By Bhanu Shekhar, Chief Digital Officer, GE Power in the Middle East and Africa

The smelters in the GCC consumed more than 63,000 GWh of electricity last year – that’s about how much Austria produces in a year. It’s also the amount of power the sector used to produce more than 5.2 million tons of aluminum.

That’s a huge amount of power demand at a time when the GCC aluminum industry is facing numerous challenges, including fluctuating oil price, changing regulations and an increasingly competitive global market.

For operators, this means an increasing focus on reducing costs, increasing efficiencies and driving productivity gains.

In looking at this, we talk at GE about the “power of 1%,” which reflects the insight that even small marginal improvements in efficiency, availability and productivity can have on the performance and the bottom line.

And it’s through powerful digital industrial software solutions that we seek to capture these efficiencies. That’s why we’ve developed Predix, the world’s first cloud-based operating system specifically designed for industry and industrial processes and systems.

We’ve looked at digital industrial-driven efficiency in the aluminum smelter industry and find that a 1% efficiency improvement could save the global industry US$ 970 million in production costs, increase output by US$ 936 million and save US$ 464 million in operations and maintenance costs.

In the GCC alone, we estimate that digitization could deliver US$50 million in savings, on operations and maintenance costs alone.

That’s why we see that digitization in the aluminum smelting sector is the big opportunity for the industry, and now is the time to adopt these solutions that can help operators right now to shift their cost curves and transform their processes.

During this week’s Arab International Aluminum Conference (ARABAL) I talked about digital opportunity and gave an example of how we are partnering with multiple  smelters around the world  to implement our digital smelter solutions.

Through our Asset Performance Management software and “digital twin” processes that help us develop deep insights into the current and future performance of the “twin” assets, we are focused on helping to reduce energy consumption and excess aluminum fluoride consumption across their operations.

We’re expecting to fundamentally transform their current operations and provide a real impact on the bottom line.

This week alone, I’ve seen great interest from many others at two events in which I’ve participated. First was ARABAL in Dubai, but also at the Kuwait Disruptive Innovation Conference & Exhibition.

This is a truly exciting way to leverage extremely powerful software to help companies in the aluminum sector and across industry more broadly to capture significant efficiency and operational gains that translate in to a range of benefits, from the environment to the bottom line.

Malawi’s debt situation is worrying after Ministry of Finance spokesperson Nations Msowoya confirmed that the country is owing foreign institutions $1.9 billion (about K1.31 trillion) while domestic borrowing is at K0.7 trillion.

The development is worrying as a significant amount of the budget and foreign currency is shipped out of Malawi to repay the foreign debts owed to multilateral and bilateral creditors when such resources should have been reinvested in the country while shoring up its balance of payment position.

Parliamentary Committee on Budget and Finance, Rhino Chiphiko, expressed concern especially about the Chinese and Indian loans because Malawi government was not transparent on how they were contracted.

“These loans were approved as a blanket by the then Parliament. They were in phases, but up to now government has not come in the open to say how much we have used and how much remains because I am sure interest rates must be very high,” said Chiphiko.

He urged government to slow down on contracting new loans to allow Parliament to scrutinise the current debt portfolio.

According to Chiphiko, some loans did not make sense, citing the borrowing from China to build the Presidential Villas and hotel in Lilongwe and wonder “what it is that Malawians are gaining from the Presidential Villas because at the end of the day it is Malawians, not the infrastructure, who are going to repay the loans through their taxes.”

Msowoya, however, defended the excessive borrowing as “normal”.

“We are not mortgaging the future of Malawians as some people are saying,” said Msowoya as quoted in the Daily Times of Wednesday November 30, 2016.

The flagship newspaper, The Daily Times has also criticised the excessive borrowing in an editorial comment titled ‘Government borrowing is killing this country.”

The paper agreed with at University of Malawi’s Chancellor College economics professor Ben Kalua that government’s borrowing would have made sense if it were meant to finance production.

“Unfortunately, for Malawians, the borrowing goes directly to bankroll consumption,” the paper noted.

It called the K2.1 trillion debts harmful to the nation against a background of K1.1 trillion national budgets which parliament approved.

The paper noted that commentators have expressed concern that government is mortgaging the future of this country through debt.

It urged the MPs to start taking government to task as to how it used the debts.

World Bank states that Malawi’s public debt has increased sharply over recent years with servicing costs now close to levels recorded prior to the 2006 debt relief.

Zimbabwe’s central bank isn’t endearing itself to anyone with this story on the front-page of the Herald newspaper. “Court cases won’t stop bond notes”, the headline says.

The notes have been issued using a statutory instrument under the Presidential Powers Act, Zimbabwe’s higher education minister Jonathan Moyo has confirmed.

That may mean the notes can only be used for six months, which isn’t what the authorities want. There have already been attempts to get the bond notes declared illegal, notably from ex-VP Joice Mujuru .

What the RBZ’s lawyer Gerald Mlotshwa is saying is that since the statutory instrument hasn’t been nullified “the central bank can proceed to issue out bond notes and coins today without any hindrance.” Not every Zimbabwean will take that lying down.

Shout-out to the citizen bankers

You’ve heard of citizen journalists and citizen scientists – but how about citizen bankers? Zimbabwean advocate Fadzayi Mahere coined this term on Twitter on Monday morning in response to the leaked photos of stacks of bond notes and bags of shiny new bond coins .

Could be a contestant for word-of-the-year, don’t you think? Here’s the definition: someone who works in the banking sector but is worried enough about the advent of bond notes to share the pics from his or her smartphone.

How they gonna fix a cash shortage like this?

OK, so last week the central bank told Zimbabweans that no-one would have more than 19 bond notes (which it says is worth $US19) in his or her purse at a time.

Now the central bank says that the maximum withdrawal of bond notes is 50 per day, 150 per week. That’s problematic on at least two fronts. First, 50 bond notes is a lot more than 19.

Also, do they mean you can only get 50 of any kind of currency out per day? There’s no confirmation of that yet, though large queues outside banks seen at 08:00 this morning would suggest Zimbabweans are rather hoping not.

Of course, if the bond notes start to lose value then it won’t take long for lots of them to be necessary to make up 19 “real” US. The rumour on the streets is that they’re already trading 1:3.

Confidence “down the tubes”

Former finance minister Tendai Biti says on Twitter that the “unanimous’ opinion of local economists is “no to bond notes”.

Professor Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University in the US isn’t Zimbabwean but he is an expert on Zimbabwean inflation (the hyper-kind).

His latest assessment: “Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe uses billboards to assure public that new bond notes are 1:1 w/ USD. This is nonsense, confidence is down the tubes.”

He also thinks the government wants to “hoard” the US dollars. Said one Zimbabwean (and his feelings were echoed by others): “I think they want to sweep off all the USD from the streets.”

#Prayforthecopywriter

Spare a thought for the copywriter at Askeland Media . The agency has had to insert a grovelling apology into the press today after Zimbabweans turned on the central bank over its badly-spelt “bond note billboards.”

Many felt the mis-spelling of “seperate” only made the bank look amateur and even less worthy of trust than it already is.

Askeland has apologised for the “embarrassing” mistakes and said they “sincerely regret any harm this might have caused to the reputation of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.” Their reputation’s already not great, guys.

ANALYSISBy Joe Westby

The oil company is back in the UK courts trying to shift the blame for the environmental destruction wrought in the Niger Delta.

At a hearing in the UK courts this week, oil company Shell asked the judge to throw out two legal actions concerning oil spills from the company’s pipelines in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Shell doesn’t deny the areas are polluted. Instead, as it has done for decades, the company is trying to shift responsibility for environmental destruction onto anybody but itself.

The claims against Shell have been brought on behalf of more than 40,000 people from two communities, Ogale and Bille. Over the years, these areas have suffered the impacts of numerous oil spills, devastating their environment and polluting their drinking water. The king of Ogale, Chief Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi, travelled from Nigeria to attend the hearing; in his golden finery and jewels, he cut a striking figure alongside the grey suits of the assembled lawyers and journalists.

This week’s hearing will determine whether the UK court can consider the Nigerians’ claims. Shell would prefer for the case to be heard in Nigeria and its defence team put forward various reasons why.

One of the company’s most striking claims is that the case should not go ahead because it will conflict with a newly-announced government-led programme to clean up pollution in the region. This project followed the landmark 2011 environmental assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which exposed massive and widespread pollution across the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta – an area that includes Ogale, but not Bille.

But what Shell’s argument amounts to is an attempt to use the much-needed clean-up process to deny justice to two individual communities, flouting Nigeria law and common sense in the process. Take a step back: Shell has a legal obligation to properly clean-up all oil spills from its pipelines. And this case alleges that Shell has failed to do so in Ogale and Bille. Yet now Shell is trying to suggest that it is in fact up to the Nigerian government to take the lead on cleaning up the mess, something the company is supposed to have done already.

The Niger Delta urgently needs a comprehensive clean-up operation to restore an environment that has been devastated by decades of pollution linked to the oil industry. But UNEP made clear that the clean-up will take another three decades. In the meantime, oil companies cannot use the UNEP report to get off the hook for cleaning up the hundreds of spills that still pour into rivers and creeks every year.

Shell also uses UNEP to argue that the situation in the Niger Delta is “uniquely challenging”, due to problems of militancy, oil theft and the illegal refining of oil. While these are undeniably real issues, Shell conveniently ignores the fact that pollution linked to the oil industry is one of the key drivers of these problems, destroying people’s traditional livelihoods and plunging them deeper into poverty.

Shell is not an innocent bystander thrust into a bad situation. It has been the main oil company operating in the region for half a century and shares substantial responsibility for the current state of affairs.

Unsurprisingly, Shell’s lawyers didn’t mention one of UNEP’s other key findings: that Shell’s clean-up of oil spills has failed to meet standards set out in Nigerian law or even the company’s own standards. UNEP was clear that its clean-up was so inadequate that “the difference between a cleaned-up site and a site awaiting clean-up was not always obvious”.

Last year, Amnesty went to the Niger Delta to see what had changed on the ground since UNEP published its report. What we found was shocking: standing pools of oil and a strong stench of petroleum in the same places where UNEP had exposed pollution four years earlier. One of the sites visited was Okuluebu in Ogale, an area covered in the UK court case, and saw for ourselves that the site was still visibly polluted. When UNEP visited the site, it found groundwater contamination at 450 times the level where Nigerian regulations state that intervention is required.

Repeated promises and commitments by Shell and the Nigerian government to implement UNEP’s recommendations have so far not led to any actual clean-up of pollution in places like Ogale. And for communities like Bille – one of thousands of oil-impacted villages in the Niger Delta outside the relatively small Ogoniland area covered by UNEP – hopes of seeing their environment restored are even further away.

In this context, communities in the Niger Delta are forced to seek justice through legal action in the home states of oil companies like Shell. This case is by no means the first of its kind. In 2015, another UK case forced Shell to pay £55 million ($70 million) in compensation to the Bodo community over two massive oil spills in 2008, while in the Netherlands four fishermen are still fighting for clean-up and compensation in the courts.

Following the hearing this week, the judge is expected to issue a ruling in early 2017. If the claims are allowed to go forward, it will pile further pressure on Shell to recognise that it cannot continue to dodge responsibility for its legacy of decades of pollution in the Niger Delta.

MORE than 300 companies closed shop in the first half of 2016, with more expected to shut down by the end of the year, raising informalisation of the economy to 94%, a renowned economist has said.

Since the end of the unity government in July 2013, the country’s economy has continued to struggle despite promises of a turnaround by President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu PF party.

Speaking at the Mass Public Opinion Institute (MPOI) public seminar in Harare last Thursday Dr Prosper Chitambara said the number of companies forced to closed shop is likely to double by the end of the year.

“There has been a lot of deindustrialisation that has taken place between January and July this year with 300 companies having closed shop,” said Chitambira, an economist with the Labour and Economic Development Institute of Zimbabwe.

The development has negatively impacted development of the national economy as the state could not tax the informal sector.

“94% of the economy is now informalised up from 84.2% in 2011, so the rate of deindustrialisation and informalisation has accelerated and that obviously has some negative implications in terms of domestic resource mobilization and employment and development.

“If most economic activities are in the informal hands it affects the capacity of government to mobilize domestic or fiscal resources.”

Under the coalition government between President Mugabe and his political rivals, Zimbabwe’s economy enjoyed sustained growth albeit from virtual collapse.

However, when the veteran leader and his party assumed sole charge after the 2013 elections, investor confidence dived with an estimated $10billion said to have spirited out of the country.

International goodwill also waned with little foreign direct investment targeting Zimbabwe while financial support from global lenders also proved hard to come by.

The Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) has announced that it will march on Monday against the pending ‘sugar tax’.

“We support a quest for a healthy nation and want an obesity-free population… However, we do not believe that a tax on sugar-sweetened beverage products will be a mechanism to achieve the intended health objectives,” said Fawu General Secretary Katishi Masemola in a statement released on Sunday.

He said Fawu believed job losses would occur if the Sugar-Sweetened Beverages tax was instated.

“The determination to mount this march was informed by admission[s] from the Treasury and their researchers that there will be job losses emanating from this Sugar Tax and the silly claims that those lost jobs will be will be fictitiously created elsewhere, say in bottled water or 100% juices factories…

“Anyway, one job loss is too many jobs to lose.”

Masemola said the march would take place on Monday in Pretoria and a memorandum would be handed over at the Treasury’s head offices.

Fawu said protestors were calling for a summit to be held in which obesity and related non-communicable diseases – as well as interventions to prevent these – would be comprehensively discussed.

He said if the tax was to raise revenue for government, “we may agree”.

However if it was a health policy intervention “we beg to differ”.

“We think this will simply become another ‘sin tax’ like those taxes on alcohol and tobacco products.”

The issue of obesity went beyond sugary beverages, raising the question why other products with high sugar and fat contents were not being taxed, said Masemola.

Furthermore, poverty and unemployment meant that it could be a lifestyle choice to consume “sugary Coke drinks or diluting an Oros concentrate into liters of drinks [rather than] consuming a relatively ‘unaffordable’ 100% juice,” Masemola said.

By Patience Ahimbisibwe

Kampala — East African Community (EAC) member states are spearheading a proposal to ban the importation of cars from outside countries.

President Museveni disclosed yesterday that they are in final stages with other East African states to ensure that no cars are imported into the region, but their spare parts, which will be assembled here to create jobs for East Africans.

However, he warned that this can only be possible if African countries accept to work together to strengthen their negotiation with the world market.

“We have discussed with East African members and we are about to agree. We need to stop the importation of cars from outside. We want them to bring the parts here and assemble them here so that our people at least get the job of joining them together,” Mr Museveni said yesterday at the 5th annual young leaders’ forum held at the International University of East Africa.

The host, Mr Dison Okumu, a council member, reported to the President that National Council for Higher Education was making their work difficult in delaying to accredit their courses.

He said it has taken National Environment Management Authority nine months to carry out an environment assessment where the university wants to construct an underwater welding department for the oil and gas students.

Before he could address the audience, students from most universities around Kampala started shouting in chorus “Makerere, Makerere” in a bid to draw his attention to the fate of the University he closed at the beginning of the month.

However, the President did not respond in his key note address.

He instead reminded African states to unite to expand market of their goods and services at the same time enriching their bargaining power on the international scene.

President Museveni closed Makerere University on November 1 after lecturers went on strike demanding for allowances that had not been paid since February.

President blamed

But Ronah Kemirembe, Uganda National Students’ Association president blamed Mr Museveni for failing to tackle issues that affect the ordinary people.

“I am so concerned that the President can come here to tell us about integration which we should have had 50 years ago.

You can’t close Makerere; the best university not only in the country but in the region and you come here to talk about integration. What is he trying to tell us? That we abandon Makerere and start bringing our children to these private institutions where it’s hard to ask for accountability?” Kemirembe asked.

A visitation committee headed by Mr Abel Rwendeire has commenced its work to establish the causes of strikes at Makerere and is expected to report back to assigning authority, President Museveni in three months’ time.

Fidelity Bank Plc has disclosed that its customers base has grown in excess of 2 million since it commenced its on-going customer loyalty scheme, Get Alert in Million Promo’.

Mrs. Chijioke Ugochukwu, Executive Director, Shared Services, Fidelity Bank, disclosed this at the prize presentation ceremony to the lucky winners that emerged in the second draw of the promo.

She stated that the promo has proven to be one of the most successful in the series of promos the bank has conducted in the last nine years, saying that the bank hoped to open additional 500,000 new accounts by the time the promo comes to an end.

Six customers of the bank drawn from the six geographical zones went home with the sum of N8 million, while another 12 were rewarded with consolation prizes.

The prize presentation took place simultaneously across the six geographical zones in the country.

Ugochukwu said the bank decided to give out cash to help its customers cushion the effect of the economic recession.

“Fidelity Bank is committed to giving our customers better value; we don’t want to repeat an old theme. Savings is a culture which people develop over time. In more advanced countries, it is easier due the power of high par capita income, but in less developed economies like Nigeria, the regulator, which is the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, tries to promote the financial inclusion strategy and savings strategy, which the banking institutions are trying to key into. This promo is Fidelity Bank’s way of raising that awareness about the importance of savings in the life of every single person.

One of the customers, Mr. Nse Stephen Usen, an Engineering student in Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, who won N2 million, thanked the bank and said that it would help him to further his education.

He said that he prize money would help him to complete the financial requirement to study Architecture at the University of Arkansa, where he applied and has secured admission.

Cashew nuts export earnings are expected to stabilize the shilling throughout December to next February, money experts projected.

The shilling remained stable against the US dollar closing at 2170/90 on Tuesday.

“We expect the pair to remain stable towards the year end supported by dollar inflows from commodity exports, such as cashew nuts,” CRDB said on its daily financial market highlights report. The report pointed out that cashew nuts exports will hold the shilling stabilisation through December to February.

Bank of Tanzania (BoT) monthly economic review for October shows that cashew nuts export has reached 182.3 million US dollars at the year ending September. While money experts figuring out that cashew nuts export inflows will stabilize the shilling, the crop value at international markets has gone down. The crop forex generation went down by some 29 per cent on year-to-year basis.

“The decline in the value of cashew nuts occurred in both export volume and prices,” BoT report indicates. The report shows that in similar period ending last September, cashew nuts generated 255.2 million US dollars.

However to add value of the crop export, Cashew nuts Board of Tanzania (CBT), envisaged to rise nuts’ processing by 30 per cent from current 10 per cent. CBT said early this year, the construction of three big cashew nuts processing factories were scheduled to start in the 2016/17 fiscal year.

The three factories are financed by the Cashew nuts Industry Development Trust Fund (CIDTF) and will be constructed in Tunduru, Mtwara Rural and Mkuranga districts. So far since 2016/17 season started four auctions have been conducted in Lindi and Mtwara regions with 10,170,438 kilogrammes sold.

A kilo of cashew nuts is 4,000/- in this season. Tanzania produces between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes of cashew nuts, most of which is exported in raw form. The country’s cashew nuts are considered one of the best quality nuts in the world.

Tanzania is among the list of top 10 world producers. The export of raw cashew nuts however is widely ridiculed as an export of jobs for Tanzanians to foreign countries while denying producers of their rightful income due to the meager prices that the raw produce attracts.

By Hassan Adebayo

The Senate has summoned the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, over his claims of multibillion dollars oil and gas deals with India and Chinese firms.

Mr. Kachikwu, in an interview with This Day in June, said Nigeria signed Memorandums of Understanding with several Chinese firms during a road show in the Asian country on “$80 billion new investments, spanning five years, in the oil and gas industry covering pipelines, refineries, gas and power, facility refurbishments and upstream financing.”

He also hinted at new investments worth $20 billion from Sinopec and Chinese National Offshore Oil Company in the Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.

In October, Mr. Kachikwu, through a statement by the Director of Press in the Petroleum Ministry, said Nigeria was set to sign with India an investment deal which would see the Indian make an upfront payment of $15 billion to Nigeria for crude purchases.

But on Tuesday, the Senate resolved the Minister should appear before its committees on petroleum, gas and foreign affairs to explain the terms of the deals and the their implications for the economy.

The Senate’s resolution followed a motion by Clifford Ordia (PDP-Edo).

In his remarks, Senate President Bukola Saraki expressed appreciation to Mr. Kachikwu for his initiatives but emphasised the need for transparency.