Business leaders have welcomed the appointment of Eskom’s new board as a sign that there is political will to restore confidence in state-owned enterprises.

Government announced on Saturday that Telkom Chairperson Jabu Mabuza will chair Eskom’s board as part of a host of measures to “stabilise management” at the power utility, Fin24 reported.

It also recommended that former Land Bank CEO and Absa Capital executive Phakamani Hadebe be appointed as Eskom’s acting group CEO, with immediate effect.

“This is a clear display of commitment by government to the transformation of our state-owned corporations,” said Business Leadership SA (BLSA) CEO Bonang Mohale.

He said the composition of the board brought a mix of diverse but specialist skills that were needed to quickly restore stability to Eskom’s operations and finances.

It also showed what was possible “when there is political will”.

Mohale said Mabuza brought with him “unimpeachable integrity – a trait that is so badly needed right now in our country”.

Business Unity SA (BUSA) CEO Tanya Cohen said the announcement was a significant step by government to “finally” rid Eskom of escalating maladministration and corruption.

‘Complex challenges’

Mabuza’s office released some of his comments and/or reaction on his appointment, cautioning it should not be construed as an official statement.

He said he was honoured to heed the call to work together to reform South Africa’s economy through a display of ethical and inspirational leadership.

“The stabilisation of Eskom is of critical importance but is not a task that should be taken lightly. However, I believe that with the right people and support structures in place, we will find credible solutions to the complex challenges that need to be addressed to achieve sustained financial stability at Eskom, and by extension, alleviate the swelling debt burden on the fiscus.”

The new board had yet to convent and charter a way forward, and Mabuza said it should be given the space to do so.

“That said, I believe that part of any credible solution to stabilise Eskom centres around transparent and effective governance starting with the Board, supported by a competent and strong management team to formulate and execute on a strategy that supports the Board’s mandate.”

With the right governance structures, the priority would be to restore the credibility and integrity of the utility with financial markets.

Source: Fin24 , allafrica.com

By Babajide Komolafe

Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun and finance ministers from West and Central African countries have called for additional capital injection into African Development Bank (AfDB) to enable it meets its mandate for Africa.

This was one of the highlights of the Regional Consultative Meeting between the AfDB President, Mr. Akinwumi Adesina and the bank’s Governors and Ministers of Finance from West Africa and Central Africa held in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The meeting was the first consultations of its kind since the creation of the Bank in 1963.

Making the case for a general capital increase for the AfDB, the Governors recalled that the sixth capital increase, ratified in 2010, made it possible for the bank to take the volume of loans to unprecedented levels, noting that aid to countries receiving African Development Fund financing has increased seventeen-fold.

According to Adeosun there is need for a strong and well capitalized AfDB that is capable of fulfilling its commitments to member-countries.

She stated, “At the height of the crisis that shook our economy due to the fall in oil prices, the AfDB provided us with substantial budget support, while other partners were very reluctant.”

“At the height of the crisis that shook our economy due to the fall in oil prices, the African Development Bank provided us with substantial budget support, while other partners were very reluctant.

“We need a strong bank capable of fulfilling its commitments to assist us in mobilizing our internal resources”, Adeosun said.

Also speaking, Régis Immongault, the Minister of Economy and Finance and African Development Bank Governor for Gabon, said: “We are fully behind the bank’s general capital increase”.

“We are convinced that this will provide the bank with the resources it needs to support us even more in our development efforts than it has up to now. We are faced with the new challenges of population growth, climate change and security threats.”

Emphasized the urgency of providing the bank with sufficient resources to continuing providing development leadership in Africa, Guinean Minister of Development, Mama Kanny Diallo said: “The AfDB is the premier bank on the ground. It has helped a country like mine engage in policies to improve governance and mobilize internal resources. It has also helped us renegotiate mining contracts that are in our best interests and to explore innovative solutions”. .

Kanny Diallo went on to say, “Looking beyond the case of Guinea alone, a general capital increase is about giving the bank the means to keep the young people of the continent here. The destiny of our young people is not to go and die at sea or crossing the desert.”

Source: allafrica.com

By Isaiah Esipisu

Maseno, Kenya — Armed with a solar-powered water pump for irrigation and a quarter-acre piece of borrowed land, widow Hakima Mohammed has become a Western Kenya tree tycoon.

Since 2013, she has sold at least 1.5 million seedling trees, mainly to local small-scale farmers, who are planting them as a way to boost their incomes from wood and fruit sales, particularly in the face of recurring droughts that have shriveled crops.

In the process, the 57-year-old has found a way to support herself and her family – and Kenya is getting a hand in its efforts to see at least 10 percent of the country’s land covered in trees by 2030, as part of efforts to rein in drought and meet climate change goals.

“This is a very good example of entrepreneurship which I would really encourage young men and women to take up, and do the same in other parts of the country,” said Eston Mutitu, a senior research scientist at the Kenya Forest Research Institute.

Mohammed, who lives in Mwiyekhe, a village near Western Kenya’s Maseno township, started her tree nursery in 2013, soon after her husband’s death following a short illness.

Officials at the forest institute, where she has been working for nearly 30 years in a low-level position, arranged for her to borrow a plot of land for the sapling nursery, a project she and her husband had talked about trying before his death.

With little experience beyond having watered tree nursery beds at the institute, Mohammed went to work planting an initial 20,000 seedling trees, hiring local young men to help her carry water from a nearby stream to irrigate the young plants.

That hard work became easier starting in 2016, when she acquired a solar-powered water pump from Futurepump, a company in Kenya that makes pumps available on credit. The bit of technological help has let her dramatically step up the number of seedlings she can raise and sell.

“This helped me increase productivity and now I have at least 250,000 tree seedlings on my nursery at any given time all round the year, given that I no longer rely on rainfall or manual fetching of the water to sprinkle on the crops,” said the mother of three, who was not educated beyond primary school level.

PLENTIFUL BUYERS

Mohammed’s trees have found a ready market among local farmers who, like her, are less concerned about the environmental impact of planting trees and more interested in the profits they generate.

On his three-acre piece of land in Muhanda, a village in Siaya County, farmer Moris Otieno has planted a thousand trees from Mohammed’s nursery, mainly eucalyptus but also grevillea – another Australian native – and cypress.

Unlike many other tree nurseries in the area, which offer smaller numbers of seedlings of just a few types, Mohammed’s nursery has 30 species of trees that grow well in the region – and farmers can take home as few as 10 or as many as 20,000 seedlings in a single order, she said.

Apart from fruit trees – including grafted avocadoes, mangoes, oranges, pawpaws and loquats – she sees the highest demand for three kinds of eucalyptus trees, as well as grevillea, casuarina (also from Australia) and cypress.

“We prefer eucalyptus because they grow fast and uniformly, and have high demand in the timber industry,” Otieno said.

Tom Joseph Olumasai Nyangweso, another farmer who lives in Ebunyiri, a village in the heart of Kakamega County, has planted eucalyptus on two of his three acres of land, and grevillea trees throughout the property, many used as a living fence posts.

Both men say their move into tree planting is driven by a desire to boost their incomes.

“In the next three years, I will sell all these trees either to the Kenya Power and Lighting Company to be used as electricity poles, or locally as timber – and that will definitely help me buy another piece of land,” said Otieno, of his three-year-old eucalyptus woodlot.

In Western Kenya, a six-year-old eucalyptus tree can fetch up to 6,000 Kenyan shillings ($60) in the local market. For 750 trees – assuming that 50 of them may have structural flaws by then – Otieno could earn up to 4.5 million shillings ($45,000).

If he had planted maize each year – the most commonly grown crop in the area – he would likely earn about $8,100 over the same six-year period, based on average harvests and prevailing market prices, he said.

Apart from more expensive grafted fruit trees, all other trees at Hakima’s nursery retail at 10 Kenyan shillings per seedling. She sells not less than 200,000 each rainy season, which earns her at least 2 million shillings ($20,000) – and she cannot meet all the demand, she said.

“This has helped me take my children to school, where one of them has just finished her undergraduate degree and the other a diploma course. This nursery is also going to be my main source of livelihood when I finally retire sometime next year,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

 Source: allafrica.com

If I told you there was a cancer-causing poison that 4.5bn people are chronically exposed to you’d think I was making it up. But I’m deadly serious.

Most of you won’t even have heard of its name before. That needs to change and we need to eradicate it. And the incredible thing is that the very people who could do this aren’t scientists – they’re computer gamers.

The poison is called aflatoxin. It’s an invisible substance produced by fungus that contaminates staple food and cash crops, mainly in the developing world. Staple foods that billions of people need to survive – maize, tree nuts, cassava, millet, peanuts, wheat – are affected, as are animal feeds too. Billions of people around the world are eating foods contaminated by aflatoxin as you read this.

Aflatoxin B1 is the most potent naturally occurring liver carcinogen that we know. It’s considered a Class 1 carcinogen by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer. As a result, it is thought that aflatoxins may play a role in up to 28% of all liver cancer cases globally. Climate change will only make this worse. Rising temperatures allow the aflatoxin-causing fungi to flourish.

Worryingly, the impact doesn’t stop at increased cancer rates. Eating aflatoxin-contaminated food is also associated with stunting in children, as well as increased rates of maternal anaemia and mortality. Stunted children suffer from poor cognitive skills, leading to low educational performance and even lower wages in adulthood. There is no reason why there can’t be many more brilliant African scientists in the world, but aflatoxins make that much less likely. We have an urgent moral imperative to change this.

This burden falls primarily on the developing world. In developed countries, laws limit the parts-per-billion (ppb) of aflatoxins allowed in food for humans, livestock and pets. These laws are enforced by extensive – and expensive – monitoring processes and technology. The developing world, on the other hand, has low healthcare budgets, subsistence agriculture and small-scale, under-regulated food production businesses. And in that context limits are set, but often not enforced.

At Mars, we test raw materials for aflatoxin to ensure that our products are safe. But consistently over the past 50 years, most food and feed samples in the developing world have been found to be well above legal aflatoxin limits.

In Nigeria, aflatoxin is now the single largest cause of liver cancer. Kenya has been particularly badly affected by aflatoxins. In 2004, Kenya was beset by the largest recorded aflatoxicosis outbreak in which 319 people who had consumed aflatoxin-contaminated maize were hospitalised. Scientists have been working hard to address aflatoxin for years, but no current strategies to remove aflatoxin infestation have been successful.

The harm isn’t just to human health either. It’s also a massive trade and economic issue. In the 1960s, before the effects of aflatoxin were understood, Africa had 77% of the global peanut export market. Its current share is about 4%. African countries now find it very difficult to meet aflatoxin standards in the developed world, and this hits exports hard. This is costing it $1bn per year in lost peanut revenue alone. If you include other indigenous crops to this, the number will increase dramatically.

Computer gamers seek solution

But the solution to this growing public health crisis may come from an unlikely source: an army of global computer gamers. On World Food Day 2017, we launched a series of aflatoxin puzzles on the Foldit platform led by computer scientists from Northeastern University and the University of Washington.

Foldit is a revolutionary crowd-sourcing computer game that allows anyone in the world with a computer and imagination – but not necessarily any scientific training – to help solve scientific puzzles. Foldit has already had great success by solving a riddle involving an HIV enzyme that had troubled scientists for decades.

The gamers cracked the structure within three weeks and helped identify targets for drugs to neutralise HIV. In this case, the puzzle is to figure out how amino acids are folded together to create proteins, the workhorses of our bodies. Gamers don’t need to know how the science works, they just need to create an increasingly perfect folded form that might mimic the one that exists in nature.

At the start of the gaming session, Foldit players are provided with the form of an enzyme that has the potential to degrade aflatoxin. Gamers can then put their skills to the test to see if it can be redesigned and improved by twisting and turning the enzyme’s structure. In the month that the puzzles have been active, gamers have generated over 400,000 designs.

The important thing is this – humans have an innate skill in coming up with solutions to 3-D puzzles, more so, at the moment, than computers. Science has not been able to provide a solution to aflatoxin yet. This initiative means this challenge is now open to hundreds of thousands of gamers around the world.

The gamers’ best designs are currently in development using the latest synthetic biology techniques and materials donated by Thermo Fisher Scientific. The souped-up enzymes will then be tested in real life by the Siegel Lab at the University of California, Davis to see how they can recognise and neutralise aflatoxins. And all of the players’ discoveries will be kept in the public domain, free of patents. The Siegel Lab is optimistic that we can expect the first results later this month.

We’ve brought together a diverse set of partners to make this happen, including the Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa, led by the African Union Commission. And on World Food Day 2017, we brought together some of the world’s best Foldit players to bring the search for a way to eradicate aflatoxin that bit closer.

Over my lifetime, computer technology has transformed the potential for finding solutions to complex scientific problems. I never thought that computer technology and science could work hand in hand one day to solve some of the world’s most terrible health issues. It’s a dream that will hopefully come true when we say game over to aflatoxin, the silent killer in our food.

Dr Howard-Yana Shapiro is chief agricultural officer of Mars, Incorporated.

Source: African Business Magazine

By Office of Congressmember Karen Bass (CA -37)

OPINION By Dagim Belayneh

The last couple of years have been quite challenging for the Ethiopian economy as natural and man-made problems posed themselves as obstacles to efforts of sustaining the rapid growth of the last fifteen years. The El-Nino induced drought and political unrests in various parts of the country took their toll on various sectors of the economy. Notably, the drought slowed down agricultural growth while various investment projects were vandalized throughout the political unrest.

Various sources on the forces driving FDI identify both policy and non policy factors as drivers of FDI. Policy factors include openness, product – market regulation, labor market arrangements, corporate tax rates, direct FDI restrictions, trade barriers, human development and infrastructure. Non-policy factors include market size of the host country (often measured by the GDP), distance/transport costs, and political and economic stability.

The time after the natural and man-made challenges was, therefore, a period of fierce competition between the pull forces of policy and the push forces of political instability. Setting horticultural green houses and the properties of other investments on fire is only going to discourage FDI flow into the country. The uncertainty that is associated with such unrests is a threat to those who seek to make money off their investments. Therefore, the lack of political instability in the country serves as a push factor keeping foreign investors away.

On the other hand, the policies that set out to draw in FDI act as pull factors. As Ethiopia has opened its market for foreign investment over a couple of decades ago, the expected expansion and maturity that comes with age is now evident in the country. With an educational system that plans to make education accessible to most of the people, the country produces enough skilled manpower to satisfy the demands of foreign investors. The great deal of attention granted towards radically changing the state of infrastructure also serves well in drawing FDI. The availability of energy, water, roads and other forms of infrastructure has shot up in the last couple of decades due to the pro-poor nature of Ethiopia’s development schemes and the key role foreign investment is expected to play in them.

The tax and land incentives provided to foreign investors in Ethiopia are also internationally known for their generosity. Some even question the feasibility of the scheme that provides long periods of tax exemption and extremely cheap lease of land. For instance, the country exempts business income tax from five to fifteen years depending on the sector the business operates in. Businesses can also carry forward their losses for five years and beyond. There is also a personal income tax exemption of up to five years to expatriate employees of sourcing companies located in industrial parks. The price of land appropriated for investors is also one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, in the world.

As disheartening as damage to property can be, the policies and incentives put forward by the government prove to be far more appealing. There is also the little matter of belief in the capability of the Ethiopian law enforcement to put things back to normal within a short period of time.

The result of the meshing of all these variables is a sustained fast growth in foreign investment coming into the country. Investment Commissioner, Fitsum Arega, recently noted that FDI flowing into the country is increasing despite global and national challenges. He cited falling commodity prices as the main global challenge while the national challenges are represented by the above discussed realities in the country over the last couple of years.

The Commissioner explained that FDI flow has reached 4.17 billion USD this year and created 16,000 jobs. That is a five fold increase on FDI flows a decade ago. Xinhua reported that FDI inflow in the Ethiopian Fiscal Year (EFY) 2007/2008 was 814.6 million U.S. dollars but that figure has increased to 4.17 billion dollars in EFY2016/17.

The official website of the Ethiopian Investment Commission indicates that manufacturing, agriculture, construction, hotel and real estate services as well as horticulture are the sectors foreign investors have invested in. It also quotes the Commissioner Fitsum as saying: ” We are one of the few countries to register such a high FDI.” It also identifies investors from China, India and the Netherlands as being at the forefront in their engagement in industrial parks, textile manufacturing and horticulture.

A 2012 study presented by the International Journal of Financial Research indicated that FDI has expanded strongly over the past three decades. The study cites UNCTAD as saying that the growth in FDI accelerated in the 1990s, rising to 331 billion USD in 1995 and 1.3 trillion USD in 2000. The study states that Africa’s share in total FDI flows dropped significantly from 36 percent in 1970 – 74 to ten percent in 1980 – 84 and to three percent in 1995 – 99. A 2007 UNCTAD report indicates that Africa’s share of global FDI inflows decreased from 3.3 percent in 2003 to 2.7 percent in 2006.

The recent invigorated quest for development in the African continent has brought the continent forward as infrastructure and social services such as health and education have all enjoyed a tremendous bask of sunshine. Accordingly, the state of FDI inflows to the continent has gained a positive momentum.

The World Investment Report 2015 by UNCTAD clearly depicts the steady rise in Africa’s share in global FDI inflows to reach 4.4 percent in 2014. The report shows that despite a 16 percent global FDI fall in 2014, inflows to Africa remained stable at 54 billion USD. “North Africa saw its FDI flows decline by 15 percent to 12 billion USD, while flows to Sub-Saharan Africa increased by five percent to 42 billion USD. In Sub-Saharan Africa, FDI flows to West Africa declined by ten percent to 13 billion USD , as Ebola, regional conflicts and falling commodity prices negatively affected several countries. Flows to Southern Africa also fell by two percent to 11 billion USD. By contrast, Central Africa and East Africa saw their FDI flows increase by 33 percent and 11 percent, to 12 billion USD and seven billion USD, respectively.” The report goes on to state that East Africa saw its FDI flows increase by 11 percent, to 6.8 billion USD and singled out Tanzania and Ethiopia for claiming a considerable stake of the increased inflows.

With five fold increment in FDI inflows in the past decade, Ethiopia has demonstrated its capacity to serve as a positive influence in the region. The tremendous growth is also a testament to the triumph of the pull factors of policy over the push factors of political instability in Ethiopia.

Source: allfrica.com