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Macro Thoughts

Home Thoughts

At night, the crickets make my street sound like the wilderness. In
the morning, I hear the birds chirping at top volume from sun up until
deep into what used to be rush hour.
But in late afternoon, the sounds of nature in a city where millions
of people are working from home, or not working at all, give way to
something else: a burst of welcome human noise.
In neighborhoods once defined by cars and busy schedules, kids rush
out of front doors and garages, roaming free on bikes, scooters and
skateboards, screaming down empty streets. Literally screaming, as if
they just escaped from prison.
“Three, two, one, go!” I heard a young neighbor yell the other day,
goading a sibling to speed over a tree limb they’d dragged into the
street, leading to a crunch of bike tires on branches followed by
shouts of “Whoooaaaa!”
And let’s be clear: It is heavenly. Actual voices! Kids! Couples!
Arguments! What I hear outside my home office window, or passing by
when I run, is the elevator music I never used to notice, and now
eagerly anticipate for connection and to mark the passage of time.
The Magic Hour is by no means unique to Sydney. It can’t be a
coincidence that the cheers for health workers in New York, the block
parties in San Francisco and the mass singing in Italy all tend to
occur just before dusk.
As sociologists are quick to note, many of us feel compelled to end
our days of pandemic loneliness with some kind of connection,
preferably outdoors.

It certainly is a new c21st that we find ourselves in. There is a
luminous and Fairy Tale feel to life in quarantine and as you know
most fairy tales have an oftentimes dark and dangerous and unspoken
undercurrent.
I sit in my study and its as if my hearing is sharpened. I hear the
Breeze, birdsong, Nature in its many forms and the urban background
noise which was once the constant accompaniment to daily life has
entirely retreated.
The Nights are dark, the stars are bright and the neighbiours long gone.
''You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years
ago, to what had been there always.”
Don DeLillo wrote "Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We
have minutes to live."

Political Reflections

Top U.S. scientist and research pioneer Dr. Judy Mikovits said she
cooperated with the FBI during an investigation of Dr. Anthony Fauci
and the National Institute of Health, alleging Fauci was a workplace
tyrant who was under investigation for swiping scientific research,
covering up tainted vaccines, doling out lucrative federal grants to
feckless cronies and much more.
These details warrant a host of NEW federal investigations to get to
the bottom of numerous Fauci-led schemes revealed by Dr. Mikovits on
the Thomas Paine Podcast.
Paine also detailed the FBI probe on the Moore Paine Show on Patreon.
Dr. Mikovits said Fauci helped imprison her after stealing her
proprietary research not once, but twice and her allegations against
the White House’s coronavirus top medical advisor and his government
cronies paint a disturbing portrait of widespread institutional
corruption. And greed.
The alarming allegations include: stealing research, covering up
tainted vaccines, fraud and much more.
And Fauci’s parent agency, the National Institute of Health is not the
only governmental agency involved in what amounts here to decades of
corruption gone awry. Listen above or to the backup feed below —

ANTHONY “TONY” FAUCI has become the scientific face of America’s
COVID-19 response, and he says the best evidence shows the virus
behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China.
Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, shot down the discussion that has been raging
among politicians and pundits, calling it “a circular argument” in a
conversation Monday with National Geographic.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out
there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning
toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately
manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time
strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped
species,” Fauci says.
Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an
alternate theory—that someone found the coronavirus in the wild,
brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
Fauci is most concerned that the United States will be put to the test
this fall and winter by a second wave of COVID-19 if the country does
not blunt the infection rate by the summer.
“Shame on us if we don't have enough tests by the time this so-called
return might occur in the fall and winter,” he says, advising that the
U.S. needs to make sure we not only have an adequate supply of tests
available before a second wave hits, but also a system for getting
those tests to the people who most need them.
“I don't think there's a chance that this virus is just going to
disappear,” he says. “It's going to be around, and if given the
opportunity, it will resurge.”
One reason for his confidence is the “impressive” results being seen
now in animals tested with a vaccine candidate made by Cambridge,
Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics, which brought it into human
trials in a record 42 days.
The candidate is what is known as an mRNA vaccine—a drug that uses
snippets of a virus’s genetic material—rather than the dead or
weakened virus itself—to build the proteins that trigger the body’s
protective immune response.
To date, no type of mRNA vaccine has been licensed for use in humans,
but Fauci believes there is great promise for this technology
targeting the coronavirus, based in part on his experience developing
treatments for HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s.
“For some reason that we're still struggling with, the body does not
make an adequate immune response to HIV,” he says. To fight off that
virus, a vaccine has to work better than the body’s own natural
response.
By contrast, “it's obvious that many people make a very adequate
immune response” to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the animal trials so far
show that modest doses of the mRNA vaccine for coronavirus have also
generated a strong immune response.
One topic in the news lately has been the origins of SAR-CoV-2. Do you
believe or is there evidence that the virus was made in the lab in
China or accidentally released from a lab in China?
If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what's out
there now is very, very strongly leaning toward this [virus] could not
have been artificially or deliberately manipulated—the way the
mutations have naturally evolved.
A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that
everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates
that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.

International Markets

Euro 1.0831
Dollar Index 99.869
Japan Yen 106.28
Swiss Franc 0.9732
Pound 1.2445
Aussie 0.6442
India Rupee 75.675
South Korea Won 1221.87
Brazil Real 5.5801
Egypt Pound 15.7469
South Africa Rand 18.3782

Dollar Smile In Reality: 2020 Global Recession resembles 2009 and puts
us in the $ haven regime. 2021 is set to see RoW growth outperform the
US meaning the broad $USD index should weaken. 2021 US GDP
expectations have to be revised markedly higher for this narrative to
change

Commodities

4/12 Interestingly, this period marked one of the worst decades for
this market in history. The contradiction between these numbers,
presumably more accurate, and the numbers “created” by the Chinese
communist government is undeniable.

At this point I would venture Gold is correlated to the #Coronavirus
which is set to turn parabolic and is already non linear and
exponential ~

Emerging Markets

Frontier Markets

Sub Saharan Africa

In this pandemic, we have quickly become acquainted with a new form of
witnessing, one that is both more collective and more remote than
ever.
From our various isolated “indoors,” blue LED screens have formed
small portals into violence, beauty, tragedy, and nonsense. More than
ever, we exist “in the discourse.”
The outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2, began in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which
ultimately suffered the highest toll in China—as of the end of April,
more than 84,000 confirmed cases and 3,200 deaths—by a wide margin.
The next highest number of cases has been 1,532, in Guangdong
Province, of which Guangzhou is the capital.
Wuhan’s city-wide lockdown, which sealed off 11 million people from
January 23, was finally lifted on April 7.
For the entire month of April, China has reported no more than a
hundred and fifteen new cases per day (with the exception of April 17,
when 352 new cases were added by a review board that retroactively
resolved duplicate and missing cases).
But as the country cautiously transitions toward some semblance of
normalcy, efforts to trace and control potential new outbreaks—like
that in Heilongjiang Province, which prompted authorities to seal off
the city of Mudanjiang and detain “any group of more than three
people”—remain as stringent as ever.
By April 11, the authorities in Guangzhou had identified one hundred
and nineteen “imported” cases of Covid-19, twelve of which concerned
nationals of African countries.
A cluster of local, non-imported infections in the city was traced to
a single African restaurant.
These incidents resulted in a severe crackdown, which may have led to
an uneven and chaotic interpretation of official policies as the
orders made their way down the bureaucracy.
One Togolese student was unable to find a place to stay when he was
evicted after his university shut down campus housing.
He took to sleeping under a bridge until he was chased away by police.
A Nigerian student was given just hours to evacuate his apartment and
forced into self-isolation at a designated quarantine hotel (often at
the “guest’s” own cost) even after testing negative for Covid-19.
 Sectioned-off sidewalks were barred to Africans. A McDonald’s
employee was pictured holding up a sign stating that the restaurant
was no longer serving black people.
These and many other similar incidents captured on phone cameras
traveled online across the world, along with a deluge of comments on
Chinese social media justifying such actions and repeating racist
stereotypes of Africans as “ungrateful” foreign migrants, carriers of
disease, and criminal elements.
Taken together, the experiences of Africans and the haunting chorus of
racism suggest that this was about more than simply pandemic
management.
The response from African states has been sharp and critical. The
controversy was widely framed as a diplomatic catastrophe for the
Chinese government, a “crisis in Sino-African relations” that
threatened to undo all the goodwill that might have been cultivated
through coronavirus-related donations that the Chinese government,
along with Chinese companies and philanthropic organizations, had made
to African countries over the past months.
The official response of several Chinese embassies tried to remind
African leaders of their countries’ “time-tested friendship,” and gave
assurances that an investigation was underway.
At the same time, Chinese diplomats advised their African counterparts
not to let certain media outlets exaggerate the situation and “drive a
wedge between China and Africa.”
These officials may have failed to understand how much of the
controversy was driven by a surge of popular outrage and demands for
accountability from netizens in Africa and the black diaspora.
They also seem to have under-estimated the groundswell at home: even
as the Chinese state appealed to Sino-African comity, a wave of
nativist, anti-black rhetoric in China swept it away.
In response to an address given by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao
Lijian that was posted by the People’s Daily, the top online comments
were overwhelmingly anti-immigrant and racist, many even criticizing
the Chinese government explicitly for bending over backward to please
foreigners.
It was “a rare moment in China,” as journalist Tony Lin noted, “when
nationalism lost, to racism.”
Censorship regimes with as much experience and sophistication as China
understand the physics of discourse: they know how nationalism, like a
flywheel, once set in motion, can generate great force and be
difficult to stop.
An information ecosystem “curated” by censors is inherently
imbalanced: it is the distorted remnant after some things have been
actively removed and others passively left intact.
Content even remotely related to independent popular mobilization,
say, is swiftly censored, while rhetoric that falls within the
approved discourse—sometimes anodyne, but sometimes dangerous and
hate-filled—is tolerated.
For example, Chinese authorities have left online anti-Muslim rhetoric
largely unchecked for years, because building a narrative of
separatist terrorism fomenting among the Muslim-dominant Uyghur
population of northwest China helped to strengthen public support for
greater surveillance and the notorious “re-education camps” in the
province of Xinjiang.
In 2017, a community of Hui—another predominantly Muslim ethnic
minority—in Hefei province came forward with a proposal to rebuild the
Nangang Mosque, a centerpiece of Hui culture and history first
established in the 1780s.
The new mosque was to be erected near a recently built, flashy
condominium complex. However, opposition to the project from
neighboring majority-Han people unleashed an online torrent of
anti-Muslim hate speech, culminating in threats to desecrate the
proposed site with a pig’s head and pigs’ blood.
This is how China’s censored discourse flywheel works. This
nationalism—of which the particularly virulent online anti-black
racism we’ve seen recently is a strain—though highly motivating and
thus politically useful, once it gains momentum, is difficult to
moderate.
It is also a paradox of itself. Nationalists, argues Chenchen Zhang,
an assistant professor of politics and international relations at
Queen’s University Belfast, orient themselves in such diametric
opposition to the West—here, they assign it the liberal values of the
“white left,” or what those in the US might call the “libs”—that they
end up employing much of the same language and ideas as right-wing
populist movements of North America and Europe.
The racism we see directed toward black people, immigrants, and
Muslims, as well as the misogyny, that have their source in far-right
Western groups, is replicated in the rhetoric of China’s digital
nationalists.
No question, China has its own, specific history of racisms. But the
modern form that Zhang highlights, which lives on the Internet,
permitted in effect by the “nationalism filter” insofar as it is
anti-Western, is distinct and new for how fast these images and words
can travel.
The sheer force of so many voices on so many portals, witnessing all
at once, yet seeing different things, makes everything so much more
flammable.
I have been to Guangzhou only once, for a brief few days five years
ago. Like most people, I witnessed the recent photos and videos via my
own quarantine portals—a laptop and a smartphone—from thousands of
miles away, in Nairobi, Kenya.
Here, I am a part of a Chinese diaspora in East Africa—a mirror-image
of the Africans in Guangzhou.
I watched what unfolded in Guangzhou with a multilayered discomfort,
that familiar progression of powerlessness, vulnerability, and
complicity.
First, a secondhand anxiety and firsthand shame at how blatant and
unapologetic these acts of racism were.
Second, a knot of dread: knowing that the tragedies unfolding in
Guangzhou would inevitably manifest, through the zero-sum logic of
identity politics, as a backlash against Chinese people living in
Kenya.
And then, finally, a discomfort about that discomfort, knowing that
being called a “chink” cannot possibly compare to being forced to pack
my bags, put on a mask, and sleep under a bridge. Being a member of a
diaspora often feels like a form of conscription.
Knowing how little I understood about this city I was watching from
afar, I embarked on a process to understand “Little Africa,” as
Guangzhou is sometimes known—not Guangzhou writ large, but
specifically the city’s relationship with its African diaspora, which
is the largest in China.
I learned that we must begin to speak of “Little Africa” in the past
tense. The official number of Africans in Guangzhou—though, arguably,
a vast underestimate, since it doesn’t take undocumented migrants into
account—has plummeted from 16,000 in 2014 to 4,500 this year.
Whatever “Little Africa” used to be, it is not anymore. But as I read
descriptions, watched documentaries and movies, dug up images of what
“Little Africa” used to look like, it became clear to me that much
more has been lost, beyond the numbered population.
I had not expected the research process to feel like mourning.
One of my favorite videos was a seven-minute, uncut introduction to a
documentary from 2014, posted by Roberto Castillo, a professor of
cultural studies at Lingnan University who studies race and
China–Africa relations.
He is filmed walking at night through a single stretch of open market
in Dengfeng, part of Yuexiu District where many Africans lived and
worked, as well as where some of the recent videos were taken.
The neon-pink fluorescents and backlit red awnings harmonize with what
I imagine to be the warm, humid air of tropical Guangdong.
Fruit stands, clothes racks, and suitcases spill into the walkway, and
as Castillo walks, mostly wordlessly, the people passing by form a
stunning carousel of humanity: a Muslim Chinese woman in a pink silk,
sequined hijab; an African man in a long, sand-toned kaftan; two
professorial black men in loose, silk shirts; right behind them, a
young black man wearing a glitzy cap; a bearded white man clutching
his backpack; a Uyghur man brushing sauce or oil on a row of charred
tilapia, while an African man waits for his fish. (Castillo stops to
point out that tilapia, grilled whole like this, is an “African”
preference; many Uyghurs started serving fish and chicken
“African-style” in the past few years.)
Castillo’s video captures a collage of voices: many “broken”
Englishes, Putonghua with a Guangdong accent, a “salaam aleikum,” a
mother yelling at child, and many other languages that I do not
understand.
Dengfeng, like other districts in Guangzhou where African migrants and
those from other parts of China, often ethnic minorities, mingled, was
a sociologist’s paradise: an intricate ecosystem totally indifferent
to its own diversity.
It was driven not by any extraneous force or overarching “mission,”
but rather by the complicated, imperfect, almost molecular human
forces of profit-seeking, love, pride, boredom, curiosity,
self-actualization, escape.
Of course, there was nothing romantic about “Little Africa.” Guangzhou
was, and is, quite literally, a place where outsiders are not allowed
to belong.
China is not a country of immigrants. Compared to North America and
Europe, where international migrants often make up 10–30 percent of a
country’s total population, the figure in China remains at only a
tenth of a percentage point, lower even than North Korea’s.
There are comparatively fewer pathways for work permits, permanent
residence, and naturalization than in other countries. (Only 7,356
permanent residence cards were issued between 2004 and 2014.)
In 2012, with the passage of the Exit–Entry Administration Law, which
mandated detention for up to sixty days for those caught working or
staying illicitly, along with a steep increase of fines, life in
Guangzhou became more perilous for many African migrants.
Some more vulnerable foreigners, especially those from the global
South, who often set out on their own, with little formal support or
safety nets, found themselves with no choice but to overstay their
visas and slip into an undocumented life.
(Castillo writes that these people will face incredible hardships in
the coming months, as China’s deployment of its tightening system of
bio-surveillance to manage the transition into post-epidemic life
becomes the norm.)
Any sense of belonging or home that Africans had been able to carve
out in Guangzhou—whether through networks and shared spaces with other
Africans or by integrating into Chinese society—existed in spite of
these circumstances.
For many, the city offered only a veneer of cosmopolitan hospitality.
The conditionality and fragility of these marginalized people’s place
in Guangzhou was always an inescapable reality.
We are reminded of this when we see those photos of young black men,
face masks on, standing with their packed belongings out on the
street.
There is a special horror in facing humiliation and ostracization as a
vulnerable minority, far from home.
Guangzhou remains, by Chinese standards, an outward-facing city that
offers opportunities to both international and Chinese migrants, which
is why many risk it all to go there.
Dengfeng and others were places where a plurality of identities—not
just “Chinese” or “African,” but Hui, Igbo, Pentecostal, atheist,
biology student, villager, entrepreneur, undocumented person, lover,
matriarch—could interact in unpredictable ways that defied the unified
message of officially sanctioned nationalism.
But last month, a draft revision of regulations that would broaden the
criteria for foreigners to obtain permanent residency sparked a sharp
racist backlash on Chinese social media.
“In a hundred years’ time, I don’t want China to have become like the
US, with all kinds of people mixed together,” wrote a Weibo user,
cited by the online magazine SixthTone, in a post that received over
22,000 likes.
“We Chinese people have a strong national sentiment. We have the same
ancestors, we’re all children of the Yellow Emperor, the same blood
courses through our veins.”
Amartya Sen wrote in his 2006 book Identity and Violence that the
counter to identity-based conflict is not “We are all the same,” but
rather, “We are diversely different.”
The reduction of humans to a single identity, he writes, not only
makes the world more volatile, but is too easily beholden to power.
Who gets to control which single identity “matters,” takes primacy
over all the rest, whether or not the individual even identifies with
it?
China is projecting broad messages of co-operation, especially in
service of the Belt and Road Initiative.
But these paradoxical forces—one outward-facing and positive, the
other inward-facing and negative—will surely work against each other.
The indifferent plurality of Guangzhou called the bluff of so-called
China–Africa “peace programs.” These well-intentioned aims to “bridge
the gap” between Africans and Chinese are still predicated on the
notion that, among our various identities, “Chinese” or “African”
naturally takes primacy.
Such binary ways of imagining China’s and Africa’s shared future serve
only to maintain the tensions in this relationship just below
flash-point, ready to be ignited by the next video.
The binary also contains its own asymmetry: Why does immigration only
get to flow in one direction? How is it that the Chinese diaspora
flourishes openly in Africa—according to one study, there are more
than 40,000 Chinese nationals in Kenya alone—but in China, Africans
are met with violent dehumanization?
Today, the flywheel has gained inertia. The Chinese diplomatic
community’s attempts to assure African governments of goodwill, to pin
blame on Western media, have failed to paper over the racist,
anti-immigrant invective on Chinese social media, exposing how potent
nativist ideas are, once set in motion.
The human wounds of humiliation, ostracization, and hatred will endure
longer than the official communiqués.
Ultimately, though, all of these narratives—whether the global glory
of the Belt and Road, or nationalists’ imagined “pure” China, or even
the destiny of Sino–African friendship—promise some form of
inevitability.
“Little Africa,” a fragile ecosystem of the margins, was the opposite
of inevitability. That window to a more complicated, ungovernable
shared future for Chinese and Africans—one that, right now, we might
not even be able to visualize—is closing.
The warm pink lights of Dengfeng’s night-market have faded from the
blue screen of my phone.

Lets Turn now to the defining Engagement of the last two decades for
SSA – The SSA China relationship.
And the entire China Africa relationship has been an extraordinary
exercise in Narrative Framing and linguistic control, accompanied by a
chorus of Party Hacks chirruping Hosannas at every turn amplifying
largely meaningless feel good Phrases artfully placed in the mouths of
our Politicians and our Newspapers. It is remarkable.
September has just set in Beijing, bringing with it refreshing breeze
and picturesque autumn scenery. And we are so delighted to have all of
you with us, friends both old and new, in this lovely season for the
reunion of the China-Africa big family at the 2018 Beijing Summit of
the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).
History follows its own rules and logic. With similar fate in the past
and a common mission, China and Africa have extended sympathy to and
helped each other throughout all the years. Together, we have embarked
on a distinctive path of win-win cooperation.
No one could hold back the Chinese people or the African people as we
march toward rejuvenation.
"The ocean is vast because it rejects no rivers."
“China had a singular and positive influence on Africa. It rebalanced
the demand side for Africa’s commodities and also bought those
commodities on a long-term basis. It was this which triggered the
African recovery some two decades ago, However, since then a
freewheeling China has favourited elites, has facilitated large-scale
looting via inflated infrastructure, some of which were white
elephants and has lumped the African citizen with the tab. How this
plays out is now the key to Sino-African relations going forward. A
Hambantota scenario would be problematic,” referring to the Sri Lankan
port which has been leased to China for 99 years.
Tavi Costa tweeted
1/12 The idealization of Chinese economic success has always been a
big scam. Throughout history we have had several similar examples of
communist countries that have reached unsustainable levels of internal
and external debt and have suffered marked collapses.
2/12 Para elaborar nessa proposição, considere a seguinte reflexão. De
acordo com o PIB publicado pelo governo chinês, a China foi
responsável por mais de 60% do crescimento econômico global desde
2008.
2/12 To elaborate on this proposition, consider the following
reflection. According to GDP published by the Chinese government,
China has accounted for more than 60% of global economic growth since
2008.
3/12 Com isso, ela passou a ser, incomparavelmente, a maior
importadora de commodities no mundo. Se caso o seu crescimento de PIB
tivesse sido tão expressivo, como justificaríamos a queda geral de
preços de commodities no mundo?
3/12 As a result, it has become, by far, the largest importer of
commodities in the world. If your GDP growth had been so expressive,
how would we justify the general drop in commodity prices in the
world?
4/12 Curiosamente, esse período marcou uma das piores décadas para
esse mercado na história. É incontestável a contradição entre esses
números, presumivelmente mais apurados, e os números “criados” pelo
próprio governo comunista Chinês.
4/12 Interestingly, this period marked one of the worst decades for
this market in history. The contradiction between these numbers,
presumably more accurate, and the numbers “created” by the Chinese
communist government is undeniable.
“China had a singular and positive influence on Africa. It rebalanced
the demand side for Africa’s commodities and also bought those
commodities on a long-term basis. It was this which triggered the
African recovery some two decades ago, However, since then a
freewheeling China has favourited elites, has facilitated large-scale
looting via inflated infrastructure, some of which were white
elephants and has lumped the African citizen with the tab. How this
plays out is now the key to Sino-African relations going forward. A
Hambantota scenario would be problematic,” referring to the Sri Lankan
port which has been leased to China for 99 years.
The Hambantota Moment has arrived
18-JUN-2018 :: So the first overarching Point, is that creditors are
not Santa Claus and miscues will exact a very heavy price, Countries
will be "Hambantota-ed"
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Some African governments who
are already bilaterally petitioning China for relief say Chinese
envoys are citing provisions in loan agreements that would transfer
collateral, in some cases strategic state assets, into Beijing’s
hands:
Basically China has an Option to buy in SSA Assets at fire-sale Prices.
Meanwhile, China is facing a rebellion at ground level.

There are literally hundreds of stories like this on Social Media.
Privileged Pro-China African Elites who are trying to defend the
Chinese Position are seeing their bona fides shredded in real time.
The entire WIN WIN Narrative Paraphernalia is being shredded as we
speak.

We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world.
Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ...
then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!

Rising cases of unexplained deaths have put Nigeria’s second-biggest
city of Kano at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Africa’s
most populous country.
Local news reports citing cemetery workers that emerged last month
revealed a spike in mysterious deaths in the city with an estimated 8
million residents.
Kano state Governor Abdullahi Ganduje initially blamed ailments such
as diabetes and malaria.
President Muhammadu Buhari extended the lockdown in the city, while
loosening restrictions on the biggest urban area, Lagos, and the
capital, Abuja.
An emergency team he sent to assess the situation pointed to the pandemic.
“Our careful observation and understanding indicated that coronavirus
is the cause of the mass deaths,” Nasiru Gwarzo, the head of the
presidential task force, told reporters on Sunday in the city.
While fewer than 50,000 of the approximately 3.5 million confirmed
cases of coronavirus worldwide are in Africa, the speed with which the
situation unraveled in Kano has heightened concern the virus has
spread undetected in other crowded cities on the continent.
Some hospitals in Kano have closed because health workers fear
contracting the disease as they lack protective equipment, while
others are taking in an increasing number of people with symptoms of
the virus, said Isa Abubakar, the director of the Centre for
Infectious Diseases and Research at Kano’s Bayero University.
People with other conditions, either unwilling or unable to seek
medical care, are dying at home.
“This disease has spread among almost every strata of our society,”
Abubakar said.
Lagos remains the hardest-hit part of Nigeria, recording 1,100
confirmed coronavirus cases as of Monday, about a third of the
nation’s total and three times as many as in Kano.
But there isn’t enough testing capacity in the city, which is a trade
hub for northern Nigeria and the Sahel, an arid area on the southern
fringe of the Sahara.
After Kano recorded its first case on April 11, testing was slow to
gain traction, with the lone laboratory testing for the virus closed
for five days after one of the workers was infected.
Two sites are now able to process about 300 samples a day, according
to Abubakar, and Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has donated a
clinic supposed to perform 1,000 tests by May 10.
“If Kano had the capacity of testing of Lagos, Kano would probably
surpass Lagos” in the number of cases, Abubakar said.
Critics of the state government say Governor Ganduje was slow to
shutter markets and mosques in the predominantly Muslim city at a time
when the central government and other regional authorities imposed
movement restrictions and social distancing.
Even as Abuja and Lagos went into lockdown on March 30, many people
were still able to travel to Kano city with the state government
“evidently unprepared to deal with a Covid-19 outbreak,” the
Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development said in a report.
Now the coronavirus has been detected even among the city’s street
kids, known as “almajiris,” who attend Islamic schools and often beg
for a living.
The Kano authorities have responded by sending many of these children
back to their home states, a move that has raised fears the infections
may be spreading further.
“We are now at great risk from what is happening in Kano,” said Kaduna
Governor Nasir el-Rufai, who recovered from Covid-19 last week. He
said 21 street boys sent to the state from Kano tested positive for
the virus.
A lack of record keeping and the speed with which burials take place
add to the difficulty of tracking the coronavirus in Kano, according
to Zainab Mahmoud, a Nigerian cardiology fellow at Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, who is part of a
team that investigated deaths in Kano between April 18-25.
The authorities are also struggling to persuade Kano’s inhabitants of
the seriousness of the outbreak and the need to change social norms.
“Part of the contributing factors in Kano is that people don’t really
believe that Covid-19 exists,” she said.

It’s high but doctors say the number doesn’t reflect spread of disease
among wider society because those tested were specifically selected,
referred by doctors after showing symptoms

The COVID19 is invisible but it has already defeated the most
expensive Aircraft carriers, it lurks everywhere and in silence

Madagascar is building a factory to mass-produce a drink that’s touted
by authorities and some African leaders as a ‘cure’ for Covid-19 even
though it hasn’t been clinically tested or approved by drug
regulators.
Sold as Covid-Organics, the drink contains extracts of the artimisia
annua plant, which is used to treat malaria.
The factory will be operational within a month, according to President
Andry Rajoelina. “Our researchers and scientists are doing the
necessary to make our coronavirus remedy a drug that meets the
standards,” he said on state TV.
The president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, has said he’s sending a
plane to Madagascar to fetch the tonic, and Rajoelina said on Twitter
that Equatorial Guinea’s vice minister for health had arrived in the
country to procure an unknown quantity.
Other countries that have shown interest are Senegal, Guinea-Bissau
and Comoros, Rajoelina said.

7 truck drivers yesterday out of 8 cases
5 from Kenya border entry
2 from Tanzania border entry
1 working at Tanzania border entry

Kenya

Reserves have been dependent on foreign debt flows last few years. Not
a good way to build them. In this case, debt immediately goes up by
KES 180b

Kenya reports a RECORD 45 new Coronavirus cases & one of its highest
hit rates EVER. 4.18% of 1,077 samples tested positive, as compared to
0.6% of 1,330 samples on 19th April. Total hit rate is 2.07%.
Total cases have SURGED 50% in 9 days.
CFR 11.7%
CRR 88.3%

Kenya plans a 1.5% digital tax on the value of online transactions,
according to proposals in the Finance Bill 2020, cashing in on a
nascent industry taking off amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The government in East Africa’s biggest economy will also start
levying a minimum gross sales tax of 1% and proposes a minimum tax for
all companies.
The draft measures will be presented to the National Assembly for a
first reading on Wednesday.
The minimum tax will require even loss-making firms to remit tax based
on their sales, according to Daniel Ngumy, a partner and head of the
tax department at Anjarwalla & Khanna, a Nairobi-based law firm.
The Capital Markets Authority will license and regulate private equity
and venture capital firms seeking access to public funds such as
pensions.
The bill proposes to establish a three-year voluntary tax disclosure
program through which taxpayers can disclose unpaid tax liabilities in
exchange for some relief on penalties and interest.
A 2.5% duty on the customs value for goods manufactured in
export-processing zones that are sold in the domestic market.
The Retirement Benefits Authority will receive powers to penalize
pension funds that fail to submit actuarial valuation reports within
the specified periods.