Thursday, May 31, 2018

Zimbabwe: For The People

ZIMBABWE

For the People

Zimbabwe slated for July 30 its first presidential and parliamentary elections since the ouster of strongman Robert Mugabe.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took power after a military coup unseated the longtime leader in November, pledged to ensure free and fair polls with international monitoring, Reuters reported.
For the first time in 20 years, the ballot will be missing the names of 94-year-old Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, the longtime opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader who died of cancer in February.
If approved by international monitors, the election could boost foreign lending to Zimbabwe, which has been largely cut off for two decades, Reuters said. As the incumbent, Mnangagwa enjoys some advantages in a vote that’s likely to go down to the wire, as his main challenger, 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa from the MDC, has energized the opposition.
Billed as a contest between the old guard of Zimbabwe’s 1970s independence war and a younger generation, the election will grant Mnangagwa democratic legitimacy if he can win it.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Africa's Hidden Oil Hub Near Cape Town Booms After Making Millions for Traders

frica's hidden oil hub near Cape Town booms after making millions for traders

May 29 2018 07:53 
Paul Burkhardt, Bloomberg
For oil traders, there’s no place quite like Saldanha Bay. When prices slumped in 2014, trading houses generated outsize profits by storing millions of barrels of crude in the deep-water harbour north of Cape Town.
Now storage facilities at the port - where South Africa built vast concrete bunkers in the 1970s that helped insulate the apartheid regime from United Nations oil sanctions - are expanding.
Saldanha could have turned into a white elephant, but it held an unforeseen commercial potential. When a price structure known as contango emerged in the oil market, traders were able to lock in profits by storing crude for future delivery to buyers elsewhere. This happened in 2009 and again four years ago, when companies from Mercuria Energy Group to Vitol Group used the site.
While those opportunities have evaporated as oil rebounded, the strategic importance of the shipping route around the Cape of Good Hope has grown.
“There’s nothing that really compares with Saldanha Bay,” said Joe Willis, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd, who highlights its accessibility to supertankers plying an ocean highway that connects key markets in Asia, Europe and the Americas. “It’s quite unique in its own right.”
After the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of sanctions, South Africa’s Strategic Fuel Fund gradually sold off its reserves and began to lease out Saldanha’s six concrete tanks - which from satellite photos resemble a line of computer chips on a circuit board - to trading companies.
About 5.8 million barrels a day of crude moved around the Cape of Good Hope in 2016, and accounted for about 9% of all seaborne-traded oil the previous year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Capacity gains
Saldanha is currently able to hold as much as 45 million barrels, enough to fill more than 20 large tankers. By comparison, Cushing, the better-known US oil storage centre in Oklahoma that serves as the pricing point for the West Texas Intermediate oil benchmark, can hold about 75 million barrels.
The capacity of Saldanha will grow by almost 30% with the addition of more than 13 million barrels of storage and blending facilities by the end of next year, according to a joint venture of Hamburg-based Oiltanking GmbH, the world’s second-biggest independent crude storage provider, and local company MOGS.
Following the contango bonanza, in late-2017 traders sold oil stored at Saldanha as prices more than doubled. For most of 2015, 2016 and the early part of 2017, the market was in contango, which allows traders to buy crude, put it into storage and lock-in a profit for a future sale by hedging forward. Profit at Vitol, the world’s biggest independent oil trader, climbed to a four-year high of $1.6bn in 2015.
Blissful isolation
“Saldanha Bay has played an important part in our evolution as a company,” said Matt Lauer, a spokesperson for Mercuria in Geneva. “We are always looking at the means to provide solutions for global supply requirements. By finding value in existing infrastructure, we conserve resources and fulfill the needs of our counterparties.”
Saldanha’s storage facilities, a few miles beyond the crayfish restaurants of Langebaan, also afford traders the advantage of privacy. A small industry has grown up around using satellite photos, thermal imaging or even helicopter trips to figure out how much crude is stored in strategic locations, such as Cushing, by observing the roofs of tanks, which typically rise and fall as they are filled or emptied.
Saldanha’s partially buried concrete tanks give away fewer clues, even inspiring a frustrated lament from TankerTrackers.com, an online community that keeps tabs on movements of the petroleum.
The expansion should increase the hub’s appeal to international oil traders. Oiltanking MOGS Saldanha, the joint venture unit, is building the new capacity with a fixed roof design, though in a different configuration of 12 tanks of 1.1 million barrels, Chief Executive Officer Dirk Exalto said in an interview. This allows partial cargoes to be unloaded and blended with other oil grades, according to Willis.
“What we’re trying to do is try and create a more flexible blending location,” Exalto said. “We see a lot of flows from South Africa and West Africa that pass by the Cape.”
The first three tanks of the terminal are scheduled for completion in the third quarter, with the remainder finished by mid-2019.
There’s been interest in the project from international traders as well as refiners and South African companies, according to Exalto, who declined to identify them.
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Consumers Que For Fridges Amid Price Hikes As The Zimbabwe Economy Falters

Consumers queue for fridges amid price hikes as Zim economy falters

May 28 2018 20:46 
Memory Mataranyika
Harare – Despite the pledge of Emmerson Mnangagwa's new administration to end cash shortages and right the economy, the desperation shown by companies and consumers in Zimbabwe point to a different reality. 
This was illustrated on Monday when nearly a thousand people pushed and shoved, with some getting injured in the process, for the chance to buy heavily discounted appliances at a Zimbabwean manufacturer.
The scene can be regarded as symbolic of the country’s slowing economy, with battling companies and crisis-ravaged consumers at the mercy of price increases, multi-tier pricing and cash shortages.
Zimbabwe’s economy, largely expected to improve after the exit of former leader Robert Mugabe last November, has lurched from one crisis to another, hobbled by little to no real foreign direct investment inflows.
On Monday, nearly 1 000 people gathered at refrigeration manufacturer Capri – listed as a unit of Innscor Africa in the group’s 2017 annual report – to buy heavily marked down refrigerators.
Fridges were marked down by up to 40% and this attracted a large gathering, with people stampeding for the chance to buy the appliances.
“I was told by a nephew who works around this area over the weekend that prices will be reduced by half, starting today, and I made sure I arrived around 05:00. But when I arrived, there were already people lining up.
"It was a bit orderly in the morning but now everyone wants to jump in and we are just hoping we get the fridge we want at the end of the day,” said a woman in her mid-40s as she pushed to gain entry just after the shop opened.
Desperate companies and consumers
The large crowd at Capri epitomises the desperation of both Zimbabwean companies and individuals. The companies have been suffocated by shortages of forex, which they badly need to import equipment and raw materials.
But there is already speculation that the marked-down refrigerators could be damaged or faulty products. Others have also said through social media that the company reduced prices to clear stockpiled products it had failed to clear from shops.

Kenya: Chargong Ahead

KENYA

Charging Ahead

Kenya issued formal charges Monday against more than 50 people as part of an investigation into the theft of nearly $100 million of public funds.
Mainly implicating civil servants, the charges represent a rare effort to hold public officials accountable for graft in the East African nation, Reuters reported.
The accused included the head of the National Youth Service and the chief internal auditor at the national treasury, chief prosecutor Noordin Mohamed Haji told a news conference.
Though President Uhuru Kenyatta pledged to stamp out corruption when he was first elected in 2013, there have been no high-profile convictions since he took office, the agency noted. Reuters wasn’t able to reach any of the accused for comment.
Meanwhile, Haji said the probe would now look into the role played by local banks in the case, in which youth service officials allegedly stole government funds by creating fictitious invoices and receiving multiple payments on one supplier invoice. The state organization trains young people and deploys them to projects ranging from construction to traffic control.

Friday, May 25, 2018

Nigeria: No Safety In Succor

NIGERIA

No Safety in Succor

Amnesty International claimed that Nigerian soldiers raped women and girls who fled Boko Haram, sometimes extorting sex in exchange for food.
Nigeria’s military, which has repeatedly been accused of carrying out atrocities during the fight against the Islamist militants, denied the allegations, the BBC reported.
“These false reports, which are capable of derailing the good work being done by our patriotic and selfless soldiers, must stop,” the military said in a statement.
Based on more than 250 in-depth interviews conducted over two years, the Amnesty report cited “scores of women (and some men)” as saying soldiers and Civilian Joint Task Force members commonly used force and threats to rape women and girls or took advantage of their plight to coerce them into sex.
Nine women reported cases of rape to Amnesty International and 10 others reported that they had been coerced to become the “girlfriend” to a soldier or the Civilian JTF, the rights agency said. The report also detailed other abuses.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

South Sudan: Things Falling Apart

SOUTH SUDAN

Things Fall Apart

Talks to end South Sudan’s civil war broke up without yielding a peace deal on Wednesday in Ethiopia, threatening to prolong a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.
The eight-country Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) trade bloc has been attempting to revive a 2015 peace deal between factions led by President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar, but it said in a statement that “several attempts to narrow the gaps between the positions of the parties” had failed, Reuters reported.
IGAD’s statement didn’t provide further details on the sticking points.
If a peace deal can’t be forged, the country could face a continuation of ethnically motivated violence, man-made famine and tit-for-tat human rights violations or perhaps a degeneration into “a state of permanent anarchy in which life is nastier, shorter, and even more brutish” than it is today, opined Luka Kuol, with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University in Washington, DC.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Congo: Scrambling For Containment

CONGO

Scrambling For Containment

Aid workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo unveiled an experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus Monday after reports began surfacing in April of at least 49 suspected new cases and at least 26 deaths, NPR reported.
The unlicensed drug has been fast-tracked for use, with 7,500 doses now available in Congo and another 8,000 on the way, according to the World Health Organization.
The vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV, was initially tested during West Africa’s massive Ebola outbreak in 2015, in which more than 11,300 people died, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Its current distribution in Congo marks the first time the vaccine has been widely administered since then.
Medical workers said it’s being used to safeguard against another high-magnitude outbreak – four new cases have already been confirmed in the port city of Mbandaka, a sprawling urban center with more than 1 million inhabitants.
To prevent the spread of disease in close quarters, health workers and first responders, as well as funeral workers and those with close contact to the infected, have been prioritized for vaccination.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Burundi: No Limits

BURUNDI

No Limits

Citizens in the small east African nation of Burundi voted Thursdayto decide whether to amend the nation’s constitution to allow current strongman President Pierre Nkurunziza, in power since 2005, to extend his term to 2034, the Wall Street Journal reported.
While in power, Nkurunziza has cracked down on opposition groups and the press. The situation in Burundi, the world’s third-poorest nation, has become increasingly violent since 2015, when Nkurunziza ignored the nation’s two-term limit on presidents and remained in office, citing his God-given right to do so.
The political crisis has led to 1,200 deaths since 2015, and more than 400,000 have fled to neighboring countries, human rights organizations estimate.
The measure is likely to pass, which would extend terms from five to seven years, and allow any president who’d previously served two consecutive terms to run again after sitting one out, the Journal reported.
It’s an observable trend across Africa: Although 18 countries on the continent have imposed term limits, 10 have done away with them, including Rwanda and Uganda.

The Valiant Lady Fighting To Save Steinhoff

How saving Steinhoff became Heather Sonn's 14-hour-a-day mission

May 18 2018 06:20 
Janice Kew, Bloomberg
Until December, Heather Sonn was running a small investment firm in Cape Town. Then an accounting scandal erupted at Steinhoff International Holdings [JSE:SNH] and she was tapped to chair the board.
The 46-year-old says she accepted the non-executive role because she felt a duty to those affected by the crisis, which has wiped more than 95% from the share price. She also realised it was the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often.
“When things are broken, I want to fix them,” Sonn said in an interview at Steinhoff’s headquarters in Stellenbosch, South Africa. “It was clear it was going to take a heck of a lot of time and I would have to step out of other formal roles as this was going to be an immersion.”
Six months on, Sonn, who has likened the embattled retailer to a burning building, is still in firefighter mode.
The owner of Conforama in France, Britain’s Poundland and Mattress Firm in the US arranged new credit lines for units in those countries in January and has raised some $2bn selling assets to stay afloat. The next big test for Sonn and her newly established board comes on Friday: a meeting with lenders to start working toward a restructuring of more than €10.4bn ($12.3bn) of debt.
Nor is there an end in sight. An audit of Steinhoff’s books by accountants at PwC may drag on until the end of the year. Investigations are under way across several countries. And billion-dollar legal claims are arriving, including shareholder class-action cases in Germany and the Netherlands.
Even Sonn’s predecessor as chairperson, billionaire Christo Wiese, is suing, for about $4.8bn.
Sonn isn’t a newcomer to Steinhoff’s supervisory board. She joined in December 2013, four years before the crisis erupted. Her name was put forward by her father, Franklin Sonn, an anti-apartheid activist and former ambassador to the US who served as a non-executive director at the company for more than a decade.
Heather had done her undergraduate studies at Smith College and earned a graduate degree in international business from Georgetown. Her experience included stints at Merrill Lynch & Co, Sanlam Investment Management and Barclays Plc. In joining Steinhoff’s board, she says she was keen to understand how South African companies with large, global businesses worked. Now she’s getting a crash course.
“This is the best experience I could ever gain from work, but I just hope I never have to apply it all again,” said Sonn.
Seated in a wood-paneled board room with a painting of a derelict building almost covering one wall, she was personable and focused. She said she’s not the only one who’s working hard, and praised the efforts of the revamped board and management team.
Her most frightening moment occurred just before the crisis began, when Chief Executive Officer Markus Jooste failed to turn up for a key meeting with directors in early December.
“We were aware that Deloitte had raised questions, but they were being dealt with,” Sonn said. “When I arrived I could see from the mood that it was serious, but I was still expecting Jooste to show up. Hearing that he wouldn’t was terrifying as I then knew something was seriously wrong.”
Jooste, who’d led Steinhoff on a decades-long acquisition spree that turned it into one of South Africa’s biggest companies, quit on December 5. Less than two weeks later, Wiese had also stepped down.
Since taking over as chairperson, Sonn has been spending up to 14-hour days wading through the consequences. Her fluency in Afrikaans, the primary language used in the Stellenbosch area, has undoubtedly helped. Even so, compared to the previous, largely homogeneous board, she stands out.
Some stakeholders would prefer a chairperson with deep experience managing large, global corporations. For them, it’s impossible to compare a relative unknown like Sonn to Wiese, who’s spent five decades building and running companies. For others, such as The Public Investment Corporation, Steinhoff’s largest investor, mixing up South African boards is exactly what’s needed.
Steve Booysen, who’s been a Steinhoff director since 2009 and heads the audit and risk committee, describes Sonn’s style as consultative, calm and “firm at the right time”.
“You can have all the qualifications, with 20 years accounting experience, and nothing can prepare you for this,” said Graeme Korner, a fund manager at Johannesburg-based Korner Perspective. “The best credentials you can possibly have are a mindset of saying let me try to make the best of this lousy situation, be as honest and open as possible and try and limit the fallout.”
Still, investors who’ve had their trust in the company shattered are asking why no one on the board, Sonn included, spotted the problem much earlier.
“There must have been a lot of smoke,” said Mark Hodgson, a Cape Town-based analyst at Avior Capital Markets. “What key actions had the board taken to convince themselves that all was okay?”
Wiese, 76, told South African lawmakers in January that news of the irregularities came as a “bolt from the blue,” and that detecting fraud is very difficult for board members, especially if the CEO is involved, as has been alleged in the case of Steinhoff.
Sonn said that great efforts had been made to keep things hidden, describing the scandal as “the worst thing that could have happened on our watch”.
Now, in trying to set things right, she has to decide how to define success, no simple task in a situation that’s unlikely to have a happy ending for anyone involved - not investors, creditors or employees.
“For me, what that looks like is all stakeholders are dealt a fair outcome,” she said.
“We have to uncover all wrongdoing and pursue the guilty. And then at the same time, so far as possible, try and prevent job losses, make good on our commitments with regards to lenders and, as far as we possibly can, protect or recover some value for shareholders.”
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Thursday, May 17, 2018

Chad: Off The Blacklist

CHAD

Off the Blacklist

Citizens of Chad are able to once again enter the United States after President Trump removed the predominantly Muslim, Central African nation from the list of countries falling under his controversial travel ban.
The reversal was a calculated decision, as Chad counterterrorism forces have been key in the fight against Islamic militants in the region, the BBC reported. Chad is an important Western ally, and many were shocked that it even made it onto the list in the first place.
But Washington’s strategic about-face on Chad comes at an interesting moment in the nation’s history – a constitutional rewrite has effectively guaranteed that longtime President Idriss Déby could rule another 15 years.
Déby has been sparring with Boko Haram – the Islamic militant group infamous for the Nigerian schoolgirl kidnappings – ever since it overran the Lake Chad region in 2009. Boko Haram’s violence in the region has prompted an ongoing humanitarian crisisas the group attempts to impose Sharia law on the region and isolate it from aid groups and local governments. Millions from Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon have been displaced in the conflict.
As America’s war on terror intensified, Chad developed a reputation as a dutiful ally, eager to fight Boko Haram, when it deployed troops to fight the militants in Nigeria. But once Chad made President Trump’s blacklist, Déby withdrew hundreds of troops from the region, Reuters reported.
Trump seems to have bandaged the broken relationship with a pivotal regional ally by excluding Chad from the ban.
But one should be careful to classify Chad as a proponent of Western values now that it’s back in Trump’s good graces.
Resisting the wave of ousted strongmen across the continent, Chad’s parliament overwhelmingly approved a new constitution that could allow President Déby to hold his post until 2033, when he will be at least 80, Reuters reported.
Approved by a vote of 132 to 2, the rewritten constitution reinstates a two-term limit on the presidency, and extends the president’s term from five to six years. And because the new term limits are not retroactive, Déby, who’s been in office since 1990, could serve two terms after the next election, in 2021.
Despite overwhelming parliamentary support, the move ignited opposition groups who see the changes as turning Chad into a de-facto monarchy. To show their disapproval, they boycotted a two-week national forum that discussed the amendments and was attended by business leaders and high-ranking politicians.
For all the controversy of the constitutional change, however, it appears that counterterrorism trumps democratic norms when it comes to Western perceptions of Chad