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Tuesday 01st of August 2017 |
Morning Africa |
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If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke
Macro Thoughts |
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Don't mess with Grace Mugabe - she could be the next president of Zimbabwe Africa |
During a state banquet in Pretoria, South Africa, in April 2015, I had a brief encounter with Grace Mugabe, the first lady of Zimbabwe. I was asking her husband, Robert Mugabe, about the question of her succeeding him as president. “She doesn’t have those ambitions,” began Mugabe, the spectacles perched on his nose reminiscent of an elderly librarian, a narrow moustache clinging to his upper lip like a caterpillar. Suddenly he interrupted himself with mock alarm: “Careful, there she comes!” The frail 91-year-old, who increasingly resembles a hanger for his well-tailored suits, remained seated. I rose and turned to behold his 49-year-old wife, with her cropped hair and long black dress, lace hanging daintily at the wrist. Grace, who had been the subject of persistent gossip about a serious illness, was returning from an interlude on the dancefloor that delighted dinner guests.
“Hello, David Smith of the Guardian. We were just talking about you.”
For two decades, she was a demure companion at her husband’s side. Now she has taken the stage as a fearsome political figure in her own right. Can Grace Mugabe seize power before it’s too late?• Click here for text version
“Oh, really? You were talking about me? But I’m dead, I’m a corpse,” she replied smiling. The reports about her ill-health had apparently been exaggerated.
“I just wanted to ask you if it’s true you might like to be president one day,” I asked.
Her hard features, which can resemble a mask with striking dark eyes and sculpted cheekbones, dissolved into a laugh. She did not deny it. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Just then a band struck up and I beat a retreat, past the glares of South African protocol mandarins, one of whom ordered me to leave, snarling: “I hope we never see you again.”
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South Africa's main stock index scaled a record high on Monday Africa |
The bourse's performance - the All-share index rose 0.85 percent in early trade on Monday to a new peak of 55,366.74 - has been driven by foreign flows into equities and earnings garnered offshore.
Naspers, a newspaper publisher turned global e-commerce giant which accounts for over 20 percent of the JSE's market capitalisation, was largely responsible for the JSE's run, having risen sharply as investors see it trading at a large discount to its one-third stake in China's Tencent.
Naspers, trading close to an all-time high and up 42 percent so far this year, has its primary listing on the JSE, and luxury goods group Richemont, which has a secondary listings on the bourse, is up 21 percent.
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"There is no doubt that he was tortured and murdered," Chebukati said. "The only issue in our minds is who killed him and why." Kenyan Economy |
The IEBC has postponed a Monday test of its election results-transmission system and will announce a new date soon, Chebukati said. He vowed the IEBC will ensure all its employees’ lives are “secured” before voting day.
The National Super Alliance, which is backing Odinga’s bid for the presidency, condemned the killing. Addressing reporters in Nairobi, coalition spokesman Musalia Mudavadi said Msando’s responsibilities included systems dealing with voter identity verification, electronic tallying and transmitting results.
“He was at the nerve center,” Mudavadi said. “He was supposed to lead the results transmission trial run today. It’s telling that the key person has been eliminated at this delicate time.”
The killing is “an attempt to drive a dagger into the heart of the forthcoming election, and indeed a dagger into the heart of Kenyan democracy,” he said. “But we are totally confident that this terrible crime will accomplish the opposite and strengthen all Kenyans’ will to demand a free, fair and credible election.”
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Youth turnout key in elections Jul. 31, 2017, 2:00 am By ALYKHAN SATCHU Kenyan Economy |
I learnt last week that Nearly half of the atoms that make up our bodies may have formed beyond the milky way and travelled to the solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars.
“Science is very useful for finding our place in the universe,” said Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, an astronomer at Northwestern University “In some sense we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.”
Rumi said “We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.” I have digressed but the tangential point is that our politics has been driven largely by a narrow ethnicity when we are all in fact inter-galactic citizens.
The eighth of August now looms real close, and as it gets closer the cacophony outside my window overlooking Waiyaki way gets louder and louder. Most polls show this election as too close to call but pollsters the world over have been getting it wrong from Brexit to Trump. If you look at the United Kingdom, the youth vote slept in during Brexit then woke up for the UK snap election and nearly carried Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street. The newly enfranchised youth vote is a big absolute number of first time voters, and is a very big curve ball. Is this youth vote turned on? Will it turn out? And how will it vote? My view is that this demographic actually has the election in its hands. Will we see a youthquake and if so how does it break?
The next key issue is turn-out. Are voters on both sides motivated in the same way as they were last time, when the ICC proved a lightning rod in motivating voters in Jubilee strongholds? I was listening to Shaffie Weru on his morning show on Kiss FM, and he was regaling his listeners with a tale about how a group of women were withdrawing conjugal rights from their menfolk as a way of compelling turn-out and its direction. Whilst Shaffie was being ''tongue in cheek'' as is his wont, he was touching on a key issue. This election can surely be won or lost on turn-out. I recall a US Congressman-a Hillary Clinton partisan-who described to me how the Democrats never saw the Trump campaign on the ground. He said, we would see US Flags but nothing more. And yet, Cambridge Analytica and Jared Kushner, with help from the Russians and Wikileaks, seriously motivated their core base via digital micro-targeting. Are Cambridge Analytica deploying a similar micro-targeting strategy and will it work? Moving the dial a few percentage points might make all the difference.
Beyond those two big macro trends, we know there has been some erosion in what was a monolithic Rift Valley vote last time around. The amount of that erosion is key. How will Maasailand break? And it seems Ukambani is considered all to play for.
LVMH's Hennessy Cognac CEO Peillon was in town last week and he said “Kenya is a boost market, the next emerging market frontier for us. Our role is to figure out what might happen in the world, to have a vision of what could become of Kenya, and we are positive.” I agree with Peillon but the next few days are a pivot moment.
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Kenya's social media election: attack ads and data mining @AFP Tristan MCCONNELL Kenyan Economy |
Nairobi (AFP) - A strikingly toxic campaign ad was unleashed online in Kenya just weeks before national elections -- a potentially explosive move in a country where politics and ethnicity are closely aligned.
The 90-second video, shot in moody monochrome, presented a dystopia in which Raila Odinga, the leading opposition candidate, wins the August vote and plunges the nation into a violent and inept dictatorship.
Under this scenario, tribes would be set against one another while terrorists run riot. "Stop Raila, Save Kenya. The Future of Kenya is in Your Hands," the video said.
East Africa's largest economy holds its general election on August 8, a decade after disputed poll results fuelled violence that left more than 1,100 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.
It is unclear who is behind last week's slick video or "The Real Raila", the shadowy pro-government outfit that disseminated it.
But some on Kenya's vibrant social media networks were quick to blame Cambridge Analytica (CA), a company credited with using its data mining and psychological profiling techniques to help swing recent votes in the United States and Britain.
In May, local press reported President Uhuru Kenyatta's Jubilee campaign had hired CA. A spokesman, Nick Fievet, declined to comment on CA's possible work in Kenya but said it had "no connection" with the attack video.
With 7.1 million Facebook users and an estimated two-thirds of Kenya's 45 million people able to access the internet, there is a critical mass of people leaving an increasingly detailed trail of information about their fears and preferences -- a rich resource for those seeking to influence voting choices.
"Here it can lead to war," said John Githongo, a veteran anti-corruption campaigner. "The wrong video, the wrong information, it can go out of control."
Githongo believes both government and opposition seek to use the new techniques, only the ruling party is more effective. "Jubilee has been way ahead from the very beginning."
CA worked on Kenyatta's last campaign in 2013 -- devised by PR company BTP Advisers -- to paint Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto as victims of a Western imperialist plot to try them at the International Criminal Court for politically motivated tribal violence.
"We made the election a choice about whether Kenyans would decide their own future or have it dictated to them by others," said a statement by London-based BTP, which is reportedly working with Kenyatta and Ruto again this year.
According to its website, CA "designed and implemented the largest political research project ever conducted in East Africa" ahead of the 2013 vote to hone a campaign based on voters' desires for jobs and fears of "tribal violence".
It also "segmented the Kenyan population into key target audiences".
Now there are fears data will be swept up and used to create psychological profiles of voters so that specific messages can be tailored to specific voters.
Frederike Kaltheuner, a policy officer at data advocacy group Privacy International, is worried by the "lack of any kind of data protection framework" in Kenya.
"There are concerns about the integrity of data in Kenya. Who would have access to it? Who is storing it? Do people even know what is being collected about them? None of these questions are being answered," she said.
Others are concerned about what happens when you seek to segment a society for electoral purposes where already politicians' primary appeals are to their ethnic constituents.
"There are very strong communities in Kenya and that's exactly the kind of situation present where you can start to drive different conversations about the election in different sub-communities," said Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has studied CA's techniques.
"We've seen it with Brexit and the US election, and the same can be done in Kenya, or elsewhere that there's a lot of fragmentation already."
- Fake news, trolls and bots -
"Fake news", a term that dominates political discourse in the United States, has already made itself felt in Kenya's election
Jeffrey Smith, executive director of the US-based Vanguard Africa, an organisation promoting free and fair elections, has been under attack since he invited Odinga to the United States in March to meet policymakers.
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Dead voters and other ways to steal a Kenyan election AFP Kenyan Economy |
Nairobi (AFP) - Elections in Kenya are a fraught business, with polls beset with claims of rigging and intimidation, some subtle, some not, and this year's vote on August 8 is no different.
A decade after a disputed election led to the country's worst electoral violence with over 1,100 killed, fear of irregularities is growing.
"In Kenya, people say the dead come back to vote, and then return to their graves," said George Morara, chairman of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR).
The fraudulent inclusion of the deceased on the voters' register is just one way to cheat your way to victory in Kenya.
Recent months' violence which has displaced citizens in Laikipia and Baringo counties has worried observers who fear ostensible banditry and land struggles as masking efforts to push people from their place of registration.
Advocacy group Human Rights Watch in early July documented incidents of intimidation in the Naivasha region, a hotspot of violence in 2007-08.
Another strategy is to "rent" voters' identity cards during elections, essentially paying someone not to turn out. "When you have someone's ID, this is the guarantee he will not be able to vote," said Morara, adding that some in Kenya will sell their ID and therefore their vote for 1,000 shillings ($10; 8 euros).
Kenya's electoral law allows voters to choose where they register, opening up the possibility of manipulating the polls by bussing in supporters to stack the odds in a particular constituency.
"In some constituencies, we notice that the registration levels are higher than normal," said Kelly Lusuli of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC). "We fear that some are paying others to come and register in a constituency in which they don't live so as to favour a candidate."
- Dodgy technology -
In 2013, Kenya introduced an electronic system that included biometric voter registration intended to ensure only those registered could vote.
It also provided for the electronic transmission of results from polling stations across the country to the national tally centre in the capital, reducing opportunities for tampering with result sheets en route.
But technology is neither fool-proof nor tamper-resistant with hackers able to modify results or render the entire system unuseable.
But simpler still, said Nic Cheeseman, a professor at Birmingham University and a Kenya expert, is finding a way not to use the electronic system.
"The head of the polling station can certainly find an excuse not to use the biometric kit, he could say it is dysfunctional or that its battery is empty," he said.
That happened in multiple cases in 2013 even before a major technical failure meant the election commission abandoned the electronic system altogether, reverting to manual tallying.
With the electronic system out of commission, several illegal avenues open up to stuff ballot boxes.
Party loyalists can be tasked with casting ballots on behalf of the deceased whose names are still on the voters' register.
An audit of the current, new electoral register, by accounting firm KPMG, estimated there are over a million dead voters.
The last elections were close, with President Uhuru Kenyatta winning by a margin of less than that: around 800,000.
"It is also possible to cast a ballot for the people who did not show up to vote," said an African diplomat on condition of anonymity. "You wait until the end of the day, you look at the results of other polling stations and you adjust with subtlety depending on how many votes you need."
Observers say that in the past a still less sophisticated method was to stuff boxes with pre-ticked ballots, with little effort made to disguise the fraud. In recent weeks the opposition has accused the electoral commission of printing many more ballot papers than necessary.
The elections will be monitored by thousands of observers, local and foreign, but they cannot be present in each of the country's nearly 41,000 polling stations. "In the strongholds, there are polling stations where all the agents are in favour of a candidate or a party," said Lusuli.
As for the agents sent by the adverse parties to watch the elections in these bastions, they can be bought to be silent or intimidated. In 2013, Lusuli said, the turnout was over 100 percent in some areas.
"You don't cancel an election just like that. Courts have to be convinced that the will of the people has been outweighed by the irregularities," Lusuli said.
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STANLIB FAHARI I-REIT H1 2017 EPS +230.769% Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: Closing Price: 12.00 Total Shares Issued: 180972300.00 Market Capitalization: 2,171,667,600 EPS: 0.59 PE: 20.339
H1 Rental and related income 137.969452m vs. 120.855334m +14.161% H1 Straight-lining of lease income [2.674906m] vs. 88.625294m -103.018% H1 Other income 52.850748m vs. 87.346054m -39.493% H1 Operating Expenses [112.546133m] vs. [160.844428m] -30.028% H1 Increase/ [decrease] in fair value of investment property 2.674906m vs. [88.625294m] +103.018% H1 Operating profit 78.274067m vs. 47.356960m +65.285% H1 Finance costs – vs. [22.955567m] H1 Net profit for the period 78.274067m vs. 24.401393m +220.777% Basic EPS 0.43 vs. 0.13 +230.769% Headline EPS 0.42 vs. 0.49 -14.286% Distributable EPS 0.43 vs. 0.13 +230.769% Total Assets 3.694459035b vs. 3.677967790b +0.448% Total Equity 3.573328950b vs. 3.515729819b +1.638% Net Asset Value per share 19.75 vs. 19.43 +1.647% Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 393.999343m vs. 363.138822m +8.498% No interim dividend
Company Commentary
currently owns 3 properties [a shopping centre and two semi office/light industrial buildings] valued at 2.4b. The REIT as delivered growth of 221% in earnings for the 6 month period ended 30th June 2017 currently ungeared
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Eaagads Ltd reports FY PAT 2017 +3,696% Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: 1/25 Closing Price: 25.50 Total Shares Issued: 32157000.00 Market Capitalization: 820,003,500 EPS: 0.56 PE: 45.53
Eaagads Limited FY 2017 results through 31st July 2017 vs. 31st July 2016
FY Sales 140.224m vs. 126.012m +11.278% FY [Loss]/ gain arising from changes in fair value of biological assets at fair value less costs to sell [1.279m] vs. 3.487m -136.679% FY Cost of production [67.178m] vs. [89.082m] -24.589% FY Gross profit 71.767m vs. 40.417m +77.566% FY Administrative Expenses [41.746m] vs. [31.428m] +32.831% FY Profit before tax 32.212m vs. 9.691m +232.391% FY Profit for the year 18.107m vs. 0.477m +3,696.017% EPS 0.56 vs. 0.01 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the year 0.4m vs. 1.012m -60.474% FY Total Assets 922.802m vs. 761.165m +21.235% FY Total Equity 850.586m vs. 691.936m +22.928%
Company Commentary
Average price realised during the year increased to $4.218 per KG versus 3.863 per KG Production volumes increased from 326 tons in 2016 to 424 tons in the current financial year The other comprehensive income reflects the after tax revaluation surplus of the company's freehold land measuring 44 hectares. remaining land is 341 hectares is leasehold land and therefore not subject to revaluation. No Dividend
Conclusions
Stronger results off a low base, however.
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N.S.E Today |
The Dollar remains under pressure. The Euro topped $1.18 for the first time since January 2015 Crude Oil has staged quite a comeback Rally and is trading above $50.00 a barrel in New York for the first time since May. African Stock Indices have been on quite a Tear of late and that was why I was saying that the Bull Market in Nairobi was a part of an Africa wide bull Phenomenon and that this Phenomenon was in fact externally generated. The South African All Share is +8.99% in 2017 and at an all time High lifted by Naspers [an old Apartheid Era Media Co. which re-invented itself as a Go-Go Internet Co. via an early purchase of a slice of Tencent]. The Nigeria All Share is +33.39% and the Ghana Composite Index +33.61% in 2017. The Nairobi All Share had rallied +21.01% in 2017 through this morning and yesterday closed at a 25 month closing high. The All Share corrected -1.85% off that 25 month high to close at 158.35. The Nairobi NSE20 retreated -1.449% to close at 3742.50. The Equity Market woke up to the proximity of the General Election today. Turnover was robust and registered 1.536b.
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N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services |
Safaricom corrected -3.06% off a record High to close at 23.75 and on brisk volume action of 23.415m shares worth 559.101m. Safaricom will resume its march towards 28.00 after this corrective, profit-taking phase. Safaricom is +29.086% in 2017 and has underpinned the Rally at the Bourse in 2017.
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N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
The Banks saw good volume action. Equity Bank firmed +0.61% to close at 41.00 and traded 5.354m shares worth 219.535m. Equity Bank is +43.33% through 2017 on a Total Return Basis. CFC StanBic Bank closed unchanged at 80.00 and traded 2.015m shares worth 162.197m. CFC StanBic Bank is +20.92% on a Total return basis. COOP Bank firmed 5cents to close at 15.70 and on robust volume action of 7.505m. The Bonus shares have been credited and some of the recent supply might be from some Long Investors doing some portfolio rebalancing. KCB Group retreated -3.07% to closed at 39.50 and traded 2.104m shares. DTB Bank closed unchanged at 184.00 and traded 279,500 shares.
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N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied |
British American Tobacco said on Tuesday that Britain's Serious Fraud Office has opened a formal investigation into possible historic misconduct by the company in Africa. The maker of tobacco brands including Dunhill and Lucky Strike said it has been investigating a number of allegations of misconduct, that were originally made towards the end of 2015, through its legal advisers and by liaising with the SFO. The company said in a statement that it intends to co-operate with the investigation. BAT traded a 1,000 shares at 800.00 -2.44%.
EABL which released its FY Earnings at the end of last week, firmed 1 shilling to close at 265.00 and traded 511,000 shares. The FY Results are deserving of a higher share price, somewhere nearer 300.00.
KenolKobil eased -0.99% to close at 14.90 and traded 6.648m shares.
Unga ticked +4.098% to close at 31.75 and traded 5,500 shares.
BOC Kenya was marked down -8.08% on light volume to close at 91.00.
KenGen corrected -3.55% to close at 8.15 and traded 2.752m shares.
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