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Ride Lonesome. Africa |
“A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.” ― Don DeLillo, Underworld
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So sommerlich wird es jetzt in Deutschland Africa |
“My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.” ― Don DeLillo, Underworld
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The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru How Ben Rhodes @rhodes44 rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age. Law & Politics |
Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”
Everything changed that day. But the way it changed Ben Rhodes’s life is still unique, and perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction. He was in the second year of the M.F.A. program at N.Y.U., writing short stories about losers in garden apartments and imagining that soon he would be published in literary magazines, acquire an agent and produce a novel by the time he turned 26. He saw the first tower go down, and after that he walked around for a while, until he ran into someone he knew, and they went back to her shared Williamsburg apartment and tried to find a television that worked, and when he came back outside, everyone was taking pictures of the towers in flames. He saw an Arab guy sobbing on the subway. “That image has always stayed with me,” he says. “Because I think he knew more than we did about what was going to happen.”
Unnoticed by the reporters, Ben Rhodes walks through the room, a half-beat behind a woman in leopard-print heels. He is holding a phone to his ear, repeating his mantra: “I’m not important. You’re important.”
The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. He heads downstairs to his windowless basement office, which is divided into two parts. In the front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price, are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from which CNN blares nonstop. Large pictures of Obama adorn the walls. Here is the president adjusting Rhodes’s tie; presenting his darling baby daughter, Ella, with a flower; and smiling wide while playing with Ella on a giant rug that says “E Pluribus Unum.”
For much of the past five weeks, Rhodes has been channeling the president’s consciousness into what was imagined as an optimistic, forward-looking final State of the Union. Now, from the flat screens, a challenge to that narrative arises: Iran has seized two small boats containing 10 American sailors. Rhodes found out about the Iranian action earlier that morning but was trying to keep it out of the news until after the president’s speech. “They can’t keep a secret for two hours,” Rhodes says, with a tone of mild exasperation at the break in message discipline.
As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. The president and Rhodes communicate “regularly, several times a day,” according to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who is known for captaining a tight ship. “I see it throughout the day in person,” he says, adding that he is sure that in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls. Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. “Every day he does 12 jobs, and he does them better than the other people who have those jobs,” Terry Szuplat, the longest-tenured member of the National Security Council speechwriting corps, told me. On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.
Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.
Part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”
Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.
Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.
Rhodes logs into his computer. “It’s the middle of the [expletive] night in Iran,” he grumbles. Price looks up from his keyboard to provide a messaging update: “Considering that they have 10 of our guys in custody, we’re doing O.K.”
Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going that Rhodes and the president have been formulating together over the past seven years. When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, “We saw that as our entire job.”
“What novel is this that you are living in now and will exit from in eight months and be like, ‘Oh, my God’?” I ask him.
“Who would be the author of this novel?” he asks.
“The one you are a character in now?”
“Don DeLillo, I think,” Rhodes answers. “I don’t know how you feel about Don DeLillo.”
“I love Don DeLillo,” I answer.
“Yeah,” Rhodes answers. “That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
The books on his shelves are a mix of DeLillo novels, history books, recondite tomes on Cuba and Burma and adventure-wonk stuff like Mark Mazzetti’s “The Way of the Knife.” C. S. Lewis makes an appearance here, alongside a volume of Lincoln speeches (Obama tells all his speechwriters to read Lincoln) and George Orwell’s “All Art Is Propaganda.” I have seen the same books on the shelves of plenty of Brooklyn apartments. Yet some large part of the recent history of America and its role in the world turns on the fact that the entirely familiar person sitting at the desk in front of me, who seems not unlike other weed-smokers I know who write Frederick Barthelme-type short stories, has achieved a “mind meld” with President Obama and used his skills to help execute a radical shift in American foreign policy.
He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.
In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them — ”
“And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”
This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.
When I later visited Obama’s former campaign mastermind David Axelrod in Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was “free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Axelrod, a former newspaperman, sighed. “It’s not as easy as standing in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents have been able to do,” he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn’t exist anymore, he explained. “So more and more, over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found,” he said. “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.”
In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program.
The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.” For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
The parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times absolute necessity of killing. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin move.
Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.
“He is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the president. “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book. He hears arguments like, ‘We should be punching Iran in the nose on its shipments of arms, and do it publicly,’ or ‘We should sanction the crap out of them for their ballistic-missile test and tell them that if they do it again we’re going to do this or we’re going to do that,’ and he hears Dick Cheney in those arguments.”
I ask Panetta whether, as head of the C.I.A., or later on, as secretary of defense, he ever saw the letters that Obama covertly sent to Khamenei, in 2009 and in 2012, which were only reported on by the press weeks later.
“No,” he answers, before saying he would “like to believe” that Tom Donilon, national security adviser since 2010, and Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, had a chance to work on the offer they presented.
In Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine.
It is clearly time for me to go. Rhodes walks me out into the sunlight of the West Wing parking lot, where we are treated to the sight of the aged Henry Kissinger, who has come to pay a visit. I ask Rhodes if he has ever met the famous diplomat before, and he tells me about the time they were seated together at a state dinner for the president of China. It was an interesting encounter to imagine, between Kissinger, who made peace with Mao’s China while bombing Laos to bits, and Rhodes, who helped effect a similar diplomatic volte-face with Iran but kept the United States out of a civil war in Syria, which has caused more than four million people to become refugees. I ask Rhodes how it felt being seated next to the embodiment of American realpolitik. “It was surreal,” he says, looking off into the middle distance. “I told him I was going to Laos,” he continues. “He got a weird look in his eye.”
There is nothing snarky about his delivery. Rhodes just was bothered by seeing legless kids and unexploded cluster bombs in the jungle. He is not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral actor is eerily similar. He is torn. As the president himself once asked, how are we supposed to weigh the tens of thousands who have died in Syria against the tens of thousands who have died in Congo? What power means is that the choice is yours, no matter who is telling the story.
Rhodes during a video conference in the White House Situation Room. http://nyti.ms/1UBdzDs
Conclusions
The Thing is @rhodes44 is a c21st Communications Protege.
Winning the Iran argument speaks volumes.
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Fear trumps hope @realdonaldtrump Economist Law & Politics |
WHEREVER the eye falls in Donald Trump’s Manhattan office, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, there is Trump. Images of the tycoon glower from walls plastered with covers of Playboy, GQ, Newsweek and more. Piles of campaign literature—“Trump—Make America Great Again!”—jostle with stacks of more recent Trump-fronted publications on a desk so packed as to recall a dentist’s waiting room. A mound of Trump-covered copies of The Economist has pride of place: “I put you up front,” he says solicitously.
The pride Mr Trump takes in such self-aggrandising trumpery is almost touching. His Aladdin’s cave of celebrity puff, which doubles as the headquarters of a presidential campaign and large property company, is sufficiently eccentric to recall why his candidacy, announced at Trump Tower last June, was at first ridiculed. He looked like a chancer—a reality television star, with no serious political experience, who had changed his political stripes at least four times. Yet Mr Trump’s victory in Indiana on May 3rd (see article) has made him the presumptive Republican nominee. His remaining opponents, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, have quit the race. He was for far too long underestimated. The same must not be said of the threat his egomania and pernicious nativism represents to America and the world.
Some commentators say he is a fascist—an idea he encouraged by inviting his followers to pledge their allegiance to him with a fascist-style salute at a rally in Florida. This seems like an exaggeration, however, and, given his hunger for a grievance, self-defeating. There is, similarly, no reason to suppose he is racist, as many have. But a significant minority of his supporters are—17% of them consider ethnic diversity bad for America, a strikingly high number—and Mr Trump’s dog-whistling on immigration seems at least partly designed to appeal to them. No wonder 86% of African-Americans and 80% of Hispanics have a negative view of him. Through a conscious effort to spread discord he regularly transgresses moral lines that no decent American public figure ever should. His methods are abhorrent to most Americans; two-thirds of voters dislike him. Yet the minority that does not balk at them is growing.
Turning to Mrs Clinton, his one-time wedding guest, the presumptive Republican nominee is disdainful. “She’s playing the woman card. That’s all she’s got going. She’s got nothing else going. The only thing she’s got is the woman card. And she plays it to the hilt,” fumes Mr Trump, whom 70% of American women dislike.
Conclusions
He has a Chance a Big Chance. He just needs one serious Homeland Security Event in the run-up to the Vote.
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China Envoy to Visit Djibouti, Site of 1st Overseas Base VOA Africa |
The base is seen as a milestone in the global advance of China's military and expands on its traditional mission of safeguarding Chinese territory and conquering self-governing Taiwan.
Despite that, the Defense Ministry has provided few details and refrained even from referring to it as a military base, in line with China's longtime policy of not establishing military alliances or a permanent overseas military presence.
China's choice of strategically located Djibouti has raised eyebrows among military envoys and foreign governments since the small, strategically located nation is already home to U.S. and French military installations.
It has especially raised concerns in India, which has cast a wary eye on the Chinese navy's growing presence in the Indian Ocean and China's close ties with Pakistan and other countries in the region.
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August 19 2013 I have no doubt that the Indian Ocean is set to regain its glory days. @TheStarKenya Africa |
Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto explains why ‘The precocity of the Indian Ocean as a zone of long-range navigation and cultural exchange is one of the glaring facts of history’, made possible by the reversible escalator’ of the monsoon.’
I have no doubt that the Indian Ocean is set to regain its glory days. China’s dependence on imported crude oil is increasing and the US’ interestingly is decreasing. I am also certain the Eastern Seaboard of Africa from Mozambique through Somalia is the last Great Energy Prize in the c21st. [President Kenyatta probably posed the question to Vladimir Putin, whether Russia felt it had a role to play in this Energy Great Game in East Africa]. Therefore, the control of the Indian Ocean becomes kind of decisive and with control China can be shut down quite quickly. A Sine qua non of President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia is US/NATO Power Projection over the Indian Ocean.
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Mozambique's tuna fleet rusts as an African success story fades @reutersafrica Africa |
The 24 fishing boats rusting in the harbor of Mozambique's capital were meant to be a modern tuna fleet that would rake in hard currency, create jobs and provide a cheap source of protein for one of the world's poorest countries.
Instead, they have become monuments to government mismanagement and heavy lending by Western banks that has buried a promising African economy in a deep debt crisis.
The boats, moored in the harbor of Maputo, were paid for out of an $850-million loan arranged in 2013 by Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) and Russia's VTB (VTBR.MM) to finance "fishing infrastructure". The cash came in the form of a government-backed bond to state tuna-fishing company Ematum.
Nearly three years later, the fishing project, initially touted as self-sustaining, is defunct and has contributed to a sovereign foreign debt mountain equal to 80 percent of GDP that could bankrupt the southeast African nation's government.
Not only did Ematum fall short of its targets but $500 million of the "tuna bond" was found to be for maritime security and had to reallocated to the defense budget.
"Sorry sir, we don't have tuna on the menu," said Raul, a waiter at a restaurant overlooking the dormant fleet. "The boats never go out. They are resting."
Even when they did sail, in Ematum's early days, the fleet never caught the amount of fish that would have been needed over a long period to pay off the debt.
Ematum's results published last year pointed to the fleet catching just $450,000 of tuna a year, compared with sales of $18 million forecast at that stage of its life in a 2013 feasibility study circulated by the government.
Growth is still robust but the metical MZN= currency lost a third of its value in 2015 and another concern for investors is fighting between government forces and guerrillas in some parts of Mozambique.
The fate of the "tuna bond" is emblematic of the difficulties facing the country of 26 million, and particularly of the debt problem.
The overall loan was restructured last month in what ratings agency Standard & Poor's described as "selective default" after the government struggled to make repayments.
Deepening the mire, a further $1.35 billion of debt then emerged. Most of it was also from Credit Suisse and VTB, according to an International Monetary Fund source.
Credit Suisse, whose Ivorian chief executive was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying in October that it was "madness" for poor countries to finance infrastructure through dollar borrowing, declined to comment.
The metical is likely to continue its decline, inflation -- already running at an annual rate of more than 13 percent -- will soar, and foreign and public investment will drop, with a knock-on impact on economic growth, analysts say.
"The debt that we just found out about is a huge burden on the economy. What's worse is it has a multiplying effect, multiplying problems," said economist Ragendra de Souza, criticizing the habitual secrecy of the dominant Frelimo party.
"To hide debt is an 'ostrich policy' -- hide the head but everything else is exposed. A monopoly behaves like this."
A comprehensive aid package is the most likely way out but the IMF and donors would demand stringent conditions, including full transparency on state finances, measures to ensure no repeat of the mistakes and consequences for those responsible, two Western diplomats said.
The last demand will be particularly tough for President Filipe Nyusi, who was defense minister under former President Armando Guebuza when the loans were agreed.
"This was a fundamental breach of trust. There's no way it's back to business as usual," one diplomat said. "We are supposed to be doing anti-poverty work, not paying for undisclosed loans taken out with no transparency to unsustainable businesses."
Prices of basics such as bread and fuel are rising along with public anger at the scale of the problem. Armed soldiers and police took to the streets of Maputo last week after rumors of demonstrations.
"We see the government lied to us and things will get harder for ordinary Mozambicans now," 37-year-old singer Tinoka Zimba said. "We used to think that we are all in together, trying to make things better. This crisis is really sad."
Conclusions
"The saddest thing is this country has everything needed to be a huge success story," a diplomat said.
Mozambique from Hero to Zero.
When Mozambique was a Hero
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4 JUN 12 :: 'Maputo, Boom Town' @thestarkenya Africa |
GREETINGS from the Serena Polana, Maputo. I can confirm that Maputo is the land of wonderful and flavoursome tiger prawns.
The Architecture is also deliciously retro. By the way, the Polana was built in 1922 and the flavour is fabulously Riviera and very swanky. It is less than 4 hours by plane from Nairobi and surely set to be the most of in things and places to visit.
Of course, Mozambique has popped large onto the global radar because of gas reserves that have been discovered offshore and in the deep sea. I have said before, that I believe the eastern seaboard of Africa is clearly the last great energy prize in the c21st and I believe this lake of hydrocarbons stretches from Mozambique up through Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. We remain in the early stage of this discovery process but Mozambique is further along the curve.
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31/ On the Run in Burundi BY JAMES VERINI The New Yorker Africa |
Four decades of Belgian colonial government fostered little development and a lot of ethnic animosity. In 1961, the first elected Prime Minister was assassinated; in 1965, another was killed. In 1972, as many as three hundred thousand Hutus were killed by the Tutsi-led army. (This “first genocide,” as it is sometimes called, passed almost without notice outside Burundi, but did incense Richard Nixon. “I’m tired of this business of letting Africans eat”—meaning kill—“a hundred thousand people and doing nothing about it,” he said to Henry Kissinger, who in turn noted that more people had been killed in three months in Burundi than had died in eight years of war in Vietnam.) That was followed by a coup in 1976, another in 1987, and another in 1993; after the President was assassinated in the last, as many as a hundred and fifty thousand Burundians were killed in a bout of violence that some consider a second genocide. A Hutu rebellion spurred a civil war that lasted from 1993 to 2005 and left another estimated three hundred thousand dead. In 1994, yet another President was killed when the plane in which he was flying with the Rwandan President was shot down, touching off the more famous genocide next door.
Pierre Nkurunziza was in his thirties when he left the army to join the Hutu rebellion. His father and five of his six siblings had been killed in 1972. After a peace accord in 2005, Nkurunziza was elected President by a broad coalition of Hutus and Tutsis in parliament, who were excited by his claims to be the candidate of reconciliation. And, for a few years, he seemed at least to want to be sincere, building an inclusive government and reducing ethnic strife. But, around the 2010 election, Nkurunziza began trampling his opposition. There was a string of political assassinations. His party formed the Imbonerakure, a citizen militia. Then, in April of last year, after nearly a decade in office, he announced his intention to run for a third term, defying popular will and, many believe, the Constitution, which limits Presidents to two terms. (Nkurunziza’s supporters claimed that, because he’d come to power in a special vote of parliament, he was eligible.) The Constitutional Court ruled in his favor, but there were allegations of intimidation, and one of the justices fled to Rwanda, saying he had been threatened into the ruling.
And yet, as Jean-Marie Ngendahayo, a former politician, pointed out, the fact that Nkurunziza is not an ethnic fanatic may make him more dangerous. “He can kill anyone,” he said.
Nkurunziza is, increasingly, an object of contempt and ridicule. He is referred to by his detractors as Peter, as though he does not deserve the title “President,” or a surname, or even the use of the French version of his name. “He’s always in the rural area, playing football,” Émile told me. Nkurunziza is known to be a great lover of sport. An ordained pastor, around the time of the election, he could be found on Sundays preaching at different churches around the country—though not in the capital, which locals say he has avoided since a feeble attempt at a coup, by a breakaway general, last May. It was put down in two days but gave Nkurunziza license to brand the demonstrators “insurgents” and “enemies of democracy.” Still, anyone who wants to see him—his ministers, legislators, and even, recently, a United Nations Security Council delegation—must travel to his home in Gitega. The word “messianic” comes up often in discussions of his psychology. He likes to say that he was chosen by God to lead Burundi.
The prison where Auguste was tortured, which belongs to the National Intelligence Services, is known around Bujumbura as “the secret prison.” In fact, everyone knows where it is, in the middle of downtown, in a residential-looking compound near Regina Mundi, the central cathedral, and by a primary school whose khaki-uniformed students walk by the torture chambers every morning and afternoon. I spoke with several men who were beaten there, and their stories were very similar: the tied forearms, the rebar rods, the stones in the mouths, the unanswerable accusations. In July, the U.N. reported that, of the roughly three hundred prisoners who were known to have been taken there, most had been “subjected to torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”
“Only assassination can put an end to this,” the official said. He begged me not to write anything that might identify him. “They would kill me, I’m telling you,” he said.
He lamented the will of African Presidents to hold on to power. “It’s a kind of sickness,” he said
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09-MAY-2016 ::The Weather is a Wild-Card, @TheStarKenya Kenyan Economy |
On Saturday night I sat and listened to the torrential downpour. In fact, I found it quite sensual (what with the accompanying crescendo of thunder and lightning). Well, until I peered outside my ground-floor window and called Nishet and said
“if the velocity is maintained, we are going to be submerged”.
and then I started to scan social media and noted Nakumatt Ukay had sunk below the waterline. Of course, the Huruma building collapse was still fresh in my mind and I cannot help feeling it is a precursor or a harbinger.
Did you know the name ‘Nairobi’ comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nairobi, which translates to “cool water?’’ thee phrase is also the Maasai name of the Nairobi River, which in turn lent its name to the city. thee area was essentially uninhabited swamp until a supply depot of the Uganda Railway was built in 1899. I have always said to Nishet, we have built on rivers and if rainfall spikes (like it is doing now), a whole lot of this city is going to be washed away and very little distinction is going to be made between Huruma, Westlands or Mzima Springs on the way to Lavington.
Over the weekend, we also learnt five islands have disappeared in the Pacific’s Solomon Islands due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion, according to an Australian study. The global warming phenomenon is real, it was kind to us in 2015, but I cannot help feeling the phenomenon is set to intensify. And the last few days are a powerful signal of where things are headed.
Last year, we found ourselves in a ‘’sweet spot’’ in the El Niño phenomenon. Whilst farmlands to our North and South were parched, Kenya sat in a ‘’sweet spot’’. Agriculture constitutes 25 per cent of Kenya’s GDP and the diffusion effect means when agriculture does well, there is good trickle-down. The economy expanded at a 5.6 per cent rate in 2015, according to the KNBS. “Agriculture gross value improved to 6.2 per cent in the period under review from 3.5 per cent in 2014 due to good weather and abundant rainfall,” said Kenya National Bureau of Statistics director general Zachary Mwangi.
The governor of the Central Bank Patrick Njoroge said wistfully in a Reuters Interview in December: “I wish I could say something about controlling the weather.”
The weather is now a serious wild-card for folks who are parked on riparian land, for the farm economy and even monetary policy. Thee historian Sir Stephen Ranchman and was known for having “played piano duets with the last emperor of China and twice hit the jackpot on slot machines in Las Vegas”. The last point, “twice hit the jackpot on slot machines in Las Vegas” are the odds, in my opinion, for another similarly benign outcome in 2016 as we had in 2015.
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Jubilee tops profit list of insurers as Britam comes last Cytonn Business Daily Kenyan Economy |
Jubilee Insurance had the highest return on equity (ROE) or profitability in 2015 among underwriters listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) as Britam performed the worst, a new report shows.
According to Cytonn Investments, Jubilee Insurance had a ROE of 16.9 per cent while Kenya Re came second at 16.6 per cent.
ROE is a profitability measure that shows how much a company generates with the money shareholders have invested. Firms with higher ROEs are better at utilising capital to generate profits.
The lowest ROE was that of Britam at negative five per cent, the Cytonn report showed
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