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Morning
Africa
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Register and its all Free.
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“Derivatives,” Alvin said. “I don’t speculate about the future, I trade it.” @NewYorker
World Of Finance
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And they were cross‑linked and interwoven and resold in large bundles, “future on future,” Alvin said, handing me a paper towel.
“Forget about the forces of the free market, my friend. Commodity prices no longer refer to any value, past or present—they’re just ghosts from the future.”
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
World Of Finance
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Build a circus and the clowns will come. @NorthmanTrader
World Of Finance
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The Markets Are Wilding
World Of Finance
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Only you know...@hendry_hugh
World Of Finance
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09-MAY-2021 The Markets The Lotos-eaters
World Of Finance
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"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
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The generational difference between people who are looking for ladders and people who are looking for trampolines @kevinroose
Misc.
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27 NOV 17 :: "Wow! What a Ride!"
World Currencies
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8 JAN 18 :: The Crypto Avocado Millenial Economy.
World Of Finance
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The ‘’Zeitgeist’’ of a time is its defining spirit or its mood. Capturing the ‘’zeitgeist’’ of the Now is not an easy thing because we are living in a dizzyingly fluid moment.
Paul Virilio has said ‘Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth’ and he is not wrong.
The most extreme example of this virus style [millenial] behaviour has been in the crypto-currency markets.
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Tsavo East National Park is one of the oldest and largest parks in Kenya at 13,747 square kilometres.
Africa
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Situated in a semi-arid area previously known as the Taru Desert it opened in April 1948, and is located near the town of Voi in the Taita-Taveta County of the former Coast Province.
The park is divided into east and west sections by the A109 road and a railway.
Named for the Tsavo River, which flows west to east through the national park, it borders the Chyulu Hills National Park, and the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania.
Inside Tsavo East National Park, the Athi and Tsavo rivers converge to form the Galana River. Most of the park consists of semi-arid grasslands and savanna.
It is considered one of the world's biodiversity strongholds, and its popularity is mostly due to the vast amounts of diverse wildlife that can be seen, including the famous 'big five' consisting of lion, black rhino, cape buffalo, elephant and leopard.
The park is also home to a great variety of bird life such as the black kite, crowned crane, lovebird and the sacred ibis. T
Tsavo East National Park is generally flat, with dry plains across which the Galana River flows. Other features include the Yatta Plateau and Lugard Falls.
Tsavo West National Park is more mountainous and wetter, with swamps, Lake Jipe and the Mzima Springs. It is known for birdlife and for its large mammals. It is also home to a black rhino sanctuary.[4]
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The "Lunatic Express" Mombasa Nairobi Railway just outside the Entrance to Tsavo East
Africa
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Our daily aerial patrols ensure threatened and vulnerable wild animals living in the Tsavo Conservation Area remain protected from human activities. So that with each new day, our natural world has a chance to flourish. @SheldrickTrust
Africa
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Young leopard in #Tsavo East this morning. I saw hundreds of Buffalo, scores of elephant, kudu, hippo, hartebeest, birds, tawny grass, swathes of green - between Malindi and Manyani. @TheHorseCure
Africa
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Tsavo East National Park. Photo by Justyna @kenyapics
Africa
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Tim strolling through a Yellow Fever tree forest in the Tsavo via @David_Yarrow
Africa
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Elephants Tsavo West @finchhattons You hear them first.
Africa
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A late evening encounter with Elephants at Mzima Springs Tsavo West @Finchhattons
Africa
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''The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower." - Roberto Bolano, 2666 Sunset in the Tsavo @MagicalKenya
Africa
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The train station. Somewhere in England. @London_W4
Misc.
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The Pandemic is a Portal
World Of Finance
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East London @London_W4
Misc.
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Something that absolutely blows my mind is that almost all complex life on Earth arose about 540 million years ago—when the planet was already 88.2% its present age. @ThePlanetaryGuy
Misc.
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We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. DON DELILLO, Point Omega
Misc.
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Sic transit gloria mundi It has been interpreted as "Worldly things are fleeting''
Misc.
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Political Reflections
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Russia has refused airspace access to Austrian Airlines because airline would have avoided Belarus’ airspace on its scheduled Vienna-Moscow flight — latest escalation in a rapidly developing aviation political row. @AlexInAir
Law & Politics
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Those who voted for Boris Johnson, the arch populist, invested in his personality and not his politics. After all, what are his politics? That's why he can fend off so many brickbats. It's a bit like a cult. @Otto_English
Law & Politics
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Actually this is a bug @BorisJohnson Trump @narendramodi @jairbolsonaro
Law & Politics
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Political decision-making is now driven by often weaponized babble. @FukuyamaFrancis
Law & Politics
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States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”
Law & Politics
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Ibn Khaldun explained the intrinsic relationship between political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period in his book Muqaddimah
Historically, such pandemics had the capacity to overtake “the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration” and, in the process, challenged their “power and curtailed their [rulers’] influence...”
Rulers who are only concerned with the well-being of their “inner circle and their parties” are an incurable “disease”.
States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”
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“Politics has become a pantomime or vaudeville in that it creates waves of anger rather than argument. Maybe people like Trump are successful simply because they fuel that anger, in the echo chambers of the internet.”
Law & Politics
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“My take on Trump is that he is an inevitable creation of this unreal normal world,” Adam Curtis says.
“Politics has become a pantomime or vaudeville in that it creates waves of anger rather than argument. Maybe people like Trump are successful simply because they fuel that anger, in the echo chambers of the internet.”
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The @Dominic2306 circus is an indictment of the entire governing class @guardian @chakrabortty
Law & Politics
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And a grateful press hyped up the coming “Domageddon”, describing him as the “terrifying” kamikaze genius prepared to slay the prime minister or, at the very least, detonate Matt Hancock for “lying”.
“It’s a full-on knife fight,” frothed one insider at the Evening Standard.
Another source whispered hoarsely to the Sunday Times: “Dominic has copies of everything and knows where all the bodies are buried.”
And, my, aren’t there a lot of bodies. More than 150,000 Britons have been killed by Covid: the equivalent in deaths of a twin towers terrorist attack happening on these shores every week for a year.
Well over a million people report suffering long Covid, with one in six so ill they cannot carry out daily tasks.
Forget the blame game being played on Downing Street, this is an indictment of an entire governing class: lethal in its complacency, cocksure despite its manifest inadequacy, and forever blocking its eyes and ears to the lessons from history, or even the TV pictures from hospitals across northern Italy.
The result is that Johnson’s UK stands alongside Donald Trump’s US as a cautionary tale of what happens when a ragtag bunch of cash-in merchants, state-haters and incompetent braggarts are allowed to run a country in grave danger.
The prime minister, who claims to be led by “data, not dates”, also promises we are on a “one-way road to freedom”.
Both things cannot be true, as proved by the minutes of the last Sage meeting held two weeks ago.
Discussing the new variant, scientists agreed that it was a “realistic possibility” that it is “as much as 50% more transmissible” than the previous Kent strain.
In that case, the minutes record, for Johnson to press on with his road map “would lead to a substantial resurgence of hospitalisations”.
The potential is lethal, as observed by Deepti Gurdasani, clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London:
“Thousands may well die just because huge numbers will get infected, even if the risk of death for each person is low.”
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‘You’re a mutant virus, I’m the immune system and it’s my job to expel you from the organism.’ OCTOBER 30, 2014 BY DOMINIC CUMMINGS The Hollow Men II
Law & Politics
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1. Complexity makes prediction hard. Our world is based on extremely complex, nonlinear, interdependent networks (physical, mental, social).
Properties emerge from feedback between vast numbers of interactions: for example, the war of ant colonies, the immune system’s defences, market prices, and abstract thoughts all emerge from the interaction of millions of individual agents.
Interdependence, feedback, and nonlinearity mean that systems are fragile and vulnerable to nonlinear shocks:
‘big things come from small beginnings’ and problems cascade, ‘they come not single spies / But in battalions’.
Prediction is extremely hard even for small timescales. Effective action and (even loose) control are very hard and most endeavours fail.
Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?
Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.
Politics therefore suffers from a surfeit of narcissists.
The occupants of No10, like Tolstoy’s characters in War and Peace, are blown around by forces they do not comprehend as they gossip, intrigue, and babble to the media.
The MPs and spin doctors steer their priorities according to the rapidly shifting sands of the pundits who they are all spinning, while the pundits shift (to some extent unconsciously) according to the polls.
The outcome? Everybody rushes around in tailspins assembling circular firing squads while the real dynamics of opinion play out largely untouched by their conscious actions.
In terms of a method to ‘manage’ government, it is not far from tribal elders howling incantations around the camp fire after inspecting the entrails of slaughtered animals.
It makes no sense because it is not based on the real world. Because of this systemic dysfunction, the rest of us get repeatedly ‘Macked’.
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04-JAN-2021 :: we are witnessing massive decline in the cognitive capacity of leadership an Era of gobbledygook debate, a moment of complete combustion.
Law & Politics
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Goldmans | Coronavirus Trackers Globally, new COVID-19 infections are at 544k @PriapusIQ
Misc.
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Re-rising new cases are reported in Asian countries, including Japan, Thailand, Korea and India.
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28-MAR-2021 :: The Virus remains an exogenous uncertainty that is still not resolved #COVID19
Misc.
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COVID19 posted two record high weeks of Infections and then declined -4% and -12% and -14% in the 3 following weeks
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The rates of confirmed cases are high and continue to increase in several South American countries. @MaxCRoser
Misc.
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Countries w/ high avg COVID-19 growth rate (daily/total) @jmlukens
Misc.
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Taiwan: 13.49%
Maldives: 3.01%
Trinidad and Tobago: 2.85%
Thailand: 2.55%
Cambodia: 2.02%
Sri Lanka: 2.02%
Nepal: 1.63%
Uruguay: 1.44%
Malaysia: 1.33%
Bahrain: 1.28%
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''Viruses exhibit non-linear and exponential characteristics''
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A statement as much about network connectivity as it is about the relative fitness of the variant. Though the two are somewhat inextricably linked. @pmholling
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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Professor Allen Bartlett
Misc.
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Looking across these nine states, the current ranking of logistic growth rate seems to be B.1.617 > P.1 > B.1.1.7 > B.1.526 > B.1.351. @trvrb
Misc.
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Public Health England data shows that B.1.617.2, a coronavirus variant first found in India, continues to surge: 6,959 cases so far, an increase of 103% from last week @BNODesk
Misc.
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UK Covid cases are up 20.5% week on week. Today 3,542 new cases have been recorded.
Misc.
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Yesterday the most recent seven-day total was 18% up on the previous week.
India Covid variant now dominant and could account for up to 75% of new cases, says Hancock
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27 May 2021 Risk assessment for SARS-CoV-2 variant: VOC-21APR-02 (B.1.617.2) @PHE_uk
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《Daily new cases in Okinawa, Hokkaido, Tokyo and Osaka/million》@Kleidsesulpice
Misc.
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We can't check our government from rushing headlong toward the Tokyo Olympics. It'll certainly be a petri dish for new variants, bc: 1. Vaccines are not almighty. 2. The ferocious variant B.1.617 is
《Daily new cases in Okinawa, Hokkaido, Tokyo and Osaka/million》
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“Dehshat hai. (It’s a horror.)”
Misc.
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09-MAY-2021 :: Benito Modi whose hyper incompetence even the Die Hard BJP ''Deadenders'' are finding it impossible to defend
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Mumbai Remarkably, the total number of infections Mumbai has seen since the pandemic began may be approaching the total number of residents in the city. @TheWireScience @muradbanaji
Misc.
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A difficult question is how many new infections have so far occurred during this surge. Estimates suggest that 20% to 45% of the city’s people were infected during this wave.
Remarkably, the total number of infections Mumbai has seen since the pandemic began may be approaching the total number of residents in the city.
This does not mean that almost everyone has been infected. It hints that reinfections could have been quite common, especially in the slums and during this wave.
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Modi has finished any chance that India may have had to catching up with China. That race is now so over. @sonaliranade
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Even if Modi doesn’t make any more blunders we will finish 2024 more or less at par with 2019 in terms of GDP plus or minus 5%.
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The accelerated growth was "a fantastically crafted fiction," according to Prasad, Blood and Soil in @narendramodi's India @NewYorker
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The investigation of the origins of COVID is producing a “hard fork” in our attitudes toward journalism.
Misc.
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The investigation of the origins of COVID is producing a “hard fork” in our attitudes toward journalism.
On the one hand are those who seek factual truth. On the other those who evaluate knowledge of reality chiefly in terms of its political effects
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There is no natural pathway for the Evolution of COVID19.
Misc.
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Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists and WHO will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19.
It is remarkable that the Propaganda is still being propagated more than a year later.
Those who have chosen to propagate this narrative are above the radar and in plain sight and need to be called to account.
The Utter Failure to call these 5th columnists to Account is the clearest Signal that there is no external threat because it is already on the inside.
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01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19
Misc.
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“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”
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A leading respiratory physician who made an evidence-based comment that Covid is airborne has been banned from Twitter and told his account will be deleted. His appeal was unsuccessful. This is Orwellian and dangerous @/trishgreenhalgh
Misc.
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A virulent plague that “travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire”. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
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From the Notebook: Archegos Bikini Atolls @TFL1728 H/T @sajeedsacranie
Misc.
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Do you remember the end of Dr. Strangelove? When the Russian ambassador reveals the existence of the Doomsday device Strangelove makes the point that such weapons only have deterrent power if everyone knows about them.
Secret weapons have no ability to deter cataclysmic violence.
The reply from the Russian ambassador is one for the ages, “It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday.”
Remember this when we consider the curious question of the demise of Archegos Capital.
Instead, the stock that Archegos was long would be “owned” by its prime broker, the same entity that allowed it to enter into TRS in the first place.
As such Archegos also never had any disclosure requirements, allowing it to transact completely in the dark while being fully compliant with SEC disclosure requirements – since it didn’t own the underlying stock, Archegos did not have to disclose it.
As Bloomberg adds, at several points during those exchanges, bankers implored Hwang to buy himself breathing room by selling some stocks and raising cash to post collateral. But “he wouldn’t budge.” [emphasis mine]
So I have to ask the question, “If you were the Chinese and you were now in a hybrid war with the U.S. how would you send a message back across the Pacific?”
This state of hybrid war, in effect a proxy for a direct military World War III began with the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and has been escalating for years.
The entire Trump administration was one big hybrid war exercise of asymmetric attacks on each others’ capital markets and internal domestic policies — sanctions, counter-sanctions, tariffs, currency manipulations, etc.
Would you send warships some place or would you attack our credit markets?
Or more importantly would you plant literal financial tac nukes across multiple sectors of the financial world to combat any big push from the U.S. and Europe to foment a financial crisis on the eve of a conflict going kinetic?
If you were China how would you defend against that? By creating asymmetric time bombs that blow back on western capital markets the second the dollar begins to drain overseas liquidity.
To quote Zerohedge, “Simple and brilliant.”
In any prelude to kinetic war there is always a financial war that precedes it.
First give the world excessive amounts of easy money and allow overseas export markets to overlever to supply U.S. consumption markets, then pull the punch bowl away and watch the cheap dollars become albatrosses around their necks.
Welcome to Russia and SE Asia in 1997-99, Turkey in 2018, etc.
If I’m China, I allow Archegos to go poof and then watch the plumbing of the financial West clog up like the Suez was last week.
This is how you play the real game. And I would be shocked if this is the only family office nuclear time bomb out there.
Which, when you think of it that way, was exactly the point of the lesson Archegos just taught everyone. The Party Congress on Monday announced this to the world.
boom.
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9-NOV-2020 :: The Single biggest Issue remains how Biden engages with the Algorithmic Master [Blaster] and Sun Tzu Maestro
Law & Politics
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''The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting''
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Xi Jinping is both Sun Tzu ‘'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting'' And hard edged at the same time.
Law & Politics
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That big thing may be that he who rules Taiwan rules the world @bopinion @nfergus
Law & Politics
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The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
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The Ukraine – Taiwan Risk Connectivity @Convertbond
Law & Politics
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I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. @RobertGReeve
Information & Communication Technology
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I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.
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First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again. @RobertGReeve
Information & Communication Technology
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But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.
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Your apps collect a ton of data from your phone. Your unique device ID. Your location. Your demographics. Weknowdis. @RobertGReeve
Information & Communication Technology
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Data aggregators pay to pull in data from EVERYWHERE. When I use my discount card at the grocery store? Every purchase? That's a dataset for sale.
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If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I'm in regular contact with. @RobertGReeve
Information & Communication Technology
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The advertisers can cross-reference my interests and browsing history and purchase history to those around me. It starts showing ME different ads based on the people AROUND me. Family. Friends. Coworkers. @RobertGReeve
Information & Communication Technology
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I never cared about this until recently having had a traumatic breakup and suddenly every single ad is about a dating app... Pretty hurtful and tiring. @Retrodibus
Information & Communication Technology
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International Markets
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61.7% labor participation rate. This is not a "tight labor market". It is a subsidized unemployment mechanism due to stimulus checks. @dlacalle_IA
World Of Finance
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In 1929, President Herbert Hoover assured the country that things were already “back to normal,” Liaquat Ahamed writes in Lords of Finance
World Of Finance
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#US10Y $TNX US Govt Bonds 10-Year Yield @TeslaThings
World Of Finance
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ
World Currencies
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Euro 1.2171
Dollar Index 90.15
Japan Yen 109.894
Swiss Franc 0.8988
Pound 1.4177
Aussie 0.7725
India Rupee 72.462
South Korea Won 1115.55
Brazil Real 5.2393
Egypt Pound 15.6837
South Africa Rand 13.8150
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Dollar Index Chart INO 90.139
World Currencies
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Euro versus the Dollar Chart 1.2172
World Currencies
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$BTC @DogeSOL 36,750.00 [I expect a Re Test of 30,000 over next 4 week period]
World Currencies
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We need to get out of that range for bull to resume, trade with caution @RemiGMI
World Of Finance
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Avocados have been a better store of value than Bitcoin during this rout. @tracyalloway
World Currencies
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Ponzi algos "AI" bots are everywhere. they are super smart, running the stops. & front the leaked news & pump'n dump & dump'n pump @kerberos007
World Of Finance
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As I write this on the 3rd of January 2021 $BTC has touched 35,000.00 in a parabolic shift higher
World Currencies
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Conclusions
Markets when they retreat always fall much much further than expectations.
I recall Russian Prins falling from 60+ to 6.
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09-MAY-2021 :: The liquidity of this complex is illusory, as the reflexivity embedded within creates a lurking shadow convexity that is vulnerable to predatory flows. @FadingRallies
World Of Finance
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It was the second wave that killed the dip buyers the most @sunchartist
World Currencies
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Crypto Dip being bought is not much different from the Asian financial crisis (central govt raising rates to protect currency) and the pre-GFC selloff (the entire subprime was $600 bln small in the scheme of things)
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What the Heck Is Hodl? Bitcoin Lingo for Crypto Noobs
World Of Finance
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''Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro."
Misc.
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Commodity Markets at a Glance WSJ
Commodities
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04-JAN-2021 :: What Will Happen In 2021 I expect Gold to top $2,500 this year and Silver to reach $50.00
Commodities
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28-MAR-2021 :: GOLD HAS COMPLETED ITS CONSOLIDATION AND IS HEADED BACK TO ATHS
Commodities
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There is an almost perfect relationship between the price of #gold and the real bond #yield. ('yes', levels!) @jsblokland
Commodities
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09-MAY-2021 The Markets The Lotos-eaters Gold and Silver Have finally got the Big MO
Commodities
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Crude Oil Chart INO 66.93
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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One senses that the caretakers of coronavirus on the continent are very nervous. The Indian variant has a foothold. Might it scale? @Africa_Conf
Africa
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09-MAY-2021 Africa might be casting a weary glance over its shoulder at India and would certainly be prudent to do so.
Africa
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''Viruses exhibit non-linear and exponential characteristics''
Africa
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Africa is currently reporting a million new infections about every 96 days @ReutersGraphics
Africa
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Average number of new infections reported each day in Uganda rises by more than 120 over the last 3 weeks, 17% of its previous peak
Average number of new infections reported in Réunion each day reaches new high: Now reporting more than 1,000 daily
South Africa reports highest number of new infections since January
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359,237 Active COVID-19 Cases in Africa @BeautifyData
Africa
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Active #Covid19 cases record 520,000 was in January 2021 @NKCAfrica
Africa
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Was Africa spared from the pandemic? Clearly not. @fibke
Africa
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Check out these latest excess death estimates for large countries in SSA
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Drinking The Kool Aid
Africa
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The average (7-day rolling average) test positivity rate in South Africa has now breached the 10% level, and increasing @rid1tweets
Africa
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Seychelles’s Covid Mysteries Pit Anti-Vaxxers Against Scientists @BW
Africa
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For epidemiologists, the past year and a half has been a voyage of discovery. Recently their journey aboard SARS-CoV-2 took an unexpected turn toward Seychelles, a palm-fringed archipelago in the Indian Ocean with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.
A country that few could pinpoint on a map suddenly became internet-famous as the most vaccinated nation on Earth, with 64% of the population having received the requisite two shots.
Yet to the surprise of virologists—and the dismay of the government, which had been counting on the immunization drive to reopen the tourism-dependent economy—the infection count has been ticking up.
As of May 13 a third of active cases—about 900 in all—were among residents who’d been fully vaccinated.
Vaccine skeptics pronounced themselves vindicated, while international health experts have been scrambling to answer a host of questions without the benefit of robust data.
Did one or both of the vaccines used in Seychelles fail? Has herd immunity not been reached? Is the nation grappling with a more infectious variant capable of evading the defenses that certain types of vaccines provide?
“So what’s going on?” asked Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity at the Sydney campus of the University of New South Wales, during an online presentation on May 18.
“It’s probably that the herd immunity threshold hasn’t been reached, plus or minus, if it’s the South African variant in there.”
The answers to the questions MacIntyre and other experts are posing may influence the future course of the pandemic.
For starters, the tiny nation has become a test case for two of the world’s most widely used vaccines.
In the Seychelles, 57% of the vaccinated population received Sinopharm’s shot, and 43% got the Covishield vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc.
Sinopharm’s inoculation has been donated or sold to countries around the globe, including Indonesia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe;
Covishield makes up the bulk of shots distributed to poor nations in Africa and elsewhere through the Covax initiative, which seeks to make vaccine distribution more equitable.
What’s happening in Seychelles is very different from the experience of Israel, the second-most vaccinated nation, where Covid-19 infections have plummeted.
The contrast could yield crucial insights into the efficacy of the different types of immunizations.
In Israel the dominant vaccine was the messenger ribonucleic acid shot made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
The pandemic has seen mRNA vaccines— Moderna Inc. makes another—being used in scale for the first time.
Data from clinical trials so far suggest they are better at stopping Covid, tackling variants, and preventing the virus from spreading in the community.
Sinopharm’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines rely on more traditional methods, and their shots have been shown to have lower efficacy in studies.
What’s also apparent, so far, is that though there’s been a surge in cases in Seychelles, very few people are getting seriously ill.
“We have only a few people needing intensive care. Two out of 40” in hospitals, said Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan in a May 10 interview.
“The vaccine will protect people from getting serious symptoms.”
Still, more answers are needed. The government hasn’t disclosed what vaccine was administered in the breakthrough cases that make up a third of the total count.
No agency has done any genomic sequencing to determine which variant is dominant on the islands, though the one first identified in South Africa, B.1.351, was detected in Seychelles in February.
On May 13, Jude Gedeon, the country’s public-health commissioner, said samples were to be sent to the Kenya Medical Research Institute for testing.
The World Health Organization is also taking action. “We are very concerned, and we are sending a multidisciplinary team there to help the Seychelles government address the situation,” says Richard Mihigo, program area manager for immunization and vaccine development at the WHO’s regional office for Africa in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo.
“We are also in discussion with the government to conduct a vaccine effectiveness study.”
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A sign for social distancing in Seychelles on Jan. 12. PHOTOGRAPHER: LI YAN/XINHUA/GETTY IMAGES @BW
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File this under shocking connections worth further exploration: @JordanSchachtel
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel (now a billionaire equity shareholder) was previously CEO of bioMérieux.
bioMérieux's founder, Alain Mérieux, is a personal friend of Xi Jinping, & he helped build the P4 lab in Wuhan.
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Moderna also happened to have a vaccine ready to go within hours of China publicizing gene sequence for virus. Recall, bio tech company had ZERO products brought to market prior to its "miracle" mRNA vax @JordanSchachtel
Misc.
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Moderna also happened to have a vaccine ready to go within hours of China publicizing gene sequence for virus. Recall, the bio tech company had ZERO products brought to market prior to its "miracle" mRNA vax receiving emergency approval
Prior to mRNA vax, Moderna was on its way to becoming the next Theranos. They had billions of $$$ in fundraising thanks to hype, but no functioning products. We are now supposed to believe they solved it in a matter of hours, after a decade of failures.
To highlight the bond between Merieux and China, check out this article about Merieux receiving a prestigious award from the CCP while Xi was in attendance.
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Seychelles receives tourists three times its population every year.
Tourism, Travel & Transport
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Oct 31, 2015 The Beach The Seychelles
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Nyiragongo’s fury A frightening night in Goma under its erupting volcano @TheEconomist
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A decade of "semiotic arousal" when everything, it seemed, was a sign, a harbinger of some future radical disjuncture or cataclysmic upheaval.
Africa
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US is right to impose sanctions on Ethiopia @FT
Africa
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The Biden administration’s patience has snapped with Ethiopia, an important US ally in Africa.
Washington imposed visa restrictions this week on as yet-unnamed Ethiopian and Eritrean officials, saying they had “taken no meaningful steps to end hostilities” in a brutal six-month war in the Tigray region.
The US also put curbs on economic and security assistance, though humanitarian aid — which accounts for most of the $1bn it spends in Ethiopia each year — will continue.
Washington is right to get tough. The UK and Europe should follow suit.
Under Abiy Ahmed, the once-lauded prime minister and winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, the Ethiopian government has been responsible for appalling atrocities in Tigray.
There is near-incontrovertible evidence of civilian massacres, rape, looting and destruction of property, including schools, hospitals and churches.
This has been perpetrated by Ethiopian troops as well as by fighters from the neighbouring country of Eritrea, who were given virtual carte blanche to act as they pleased.
There are also credible accounts of atrocities perpetrated by forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the party now fighting a guerrilla war against the central government.
Still, even if the TPLF can meaningfully be designated a terrorist organisation as the Ethiopian government insists, there can be no justification for the atrocities being committed by the Ethiopian state.
Targeted sanctions can work. The international community did not act swiftly enough when the then TPLF-led government rigged the 2005 election and shot protesters in their hundreds. It should have.
John Prendergast, former director for African affairs at the US National Security Council, this week gave testimony to Congress in which he argued that US intervention helped bring an end to the senseless Ethiopia-Eritrean war in 2000.
He also argued persuasively that carefully targeted Magnitsky sanctions, which go beyond those the US has so far imposed on Ethiopia by including asset freezes, had helped prevent war crimes in several African countries.
The objective of the latest measures is to convince Abiy’s government to start a peace dialogue with the TPLF, which enjoys genuine popular support in Tigray despite all its past brutalities.
Plenty of governments have negotiated with designated terrorist organisations before. Abiy must also make good on his promise to expel Eritrean troops.
The first step must be to end what appears to be a cynical pact with Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s dictator, to destroy the TPLF.
Addis Ababa has already angrily rejected US sanctions as interference in its internal affairs.
Everything must be done to avoid Ethiopia, a country that strategically dominates the Horn of Africa, sliding towards pariah status.
It would be a mistake, for example, to end the current IMF programme. Nor should sanctions be deployed to scupper liberalisation of the telecoms sector, a development that could profoundly improve both the economic and political lives of Ethiopia’s 114m people.
Only a few years ago, for all the queasiness about the violence unleashed by the TPLF-led government, the international community held Ethiopia up as an economic model for Africa.
It had wracked up two decades of Asian-style growth and lifted tens of millions from penury.
Abiy was seen as a progressive leader who could take the country further by grafting political pluralism on to broadly successful economic policies. That hope is now barely flickering.
Ending the violence in Tigray is the first step if the hope is ever to be revived.
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.@PMEthiopia has launched an unwinnable War on Tigray Province.
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[Dissolution risk is blinking amber] A fiendishly complicated task fending off the centrIfugal forces which are tearing Ethiopia apart @PMEthiopia has lost this battle
Africa
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"Rather than stay home and be slaughtered, you must fight." @rcoreyb
Africa
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Africa
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“Deepening divisions” Janes Intelligence Review May edition @japanizar & @JordTAnderson
Africa
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Delayed Ethiopian poll likely to be disrupted by ongoing conflict Janes Intelligence Review May edition @japanizar & @JordTAnderson
Law & Politics
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Ethiopia’s general election, originally scheduled for August 2020 but delayed amid the Covid-19 pandemic, is set for 5 June.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is looking to secure a mandate for his Prosperity Party (PP), formed in November 2019 out of the parties in Ethiopia’s former ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), with the exception of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with which he went to war in November 2020.
The conditions for holding the polls are worse than in 2020.
Despite limited testing, by 20 April the Ministry of Health had recorded a cumulative total of almost 250,000 Covid-19 cases in a country with a population of more than 100 million.
Separately, on 23 March Abiy told parliament that the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) was “in a major fight on eight fronts” against armed groups in north and west Ethiopia.
These fronts include the conflict in the Tigray region, where forces working with the ENDF – Amhara special forces and militia, and Eritrean troops – are fighting forces aligned with the TPLF, the region’s former ruling party that Abiy replaced at the end of November 2020 with PP affiliates as the transitional administration.
The ENDF is also combating an insurgency by the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in western and southern Oromia.
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There was the coup in Mali, African Union (AU) said nothing. Then the coup in Chad happened, again they said nothing. Then the second coup in Mali 9 months later. It's clear now, coups have fully returned to Africa, God save us @JibrinIbrahim17
Law & Politics
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Security and intelligence: What would it take to stabilise Cabo Delgado? @dailymaverick
Law & Politics
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Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province is caught up in a security challenge that has captured global attention.
The situation endangers tens of thousands of lives and has destabilised northern Mozambique. It also potentially threatens foreign direct investment in large-scale infrastructure, mining, exploration and other projects in the entire southern Africa region.
At the root of the conflict is a governance challenge that includes allegations of deeply entrenched corruption in the ruling party, the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO).
Poor governance and state absence have antagonised the local population and left a security vacuum.
Stabilising northern Mozambique will require a people- rather than security-centric strategy that tackles the security, humanitarian, political, economic, social and religious aspects of the insurgency.
In the short term, the attacks need to be contained and the violent extremists driven out of the areas they occupy, such as the strategic port of Mocimboa da Praia.
Substantial aid and support are urgently needed to respond to the humanitarian tragedy caused by the recent attacks during which 30,500 people were displaced.
Overall, the insurgency has caused 2,838 deaths, of which 1,500 were civilians, and displaced more than 700,000 people.
To restore security, Mozambique’s government should develop a detailed intelligence picture on funding, arms sources, local collaborators and supporters and external linkages.
A 24-hour intelligence, policing and operations centre in the country’s north is needed, informed by ongoing land, sea and air surveillance systems.
The SADC technical team indeed recommends establishing a Regional Coordination Mechanism and a Joint Intelligence Fusion Centre.
Without intelligence and a detailed understanding of the context, security and development cannot follow.
Mozambique requires a security capacity (police and military) stationed in Cabo Delgado that can quickly move by road, air and sea throughout the region and along the Tanzanian border.
These security forces also need to patrol and secure the coastline.
Along with boots on the ground, the most important element of SADC’s intervention should be regional cooperation in intelligence gathering and border management.
The maritime smuggling routes that enable the illicit economy in the region also need to be closed down.
It is unclear to what extent the insurgency is funded by the extensive criminal networks that transport heroin in bulk from Afghanistan by sea down Africa’s East coast for onward smuggling into Europe.
But 2018 research in northern Mozambique detailed links between the insurgents and a substantial illicit economy with ties to “political figures, the ruling party and their elite criminal associates.”
Institute for Security Studies research on Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin has shown that demobilisation is vital in dealing with violent extremism.
Mozambique’s government and its partners must take a proactive and holistic approach.
Formal screening and profiling are needed to ensure that innocents are reintegrated, and those with a criminal record are processed through the justice system.
To effectively counter radicalisation at community level in Cabo Delgado, the Mozambican government should pursue broad consultations with community, youth, women, civil society and religious institutions.
Initiatives to promote inter-community and inter-faith dialogue among the population will be needed. This could culminate in civil society or non-governmental platforms or committees to help resolve the crisis.
In the longer term, the region’s recovery will depend on alternative livelihoods and poverty-alleviation measures to offset the local community’s reliance on the illicit economy, smuggling and the drug trade.
That economy is deeply rooted in Mozambique’s large informal sector and will resist regulation.
The government must commit to the development and effective governance of the region.
Without this, the people of Cabo Delgado are unlikely to provide intelligence, support the security forces and join development initiatives.
There have been some steps in this direction. Maputo is mobilising $764-million from multilateral partners to finance the Integrated Northern Development Agency (ADIN). ADIN has four main pillars — humanitarian assistance, economic development, community resilience and communication.
The government needs to ensure that all critical stakeholders, including the religious and private sectors and traditional authorities, support it.
The education system must be reinvigorated to train and prepare locals for skills suited to new job opportunities. Authorities in Cabo Delgado would also need to invest in public works programmes to complement job creation in the formal and informal sectors and offer social activities such as sport to engage the youth.
An important poverty-alleviation measure would be a cash transfer (or social grants) programme that would directly benefit the community and demonstrate the government’s commitment to development. ADIN has already earmarked $25-million for this purpose for families in Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Nampula province. After that, it could be funded by ringfencing government income from the natural gas resources that should start flowing in 2024.
Finally, Mozambique must control and coordinate the foreign support now flowing through many aid agencies and countries eager to help.
Its future income from gas allows some flexibility not available to other similarly afflicted countries.
Support that is uncoordinated and comes with numerous conditionalities detracts rather than contributes to stabilisation efforts.
Maputo needs to own and drive the response to the insurgency and the recovery of local and investor confidence.
No amount of private security advice, support or foreign troops and equipment can compensate for political leadership and the establishment of trust between people, the government and regional actors.
Conclusions
''At the root of the conflict is a governance challenge that includes allegations of deeply entrenched corruption in the ruling party, (FRELIMO)''
[Therefore] Maputo needs to own and drive the response to the insurgency and the recovery of local and investor confidence [seems counterintuitive]
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Mozambique army soldiers pass near a destroyed building during a patrol in the streets of Palma, Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, 09 April 2021. (Photo: EPA-EFE/JOAO RELVAS) @dailymaverick
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Sudan's Recovery And Growth Prospects. | Business Edge - @YouTube
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10-JUN-2019 :: The "zeitgeist" of the Revolution in Khartoum was intoxicating
Africa
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#Angola's #oil exports are dropping dramatically amid a lack of investment and as its wells age. Shipments have roughly halved since 2016. @PaulWallace123
Africa
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Zambia's inflation accelerated to an 18-year high in May as the cost of meat and fish pushed up food prices @BBGAfrica
Africa
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Zambia's May Inflation Rises 23.2% From Year Earlier, Statistics Agency says
•Inflation increases from 22.7% in April.
•Prices rose 2% month on month.
•April Trade Surplus: 10.2 Billion Kwacha.
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The panel left its benchmark interest rate at 8.5% after hiking by 50 basis points in February. @economics
Africa
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While the kwacha remains among the worst-performing African currencies tracked by Bloomberg and has added to inflation, the rate of depreciation slowed this year, compared with the same period in 2020.
A deal with the International Monetary Fund that is crucial to Africa’s first pandemic-era sovereign defaulter’s plans to restructure as much as $12.7 billion external debt and boost foreign-exchange reserves could improve the kwacha’s outlook and ease inflationary pressures.
“Significant changes in the currency’s trajectory are only likely to materialize post an IMF deal,” Neville Mandimika and Daniel Kavishe, analysts at FirstRand Ltd.’s Rand Merchant Bank in Johannesburg said this week in a client note.
The nation had hoped to reach a deal before general elections on Aug. 12
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Kwacha currency has depreciated against the dollar every day for almost four months. Even as prices for copper, which the country depends on for about three-quarters of export earnings, reached historical highs @markets
Africa
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The Bank of Zambia’s foreign exchange reserves have dwindled to near record lows, and there are dollar shortages.
That’s caused some people to try source foreign exchange through informal channels.
To combat this, the central bank increased the limit that customers can buy or sell from a bureau de change to $5,000 from $1,000, and the maximum that commercial bank account holders can access daily to $10,000 from the previous $5,000.
The old limits were set 20 years ago and led to a distortion in the market, Mvunga said in comments broadcast Thursday on Lusaka-based Hot FM radio.
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If copper can maintain the average price of Jan-April 2021, it would suggest #Zambia copper exports would rise to $8.4bn in 2021, enough to more than double the current account surplus to nearly $5bn @Rencapman
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14-OCT-2019 ::The Canary in the Coal Mine is Zambia
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South Africa All Share Bloomberg
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Dollar versus Rand Chart INO 13.8365
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Egypt Pound versus The Dollar Chart INO 15.6743
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Two deaths that could strengthen the insurgents @Africa_Conf
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In their different ways, the loss of the Army Chief in a plane crash and the death of the Boko Haram leader create new problems for the government
Other sources said Shekau had been injured in the fighting but had escaped.
To date there has been no confirmation of the current situation in Sambisa forest.
Officials have reported Shekau's death many times over the past 12 years since the launch of Boko Haram's insurgency.
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HOW MUCH SPENT ON SERVICING DEBT In 2013, N24 servicing debt. In 2020, it was N83 @StatiSense
Africa
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Out of every N100 revenue, FG spent....
In 2013, N24 servicing debt.
In 2014, it was N29
In 2015, it was N33
In 2016, it was N45
In 2017, it was N62
In 2018, it was N56
In 2019, it was N60
In 2020, it was N83
#StatiSense
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09-DEC-2019 ::Time to Big Up the Dosage of Quaaludes
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Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg
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The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush @NewYorker
Africa
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In June, 2014, a man began digging into the soft red earth in the back yard of his house, on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. About eight feet into the soil, his shovel hit a slab of gray rock that was streaked with black and punctuated with what looked like blobs of bright-turquoise mold.
He had struck a seam of heterogenite, an ore that can be refined into cobalt, one of the elements used in lithium-ion batteries.
Among other things, cobalt keeps the batteries, which power everything from cell phones to electric cars, from catching fire.
As global demand for lithium-ion batteries has grown, so has the price of cobalt.
The man suspected that his discovery would make him wealthy—if he could get it out of the ground before others did.
Southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world’s known supply.
In recent decades, hundreds of thousands of Congolese have moved to the formerly remote area. Kolwezi now has more than half a million residents.
Many Congolese have taken jobs at industrial mines in the region; others have become “artisanal diggers,” or creuseurs.
Some creuseurs secure permits to work freelance at officially licensed pits, but many more sneak onto the sites at night or dig their own holes and tunnels, risking cave-ins and other dangers in pursuit of buried treasure.
The man took some samples to one of the mineral traders who had established themselves around Kolwezi.
At the time, the road into the city was lined with corrugated-iron shacks, known as comptoirs, where traders bought cobalt or copper, which is also plentiful in the region.
(In the rainy season, the earth occasionally turns green, as a result of the copper oxides beneath it.)
Many of the traders were Chinese, Lebanese, and Indian expats, though a few Congolese had used their mining profits to set up shops.
One trader told the man that the cobalt ore he’d dug up was unusually pure. The man returned to his district, Kasulo, determined to keep his find secret.
Many of Kasulo’s ten thousand residents were day laborers; Murray Hitzman, a former U.S. Geological Survey scientist who spent more than a decade travelling to southern Congo to consult on mining projects there, told me that residents were “milling about all the time,” hoping for word of fresh discoveries.
Hitzman, who teaches at University College Dublin, explained that the rich deposits of cobalt and copper in the area started life around eight hundred million years ago, on the bed of a shallow ancient sea.
Over time, the sedimentary rocks were buried beneath rolling hills, and salty fluid containing metals seeped into the earth, mineralizing the rocks.
Today, he said, the mineral deposits are “higgledy-piggledy folded, broken upside down, back-asswards, every imaginable geometry—and predicting the location of the next buried deposit is almost impossible.”
The man stopped digging in his yard. Instead, he cut through the floor of his house, which he was renting, and dug to about thirty feet, carting out ore at night.
Zanga Muteba, a baker who then lived in Kasulo, told me, “All of us, at that time, we knew nothing.”
But one evening he and some neighbors heard telltale clanging noises coming from the man’s house.
Rushing inside, they discovered that the man had carved out a series of underground galleries, following the vein of cobalt as it meandered under his neighbors’ houses.
When the man’s landlord got wind of these modifications, they had an argument, and the man fled.
“He had already made a lot of money,” Muteba told me.
Judging from the amount of ore the man had dug out, he had probably made more than ten thousand dollars—in Congo, a small fortune.
According to the World Bank, in 2018 three-quarters of the country’s population lived on less than two dollars a day.
Hundreds of people in Kasulo “began digging in their own plots,” Muteba said. The mayor warned, “You’re going to destroy the neighborhood!”
But, Muteba said, “it was complicated for people to accept the mayor’s request.”
Muteba had a thriving bakery and didn’t have time to dig, but most locals were desperate.
In Congo, more than eighty-five per cent of people work informally, in precarious jobs that pay little, and the cost of living is remarkably high: because the country’s infrastructure has been ravaged by decades of dictatorship, civil war, and corruption, there is little agriculture, and food and other basic goods are often imported.
For many Kasulo residents, the prospect of a personal cobalt mine was worth any risk.
About a month after the man who discovered the cobalt vanished, the local municipality formally restricted digging for minerals in Kasulo.
According to Muteba, residents implored the mayor:
“We used to mine in the bush, in the forest. You stopped us. You gave all the city to big industrial companies. Now we discovered minerals in our own plots of land, which belonged to our ancestors. And now you want to stop us? No, that is not going to work.”
Muteba recalled, “People started to throw rocks at the mayor, and the mayor ran away. And, when the mayor fled, the digging really started.”
Odilon Kajumba Kilanga is a creuseur who has worked in the Kolwezi area for fifteen years. He grew up in southern Congo’s largest city, Lubumbashi, which is near the Zambian border, and as a teen-ager he worked odd jobs, including selling tires by the roadside.
One day when he was eighteen, a friend who had moved to Kolwezi called him and urged him to join a coöperative of creuseurs which roamed from mine to mine, sharing profits.
“There were good sites that you could just turn up to and work,” Kajumba said, when we met in Kolwezi.
In those days, it took eight hours to get from Lubumbashi to Kolwezi by bus, on a rutted two-lane road.
The thickets on either side of the highway crawled with outlaws, who occasionally hijacked vehicles using weapons they’d leased from impoverished soldiers.
Once, bandits stopped a bus and ordered the passengers to strip; the hijackers took everything, even people’s underwear.
Kajumba knew that the journey to Kolwezi was dangerous, but he said of the creuseurs, “If they tell you to come, you come.”
At first, the work, though strenuous, was exciting; he began each shift dreaming of riches. He had some stretches of good luck, but he never made the big score that would transform his life.
Now in his mid-thirties, he is a laconic man who becomes animated only when he is discussing God or his favorite soccer team, TP Mazembe.
Mining no longer holds romance for him; he sees the work as a symptom of his poverty rather than as a path out of it.
When you are a creuseur, he said, you are “obliged to do what you can to make ends meet,” and this necessity trumps any fears about personal safety. “To be scared, you must first have means,” he said.
Kajumba joined the mining economy relatively late in life. In Kolwezi, children as young as three learn to pick out the purest ore from rock slabs. Soon enough, they are lugging ore for adult creuseurs.
Teen-age boys often work perilous shifts navigating rickety shafts. Near large mines, the prostitution of women and young girls is pervasive.
Other women wash raw mining material, which is often full of toxic metals and, in some cases, mildly radioactive.
If a pregnant woman works with such heavy metals as cobalt, it can increase her chances of having a stillbirth or a child with birth defects.
According to a recent study in The Lancet, women in southern Congo “had metal concentrations that are among the highest ever reported for pregnant women.”
The study also found a strong link between fathers who worked with mining chemicals and fetal abnormalities in their children, noting that “paternal occupational mining exposure was the factor most strongly associated with birth defects.”
This year, cobalt prices have jumped some forty per cent, to more than twenty dollars a pound.
The lure of mineral riches in a country as poor as Congo provides irresistible temptation for politicians and officials to steal and cheat.
Soldiers who have been posted to Kolwezi during periods of unrest have been known to lay down their Kalashnikovs at night and enter the mines.
At a meeting of investors in 2019, Simon Tuma Waku, then the president of the Chamber of Mines in Congo, used the language of a gold rush: “Cobalt—it makes you dream.”
After Kasulo’s mayor fled, many residents began tearing away at the ground beneath them. Some wealthier locals hired creuseurs to dig under their houses, with an agreement to split the profits.
Two teams of creuseurs could each work twelve-hour shifts, chipping at the rock with hammers and chisels. A pastor and his congregation began digging under their church, stopping only for Sunday services.
By the end of 2014, two thousand creuseurs were working in the neighborhood, with little regulation.
Kajumba and his coöperative soon joined in the hunt for minerals.
One man on Kajumba’s team, Yannick Mputu, remembers this period as “the good times.”
He told me, “There was a lot of money, and everybody was able to make some. The minerals were close to the surface, and they could be mined without digging deep holes.”
But the conditions quickly became dangerous. Not long after the mayor formally prohibited excavating for minerals, a mine shaft collapsed, killing five miners.
Still, people kept digging, and by the time researchers for Amnesty International visited, less than a year after the discovery of cobalt in Kasulo, some of the holes made by creuseurs were a hundred feet deep.
Once diggers reached seams of ore, they followed the mineral through the soil, often without building supports for their tunnels.
As Murray Hitzman, the former U.S.G.S. scientist, pointed out, the heterogenite closest to the surface often contains the least cobalt, because of weathering. Creuseurs in Kasulo were risking their lives to obtain some of the worst ore.
One of Kajumba’s teammates told me that their coöperative of six used to regularly extract two tons of raw material from a single pit in Kasulo.
But most of the best sites were quickly excavated, and the yield from newer pits was less than half as much.
The team was also ripped off by unscrupulous traders and corrupt officials.
Kajumba said that lately he has struggled to pay his rent of twenty-five dollars a month. “Whenever we dig up a few tons, I send some money to my family,” he added.
Drug and alcohol use are rampant among creuseurs. Kajumba said that, though many people he knew in Kasulo wasted all their earnings on narcotics, he avoided such temptations. Whenever I met up with him, he made a point of drinking a cola.
Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger.
Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, a Catholic charity that tries to stop child labor, said, “If the kids don’t make enough money, they have no food for the whole day. Some children we interviewed did not remember the last time they had a meal.”
Researchers estimate that thousands of children work in mining in Kolwezi alone. Mark Canavera, a faculty member at Columbia University who focusses on child welfare, has spent time in Kolwezi.
“I don’t think the government has any capacity to monitor children’s involvement in this,” he told me.
“Even if it did, it doesn’t have a framework for thinking about what is child labor and what isn’t.”
In such a poor region, parents often expect their children to supplement the family’s income, even if the work is dangerous.
At a school run by Good Shepherd, I met Ziki, a serious boy with large dark eyes. He was fifteen but, because he had been malnourished for long periods, he looked much younger.
His parents had been killed in a roadside accident when he was three; afterward, he was sent to live with his father’s sister.
“My aunt sent her kids to school but sent me to the mines,” he said. “I was full of bitterness.” He joined a team of boys who roved across Kolwezi.
I was initially skeptical that Ziki had begun working at such a young age, but Mutindi said that she has seen many such cases.
“The younger children of four, five, six, seven, these will mainly be collecting—picking stones,” she said.
“It’s amazing how they know the value.” Children are eventually given such jobs as washing ore or carrying heavy sacks of rocks to traders who loiter near the sites on motorcycles.
When I visited Kolwezi, streams alongside the city’s main roads teemed with women and children washing minerals.
As Ziki and his friends grew older, they began entering pits dug by creuseurs. The tunnels were square, four or five feet across, and about sixteen feet deep. It was infernally hot inside them, and oxygen was scarce.
“As you were descending, there were rocks that you held on to,” he recalled.
“If you held on to the wrong rock and it loosened from the wall, you would tumble into the hole. I would bump into older people who were going down into the pits, and they would tell us, ‘You children, if you enter you will die.’ ”
Ziki worked at mine sites around Kolwezi for eleven years. Although Congo’s government periodically claimed that it was cracking down on child labor, few adults tried to stop him from working.
“Soldiers would hunt us,” he recalled. “If they caught you, they would beat you.” He went on,
“If you sold your minerals, when you had money, there were street kids, thugs, who could stop you on the road and snatch your money. To pass safely, you had to pay five hundred francs”—about fifty cents—“so you could have safe passage. If you gave them nothing, they would beat you.”
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The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush @NewYorker [continued]
Africa
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Copper has been mined in Congo since at least the fourth century, and the deposits were known to Portuguese slave traders from the fifteenth century onward.
Cobalt is a byproduct of copper production. In 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold II claimed the country as his private property and brutally exploited it for rubber; according to “King Leopold’s Ghost,” a 1998 book by Adam Hochschild, as many as ten million Congolese were killed.
But, because of local resistance and the inaccessibility of the region, large-scale commercial mining didn’t begin in the south until the twentieth century.
Kolwezi was founded in 1937 by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, a mining monopoly created by Belgian royal decree.
These colonialists may not have matched the atrocities of King Leopold, but they still saw the country in starkly exploitative terms.
They understood that the best way to extract Congo’s mineral wealth quickly was to create infrastructure.
The company cleared the thickets of thorny acacias and miombo trees that had grown atop Kolwezi’s rich mineral deposits and built the town across the area’s rolling hills, with wide streets and bungalows for Europeans, whose neighborhoods were segregated from those where Congolese workers lived.
Locals were used to create this infrastructure, and to labor in the mines, but, as Hitzman put it, “the whites ran everything.”
After independence, the southernmost province, Katanga, was viewed as a prize by Cold War powers.
In the sixties, Katanga unsuccessfully tried to secede, with the support of Belgium and the Union Minière.
Then, in 1978, Soviet-armed and Cuban-trained rebels seized Kolwezi and several hundred civilians were killed.
Before the insurrection, the Soviet Union appeared to have been stockpiling cobalt, and, according to a report by the C.I.A., the attack set off “a round of panic buying and hoarding in the developed West.”
Cobalt, the report declared, “is one of the most critical industrial metals.” Then, as now, the mineral was used in the manufacture of corrosion-resistant alloys for aircraft engines and gas turbines.
The West’s solution to the market instability was to prop up the country’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who presided over an almost farcically kleptocratic regime.
The country’s élite sustained themselves, in part, on the profits from the mines. Gécamines, a state-controlled mining company, ran a virtual monopoly in Katanga’s copper-and-cobalt belt, and owned swaths of the cities that had been built to house miners.
By the early nineties, Mobutu and his cronies seemed to have stolen everything they could, and Congo was falling apart. As the country drifted toward civil war, the Army pillaged Gécamines, and former workers sold off minerals and machine parts in order to feed their families.
In 1997, Mobutu went into exile. The disintegration of Gécamines transformed Congo’s mining landscape.
Creuseurs began digging at the company’s largely abandoned sites, selling ore to foreign traders who had stayed behind after Mobutu was deposed.
Congo became mired in a series of wars in which more people were killed than in any other conflict since the Second World War.
The country’s next leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was assassinated, in 2001, and his son Joseph took over.
Both Kabilas funded their war efforts by selling Gécamines sites to foreigners.
By the time Hitzman arrived, in the mid-two-thousands, Gécamines had become a shell. “Some of the best geologists I’ve ever met in my life were still working for Gécamines, and hadn’t been paid for three years,” Hitzman said. “It was sad as hell.”
Some creuseurs in Odilon Kajumba Kilanga’s collective used to work for Gécamines.
Yannick Mputu, who is from Likasi, three hours east of Kolwezi, told me that he once reprocessed tailings at a company mine in his home town, adding, “When Gécamines closed, we had to go to Kolwezi.”
The collective regularly sneaked into open-pit mines that are now owned by companies like the Swiss multinational Glencore.
“We enter at night, we work, and leave early in the morning,” Mputu told me.
He noted that creuseurs put something aside for the soldiers and the police who supposedly prohibit outsiders from entering: “We give them a percentage of our earnings, and they let us in.”
In June, 2019, more than forty creuseurs were killed in a landslide after breaking into a Glencore-owned mine in Kolwezi.
Kajumba and his friends were also at the site that night, but they were working a different seam.
“The worst thing I’ve seen as a miner is the sheer number of dead bodies when there were cave-ins,” Kajumba said.
The night after the Glencore landslide, a mining-company employee told me, “people snuck back in and continued digging.”
Videos of Kasulo taken during the height of the 2014 cobalt rush show orange tarpaulins covering fresh pits and bags of minerals littering the streets.
Michael Kavanagh, a journalist, visited the district a year later, and published an article in the Times observing that the profusion of holes made it look “as if it had been bombed.”
At one point, after creuseurs tunnelled beneath the main road running west to Angola, the road collapsed.
Kajumba and his team were part of this initial frenzy. They knew that picking at the rock beneath Kasulo’s sandy soil was treacherous, especially during the rainy season, but they were happy not to be risking arrest, as they were when they broke into the big mines.
One day in December, 2014, Kajumba and other creuseurs were working a pit at Kasulo when they felt a rumble. “It was as if something was falling deep underneath us,” Kajumba recalled.
They knew that, the previous day, a group of creuseurs working in a neighboring hole had asked a local chief to perform a ritual over a new area where they had been digging.
Creuseurs, many of whom have little formal education and enter pits every day fearing that they might die, can be superstitious.
Magic practitioners, known as féticheurs, are sometimes employed in the hope of increasing the chances that a fresh pit will contain bounties of cobalt and copper.
Such rituals are often benign, but they can have a sinister side. Among the prevailing superstitions in the region is a belief that having sex with a virgin girl will enhance one’s luck in the mines.
While I was in Kolwezi, Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, showed me photographs of the bruised corpse of an eight-year-old girl who had been abducted and raped by a creuseur the previous week.
(The miner was later apprehended; she sent me a video of him in prison.)
Children frequently die while being raped. In one case, Mutindi said, she saw the body of an eighteen-month-old infant who had been raped by a creuseur.
At Kasulo, the féticheur who had performed the ritual over the neighboring pit had warned the miners not to enter it for three days, to avoid angering a dragon that, he said, lived at the bottom.
The creuseurs were told that the pit would then be safe—and full of minerals. Rumors of the pit’s riches spread, and a day later some miners decided to disobey the féticheur.
“Creuseurs have curiosity,” Mputu said. “They wanted to see what was down there.”
After Kajumba and Mputu felt the ground shudder, they rushed to the neighboring hole. Part of the tunnel had caved in, trapping their neighbors deep below.
Some fifty people vaulted into the darkness, desperate to save their friends. Rescuers nearly suffocated in the subterranean passages. Eleven of the trapped miners died, as did four rescuers.
Following another series of féticheur rituals, and another period of waiting, all the bodies were pulled from the hole. Some were horrifically burned.
“The last person who escaped from the pit said that he saw a huge flame,” Mputu told me.
The fire’s origin was unclear, but artisanal miners can unearth pockets of flammable gas.
To Mputu and his colleagues, the accident had supernatural trappings. “The cause of the flame was none other than the dragon,” he told me.
Nine months after the cave-in, another group of creuseurs in Kasulo burned a tire in an underground gallery, in an attempt to crack open a stubborn rock face.
Five people asphyxiated from the fumes; thirteen others were hospitalized. After the incident, Radio Okapi, a media group sponsored by the United Nations, interviewed Kolwezi’s mayor, who said that a year earlier he had sent a report to his superiors urging the closure of the artisanal pits.
According to Radio Okapi, the mayor “expressed regret that no site was closed because of this request.”
The report noted that more than a thousand holes had been dug in Kasulo.
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The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush @NewYorker [cont]
Africa
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The Democratic Republic of the Congo was reorganized in 2015, and Kolwezi became the new capital of a region called Lualaba.
The first governor of Lualaba, Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, promoted himself as Papa Solution.
In Kolwezi, many benches at bus stops were painted with his nickname. In an interview with the magazine Mining and Business, Muyej spoke critically of the cobalt “contagion” in Kasulo.
“A plan is needed to avoid hasty movements that could turn into a humanitarian tragedy,” he said. “We have made a project proposal that we will submit to the authorities.”
The proposal, which Muyej didn’t disclose at the time, involved granting the mineral rights at Kasulo to a foreign company: Congo Dongfang International Mining, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou, a Chinese conglomerate that, among other things, has supplied materials for iPhone batteries.
China is the world’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and Huayou has made a huge investment in Congo.
After acquiring mineral rights in the region, in 2015, it built two cobalt refineries. According to an internal presentation, by 2017 Huayou controlled twenty-one per cent of the global cobalt market.
(A Huayou spokesperson said that Congo Dongfang followed international standards in developing Kasulo, and plans to “gradually eradicate all forms of human-rights violation with a responsible supply chain.”)
China and Congo have a long history. During Leopold’s reign, Chinese workers were shipped to Congo to help build the national railroad.
In the nineteen-seventies, Mobutu turned to Mao’s regime for technical collaboration on infrastructure projects.
By the nineties, the Chinese were becoming the bosses: the Beijing government and myriad Chinese businesses began making heavy investments in Africa, particularly in resource-rich and regulation-poor countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Peter Zhou, a Chinese-born financier who has worked on a few mining deals in Congo, said that in such countries “there is corruption, there is lack of the rule of law, which gives you more autonomy to be entrepreneurial.”
(Zhou emphasized that he hadn’t directly witnessed or engaged in corruption.)
In 2007, Joseph Kabila made a six-billion-dollar infrastructure deal with China that included a provision allowing the Chinese to extract six hundred thousand tons of cobalt.
The journalist Howard French, in his 2014 book, “China’s Second Continent,” writes that in Zambia, Congo’s neighbor, Chinese companies invested so extensively in copper mines that the flood of foreign money was said to be influencing elections.
Beijing was blamed for increasing Africa’s debt burden, and an essay in the magazine New African accused China of “a new form of colonialism.”
These days, most of the cobalt in southern Congo comes from industrial mines, which are largely owned by Chinese companies.
In 2016, China Molybdenum paid the U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan $2.65 billion for a controlling stake in Tenke Fungurume, a giant copper-and-cobalt mine about two hours east of Kolwezi;
three years later, China Molybdenum acquired another stake, for $1.14 billion. Zhou, who worked on the Tenke Fungurume deal, divided the current Chinese involvement in Congo into two phases.
At first, he said, companies had to take significant financial risks, because “there was a lack of infrastructure—the cost base is high to transport all the materials.”
They also had to pay bribes to government officials and Gécamines executives.
During this phase, Chinese companies were incentivized to make money by whatever means possible.
“If you conduct your business without, you know, a proper return, then you can’t justify the risk,” Zhou told me. During this period, he said, mines had few safety protections.
With sufficient infrastructure in place, Zhou went on, the “Chinese are now conducting business in a more moral way. They have to keep the people in a peaceful mind-set, so they started to build a social relationship—training locals in how to grow out their culture, their schools.”
He continued, “There’s less gray conduct now, and more of a sort of transparent business.”
In 2017, Chinese workers arrived in the village of Samukinda, half an hour northwest of Kasulo, and quickly constructed two dozen houses with corrugated-iron roofs.
Kasulo residents were ordered to leave their neighborhood within two weeks.
The Congolese government revealed that a mining permit had been granted to Congo Dongfang, which would remove the topsoil and then wall off what had once been the neighborhood.
Creuseurs from an approved coöperative would be allowed to mine the site, and Congo Dongfang would become the exclusive buyer of Kasulo’s ore.
Congo Dongfang offered the families of Kasulo either a lump sum for their plots—up to twenty-five hundred dollars—or a new home in Samukinda.
A consortium of local organizations wrote to Governor Muyej, protesting that the evictions were illegal, but he pressed on.
Muteba, the baker, told me that on a rainy day a couple of months later, employees of Congo Dongfang “came with huge trucks to crush our houses.”
Around this time, Joseph Kabila announced that, after eighteen years in office, he would not run for reëlection. In January, 2019, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo became President.
The following spring, I met with Governor Muyej at his fortified compound in the center of Kolwezi. Muyej said that Tshisekedi would likely maintain the course set by Kabila—“a flight that we must take to get out of poverty.”
Muyej told me that he hoped to diversify the local economy through tourism and agriculture.
Mining, he said, exacerbated inequalities—“enormous mineral wealth beside a population that lives in enormous precarity.”
In 2018, Forbes praised Muyej’s governorship as “a model for bringing together economic prosperity, political transparency and social impact.”
Yet it’s hard to imagine Kolwezi becoming a travel destination anytime soon.
On a recent trip there, I tried to visit Katebi Lodge, a new lakeside resort. At the entrance, a metal gate topped with barbed wire, I was shooed away by a police officer toting a Kalashnikov. Apparently, the lake was too polluted to allow visitors.
Muyej often cited the building of a new governorate office—a gaudy structure rising above a sea of ramshackle cinder-block houses—to show how he had modernized Kolwezi.
Renovations of the local soccer stadium and the town’s central roundabout, which features a statue of mine workers, were financed by mining companies.
Muyej told me that he hoped to reform the mining sector, in part, by reducing child labor and by centralizing the market where traders buy cobalt, thus instilling transparency in the supply chain.
Critics have called such reforms cynical bids to control and tax artisanal production for personal gain. Muyej, his family, and officials close to him have profited from the mining boom.
The Governor’s son Yves is the C.E.O. of a logistics company in Kolwezi; on LinkedIn, one of his employees describes himself as the site supervisor of the Congo Dongfang mine.
Muyej’s cabinet chief, Yav Katshung, is a lawyer whose firm does work for Congo Dongfang. (Katshung and Yves Muyej both declined to speak to me.)
Muyej said that as many as a hundred and seventy thousand creuseurs work informally in his province. Among the forty or so sites where artisanal miners are employed as day laborers is the Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo.
Only eight hundred or so creuseurs work there, however, and that has stoked resentment. Jacques Kayembe, the president of an artisanal mining collective, told me, “Kasulo is a village that is built on mineral deposits, but not enough creuseurs can legally work on official artisanal deposits, and that’s a problem.”
Whenever Muyej tried to reason with creuseurs who had sneaked onto industrial concessions, he was attacked with stones, and in 2019 there was so much unrest in Kolwezi that the military was sent in.
It has become common to see soldiers carrying machine guns and rocket launchers around the city. When I first visited the area, in 2019, a toll booth outside the city was riddled with bullet holes.
A local journalist travelling with me said that a policeman at the booth had recently been murdered by gangsters.
Since the emergence of covid-19, Congo’s south has endured a series of lockdowns. Kajumba said that creuseurs like him “continue to work, but the situation is difficult.”
Companies have furloughed workers, adding to their frustration. Several months ago, a Congolese friend sent me a video of miners protesting for back pay at a Chinese-run mine in Kolwezi.
As pandemic restrictions continued, my friend sent me footage of protesters burning tires in the streets.
Last year, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa announced that two Congolese citizens had leaked documents revealing numerous improprieties at Afriland First Bank, a Cameroon-based institution where Muyej had at least one account.
Muyej, it was revealed, had been moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through the bank.
He is now under investigation in Congo for corruption, and his vice-governor is running Lualaba.
According to Radio France Internationale, the Congolese authorities have accused Muyej of not being able to justify forty per cent of his cabinet’s expenses.
(A representative for Muyej said that the Governor had done nothing wrong, and welcomed an audit of his finances.)
Huge sums of money continue to change hands in the region. In December, China Molybdenum paid Freeport-McMoRan half a billion dollars to acquire a controlling stake in Kisanfu, a copper-and-cobalt concession east of Kolwezi.
At a recent conference sponsored by the Financial Times, Ivan Glasenberg, the C.E.O. of Glencore, said, “China, Inc., has realized how important cobalt is.”
He continued, “They’ve gone and tied up the supply.” He warned that if Chinese companies stopped exporting batteries, this could hamper the ability of non-Chinese companies to produce electric vehicles.
Last month, catl, a Chinese conglomerate that develops and manufactures lithium-ion batteries, acquired a hundred-and-thirty-seven-million-dollar stake in the Kisanfu mine.
Tesla works with the company to make its car batteries, and catl has supplied batteries to Apple. Recently, according to witnesses at Kisanfu, a cave-in killed at least four creuseurs.
In the spring of 2019, I visited the Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo, escorted by company representatives. Signs by the gate said that children and pregnant women were forbidden to enter.
Inside the compound, the land that had once been a bustling neighborhood was now a giant red crater. (I saw no children during my visit, but Kajumba told me that they still find their way in.)
My minders cautioned me not to wander too close to the creuseurs, as they were liable to be violent. Not long before my arrival, a group of them had set some company trucks on fire.
Kajumba said that Congolese had been employed to mediate between the creuseurs and company officials. Often, the creuseurs’ demands were not met and they went on strike. “
You go in to work and say, ‘No, I won’t do anything,’ ” Kajumba said. “The Chinese will feel unsafe and call in the police.”
The police, he said, do the company’s bidding: “They know they will get a gift from the Chinese, so they will threaten you with teargas and batons.”
Kajumba said that he had been teargassed by police at Kasulo: “Everyone ran to save his life. We felt defenseless.”
At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period.
In a video shared with me by Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, a Congolese guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back beats a man who is lying, semi-naked, in mud, his arms bound.
Behind the camera, a man otherwise speaking Mandarin starts yelling “Piga! ”—the Kiswahili word for “beat.”
In the background are seven of the trucks that Congo Dongfang uses to transport cobalt ore.
Upon my arrival at the mine, I had been given a long explanation of safety protocols, but as I approached the creuseurs it was clear that they had only rudimentary equipment.
Plastic jerricans, cut roughly in half and tied to ropes, were being used to haul ore. Many creuseurs were shoeless, and I saw none wearing helmets or goggles, despite the fact that a confidential 2018 audit, by the Korean conglomerate LG Chem, had criticized the site for a lack of proper safety equipment.
Some creuseurs washed ore in dirty ponds by the pits. “The Chinese are cheating us,” one of them murmured.
“They’re telling us the ore is less pure than it is.”
Kajumba said that he had stopped working at Kasulo six months earlier because he felt that he was being treated unfairly. “It’s as if you were working to suffer even more,” he told me.
In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire.
No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.
One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. I was immediately allowed inside, but they were stopped at the door and told that they could not gamble.
Black Africans, the casino’s staff explained, can’t be trusted with money. At a roulette table, a host of drunken white South Africans addressed a Congolese croupier as “Black man.”
It’s unclear how many Chinese live in Congo, though estimates range from fewer than ten thousand to as many as a hundred thousand.
Before the pandemic, Ethiopian Airlines’ daily flights from Addis Ababa into Lubumbashi were filled with Chinese passengers.
When these workers arrive in a mining town, signs in Mandarin guide them to Chinese-run hotels, shops, and restaurants.
Outside work, the Chinese rarely mingle with the locals. Very few of them know French or Kiswahili, the most commonly spoken languages of Congo’s south.
In a 2017 essay, the Congolese political scientist Germain Ngoie Tshibambe wrote that many Chinese find their time in Congo lonely and difficult. “It is no paradise for migrants,” he noted.
Few locals patronize Chinese restaurants, which tend to be relatively expensive and not to their taste, but Chinese health clinics have become popular. T
he clinics offer a rare opportunity for casual social interaction—perhaps more so than at the mines themselves.
In 2011, Jean Jolly, a French journalist, reported that one of Congo Dongfang’s directors of external relations had never visited the mine that he represented, two miles away.
Congolese who work at Chinese-run mines said that their supervisors were often racist. A Congolese translator who speaks Mandarin told me, “Chinese people are coming here for business to make money, so they can never be our friends.”
He had overheard Chinese employers saying of the Congolese, “These people, they don’t really think.”
Creuseurs around Kolwezi frequently complained to me that Chinese-owned mines had replicated the harsh conditions of China’s own mining industry.
Congolese often say, “If they work without shoes there, how can they be expected to give us shoes to work here?”
A Western mine official told me he had visited a mine in Congo, owned by a small Chinese company, that had many Chinese laborers.
It reminded him of an internment camp: “The Chinese were barefoot, they were digging with shovels, and they couldn’t leave.”
Peter Zhou, the Chinese-born financier, referred to the locals in Congo as his “Congolese brothers,” and argued that many big Chinese-run mines in the region had implemented strong safety standards.
Recalling his first visit to southern Congo, Zhou said, “I wasn’t too surprised about the poverty, because I grew up in Shanxi Province, in the interior of China.”
When he met with Congolese families in roughly constructed homes, he was reminded of the cinder-block rooms of his youth.
Zhou acknowledged that there was “a lot of corruption” in Congo’s mining sector, but he maintained that, with enough economic prosperity, the gray economy in Congo will fade, much as it has in China.
“My Western friends come to it and say, ‘There are significant risks associated with business here,’ ” he said. “I see something familiar.”
During one of my visits to Kolwezi, Kajumba invited me to the cramped room that he shares with Yannick Mputu and Mputu’s brother, Trésor.
I followed Kajumba down an alley in one of the town’s sprawling working-class neighborhoods.
We entered a courtyard, hung with drying linens, that smelled strongly of sewage, then passed through a green doorframe covered with printed fabric.
Inside, the walls were painted various bright colors. Above a bed facing an old cathode-ray television was a rack of neatly pressed suits, shirts, and jackets, many with natty checks and patterns.
Even though Kajumba struggles to get by, he keeps up with the latest fashions. On the day that I visited, he was wearing an orange gingham button-down paired with a black-and-white-speckled baseball cap.
Creuseurs take pride in the ingenuity required to do their job well, and some of them told me that they like the irregular working hours.
But Trésor Mputu, who has two children living in Likasi, told me, “As a father, I wouldn’t accept my son going to the mines.”
Yannick nodded. “I would want, through my labors, to enable my children to go further,” he said. “I want them to be able to study in good conditions, and for them to be able to leave the country to develop themselves.”
Even if artisanal mining supports poor families in the region, it’s hard to applaud it. The lives of most creuseurs are short and marked by suffering.
Many have physical and psychological injuries from mine collapses and other accidents, and from violent confrontations with the police and the Army.
Ziki, the former child creuseur, recalled an incident that took place when he was about twelve:
“One Friday, we were sitting down, and soldiers came into the mine—they caught us. They threw us to the ground. They sprayed us with water and then began to whip us. We began to cry and ask for mercy. And we swore to them that we would never come again to this place.”
Soon afterward, Ziki left his group of friends, who had begun drinking and smoking heavily, and wandered around mine sites by himself.
He began sleeping at sites, eating little and being abused by soldiers. At one point, he was taken hostage by older creuseurs who accused him of stealing their wares.
In a stroke of luck, members of a CBS News crew met him while he was washing minerals. They encouraged his family to take him and his siblings out of the mines.
“They asked my grandmother, ‘Aren’t these children capable of studying?’ ” he said. “My grandmother promised to take us back to school.” (CBS viewers donated money for their schooling.)
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The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush @NewYorker [further]
Africa
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I asked Ziki what he thought of people who profited from cobalt mining. “I have sadness in my heart when I think of people who buy the minerals,” he said.
“They make so much money, and we have to stay like this.” When I told him that Americans paid more than a thousand dollars for the latest iPhone, he replied, “It really hurts me to hear that.”
The companies that use lithium-ion batteries periodically respond to public pressure about the conditions in cobalt mines by promising to clean up their supply chains and innovate their way out of the problem.
There is also a financial incentive to do so: cobalt is one of a battery’s most expensive elements.
Last year, Tesla pledged to use lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, which do not contain cobalt, in some of its electric cars. Huayou stock plummeted.
Still, Reuters noted, “it was not clear to what extent Tesla intends to use L.F.P. batteries,” and the company “has no plans to stop” using batteries that contain cobalt.
(L.F.P. batteries aren’t used in cell phones: to achieve the required voltage, the batteries would have to be doubled up, adding unacceptable bulk and heft.)
After Amnesty International published a report on unethical cobalt mining, in 2016, Apple issued a statement saying that it “believes every worker in our supply chain has a right to safe, ethical working conditions,” and that “underage labor is never tolerated.”
The following year, after a report by Sky News showed that cobalt mined by children was still being used in the company’s devices, Apple suspended purchases of hand-mined cobalt, but once the media attention died down the practice continued. Huayou remains part of Apple’s supply chain.
In December, 2019, attorneys from International Rights Advocates, a law firm in Washington, D.C., sued Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla for involvement in the injuries or deaths of child miners.
“These boys are working under Stone Age conditions for paltry wages, and at immense personal risk, to provide cobalt,” the complaint alleges.
“The hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the Defendants each year would not be possible without cobalt mined in the D.R.C.”
Terry Collingsworth, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, believes that the brutal conditions must have been apparent from the start.
“I can’t imagine that a company like Apple would become dependent upon a supply chain without having spent quite a bit of time on the ground,” he told me.
In response, Apple said that it had been improving standards since 2014 and contended that it is “constantly working to raise the bar for ourselves, and the industry.
” It also said that it had made innovations in cobalt recycling. (In August, 2020, the companies being sued jointly filed a motion to dismiss, and in October the plaintiffs filed a brief in opposition.)
The outcry over working conditions has led industry players to found the Fair Cobalt Alliance, an organization that, among other things, supports small-scale mining with safety equipment and clean water.
The group is now present at Kasulo and at another site. Glencore, Huayou, and Tesla have joined the alliance.
Ziki, who is now in school, likes studying and playing soccer, and administrators have given him basic supplies to take home to his family.
When I asked him what he hoped for in life, he replied, “I have the hope that I can become the governor!”
One Sunday morning, I met Kajumba and Trésor Mputu at the Temple Évangélique de Carmel, a hangar-style megachurch in the center of Kolwezi.
The sign outside proclaims that it is the “thirtieth Pentecostal community in Congo.” Kajumba and Mputu attend services every Sunday.
“When someone finds themselves in difficulties, they can come to the church, they can pray,” Kajumba said.
Inside, people swayed and sang, their hands outstretched. A few congregants spoke in tongues. On a stage covered with flowers, one of the pastors declared that the church was “worth more than any enterprise.”
He promised that spiritual riches awaited even his poorest parishioners.
After church, Kajumba, Mputu, and I went to a local bar to watch the broadcast of a soccer match between a Malagasy team and TP Mazembe, which is passionately supported throughout the south.
When Mazembe scored the first goal, Kajumba smiled. Suddenly, the television crackled, and the programming switched to another game, in Kinshasa, the nation’s capital.
“They always forget us down here in the south,” someone said. Kajumba sighed and said that he should probably head home.
One day, driving north out of Kolwezi, I noticed how deeply faith permeated everything around me: the Mount Carmel health clinic, the Salon Apocalypse hairdresser, the Light of God tire shop.
Eventually, the road became unpaved. Trucks carrying sulfuric acid threw up plumes of dust as they trundled toward factories where raw minerals are processed.
I turned onto a side road and crossed a creek where men, women, and children were washing cobalt ore. On the other side lay a cluster of mud-brick houses.
This was Samukinda, the village where new houses had been built for the exiled residents of Kasulo.
The sun was punishingly hot that day, and I was grateful when Nama Mavu, the local chief, invited me into her home for a chat.
“My ancestors came from Angola, and they set up the village in 1941,” she said.
On her parlor wall there was an image of Jesus, and a poster advertising a copper-and-cobalt mine.
“My ancestors came here to build the railroad, and, when the construction of the railroad finished, they stayed.”
For years, the villagers farmed the surrounding bush, growing large crops of manioc, but about a decade ago the land became polluted after some foreign businessmen opened a cobalt-processing plant nearby.
This left no source of employment for the villagers, except as low-paid day laborers. In 2018, the residents of Kasulo who had been displaced by the Congo Dongfang mine began to arrive.
As I walked through the village, children laughed and pointed at me, shouting “Chinese! Chinese!” Mavu said that the villagers were seldom visited by foreigners, even though their factories and mines now surrounded the town.
She assigned two young men to escort me to the houses that Congo Dongfang had built. A row of modern-looking white buildings rose in the distance. As they came into focus, it was clear that their construction was slapdash.
Few of the homes were even occupied, as most of the original residents of Kasulo had accepted money instead.
Those families who had chosen to take a house had been shown a brochure with beautiful pictures.
But the homes turned out to have no electricity or bathrooms. The roofs leaked, and the well at the corner of the development was dry. Most of the families moved away.
Muteba, the baker, was one of the few arrivals from Kasulo who had remained in Samukinda. Now in his seventies and retired, he wore a soiled lab coat over his emaciated body.
He welcomed me into his house, which was stifling hot. The roof was only roughly attached to the walls.
He had dug himself a lavatory pit, which was covered with a board. “The water here, it’s not good,” he said. “The smell of acid and pollutants comes out of any hole we try to dig for water.”
Muteba, who was ill with diarrhea, wistfully recalled his home in Kasulo. “It was a big parcel of land,” he said. “It had at least fifteen trees—avocado trees, mango trees. All this was mine.”
He continued, “We were chased out of our homes like animals, and now we suffer like strangers.”
Mavu told me that her village can hardly support its own inhabitants, much less the new ones from Kasulo. She has no means of transport, and Governor Muyej has refused to come and see her in order to take stock of the village’s problems.
She asked me to change about twenty dollars’ worth of Zambian money that she had carefully folded away after making a trade with food importers. There is no school at Samukinda, and the nearest shops are miles away.
During my meeting with Governor Muyej, I raised some of the complaints I had heard at Samukinda. He insisted that I had “a bad comprehension of the issues.”
He promised to address the dry well and the poor housing construction. When I returned to the village, five months later, Mavu told me that Papa Solution still hadn’t sent anyone: “All that has changed is that I am older.”
At the end of my first visit to Samukinda, I noticed mining tailings spread across a path. The residents had put them there to check erosion during the rainy season.
I wondered if the tailings contained any cobalt, and a young villager told me that they probably did—after all, the entire region rested on mineral deposits.
I then asked him if the residents of Samukinda had considered digging beneath the village. The young man shrugged and said that the people in his village didn’t want to suffer the same fate as those in Kasulo.
Then he made a prediction: “In the end, they will come and kick us out of here.” ♦
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The results of the Treasury Bills auction held on 27 May 2021. @CBKKenya
Africa
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Kenya’s Biggest Bank @KeEquityBank Targets Seven-Fold Customer Growth by 2025 @business
Africa
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Kenya’s biggest bank by market value plans to grow its customer base to 100 million by targeting small businesses and mining sectors in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
Equity Group Holdings Plc, which has operations in seven African markets, plans to exploit lending opportunities outside its home base where risk-based pricing of loans remains out of reach two years after the government repealed a law on interest-rate caps that ate into margins.
By the end of this year, Equity wants to beat Rawbank Sarl to be the market leader in the DRC, the central African nation with a population of more than 90 million people, Chief Executive Officer James Mwangi said in an interview.
Equity combined operations of its unit there with those of Banque Commerciale du Congo Sarl, in which it acquired a stake last year.
The merger of BCBD and Equity Bank Congo, formerly known as ProCredit, almost tripled the group’s cash and cash equivalents, and increased the amount of dollar loans to 41% of its book, Mwangi said.
“Becoming a systemic actor in all the markets we operate in means increasing the number of customers,” Mwangi said in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
“With the insights, capabilities, and the competence that we’ve built within the bank, and with the ability to leverage on technology and innovation, we could be able to do what we did in Kenya for over a period of 30 years in 10 years.”
Equity will take an even shorter time to replicate Kenya’s success in Ethiopia when Africa’s second-most populated market opens up financial services to foreign investors, Mwangi said. The main driver of growth will be private-sector credit demand, he said.
In Kenya, private-sector lending is 27% of gross domestic product, compared with 42% before the East African nation’s government introduced the rate cap.
A rapid increase is achievable if banks can be allowed to price loans to people currently considered risky borrowers appropriately, he said.
“The opportunity to bounce back to above 50% private sector to GDP should be achieved within two years,” he said.
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.@KeEquityBank Equity Bank share price data
N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment
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Conclusions
A Dash for Growth [driven by the DRC acquisition which I believe will prove a Jewel in the Crown] in a pandemic Year.
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Kenya Shilling versus The Dollar Live ForexPros
World Currencies
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Nairobi All Share Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Every Listed Share can be interrogated here
N.S.E General
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