Tag Archives: France

Africa-China Loans Facts

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This is from a CGD paper by Scott Morris, Brad Parks, and Alysha Gardner:

The World Bank’s portfolio is more concessional than China’s portfolio in every region of the world, and sometimes dramatically so. The overall concessionality of China’s portfolio demonstrates less variation from region-to-region, hovering between 15%-22% in all regions except Europe and Latin America. By contrast, the overall concessionality of the World Bank’s portfolio varies widely — from a low of 15% in Latin America to a high of 60% in Sub-Saharan Africa (which is also the region where Chinese lending volumes are highest). The differences between China and the World Bank are most stark in Sub-Saharan Africa. Whereas the overall concessionality of the World Bank’s portfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa is nearly 60%, China’s portfolio concessionality in the same region is only 22.5% All three measures of lending terms contribute to these differences in portfolio concessionality rates: China consistently has higher interest rates, shorter maturity lengths, and shorter grace periodsconcessionality

Notice that China is neck and neck with the World Bank across Africa, unlike in other regions where Bank lending dominates. What proportion of Chinese lending in Africa are concessional loans?

Whereas the overall concessionality of the World Bank’s portfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa is nearly 60%, China’s portfolio concessionality in the same region is only 22.5% .

Recall that, overall, China is the single largest creditor to developing countries:china creditor

What we should make of African states’ indebtedness to China? A lot of people have opined that China is engaging in debt diplomacy — intentionally trapping African countries with high interest non-concessional loans, after which it will demand all manner of concessions from them (perhaps UN votes, or other forms of assistance in aid of Beijing’s geo-strategic objectives). I have two thoughts on this.

First, the Chinese debt bonanza seen on the Continent over the last two decades was driven, in part, by local demand for infrastructure and other visible and attributable forms of “development.” And yes, intra-elite distributive politics and over-pricing was also involved. And Chinese firms, which often competed against each other, played along, too — perhaps because of the reasons Yuen Yueng Ang describes in her latest book (highly recommended). With this in mind, it is not entirely true to claim that Beijing pushed loans on African states. While it is true that some of the projects were driven more by the quest for kickbacks than for economic reasons, the fact is that individual country dynamics drove the demand for loans and projects. Some of those fit into China’s global geopolitical ambitions (like the Belt and Road Initiative). Others did not. 

Second, let’s think through the debt diplomacy game. Is the idea that China would ruin dozens of African states’ fiscal positions so much so that they would turn to Beijing for bailouts? How many Hambantota’s can China run across Africa? Does Beijing have the fiscal, military, or administrative capacity to do so?

The simple fact is that the use of gunboat diplomacy to settle sovereign debts is no longer kosher within the international system. My guess is that while Beijing certainly was out to buy influence with loans and other commercial relations, it also wanted to make money. Chinese officials were not running around peddling cheap concessional loans (see above). They were out looking for business for Chinese firms and banks. And so to the extent that African countries mismanaged their debt or invested in economically unviable infrastructure projects (even if in collusion with Chinese firms), that is on them.

Moving forward, it is clear that it will be in China’s best interest to make sure that its commercial relations in Africa do not stray too far from general economic viability. A strategic coddling of poor and weak allies will be very costly in the long run (see France in the Sahel). It will also likely turn African public opinion against China. For a long time, majorities of African publics have reported net favorable views of China. But this will most likely change if China morphs from a largely likable development partner building roads, power lines, and water works, to little more than a banker of tinpot tyrants in the business of building white elephants and saddling future generations with debt.

What’s really driving African Students’ enrollment in foreign universities?

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The rise in enrollment of African students at non-African universities continues to be a topic of interest in the news media. Much of the discussion presently frames the emerging trends within the geopolitical competition between the West and China and Russia.

Consider this take from the FT on African students in Russia:

Desree is one of 334,000 foreign students enrolled in Russian universities, according to government figures, a cohort that has more than doubled since 2010 as part of a push by Moscow to ramp up a policy that served as an instrument of soft power during the cold war. Russia is vying with Germany and France to be the world’s sixth most popular destination for international students and the second most popular non-English-speaking country after China.

…. Russian universities are teaching 17,000 students from African countries this academic year, up from 6,700 just eight years ago, President Vladimir Putin said at a conference dedicated to Moscow’s African relations in October. Four thousand are supported by scholarships provided by the Russian taxpayer.

Or this on China:

In 2003, less than 2,000 African international students were calling China home, yet a mere thirteen years later, this number had ballooned to around 60,000; a twenty-six fold increase. If one takes 2000 as the starting point, 60,000 represents a forty-four fold increase. As a result, “proportionally, more African students are coming to China each year than students from anywhere in the world.” Whereas the United States leads in raw numbers, with over a million international students compared to less than half that number in China, fully half of all foreign students in the U.S come from just two countries: China and India. In comparison, over sixty African and Asian countries send more students to China than the United States.

While there are certainly incentives (such as scholarships from home or host governments) that push or pull students towards foreign universities, that does not appear to explain all of the surge in African student enrollment abroad. Even within Africa, tertiary enrollment has surged over the last few years. According to The Economist, enrollment in African institutions of higher learning has doubled since 2000 and is projected to grow at an increasing rate into the near future:

In recent decades millions of young people like Mr Bahati have swelled the number of students in sub-Saharan Africa. Today 8m are in tertiary education, a term that includes vocational colleges and universities. That is about 9% of young people—more than double the share in 2000 (4%), but far lower than in other regions (see chart). In South Asia the share is 25%, in Latin America and the Caribbean, 51%.

Both the number and share of young people in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa will keep growing. The region has about 90m people aged 20-24, a figure projected to double over the next 30 years. Whereas 42% of that age group had completed secondary school in 2012, 59% are forecast to do so by 2030. If African countries are to meet the aspirations of educated young people, they must ensure there are opportunities for further study.

In other words, the observed rise in African enrollment in universities in China, Russia, and elsewhere could be largely due to this unmet excess demand in the region. A look at African enrollment in the US (which has better data and where enrollment has trended upward since 2012) further supports this claim. African enrollment in US universities appear to rise and fall with changes in the economic situation on the Continent (see figures below). Interestingly, there appears to be no lag in the correlation, suggesting that economic conditions largely impact households’ ability to fund their children’s studies abroad (or preparation for the same back home); as opposed to say some structural public under-investment in education during bad economic times. enrollmentincome

In sum, the geopolitical machinations of Beijing and Moscow are only a small part of the story here. The bigger story is the overall increase in demand for higher learning in Africa — driven in no small part by increased primary and secondary enrollment and rising incomes — that is not being met by African universities.

 

The Future of Tax Administration?

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Low-income states struggle to collect taxes. And with low fiscal capacity comes the inability to spend any money on vital public goods and services. Take Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy. The country struggles to collect income tax, and heavily relies on revenues from oil (58.1% of revenues in 2018) and indirect taxes. Nigeria also spends precious little on its people. In 2018, general public expenditures added up to a paltry 10.9% of GDP (believe it or not, Nigeria is a libertarian paradise!). In comparison, public expenditures in Kenya amount to about a quarter of GDP. In 2018, income tax accounted for 47.9% of Kenya’s total tax revenue haul.

The demand for public expenditures will only continue to rise as African countries get richer. Overall, government expenditures as a share of GDP tend to rise with income. For instance, in 2017 the expenditures among OECD states ranged from a low of 26% of GDP in Ireland to 56.4% in France. It goes without saying that any future increases in government spending in countries like Nigeria will require ever more efficient means of tax collection. But such moves will likely be hampered by the illegibility of taxpayers.

Enter Russia. According to the FT, Moscow is pioneering real time tax administration:

taxrusStanding in front of a huge video wall, Mikhail Mishustin, head of the tax service, prepares to show off its capabilities. “Where did you stay last night?” he asks. When I reply, his staff zoom in on a map to Hotel Budapest on the screen. “Did you have a coffee?” His staff then click on the food and drink receipts in the hotel from the previous evening. “Look, it sold three cappuccinos, one espresso and a latte. One of those was yours,” Mr Mishustin declares triumphantly. He was right.

This is the future of tax administration — digital, real-time and with no tax returns. The authorities receive the receipts of every transaction in Russia, from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, within 90 seconds. The information has exposed errors, evasion and fraud in the collection of its consumption tax, VAT, which has allowed the government to raise revenues more quickly than general Russian economic performance.

The new system is directed more at shopkeepers than oligarchs. Russia still scores poorly on international league tables of corruption, being ranked only 138 out of 180 on the Transparency International corruption perceptions index, with concerns including cronyism, a lack of independent media and a biased judiciary. But reducing tax evasion among ordinary Russians and highlighting corrupt tax officials have helped raise revenues and clean up the system.

Reasonable people should worry about the potential misuse of these government powers. But remedies to this problem must be tempered with an understanding of the deep structural barriers to poverty alleviation caused by low fiscal capacity (not to mention a weakened fiscal pact between citizens and their governments).

If no taxation without representation is true, then no representation without taxation must also be true.

Finally, as correctly noted in the FT piece, technology cannot fix the problem of tax avoidance by the politically-connected. If Russia’s system catches on in low-income countries, it will most likely be effective in widening the tax base among diffused average taxpayers. The hope then would be that higher levels of tax compliance among average taxpayers will create political pressure for the same from the big fish.

A most unlikely critique of françafrique

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This is from the BBC:

On Sunday, Luigi di Maio [Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister] called on the European Union to impose sanctions on France for its policies in Africa.

He said France had “never stopped colonising tens of African states”.

He accused France of manipulating the economies of African countries that use the CFA franc, a colonial-era currency backed by the French treasury.

“France is one of those countries that by printing money for 14 African states prevents their economic development and contributes to the fact that the refugees leave and then die in the sea or arrive on our coasts,” he said.

“If Europe wants to be brave, it must have the courage to confront the issue of decolonisation in Africa.”

Read the whole thing here.

di Maio is a member of the Five Star Movement, whose popular support in Italy appears to be trending in the wrong direction (which might explain the decision to poke France in the eye in this manner).

Here’s a description of Macron’s françafrique. 

And here’s how violent extremism in the Sahel might be reinforcing françafrique.

screen shot 2019-01-22 at 11.47.02 amIt is worth noting that, from the French perspective, the economic case for françafrique is not as strong as it used to be (see image). Trade with the CFA zone as a share of total French trade volume has been on a steady decline since the 1960s. However, the corrupt symbiotic relationship between African and French economic and political elites is still strong. Plus France still needs francophone Africa for geopolitical reasons. By 2050 about 80% of the world’s French speakers will live in Africa.

How Russia Moved Into Central Africa

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This is from Newsweek (highly recommended):

There are new guests at the ruined palace where Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa once held court. During his rule over the Central African Republic in the 1970s, Bokassa used a year’s worth of development aid to stage an extravagant coronation, and he personally oversaw the torture of prisoners. He fed some to his pet crocodiles and lions.

But the French government that helped install Bokassa in 1966 ousted him in 1979, deploying paratroopers to prevent any countercoup. Now, four decades later, it is Russian soldiers who mill around this crumbling estate in Berengo—and the shifting power dynamic is raising concerns in the West. President Vladimir Putin is pushing into Africa, forging new partnerships and rekindling Cold War–era alliances. “There will be a battle for Africa,” says Evgeny Korendyasov, head of Russian-African studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, “and it will grow.”

How did Russia muscle its way into CAR? According to Reuters:

CAR has been under a U.N. arms embargo since 2013 so weapons shipments must be approved by the U.N. Security Council’s CAR sanctions committee, made up of the Council’s 15 members, including France and Russia. It operates by consensus.

France first offered to help CAR buy old weapons but the proposal was too expensive. France then offered 1,400 AK47 assault rifles it had seized off Somalia in 2016, according to a Security Council memo and four diplomats.

Russia objected on the grounds that weapons seized for breaching the U.N. arms embargo on Somalia could not be recycled for use in another country under embargo, two diplomats said. But mindful of the need for a quick solution, the sanctions committee approved Moscow’s donation of AK47s, sniper rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers in December, according to committee documents and diplomats.

Why Russia interested in the CAR now? Possible answers include (i) the potential for lucrative mining deals (Putin’s Chef, Evgeny Prigozhin, reportedly runs a diamond mine near Bangui and a gold mine in a rebel-held area); (ii) the CAR might be a great launching pad for Moscow’s ambitions in the Sahel and therefore a great addition to existing military deals on the Continent; and (iii) Russia’s defense firms might just be in it to run guns and make a quick buck in a country that remains overrun by all manner of rebel groups (some reports claim rebels control 80% of CAR’s territory).

And as for the CAR leadership, they just might be in the mood for a partner that delivers results without too much paperwork and rules:

President Touadéra has a number of incentives to work with Russia rather than France or the United States. Russia’s aid in arming the CAR’s military is a huge boon for the chronically underfunded state. The EU training mission in CAR has been agonizingly slow, leaving an underequipped and undertrained military to face a deteriorating security situation. Russian instructors, while certainly less concerned with the moral or ethical dilemmas of war, may give Touadéra the military he needs to combat the rebel groups across the country.

 

 

 

On Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy

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This is from Ferdinand Mount’s review of A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, by Julian Jackson:

De Gaulle’s coup of 13 May 1958 was equated by many, including de Gaulle himself, with Napoleon’s 18 Brumaire, and led to intensified misery for huge numbers of people. By encouraging the pieds noirs with his famous words ‘je vous ai compris,’ the war was prolonged for another four years and led to such horrific bloodshed that there could be no question of the settlers and the Muslims living side by side after independence. De Gaulle not only betrayed the whites who had brought him to power, he did nothing to help them when they decamped en masse to the mainland, bedraggled and destitute. Nor did he ‘raise a little finger’ to help the harkis – the Algerians who had fought loyally for France and who were murdered in their thousands after independence. These horrors are recounted more fully in Alistair Horne’s unforgettable A Savage War of Peace, but Jackson certainly does not underplay them. The creepy Foccart remained with de Gaulle to the end, as his adviser on Africa, wheeling in assorted francophone tyrants to be flattered by his master, who still had a cloudy vision of la gloire continuing to permeate sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the worst brutes – such as Bongo père et fils of Gabon and Bokassa of the Central African Republic – continued to enjoy French patronage. So much for de Gaulle the decoloniser.

Read the whole thing here.

 

Demography and the African future of the French language

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This is from the Economist:

Today more people speak French in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, than in Paris. By 2050, thanks to population growth in Africa, some 85% of the world’s French-speakers will live on the continent. Mr Macron has been promoting French on his recent travels to the Gulf, China and, pointedly, Ghana, an English-speaking west African country surrounded by French-speaking ones. Visiting Tunisia, he said he wanted to double the number learning French there by 2020.

I wonder what Ngugi wa Thiong’o makes of these developments.

Here is a possible answer:

La Francophonie “cannot just be an institution for saving the French language; that is not what Francophone countries are worried about,” explains Mr Mabanckou. “Africans don’t need the French language to exist.” He asks how many universities in France teach Francophone African literature, and complains that American students are more likely to study such writers than are French ones. The French literary world clings to a Paris-centric vision, Mr Mabanckou says, too often failing to consider writers from former colonies as part of mainstream literature, as British publishers and universities now do.

The Politics of the CFA Franc Zone

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This is from the Economist:

Where some see an anchor, others see a millstone. To maintain the euro peg, notes Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, these very poor countries must track the hawkish monetary policy of the European Central Bank. Since the introduction of the euro, income per person in the franc zone has grown at 1.4% a year, compared with 2.5% in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

More on this here.

People like Cameroonian president Paul Biya love the CFA. With good reason.

Yet elites do rather well out of the system, which makes it easier to send wealth abroad. And a weaker currency would increase the cost of imported goods. The only devaluation, in 1994, sparked riots.

Mozambique: Is there such a thing as predatory sovereign lending?

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The Wall Street Journal has a great story on Mozambique’s hidden debt scandal:

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 8.03.37 PM.pngThe government picked Mr. Safa’s company, Privinvest, to supply ships, including patrol and surveillance vessels, and asked its help getting financing. The company disputes the characterization of the ships as military, saying they weren’t outfitted with weapons. Privinvest approached Credit Suisse about a loan for Mozambique, and a committee of senior executives, including then-CEO Gaël de Boissard, approved the deal.

Credit Suisse’s top brass signed off in part because the bank had pioneered a way to lend in developing countries without taking on much risk.

The bank found it could purchase sovereign-debt insurance through the Lloyd’s of London insurance market to hedge as much as 90% of the loans against default. Credit Suisse charged higher interest rates on the debt than its insurance premiums, pocketing the difference mostly risk free.

The insurance policies Credit Suisse used only covered governments. So when Mozambique wanted to borrow the money through state-owned companies instead, the bank came up with a twist: Mozambique would cosign.

FT notes that:

The debt was originally borrowed via a special purpose vehicle for Ematum [tuna fishing company], an arrangement that does not require the same level of disclosure as a sovereign bond issue.

Basically Credit Suisse, the Russian VTB Capital, and their Mozambican accomplices knew exactly what they were doing.

When the money got to Mozambique it mostly went into private pockets. The proposed tuna business the loans were intended to finance went bust (realizing a paltry 2.5% of projected sales). And the security purchases (ostensibly to secure Mozambique’s vast yet-to-be-developed gas fields) proved useless.

Meanwhile…

…….conditions in Mozambique are worsening. Its foreign-currency reserves fell to $1.8 billion in May from $2 billion in January, and it is seeking $180 million in food aid. Intensified fighting has sent more than 10,000 refugees to neighboring Malawi, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

Credit Suisse is a Swiss financial services company. According to the WSJ Privinvest’s struggling subsidiary Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie built the ships sold to Mozambique. The latter is, of course, based in France. Corruption knows no borders.

The Long Peace Since WWII, Visualized

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Fewer people are dying in violent conflict (both in absolute figures and as a proportion of the total population of humans) than at any time since World War II. It is hard to believe this amid the flood of images and stories of violent death (state-sanctioned or otherwise) in countries like Mexico, the United States, Burundi, or Syria.

Elite Political Stability and Development: The Case of Europe

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Alex Lee of Rochester and Avi Acharya of Stanford write:

During the Middle Ages, most European polities operated under a norm that gave only the close male relatives of a deceased monarch a clear place in the line of succession. When no such heirs were available, succession disputes were more likely, with more distant relatives and female(-line) heirs laying competing claims to the throne. These disputes often produced violent conflicts that destroyed existing state institutions and harmed subsequent economic development. Given these facts, we hypothesize that a shortage of male heirs to a European monarchy in the Middle Ages has a deleterious effect on levels of development across contemporary European regions ruled by that monarchy. We confirm this hypothesis by showing that regions that were more likely to have a shortage of such heirs are today poorer than other regions. This finding highlights the importance of the medieval period in European development, and shows how a sequence of small shocks can work in combination with both institutions and norms in shaping long-run development trajectories.

……. Our main empirical finding demonstrates the path dependent effects of the uneven nature of state development in medieval Europe arising due to the availability of male heirs. We show that regions of Europe that were ruled by medieval monarchs who had an abundance of male heirs are today richer than other regions. We are also able to trace our effects over time by showing that urban density in each century between 1300 and 1800 was higher in regions that had an abundance of male heirs. In addition, we show that an abundance of male heirs also decreased the frequency of internal wars and coups during the Late Middle Ages, and we find that contemporary economic development is negatively correlated with the frequency of these medieval wars and coups.

Forget the sweeping comparisons between England and the rest (esp France) that is common in works about economic development in Europe. This paper offers lots of great insights about the mechanics of statebuilding (and institution building) and the impact on economic development.

The linking of medieval European political realities to economics outcomes in 2007-2009 still requires a tighter justification. But the general insights in the paper about elite-level conflict and institution-building are spot on.

The paper is a reminder that our obsession with vertical accountability (mostly elections) as a means for institution-building is patently misguided. Much of the action takes place at the elite-level, hence the need to focus on horizontal accountability (as yours truly does….)

As they say, the paper is self-recommending.

H/T Andy Hall.

How is the world reacting to China’s rise?

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China has experienced a spectacular economic growth in recent decades. Its economy grew more than 48 times from 1980 to 2013. How are the other countries reacting to China’s rise? Do they see it as an economic opportunity or a security threat? In this paper, we answer this question by analyzing online news reports about China published in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US. More specifically, we first analyze the frequency with which China has appeared in news headlines, which is a measure of China’s influence in the world. Second, we build a Naive Bayes classifier to study the evolving nature of the news reports, i.e., whether they are economic or political. We then evaluate the friendliness of the news coverage based on sentiment analysis. Empirical results indicate that there has been increasing news coverage of China in all the countries under study. We also find that the emphasis of the reports is generally shifting towards China’s economy. Here Japan and South Korea are exceptions: they are reporting more on Chinese politics. In terms of global sentiment, the picture is quite gloomy. With the exception of Australia and, to some extent, France, all the other countries under examination are becoming less positive towards China.

That’s Yuan, Wang and Luo writing in a neat paper that analyzes news coverage of China in different countries.

More on this here (HT Jay Ulfelder).

On the Continent opinion survey data from a select set of countries show high favorability ratings for China — by about two thirds or more of survey respondents. The same countries have seen some decline in US favorability ratings over the last few years. As you’d expect, people’s reaction to China’s rise is based on perceptions of the potential material impact it will have on their lives. On average, the survey evidence suggests that most Africans view China’s rise as a good thing.

It is interesting that across the globe young people, on average, have a more positive view of China’s rise than older people. Younger people probably associate China more with glitzy gadgets in their pockets; and less with cultural revolutions and famine-inducing autocracy.

Africans Covered 98% of the Cost of Administering Colonial French West Africa (AOF)

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Elise Huillery writes in the Journal of Economic History:

What share of French expenditure was allocated to West Africa? What share of West Africa’s revenue was provided by France? These two questions are crucial since scholars and politicians who claim colonization had a “positive role” make essentially the two arguments that the colonies benefited from imperial public investments and that mainland taxpayers sacrificed local investments for investments in the colonies.

I find that the costs of AOF’s colonization for the metropolis were low. From 1844 to 1957 France devoted on average 0.29 percent of its public expenditures to AOF’s colonization. Colonization of French West Africa was profitable for France to the extent that the impact on cumulative domestic production exceeded 3.2 billion 1914 francs. The military cost of conquest and pacification accounts for the vast majority (80 percent) of the average annual cost. The cost of central administration in Paris accounts for another 4 percent. So subsidies to AOF account for only 16 percent of the average annual cost, meaning that less than 0.05 percent of annual total metropolis public expenditures were devoted to AOF’s development.

For French West African taxpayers, French contribution was not as beneficial as has been argued. From 1907 to 19578 the metropolis provided about 2 percent of French West Africa’s public revenue. Local taxes thus accounted for nearly all of French West Africa’s revenue. These resources supported the cost of French civil servants whose salaries were disproportionally high compared to the limited financial capacity of the local population. Administrators, teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and so on, were paid French salaries and got an additional allowance for being abroad. Thus, in the colonial public finance system, most revenues were collected on an African basis while being spent on a French basis. To illustrate this point, I show that colonial executives (eight governors and their cabinets) and district administrators (about 120 French civil servants) together accounted for more than 13 percent of local public expenditures.

The rest of this very fascinating paper is here.

Besides the headline finding, also interesting in the paper are: (i) the extent to which Paris subsidized private firms involved in the colonial enterprise; and (ii) the structure of the public finance system that allowed the AOF administration to borrow directly from French banks with the full backing of Paris (which allowed for lower rates). This might explain the persistence of the monetary relationship between former AOF territories and Paris in the form of the CFA and a common central bank (BCEAO).Screen Shot 2015-07-05 at 12.05.23 AM

As I keep saying, Economic History is hot again. And sooner rather than later it’s going to become more apparent to more people that African political and economic history did not begin in 1960, or for that matter in 1884-5. And neither was it just about the unimaginably catastrophic Atlantic experience.

Kenyan Intervention in (al-Shabab dominated) Southern Somalia

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The ICG has an excellent new report on the state of the the Kenyan military intervention in Somalia.

The pressing issues raised in the report include economic, political and social concerns:

The slow pace of the military operation and the high cost of keeping troops in the field are the main reasons behind Nairobi’s desire to operate under AMISOM command. The treasury would then not have to pay the full cost of the campaign. It is estimated that Linda Nchi is costing the government at least KSh 210 million ($2.8 million) per month in personnel costs alone in a year of a record KSh 236 billion ($3.1 billion) budget deficit. If the interven- tion’s cost is not contained, already high inflation will spiral, and local discontent could become more serious…..

The intervention in Somalia is likely to have a complex impact on Kenyan Somalis’ political positions, because their attitude toward it is not straightforward. The government’s desire to establish a buffer zone between the border and the rest of Somalia privileges the Ogaden, the majority Kenyan-Somali clan. The possibility of a semi-autonomous state in the south of Somalia politically dominated by Ogaden may not be favoured by the minority, marginalised clans of north-eastern Kenya, such as the Ajuran and Degodia…..

Views within the ethnic Somali and wider Muslim community regarding the war are mixed but predominantly critical. Even those now mildly supportive could easily become hostile, especially if things go badly wrong, and civilian deaths mount. The notion that the war is popular within the Muslim community is wishful thinking, and the potential to exacerbate already worrying radicalisation in the country is very real. The police and other security services have shown some restraint in bigger cities, but there have been numerous reports of abuses in North Eastern Province.

Congrats to the All Blacks

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New Zealand just won the rugby world cup after a 24-year wait. The other finalists, France, put up a most spirited fight. The final score was 8-7. I wish the Boks had gone all the way but for the next four years the All Blacks will be worthy world champions.

Here is presenting the NZ Herald: