Africa
Njoroge stresses need for Kenya banks to innovate
Patrick Njoroge, governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, is reflecting on the topic of weight. But it is not the balancing of fiscal levers or the appropriate spreads for Kenya’s $7.2 billion in foreign reserves that is concerning him. No, for this recent arrival – he took over the … read more >>
Kenya: central bank governor Njoroge: Calling it as he sees it
Patrick Njoroge has spent much of his career outside Kenya, mostly in Washington at the IMF as a senior economist. Two decades in that role took him around the world, occasionally as its ambassador, more often in a team of firemen fixing damaged economies. As for central banks, he has … read more >>
Kenya: Patrick Njoroge, corruption-fighter
Patrick Njoroge, governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, is reflecting on the topic of weight. But it is not the balancing of fiscal levers or the appropriate spreads for Kenya’s $7.2 billion in foreign reserves that is concerning him. No, for this recent arrival – he took over the … read more >>
Morocco: Attijariwafa stakes claims south of the Sahara
It’s a steamy mid-September and l’atmosphere in downtown Casablanca could well be mistaken for a languid late summer in Marseilles. In myriad chic eateries, Fashionable Young Things in oversized Jackie O sunglasses tap instant messages to each other into new iPhones over café au lait, while their male equivalents motor … read more >>
The Stain on Spain
LAST July 1, in a sweltering greenhouse in southern Spain, a black man from Africa was shot by a white man from Europe. Allegedly. The black man was Dinantou Barbosa, a 29-year-old from the impoverished West African state of Guinea-Bissau, one of as many as 100,000 Africans living and labouring … read more >>
Room for Everyone at The Hague
MEET Kuniko Ozaki – 55, Japanese and, since 2009, international resident of The Hague. Ozaki-san is one of the current 19 judges of the International Criminal Court, which sits in The Hague with claims as the world’s most distinguished forum to transact criminal justice. With her untaxed, near €300,000-a-year … read more >>
Egypt: Banking on a revolution
CAIRO – In January and February this year, as revolution coursed through Cairo and beyond, Egypt’s central bank governor, Farouk Abd El Baky El Okdah, called the heads of the country’s main banks to a series of urgent meetings at the Cairo Marriott on Zamalek Island in the middle of … read more >>
Australia: Hockey needs more than Google for his economic research
Joe Hockey presents as a pleasant enough chap, in a matey, Billy Bunter type of way. But he needs help. The man who seems poised to hold Australia’s economic future in his hands needs to try harder. At the least, he needs to read more extensively, more deeply and of … read more >>
Libya: Untainted talent leading from front
TUNIS: It’s somewhat alarming, when awaiting a flight to Benghazi, to receive word from Libya that the arranged interview with the economist one is flying to war-torn Libya to see is suddenly cancelled because he ”got the bullet”. Nuance is not always the strong suit of revolutionaries. And neither is … read more >>
Why David Cameron is sounding a lot like Hosni Mubarak
CAIRO: David Cameron doesn’t look like Hosni Mubarak — hated scourge of Egyptians. That would be Robert De Niro. Nor does dapper Dave look like Tunisia’s ousted strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, or Syria’s aptly-onomatopoeaic Bashar al-Assad, or any other tyrant from Pyongyang to Minsk. But in making a … read more >>
Egypt’s reluctant finance minister gets to work
Samir Radwan was a surprise choice as Egypt’s new finance minister, even to himself. Appointed at the height of the chaos, the retired economist is working hard to sustain Egypt’s finances and economy through a period of extraordinary upheaval. Eric Ellis joins him in Cairo IN EGYPT’S chaotic last days … read more >>
Egypt still waiting for someone to lead
BE IT by accident or design, the massive new billboard framed by Cairo’s October 6 bridge across the Nile speaks to a telling transition in these revolutionary times. The bridge marks an Egypt whose time has passed, the 1973 war when Cairo’s military regime led an Arab coalition across the … read more >>
Indonesia is no role model for Egypt
JAKARTA: Let’s hope life after Mubarak does not resemble the post-Suharto era From Barack Obama to prolix purveyors of punditry in Australia and abroad, it has become fashionable in these heady revolutionary times to cast Indonesia as the democratic vision for a post-Mubarak Egypt — largely, it seems, because the … read more >>
Making turmoil pay- Egypt’s richest man is not for fleeing
CAIRO: Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris knows a thing or two about operating among strongmen in their dictatorships When tyrannies teeter to people power, as we are witnessing in Egypt and beyond, the cronies and rentiers who got rich from their cosiness to authority usually cut their losses and run for … read more >>
Orascom: A very modern tale of corporate finance
North Korea. Zimbabwe. Tunisia. Algeria. Iraq. Pakistan. Egypt. It’s a list of the world’s flashpoints. And they’re all part of Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris’s unique telecoms empire. So when his Orascom group needed financing, and then sought a buyer, it presented Sawiris’s advisers with a unique set of challenges. Eric … read more >>
Orascom: How do you solve a problem like Korea?
Naguib Sawiris has built large parts of his empire by being prepared to do business where other companies would fear to tread. He explains how he became a telecoms operator, banker and even an hotelier in the biggest rogue state of all, North Korea. “We looked at a map of … read more >>