As a result, China has opened its checkbooks and become the most active nontraditional lender in Africa. According to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, China loaned $152 billion to 49 African countries between 2000 and 2018. The World Bank estimates that, as of 2017, the value of China's loans to sub-Saharan African countries was $64 billion, or more than 60% of the stock of bilateral debt. Besides showering Africa with credit, China has bet big on direct investments, mainly through its state-owned enterprises. Between 2008 and 2018, Chinese FDI in Africa rose from $7.8 billion to $46 billion, according to official data. On paper, China may seem to have got its money's worth. Merchandise trade between China and Africa rose from $107 billion to $204 billion in 2018, based on data provided by the Chinese government. But the question is whether China could have expanded its trade with Africa and maintained its access to raw materials without committing nearly $200 billion in bilateral loans and FDI in a distant continent full of political and economic risks. In all likelihood, China might not have paid more for the same raw materials had it chosen to purchase them on the open market. Beijing's hope that direct or semi-direct control of resources would provide greater security is illusory. For one thing, once China extended the credit or made the direct investments in mines, oil fields or roads, it was at the mercy of the recipients, Africa's national governments and political elites. China has no power to prevent the nationalization of its investments or defaults on its loans. If supply disruption occurs because of conflict in Africa or along China's long sea lines of communication, the theoretical advantage of direct control will be worthless because China, at least for the foreseeable future, lacks the military capabilities to protect its mines and railways in Africa or escort its merchant ships on a sustainable basis. China's gamble in Africa also flopped thanks to bad timing. Its foray into the continent coincided with the peak of the most recent commodity supercycle, skyrocketing prices of raw materials, this time driven by Chinese demand. As a result, Chinese companies paid top price for assets that most probably have lost huge value after the collapse in commodity prices. Now that the coronavirus outbreak is about to devastate Africa's fragile economies and societies, China needs a pragmatic exit strategy. Beijing must realize that it is unlikely to recover most of its sunken investments or loans because of the economic impact of the virus on Africa. The only sensible policy flowing from such a reckoning is to write off its loans as a humanitarian gesture. But this dramatic step will be a bargain since it will earn Beijing goodwill, with the money that it has no realistic hope of recouping.
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Will we see a post-Covid China-Africa reset? @dailymaverick H/T @mmnjug Africa |
Stepping back from the day-to-day predictions and prognostications about Covid-19, two things are of longer-term interest concerning the politics of recovery in Africa: First, internally, what will be the effect of the crisis on African governments and, particularly, on the relationship between the state and citizens? And second, externally, how will the relationship between Africa and other powers – specifically China – alter in the aftermath? On the first question, the immediate answer depends in part on who appears to have done better in managing the Covid crisis. This understanding is influenced invariably by the availability of information. If China has – or is perceived as having – done better than the West in managing the crisis (and we probably will never know entirely), this could embolden calls for a more powerful and authoritarian state and centralised administration. The extension of powers under national crisis conditions has already given some leaders a taste of dictatorship. There are pluses and minuses for African leaders of this outcome. Following more closely a China model offers the prospect of more efficient delivery without the bother of managing the politics of the economy. Covid and the lockdown enables statists to display their power and prowess – one only has to look at the instances of bully-boy enthusiasm of the South African National Defence Force in cracking down during the lockdown. Many African leaders might like the idea of the Chinese system because it offers the prospect of staying in power and making money, rather than because of the development advantages of an efficient, centralised state. But democracy protects leaders and citizens. The Nirvana of relatively unobstructed, unfettered power does not provide the constitutional and institutional safeguards for leadership. Unlike the Asian development experience, post-colonial African history saw a slide into militarism, autocracy and incessant instability, not least because the government lacked the competition and competency to deliver prosperity. In a vicious cycle, this is because the state is weak and fragmented. It is one thing to mobilise against a common enemy (coronavirus) or for a short-term national goal (the World Cup); it is another to keep this machinery up, running and motivated for the longer term, not least because it is expensive. The Chinese model comes at an immense political and economic price. This includes (but is not limited to) the cost of exchange rate manipulation to remain competitive in trade, and continued infrastructure investment to drive demand for commodities, job creation and urban expansions. These aren’t costs that many African governments can afford to incur, without falling ever-deeper into a debt trap. Statist overreach by African governments – mimicking the developed world’s response in a developing world reality on behalf of elites – can only have dramatic and negative economic consequences. These will, sooner rather than later, inevitably have a political impact. Populism thrives in situations of dearth and excess, and desperation. It is also not clear where the emergency anti-coronavirus provisions end and the benign development state supposedly takes over. African history suggests that this authoritarian path is invariably costly and fraught with personalised, fragmented interests. The benefits of this path depend, also, on the flow of external capital, skills and technology. Yet the dilution of democracy suggests that investors will be less forthcoming absent constitutional and legal safeguards, and donors are less likely to invest beyond humanitarian assistance. The political resilience of African citizenry also might well surprise in this regard. Africa is not China. African democracy is not a system which was once upon a time benevolently handed out by leaders; it is the system favoured by the vast majority of citizens given the previous experience. And its freedoms have been hard fought for in most instances. The answer to the second issue – what changes the pandemic might bring in external relations – in part depends on the outcome of the first, and to the nature of global engagement post-Covid. China might well face other areas of push-back, not least given the allegations of the poor treatment of Africans in China during the Covid pandemic, and calls for China to pay damages for its role in the spread of the virus. Also, a surge of other sources of debt might shift attention away from China as a source of capital. The outcome will depend, as ever, on how all these partners respond: Africa, China and Western lenders. Global growth, according to the IMF, is set to contract sharply by -3% in 2020, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth is predicted to fall by -1.4%, with Nigeria at -3.4% and South Africa -5.8%, the two giants comprising 45% of regional economic output. This crisis has laid bare Africa’s differentiation, often overlooked in sweeping descriptions of the continent as “hopeless” or “rising”, one where there are “lions on the move”. But one generality is accurate. The continent is likely to become increasingly debt-stressed as a consequence of Covid. This reflects the debt position of African countries before Covid, the depth of their domestic markets and resources, and their options today. It also relates to the extent outside actors and specifically Chinese institutions are willing to renegotiate African debt. It’s now a case of all hands on deck with debt and funding. The IMF released emergency funds to at least 39 countries in March. The World Bank has expedited $14-billion for crisis relief, and earmarked more. The Bretton Woods institutions have also called on the G-20 group of creditor nations to suspend collecting interest payments on loans they have made to low-income countries. On April 15, the G-20 agreed to do so until the end of the year – all except one: China. According to Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca, writing in Foreign Affairs, China loaned more than $120-billion to 67 mostly developing nations through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for infrastructure development. Beijing has, they report, caveated “preferential loans” such as those made by the Export-Import Bank of China (EximBank) for debt relief, thereby making “a mockery” of the G-20 pledge. EximBank has financed more than 1,800 BRI projects in dozens of countries. As Steil and Della Rocca conclude: “By continuing to demand interest payments on the loans, China will force poor nations to choose between servicing debts and importing essential goods such as food and medical supplies. Some BRI projects, such as the Standard Gauge Railway loans to Ethiopia and China, for example, are believed (since these are opaque arrangements) to carry interest rates of around 8%, double the cost of capital to the Chinese lenders.” According to their analysis, since 2013, “China has provided nearly half of all new loans to nations considered to be at a high risk of default”. Ethiopia owes nearly 20% of its GDP to China, South Africa some 4%, or $14-billion, and Kenya more than 11%. Sub-Saharan Africa has around $400-billion in total public external debt today. And they will now inevitably take on more, as governments try to reinvigorate stagnant economies post-Covid. Remember Jubilee 2000, the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, Bono on the White House lawns, and the Gleneagles G8 “Make Poverty History” summit? Under the debt relief provisions of the early 2000s, Africa was forgiven more than $100-billion in debt. In effect, these measures supported subsequent Chinese debt issuance. It is unlikely that G20 nations will want to similarly support Chinese debt maintenance. If Beijing does not offer debt relief, it will stand accused of profiting from Africa’s poverty, and gaming the international development system. Jack Ma’s generosity with face masks and testing kits notwithstanding, without commitment on financial relief, China’s relationship with Africa will be exposed as shallow and transactional. Beyond Covid-19, a step-change in debt flows to Africa based on a “freedoms’ means test” on delivery and governance is what Africa’s performers and their citizens want and need. The question is: Can donors offer this disaggregated alternative? DM
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19-APR-2020 :: The End of Vanity China Africa Win Win Africa |
Growth in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 is projected at –1.6 percent, the lowest level on record Among the sub- Saharan African region’s key trading partners, the euro area is expected to contract (from 1.2 percent in 2019 to −7.5 percent in 2020), and growth in China is to slow considerably (from 6.1 percent to 1.2 percent). Lets Turn now to the defining Engagement of the last two decades for SSA – The SSA China relationship. And the entire China Africa relationship has been an extraordinary exercise in Narrative Framing and linguistic control, accompanied by a chorus of Party Hacks chirruping Hosannas at every turn amplifying largely meaningless feel good Phrases artfully placed in the mouths of our Politicians and our Newspapers. It is remarkable. I reference excerpts from Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at the opening ceremony of 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit BEIJING, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) here on Monday. Ladies and Gentlemen, September has just set in Beijing, bringing with it refreshing breeze and picturesque autumn scenery. And we are so delighted to have all of you with us, friends both old and new, in this lovely season for the reunion of the China-Africa big family at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). path of win-win cooperation "The ocean is vast because it rejects no rivers." China's Xi says funds for Africa not for 'vanity projects' Reuters #FOCAC2018 2-SEP-2019 :: the China EM Frontier Feedback Loop Phenomenon. #COVID19 This Phenomenon was positive for the last two decades but has now undergone a Trend reversal. The ZAR is the purest proxy for this Phenomenon. African Countries heavily dependent on China being the main Taker are also at the bleeding edge of this Phenomenon. This Pressure Point will not ease soon but will continue to intensify “China had a singular and positive influence on Africa. It rebalanced the demand side for Africa’s commodities and also bought those commodities on a long-term basis. It was this which triggered the African recovery some two decades ago, However, since then a freewheeling China has favourited elites, has facilitated large-scale looting via inflated infrastructure, some of which were white elephants and has lumped the African citizen with the tab. How this plays out is now the key to Sino-African relations going forward. A Hambantota scenario would be problematic,” referring to the Sri Lankan port which has been leased to China for 99 years. 3/12 Com isso, ela passou a ser, incomparavelmente, a maior importadora de commodities no mundo. Se caso o seu crescimento de PIB tivesse sido tão expressivo, como justificaríamos a queda geral de preços de commodities no mundo? The Hambantota Moment has arrived 18-JUN-2018 :: So the first overarching Point, is that creditors are not Santa Claus and miscues will exact a very heavy price, Countries will be "Hambantota-ed" The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Some African governments who are already bilaterally petitioning China for relief say Chinese envoys are citing provisions in loan agreements that would transfer collateral, in some cases strategic state assets, into Beijing’s hands: Basically China has an Option to buy in SSA Assets at fire-sale Prices. In an interview, The World Bank’s Malpass cited liens against Angola’s oil revenues associated with Chinese debt that were hidden by non-disclosure agreements, convenient for politicians and contractors. The Terms of these debts are hidden precisely because they are so egregious. And this is now precisely the Point we have arrived at.
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A papaya, a quail and a goat tested positive for the virus at a Tanzania lab -- according to President Magufuli @AFP #COVID19 Africa |
Tanzanian President John Magufuli on Sunday questioned his country's coronavirus numbers, and called on the authorities to investigate "sabotage" at the national laboratory. The East African country had recorded 480 cases of the virus and 16 deaths at its last update on Wednesday. The government has come under fire from the opposition for allegedly hiding information and failing to take the disease seriously. Magufuli said that people who tested positive for the virus may not be sick, and cast doubt on the credibility of laboratory equipment and technicians. "The equipment or people may be compromised and sometimes it can be sabotage...," Magufuli said in a Swahili speech broadcast live through state-run TBC. He said he had secretly had a variety of animals, fruits and vehicle oil tested at the laboratory. According to Magufuli, a papaya, a quail and a goat tested positive and he suspects a "dirty game" in the laboratory. "That means there is possibility for technical errors or these imported reagents have issues. Probably, the technicians are also bought to mislead." Magufuli was swearing in the new Minister for Constitution and Legal Affairs Mwigulu Nchemba, and urged him to "go and investigate if there is criminal possibility at the national laboratory and take action". Nchemba is taking over after the death of Augustine Mahiga -- one of three MPs who died in the space of 11 days. No reasons were given for the lawmakers' deaths. However one MP tested positive for the coronavirus in April, and the opposition announced Friday it was ordering its lawmakers to stop going to parliament and to isolate themselves after the string of deaths. Tanzania is one of a few countries in Africa that have not taken extensive measures against the virus, and Magufuli is among a handful of world leaders still playing down the seriousness of the disease. Schools and universities have been shut but markets, bus stops and shops bustle as usual, with Magufuli urging citizens to continue working hard and not stop going to church or mosques. On Sunday he criticised a Muslim leader who on Friday shut a large mosque in Dar es Salaam as a precaution against the spread of the virus. "It's strange to stop believers from entering a mosque which they built themselves. If you fear going there, let others go and pray. By the way we are still in the elementary stage of coronavirus," he said. Magufuli also said Tanzania was in talks with Madagascar for a potion that the island nation claims cures COVID-19 patients within 10 days.
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Tanzania Opposition Stop Going to Parliament After Three MPs Die @bpolitics Africa |
Tanzania’s biggest opposition party asked its members to suspend attending parliament sessions after a minister became the third lawmaker to die in 11 days. Justice Minister Augustine Mahiga died suddenly on Friday morning in the capital, Dodoma, President John Magufuli announced in an emailed statement. He was 74. Mahiga’s demise followed the death of Getrude Rwakatare on April 20 and Richard Ndassa nine days later. The authorities haven’t given information on causes of the deaths, prompting speculation after Covid-19 cases in the country jumped to 480 and 16 deaths in one month. Members of the Chadema party “should immediately stop attending parliament sessions and should not go anywhere near parliament offices,” Chairman Freeman Mbowe said in a statement on Friday. The party also asked it’s lawmakers to go into self-isolation for 14 days on fears the coronavirus outbreak could be wider than reported. On April 20, Deputy Speaker Tulia Ackson announced that one lawmaker, she didn’t identify, was infected with the virus. The government hasn’t linked the politicians’ deaths to the virus, and Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa on Wednesday said “fear-mongering” should stop. “We forget that there are other deadly diseases out there such as malaria, blood pressure, diabetes and AIDS,” he said. Criticism of Magufuli’s approach to the pandemic is mounting, being one of few African leaders to have shied away from movement restrictions, saying they will devastate the economy. Chadema also asked parliament’s leadership to suspend sessions on the budget for 21 days and test all members and staff for the virus.
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The @MoodysInvSvc downgrade in two graphs @nonso2 Africa |
This week @MoodysInvSvc downgraded Nigeria to negative and we learnt that Foreign Investors are propping up the Naira to the tune of NGN5.8 trillion ($16 billion) via short-term certificates. Everyone knows how this story ends. When the music stops, everyone will dash for the Exit and the currency will collapse just like its collapsing in Lusaka as we speak.
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The Maldives' tourism industry, accounts for 28% of GDP, has been hit hard by the pandemic, Tourism Minister @ali20waheed says "right now, we are in the middle of the storm," hopes to welcome back visitors by Q3. Africa |
The #Maldives' tourism industry, which accounts for 28% of the island nation's GDP, has been hit hard by the pandemic, as borders remain closed. Tourism Minister @ali20waheed says "right now, we are in the middle of the storm," and that he hopes to welcome back visitors by Q3.
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Zambia Inflation Surges as Currency Tumbles @economics Africa |
Key Insights
The kwacha has weakened 2.5% against the dollar this month, taking its plunge for the year to 24%, the worst-performing currency in Africa. The depreciation was partly driven by investor fears that the southern African nation will default on its debt. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings both flagged that risk when they downgraded their assessments of the country’s debt in April. Inflation has now been above the target band of 6% to 8% for 12 consecutive months and is expected to remain high in the earlier part of the central bank’s two-year forecast period. That’s preventing the Bank of Zambia from cutting interest rates to help cushion the economy against the the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The International Monetary Fund projects gross domestic product will contract 3.5% this year. Africa’s second-largest copper producer experienced a severe drought in the southwest of the country during the 2018-19 rainy season, which pushed food prices higher and slashed output at the hydropower plants, resulting in daily rolling blackouts lasting as long as 12 hours. The southern African nation relies on hydropower for about 80% of electricity generation.
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Zimbabwe government close to collapse as Ncube sends plea for cash @Africa_Conf Africa |
In an extended mea culpa on behalf of President Emmerson Mnangagwa's government, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has written to the international financial institutions (IFIs) in Washington saying it takes 'responsibility for the recent policy missteps during late 2019' which have led to inflation currently running at an annual rate of over 500% year. Ncube then writes that the government and economy are near to collapse, with the coronavirus pandemic dealing the final blow. The letter, dated 2 April, came a few days after reports of a coup plot against Mnangagwa had been circulating. A security source said the authorities had delayed the lockdown in Harare for fear that dissident officers might exploit conditions to move against the president and his circle. In the letter, a copy of which has been seen by Africa Confidential, the usually upbeat Ncube paints a relentlessly grim picture. 'Zimbabwe's economy could contract by 15-20% during 2020 – with very serious social consequences. Already 8.5 million Zimbabweans (half the population) are food insecure,' he writes. So bad is the situation, says Ncube, that it could cause an implosion of the state and threaten security in neighbouring states. 'The global pandemic will take a heavy toll on the health sector, with many lives being lost and raise poverty to levels not seen in recent times, including worsening food security. A domestic collapse also would have potentially adverse regional effects, where spillovers are significant.' Concerns in southern Africa about conditions in Zimbabwe are deepening. They might explain a call by South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa, at an African Union teleconference on 28 April, for Western states and the IFIs to lift sanctions against the Mnangagwa government. On the previous day, Zimbabwean telecoms magnate Strive Masiyiwa called for urgent aid for his country to fight the pandemic. His Econet cellphone and money transfer companies have been a lifeline for many Zimbabweans. Masiyiwa said the World Bank, the IMF and other multilateral institutions should create humanitarian trusts for Zimbabwe and Sudan, both under United States sanctions, to be managed by third parties to ensure a fair distribution of life-saving aid. 'For the avoidance of doubt; this is not an appeal for the lifting of sanctions,' said Masiyiwa. 'I don't want to get into the issues around how and why there are sanctions. Everyone knows I had to flee my country because of persecution 20 years ago.' The state media in Harare covers every donation from business supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to the government's coronavirus campaign but is more reticent about contributions from non-partisan donors such as Masiyiwa's Higher Life Foundation. Earlier this year, Higher Life paid health workers' salaries after the government said it had exhausted the budget. Ncube's letter is addressed to David Malpass, President of the World Bank, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank. He asks them to support the rescheduling or cancellation of all Zimbabwe's foreign bilateral debt arrears and help in clearing all its multilateral arrears (AC Vol 60 No 6, Ncube wins foreign fans). The government also needs $200 million, says Ncube, for unplanned spending to fight the pandemic, referring to World Bank estimates that the country's financing gap is nudging $1 billion for health, education, food security and social protection. Without those funds, Ncube says, the government will have no choice but to revert to printing money, risking a return to hyperinflation and the crash of the local currency. In exchange for the Bank and the IMF agreeing to an emergency debt rescheduling, the government promises a 'time-bound programme' of economic, political and governance reforms. Ncube, who has been at odds with Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor John Mangudya, pledges the government will introduce a market-determined exchange rate and end what he calls the reserve bank's 'quasi-fiscal operations' and its direct lending programme. It will also include all state subsidies in the budget documents presented to parliament and scrutinised by the Public Accounts Committee, he adds. This, according to finance officials in Washington, is code for saying conditions are so horrendous that Ncube has been the given the political cover to promise a crackdown on grand corruption at the heart of the government. They add that it is well-known among banks and business people as well as foreign diplomats that RBZ subsidies to gold-mining companies have directly benefited President Mnangagwa's inner circle. This group and senior army officers have also benefited from preferential access to foreign exchange and schemes that profit from arbitrage between the official and parallel rates of the Zimbabwe dollar, the officials add. Even if he wanted to, there is no way that Mangudya could have stood up to those factions. Ncube's letter also promises to 'limit the fiscal costs of the financing of agriculture, ensure transparency, and resolve all the related governance issues'. This would deal with another big leakage of state funds: the financing with zero accountability of Mnangagwa's favoured Command Agriculture scheme (AC Vol 60 No 18, Cash at the generals' command). Apart from failing to boost productivity substantially – due to poor distribution of seeds and fertiliser as much as the latest regional drought – the Command Agriculture Programme has become a formidable source of patronage for Mnangagwa's ally Kudakwashe Tagwirei, owner of the Sakunda group of companies working with Swiss-based Trafigura to import fuel, and well as running its own agricultural projects (AC Vol 60 No 23, Cashing in on the crisis). One of Zimbabwe's canniest operators, Tagwirei, who financed ZANU-PF's election campaign in 2018, has evaded any attempt to limit his sprawling empire, and maintains close ties to both Mnangagwa and Vice-President General Constantino Chiwenga even though they are bitter rivals (AC Vol 61 No 8, Rule by rivalry). Against this, Ncube's promise of an 'ambitious anti-corruption strategy' rings hollow to finance officials. Neither do they take seriously his promises of political reform, most of whose elements have been on the government's agenda for the past five years. Ncube's final pledge to continue with 'engaging in National Dialogue' elicited the response of 'what dialogue?' from an official in Washington. We hear that neither the World Bank nor the IMF have responded formally to Ncube's letter, nor do they intend to, despite him following up with phone calls over the past week. 'Zimbabwe is in a political, not an economic policy, crisis …without credible change on that level, nothing else will move,' concluded the official. Failing that, the country's best hope might be for an international organisation to work with Masiyiwa's plan for an independent humanitarian trust to distribute food and medicine to the most threatened people.
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