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Friday 13th of December 2019 |
11-NOV-2019 :: The Markets are Run by Machines, Computers, Algorithms and Bots Africa |
Practically every trading day now and for over a year, President Trump recycles the same headline. The latest iteration ‘’Donald Trump says China trade talks moving ‘very nicely’, claiming Beijing wants to deal more than the US’’ [SCMP]. Recycle the same headline over and over and over again. And each time markets jump. And each time it means nothing tweeted @NorthmanTraderYou know why algos buy unsubstantiated headlines? Because they’re stupid. @NorthmanTrader:
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THE AGE OF @instagram FACE @NewYorker Africa |
This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). “It’s like a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger,” Cara Craig, a high-end New York colorist, observed to me recently. The celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith told me, “It’s Instagram Face, duh. It’s like an unrealistic sculpture. Volume on volume. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.” Instagram, which launched as the decade was just beginning, in October, 2010, has its own aesthetic language: the ideal image is always the one that instantly pops on a phone screen. The aesthetic is also marked by a familiar human aspiration, previously best documented in wedding photography, toward a generic sameness. Accounts such as Insta Repeat illustrate the platform’s monotony by posting grids of indistinguishable photos posted by different users—a person in a yellow raincoat standing at the base of a waterfall, or a hand holding up a bright fall leaf. Some things just perform well. The human body is an unusual sort of Instagram subject: it can be adjusted, with the right kind of effort, to perform better and better over time. Art directors at magazines have long edited photos of celebrities to better match unrealistic beauty standards; now you can do that to pictures of yourself with just a few taps on your phone. Snapchat, which launched in 2011 and was originally known as a purveyor of disappearing messages, has maintained its user base in large part by providing photo filters, some of which allow you to become intimately familiar with what your face would look like if it were ten-per-cent more conventionally attractive—if it were thinner, or had smoother skin, larger eyes, fuller lips. Instagram has added an array of flattering selfie filters to its Stories feature. FaceTune, which was released in 2013 and promises to help you “wow your friends with every selfie,” enables even more precision. A number of Instagram accounts are dedicated to identifying the tweaks that celebrities make to their features with photo-editing apps. Celeb Face, which has more than a million followers, posts photos from the accounts of celebrities, adding arrows to spotlight signs of careless FaceTuning. Follow Celeb Face for a month, and this constant perfecting process begins to seem both mundane and pathological. You get the feeling that these women, or their assistants, alter photos out of a simple defensive reflex, as if FaceTuning your jawline were the Instagram equivalent of checking your eyeliner in the bathroom of the bar. “I think ninety-five per cent of the most-followed people on Instagram use FaceTune, easily,” Smith told me. “And I would say that ninety-five per cent of these people have also had some sort of cosmetic procedure. You can see things getting trendy—like, everyone’s getting brow lifts via Botox now. Kylie Jenner didn’t used to have that sort of space around her eyelids, but now she does.” Twenty years ago, plastic surgery was a fairly dramatic intervention: expensive, invasive, permanent, and, often, risky. But, in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox for use in preventing wrinkles; a few years later, it approved hyaluronic-acid fillers, such as Juvéderm and Restylane, which at first filled in fine lines and wrinkles and now can be used to restructure jawlines, noses, and cheeks. These procedures last for six months to a year and aren’t nearly as expensive as surgery. (The average price per syringe of filler is six hundred and eighty-three dollars.) You can go get Botox and then head right back to the office. A class of celebrity plastic surgeons has emerged on Instagram, posting time-lapse videos of injection procedures and before-and-after photos, which receive hundreds of thousands of views and likes. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections in 2018, and more than two and a half million filler injections. That year, Americans spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery; ninety-two per cent of these procedures were performed on women. Thanks to injectables, cosmetic procedures are no longer just for people who want huge changes, or who are deep in battle with the aging process—they’re for millennials, or even, in rarefied cases, members of Gen Z. Kylie Jenner, who was born in 1997, spoke on her reality-TV show “Life of Kylie” about wanting to get lip fillers after a boy commented on her small lips when she was fifteen. Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement. Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit—and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too. In October, Instagram announced that it would be removing “all effects associated with plastic surgery” from its filter arsenal, but this appears to mean all effects explicitly associated with plastic surgery, such as the ones called “Plastica” and “Fix Me.” Filters that give you Instagram Face will remain. For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does. Smith first started noticing the encroachment of Instagram Face about five years ago, “when the lip fillers started,” he said. “I’d do someone’s makeup and notice that there were no wrinkles in the lips at all. Every lipstick would go on so smooth.” It has made his job easier, he noted, archly. “My job used to be to make people look like that, but now people come to me already looking like that, because they’re surgically enhanced. It’s great. We used to have to contour you to give you those cheeks, but now you just went out and got them.” There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. “Absolutely,” Smith said. “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.” Did Smith think that Instagram Face was actually making people look better? He did. “People are absolutely getting prettier,” he said. “The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.” This was an optimistic way of looking at the situation. I told Smith that I couldn’t shake the feeling that technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes. “Don’t you think it’s scary to imagine people doing this forever?” I asked. “Well, yeah, it’s obviously terrifying,” he said. Beverly Hills is L.A.’s plastic-surgery district. In the sun-scorched isosceles triangle between the palm trees and department stores of Wilshire and the palm trees and boutique eateries of Santa Monica, there’s a doctor, or several, on every block. On a Wednesday afternoon, I parked my rental car in a tiny underground lot, emerged next to a Sprinkles Cupcakes and a bougie psychic’s office, and walked to a consultation appointment I had made with one of the best-known celebrity plastic surgeons, whose before-and-after Instagram videos frequently attract half a million views. I’d booked the consultation because I was curious about the actual experience of a would-be millennial patient—a fact I had to keep mentioning to my boyfriend, who seemed moderately worried that I would come back looking like a human cat. A few weeks before, I had downloaded Snapchat for the first time and tried out the filters, which were in fact very flattering: they gave me radiant skin, doe lashes, a face shaped like a heart. It wasn’t lost on me that when I put on a lot of makeup I am essentially trying to create a version of this face. And it wasn’t hard for me to understand why millennial women who were born within spitting distance of Instagram Face would want to keep drawing closer to it. In a world where women are rewarded for youth and beauty in a way that they are rewarded for nothing else—and where a strain of mainstream feminism teaches women that self-objectification is progressive, because it’s profitable—cosmetic work might seem like one of the few guaranteed high-yield projects that a woman could undertake. The plastic surgeon’s office was gorgeous and peaceful, a silvery oasis. A receptionist, humming along to “I Want to Know What Love Is,” handed me intake forms, which asked about stress factors and mental health, among other things. I signed an arbitration agreement. A medical assistant took photos of my face from five different angles. A medical consultant with lush hair and a deeply warm, caring aura came into the room. Careful not to lie, and lightly alarmed by the fact that I didn’t need to, I told her that I’d never gotten fillers or Botox but that I was interested in looking better, and that I wanted to know what experts would advise. She was complimentary, and told me that I shouldn’t get too much done. After a while, she suggested that maybe I would want to pay attention to my chin as I aged, and maybe my cheeks, too—maybe I’d want to lift them a little bit. Then the celebrity doctor came in, giving off the intensity of a surgeon and the focus of a glassblower. I said to him, too, that I was just interested in looking better, and wanted to know what an expert would recommend. I showed him one of my filtered Snapchat photos. He glanced at it, nodded, and said, “Let me show you what we could do.” He took a photo of my face on his phone and projected it onto a TV screen on the wall. “I like to use FaceTune,” he said, tapping and dragging. Within a few seconds, my face was shaped to match the Snapchat photo. He took another picture of me, in profile, and FaceTuned the chin again. I had a heart-shaped face, and visible cheekbones. All of this was achievable, he said, with chin filler, cheek filler, and perhaps an ultrasound procedure that would dissolve the fat in the lower half of my cheeks—or we could use Botox to paralyze and shrink my masseter muscles. I asked the doctor what he told people who came to see him wanting to look like his best-known patients. “People come in with pictures of my most famous clients all the time,” he said. “I say, ‘I can’t turn you into them. I can’t, if you’re Asian, give you a Caucasian face, or I could, but it wouldn’t be right—it wouldn’t look right.’ But if they show me a specific feature they want then I can work with that. I can say, ‘If you want a sharp jaw like that, we can do that.’ But, also, these things are not always right for all people. For you, if you came in asking for a sharp jaw, I would say no—it would make you look masculine.” “Does it seem like more people my age are coming in for this sort of work?” I asked. “I think that ten years ago it was seen as anti-cerebral to do this,” he said. “But now it’s empowering to do something that gives you an edge. Which is why young people are coming in. They come in to enhance something, rather than coming in to fix something.” “And it’s subtle,” I said. “Even with my most famous clients, it’s very subtle,” the doctor said. “If you look at photos taken five years apart, you can tell the difference. But, day to day, month to month, you can’t.” I felt that I was being listened to very carefully. I thanked him, sincerely, and then a medical assistant came in to show me the recommendations and prices: injectables in my cheeks ($5,500 to $6,900), injectables in my chin (same price), an ultrasound “lipofreeze” to fix the asymmetry in my jawline ($8,900 to $18,900), or Botox in the TMJ region ($2,500). I walked out of the clinic into the Beverly Hills sunshine, laughing a little, imagining what it’d be like to have a spare thirty thousand dollars on hand. I texted photos of my FaceTuned jaw to my friends and then touched my actual jaw, a suddenly optional assemblage of flesh and bone. The plastic surgeon Jason Diamond was a recurring star of the reality show “Dr. 90210” and has a number of famous clients, including the twenty-nine-year-old “Vanderpump Rules” star Lala Kent, who has posted photos taken in Diamond’s office on Instagram, and who told People, “I’ve had every part of my face injected.” Another client is Kim Kardashian West, whom Colby Smith described to me as “patient zero” for Instagram Face. (“Ultimately, the goal is always to look like Kim,” he said.) Kardashian West, who has inspired countless cosmetically altered doppelgängers, insists that she hasn’t had major plastic surgery; according to her, it’s all just Botox, fillers, and makeup. But she also hasn’t tried to hide how her appearance has changed. In 2015, she published a coffee-table book of selfies, called “Selfish,” which begins when she is beautiful the way a human is beautiful and ends when she’s beautiful in the manner of a computer animation. I scheduled an interview with Diamond, whose practice occupies the penthouse of a building in Beverly Hills. On the desk in his office was a thank-you note from Chrissy Teigen. (It sat atop two of her cookbooks.) As with the doctor I’d seen the day before, Diamond, who has pool-blue eyes and wore black scrubs and square-framed glasses, looked nothing like the tabloid caricature of a plastic surgeon. He was youthful in a way that was only slightly surreal. Diamond had trained with an old guard of top L.A. plastic surgeons, he told me—people who thought it was taboo to advertise. When, in 2004, he had the opportunity to appear on “Dr. 90210,” he decided to do it, against the advice of his wife and his nurses, because, he said, “I knew that I would be able to show results that the world had never seen.” In 2016, a famous client persuaded him to set up an Instagram account. He now has just under a quarter million followers. The employees at his practice who run the account like that Instagram allows patients to see him as a father of two and as a friend, not only as a doctor. Diamond had long had a Web site, but in the past his celebrity patients didn’t volunteer to offer testimonials there. “And, of course, we never asked,” he said. “But now—it’s amazing. Maybe thirty per cent of the celebrities I take care of will just ask and offer to shout us out on social media. All of a sudden, it’s popular knowledge that all these people are coming here. For some reason, Instagram made it more acceptable.” Cosmetic work had come to seem more like fitness, he suggested. “I think it’s become much more mainstream to think about taking care of your face and your body as part of your general well-being. It’s kind of understood now: it’s O.K. to try to look your best.” There was a sort of cleansing, crystalline honesty to this high-end intersection of superficiality and pragmatism, I was slowly realizing. I hadn’t needed to bother posing as a patient—these doctors spent all day making sure that people no longer felt they had anything to hide.
I asked Diamond if he had thoughts about Instagram Face. “You know, there’s this look—this Bella Hadid, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner thing that seems to be spreading,” I said. Diamond said that he practiced all over the world, and that there were different regional preferences, and that no one template worked for every face. “But there are constants,” he said. “Symmetry, proportion, harmony. We are always trying to create balance in the face. And when you look at Kim, Megan Fox, Lucy Liu, Halle Berry, you’ll find elements in common: the high contoured cheekbones, the strong projected chin, the flat platform underneath the chin that makes a ninety-degree angle.”
“What do you make of the fact that it’s much more possible now for people to look at these celebrity faces and think, somewhat correctly, that they could look like that, too?” I asked.
“We could spend two whole days discussing that question,” Diamond said. “I’d say that thirty per cent of people come in bringing a photo of Kim, or someone like Kim—there’s a handful of people, but she’s at the very top of the list, and understandably so. It’s one of the biggest challenges I have, educating the person about whether it’s reasonable to try to move along that path toward Kim’s face, or toward whoever. Twenty years of practice, thousands and thousands of procedures, go into each individual answer—when I can do it, when I can’t do it, and when we can do something but shouldn’t, for any number of reasons.” I told Diamond that I was afraid that if I ever tried injectables, I’d never stop. “It is true that the vast majority of our patients absolutely love their results, and they come back,” he said.
“I can answer that in part because I do these things, too,” he said, gesturing to his face. “You know when you get a really good haircut, and you feel like the best version of yourself? This is that feeling, but exponential.”
On the way to Diamond’s office, I had passed a café that looked familiar: pale marble-topped tables, blond-wood floors, a row of Prussian-green snake plants, pendant lamps, geometrically patterned tiles. The writer Kyle Chayka has coined the term “AirSpace” for this style of blandly appealing interior design, marked by an “anesthetized aesthetic” and influenced by the “connective emotional grid of social media platforms”—these virtual spaces where hundreds of millions of people learn to “see and feel and want the same things.” WeWork, the collapsing co-working giant—which, like Instagram, was founded in 2010—once convinced investors of a forty-seven-billion-dollar vision in which people would follow their idiosyncratic dreams while enmeshed in a global network of near-indistinguishable office spaces featuring reclaimed wood, neon signs, and ficus trees. Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.
I went to see another Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, one who had more than three hundred thousand Instagram followers. I told the doctor that I was a journalist, and that I was there for a consultation. He studied my face from a few angles, felt my jaw, and suggested exactly what the first doctor had recommended. The prices were lower this time—if I had wanted to put the whole thing on my credit card, I could have. I took the elevator down to the street with three very pretty women who all appeared to be in their early twenties. As I drove back to my hotel, I felt sad and subdued and self-conscious. I had thought that I was researching this subject at a logical distance: that I could inhabit the point of view of an ideal millennial client, someone who wanted to enhance rather than fix herself, who was ambitious and pragmatic. But I left with a very specific feeling, a kind of bottomless need that I associated with early adolescence, and which I had not experienced in a long time. I had worn makeup at sixteen to my college interviews; I’d worn makeup at my gymnastic meets when I was ten. In the photos I have of myself at ballet recitals when I was six or seven, I’m wearing mascara and blush and lipstick, and I’m so happy. What did it mean, I wondered, that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant? How had I been changed by an era in which ordinary humans receive daily metrics that appear to quantify how our personalities and our physical selves are performing on the market? What was the logical end of this escalating back-and-forth between digital and physical improvement?
On Instagram, I checked up on the accounts of the plastic surgeons I had visited, watching comments roll in: “this is what I need! I need to come see you ASAP!”, “want want want,” “what is the youngest you could perform this procedure?” I looked at the Instagram account of a singer born in 1999, who had become famous as a teen-ager and had since given herself an entirely new face. I met up with a bunch of female friends for dinner in L.A. that night, two of whom had already adopted injectables as part of their cosmetic routine. They looked beautiful. The sun went down, and the hills of L.A. started to glitter. I had the sense that I was living in some inexorable future. For some days afterward, I noticed that I was avoiding looking too closely at my face.
Political Reflections
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Citizenship bill puts India on a path to become a Hindu nationalist state @washingtonpost @RanaAyyub Law & Politics |
On Monday, India’s home minister pushed a bill in Parliament — Narendra Modi’s most brazen action to lead India away from being the world’s largest democracy to a Hindu nationalist state — with an inflammatory speech stoking Hindu victimhood. The minister, Amit Shah, said the Citizenship Amendment Bill — which offers legal status and citizenship to non-Muslim minorities — aimed to correct the injustices meted out to the Hindu majority with the partition of India in 1947. The speech given by the home minister was an exercise in perpetuating Hindu victimhood in a country that boasts of an 80 percent Hindu population. Since the partition of India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has been stoking a misplaced victimhood in the self-pitying Hindu majority asking for a first stake to all resources in the country since Muslims were given a separate piece of land in the form of Pakistan. The resentment was stoked over decades by right-wing leaders who exaggerated figures of Muslim population in the country. WhatsApp messages and fake news published by right-wing websites leading up to the Indian election this year even spoke of a Muslim takeover in India by 2050. Article 14 of the Indian constitution seeks to protect all citizens from any form of discrimination. But by presenting this anti-Muslim bill in the sanctum sanctorum of the Indian Parliament, the Modi government has sought to give an official legal cover to its dream of entrenching Hindu supremacy. Intellectuals and commentators have called the amendment bill an attack on the Indian constitution and a distraction from the country’s economic failures. Many, like me, disagree. Since his ascent to power in 2014, Modi has been explicit in his agenda for a totalitarian, fascist regime, laying out his blueprint to “other” India’s Muslims from his first day in office. Modi’s BJP swept to power with an increased majority in 2019 for his fulfillment of those promises. Soon after, the government implemented the National Register of Citizens that rendered nearly 2 million citizens of the northeastern state of Assam, mostly Muslims, stateless and excluded as citizens. Next came the revoking of the special status of Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state in the country, which was kept under months of lockdown with mass detention and arrests of democratic leaders. The election manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party also promised a magnificent Ram Temple on a disputed site where Hindu nationalists razed the iconic Babri Mosque in 1992. Last month, a court ruling allotted the land in favor of Hindus. The Citizenship Amendment Bill cannot be seen in isolation — it should also be seen in conjunction with the Modi government's announcement last month to implement the National Register of Citizens across the country. While the government plans to rescue and rehabilitate persecuted Hindus from neighboring countries through the Citizenship Amendment Bill, it is simultaneously seeking to disenfranchise Muslim citizens through the National Register of Citizens by labeling them as migrants and infiltrators. The message is clear, and that’s why Muslims in the country are living in fear. Mosques in India are asking Muslims to keep their citizenship documents in order, but in a country where Muslims form the lowest rung of the socioeconomic strata, this has only resulted in widespread paranoia and anxiety. Zainul, a construction worker in Mumbai, stared blankly at his 8-month-old son Abid, as his wife spread out a sheet of newspaper for them to eat lunch in a slum in central Mumbai. Both Zainul and his wife, Ameena, arrived in Mumbai two years ago from Dhaniakhali, a village in Hooghly district, after a torrential flood hit and swept off the roof above their head. It took them three days to arrive in Mumbai, in a crowded train with no money to buy tickets, and without food for more than a week. After months of struggle, Zainul found work as a mason, and his wife took odd jobs, including cleaning the sewage, to feed themselves. Last month, four of Zainul’s relatives who work as contractual laborers left for their hometown in West Bengal to hunt for documents as the government announced a Nationwide Register of Citizens. “Where do we bring the documents from?” Ameena asked. “Every bit of our livelihood was washed away. How could we save the documents?” Zainul showed me a copy of his ration card, which is almost in shreds, pieced together with tape. He managed to save his ration card but fears it will not be enough. Two months ago, cops from the area rounded up the slum dwellers in Antop Hill, mostly Muslims, and locked them up overnight calling them infiltrators. He and his neighbors bribed the cops with their meager savings and found their way out. Ameena asked me whether I have seen the detention camp being built in Mumbai to incarcerate all migrants who will fail to prove their citizenship — she was referring to the Modi government’s identification of a land in the suburbs of Mumbai for its first detention center. Zainul left for his hometown to collect documents that can prove his spouse’s citizenship. Ameena would not let him go, afraid that there could be another midnight knock from the cops and she would have to plead: “I am not a Bangladeshi madam; I am an Indian. My parents have stayed in this country all their lives.” Ameena is one among the million citizens who fear she will be othered overnight in a country she has always called her own. During a television debate on Monday, the news anchor asked Sudhanshu Mittal, a BJP spokesman, if he considered Ahmadiyas, who are a persecuted minority in Pakistan, eligible for citizenship. His response: “Ahmadiyas are Muslims, and Pakistan is an Islamic country.” In the list of neighboring countries whose persecuted citizens minorities will be sheltered in India, the government conveniently chose to ignore Myanmar, whose Rohingya Muslims have suffered state-sponsored persecution. But the Rohingyas do not fit the criteria. They are Muslims, a faith whose adherents are looked at in India as the enemy of the state.
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02-DEC-2019 :: India's Narendra Modi whose calling card was economic growth in Gujarat notwithstanding his fondness for a good old fashioned pogrom Law & Politics |
India’s Narendra Modi whose calling card was economic growth in Gujarat notwithstanding his fondness for a good old fashioned pogrom is clearly embarked on a ‘’West Bank’’’ level settlement project of Kashmir. At a private event on Saturday in New York City, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul-general to the city, told Kashmiri Hindus and Indian nationals that India will build settlements modelled after Israel for the return of the Hindu population to Kashmir. Three years ago, India was enjoying economic growth of about nine per cent. Now the rate of expansion has slumped to just half that. The country’s gross domestic product grew by just 4.5 per cent in the July to September quarter, the lowest level since early 2013. GDP growth was at seven per cent in the same period last year, and five per cent in the previous quarter. Economic growth has now fallen for six consecutive quarters, a slide that can be partially attributed to the recent weakness of India’s factories. The manufacturing sector shrank one per cent last quarter. The growth rate for agriculture was more than cut in half. The GDP figure is the weakest recorded under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who first swept to power five years ago promising to take India’s economy to new heights and create millions of jobs every year.
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19-AUG-2019 :: Essentially, Modi is seeking to flood the zone. Law & Politics |
The Point is that the Smart Phone is ubiquitous even in the furthest corners of the World and we are all peering at a newsreel. Except, of course, if you are in Kashmir which was described by Nehru as “the snowy bosom of the Himalayas” and which is currently switched off from the c21st. Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Article 370, which protected Kashmir’s demography by restricting residency to Kashmiris alone and, under a sub-section known as Article 35A, forbade the sale of property to non-Kashmiris. Essentially, Modi is seeking to flood the zone. The Periphery is a Tinderbox in many parts of the World.
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The War That Continues to Shape Russia 25 Years Later @nytimes Law & Politics |
Haunting images show how the first Chechen war humiliated post-Soviet Russia, exposed its weakness, strengthened hard-liners and enabled the rise of Vladimir V. Putin. It began not so much as an invasion, but as a slouching stumble through mud and snow by frightened, ill-fed Russian conscripts, the hollowed-out remnants of a force that, before the collapse of the Soviet Union just three years earlier, had been the mighty Red Army. But the Russian troops who advanced from three directions into the rebellious region of Chechnya on Dec. 11, 1994, carried history-changing forces that have since reshaped Russia and the world. The Russian attack, initially in staggering disarray but then increasingly organized and brutal, signaled not just the start of the First Chechen War — a merciless conflict that killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians — but also the end of Russia’s liberal dream. It was a turning point that tilted Russia toward the rule of President Vladimir V. Putin, now in power for two decades. At the time, Mr. Putin was an unknown municipal official in St. Petersburg, but five years later he became master of the Kremlin, propelled there by yet another Chechen war. Anatoly Shabad, a former physicist and prominent pro-democracy politician in the early 1990s, visited Chechnya repeatedly in 1994, first to try to prevent war and then to halt the killing once it started. Holed up in the basement of the presidential palace in Grozny, the Chechen capital, as Russian forces launched a disastrous, all-out assault on the city on New Year’s Eve 1994, Mr. Shabad emerged in the morning to find streets strewn with the corpses of Russian soldiers and their burned-out tanks. Despite the Grozny debacle and many others, Mr. Shabad said, security and military officials who had pushed for the war — known as “siloviki,” or men of force — came out on top, regaining much of the influence they had lost to democratic forces after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. “The siloviki were the losers on the ground but they acquired power. The time of democratic transformation passed and society returned to its old state of mind,” Mr. Shabad, now retired from politics, recalled. When President Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected leader, announced 25 years ago that he would “employ all means at the state’s disposal” to crush Chechen demands for independence, he expected to subdue the Chechens with a swift show of overwhelming force. The hope and expectation was that Russia would repeat the success that the United States military had in Haiti, which it had invaded in September 1994 to swiftly remove a military dictatorship. Instead, the Chechen war dragged on for nearly two years and achieved none of Russia’s principal aims other than the death of the region’s despotic leader, Dzokhar Dudayev, who was killed in April 1996 by a laser-guided Russian missile. The war reduced Grozny, a modern, multiethnic city, to a rubble-strewn wasteland reminiscent of Stalingrad in World War II, and shredded Russia’s post-Soviet image as a peaceful democracy. It also set up a second war in 1999 that helped convince Mr. Yeltsin — ill, often drunk and never fully recovered from the trauma of the first war — to hand over power to Mr. Putin on the eve of the new millennium. The horrific brutality of the conflict turned what began as a secular nationalist movement in Chechnya into a cause increasingly colored by militant Islam, with many fighters viewing their battle against Russia as part of a global jihad. Money and fighters poured in from the Middle East during the later stages of the war, turning Chechnya into a breeding ground for the violent ideology of Al Qaeda. The 1994-96 war was freighted with foreboding from the start, with many of Mr. Yeltsin’s most stalwart supporters and senior military figures warning of disaster. “It will be a blood bath, another Afghanistan,” predicted Gen. Boris Gromov, the deputy defense minister, who had led the last Soviet troops home from that country in February 1989. The deputy commander of Russia’s ground force resigned in protest. Like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the first Chechen war ended in a stalemate. Russia pulled out after signing a peace accord that left Chechnya’s ultimate status undecided but essentially gave the region the self-rule that Moscow had gone to war to prevent. And like the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Russian departure from Chechnya left a devastated land that quickly descended into lawless strife among rival factions. While the Afghan war had pushed the Soviet Union toward collapse, the Russian Federation survived the Chechen debacle. But it was utterly humiliated and fundamentally reshaped. That made the ascent of a strongman like Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who vowed to restore order and avenge Russia’s defeat in Chechnya, not only possible but perhaps also inevitable. The 1994 invasion “was a real crossing of the Rubicon for Russia,” said Thomas de Waal, a British expert on the Caucasus who co-wrote “Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus,” a classic book on the conflict, with Carlotta Gall, now a reporter with The New York Times. The war, he said, “sucked the whole country into a violent nightmare” as soldiers, mostly ill-trained conscripts, were thrown into the caldron. “The hawks lost the war but won power,” Mr. de Waal said. The official Russian military death toll was nearly 6,000, but most independent estimates put the real figure at perhaps twice that or more. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated at between 30,000 and 100,000. Mr. Yeltsin’s decision to send troops into Chechnya was initially billed as a straightforward exercise to “restore constitutional order” and reverse the declaration of an independent state. But as with subsequent Russian military interventions, notably in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, the war began with an elaborate subterfuge orchestrated by Russian intelligence. Fifteen days before the main invasion, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers poured into Chechnya, in what was presented as a push by Chechen opposition groups to topple Mr. Dudayev. Mr. Shabad, who visited Grozny in late November 1994 with other Russian lawmakers, said it was immediately obvious that official denials of Russian involvement were lies. “They pretended that the Chechens were just fighting among themselves,” he said, “but the whole thing was organized by Russia, mainly the F.S.K.,” the domestic intelligence agency that succeeded the K.G.B., with the connivance of the military. Andrei Rusakov, an army captain among the 20 or so Russians captured, told how he had signed a secret contract in which the F.S.K. — now called the F.S.B. — offered him several thousand dollars to take part in the phony Chechen opposition attack. The revelation of the security service’s failure prompted public gloating by Russia’s military. Pavel S. Grachev, the defense minister, stated on television that the armed forces could have taken control of Chechnya with “one paratroop regiment in a couple of hours.” His boast quickly came back to haunt him, when Mr. Yeltsin ordered the military to invade. The disastrous performance of the armed forces made Mr. Grachev perhaps the most reviled man in Russia, amid accusations that he had pushed for a military solution simply to disperse the whiff of corruption around him and his ministry. After the failed New Year’s Eve attack on Grozny, Russian forces pounded it relentlessly from the air, an orgy of destruction that Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany denounced as “sheer madness.” The Russians finally captured the city, but as the war ground on amid horrendous brutality on both sides, Chechens recaptured it the following year, and laid siege to Russian forces in other major towns. In August 1996, Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, Mr. Yeltsin’s national security adviser, reached an agreement with the Chechens to stop the fighting. Mr. Yeltsin, increasingly infirm, erratic and under siege politically, initially balked at the deal, which effectively acknowledged Russia’s defeat, but ultimately endorsed it. “The main thing,” he said, “is that bloodshed has been stopped.”
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Letter from Moscow The Kremlin's Creative Director Konstantin Ernst went from discerning auteur to Putin's unofficial minister of propaganda. @NewYorker Law & Politics |
In the final days of 1999, Konstantin Ernst prepared to film the Russian President’s annual New Year’s address, just as he had every December for several years. Ernst, who was thirty-eight, with floppy brown hair and a look of perpetual bemusement, had recently become the head of Channel One, the state television network with the largest reach, a post he retains today. The position makes him one of the most powerful men in Russia, with the ability to set the visual style for the country’s political life—at least the part its rulers wish to transmit to the public.
The ritual of the New Year’s address began in the seventies, under Leonid Brezhnev, who sat stolidly atop the Soviet hierarchy for two decades, and continued in the eighties under Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of perestroika. After the Soviet collapse, Boris Yeltsin, the first President of independent Russia, kept the tradition alive. Yeltsin began his term as a charismatic advocate of democratic reform, but, by the late nineties, he seemed aged and defeated. Russia was only a year removed from a devastating financial crash that led the government to default on its debt, and its troops were fighting their second costly war in a decade in Chechnya, a would-be breakaway republic in the Caucasus. Yeltsin seemed primarily concerned with leaving office in a way that would keep him and his family immune from prosecution. On December 29th, Ernst and a crew from Channel One made their way to the Kremlin to film his address. Ernst watched as Yeltsin sat in front of a tinsel-covered fir tree in a reception hall and held forth on the opportunities of the New Year, which included, in the spring, a Presidential election that would determine his successor. As the Channel One staff was packing up, Yeltsin told Ernst that he wasn’t satisfied—he was hoarse, and didn’t like the way his words had come out—and asked if they might record a new version in the coming days. Ernst agreed to go back on New Year’s Eve at five in the morning. When he returned, he was handed a copy of the new address, and tried to contain his shock: Yeltsin was about to resign, voluntarily giving up power before his term was over, an unprecedented gesture in Russian history. His chosen successor was Vladimir Putin, a politician whom most Russians were just getting to know: Putin had risen from bureaucratic obscurity to become the head of the F.S.B., the post-Soviet successor to the K.G.B., and had been named Yeltsin’s Prime Minister only four months earlier. Ernst had a production assistant enter the text of the speech into the teleprompter without letting the rest of the crew in on the news. It would come as a surprise to everyone. Yeltsin spoke with the labored cadence of a tired man. “I said that we would leap from the gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous, and civilized future,” he said. “I believed that we would cover the distance in one leap. We didn’t.” He went on, “I am leaving now. I have done everything I could.” He rubbed a tear from his eye. Someone from Channel One started to clap, and soon they were all giving him a standing ovation. A woman cried, “Boris Nikolayevich, how can it be?” Yeltsin and the journalists drank champagne, and marvelled at the scene they had shared. Soon after, Channel One filmed a New Year’s address from Putin, which would air after Yeltsin’s. “The powers of the head of state have been turned over to me today,” Putin said, his tone calming and businesslike. “I assure you that there will be no vacuum of power, not for a minute.” Ernst got into a waiting car with recordings of Yeltsin’s and Putin’s speeches and, with a police escort, sped through the capital to Ostankino, a sprawling complex of television studios. At noon, as night fell in Russia’s Far East, he gave the order to broadcast Yeltsin’s address. Yeltsin was hosting a luncheon with his ministers and generals in the Presidential quarters at the time. “The chandeliers, the crystal, the windows—everything glittered with a New Year’s glow,” Yeltsin recalled later, in his memoirs. A television was brought in, and his guests watched the announcement in silence. Putin’s wife at the time, Lyudmila, was at home, and didn’t see the broadcast, so she was confused when a friend called to congratulate her; she assumed that the friend was offering a standard New Year’s greeting. Later in the day, a news segment showed Yeltsin and Putin standing side by side in the Presidential office. “Take care of Russia,” Yeltsin told Putin as they left the room. The following morning on Channel One, after a kitschy variety show, the network cut to breaking news from Chechnya. Putin had gone on a surprise trip to visit Russian troop positions, where he wore a fur-trimmed parka and handed out hunting knives. He told the soldiers that the war they were fighting was “not just about defending the honor and dignity of the country” but also “about putting an end to the disintegration of Russia.” Ernst worried that the separatism in Chechnya could spread, and believed that Russia’s institutions of power were atrophied and vulnerable to collapse. “In moments when everything has gone to hell, a person shows up, who might not have known of his mission ahead of time, but who grabs the architecture of the state and holds it together,” he told me recently. He thought that this person was Putin. In the lead-up to the election, Channel One, under Ernst, portrayed Putin as Yeltsin’s inevitable successor, and relentlessly attacked his rivals, presenting them as infirm, corrupt, even murderous. Putin’s poll numbers began rising by four or five points in a week, and he quickly went from an unknown entity to the most popular politician in the country. Channel One had backed politicians before, but this was something new: the invention of a candidate from thin air, a television phenomenon from the start. Putin won handily and, afterward, Ernst began to craft a visual language for his Presidency. He suggested that the inauguration be moved from the State Kremlin Palace, a modernist concrete box, to St. Andrew’s Hall, an ornate tsarist throne room that would provide an imperial spectacle. He felt that the old era, for both Russia and Channel One, was giving way to another. As Ernst put it, “We would find a new intonation together.” Ernst was born in 1961, the son of a well-known Soviet scientist. He was bright and ambitious and, by the time he was in his twenties, bristled at the restrictions imposed on citizens by the country’s decaying gerontocracy. From a young age, Ernst was obsessed with film. In 1986, when he was twenty-five, he left a senior post at a state genetics laboratory and, inspired by the convulsions of perestroika, drifted among Moscow’s quasi-underground directors and filmmakers. He shot several music videos, including a concert by Aquarium, the godfathers of Russian rock, who, in 1988, performed in Leningrad with Dave Stewart from the British pop band Eurythmics. I met with Ernst in the summer of 2018, in a voluminous conference room at Channel One. He described his early days with vibrating enthusiasm. A central part of his self-image is clearly still grounded in that period, when he was not an all-powerful television demigod but a scrappy outsider. “I felt like a person who was deceiving everyone,” he told me. “The Soviet Union was still in full force—and yet there I was, with no formal education as a director, filming some Western musicians, not to mention my rocker friends, who themselves had been banned only two or three years before.” In 1988, he became a director at “Viewpoint,” a news-magazine program that gained a devoted following for its earnest discussion of topics that weren’t covered elsewhere: corruption in the Communist Party, the failing Soviet war in Afghanistan, the fledgling class of millionaires. Viewers in the late Soviet era had become accustomed to a heavy lexicon of bureaucratese and boosterism that verged on the absurd. In his book on the paradoxes of the time, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-American anthropologist, describes how, for decades, during the televised funeral of a Soviet dignitary, announcers would note that the official was “buried on Red Square by the Kremlin wall.” Eventually, space on the square became scarce, and high-ranking functionaries were instead cremated and their ashes placed inside the wall itself. Viewers could see that the action on their television did not match the voice-over, and state linguists petitioned the Central Committee to update the text. Amazingly, the appeal was rejected. “Since nothing about the representation of the world was verifiably true or false, the whole of reality became ungrounded,” Yurchak writes. “Viewpoint,” by contrast, spoke honestly and clearly, pushing the country to “verbalize things that were impossible to say before,” Ernst told me with pride. In August, 1991, when a cabal of Communist hard-liners in the security services mounted a coup to put an end to Gorbachev’s perestroika, the crew of “Viewpoint” hid equipment in their apartments and went on the air with emergency programming. The coup failed, and, soon after, the Soviet Union fell apart. That December, cameras filmed the Soviet flag being lowered at the Kremlin for the last time. Ernst once told an interviewer that, compared with “Viewpoint,” perhaps “only Boris Yeltsin himself played a larger role in bringing down the Soviet state.” But, when we spoke at Channel One, Ernst emphasized that the “Viewpoint” team members didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, even if history pushed them in that direction. “When you’re taking part in a big historical process, you don’t always understand how it will develop down the line,” he told me. In 1991, he launched an arts-review show called “Matador” (he simply liked the sound of the word), which was unlike anything previously seen on Russian television. Ernst appeared with long hair and a motorcycle jacket, and narrated segments on such topics as the avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The show, which aired at a time of mass bewilderment, was a captivating distillation of Ernst’s idiosyncrasies. “As always, during any great rupture, cracks and openings appear in the system, which allow just about anyone to enter,” he told me. Four years into Yeltsin’s Presidency, with the country still reeling from the Soviet collapse, Ernst produced dozens of public-service advertisements called “The Russian Project,” which used sentimental scenes to teach basic lessons: cherish your loved ones, take pride in your work. In one, an elderly man hears buskers on the metro playing an old military march and recalls a wartime love affair. As the music swells, the tagline appears: “We remember.” “People felt lost, as though they had been discarded,” Ernst told me. “It was important to let them know that not everything in the past was bad, that we still held something in common.” His most popular project from the nineties was “Old Songs About Important Things,” a faux-retro musical set on a Soviet collective farm, in which actors crooned tunes from the Soviet songbook. Leonid Parfyonov, who collaborated with him on the program, told an interviewer at the time, “It’s about admitting that there were things that were good, that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and that we don’t have any other history.” In 1995, Vladislav Listyev, a beloved television host from “Viewpoint,” was made the director of Channel One and put Ernst in charge of drawing up a plan for new programming. But, just five weeks after Listyev took over, he was killed in the stairwell of his apartment building. His murder, never solved, was rumored to be connected to his decision to change the way the company bought ads, potentially cutting out gray-market middlemen. Channel One’s main shareholder, Boris Berezovsky, a rapacious oligarch with interests in everything from oil to automobiles, proposed that Ernst take over. At first, Ernst resisted—he found Berezovsky distasteful and untrustworthy—but eventually he agreed to become the channel’s chief producer. During the 1996 Presidential race, Channel One joined other outlets in openly supporting Yeltsin’s campaign and disparaging his revanchist Communist opponent. On the eve of the election, the channel aired an ominous spot that ended with a timer counting down to voting day. Anna Kachkaeva, a television critic, saw Ernst a few days afterward and asked him about it. “From the brainwashers, hoping for your understanding,” she recalled him saying, smiling mischievously. Kachkaeva told me that, even as Ernst “retained a sense of hooliganism,” he came “to understand what kind of instrument he held in his hands, that he is a person of the state.” In October, 1999, Ernst agreed to take on the role of general director at Channel One. His relations with Berezovsky, for whom the network served as a personal plaything, were tense, but Berezovsky thought of Ernst as a “very sensible, well-educated person” with great potential. “That all turned out to be true,” Berezovsky told the weekly magazine of Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, in 2005. “But, as subsequent events showed, he has no real political position. That would be well and good in a stable democracy, but is absolutely dangerous in a transition to a totalitarian regime.” Berezovsky backed Putin’s candidacy in 2000, and even claimed credit for engineering his ascent. But after Putin gained office the system that he began to construct had little tolerance for cocky and unruly power brokers, and Berezovsky’s ego didn’t allow him to bend to the new rules. Things came to a head eight months into Putin’s Presidency, when a torpedo exploded in the bow of the Kursk, a nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, killing a majority of the hundred and eighteen men aboard. Twenty-three survived, and waited for rescue. Russia’s attempts to reach them were unsuccessful, and it initially refused foreign help. Nine days later, after Putin relented, Norwegian deep-sea divers opened the hatch and found everyone dead. Berezovsky unleashed his network, which hammered away at the Kremlin’s incompetence and compared its handling of the Kursk disaster to the government’s fumbling response to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in 1986. Channel One’s flagship news program broadcast scenes of anguished relatives subjecting government officials to scathing criticism. Putin was livid. He and his advisers claimed that the more inflammatory clips were manufactured, or at least grossly manipulated, as part of an information war carried out by Berezovsky. When Putin finally visited the bereaved relatives, he lashed out at the media: “Television? They’re lying! Lying! Lying!” According to reports in the Russian press, Ernst, in private discussions with Putin, encouraged one of the more noxious conspiracy theories floating around the Kremlin: that a number of the grieving women shown on television were actors. Ernst adamantly denies that he said any such thing. But, while Kremlin officials ordered Berezovsky to unload his shares in the channel, they held Ernst in great esteem. “He is a very talented journalist,” Alexander Voloshin, Putin’s former chief of staff, said, in 2011. “All we had to do was free him from Berezovsky’s influence.” When I spoke to Ernst, he echoed this version of events. Under Berezovsky, the channel’s news staff was “waging some kind of political battle rather than doing reporting work,” he said. At the height of the fallout over the Kursk disaster, Ernst—whether acting on his own initiative or with instruction from above—fired a number of staffers close to Berezovsky. Under duress, Berezovsky fled to England, where he hardened into a strident, although not always reliable, critic of Putin. (He died, apparently by suicide, at a manor house outside London, in 2013.) However, he never managed to develop a real hatred of Ernst. “Ernst could not exist without relying on the state,” he told Kommersant, from exile. “He made a choice not so much against me personally but for Putin. It was a choice in favor of power.” Put in charge of the largest platform in the country, Ernst set about realizing his creative vision, which skillfully combined a certain cosmopolitan savviness with ultimate subservience to the state. Ernst considers himself a gosudarstvennik—a statist—a term many in Russia’s ruling class, including Putin, use to describe their belief in the inherent virtue of the state. “It would be strange if a channel that belonged to the state were to express an anti-government point of view,” Ernst told me. Under Ernst, Putin’s subsequent inaugurations became ever more ambitious productions, involving several hundred cameramen as well as cameras mounted on helicopters and overhead tracking cranes. Ernst also reimagined the annual Victory Day parade, a celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany, putting cameras in the cockpits of bomber planes, to create shots reminiscent of “Top Gun.” According to Arina Borodina, a journalist and media critic in Moscow, Ernst has no equal in creating the spectacles that the country’s rulers covet. “Who else is going to make their illusions, their myths, their beauty?” she said. “For Ernst, a sense of immense visual scale was always important,” Andrei Boltenko, a producer and director who worked at Channel One in the early two-thousands, said. Russia was emerging from the confusion and deprivation of the nineties, and the mood was hopeful. Viewers wanted a story of resurgence. Boltenko told me, “The scale of the television form matched the scale of belief in the state.” In December, 2001, Channel One aired its first call-in show with Putin. Ernst told me that, when he introduced the idea to Putin, “he listened and said, ‘That’s interesting.’ ” The live broadcast—in which Putin fields questions from citizens, often for more than four hours—has appeared nearly every year since. At one moment, he might promise a new children’s playground; in the next, he might conjure up months of withheld salaries for laborers building a cosmodrome. Ernst described the show as a particularly Russian phenomenon: “The Russian mentality stipulates that the leader of the country, no matter what this person is called—President or tsar, Prime Minister or General Secretary of the Communist Party—is seen to answer for everything, that there is one person who symbolizes the entire state.” Under Ernst, the network took pains to avoid the sins of the Berezovsky era, as the Kremlin understood them. In September, 2004, Chechen terrorists seized a school in the town of Beslan, in the North Caucasus, and government officials claimed that there were just three hundred and fifty-four hostages when, in fact, there were more than a thousand. Channel One cited the lower number. On the third day of the standoff, when a frenzy of shooting left more than three hundred people dead, foreign media covered the events live, but Channel One aired just a few minutes on the crisis before returning to the Brazilian telenovela “Women in Love.” Ernst defended his coverage. “Today, the main task of the television is to mobilize the country,” he told the Financial Times, in 2004. “Our task No. 2 is to inform the country about what is going on.” Over time, Ernst and Parfyonov, his former collaborator, began to diverge professionally, even as they remained friends. Parfyonov prized his independence, which left him with fewer opportunities on federal airwaves; Ernst took the other route. “Kostya wanted to be both an artist and a creative director,” Parfyonov told me. “But it would prove impossible to be a creative director without serving the state in one way or another.” Yet, even as Channel One transmits the official narrative, it does so with a measure of taste and restraint, at least compared with its two main competitors: Rossiya, which is wholly owned by the state, and NTV, now owned by a holding company with ties to Putin. Rossiya is home to Dmitry Kiselev, the most sulfurous personality on Russian television, who holds forth on topics including the arms race (Russia is the only country that can turn the United States into “radioactive dust”) and gays and lesbians (“They should be banned from donating blood or sperm, and if they die in a car crash, their hearts should be burned or buried in the ground as unsuitable for the continuation of life”). NTV is known for pseudo-documentaries that disparage opposition figures and hint at all manner of foreign conspiracies. Such offerings rarely appear on Channel One—not because of Ernst’s deep ideological opposition but because they do not correspond to his vision of what is beautiful and worthy. Yulia Pankratova, a news anchor on Channel One from 2006 to 2013, told me that, during her tenure, the network’s employees prided themselves on the sense that “you can do propaganda, but you can’t let yourself fall below a certain level.” Ernst has directed most of his energies toward entertainment programming. “The news is momentary and ephemeral,” he told me. “But the artistic realm, this is something deeper. It can stay in people’s minds forever.” It is also the sphere in which he has the most freedom. Ernst told me that, while his interlocutors in the Kremlin pay close attention to Channel One’s news coverage, they let him make creative series and films with virtually no oversight. He has championed shows far edgier than otherwise appear on state airwaves. In 2012, Ernst aired “Anton’s Right Here,” a documentary about an autistic teen-ager living in a cramped apartment with his ailing mother. Autism is given little attention in Russian society, and the film treats the young man with a rare degree of dignity, which earned it praise from many liberals who are generally wary of Channel One. In 2013, Ernst broadcast “Thaw,” a dramatic series set in the nineteen-sixties, during a brief period of relaxed control over culture and politics. During one episode, viewers learn that a likable main character is gay. The show came at an acute moment of conservative revanchism in Russia’s politics, when the parliament had just passed a bill outlawing so-called “homosexual propaganda.” Ernst continues to indulge his art-house tastes, even as he’s keenly aware of the lines that can’t be crossed. In 2017, he aired the American series “Fargo,” dubbed into Russian, but a few disparaging lines about Putin were altered to refer to the leaders of North Korea. Ernst has managed to retain the affection of many liberal cultural figures, who praise the artistry and integrity of some of Channel One’s programming. He is no less at ease among the country’s political class. “He knows how to seem one of the gang everywhere,” said Nikolay Kartozia, a producer who has known Ernst for years. “You can spend three hours talking to him, and you’ll see you have so much in common you’ll be sure you’re from the same circle. I have the sense it works quite the same in the Kremlin.” Putin’s administration hosts weekly planning meetings for media bosses which are the subject of much speculation. Kachkaeva, the television critic, told me that Ernst “hints at such conversations, but he never gives details, never talks about what is asked of him.” Among the producers at Channel One, the Kremlin meetings are known as “going behind the ramparts”—a reference to the crenellated fortress walls. When we spoke, Ernst downplayed the meetings as largely administrative. “They might tell us: ‘Here is the President’s schedule,’ or some other upcoming events, or maybe the government is planning to impose a new tax, or raise the pension age.” But it is evident to the channel’s staff that Ernst and other top television bosses are given some guidance, though perhaps only as vague hints and shrugs. “Nobody comes back from those meetings and says, ‘Now we have to do this,’ ” Pankratova, the former news anchor, told me. “Maybe later that afternoon you see the top editor for a particular show call over one of the hosts to say something, to give some instructions. Or maybe you notice that a certain Russian region suddenly gets more coverage.” Part of what makes Ernst so good at his job is his ability to pick up shifts in the official mood and to subtly pass them along to his staff. He occasionally gives clear directives; Vladimir Pozner, the host of a major talk show, has said that he and Ernst agreed on a blacklist of a dozen people who were not to appear on his program. But Pankratova told me that, more often, she was expected to intuit the rules rather than have them spelled out, a system that made everyone err on the side of caution. Later in her tenure, she didn’t even think to inquire whether she could mention protests organized by Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had emerged as the country’s leading opposition politician. When I asked Ernst whether certain topics or people were off-limits, he said, “No one ever tells you, ‘Don’t show Navalny, don’t use his name.’ ” Instead, he explained, “such messages aren’t conveyed with words. After all, federal television channels are run by people who aren’t stupid.” In 2007, Russia was chosen to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, which would be held in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea. Putin promised to spend billions to introduce a “new Russia” to the rest of the world. Ernst was put in charge of producing the opening ceremony. “We wanted to show that Russia is part of the global cultural village,” Andrei Boltenko, Ernst’s Channel One colleague, who became the creative director and screenwriter of the ceremony, said. As time went on, the show became more ambitious, and the main stadium had to be redesigned to accommodate its technical complexity. “In certain moments, Ernst had to convince Putin personally,” Boltenko said. In February, 2014, Ernst watched the ceremony from a control center high above the stadium in Sochi. It opened with a troika of translucent horses lit up in white neon galloping across the night sky, gliding along invisible rails hung from the ceiling. Balloons in bright colors stood in for the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral; Peter the Great’s ships sailed across a dark and wavy ocean seemingly printed with an inky woodcut. A steam locomotive bathed in red light barrelled down, a reference to Stalin’s industrialization drive. The Second World War was represented by the rumble of approaching airplanes. The postwar years were rendered as an era of athletes, cosmonauts, students, and stilyagi—Soviet proto-hipsters who liked jazz and dressed in Western fashions. As the show concluded and chants of “Ro-ssi-ya!” echoed through the stadium, Ernst leaped from his chair in the command center. “We’ve done it!” he yelled. The ceremony was received rapturously, even among those hostile to the Putin state. Navalny called the immediate afterglow “Nice and unifying—excellent.” Ernst did not have long to savor the fantasy he’d brought to life. By the time the stadium in Sochi hosted the closing ceremony, which he also produced, two and a half weeks later, street protests in Kyiv, Ukraine, had overthrown the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled and left a power vacuum in his wake. Putin was incensed—he had long seen Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation as a proxy struggle with the West—and was intent on exacting revenge. Within days, Russian special-forces soldiers in unmarked uniforms appeared in Crimea, and, within a month, Russia had annexed the territory. Western opprobrium, sanctions, and attempts at isolation followed, deepening after the outbreak of war in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, where Russia spurred on a separatist insurgency, supplying funds, weapons, and diplomatic cover. Back home, the Russian media adopted a hysterical and bellicose tone. The country was seizing its birthright as a superpower by standing up to the West. Channel One’s news programs were consumed with talk of a coup in Kyiv, nato’s dark intentions, and the supposed neo-fascists who took over after Yanukovych. Ernst had imagined that the Olympics would mark a bright new era for Russia, and he was taken aback by the abrupt change in tone. Boltenko told me that the production team saw it as “a clear and ringing collapse of all of our hopes.” When I spoke to Ernst, however, he rejected the idea that the new narrative had been forced on him from above. “We—us at Channel One, as the citizens of the country—felt deeply offended, and we didn’t need any additional motivation,” he said. In July, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, headed from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot out of the sky as it passed over eastern Ukraine, and all two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The Dutch launched a years-long multinational investigation, which eventually identified Russia-backed separatists as having fired the missile and traced the anti-aircraft system used in the attack to a Russian military unit. As the inquiry proceeded, state media went into a fury, giving voice to every other possible theory: that the Malaysian airliner had been targeted by the Ukrainians in the mistaken belief that it was Putin’s plane; that it was hit accidentally as part of an air-defense training exercise gone wrong; that it was downed by the Ukrainian Air Force. In November, 2014, Channel One aired what it called “sensational” footage: a satellite image, supposedly taken by Western intelligence services and passed to Russia by an American scientist, that purported to show the plane being attacked by a Ukrainian fighter jet. “The image supports a version of events which has hardly been heard in the West,” a host said. The picture was quickly outed as a fake. The time stamp didn’t match that of the incident, the plane had identifying markings that distinguished it from the Malaysian aircraft, and the terrain underneath was clipped from photos posted online two years before. When I asked Ernst why his channel gave voice to something so easily disproven, he said that it was a simple error: “Yes, we’re human, we made a mistake, but not on purpose.” Baldly false stories, in the right doses, are not disastrous for Channel One; in fact, they are an integral part of the Putin system’s postmodern approach to propaganda. In the Soviet era, the state pushed a coherent, if occasionally clumsy, narrative to convince the public of the official version of events. But private media ownership and widespread Internet access have made this impossible. Today, state outlets tell viewers what they are already inclined to believe, rather than try to convince them of what they can plainly see is untrue. At the same time, they release a cacophony of theories with the aim of nudging viewers toward believing nothing at all, or of making them so overwhelmed that they simply throw up their hands. Trying to ascertain the truth becomes a matter of guessing who benefits from a given narrative. In this case, the state’s approach seems to have worked: a year later, a poll showed that only about five per cent of Russians blamed their government or the separatists for the disaster. When I asked Ernst about the official Dutch report, he told me that our disagreement came down to a matter of belief: “You believe the Dutch report is true, and I believe the Dutch report is unprofessional.” It was as if we were arguing about religion or aesthetics rather than a set of facts. As a young man, Ernst told me, he watched “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of Watergate for the Washington Post. He was enraptured by the film’s portrayal of journalism’s moral force, its critical distance and independence. Like many in his generation, he was frustrated by the stifling controls of the Soviet system, and presumed that everything was more honest in the West. But when the barriers between the two worlds collapsed Ernst began to see the blind spots of the media outlets he once worshipped. “I grew up and travelled all over, and, especially in recent years, it’s become increasingly clear to me that justice, democracy, the complete truth—they don’t exist anywhere in the world,” he said. Ernst wears his cynicism as a sign of enlightenment. It would be impossible to convince him that today’s CNN and the BBC don’t have the same partiality as Channel One, or are not also following an agenda. “People who make television are citizens of a specific country, from a certain nationality, with particular cultural codes,” Ernst told me. Channel One must play the game the way everyone else does. In recent years, the space for freewheeling and irreverent programming on Channel One has shrunk, and the intensity of propaganda has grown. But Ernst has stuck around. The unique power of television remains seductive. “I can make an impact on the place where I was born, on the people with whom I share a language, a history, and an understanding, share the same smells and songs and movie quotes,” he told me. “I know these people and can understand them. I love them.” In September, 2014, six months after the annexation of Crimea, a new program appeared on Channel One called “Time Will Tell,” a crass debate show covering the issues of the day, which usually revolve around how the West is keeping Russia down. When, in August, 2016, a producer called me to ask if I would appear as a guest—it’s hard to find Russian-speaking Americans in Moscow willing to get yelled at for an hour on live television—I agreed, curious about what it feels like on the factory floor of the state’s propaganda enterprise. On the day I was set to appear, a minder met me at the entrance to the studio and led me through a vast warren of hallways. I sat in a makeup chair and endured a heavy dusting of powder. The audience numbered about a hundred people, who were given the signal to clap when the show returned from commercial break, or when one of the pro-Kremlin guests made a particularly acerbic point at the expense of one of the show’s villains—in this case, me. We discussed the Russian Olympic athletes facing bans for doping allegations and the conflict in Syria, where both Moscow and Washington had forces deployed. All of the questions were leading ones. The United States carries itself with an air of impunity, one of the show’s hosts told me—“Isn’t that disastrous?” Another posited, “Obama referred to Russia as a ‘regional power.’ Can’t we say that’s when all our problems between the two countries began?” I returned to “Time Will Tell” every now and then over the next few months, on each occasion certain that this would be the day I would manage to say something subversive and devastatingly convincing on Russian state television. Of course, that never happened: not only was I outnumbered by half a dozen other guests but I could interject only a few words at most, and had to huff and puff and raise my voice. In the end, I came across as just another agitated talking head. Even my most forceful protests made issues of fact seem muddy and unknowable, proving that everything is a question of perspective and allegiance. The program offers viewers a crude carnival sideshow: one of its co-hosts is famous for having once brought out a bucket labelled “Shit” and daring a Ukrainian guest to eat from it. (It turned out to be chocolate.) I had a hard time imagining Ernst, the discerning auteur, being pleased with such antics; they seem to embody the ways that his channel has changed to accommodate the mood of the new era. In its loyalty to the official narrative, however, the show is in keeping with the model he has built. “Time Will Tell,” like much of the Russian news, is obsessed by the United States, a consequence of the Russian ruling class’s simultaneous fascination with and revulsion for the American political system. This became all the more true in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Ernst told me, “Of course everyone here was pleased with Donald Trump. He seemed to represent a change in the American political trend.” Trump openly favored a transactional style of politics, with little appetite for values or norms. Here was a person with whom Putin could sit down and divide up the world, as Soviet and American leaders had done at Yalta, in 1945. After Trump’s surprise victory, “Time Will Tell” reflected the Russian state media’s initial euphoria; then its hostile mockery of the notion that Russia, through hacking or trolls, might have had anything to do with that result; and, finally, a creeping sense of confusion and disappointment as Trump proved unable to single-handedly cancel sanctions and reconfigure U.S.-Russian relations. During one broadcast on which I appeared, when we were discussing an address that Trump had made to the United Nations—Channel One’s news program had called it “lengthy and rather pompous”—I asked the hosts if they felt any regret that the Russian media had favored Trump. One of them, Anatoly Kuzichev, who had a bald head and a permanent smirk, turned the question back to me: “Imagine there are two candidates. The first says, ‘I hate Russia and will do all I can to destroy it.’ The second, however, says, ‘I will do everything possible to be friends with Russia.’ So, who would you root for in Russia’s place?” I pushed again. Did Kuzichev have any regrets? “Yes, we are sorry,” he said, his voice rising. “We’re sorry that everything was just words. Yes, we were rooting for Trump. I can confirm that. We acted like fools who naïvely believed a bunch of words.” Channel One has embraced the line that Trump is being undermined by political élites and the so-called “deep state,” a position that allows its presenters to explain his inability to improve relations with Russia, while also revelling in how the American government has devolved into a self-injurious political circus. This narrative has only gained strength since the beginning of the recent impeachment hearings in Congress. “Let them fight amongst themselves,” a host on “Time Will Tell” said on a recent episode. A Channel One anchorman declared, “With impeachment, Congress has guaranteed that the 2020 Presidential election will be the most beastly in American history.” The hosts on “Time Will Tell” seem as confused as Trump is about why there would be anything wrong with linking military aid money for Ukraine to political favors. Isn’t that how American foreign policy has always operated? Watching the show, I was reminded of my conversations with Ernst, in which he seemed eager to show that he is alive to how the world really works, unlike those idealists—perhaps me included—who remain blinded by naïveté. It is a world view grounded in some truth, but it has the effect of excusing all manner of behavior as simply routine. On a recent episode, from mid-November, when a steady stream of witnesses were testifying in Congress, one of the hosts turned to an American journalist and mocked the idea that the Democrats had uncovered anything incriminating. “Where is the evidence? Why don’t they produce it?” the host asked. The American guest responded, “You just don’t show it on this channel, like they don’t show it on Fox News.” The host smiled, and pretended to act afraid: “Quick, cut to commercial break!” ♦
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BitClub Network, a bogus investment scheme that they promoted as "the most transparent company in the history of the world" and "too big to fail." @nytimes World Currencies |
Five people have been charged with defrauding investors of $722 million, using promises of huge returns if they joined a cryptocurrency investing club while privately deriding their clients as “sheep” and “idiots,” the United States attorney’s office in New Jersey said on Tuesday. Federal prosecutors said the defendants operated BitClub Network, a bogus investing scheme that they promoted in videos and in domestic and international trips as “the most transparent company in the history of the world” and “too big to fail.” The network asked investors to join a pool to share in the earnings from Bitcoin mining, in which people race to unlock new Bitcoin by solving complex algorithms and verifying cryptocurrency transactions on a public ledger. The network said that it would invest in the hardware necessary to do the complex math and that its investors would reap the rewards, much like investors in a gold-mining operation. “You’re not going to go start digging holes — the gold miners dig up the gold, they just give you your gold every single day,” one BitClub Network video says, according to federal court documents. “This is the same kind of thing.” Thousands of investors were taken in by the business, which Craig Carpenito, the United States attorney for New Jersey, called “little more than a modern, high-tech Ponzi scheme.” Mr. Carpenito said in a statement that the defendants had exploited “the complex world of cryptocurrency to take advantage of unsuspecting investors.” An indictment unsealed in United States District Court in Newark charged Matthew Goettsche, 37, of Lafayette, Colo.; Jobadiah Weeks, 38, of Arvada, Colo.; and Silviu Balaci, who was arrested in Germany, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to offer and sell unregistered securities. Joseph Abel, 49, of Camarillo, Calif., was charged with conspiracy to offer and sell unregistered securities. Mr. Goettsche was arrested in Colorado, Mr. Weeks in Florida and Mr. Abel in California, federal prosecutors said. A fifth person, whose name has not been disclosed, remained at large, Matthew Reilly, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office, said on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if those charged had lawyers or if they had entered pleas. Mr. Reilly said Mr. Carpenito’s office was prosecuting the case because some of the victims were in New Jersey, where some of the transactions had taken place. The indictment said the defendants operated BitClub Network from October 2014 until this month. Mr. Goettsche, Mr. Weeks and others solicited investments in the club’s Bitcoin mining pools by providing false and misleading figures that members were told were “Bitcoin mining earnings,” according to federal prosecutors. In February 2015, for example, Mr. Goettsche directed one of his conspirators to “bump up the daily mining earnings starting today by 60 percent,” prompting that person to reply, “That is not sustainable, that is Ponzi” territory and a “fast cash-out Ponzi … but sure,” according to the indictment. In September 2017, Mr. Goettsche sent an email to another conspirator calling for the BitClub Network to “drop mining earnings significantly now,” so that he could retire rich, according to the indictment. The indictment said Mr. Goettsche told Mr. Balaci in January 2015 that “we are building this whole model on the backs of idiots.” John M. Griffin, a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin, said that, by promising its investors access to Bitcoin mining, the BitClub Network had carried out a “classic Ponzi scheme under the guise of new, flashy technology in the cryptocurrency world, which perhaps makes it easier to engage in a Ponzi scheme.” “Like any kind of new technology coming out, there’s often a buzz about it, so that makes it a compelling case for fraud,” said Dr. Griffin, who researches illicit activity in the financial markets. “It makes the story more believable that you’ve got this money-printing machine.” The club’s marketing materials described the network as an almost surefire way to get rich, according to the indictment. In one video, a BitClub Network defendant promised club members that an investment of $3,599 could yield a return of $250,000 over three years, calling that a “very conservative” estimate, the indictment said. Dr. Griffin said that such schemes were not uncommon in the cryptocurrency world but that the magnitude of this one was notable. “Raising over $700 million in a Ponzi scheme is pretty spectacular,” he said.
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How Lebanese Default Would Play Out @economics Emerging Markets |
For many bond investors it’s a matter of when, not if, Lebanon restructures its $87 billion of debt as it reels under a deepening financial crisis. Working out what the trigger would be or the extent of the fallout is another matter entirely. After repaying $1.5 billion Eurobonds that matured last month, the focus is turning to whether authorities will honor a $1.2 billion commitment on March 9. Several influential local economists and even some officials say the country should use its dwindling reserves to pay for imports instead of creditors. Complicating the debate is the Arab nation’s political paralysis since mass protests against corruption forced the prime minister to resign in late October. The country’s debt risk, measured by five year credit-default swaps, climbed above 2,500 basis points last week and is the highest globally after Argentina, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. As politicians haggle over the formation of a new government, some creditors and distressed debt funds have been asking for documents detailing payment terms, including what would happen in the event of a default, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Government officials are aware of the requests, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is sensitive. “The market is running out of patience,” said Anders Faergemann, a London-based money manager at Pinebridge Investments, which holds an underweight position in Lebanese bonds relative to the benchmark it follows. “Until investors know who will be in control of the country’s finances, it will be hard for the market to recover.” Few expect it, but Lebanon could avert financial ruin by quickly forming a government that would pledge immediate reforms and receive aid from international allies. France is hosting a support conference in Paris on Wednesday. And while donor nations are unlikely to extend a blank check without a functioning government, diplomats fear a messy default would wreak havoc on a country at the heart of proxy wars in the Middle East. Some critics, however, would see this outcome as an easy way out for a political establishment that mismanaged the economy and stymied efforts to end corruption. For caretaker Labor Minister Camille Abousleiman, the new government should announce a restructuring before the March Eurobond is due, accompanied by a reform program that’s preferably backed by a loan from the International Monetary Fund. “We do not want to end up like Venezuela, where priority was given to creditors at the expense of basic needs,” said Abousleiman, who has acted as principal lawyer for Lebanon’s Eurobond issuance since 1995. In Venezuela, the population suffered from shortages of goods including medicine, yet the government ended up defaulting anyway in 2017. Supporters of this solution say it would help minimize the damage inflicted on creditors, domestic banks and depositors. Economic proposals floated locally include reforming the loss-making state-owned electricity company, official capital controls instead of the informal limits imposed by banks, higher taxes on the rich and a cap on interest rates. Any revamp of Lebanon’s almost $30 billion of Eurobonds would require the consent of 75% of holders voting on a series-by-series basis, Abousleiman said. The government could limit the restructuring to its local-currency debt held by the central bank, domestic lenders and other public institutions. Local debt stood at 81 trillion Lebanese pounds ($54 billion) as of September, with the central bank holding about 65% of the total. That plan would spare foreign investors and might be done in a way that avoids substantially damaging the balance sheets of local banks. “We have a high conviction about the March bond being paid, but it’s no bargain given risks,” analysts at Oxford Economics, including London-based Nafez Zouk and Carlos de Sousa, said in a Dec. 3 report. “We think the status quo of ‘pay while you can’ will prevail because it presents the way of least resistance for policy makers.” The price on the March bond fell to a record low of 77 cents last month, equating to a yield of more than 100%. It has since risen to 86 cents. A senior local banker, who asked not to be named, said this scenario could be introduced hand-in-hand with official capital controls and an economic reform blueprint that would slash the budget deficit. Lebanon probably has enough reserves to “muddle through” for more than a year and there’s a chance that external debt isn’t touched even after that, said Hans Humes, chief executive officer of the New York-based distressed-debt investor Greylock Capital Management LLC. A disorderly default would shut the country out of international debt markets, potentially for years. What’s worse, a collapse of the banking system could fuel unrest in a country that’s no stranger to turmoil. So far politicians have no clear picture of what a future government would look like. Two candidates have publicly withdrawn their nomination for the premiership and others have implicitly declined it. Lebanon’s dollar debt, most of which trades at less than 50 cents, isn’t yet cheap enough to interest Humes. That might change if a government isn’t put in place soon, which could cause prices to drop further. “The uncertainty of the situation has led to discussions among creditors to begin some preliminary discussions on how to organize,” Humes said. “We recognize the uniqueness of Lebanon’s situation.”
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@IMFNews poised to approve landmark $3bn loan for Ethiopia @FT @JamesPoliti & @davidpilling Africa |
The IMF is poised to approve a $3bn loan for Ethiopia as part of a programme to provide balance of payments support for the cash-strapped economy as well as technical assistance for the government’s liberalisation agenda. The loan, which still needs IMF board approval, has been agreed by staff after the fund opened a representative office in Addis Ababa earlier this year, according to Ethiopia’s state minister of finance, Eyob Tolina. The east African country of 105m people has enjoyed more than a decade of high growth but recently run into capacity constraints and chronic shortages of foreign exchange, a by-product of its tightly state-controlled economy. Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister, took office in 2018, promising to overhaul the economy. He has spoken frequently about the limits of Ethiopia’s Asian-style state-led development model, which has produced 15 years of near double-digit growth, and he has pledged to nudge Ethiopia towards a more open, market-oriented system. In September, Mr Abiy, who received the Nobel peace prize on Tuesday, announced a so-called “homegrown economic reform” agenda, which he said would include opening various sectors to foreign investment for the first time. Two new telecoms licences are due to be auctioned next year. Mr Tolina described the anticipated IMF programme as “a huge stamp of approval” for Mr Abiy’s agenda. “It’s excellent news,” he said. “They want to support our policy reform.” The funds, which will be released in tranches, would be used to counter a looming balance of payments crisis and to fund specific reform initiatives, he said. He added that the IMF would also provide technical assistance on macroeconomic policy, but did not specify in which areas. Analysts said Ethiopia would be keen to present the IMF programme as its own and not something imposed by the Washington-based institution. Charles Robertson, chief economist at Renaissance Capital, said: “The reality is they are running out of money. Their shortage of foreign exchange is acute and has been for years and their requirement for external capital has risen greatly.” Describing the $3bn as “a substantial chunk of change”, he said he suspected the IMF would put pressure on the government to move to a more flexible exchange rate as part of its lending programme. Razia Khan, chief Africa economist at Standard Chartered bank, said: “Finalising an IMF programme might be seen as a clear pointer that Ethiopia is that much more serious about rolling out these reforms.” The government had already indicated it had an appetite for foreign exchange liberalisation over the medium term, she said. Ethiopia has for years relied on borrowing from domestic banks to fund its investment programme. Foreign banks are not allowed to invest in the country. The policy has enabled Ethiopia to finance one of Africa’s most ambitious infrastructure builds, including the $4bn Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, but it has also contributed to foreign exchange shortages as the government allocates scarce reserves to strategic investors. The new injection of foreign currency would help to address that problem and give comfort to new market entrants, said Zemedeneh Negatu, a prominent Ethiopia investor. “The infusion of an additional several billion into the economy will . . . give local and international investors additional confidence since they will view it as concrete steps being taken by the government to address some of the current macroeconomic headwinds,” he said.
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14-OCT-2019 :: Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed Ali was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 Africa |
The Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed Ali was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and indeed it was a well-deserved award. In July 2018, I wrote: '’These 90 or so days represent the most consequential arrival of an African politician on the African stage since Mandela walked out of prison blinking in the sunlight and constructed his ‘’rainbow nation’’’’ And whilst he faces a fiendishly complicated task fending off the centripetal forces which are tearing Ethiopia apart, the Prime Minister who has a singular self-belief in his destiny is a Virilian figure and a c21st African Leader which is a scarce commodity. “Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.”
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02-JUL-2018 :: Abiy Ahmed Ali (Amharic: , Oromo: Abiyyi Ahimad Alii; born 15 August 1976) was appointed the 12th Prime Minister of Ethiopia on 2 April 2018. Africa |
He grew up in a Muslim family (Ah- med Ali, his Oromo father; Tezeta Wolde, his mother) and with Oromo Muslim and Christian grandparents. He is evidently a Virilian and Gladwellian Figure. “To create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.” “Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not, With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”—Malcolm Gladwell . He has been Prime Minster for 90 days. During those 90 days, he has criss-crossed the country, ended a state of emergency, released thousands of political prisoners, thawed relations with Eritrea [29 Mar 2018 HE Abiy Ahmed @PM_AbiyAhmed - It is time. Lets build a wall of love between #Ethiopia & #Eritrea], bagged a $1b from the UAE, announced a dramatic economic about-turn. In matters language and linguistics, he has tapped into a ‘’Nelson Mandela’’ 1994 mood. These 90 or so days represent the most consequential arrival of an African politician on the African stage since Mandela walked out of prison blinking in the sunlight and constructed his ‘’rainbow nation’’. I was watching the France-Argentina game and the arrival of Kylian Mbappe on the world stage at the tender age of 19. I recalled watching the Whirling Dervishes of the Mevlevi order on a night of a full moon in Konya, Turkey. I thought what they all have in common with Abiy Ahmed. It’s all about speed and velocity. Paul Virilio terms it ‘dromology’, which he defined as the “science (or logic) of speed“. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. “Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.” Virilio argues that the traditional feudal fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of weapons and possibilities for warfare. For Virilio, the concept of siege warfare became rather a war of movement. Abiy Ahmed has moved at lightning speed, the old guard is like ‘’the traditional feudal fortified city’’. He said “The ppl of Tigray are still begging for a drop of water; TPLF (the party) is not the people of Tigray”. On the same day he said, “we are in debt, we have to pay back but we can’t. And secondarily, we aren’t able to finish projects we have started” and announced his economic Pivot. Of course, the downside risk of all this infrastructure is plain to see and Sri Lanka and the tale of its Hambantota Port is now a cautionary Tale. FX reserves were at less than a month’s worth of imports and something needed to be done. Expectations are high. The Prime Minister needs to execute real quick on the economic front but if he levels the playing Field, a whole Troop of folks will be looking to pile in. That Troop will include the Ethiopian Diaspora, Foreign Investors and I am sure our very own Safaricom. Abiy Ahmed’s first 90 days have been as remarkable as the less than 90 minutes of France’s Mbappe’s performance on Saturday.
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@IMFNews criticised over bailouts for central Africa's petrostates @FinancialTimes Africa |
The IMF is facing criticism over a $280m bailout intended for Equatorial Guinea, a tiny oil-producing state in central Africa, where the long-serving regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema is accused of institutional corruption and human rights violations. The IMF said the programme included provisions that were meant to make the petrostate’s oil and gas industry more transparent. But anti-corruption and human rights groups warned that the IMF risked damaging its own reputation by lending its credibility to a regime with no history of serious reform. “Knowing the penchant for corruption in this country, knowing about the human rights violations, I don’t see how [the IMF] can justify bailing this country out with millions of dollars that they should know will be squandered once again,” said Tutu Alicante, executive director of EG Justice, who like many Equatoguinean critics of the government lives in exile. But the IMF’s programme in Equatorial Guinea, expected to be approved this month, is not unique. It is only the latest in a series of similar lending programmes the IMF has approved in central Africa in the past four years. Nearby Gabon received a $642m bailout in 2017, while Republic of Congo got $450m in July. Both governments are oil producers like Equatorial Guinea, with comparatively high gross domestic product per capita but poor records on graft and public finance management. The governments in all three countries have been accused of profiting from corruption. Rights groups and creditors challenged the IMF before it bailed out Republic of Congo, questioning the logic of funding a government accused of misappropriating large portions of its oil revenues and failing to honour its private debts. Now, eight civil society organisations, including Human Rights Watch, have sent a joint letter to the IMF asking it to delay its decision on Equatorial Guinea. Sarah Saadoun, a researcher who works on corruption for Human Rights Watch, said the IMF programme would serve as a badge of validation for the Equatoguinean government, sending the wrong signal to potential partners about the state of the country’s politics. “The IMF [will be giving] them the imprimatur of reform and that signals something to investors,” Ms Saadoun said. “In a country where rule of law and corruption are perennial issues for investors, that signal is very, very valuable for them.” The IMF declined to comment. In October, it said the programme would help to promote financial stability, economic diversification, good governance and transparency. Mr Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea with absolute power since 1979, when he overthrew his uncle in a violent coup. His regime has outlawed most opposition parties and arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killings and torture are all common. American oil groups discovered giant crude deposits in the country’s maritime waters in the mid-1990s. Oil production has since generated billions of dollars in annual revenue for Mr Obiang’s administration but failed to improve the lives of most Equatoguineans GDP per capita in the country of 1m people is among the best in Africa and higher than Turkey, Brazil and China, and yet its social indicators are some of the worst in the world. The oil windfall funded a huge infrastructure building spree that has given the country some of Africa’s finest roads but also seen money misspent on boondoggles such as new luxury cities. The building bonanza collapsed, along with the economy, after the 2014 crash in the price of crude, which provides nearly all government revenue. “Equatorial Guinea is not a country that needs $200m,” said Gabriel Obiang Lima, the minister of mines and hydrocarbons and one of the president’s sons. “We make that in two months.” Mr Lima said the government had agreed to the IMF programme as an act of “solidarity” with the five other countries in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, which share a currency. Most were hit hard by the oil price crash and began talks with the IMF for a regional programme in 2015. Chad, Cameroon and Central African Republic have also received support in the past four years. Mr Lima dismissed the criticism from international human rights organisations and pointed to Equatorial Guinea’s evolving relationships with international bodies as proof that the country has changed. “They are giving the indication of the development of the country,” he said. “[We already have an] agreement by IMF, we already have an agreement by the World Bank, how come those organisations don’t want to read or respect the report of [international institutions]?” But the regime’s critics increasingly see the IMF and World Bank as part of the problem, arguing that their engagement with the government legitimises the economic crimes committed by members of the president’s family such as his son, vice-president Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. Better known as Teodorin, the deputy leader was convicted by a French judge in 2017 of siphoning off payments from investors to fund a lavish international lifestyle including a sprawling collection of yachts, supercars, mansions and fine art. “Why would they bail out a violent kleptocracy with public money the amount of which could easily be covered in the blink of an eye by Teodorin selling a few of his cars in France?” said Simon Taylor, co-founder of Global Witness.
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Tanzania and Rwanda in push to reshape East African logistics @TheAfricaReport Africa |
Rwanda and Tanzania individually signed two mega-infrastructure deals in the last week in moves that will undoubtedly reshape the East African region politically and economically. Kenya stands to lose most. Tanzania signed an agreement to link its new railway line to Burundi and the DRC, while a similar deal with Rwanda is said to be in its final stages. The transport ministers of the three countries signed the deal in Kigoma, Tanzania, on 3 December. Three-way funding The first phase of the joint deal will start in Kigoma and end in Gitega, the capital of Burundi, 240km away. It will then be extended into eastern DRC. Each country will have to get funding for its own section, Tanzania’s transport minister, Isack Kamwelwe, said at the signing ceremony. The first phase of Tanzania’s Standard Gauge Railway (SRG), covering 202km from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, is almost complete. The second phase will connect Morogoro to the administrative capital of Dodoma, even as the East African country also revamps its old metre-gauge railway to enhance connectivity. When complete, the new railway line will cover 1,457km, connecting Dar and the Lake Victoria port city of Mwanza. In May 2018, Rwanda and Tanzania agreed to redesign their joint railway plan, which will start at the Isaka dry port and end in Kigali, to use electric powered trains. In late November, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli said that the two countries are in the final phases of negotiating a deal to build the railway line. The Isaka-Kigali line will cost $2.5bn, with Tanzania paying $1.3bn and Rwanda $1.2bn. Rwanda will then incur additional costs to extend it to Rubavu and Bugesera, where it is constructing its largest international airport. Kenya’s preeminence under threat The deals give Tanzania an upper hand in East Africa, as its Central Corridor blueprint will make its commercial capital of Dar es Salaam the primary route to the sea for the region’s landlocked nations. It also shows the far-reaching effects of the collapse of the ‘coalition of the willing’, a loose grouping of three East African countries – Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda – that had agreed in 2013 to construct mega-infrastructure deals together. The coalition collapsed as diplomatic relations between Uganda and Rwanda worsened, and Tanzania’s new president, John Magufuli, worked to rebuild economic relations with the country’s neighbours. Uganda is Kenya’s trade route to Rwanda and eastern DRC, and the frosty relations between the two, which saw border closures, affected trade in the region. The biggest beneficiary has been Tanzania, which shares direct borders with Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, and Uganda. Uganda chose the Tanzania route to the sea, abandoning the plan to build an oil pipeline jointly with Kenya. It cited, among other reasons, the costs of land compensation in Kenya. Rwanda also pulled out of the railway line plan because, as its then finance minister, Claver Gatete (now minister of infrastructure), said: “The Kenyan route would be expensive and time consuming.” Rwanda has also inaugurated an $80m inland port, built by Emirati DP World, 20km from the capital, Kigali. Meanwhile, Rwanda announced that it had signed a deal with Qatar Airways, which will see the Gulf airline take up 60% of the redesigned Bugesera International Airport project. It is still unclear what will happen to the preceding deal with Mota-Engil of Portugal, which began works on the airport two years ago with a concession to run it for 25 years – and an option to extend by another 15 years. Before the redesign, the project cost was $800m and a capacity of 4.5 million passengers, with the first phase due to be complete by early 2020. Mota-Engil had injected $418m into the first phase by March, when media reports indicated the company could be pulling out due to contractual issues. Mota-Engil’s likely pullout will make it the second company to withdraw from the project, after a Chinese state construction firm in 2013. In addition promising the greenest airport on the continent, Rwanda now plans for Bugesera to be one of the largest airports in the region. In the redesign the first phase, valued at $1.3bn, will accommodate seven million passengers, while the second phase, which will start by 2032, will increase the capacity to 14 million, the Rwanda Development Board said in a series of tweets on 9 December. As East Africa begins a new decade, Kenya’s dwindling position as East Africa’s trade hub will face even more competition from Tanzania and Rwanda. While Tanzania is working to make its corridor the natural route to the landlocked countries, Rwanda has been working to centre itself as a conference and events hub. The new deals bring them closer to this future, even as they iron out their financing models.
Conclusions
The erosion in Kenya's Geopolitical Lynch pin status is turning exponential.
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South Africa Risks Becoming a 'Forgotten Country,' Top Banker Warns @business Africa |
South Africa must move quickly to implement the reforms needed to salvage its status as an investment destination and breathe life into the struggling economy, a senior banker said. “SA is rapidly becoming a forgotten country and has stopped being talked about as an investment destination,” James Formby, the chief executive officer of FirstRand Ltd.’s Rand Merchant Bank, wrote in Johannesburg-based newspaper Business Day. “It’s no longer five to midnight, it is midnight. We cannot afford to wait any longer to turn things around.” Implementing greater fiscal discipline, dealing with corruption, providing a stable supply of electricity and easing labor laws are among the major challenges South Africa must address, he said. While the government battles to find consensus on the best way forward with these because of ideological differences and factions within the ruling party, there are some quick wins that can be capitalized on. A good place to start accelerating change is at the nation’s state-owned power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., Formby said. The debt-ridden firm is struggling to the keep lights on and has been labeled by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as the nation’s greatest threat. “While I appreciate the enormity of the challenge to fix Eskom, a new CEO has been announced and the best thing he can do is share his plan and implement it without fear of political interference,” Formby said. An effective plan to restructure Eskom’s balance sheet and stabilize the grid by dealing with operational issues should be done without delay, he said. While South Africa’s cash-strapped national carrier South African Airways was correctly placed in business rescue recently, “if more action is not taken and fiscal discipline is not instilled across the state, SA risks permanent damage to the economy.” Gross domestic product in Africa’s most-industrialized economy contracted for the second time this year in the third quarter. A downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service, the only major ratings company that still assesses South Africa’s debt at investment grade, is almost inevitable. “Further downgrades mean the cost of borrowing rises, not just for the government but also for banks and every ordinary business and individual,” Formby said. “The transmission of higher borrowing costs will retard economic growth.” Getting the private sector involved in important infrastructure projects means “policy makers don’t need to think too hard” about solutions but can rely on partnerships with businesses to progress its development agenda and absorb some of the risks of funding and delivery, the CEO said. “Doing some things now that send the right message is far more valuable than promises or endless debates and further years of contemplation while the country slides to an economic also-ran,” he said.
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09-DEC-2019 :: Ramaphosa's South Africa reported -0.6% Q3 2019 GDP. Africa |
President Ramaphosa, however, was awarded the Grand Croix de l’Orde National du Merit, on behalf of the Grand Master, His Excellency President Alpha Conde of the Republic of Guinea. The two biggest beasts in Sub Saharan Africa are essentially providing fewer opportunities and their Citizens have been becoming worse off year after year for more than five years now.
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Nigeria Cries Fowl: Presidential Policy Makes Chicken, the National Dish, a Rare Bird @WSJ Africa |
LAGOS—One of the largest restaurant chains in the largest economy in Africa keeps running out of chicken. Its name is Chicken Republic. In recent weeks, Nigeria has been in the grip of a run on chicken—a culinary conundrum since chicken and rice is the most popular pairing in Nigerian cuisine. Johnny Rockets ran out of wings. Mr. Bigg’s, a chain of chicken shops, has closed branches because it couldn’t source drumsticks. KFC branches are boasting that, unlike their rivals, they have a steady supply of their most important ingredient. In this country of 200 million, some of Nigeria’s most recognizable pop and movie stars have issued statements expressing the anger of consumers. “I don’t get it... a chicken place wey no get chicken,” said Funke Akindele Bello, one of Nigeria’s most famous actresses, to her almost one million followers, in pidgin English. “Excuse me?!” The reason is a policy fowl by Nigeria’s protectionist president. This summer Muhammadu Buhari shocked the country and its neighbors by closing the country’s land borders to all goods. The move was intended to stop rampant smuggling and help enforce a decade-old directive that chicken and rice should be made with only locally farmed ingredients. The announcement, part of a “Nigeria first” pivot, is popular with farmers and local producers who want a bigger stake of Nigeria’s $400 billion economy. For years, the majority of the country’s chicken and rice was smuggled across the border with the tiny nation of Benin. The birds came on the back of motorcycles, taxis, trucks, canoes, bicycles, wheelbarrows or in buckets atop women’s heads. Traffickers usually paid off the customs officers in cash, or sometimes food. President Buhari’s border closure was intended to stimulate domestic production enough to reduce an annual food import bill of some $4 billion and pry the country away from smuggled produce. The problem is that Nigeria currently produces less than one-third of the poultry and around half of the rice it consumes, according to official statistics. Benin doesn’t actually have much chicken of its own to sell to Nigeria. So it imports chicken from foreign countries, then exports it to Nigeria. In 2015, Benin imported almost as much whole frozen chicken as the U.K. and almost as much rice as China, making the country of 11 million the world’s fourth-biggest buyer of foreign rice, according to the World Trade Organization. At least 85% of Benin’s chicken slipped across the porous border into Nigeria, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These days, Benin imports about half the chicken it used to; it was the world’s sixth-largest buyer of rice last year. Now the border is patrolled by operatives from Nigeria’s National Security Agency, the CIA’s partner institute on the ground, under a mission code-named “Exercise Swift Response.” Dozens of trucks carrying chicken and rice have been impounded. Because chicken can’t get through to Nigeria, Benin was stuck with way more than it could use. Thousands of frozen chickens have been buried in shallow graves; disposing of them that way was cheaper than incinerating them. Now, the vast cold stores that once held tons of poultry on the Benin side are empty. Smugglers who could once pay a small bribe to bring truckloads of chicken across the border are now hacking frozen birds into pieces and wedging wings and breasts into boxes, handbags or car doors. Rice is poured into jerrycans that are filled with a tiny amount of oil at the spout to disguise the contraband inside. At night, smugglers on motorbikes ride in convoys of 10 with boxes of chicken strapped across their shoulders. “We go in teams because it’s safer,” said one smuggler who gave his name as Tunde. “If the customs officers come, we discard the chicken and scatter.” Nigerian soldiers have expanded nighttime patrols of the land border and searches of small boats sailing along the waterways. On local news channels, uniformed customs officers parade around tables festooned with yellow jerrycans and boxes of smuggled rice, as if it were a drug bust. The government claims the closure has been a roaring success, recording record revenue for rice and chicken arriving at sea ports that is taxed at 70%. “We are sharpening our skills and the odds are now against the smugglers,” said Joseph Atta, spokesman for Nigeria’s customs department. The price of a single bird in Nigeria has soared more than 30% to as high as 1000 Naira, or $3.50, according to farmers, almost the same price as a ram. Dozens of Chicken Republic branches have been forced to turn customers away or offer their signature chicken with spicy jollof rice dish, without its key ingredient. “We will just have to see if the government will budge… is this going to continue?” said Deji Akinyanju, the founder of Chicken Republic. Yahuza Chicken, a popular spot set in a garden in Abuja, has begun to open at 1 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. due to lack of its core product. “We have never seen this kind of scarcity before,” said Abubakar Abdullahi, the manager. The store had to raise prices by almost 40%: “We are pleading with our customers to bear with the price hike.” In Lagos, customers have begun swapping tips on which restaurant branches have stocks and where lines are longest. “When I found chicken last week, two people stopped me to ask which outlet I bought it from,” said Deborah Dede, a customer. “Osun state has sold out of chicken,” said Adiobun Kolawole, a 25-year-old who in June set up his own chicken-breeding business in the southwest, Supreme Imperio Farms, to capitalize on the market dislocation. “I have 500 birds and they sell immediately, but even if I had 50,000 it wouldn’t be enough.” Last year KFC ran out of chicken across the U.K. for 24 hours after problems with its supplier. “The chicken crossed the road, just not to our restaurants,” KFC’s U.K. office tweeted. In Nigeria, the company says it has an entirely domestic supply so it isn’t affected by the import ban and is rolling out its new Celebration Feast menu. The chain has increased prices. KFC has 16 stores in Nigeria. Chicken Republic has more than 60, and Mr. Bigg’s has 170. More price surges are expected as Nigeria moves into the holiday season, where demand for poultry soars as Christian families from across the country traditionally slaughter and eat hens on Christmas day. Grace Emmanuel, an Abuja resident, said she will have a different item at Christmas for the first time. “Chicken is fast becoming the exclusive preserve for the rich,” she said. “This year I think I will take a small amount of beef instead.”
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@HEBobiwine live in concert @mailandguardian @simonallison Africa |
Bobi Wine arrives at the Johannesburg City Hall at 10pm on a Sunday. He is five hours late. No one cares. The soft drinks ran out long ago, but the alcohol kept flowing and the air inside the grand but dilapidated building is thick with cannabis smoke. He enters the hall from the back and is mobbed by a tide of supporters in red berets who are ululating and screaming his name. His personal security have to push people away with some force to clear a path to the stage. It is not clear what this event is. It could be a campaign rally, complete with merchandise stalls, banners (“Ugandan President 2021”) and seated lines of dignitaries on the stage. It could also be the hottest hip-hop concert in town, with a 1000-strong crowd ready to sing along to one of East Africa’s most famous musicians. It is both of those things, of course; but the cognitive dissonance is not lost on Bobi Wine as he gets on stage and, briefly, takes his seat next to the besuited elders. He’s wearing jeans and a beige blazer — hardly rockstar attire —along with his signature red beret. He fidgets uncomfortably in his chair and then he can’t take it anymore. “I just want to jump on stage now and start the show,” he says quietly. And then, shouting: “START THE SHOW!” And so he does. He grabs a microphone and bounds to the centre of the stage. He raises a fist to the gilded ceiling. “People power!” he screams. “Our power!” the audience screams back. The band strikes up the intro to Mazzi Mawanvu, one of his old classics, and Bobi Wine launches into song. The audience knows every word. Bobi Wine grew up in the slums of Kampala — the “ghetto president”, he calls himself — and made his name by blending Afrobeat, reggae and Jamaican dancehall into his own distinct sound. It was only in 2017 that he officially began his political career, winning the parliamentary by-election for the Kyaddondo East constituency. He ran as an independent, but one who was opposed to the decades-long presidency of Yoweri Museveni. Soon, other politicians endorsed by Robert Kagulanyi — that is Bobi Wine’s real name — started winning too, and so Museveni’s administration cracked down with force. Last year, Bobi Wine’s driver was shot dead, and Bobi Wine was detained and charged with treason. He was also beaten while in police custody. That was not all. The government has done everything in its power to prevent Bobi Wine from performing his music in Uganda. His concerts have effectively been banned, although he keeps finding inventive ways to defy the authorities. In May, at the Kampala Sheraton, he came on unannounced to play one song at a performance by fellow reggae artist Maddox Ssematimba. Rather brilliantly, Museveni was rumoured to have been in a conference hall at the same hotel at the same time — the president would have heard the bass line. For a born entertainer, being prevented from taking the stage may be the biggest sacrifice of all. “Of course I missed it, I missed the stage as an artist,” he said as made his way to the front of the hall. “It feels amazing. It feels amazing to be able to perform.” The crowd is almost exclusively Ugandans living in South Africa. They have driven here from all over Gauteng and some have flown up from Durban and Cape Town. They are overwhelmingly young, and overwhelmingly male. There is an almost religious fervour in their support for Bobi Wine, and they keep saying the same things. “He’s a youth like me,” says Kelvin, 27. “I need change. Museveni is an old man who has been there for too long.” “I came here to watch my new president,” says Beker, 35. “We are tired of being treated like animals. Bobi Wine will give us a say in our own country.” Miti Jamil, the vice-chairperson of the Hammanskraal branch of Bobi Wine’s People Power movement, has a more personal connection. He is 37 now, exactly the same age as Bobi Wine. All the way back in 2005, when Jamil was trying to raise funds to travel to South Africa, Bobi Wine played a benefit concert for him in his home village of Mbale. The singer had heard that Jamil was working on youth empowerment projects and wanted to help. Ten thousand people came to the concert, and Jamil kept all the gate receipts, which worked out to a profit of 2.5-million Ugandan shillings (about R15 000 at the time). “Bobi Wine has changed my life. He’s my role model,” says Jamil. Fortune, in his mid-20s, also knows Bobi Wine from Uganda. They grew up in the same slum. Fortune is a sound engineer and he learnt his trade in Bobi Wine’s studio in Kampala. He is sound engineering tonight’s performance — Bobi Wine did not travel with his band, so he has put together a collection of Ugandan musicians based in South Africa to help him. “Let me tell you one thing about Bobi Wine. Bobi Wine likes to gather people around. Ever since I’ve been seeing him, he wants to gather people around,” says Fortune. “The chances for him to be president, it’s like, 95%. Uganda is full of youth and we are supporters.” The oldest man in the venue is probably Christopher Kibuuka, a 65-year-old medical doctor based in Krugersdorp. Kibuuka has seen this all before. Decades ago, he was the Southern African representative for none other than Yoweri Museveni, who was then a rebel fighting for power. “We can’t afford to make the same mistake,” he said. Disappointed by Museveni’s authoritarian bent, Kibuuka was a founding member of the Forum for Democratic Change in 2001, the largest opposition party in Uganda, along with its leader Kizza Besigye. Over the past couple of years, Bobi Wine has overshadowed Besigye, despite the latter’s long track record of resistance to the government. But none of that matters, says Kibuuka. “I am not a member of Bobi Wine’s movement. But I strongly believe that all hands are needed on deck to bring down one of the most oppressive regimes Africa has ever seen.” Up on stage, Bobi Wine is rolling out the hits. By Far. Freedom. Kyalenga. As a politician, he is still inexperienced and relatively untested. Critics say he’s light on policy and wonder what he’ll do if he ever actually gets power. But as a musician, he’s at the top of his game. He works the crowd like the old pro that he is, and they hang on to his every word. He blurs the boundaries between his two identities. In an interlude between tracks, with the band keeping up a gentle rhythm, he tells his adoring audience: “We have to work together to take down that old dictator.” They roar their approval. Bobi Wine is back on stage, and he hasn’t missed a beat.
Kenya
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