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The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński Africa |
"The emperor (of Ethiopia) began his day by listening to informers' reports. The night breeds dangerous conspiracies, and Haile Selassie knew that what happens at night is more important than what happens during the day. During the day he kept an eye on everyone; at night that was impossible. For that reason, he attached great importance to the morning reports. And here I would like to make one thing clear: His venerable majesty was no reader. . . . The custom of relating things by word of mouth had this advantage: If need be, the emperor could say that a given dignitary had told him something quite different from what had really been said. . . . It was the same with writing, for our monarch not only never used his ability to read, but he also never wrote anything and never signed anything in his own hand. Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like."
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25-AUG-2014 The signal announcing this new arrhythmic normal was the disappearance of #MH370 Law & Politics |
Picking up the signal through the noise of our world in 2014 is no easy thing. In fact, my view is the new normal is a very arrhythmic world. When I plugged ‘’arrhythmia’’ into my computer, it threw up this;
‘’For years he’d been studying the phenomenon of chaos, of which an arrhythmic heartbeat was a perfect example’’
His excellency Johan Borgstam told me the signal announcing this new arrhythmic normal was the disappearance of the MH370. Since then planes have been falling out of the sky like flies. And the uncertainty around MH370 and MH17 which is sharpened by the way the story is seemingly turned on and off took me back to Don Delillo
‘’”We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.’’
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Congo's president shows would-be successor who is in charge Reuters Africa |
"You won't scare us!" was how the Congolese leadership responded this week to Western threats of sanctions unless President Joseph Kabila ends his 15 years in power by holding an election on schedule in November.
It is a message that has also been delivered, in various ways, to Moise Katumbi, a former close ally of the president now seeking to replace him - a measure of Kabila's apparent determination to stay in power and his mastery of the means to do so.
Hours before Katumbi announced he would run for president, he was accused of hiring U.S. mercenaries for a coup plot. On Friday, police fired tear gas at him and thousands of his supporters outside the prosecutor's office hearing the case in Lubumbashi, the Democratic Republic of Congo's second city.
The standoff in the vast central African country, which has never known a peaceful transfer of power, could become a violent showdown between Kabila, who succeeded his assassinated father, and Katumbi, former governor of Katanga province in the southeast and owner of TP Mazembe, African soccer's Real Madrid.
The government says it is unlikely to be able to organise the presidential poll on time due to budgetary and logistical constraints. The country's highest court ruled a week ago that Kabila would stay in power until elections could be held.
The United States and Britain said last week they were actively considering sanctioning Kabila's inner circle unless progress was made towards holding elections on time.
In response, Henri Mova Sakani, the Secretary-General of Kabila's party, accused outside forces of trying to split up the country in a bid to restore colonialism.
"You can come up with anything you like - sanctions or whatever. You won't scare us!" he declared in a speech to hundreds of people gathered in yellow-party t-shirts on Tuesday to mark the 1997 overthrow of autocrat Mobutu Sese Seko by Kabila's father.
Leading opposition parties say the court ruling is part of a "constitutional coup d'etat" and have called for nationwide marches on May 26 to demand Kabila step down this year.
But Kabila allies won more than two-thirds of the elections for governors of newly created provinces in March, shoring up local control of security forces and patronage networks.
"Cohesion in the Kabila camp has been maintained these last months," said Hans Hoebeke, International Crisis Group's senior Congo analyst. "At this stage there is little-to-no pressure on him."
"Our future president is Moise Katumbi whether Kabila likes it or not," said Pierre Nyembo Muyeye outside the prosecutor's office in Lubumbashi. Some Katumbi partisans threatened to burn down the entire city if he was arrested.
Known during his governorship for distributing $100 bills to the public, Katumbi has been keen to present himself as the face of the people against a predatory state. "The greatest army in the world is the people," he often says.
"The government fears him because he has the potential to mobilise an electorate in different parts of the country," said Kris Berwouts, an independent Congo analyst. "There is an aura of success around him."
"Delaying tactics will work for a certain amount of time and buy him months, maybe several more years in power," he said. "But it's not a long-term strategy."
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Congo Issues Arrest Warrant for Presidential Hopeful Katumbi Africa |
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government issued a warrant for the arrest of presidential hopeful Moise Katumbi on charges that he recruited mercenaries.
“The public prosecutor has charged Mr. Katumbi and issued a provisional arrest warrant,” government spokesman Lambert Mende said Thursday by phone from the capital, Kinshasa. “He is now at the disposition of the judge who could detain him in prison or put him under house arrest, but he is no longer free.”
Thursday’s announcement “represents a significant escalation in the political crisis in the Congo,” Jason Stearns, a director of the Congo Research Group, said by phone from New York. “This is an attempt to politically eliminate the main challenger.”
Conclusions
Katumbi is a formidable Challenger. Kabila has to tread carefully because he could get ''Ouagadougou-ed''
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May 2015 "The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street" Africa |
In his book ‘Speed and Politics’ he says: “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.’’
As we look around the world today, we can see a battle for the ‘street’ from the streets of Bujumbura to the streets of Baltimore. In November last year, I wrote about Ouagadougou’s signal to sub-Saharan Africa and concluded that: We need to ask ourselves how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1000, 10000?
This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent cannot go. Where that threshold lies will be discov- ered in the throes of the event.
Therefore, the preeminent point to note is that protests in Burkina Faso achieved escape velocity.
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Piercing Zuma's bubble Daily Maverick Africa |
Zuma has been able to wriggle out of responsibility for every problem and disaster he has found himself in up to now. Even though he was found to have acted illegally and inconsistently with the Constitution, and might have allowed liberties to his friends in the affairs of government for their financial benefit, there could again be no consequences for his actions.
It is no wonder that the president is so jolly and laughs so frequently. When it comes to political survival, it seems Zuma is simply unconquerable.
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Nigeria naira devaluation, two interest rate hikes expected this year @NdabaVuyani Africa |
Nigeria's central bank will devalue the naira in the next few months, analysts in a Reuters poll said on Thursday, but will also hike interest rates next week and again in November to control inflation.
All but one of 12 analysts polled in the past few days said the currency would be devalued, with a median expectation it would be weakened by 15 percent. Many were reluctant to be pinned down on when.
"(Nigeria) has again come under immense pressure to devalue the official naira exchange rate, and the probability of this happening in the near term is high in our view," said Cobus de Hart at research consultancy NKC African Economics.
De Hart listed risks such as a severe production shock, forex shortages spilling over to the monetary environment, unions becoming more vocal and growing opposition to a stable naira within government circles as pressure to devalue.
The naira traded at a record low versus the dollar in the non-deliverable forwards market on Tuesday, with markets betting on a devaluation to tackle a spiralling economic crisis.
On the official market the central bank has put in place controls to make sure the currency does not fall below 199 per dollar.
Analysts were sceptical about saying the devaluation would be announced next Tuesday when the central bank is due to announce any changes to monetary policy, though say there may be some form of extraordinary measures.
Bismarck Rewane, chief executive of Lagos consultancy Financial Derivatives suggested the Bank could announce a dual currency exchange.
Renaissance Capital's global chief economist, Charles Robertson, said while authorities would be reluctant to float the naira they may instead introduce Venezuela-style dual-exchange rates, with an officially endorsed parallel rate around 285 per dollar.
Still, Aly Khan Satchu, an independent analyst and investor at Rich Management in Nairobi said the President had been betting the equivalent of a single number at the Roulette wheel.
"He has been betting against the curve of history: Soros, Thai baht and there are (others) too numerous to mention."
"The President needs to try and stay in charge of the process and keep it orderly, any further delay risks a disorderly and Caracas outcome," said Satchu.
Venezuela's dual-exchange rates, implemented earlier this year, has not stemmed rampant inflation that has destroyed purchasing power.
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Feb-2016 Meanwhile Nigeria, the biggest economy in SSA, will surely contract in 2016 and not least because its president is determined not to devalue the naira. Africa |
The curve of history [from Soros skinning the Bank of England in 1992, to the Mexican peso crisis in 1994, to the Thai baht crisis in 1998 and many more too numerous to mention] confirm that maintaining an artificial foreign exchange rate is a fool’s errand and eventually carries the risk that the breakdown spirals out of control and can become seriously disorderly. The official naira rate is just below 200 to the dollar but no one is holding any store by that price and that’s why absolutely no one is putting any more money in Nigeria because they all know when the haircut is finally imposed it’s going to be a big one. I find it just extraordinary that such a brilliant president would risk it all on a bet on a single number in a game of roulette. Those are the odds.
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East Africa's economic 'coalition of the willing' is falling apart Quartz Africa Africa |
Kenya’s big vision for a ‘coalition of the willing (CoW)’ agreement with Uganda and Rwanda to build a major rail line and oil pipeline that would invigorate and open up East Africa’s economy may be going up in smoke as its partners look elsewhere for more economically pragmatic paths to achieve their goals.
First it was Uganda. In March, East Africa’s third largest economy pulled the plug on a tentative agreement with Kenya for an oil pipeline deal. Desperate bids to save the deal fell through as Tanzania, the new ally in Uganda’s oil pipeline deal said it would expedite the process for a lot less less than the Kenyan route had been estimated. Then Rwanda did what took both Kenya and Uganda by surprise: opting out of the standard gauge railway (SGR)with the two partners, once ‘bosom friends’.
Tanzania’s Magufuli relishing in new gains that may usher in a radical geopolitical shift in the East African region in his favor.
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Sloshed in the slow lane How to drive drunk in Kenya @TheEconomist Kenyan Economy |
AT A bar off Langata road, a main highway in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, business has been struggling of late. The problem, the manager says, is that his bar is inconveniently positioned between two crossroads where officers from the police and the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) often put up roadblocks to check if drivers have been drinking. “It is right what the government is doing,” he says. “But it is really squeezing us. These people with their alcoblow have taken away all of our customers.”
The “alcoblow”—what Kenyans call a breathalyser— is relatively new in Nairobi. An effort to introduce the devices in 2006 was thwarted when drivers got a court to declare that their rights were being violated. But a traffic act in 2012 toughened penalties for drunk-driving; since then, breathalysers have been used at traffic stops. In March the NTSA acquired 45 new vehicles, from which officers can patrol and pull over drivers they suspect of imbibing.
Yet in a country where getting round annoying rules is a national sport, and where cops are seen as extractors of bribes rather than upholders of the law, many people find ingenious ways to get away with driving drunk. In the bar on Langata road, the manager admits that when the police are around he will use the speakers to issue updates about where the road blocks are. The information comes from a network of drivers who, on a Saturday night, run a thriving business driving tired and emotional customers in their own cars past the checkpoints (but not all the way home).
In 2013 as many as 13,000 people died on Kenya’s roads. In Britain, which has a somewhat bigger population and vastly more cars, the figure was 1,700. Of the ten most dangerous countries in the world for road deaths, only two, Iran and Thailand, are not in Africa. And the number of Africans who can afford to buy cars and lots more beer is only going up.
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