Thursday, January 26, 2017

Sasol Back In Takeover Mode-Even Considering Move Back Into China

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Thursday, January 19, 2017

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

A Guide To Mocambique's Bazaruto Archpelago

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ANC Reveals Plans To Eject Zuma But Corruption To Stay

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Friday, January 13, 2017

R100,000 A Night To Stay In Cape Town??!!!

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Thursday, January 12, 2017

This Is The Future-Stagnant Milan Is A Preview Of South Africa In The Future

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Wild Coast Mourns Man Who Inspired Anti-Toll, Anti Mine Activism

Wild Coast mourns man who inspired anti-toll, anti-mine activism

Jan 10 2017 07:09 


Samson Gampe, who died aged 86 on 5th January 2017, has proved to be one of the biggest obstacles to state-sponsored ambitions to tame the Wild Coast with two related mega development impositions; the Xolobeni Mineral Sands project and the N2 Wild Coast Toll Road, explains John Clarke.
In tribute, the following edited excerpt from John Clarke’s book The Promise of Justice opens a window into uTata Gampe’s remarkable wisdom, oratory and groundedness in the soils of the Amadiba Wild Coast community, explains Clarke.  

Photo: The Shore Break
A hero of the local community
uTata Samson Gampe helped me realise why the N2 Wild Coast Toll Road and the Xolobeni mining venture are so wrong for the Mpondo people.
He was one of the most outstanding heroes of the community mobilisation against the mining project. His homestead is situated close to the point where the new greenfield section of the proposed N2 highway starts. His strength of character was equal in strength to the physical might of his biblical namesake. It was Samson Gampe’s words to Minister Buyelwa Sonjica that brought the temple crashing down, figuratively, on the aspirations of MRC and its partners.
Nonhle Mbuthuma and Samson Gampe live between the Mzamba and Mphahlane rivers in the Amadiba Tribal Administrative Area on the Pondoland Wild Coast of South Africa. The area is collectively identified as the Sigidi community. If the Toll Road goes ahead, Nonhle and Samson will find themselves on either side of a barrier dividing a previously closely-knit rural community in two. This will play havoc with long established patterns of socio-cultural interaction.
Nonhle’s personal testimony has been excellently told through the medium of two films.  In 2009 Don Guy’s 11 minute film Pondo People won for him the SAB Environmentalist of the Year award.     
In the film, Nonhle acknowledges that the intense resistance to the threat of mining by the older people in her community, had prompted her own need to understand the reasons for their resistance. This quest had plunged her into the depths of local, national and indeed global politics – aspects of life she never imagined she would need to fathom when she was a young girl, playing happily with her peers amid the dunes and estuaries of the Wild Coast.
WATCH: Before the Shore Break

Pondo People in turn paved the way for a full-length feature film The Shore Break directed and co-produced by Ryley Grunenwald and Odette Geldenhuys filmed between 2011 and 2013 and released in 2015, which has served to amplify the story on the international circuit, winning several awards at various documentary film festivals. www.theshorebreakmovie.com, With some outstanding cinematography The Shore Break captures his melancholia – his dread at the thought of his ancestral home being taken away from him. There is now a word for it: solastalgia.  Akin to nostalgia it arises when one’s home is taken away, a now well documented ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003, it was formed from a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain)’  .
Nonhle Mbuthuma is young, female and educated; Samson Gampe was elderly, male and, by his own admission, ‘unable even to write my own name – but I know better than any young person when the end of the month has arrived, and how to feed my family,’ he told me.
For all his lack of formal education, Mr Gampe could boast of more than sixty years of vocal participation in traditional tribal imbizos. As a proud young Mpondo warrior he had cut his teeth in the resistance to the ‘betterment planning’ scheme of the apartheid government. This led, ultimately, to the Pondo Revolt of 1960, which occurred in the same year as the Sharpeville Massacre.
An avalanche of state forces were mobilised to quell the revolt but Mr Gampe escaped arrest by hiding in the deeply forested gorges. He lived to keep alive an oral history of that saga, so that young Mpondo people like Nonhle could draw wisdom from his traumatic experience when they confront new challenges to their land rights and cherished cultural traditions.
In my role as a social worker attending an imbizo, I had been privileged on more than one occasion to witness the astonished expressions on the faces of senior government officials and politicians when confronted by Mr Gampe’s eloquent orations. He warned them not to trifle with the deeply held attachment of the Mpondos to their ancestral lands. Although unable to read a newspaper, he showed astounding political acumen while articulating a coherent vision for community well-being.
In vain the smartly suited visitors would then try to make the case for why mining should be allowed – as a catalyst for ‘development’ that would provide jobs for young people, like Nonhle. They reasoned that young people nowadays had aspirations that could not be satisfied by Mr Gampe’s traditional rural subsistence lifestyle.
That would be the cue for Nonhle to rise to her feet to scold the officials for their presumption. ‘What makes the Mpondos different from all other South African citizens?’ she would ask. ‘Why do we have to sacrifice our land and our identity in order to get roads, electricity and municipal services?’
Predictably, after such awkward questions the meeting would come to a hasty conclusion. The suited visitors, with furrowed brows betraying their bewilderment and confusion, would seek refuge behind the tinted windows of the convoy of 4x4 vehicles parked nearby, and then drive away as fast as the poor roads would permit. Mr Gampe would proudly mount his Pondo pony and return to his well-maintained rural homestead, waving farewell to Nonhle and the lively Mpondo people. Local participants would disperse on foot, still singing mocking songs about the mining protagonists and opportunistic politicians – songs which, if one could understand the Mpondo dialect, would be their oral equivalent of a clever Zapiro cartoon.
The dune mining controversy had made Samson Gampe something of a film star and he featured in various TV reports (available on my YouTube channel Icosindaba). Without electricity and thus access to national TV, it occurred to me that Mr Gampe had probably never seen the TV reports produced by Don Guy of 50/50, that had kept the nation informed. So Nonhle and I visited Mr Gampe and his proud wife, Maduzemlungu, at their homestead to show them the video footage.

The author and Samson Gampe. Photo: Cheryl Alexander
My logging of a process note in May 2009 records:
"As I loaded the portable DVD player, Mr Gampe remarked, “Hey John, what is this clever gadget you are bringing?”
They watched the screen intently while I filmed their obvious satisfaction and delight. Nonhle then interviewed him, in a free ranging conversation in the local Mpondo dialect. The interview gave me even more insight into what made this remarkable man tick. In conversation with Nonhle, Mr Gampe said, “The only thing I need money for is to buy cooking oil. But I can do without that too.”
Samson Gampe may be cash poor but he is wealthy beyond all conventional economic measures.
After the interview I emerged into the yard where his grandchildren were playing and his wife offered me a bowl of juicy oranges harvested from their orchard. As a guest in the Gampe household I experienced a true sense of a family with a quality of life – “the art of living, and living well” as Aristotle once defined the purpose of economics. Despite his illiteracy and lack of formal education, Samson Gampe epitomised the classic definition of the “art of household management’’ – what Aristotle termed Oikonomía. This is in contrast to the art of money-making or Khrématistiké. What passes for economics today should strictly speaking be labelled ‘chrematistics’, as modern economics bears little resemblance to the true Aristotelian conception of economics.
But the elation I felt after my visit to Mr Gampe’s homestead was short lived. Circumstances conspired to present me with a tragedy and a conundrum that distresses me every time I think about it.
While driving away on the rough roads a very distressed young mother ran up to my car to plead for our help, followed a few paces behind by her brother carrying a baby wrapped in a blanket. Through her tears she pleaded with us to give her a lift back to her homestead, some 15 km away toward the coast. We learned that her child had woken during the night with a high fever. At first light she and her brother had walked the approximately 15 km stretch to the clinic. Alas, the clinic staff had been unable to do much for the child because the clinic did not have the necessary medication. She was turned away with a desperately sick child in her arms. Trying to control her tears she said that the child had died in her arms as she sat dejected on the roadside, yielding its frail life to the onslaught of what should have been, if not a preventable infectious disease, at least one that should have been treatable.
With her brother holding the dead child wrapped in a blanket, for the first time in my life my off-road vehicle, a favourite recreational vehicle among the well-heeled-and-wheeled in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, became a hearse. I drove the grieving family as far as my vehicle would safely permit on the bad roads, back to their homestead, so they could commence the sad process of burying their little baby girl.
Images from the biblical account of the travels of Jesus through the Galilean countryside, healing and ministering to people in similar distress, came to mind. But the best I could do was to pray with them, a prayer that was as much an effort to bolster my own doubtful faith as to console them. In another feeble gesture I gave them each one of the oranges that Mrs Gampe had given me, and (somewhat self-consciously, as one enslaved to chrematistics rather than economics) I gave them also a R100 note that I happened to have on me.
Nonhle and I returned home in confused and angry silence."
Photo: Cheryl Alexander
Mrs Gampe’s oranges
Leaving Nonhle in Port Edward, I drove on to meet my friends, Bishop Geoff and Kate Davies in Durban. I was looking forward to their consolation and pastoral support, to help me process this traumatic experience.
Driving back to Durban I speculated whether the baby would still be alive if the proposed Wild Coast N2 Toll Road, which Geoff had led a hitherto successful civil society campaign to prevent, had become a reality. I do not believe the baby would have survived. I reasoned that it would probably have made the mother’s walk even more difficult, because it has been designed to pass between her home and the clinic, and would be fenced off with a limited number of underpasses along the route.
But, with some of Mrs Gampe’s oranges still in the bulging pockets of my jacket to remind me of the early, joyful events of the day, it didn’t need much speculation to conclude that the construction of the Toll Road would spell the end of the thriving subsistence livelihood enjoyed by Mr Gampe and his family. The preferred route will pass within a stone’s throw of his homestead and almost certainly destroy the freedom, autonomy and wellbeing they presently enjoy. Just another tragic instance of an oikonomía lifestyle (i.e. ‘people coherent with themselves, the community and the environment’) being buried under concrete and tarmac by the chrematistic turn that modern economics has taken. As I reluctantly paid the R17 toll fee at the Port Shepstone ‘troll’ plaza, it occurred to me that the practice of tolling roads illustrates perfectly the ascendency of khrématistiké over oikonomía in modern developed society.
But, I have to concede, the high-speed motorway that commences at the ‘troll’ gate enabled me to complete a journey in one hour that would have taken twice as long before the motorway was constructed. I was in time for my rendezvous with Geoff and Kate, who invited me to join their dinner party. My modest contribution to a sumptuous feast enjoyed in a beautiful home of their friends was to give my kind hostess another of Mrs Gampe’s oranges, in gratitude for her attentive and consoling response when I related the extreme contrasts of my eventful day.
Leaving their home well-fed and comforted, I had one other priority commitment. It was to meet with Kevin, the husband of a couple who have been close friends for over thirty years. His wife Nolene had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and Kevin happened to be in Durban on business, affording me the opportunity to do what true friends do – spend time together.
Kevin was staying in the home of family friends in Kloof. I entered through the elegant wrought iron gates and came upon an imposing old stone and thatch Kwa-Zulu Natal home. Kevin’s hosts were away but he invited me in and we soon settled in the comfort of a beautifully decorated lounge. We talked for ages. Kevin shared with me Nolene’s amazing journey through her operation and chemotherapy. After the stress and confusion of the day I was reminded of the beauty of the human spirit when it is open to Grace.
We walked to the car and as we said our good-byes I realised that I still had one more of Mrs Gampe’s oranges left in the pocket of my jacket.
‘Take this, Kevin. There is a story to be enjoyed when you peel away the skin.’
* In tribute to uTata Samson Gampe, The Shore Break will be screened on Wednesday 11th January at 18:00 at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, 26 Melville Road, Illovo Sandton. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with John Clarke, and Margie Pretorius of Sustaining the Wild Coast. A collection will be taken to assist the Gampe family. RSVP to johngic@iafrica.com.   
* Samson Gampe's funeral will take place in Sigidi village near Bizana on Saturday, 14 January.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

China Ivory Sales Fuel The World's 4th Largest Crime Sector

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Higher Investment Returns-Which African Countries Will Join The Emerging Market Party?

Higher investment returns: Which African countries will join emerging markets party?

Jan 10 2017 07:02 


Recent political shenanigans have masked the positive effect South Africa’s political liberation has had on other African countries. As Alan Hirsch of the University of Cape Town notes here: Africa is poised for sustainable growth and development, with outward investment by South Africa having sparked significant developments in other countries.
But South Africa is no longer the star of the African show. As it loses its lustre, low-tax haven Mauritius and desperately poor Ethiopia are looking like exciting prospects for entrepreneurs and investors hoping to tap into growth opportunities. In this in-depth analysis, Professor Hirsch sets out the details of growth patterns over three decades, highlighting economic risks and positive trends. If you are looking for ways to boost your revenues or enhance or investment trends, look to East Africa, says the expert who once managed economic policy in the Presidency for South Africa’s ruling ANC. – Jackie Cameron.
As we know, growth accelerations are pretty commonplace among developing countries. Economist Ricardo Haussman and his colleagues identified 83 growth accelerations of eight consecutive years at 2% higher than the five-yearly average between the mid-1950s and early 2000s.
But most growth accelerations, and especially those in Africa, were short-lived. They did not form the foundation of a long-term step-change to a more diversified growth path. Drawing on the language of American economist WW Rostow, most growth accelerations don’t amount to a “take-off”.
The risk following the recently ended booms is that, due to insufficient planning and excessive optimism, the windfalls of growth accelerations were wasted.
Have the growth accelerations completely fizzled out? Have some African countries used the opportunities in recent decades to implement effective longer term growth and development strategies?
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3,0 Unported licence. 
Since the early 1990s many African countries have been on a trajectory of higher growth. To the surprise of many observers the global financial crisis in 2007-2009 did not spell the end of Africa’s growth surge, though the rate of growth moderated.
More recently African growth has slowed further. At around 4% in GDP terms it is considerably lower than the 6% plus for emerging Asia. Yet growth remains stronger than in the “lost decades” between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s.
And Africa’s developmental performance has improved considerably since the early 1990s. It is evident that African poverty and infant mortality, while still lagging, have improved significantly. There have been similar improvements in education access and improvements in infrastructure such as roads and electricity.
The higher rate of growth has been a valuable asset, though it is by no means the only factor which has allowed developmental improvements. While these have themselves contributed to growth, the current relatively low growth rate inhibits the pace of the improvement in the lives of people.
As Amadou Sy points out:
If the region was able to regain its 2004-2014 growth rate GDP per capita could be doubled in 20.5 years, by 2036. In contrast, at a [per capita] growth rate of 1.4% as currently predicted, this achievement would only be realised in 50 years, by the year 2065.

Why growth has slowed

To get a real sense of why growth has slowed, we first need to ask why the period since the mid-1990s was so much better than the previous two decades.
The commodity super-cycle, centred on China’s huge public and private investments, was the standout economic factor due to the demand for African products. Later China’s capital surplus allowed it to offer huge credits for infrastructure investments.
But indicators show that growth and development improvements began in Africa before the commodity super-cycle, other factors were also at play.
Clearly important was the completion of Africa’s liberation – particularly the democratic transitions in southern Africa. South Africa’s post-democratic growth had significant impact on the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. This was mostly through outward investment by South Africa’s multinationals, but also through rising trade.
The South Africa factor is a subset of the positive impact of the end of the Cold War. This allowed greater domestic accountability and improved governance in many African countries.
The improvements in governance in turn created an environment that frequently encouraged direct and indirect investment.

Economic policy risks

African growth slowed after the global crisis. But the slowdown was not as rapid as initially feared. This was partly because of global mitigation measures (for example trade credit liquidity) and partly because African growth was also driven by rising domestic consumption and investment. Growth has slowed down more in recent years in most African countries under the shadow of several economic policy risks. By these, I mean risks which can be lessened or deepened, depending on the quality of economic policy.
Even after the global economic crisis, several African countries were able to embark on sovereign bond issues for the first time.
Before 2006, only South Africa had issued a sovereign bond in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2009, fourteen other countries have issued a total of US$17 billion in sovereign bonds. In 2014 alone sub-Saharan sovereigns, excluding South Africa, issued US$6.3 billion of foreign-currency denominated bonds.
Except in South Africa, the bonds were generally issued in foreign currencies on expectation of receipts from the continued export of commodities. But faced with lower than expected tax revenues as commodity prices fell, several countries used bond finance for current expenditure rather than capital investments.
It is arguable that by 2014 investors should have been wary of high-yield sovereign bond sales. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is much busier than it has been in Africa since the height of the debt forgiveness programme. It has gone as far as to call for a “policy reset” on the continent.
The impact of twin deficits – foreign capital account and fiscal – is potentially greater than simply a sharp and temporary slowdown. Since the early 1990s, democratic governments in Africa have derived some of their legitimacy from slowly but steadily improving living conditions. Cut-backs potentially threaten the legitimacy of open democracies. The Zambian government delayed entering into negotiations for relief from the IMF until after recent elections. If the inevitable debt restructurings are not carefully designed there are potential risks to political stability.
The second major economic policy risk is that growth is tempered with high levels of inequality. High inequality reduces the impact of growth on poverty, and growing inequality is slow to reverse. Africa has a highest Gini co-efficient among continents. If these inequality levels cannot be reduced, the sustainability of growth in the region will be compromised.
Finally, is it feasible that Africa will meet, let alone beat the Sustainable Development Goal of doubling the share of employment and output attributable to the industrial sector? Much of the increase in employment and value added in recent decades has come from the services sector – now over 50% of value added.
Mauritius
In a study of 72 developing countries spanning 1996 to 2012, the UNU-Wider project found that 66 (or 88%) had become more dependent on extractives during the commodity super-cycle.
Developing a manufacturing sector requires managerial competence, sufficiently skilled workers and a good or improving infrastructural environment. To replicate Asia’s export push policies it also needs consistent policies and a state that understands and supports industrialisation.
Not many African countries meet these criteria. The countries seriously in contention are Mauritius (already there) and Ethiopia.

Positive trends

To counteract the growing pessimism about the fate of Africa’s recent growth accelerations there are also significant positive trends. These could underpin a long term growth and development trajectory.
Agricultural productivity is rising, not rapidly, but significantly and consistently. Small businesses are proliferating and thriving in many parts of Africa.
Several African countries are committed to industrial or sectoral strategies. Some are being encouraged by development agencies.
If well managed, the recent surge of investment in infrastructure, from rural roads to airports, offers advantages for producers and traders.
East Africa is in many ways showing the way. Examples include better government-business relations, better trade integration, advances in the freedom of movement of people and in the development of a regional payments system allowing easier cross-border banking.
Improvements in health and education access have had an impact and will continue to do so as quality improves.
Finally, African countries have responded to emerging fiscal squeezes with more resolve and less resistance and denialism than in previous periods when fiscal adjustments were required.
The risks have grown in recent years. But the developmental improvements of the past two decades may well have generated a sufficient legacy to enable many African countries to move to a stronger footing.The Conversation
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