|
Friday 13th of September 2019 |
January 7th 2013 On The Road Nairobi Mombasa Africa |
The Nairobi-Mombasa road arrows 'into immensities and is 'impossible-to- believe.' It retains a near mystical hold on my imagination and connects me to my childhood and beyond. Dad used to once own an Alfa Romeo [of which there were only three then in the country] and my pilgrimage along that road started then, when we used to come from Mombasa. Now, of course, we set off from Nairobi but the road still has its hold. The landmarks still reach out to me. This time we were swarmed by doves near Emali which was breathtaking. There is still the eerie and deserted very Oscar Niemeyer building which might have been a petrol station with a restaurant. We stopped at Makindu which is like being teleported to Amritsar and on New Years day was packed to the rafters. We always stop at Mackinnon road where there is a shrine which houses the tomb of Seyyid Baghali, a Punjabi foreman at the time of the building of the railway who was renowned for his strength. And this time we took ourselves to Vipingo and Watamu. In Vipingo,I was introduced to a pristine beach which is accessed via a ladder as if you were descending from the real world into another. Jim Rogers who is a trader of some repute and co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros at one point took a sabbatical and took off on a motor bike round the world and wrote a book called Investment Biker.
|
read more |
|
More Americans Questioning Official 9/11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative @MintPressNews' @_whitneywebb Law & Politics |
Today the event that defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice. While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter. Yet, with 18 years having come and gone — and with the tireless efforts from victims’ families, first responders, scientists and engineers — the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the “official story” of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil. For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks. While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to “never forget,” the commissioners’ call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause: Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries — not just airplanes and the ensuing fires — caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;” In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as “conspiracy theorists” for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result. Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting’s conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway. “We’re a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force,” Gioia said. “We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won’t be the last,” he added. While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was “set up to fail” from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day. For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the “official” report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks. Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the “official story” say were deliberately kept from them. Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners’ call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building — World Trade Center Building 7 — also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or “Building 7,” was never struck by a plane. It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a “secret office” in WTC 7 and that, after the building’s destruction, “a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers.” WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers. Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites “uncontrolled building fires” as leading to the building’s destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and released on Monday. That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building’s fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn’t know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed. Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public “goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to ‘office fires,’ everyone in the country would have heard about it.” The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that “the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them,” as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll. Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported, while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District’s recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7’s collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission. The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7’s collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires. The study, currently available as a draft, concluded that “uncontrolled building fires” did not lead the building to fall into its footprint — tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse — as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study — authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan — found that “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse,” while also concluding “that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” This “near-simultaneous failure of every column” in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7’s collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given. Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal. Yet, this 9/11 anniversary — with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation — is it still “crazy” to be skeptical of the official story? Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more “off limits,” it was often first responders, survivors and victims’ families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades — not wild-eyed “conspiracy theorists,” as many have claimed. The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American. However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims’ families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, “Never Forget” has been nearly synonymous with “Never Question.” Yet, failing to ask those questions — even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7’s collapse — is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.
|
read more |
|
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what." - Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge Law & Politics |
“You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?"
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what."
"The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market."
"A religious beef, you're saying?"
"It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations--more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.” ― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
Buddhas of Bamyan (Dari: بتهای باميان; Pashto: د باميانو بتان) were two 6th-century[1] monumental statues of Gautama Buddha carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan http://j.mp/2lRzJs8
|
read more |
|
Fear and oppression in Xinjiang: China's war on Uighur culture Beijing's crackdown on minorities reflects a broader push towards a single 'state-race' @FinancialTimes. Law & Politics |
In Yarmuhemmed’s family apartment, the police found an MP3 player with recordings of Koran recitations, and Rmb30,000 in cash (about £3,400). Yarmuhemmed, 28, was arrested, tried and jailed for 10 years. Asqar never found out what he’d been charged with. His 29-year-old brother Behram was taken to an extrajudicial internment camp a month later. The Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, make up nearly half of Xinjiang’s 24 million population. Scholars estimate that about 1.5 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and other mostly Muslim minorities have been interned in camps that the government describes as aiming to “transform through education”, while hundreds of thousands more have been arrested and jailed. During the crackdown, it has become almost impossible for Uighurs to leave Xinjiang to study or live abroad, due to a rigorous process of checks by the police before they can be granted a passport. Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang fear being deported back to China, as governments have come under pressure from it to return overseas Uighurs to Xinjiang. Most western governments have said they will not send anyone who would face abuse in the Xinjiang camp system back to China, giving Uighurs like Asqar some safety to speak out about their relatives’ fate. Former detainees have described how the facilities run ideological indoctrination courses, where they must learn Mandarin Chinese, recite laws banning unapproved religious practice and sing songs praising the Chinese Communist party. The Chinese government has said these measures are necessary to put an end to sporadic violent attacks in the region and describes the facilities as providing “vocational training” for undereducated Uighurs who are at risk of succumbing to “extremism”. But this explanation of why her nephews would have been targeted makes little sense to Asqar. “Both of these boys are very well educated and have no need for vocation training or forced brainwashing,” she says. The two brothers had run a private publishing business that sold books by their father, Yarmuhemmed Tahir Tughluq, an author of popular Uighur-language books on parenting, education and self-empowerment, with titles such as Life and Morality, Our Tradition and Culture and Grandpa Told Me So. The texts celebrated Uighur culture and emphasised its unique philosophies, history and traditions — a message at odds with the Communist party’s attempts to assimilate Uighurs into Han Chinese cultural traditions. Asqar suspects that the family’s business and religiosity ultimately led to Ekram and Behram being taken away. “I think the Chinese government arrested him because he was contributing to keeping [the] Uighur language alive,” she says. “Why would he be viewed as someone against the Chinese government when he was devoted to bridging between [the] Chinese language and Uighur?” Scholars of the region argue that China’s Communist party is attempting to “re-engineer” minority society to make Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang ever more like the Han Chinese majority. Some experts have even begun to call for the campaign to be labelled “cultural genocide”, a term usually defined as the forced assimilation of an indigenous group with the aim of eliminating its cultural distinctness. “For [the campaign] to fit the definition of [cultural] genocide, it would need to be a premeditated systematic effort orchestrated by the state,” James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, told the FT. “I think it’s important that we start to call it what it is. Re-engineering, rewiring, remoulding all work, but the evidence suggests that cultural genocide fits.” China’s Qing dynasty claimed the region as its “new frontier” — the literal translation of Xinjiang — in the 18th century, following a series of bloody military campaigns that wiped out the local Tibetan Mongal Dzungar rulers. Historians believe that a group of Turkic Muslims using an Arabic script have been the dominant ethnic people along a string of oasis communities in the Taklamakan desert for at least 500 years. The group developed a distinct linguistic, literary and cultural tradition, centred around Kashgar, the largest oasis town of the region, and mostly practised forms of Sunni and Sufi Islam. In the 20th century, the rise of China as a nation-state compelled the group to adopt the Uighur ethno-national identity and when the Communist party took control of the region in 1949, it recognised the Uighurs as the dominant ethnic group there, labelling it the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In practice, Xinjiang has only ever been autonomous in name, and the Communist party has never granted significant political power to Uighurs or other minority groups in the strategically important region, which is China’s main gateway to Central Asia and a key source of coal, oil and cotton. Xinjiang is central to President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road plan to build a network of roads, railways and ports to bolster trade between China and Eurasia. Today, Xinjiang is the front line of China’s experiments to build an all-encompassing surveillance state, powered by both technology and a rapid increase of police boots on the ground. On a recent trip to the region, I was trailed continuously by state-security agents, who stopped and questioned each person I spoke to, even shopkeepers and waiters. Every time I took a taxi, the driver would receive a call from local police, usually within 10 minutes. Once, a talkative Han Chinese driver answered the call on loudspeaker. After being told that the caller was from the ministry of public security, the driver immediately replied: “Where would you like me to take him?” On that occasion, the police said it was OK for me to be dropped off at my destination, the train station. At other times, the police asked that I be immediately ejected from the car. In Turpan, a city three hours’ drive south-east of Urümqi, I ended up walking more than 10km in scorching midday heat, only to be stopped from approaching a known internment camp by heavy-set men, who told me there was a driving test ongoing in the cordoned-off area. According to an audio recording reviewed by the FT, the documentary warns viewers to be on guard against “two-faced people” who “secretly acted to split the motherland”. With dramatic music and sotto voce narration, it tells the story of 88 individuals who “with malicious intent” had compiled and edited school textbooks in Uighur. As punishment, the narrator explains, the main compilers were investigated, stripped of their official positions and jailed. The ringleaders were sentenced to life in prison or given suspended death sentences. Such a “shocking” crime must never be repeated, viewers are warned. “The whole region, from top to bottom, must absorb the profound lessons of this case.” The case served as a cautionary tale for the future, the documentary’s narrator said. “Schools are the principal front in an ideological struggle against separatism that is long, recurring, intense and at times extremely fierce; it is a conflict without smoke.” “For a Uighur intellectual, a Uighur writer living in Xinjiang, writing about politics is suicide,” he says. “After 2009, there is a growing chorus of scholars and officials who say China is in danger of losing its grip over Tibet and Xinjiang and needs a radical reset of its ethnic policies,” says Leibold of La Trobe University. Among the loudest voices calling for a “new generation” of ethnic policies was Hu Lianhe. Alongside a professor from Tsinghua University called Hu Angang — the two are not related — Hu Lianhe suggested that attempts to promote multi-ethnic states elsewhere in the world had failed and China should push different ethnicities to “blend together” into a single “state-race”. “After 2009, there is a growing chorus of scholars and officials who say China is in danger of losing its grip over Tibet and Xinjiang and needs a radical reset of its ethnic policies,” says Leibold of La Trobe University. Among the loudest voices calling for a “new generation” of ethnic policies was Hu Lianhe. Alongside a professor from Tsinghua University called Hu Angang — the two are not related — Hu Lianhe suggested that attempts to promote multi-ethnic states elsewhere in the world had failed and China should push different ethnicities to “blend together” into a single “state-race”. “Any nation’s long-term peace and stability is founded upon building a system with a unified race (a state-race) that strengthens the state-race identity and dilutes ethnic group identity,” the two wrote in a 2012 paper. At the time, this argument was met with fierce opposition from many Chinese scholars of ethnic policy. But in the years that followed, violent incidents, which Chinese authorities said were carried out by Uighurs, helped draw support for hardline policies. That year, Xi formally launched the “people’s war on terror” and vowed to strike hard against the “three evil forces of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism” in Xinjiang. The battle has mostly been waged by Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo, who took office in 2016 following a five-year stint in neighbouring Tibet, where he rolled out similarly hardline security measures. Unlike his predecessor in Xinjiang, who had professed the need to balance economic development with safety measures, Chen declared that “social stability and long-term peace is the overall goal” for Xinjiang. He introduced a system of “grid” policing developed during his tenure in Tibet, hired thousands of additional officers and rapidly expanded the size and number of “transformation-through-education” camps in the region. The camps were not his invention, however. China’s Communist party has for decades operated a system of various “re-education” camps across the country, used to reshape the thinking and behaviour of groups seen as dangerously different from the leadership’s preferred social norms. Leibold sees the most recent camp system in Xinjiang as a direct descendant of the former. “The system evolves and changes through time . . . But I do think it’s part of the party’s DNA, this desire to transform.” “Language is the main difference between Han and Uighurs. It’s the core element of Uighur identity,” he says. After his arrest, a professor at the official Xinjiang Communist party school wrote an article that described the Uighur mother tongue movement as “the fourth evil force”, alongside those of “separatism, religious extremism and terrorism”. He says that Uighur children really need about 30 hours of exposure to learn the language, but often only get a tenth of that. “For me, the words in their mouths are not very stable, just like a raindrop on a rose – when there is a gust of wind it will disappear,” he says. “The Chinese Communist party is aware of the valorisation that Uighurs place on their mother language,” Grose says. “They see it as a threat to the crystallisation of a Han culture.” Evidence is mounting that the Xinjiang government is no longer content simply to encourage assimilation, but is forcing it by separating children from their families. The mass internment programme has left many minority children without their parents; the authorities have built a network of de facto orphanages and boarding schools that can hothouse the children in Han Chinese environments. In an analysis of government documents released in July, the independent German researcher Adrian Zenz concluded that, since 2017, the Chinese state had created “a vast and multi-layered care system that enables it to provide full-time or near full-time care” for children from as young as one or two years of age. The facilities were likely to be part of “a deliberate strategy and crucial element in the state’s systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide in Xinjiang”, Zenz wrote. In Xinjiang’s state-run Xinhua Bookstores — which fall under the management of the government’s propaganda department — the shelves are half empty. In each store I visited, the only Uighur-language book was a copy of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China. In Turpan, a local official first denied that there were no Uighur books, then, after 15 minutes of a fruitless search, said “market demands” meant that customers only wanted to buy Han Chinese books. In Kashgar, the traditional capital of Uighur culture, only five remained out of 16 independent Uighur-language bookstores listed in a 2014 article on cultural preservation by a Kashgar University professor. When asked what books on Uighur literature or history they sold, one store owner said: “We only sell novels, cookery or self-help books.” All the bookstore owners I spoke to said they had no Uighur-language textbooks or copies of Yalqun Rozi’s essay collections. In one store, the owner asked: “How do you know about Yalqun Rozi?” I said that his son was trying to find out exactly what had happened to him. After a pause, she asked: “Did you find him?” I said we had good reason to think he had been arrested, but that the government had not confirmed the details of his case. “Have you heard anything?” I inquired. She shook her head and asked me to leave, her eyes filling with tears.
|
read more |
|
05-MAR-2018 :: China has unveiled a Digital Panopticon in Xinjiang Law & Politics |
Dissent is measured and snuffed out very quickly in China. China has unveiled a Digital Panopticon in Xinjiang where a combination of data from video surveillance, face and license plate recognition, mobile device locations, and official records to identify targets for detention [CDT]. Xinjiang is surely a Precursor for how the CCCP will manage dissent. The actions in Xinjiang are part of the regional authorities’ ongoing “Strike-Hard” campaign, and of President Xi’s “stability maintenance” and “enduring peace” drive in the region.
|
read more |
|
The China price @Africa_Conf Africa |
Facing corruption probes and resource nationalism, Western mining companies are quitting the Copperbelt Producing 70% of the world's cobalt, an essential component of electric car batteries and mobile phones, Africa's Copperbelt is in the midst of a sweeping transformation. Seeking to expand their access to the metal, China's mining companies are eyeing the potential sale of assets such as Vedanta's Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) in Zambia and Glencore's mothballed Mutanda mine in Congo-Kinshasa. Buying up those assets and consolidating political ties with Lusaka and Kinshasa would enable China's companies to extend their control of supply chains in the high-tech sector and reshape the region's mining sector at the same time (AC Vol 60 No 11, Little cash, no credit). It is also fits with a shift in China's strategy in Africa to focus more on private companies' operations, rather than state-backed mega projects, as set out by Yang Jiechi, President Xi Jinping's Africa envoy, on recent trips to Kenya and Nigeria. Western mining companies' dominance in the Copperbelt is fading, owing partly to changing political conditions and business strategies while economic war between the United States and China escalates. Another complication is the growing scrutiny of international oil and mining companies. Glencore, one of the biggest commodity trading and production companies, faces a raft of corruption investigations. The US and China have not competed much for African oil or minerals. But President Donald Trump's trade war, coupled with the search for scarce minerals for high-tech products, has changed the stakes. Rising demand for cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare earths is changing mining companies on both sides of the border between Congo-Kinshasa and Zambia. With significant assets in both countries, Glencore's fate is key. The Swiss-based company's move to suspend production at its Mutanda copper and cobalt mine in Congo-K is seen as a challenge to the country's new mining code and an attempt to stabilise the price of cobalt, which halved in the previous 18 months because of over-supply (AC Vol 59 No 4, Kabila squeezes the miners). It comes amid speculation in the markets that Glencore, facing a US Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into corruption in four countries including Congo-K, is looking for an exit. Mutanda holds the world's largest-known cobalt deposits and produced a fifth of global supplies of the metal for the batteries of electric vehicles. China's expansion comes as several Western producers look vulnerable to takeover. China Molybdenum acquired Congo-K's largest copper producer, Tenke Fungurume, from the US producer Freeport-McMoran in 2016 and upped its stake to 80% earlier this year when it bought private equity company BHR's 24% share for $1.1 billion (AC Vol 57 No 11, Mine sale prompts tax grab). CITIC Metal Africa and Zijin Mining have acquired substantial stakes in Ivanhoe's Kamoa-Kakula and Kipushi projects. Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) has signalled its intention to sell its Frontier copper mine and other assets in Congo-K following a drop in value due to the mining code and a dip in commodity prices. Several Chinese suitors are queuing up.
Lungu's debts Neighbouring Zambia has long had Chinese mining companies, small and medium scale operators, in its Copperbelt. President Edgar Lungu's government has racked up much bigger debts to Chinese companies than it has previously admitted. Sources in the Finance Ministry in Lusaka say that the Chinese creditors are losing patience over debt arrears. Chinese companies are not keen on debt rescheduling and would prefer to get some collateral, perhaps in the form of other mining assets. Under growing political pressure as economic problems mount, President Lungu is running out of options. Chinese companies would seek to benefit from the liquidation of Vedanta's Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) and are also watching First Quantum Minerals (FQM), the country's largest producer, which operates Kanshansi and Sentinel mines. The government-owned ZCCM Investment Holdings, which has a 20% stake in the country's biggest mines, wants to liquidate KCM, claiming that Vedanta is lying about expansion plans and is paying too little tax. However, Chinese companies are reluctant to buy disputed assets. ZCCM-IH's claims have to go through arbitration. This is an important test and could open the way for a sale. The companies also face some anti-Chinese sentiment on the ground among trade unionists and local communities. This explains the secrecy as Jiangxi Mining has purchased about 9.9% of FQM, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The purchases have come through derivatives and direct stock purchases and have so far cost about $800 million. It would take about $2bn to give Jiangxi a shot at majority control. Meanwhile, there is a standstill agreement between FQM and Jiangxi in which the Chinese have agreed not to take over without the approval of FQM's managers and shareholders. Glencore's Zambian mine Mopani may also be ready for the auction block. Some industry insiders say Glencore's two majority-owned Congo-K companies, Mutanda and Toronto-listed Katanga Mining, which operates the Kamoto Copper Project, are also being prepared for sale. On 7 August, Glencore announced that Mutanda was no longer economically viable, citing the new mining code and the increase in corporate taxes as reasons (AC Vol 59 No 12, Making the miners sweat). The company said it would mothball the mine at the end of the year. The closure of Mutanda will constrain supply and has already stabilised the price. Glencore's threatened mine closure may strengthen its hand with the government in its bid for an exemption to the 10% strategic substance levy on cobalt and the super-profits tax in the mining code. Congo-K's tax revenues will plummet if Mutanda closes – Glencore paid the government $626m in taxes from Mutanda in 2018.
But it is not clear whose attention they are trying to get in Kinshasa. President Félix Tshisekedi would be most damaged by the job losses and the loss of tax revenues from a two-year stoppage although many of his supporters wanted him to take a harder line with the mining companies and their political allies. Ex-President Joseph Kabila and his allies still call the shots in the mining industry. Albert Yuma Mulimbi, Kabila's man and the architect of the Mining Code, has just had his contract renewed as Chairman of Gécamines, the state-owned mining firm (AC Vol 60 No 12, Tshisekedi tries his luck). Mutanda, once the jewel in Glencore's strategy to convert itself into a hybrid miner-trader and take a bet on the future of electric vehicles, has dimmed along with the price crash. Chronic energy shortages and political battles with Kinshasa have further complicated matters. In February, a truck carrying sulphuric acid to Mutanda crashed into a minibus and spilled acid on the road, leaving at least 22 people dead. A month later, 43 artisanal miners were killed at Kamoto and the army was sent in to restore order.
Core Gertler At the heart of Glencore's problems in Congo-K is the fact that its assets were acquired with the assistance of the Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who was placed on a US sanctions list in December 2017. At the time, the US Treasury said the billionaire had amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of 'opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals' in Congo-K. Gertler had used his close friendship with Kabila 'to act as a middleman for mining asset sales in the DRC, requiring some multinational companies to go through Gertler to do business with the Congolese state' (AC Vol 58 No 5, An awkward tango for Gertler and Glencore). As a result of Gertler's actions, the Treasury said, between 2010 and 2012 alone, the Congo-K, one of the world's poorest countries, may have lost more than $1.3bn in revenues from the under-pricing of mining assets that were sold to offshore companies linked to Gertler. Glencore's acquisition of the Congo-K assets is being investigated alongside charges against it of bribery and corruption in Nigeria, Venezuela and Brazil. The sanctioning of Gertler created problems for Glencore as it owed him around $200m in royalties. Paying him those royalties would put them in violation of US sanctions, so the account was frozen. After a political battle in Congo-K and a legal battle in Europe, Glencore resumed its royalty payments to Gertler in euros, rather than US dollars, to circumvent the sanctions. It said this was the only way to retain control of its assets in Congo-K. But the issue soured Glencore's relationship with the government in Kinshasa. In the view of the US authorities, paying Gertler in euros is still a violation of the sanctions and perpetuates the financial ties between Gertler and Kabila. As it tries to reach a settlement with the DOJ, Glencore is trying to restructure. Two of the company's key Africa hands – Aristotelis Mistakidis, head of copper, and Alex Beard, head of oil trading – have been pushed out. The use of middlemen to negotiate under-the-table deals is said to have been suspended. Many expect this to be followed by the retirement of managing director Ivan Glasenberg, an apprentice of commodity trading king, Marc Rich, who died in 2013. However, Glencore's argument that, whatever its regulatory problems, its exit from the Copperbelt would hand control of many strategic minerals to Chinese companies, has failed to convince US officials.
|
read more |
|
San Marino seizes $19m from Congo dictator Denis Sassou Nguesso who spent $100,000 on crocodile shoes @Telegraph Africa |
The tiny republic of San Marino has confiscated €19 million (£17 million) stashed in its banks by one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders. The money was allegedly deposited by Denis Sassou Nguesso, the president of the Republic of Congo, the former French colony also known as Congo-Brazzaville. The seizure of the money by authorities in San Marino, which covers just 23 square miles and is entirely surrounded by Italy, followed an investigation into money laundering. The €19 million – one of the largest sums ever seized by the republic - was just part of €69 million that was deposited in the republic’s banks by President Sassou Nguesso and his entourage between 2006 and 2011. It was kept in 36 separate accounts, some of them belonging to the president’s relatives, investigators said. The money funded a lavish lifestyle for the president and his circle, with €114,000 spent on crocodile skin shoes, €2.3 million splurged on watches, and hotel stays in Paris that cost up to €11,000 a night. “This was an important result which crowns the investigations by the courts of the Republic of San Marino,” said Nicola Renzi, the country’s foreign minister. “It demonstrates our capacity to fight against international money laundering.” The seized money will go into San Marino’s coffers, he said. Mr Sassou Nguesso is one of the longest-serving leaders in Africa, having first come to power in 1979. He lost the job in the country's first multi-party elections in 1992 but returned to power in 1997 after a brief civil war in which he was backed by Angolan troops. The French-trained former paratrooper has been dogged by corruption allegations, with accusations that he plundered state finances in order to buy cars and expensive homes in France. Congo is one of the biggest oil producers in sub-Saharan Africa but nearly half its people live in poverty, according to the World Bank. Life expectancy for men is 63 and for women 66.
|
read more |
|
13-AUG-2019 :: The Feedback Loop Phenomenon Africa |
We can call it the China, Asia, EM and Frontier markets feedback loop. This feedback loop has been largely a positive one for the last two decades. With the Yuan now in retreat [and in a precise response to Trump], this will surely exert serious downside pressure on those countries in the Feed- back Loop.
|
read more |
|
The front-page headline read, "Killed for being African." @WPReview's @hofrench Africa |
For outsiders looking on at a country that had provided both the world and its continent with so much hope after the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, this is not only sad but somewhat confusing. Many had dreamed that with the bane of legally enforced white supremacy behind it, South Africa would establish itself as the vanguard of a kind of African renaissance, showing the way with its peaceful reconciliation, democratic example and economic leadership. Such high expectations were neither fully fair nor realistic. That almost none of this has happened is nonetheless deeply dismaying. But the turn in South Africa’s mood against other Africans is more than that. It is a catastrophic failure.
Take the education system, surely a central pillar of economic advancement. A recent survey showed that 27 percent of South African students who complete six years of school still cannot read, compared to 4 percent in far poorer Tanzania. Only 37 percent of South African students who start school pass the matriculation exam.
But even as China has ultimately built the new railroad and highway networks in Africa, along with many other things, it is easy to forget how much less wealthy and powerful the country was when this all started. In 1994, when Mandela became president, China’s per capita GDP was a mere $473. South’s Africa’s was more than seven times higher, at $3,445. China’s wager on Africa has paid off stunningly well, for the government and for Chinese companies and workers who by the hundreds of thousands have sought their livelihoods and built new fortunes on African soil.
Some of this, and perhaps even a great deal of it, could have been achieved instead through South Africa’s initiative and agency—by energetically expanding the pie instead of dividing it. New wealth could have been built through intra-African supply chains and networks, and millions of new jobs created, both for South Africans and Africans from other parts of the continent. While most countries have little choice about their place in the world economy, for a select few, history presents more options, including whether to be a globalizer or be globalized by others. South Africa in the 1990s had a rare chance, and made the wrong choice.
Today, a diminished South Africa still tries to sell itself to the world as a gateway to Africa, but it’s unconvincing. Its people, all too often including black South Africans, talk about the rest of Africa as if it sat on an entirely different continent, and its leaders are impassive in the face of spreading anti-African sentiments and violence at home.
As if to illustrate how far South Africa has fallen, another story circulated in newspapers in Johannesburg during my recent visit, about a spate of deadly attacks on foreign truck drivers across the country. An estimated 213 people, most of them foreign drivers, have been killed over the past year, and some 1,200 vehicles and their cargo destroyed in ongoing violence. Rather than call for calm, though, South African truck drivers are calling for companies not to employ foreign drivers, “in order to protect South African jobs.” What seems clear is that China has understood the power of economic integration, while sadly South Africa still has not.
|
read more |
|
|
|
|