My Beauty Best Teacher

Nigeria's new central bank governor Lamido Sanusi, interviewed in the FT:

FT: There’s a huge crisis of credibility in the Nigerian banking sector, in the opinion of many analysts. It seems to many of the people I speak to that your fundamental task is to restore that credibility. How are you going to that?
Lamido Sanusi: In addition to the standard central bank duties of monetary policy and financial stability, I’ve set myself two primary tasks. The first one is restoring confidence in the financial system. The second one is slightly less conventional but it is actually playing an important role as an agent for development...[continue reading]

Alec Russell reports in FT:

Economists have long argued that formal statistics underestimate activity in the informal sector.Under white rule(in South Africa), townships were ignored by banks partly because they were deemed commercially unviable, partly because of the lawlessness, and partly because it did not occur to most bankers to expand services out of their “comfort zone”, says one executive drily.
Now, however, there is a dual impulse for banks to reassess their old ways: there is growing awareness of the size of the informal economy and the rewards from tapping it; and they also need to fulfil their obligations to the banking charter, which requires banks to make amends for the past, when they catered mainly to whites, by expanding services...[continue reading]

In a follow-up to a recent announcement about inflated Aids figures Christopher Caldwell of the FT writes:

A quarter-century into an epidemic that has killed millions, the organisation that leads the fight admits that it has been doing so with shaky data. Certain doctors have been saying this for a long time and the UN has ignored them. This week’s correction was a reminder that, while the UN can sidestep local political squabbles, questions of accountability inevitably crop up again at the international level, with the stakes often much higher.

The FT Interviews Dambisa Moyo author of Dead Aid she suggests:

...a telephone call from every donor nation to every aid-dependent government in Africa, warning that in five years the taps will turn off. This, she believes, would trigger the search for alternative financing on a commercial basis, and force governments to create conditions in which business would thrive.

“Most Brits would be irritated if Michael Jackson started offering advice on how to resolve the credit crisis. Americans would be put out if Amy Winehouse went to tell them how to end the housing crisis. I don’t see why Africans shouldn’t be perturbed for the same reasons,”...[continue reading]

Paul Kagame in the FT:

We appreciate support from the outside, but it should be support for what we intend to achieve ourselves. No one should pretend that they care about our nations more than we do; or assume that they know what is good for us better than we do ourselves. They should, in fact, respect us for wanting to decide our own fate...[continue reading]

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Nigerians have not seen their president for more than two months and tensions are mounting, with huge security implications for the oil-producing giant and the wider region. If Abuja does not resolve the impasse over its leadership and return governance to a clear constitutional track very soon, it will spell disaster.

The FT editorial page writes about the incoming SA president, Jacob Zuma:

Mr Zuma has yet to show he has the backbone to do what is good for the country’s long-term health rather than what is politically expedient. Six months of uncertainty lie ahead before elections, a period in which he and the “new” ANC have much to prove...[continue reading]

The FT continues its focus on the fund landscape within the continent:

Signs of a more favourable investment climate are emerging as economies strengthen and diversify, fuelled by the commodity price boom and lower debt levels, currency stability improves and fiscal governance begins to tighten...Many challenges still face the investment community and each country needs to be assessed separately in terms of risk, political instability and economic drivers. Many African countries do not have stock exchanges yet and those that do are largely typical of frontier markets, lacking in liquidity and ease of trading. But their number has grown dramatically in the past few years, as has the number of companies listed.
As yet there is no internationally recognized pan-African index, although this may change as the local stock exchanges grow.

Open Access papers a boon for developing world scientists-SciDev
Supporting Nollywood the Directors Guild of Nigeria
Challenges for Craftspeople-BBC
Is Kenya teetering?-NYTimes
Challenges for the book industry-George Ngwane
Questioning the Nigerian Stock Exchange-Basil Enwegbara
The real Water Board-WashAfrica
South-South ties contd. Asian footsteps in the continent.
Power-sharing government is a recipe for “disaster”-FT
Leadership starts with you not him!-Joachim Ezeji
The Ghadafi virus-The Moor Next Door
Public-private investment partnerships in health systems-Output Based Healthcare
Examining Charles Soludo Nigeria's Central Bank Governor-234Next

Barney Jopson at the FT reports on the continent's developing mortgage industry:

The African mortgage sector remains tiny. In spite of huge pent-up demand, mortgages are available only in a dozen or so countries and the barriers to making them a mass-market product are formidable – not least the murkiness of property rights across much of the continent. “Maybe the hype exceeds the reality, but banks are at least trying to roll out products,” says Rod Evison, head of the Africa department at CDC, a private equity fund-of-funds specialising in emerging markets...The market’s boundaries are being pushed by young innovators such as Equity Bank, which is using capital secured last year when Helios, the London private equity group, paid Ks11bn for 25 per cent of the group. Banque Commerciale du Rwanda, which is owned by Actis, another London-based private equity group, has just sold the country’s maiden corporate bond to fund its nascent mortgage business...

Dele Olojede writes about 234Next's daunting task in the FT:

It is especially daunting to attempt what we are trying to pull off in a country whose electricity grid has totally collapsed, whose ruling elites are almost uniformly corrupt and heedless, whose citizens have often appeared to accept that it is their cursed fate to live in such wretchedness, and whose government, with some happy exceptions, is clueless and dysfunctional.

John Githongo and William Gumede write in the FT:

There are leadership failures across Africa. The meltdown in Zimbabwe has focused the world’s attention on just one. Robert Mugabe’s efforts to prolong his rule have provoked an unusually strong African reaction. This may be because Africans are beginning to recognise that there are no “national” crises. The deepening social and economic interdependence of their countries mean that Zimbabwe’s problems are regional and truly African. Across the continent people are demanding more from very limited democracies...[continue reading]

The FT writes about "The legacy of Suharto":

In the 1990s, World Bank staff used to tell a joke about two friendly government ministers, one from Indonesia, the other from Nigeria. Each enriched himself by taking bribes from a big road contract. The Indonesian took 20 per cent of the contract price, but the Nigerian boasted to his friend that he was even richer because his cut was 100 per cent. But in Nigeria, of course, there was no road.The purported moral of the joke was that Asian corruption was efficient whereas African corruption was not. Former allies and business associates of Suharto, the Indonesian ex-president who died on Sunday, want his legacy to be judged in this light. Suharto may have been corrupt and authoritarian during his 32 years in power, they say, but he oversaw political stability and economic growth that pulled millions of Indonesians out of poverty...It will be easier to end corruption if the crimes of the late Suharto, his relatives and associates are not swept under the carpet in a misguided attempt to burnish his legacy. Suharto was better than some of his African counterparts, but worse than his people deserved.

The FT writes about the impact of Kenya's political turmoil on investor perceptions:

The explosion of violence that has met Mwai Kibaki’s disputed election in what was considered one of Africa’s most stable countries threatens to undermine not only Kenya’s reputation but also the continent’s.Charlemagne Capital, an emerging market specialist, said Kenya’s place “at the centre of the renaissance in eastern Africa seemed assured”. The worst-case scenarios for the country now threatened to “wipe it off the map from the point of view of international investors”.

While the clueless 'leadership' in Nigeria fiddles, MEND lays the foundation for an independent state with its own revenue.The FT reports:

Now, inhabitants of the delta have started processing crude. In small, modular refineries they are producing kerosene and other fuel and selling to the local market from so-called mushroom enterprises in the creeks and swamps.

Michael Holman writes in the FT about the Kenyan political crisis:

For the outside world, Kenya has been the acceptable face of Africa: a safe destination for a million tourists a year from Europe, Asia and North America to the country of surf and safari; a reliable base, in a tough neighbourhood, for a burgeoning aid industry; regional headquarters for the United Nations; and – less well-known – a country whose military pacts with the US and Britain have made it a crucial ally in the “war against terror”.

They did not believe it was ultimately in their interests to have a showdown with the barons of corruption. They did not want to upset what they saw as a regional “island of stability” from which the UN and other international relief agencies, including hundreds of foreign non-governmental organisations, operate – a thriving business that accounts for a fifth of Kenya’s annual foreign exchange earnings.

Joanna Chung reports in the FT:

Investment bankers are grappling with a novel challenge: explaining to potential investors that exotic places such as Abuja and Accra, the capitals of Nigeria and Ghana, are among the new frontiers in the inter­national capital markets.

“We have a super-conviction about Africa,” he says. “We are very optimistic that the corner has been turned economically. You have to imagine where it will be in two or three years’ time, and it is going to change in ways that people don’t expect.
“I fully expect the capital markets in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop as rapidly as they have done in Russia over the past 10 years.”