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Macro Thoughts

The Price of Crude Oil has surged in New York by 33% since clocking a
2017 Low below $44.00 a barrel in late June this Year and is at its
highest level since July 2015. Brent Crude scaled a 2-1/2-year high of
$64.65 on Tuesday last week and was last at $63.65. This is an
explosive and exponential price move any which way you care to cut it.
In an era of lashings of lashings of surplus Oil, the Crude Oil
markets had priced ''Geopolitical'' risk at close to zero. Since Late
June, the markets have been re-pricing ''Geopolitical'' risk and in
particular events in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia [Still the largest
single Supplier of Crude Oil to Global Markets] have led the re-price.

The then 30 Year old Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohamed bin Salman
MBS [who is expected to ascend to the throne as early as this week]
arrived on the scene and immediately launched an unwinnable war in the
Yemen. President Assad [with his Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Allies]
resisted the Regime Changers in Syria. IS which was a Sunni and Saudi
blade has been eviscerated. Iraq, which was once firmly in the Saudi
camp is now aligned with Iran completely. Qatar is lost [see the
Intercept article which refers to a Plan headlined "Control the yield
curve, decide the future" a Plan to construct the ''Big Short'' on
Qatar - The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi should have spoken to me because
I could have told them how to do it].  Saudi Arabia and its allies
UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait are caught in an ever tightening Shia pincer.
The Paranoia in the Palaces in Saudi Arabia is real and existential.
And what is also clear is that Bibi Netanyahu, MBZ [The Crown Prince
of Abu Dhabi], Jared Kushner [coaching MBS until the early hours in
Riyadh just moments before MBS launched his Night of the Long Knives]
and a Trump carte blanche have all leveraged this existential Paranoia
to effect not a State Capture but a Kingdom Capture. The Guptas were a
Precursor for this particular capture.

The existential Paranoia in the head of 32 Year old wannabe King is
evidenced in this comment about Iran in May this Year '' "How can I
communicate with them while they prepare for the arrival of al-Mahdi
al-Montazar?"

Last week after being coached into the early hours by Ivanka Trump's
husband, Jared Kushner, MBS launched his Night of the Long Knives
which according to the veteran Journalist Robert Fisk and I quote

''When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening of 3
November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen
surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his
mobile phone and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime
minister silenced'' Hours later, MBS's newly minted Anti-Corruption
commission detained 11 House of Saud princes, four current ministers
and dozens of former princes/cabinet secretaries – all charged with
corruption. Bank accounts were frozen [We could witness a massive $1
trillion dollar disgorge right here], private jets grounded. The
high-profile Princely crew is jailed at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton and
the gates are now shut, the phone line is perpetually busy and you
can't book a room until Feb. 1. Fisk concludes ''Put bluntly, he is
clawing down all his rivals.''

In all the history Books I have read, its probably wisest to operate
on one Front not two and certainly not 3. The desperate impulse to act
is also up against a 4 year deadline. The Speed of decline in FX
reserves produces a 48 month shelf-life.

This week-end The Baghdad Post is reporting the kingdom has mobilised
its F-15 fighter jet fleet ito launch a military operation against
Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Geopolitical Risk is biting back hard. I predict the Spot Crude Oil
market re-price has further to run and will lift Brent Crude over
$70.00 a Barrel.

This is an unprecedented moment in the history of the Kingdom and the
most perilous moment for the House of Saud that I can recall.  Taking
on Iran looks like will the straw that breaks the Camels back.

WB Yeats' extraordinarily prescient Poem The Second Coming is the most
quoted poem on the Internet world-wide and its not difficult to see
why.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

The style of the wording wasn't Lebanese, says political scientist
Hilal Khashan of the American University of Beirut. “Hariri was
summoned to Riyadh, and he was coerced to read his resignation
statement [which] was written by the Saudis,” Khishan told me. The
abrupt aggressive intervention bore the fingerprints, again, of Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS.

Mohammad bin Salman is “a young man in a hurry,” says Daniel Shapiro,
the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, speaking with diplomatic care.
MBS is “a young prince, not very experienced, and doesn't seem to be
well educated,” says Teitelbaum.

The cost of insuring Saudi Arabian debt against default through
five-year credit-default swaps soared more than 20 basis points last
week amid an anti-corruption purge in the kingdom. Renewed tensions
with Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group, have compounded
investor concerns about rising political risks in the region. The last
time the nation’s CDS jumped as much in a single week was in January
2016 at the height of the oil-market crash.

Home Thoughts

My Father said he lived in Bagamoyo during WW2 and his Aunt was murdered there.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was on the fourth night, very early in the great Arabic tale, that
Shahrazad, in telling the story of King Yunan and his evil vizier,
says as follows: “Oppression hideth in every heart; power revealeth it
and weakness concealeth it.”1 It’s hard to say from Washington, DC,
how oppressive it really is for a passel of princes (11 at last count)
and assorted retainers (as many as 500, according to some reports) to
be held under “hotel arrest” at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, but it’s
easy to suppose that Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old Saudi Crown
Prince—and King in all but formal title—senses that his burgeoning
power gives him license for a bit of what he no doubt considers
necessary oppression. It no longer hideth entirely in his heart.

We’ll see how all this ends in due course: whether MbS remains the
banquet hall’s premier diner long into the future, or rather sooner
than that becomes the entrée. Both outcomes are possible. What is not
possible the longer his coup from above lasts is that Saudi political
arrangements will be put back the way they were pretty much since the
end of 1953. He has destroyed the status quo, presumably with his
feeble 81-year-old father’s blessing—or maybe not. He did so possibly
because he thinks the future of the Kingdom depends on it, possibly
because his will to power and personal ambition far outrun his wisdom
and experience, and likely because he shrouds, even to himself, the
latter truth with the former conviction.

What has gone on in Saudi Arabia over the past few days—along with its
related external emanations, from the shocking resignation of the
Lebanese Prime Minister while in Riyadh to the Houthi missile attack
on Riyadh—is the most significant cluster of events to hit the region
since ISIS burst onto the scene, seemingly from nowhere, to overrun
Mosul in June 2014. But unlike ISIS taking Mosul, the Saudi events may
well reverberate for far longer than three and a half years, and their
ultimate significance could be far more profound.

Alas, the actuarial tables have turned on Abdel Aziz’s remaining sons,
all of whom are either very old now or not kingly material. Everyone
understood that the transition to the next generation required a
particularly exquisite implementation of ijma’. Some believe that the
generational transition should have happened already, and that Salman
should not have become king. But evidently no agreement was
forthcoming as to who should be enthroned, so Salman may well have
been the only acceptable, temporary compromise. And now his son
Mohammed has short-circuited the ijma’ process, having established at
least temporary control over the army, the national guard, and the
internal security apparatus.

Casual Western observers generally miss the significance of this
because they do not understand the origins of the Saudi state and
hence what kind of Islamic society it has spawned. Contrary to what
the vast majority of Americans seem to think, Saudi Arabia is not a
traditional Muslim country. Saudi Arabia is an attenuated
neo-fundamentalist country from having been taken over, by force of
arms in the early 20th century, by a “revitalization movement”—to use
Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic 1956 description of the type. The
Wahhabi movement is therefore similar in some ways to the 19th-century
Mahdiya movement in Sudan and the early 20th-century Sanusiya movement
in Libya, also to the Almohad convulsion of the 12th century and its
long-delayed doppelganger, ISIS—and, not entirely coincidentally, to
the original rise of Islam in Arabia under Muhammad himself.

What happens most of the time in such circumstances is the
construction of a serviceable hypocrisy that, eventually, can permeate
many aspects of ordinary daily behavior. An example: If a typical
pious Muslim woman from Pakistan gets on a plane in Islamabad in order
to visit Paris for some reason, she will probably exit the plane
wearing the same clothing she was wearing on entering the plane, for
she has internalized the rules of her religious culture; when a Saudi
woman flies from Riyadh or Jedda to Paris, she will likely enter the
plane in standard Saudi attire but exit the plane in the latest
Western fashion, for she cannot internalize an externally enforced set
of obligations in service to an obviously impossible goal. So she tows
the line at home where others see her in that apparently stable if
stultified, hypocritized context, but outside of that context she
feels little obligation to otherwise empty forms. Similarly, Saudi men
will not usually violate restrictions on alcohol and non-halal food at
home, but many with the means to do so think little of crossing the
causeway to Bahrain to indulge in what some entrepreneurial locals
there call a Saudi Special: champagne and barbecued pork ribs.

It has noted, too, that in wanting to confront Iran MbS has been
talking tougher, and now has pulled away the curtain of Lebanese
politics by apparently forcing Saad Hariri to resign so that everyone
can see the raw truth: the diabolical betrayal of the Maronite
President Michel Aoun in laying the country at the feet of Hezbollah
and hence Iran. (If there is any country in the Arab world that
Americans tend to misunderstand even more than they misunderstand
Saudi Arabia, it’s Lebanon, but never mind that for now.) That could
spark a renewed civil war in Lebanon, thus raising the price to Iran
of controlling its satrapy now that the war in Syria seems to be
turning Iran’s way, but it could also maul the Sunni community there
in the process. That’s fairly obvious, too.

And the press has called attention to the fact that just yesterday the
Houthis again lobbed a missile about 800 miles to the outskirts of
Riyadh, where a Patriot missile battery apparently intercepted it,
meaning that we’re closer to turning an already extant proxy war
between Saudi Arabia and Iran into a direct one. Well, maybe.

What’s not obvious in the press, seeing as how it is not mentioned, is
that neither country can mobilize a conventional expeditionary force
worth so much as a skewer of shishtawook, and there is anyway no land
border between them. Nor is the right analogy obvious in the press:
Iran helping Yemenis to use their territory to rocket Riyadh is
something a bit like Nikita Khrushchev putting missiles in Cuba,
because it undermines the asymmetrical advantage of one side. In 1962
we could hit the Soviets but they could not hit us, and the Saudis can
bomb Sana‘a but not the other way around . . . until now.

In any event, the air forces and navies of both countries (with the
UAE probably helping the Saudis), such as they are—and Iranian
militias in Iraq and Houthi allies in Yemen ankle biting, rocketing,
and terrorizing Saudi cities—look to be the modalities of any fight,
if there is one. That and Iranian-supported and equipped Shi‘a
saboteurs in Bahrain, perhaps, trying for a head shot at a Saudi
ally/client. All kinds of interesting if improbable larger scenarios
can be spun, too: Pakistan supporting Saudi Arabia by attacking and
seizing Iranian Baluchistan, for example.

And so it was, on the 544th night that, as Shahrazad told the story,
Sindbad the Seaman felt remorse, and said, “Would heaven I had tarried
in the island. It was better than this wild desert; for there I had at
least fruits to eat and water to drink, and here there are neither
trees nor fruits nor streams. . . . Verily, as often as I am quit of
one peril, I fall into a worse danger and a more grievous.”2 Oh yes,
Dinarzad, these things happen.

Apart from a few half-hearted and timid FONOPs [freedom of navigation
operations], China has established control over the South China Sea.
It has created artificial Islands and then militarised those
artificial islands across the South China Sea. It is a mind-boggling
geopolitical advance any which way you care to cut it.

In the psychological assessment of Duterte detailed in the report, the
doctor concluded that he was suffering form narcissistic personality
disorder, with aggressive tendencies including a”‘grandiose sense of
self and entitlement” and “a pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate
others”.

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would
NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his
friend - and maybe someday that will happen!

President Donald Trump is showing he “can be played” by Vladimir Putin
when he doesn’t acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election,
a former Central Intelligence Agency director said.

“I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” John Brennan, CIA director under
President Barack Obama, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It
demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign
leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and to try to play upon his
insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national-security
standpoint.”

James Clapper, former U.S. director of national intelligence, agreed
with that assessment and said he thinks “both the Chinese and the
Russians think they can play" Trump with flattery.

Forty MPs have agreed to sign a letter of no confidence in Theresa May
as European Union negotiators threaten to block trade talks until
March unless Britain agrees to settle the Brexit divorce bill.

The embattled prime minister is facing a fight on three fronts
following another week of Tory turmoil in which Priti Patel become the
second cabinet minister to resign and two other cabinet ministers —
Damian Green and Boris Johnson — faced pressure to quit.

Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

— Rocket Man, by Elton John

Euro 1.1655
Dollar Index 94.39
Japan Yen 113.66
Swiss Franc 0.9967
Pound 1.3121
Aussie 0.7660
India Rupee 65.38
South Korea Won 1120.34
Brazil Real 3.2779
Egypt Pound 17.6585
South Africa Rand 14.4047

Between the FAANG quintet and China’s rivaling BAT companies, gains in
the world’s top technology shares are nearing a whopping $1.7 trillion
in market value this year.

That’s more than Canada’s entire economy, and exceeds the worth of
Germany’s biggest 30 companies put together. The eight tech giants --
Facebook Inc., Amazon Inc., Apple Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent
Alphabet Inc., as well as their Asian peers Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group
Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. -- have amassed as much money
in 2017 as Pacific Investment Management Co., one of the world’s
biggest fund managers, has done in about 46 years.

Frontier Markets

The sacking of the regime's veteran enforcer Emmerson Mnangagwa from
the vice presidency has started the endgame

By throwing out Emmerson Mnangagwa from the Vice Presidency and the
ruling party, President Robert Mugabe is testing his grip on the
security services as the regime faces another economic meltdown over
the next six months. Mnangagwa and his allies are aware of Mugabe's
declining ability to pay for the loyalty of the soldiers and police
that keep him in power as the spectre of another bout of
hyperinflation looms.

"Her power belies in the fact that her husband is the president, but
we are yet to see what happens if Robert Mugabe isn't there for her.
She is angling for the vice presidency right now, but she also seems
intent on keeping the presidency in the Mugabe household.

"For now the choreographed endorsements we have seen from the
provinces may be all the Mugabes need to convince themselves that what
they are doing is legitimate and they have the will of the people," he
said.

The pneumonic plague — a relative of the bubonic plague, or Black
Plague, but not exactly the same thing — is a bacterial disease spread
from person to person by droplets in the air. It can kill in as little
as 24 hours if left untreated. Over the past few months, there have
been more than 1 900 suspected cases in Madagascar, and 143 deaths.

Dollar versus Rand 6 Month Chart INO 14.4060


Nigeria All Share Bloomberg +38.12% 2017


Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg +42.56% 2017

An official document seen by The EastAfrican indicates that as of end
of September, the EAC executive arm in Arusha had only pocketed 4.6
per cent of the 2017/18 budget contributions, leaving the Secretariat
in critical liquidity pressure.

“Moody’s is just doing freelance rating. We only have two ratings that
we’ve contracted so far,” he told journalists at a breakfast meeting
on Thursday morning in the capital Nairobi as he termed the agency's
rating as “desk analysis”.

ARM Cement Ltd., is the newest takeover target in the battle among the
world’s biggest cement makers to expand in Africa, according to people
familiar with the matter.

ARM’s owners are exploring a sale, said the people, who asked not to
be identified because the talks are private. The Nairobi-based company
is currently valued at about $133 million on the Nairobi stock
exchange, though the sellers are seeking more than double that amount,
the people said. ARM’s two biggest shareholders are CDC Group Plc, a
development-finance institution owned by the U.K. government that
invested last year, and the founding Paunrana family.

“We are in the process of finding an equity and a strategic buyer to
inject equity into the business,” ARM Managing Director Pradeep
Paunrana said by phone on Friday. “The process is on and we expect
over the next few weeks to complete that process.”

Rival cement companies including LafargeHolcim Ltd., the world’s
biggest, HeidelbergCement AG of Germany, Nigeria’s Dangote Cement Plc
and Titan Cement Co. SA of Greece are among parties considering bids,
said the people. No final decisions have been made. ARM currently
produces about 2.7 million metric tons of cement in Tanzania, Kenya
and Rwanda, according to its website.

Spokespeople for LafargeHolcim, HeidelbergCement and Titan declined to
comment. A spokesman for Dangote Cement didn’t respond to an email
seeking comment. A spokesman for parent company Dangote Group said
Dangote Cement wasn’t intending to bid for the company.

There are more than six potential investors, Paunrana said. The
evaluation process includes gauging the level of interest in the
company and deciding how to structure the deal, he said.

The European players and Dangote are competing to expand their
footprint on a continent with the potential to develop infrastructure
at a blistering pace in coming decades. Cement use in Africa is less
than 50 kilograms (110 pounds) per person, with some countries as low
as 30 kilograms, according to London-based Bloomberg Intelligence
analyst Sonia Baldeira. That compares with China’s 1,737 kilograms per
person and Europe’s 230 kilograms.

ARM isn’t the only target. LafargeHolcim is in talks with South
Africa’s biggest cement maker, PPC Ltd., while HeidelbergCement,
Dangote and Titan are monitoring the situation. The 125-year-old
company has received a formal offer from Canadian insurer Fairfax
Financial Holdings Ltd., which has pledged to buy a stake on condition
it agrees to merge with a local rival. PPC has supplied cement for
major building projects in several African countries and has expanded
with new plants in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of
Congo.

LafargeHolcim in Talks With South Africa’s PPC About Offer

Major cement makers outside Africa have been in consolidation mode
since the creation two years ago of LafargeHolcim from Swiss and
French rivals. Last month, Dublin-based CRH Plc received approval from
Ash Grove Cement Co. shareholders to buy the U.S. supplier for $3.5
billion and in September, HeidelbergCement agreed to acquire Italian
assets from Cementir Holding SpA.

Par Value:                  5/-
Closing Price:           14.30
Total Shares Issued:          959940200.00
Market Capitalization:        13,727,144,860
EPS:             -5.84
PE:                 -2.449

A mineral extraction and processing company which manufactures lime,
cement and other industrial fertilisers.

ARM Cement PLC H1 2017 results through 30th June 2017 vs. 30th June 2016
H1 Revenue 5.347487b vs. 6.670350b -19.832%
H1 [Loss]/ profit before tax [1.379980b] vs. [363.905m] -279.214%
H1 [Loss]/ profit after tax [1.413541b] vs. [266.782m] -429.849%
[Loss]/ earnings per share [3.30] vs. [1.10] -200.000%
No interim dividend
Total assets 49.363670b
Equity attributable to equity holders of parent company 26.381580b
Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 113.403m vs.
100.220m +13.154%

“It’s just incredible and unconscionable and is remarkably activist of
the judge to impose such an egregious solution on Kenya Airways,
especially at a time when a new management team has been brought in to
rescue the airline,” Aly Khan Satchu, chief executive officer of
Nairobi-based Rich Management, said in an emailed response to
questions.

It’s an ignominious fall - with more than 60 outlets and 1,500
suppliers, turnover at the company once equaled nearly one percent of
Kenyan GDP.

Former employees, suppliers, fellow business people and private equity
investors paint a picture of a firm whose management capacity did not
keep up with its prodigious growth.

“It’s a tragedy that needn’t have happened,” said Andrew Dixon, who
was hired in a scramble to revamp management. A former executive at
Tesco and Burt’s Bees, Dixon quit as chief marketing officer last
month and this week took a job with Uchumi, another struggling Kenyan
chain.

@michaelj2 I have just visited Bob Collymore and he has NOT resigned
and is doing fine under the circumstances. He needs support, prayers,
love and not vacuous, ill-informed, malicious comments.

Let’s now turn to the more ‘’Go-Go’’ trajectories. H1 mobile data
revenue accelerated +31% to Sh17.55 billion. The average per capita
mobile data consumption accelerated +66% and this confirms Kenya Inc
is surfing the new c21st information superhighway, something Ali
Baba’s Jack Ma also alerted us to when he visited. He was asked about
our infrastructure deficit and he replied

‘’But the most important infrastructure in the c21st is the internet
and yours is fast!’’

Safaricom have invested heavily in building out this c21st information
highway, it represents the democratisation of data and Safaricom has
given every Kenyan an entry ticket and not any old entry ticket but a
Ferrari to this new c21st of ours. Calls for the boycott of Safaricom
are ‘’kindergarten’’ economics and will surely tip opposition
strongholds into economic recession.