Why Triton stole and unanswered questions

Having read through the stories in the daily (I think DN has done a very good job so afr on this oil story), one can conclude that:

1. The loan that KCB is running after is considerably higher than the Ksh2bn that is out there. As DN makes clear today, this was based on a KPC estimate of the import price at Ksh60*126m litres. But remember that prices during this period (and the period seems to be almost 9 months) were alot higher, so its better to use say Ksh90. That means that KCB share of the loan now goes up to Ksh3bn. The questions, given volatile oil prices, how does KCB (1) value its loans (2) keep up with the collateral needs for such loans?
2. Triton stole the oil because it wanted to create an artificial shortage so that prices would temporarily go up allowing it to make money or breakeven on its omporting prices.
3. Its still not clear why KPC was not the one importing the oil. Why?
4. The collateral agreements are not agreements. It is merely a process and one that can easily be breached. A collateral agreement always has a clause that in effect makes you the guarantor. Is KPC (and by extension GoK) the guarantor of these loans?
5. MTNs-when did they become legal financial instruments in Kenya? Is CMA aware?

Setting up bank branches in the West just got harder

Up until the latest economic crisis in Kenya engendered by the events of January yesteryear, several banks were thinking of having small operations in the UK or in the US to tap into the diaspora. In theory, I didn’t think this was necessary. I for example never needed to go to Kenya to open my online bank account with Equity. However, KCB had for example explored this seriously and Equity is apparently thinking of doing so in Baltimore (?).

Time for a re-think...

From October, any UK-based has to in effect be self-sufficient in terms of liquidity. Other nations will also follow suit. What does this mean? In addition to the fairly onerous capital commitment, banks operating in all G10 and other signatories to Basel 2 will in effect have to demonstrate that in normal and stressed situations, their operations can withstand any cash flow requirements either to hand or from funding that is easily accessible. Sounds simple but one thing the regulators don’t want to hear is that especially in periods of stress, your operations will be dependant on parent bank to provide liquidity. The credit crunch has demonstrated that this doesn’t happen (Iceland banks, Lehman Brothers all swiped cash into home territory as soon things went pear-shaped).

You in effect need to demonstrate that this will be a stand alone banking business...

KPC, KCB, KTB: we are not or are we?

In the 90's you read a financial scandal and re-read to see if what you were reading was true or some fictional thriller. One gets the same feeling reading some of the stories now.

One Samuel Gichuru is now known for his billions made at KPLC via various schemes such as the treated or untreated poles, deliberate reduction of HEP and ofcourse his appetite for "relations". Then you recall NBK and its laundry list of bad uncollateralised and unrecorded loans to the honourable MPs.

Now KPC has a missing 56m litres of oil which was allegedly bought by Triton. Triton had used this oil as collateral to borrow (wait for it), Ksh2bn from KCB (and I am ignoring the Ksh90bn that KCB has apparently lent to Triton over 4 years on the assumption most of it has been paid)! KCB which I unfortunately commended the other day for being ahead in its risk management now risks having to provide for a large portion of this loan as it didn't actually have anything but letters of assurance from KPC about its collateral. Triton collapsed just before year end... And yes, KPC is due to be listed this year... By the way, why was Triton doing KPC's job for it?

Memo to KCB: In good times, risk management has to be first class, in bad times, natural risk aversion should kick in. Its your collateral and it doesn't matter if KPC is the only one with storage, you have to have letters of guarantee that says KPC will bear the substantial risk of the collateral. Its not me being clever in hindsight. Did anybody evaluate Triton's cashflow and finances before the loan?

As for KTB, the story shows another sad state of affairs especially when the tourism industry needs all the positive PR it can get.

So are we regressing back to m-o-i days again? My take is we are and I really hope that GoK is serious about divesting itself from business asap.

NSE weekly catch up: Have we hit the bottom?

The NSE continues to benefit from investors re-positioning to take advantage of the results season. Olympia was highest gainer in the week despite a blind strategy, while Centum and Equity topped the losers table.

The answer to the question is maybe. We did hit bottom at the NSE in October but have we bottomed out? The answer is no and we'll continue to yo-yo along the bottom for a while and may even work ourselves into going  below 3,000. There are various reasons for this not least the uncertain Kenyan macroeconomy and the very sickly global situation. Volumes at the NSE remain wafer-thin (see graph for comparison to the first 6 days in the '08) a combination of the anaemic cash positions of many investors (inflation and school fees) and confidence levels.

Grapevine says that NMG sacked 100 of its journalists. My info has always been that for a listed company, it pays atrociously, so cutting staff might not be the easiest way to reduce costs. Instead, attention should go to its many dailies especially in Kenya. Even a willing, able person like me when on my hols, would struggle to justify buying BDA, DN, and Standard in the same day. Not to mention Daily Metro and Taifa Leo. My suggestion would be for the time being, to make BDA a pullout paper within DN; make daily metro a free newspaper financed by ads and probably re-think Taifa Leo.

FTSE corner: How do you tell the market is lousy? Walk past broker/investment bank offices and see guys sitting down infront of three screens while playing on their blackberries. Normally, you'd see them watching all three screens while holding 2 phones.

LUSE-why now, what to buy and how?

A few good reasons:
Weak Kwacha: when I first started looking at opportunities there, I was getting around 6800, now its 7400. To the pound. If you are doing $ or Ksh, its even better.

• Its not just Ghana that had succesive African elections. By any standards (I don't who sets them), the el;ction went well and despite the opposition complaining (and they always do even Hillary Clinton and McCain murmured about this or the other), Zambians were able to move one from death via peaceful election. Next elections are 2011...


• Copper and other minerals: Zambia is rich in copper and cobalt. The fall in prices of some of these commodities is temporary driven by brief lull in China's economy (though the Swiss are its main export partners according to CIA's factbook) and deliveraging. Clearly, leverage won't ever reach the 2007 levels, but China and the other BRIC countries will resume growth path. The country is also developing tourism around the Victoria falls and game parks.


• Prices are genuinely under valued: I will cover specific stocks in another post

Reasons not to:

Adverse impact of falling copper prices now being seen in mine closures. Economy may take a break this year. Illiquid market. Selling at choice price might be an issue. FX rates: the converse of above might be true

I use stockbrokersszambia, who are very efficient in account opening and who do send daily/weekly and monthly reports and the occasional results announcement.

Indispensability

Kimunya said he'd rather die than resign. then he promptly resigned...but lived

Dick Fuld turned down no less than 5 different offers for a stake or takeover of Lehman Brothers because his valuation was double or more that of those offering. He didn't believe what the prospective buyers said about his beloved Lehman's toxic balance sheet and also believed Hank Poulson.

Around 4/5/6 months traders on Wall Street and elsewhere were still paying out £10k+ in a restraunt, today many are having to take pay cuts or re-orientation courses.

Tupac used to swagger after surviving a pac-getting shooting and believed he'd live for ever. He died shortly, of the same.

The other day, the captain of the England Cricket (a glorified drunk's day in the park) team went to the Cricket Board and told them that he being the best batsman since sliced bread would step down as captain, if the board didn't fire England head coach who he reckoned was useless. The board thought about it and told him thus;

we agree the coach his rubbish, so we'll sack him

but we also think you are a rubbish captain, so you're fired. lol...

Its called the law of indespensability...and will catch up with Kenyan politicians

Africap reduced stake in Equity to 1%

BDA (finally, and it still repeated that mistake with the shareprice perfomance) confirms the trade that took place just before year end.

Africap haven't yet explicitly confirmed this and its website still shows that it does still hold a stake in Equity.

Does it matter that Africap has exited? Not really, it has held the stake for over 5 years and crucially gave Equity the credibility it required at the time in addition to the funding. The end of the lockdown in August was always meant to give some of the shareholders an opportunity to exit. Equity today has some other strong foreign stakeholders such as Britak and Helios (by the way, I am willing to bet any money that some of the large investors in Helios are Kenyans). Still, having some local investors will add to that feeling of deja vu...

Investment Club Software featuring NSE...

If you are an investment club and are looking to bring your club's share investment activity at the NSE into the 21st century, help might be at hand.

If you struggle to value your share holdings at a corporate and member level and want to be able to give members access to monitor share transactions centrally, time to trade have unveiled just the software for you...

Kenyan Banks & BASEL II: Implementation

Why is it important for Kenyan banks to adopt Basel 2 in its entirety?

1. Growth: Any bank looking to grow domestically and internationally will need robust and scalable risk management systems and processes. As it grows, it'll notice different types risks e.g. market risk (fx and interest rate exposures) for international banks; for a domestic bank that is growing, its branch mangers will no longer have time to relation manage every creditor thus credit risk grows. A bank acquiring a broker for example opens itself to huge operational and market risks (proprietary equity positions).
2. Capital sourcing: For banks that look to source funding from either NSE or abroad; risk management is a consideration for the investors. Having class "A" risk management may reduce the premium that investors require
3. Reputational: the risk of not having risk management in place is that the bank will find its reputation in tatters or worse when one type of risk trips it up.
4. Contigency planning: Part of Basel 2 risk management is stress testing which is about capitalising for one-off capital destroyers.
5. Shareprice: Could be impacted by the feeling that a certain bank is at risk from its reckless risk management. As an investor in Equity, one question I always ask myself is this, if say Equity was to be hit by one of the above risks; was discovered to have insuffcient capital as a result and had to de-scale its operations, would CBK's Ndungu have tell Equity to reduce its operations? And I think we all know the answer to that.

In terms of Implemntation, CBK would like to start implementing Basel 2 from next year so that is our starting point.

Credit Risk:
-The standard approach won’t be applicable unless
---Bank has significant banking book-applies to most Kenyan banks
---Significant corporate or sovereign (including municipalities, parastatals and county council) exposure
---Significant credit rating coverage-very few corporates are credit rated in Kenya and even those that are, very few keep these ratings updated.

This leaves the two internal rating methodologies. In theory, this should mean a quicker uptake by the banks because many should already have these in place, right? Wrong-many are reliant on credit appraisals some which require subjective judgements. The initial credit approval process lacks the scalability that the use of credit scoring system would bring about. Then regulators have to approve these models. Which is where the next comes especially if different banks use different models as opposed to ones within set industry standards. It places a lot of pressure on the supervisor knowledge wise. How do they know which internal model is delivering adequate credit risk coverage? How do you compare an internal model that Equity uses to credit rate its mass customers with that of Standard Chartered which has middle/upper class customers?
Under the Advanced IRB, the bank can use it own model to estimate pd, as well as loss given default, expected loss, maturity, but in most countries this is only allowed if the bank has been producing these estimates for 3 or more years. Most Kenyan banks don't have these internal credit rating models now let alone for 3 years.
Under Foundation internal rating based approach, the bank is allowed to estimate the probability of default. To estimate PD, most banks would need to have the ability to stratify their customers using various criteria but the main ones might be maturity profile, collateral type and repayment track record. Once, the bank is able to break this down into say 10-15 categories, it can attach risk weightings to each category which will in effect denote the capital that needs to be held against each. Being able to get this model signed off by regulators will thus reduce capital required in most cases if the classification is sufficiently granular.

Market Risk:

Most Kenyan banks will have fx and interest rate risks under this risk category and exceptionally, equity. Daily VaR approach requires the bank to be able to calculate the daily P&L impact of a 1 basis point movement in interest rates on its banking book. Similarly for those parts of its banking and trading book that have exposure to non-domicile currencies. The fx risk will thus apply to KCB, DTB, Equity and others that have foreign businesses.

Operational Risk:

This is in effect the easiest to implement because with the exception of the advanced approach, most banks should be able to get data by business lines for several years and this just then need to apply a factor.

Holistic Scenario Testing:
Once the bank is able to calculate the required regulatory capital from the above and other risks, Basel 2 requires that a bank using the internal models in of the approaches to do stress test its capital against various one-off scenarios. For most Western banks these are events such as; credit crunch; LTCM, the tech bubble burst; oil prices crisis; black Monday et al. In Kenya, banks should consider the likely impact on their regulatory of the following scenarios and then provide the necessary capital buffer:

• A coup overthrowing current government
• Civil war lasting 6 months
• Drought lasting 1 year
• A run on the bank
• IMF/WB sactions against Kenya
• Withdrawal of a shareholder
• Arresting of CEO for murder
• Security breach on internet facility
• NSE fall by 50% in 7 days
• Global depression

Pick of 16

Of the 16 companies that gova is talking about privatising i.e. introducing to private sector ethos, I'd say that this is the way they'll pan out.
Don't forget, GoK had a ksh127bn deficit when it did the budget, this was to be bridged by the Eurobond loan which won't now happen until uuh late 2010 at the earliest and it has had to take on higher contigency funding than planned for.
OFS:
KPC- PBT fell last year, but it does need to step up a gear perfomance-wise. Its monopoly so not sure if competitiion will be an issue for the foreseeable future
Development Bank-Already TC has a 10.7% stake in the bank, so I wonder if ICDC would in effect have to put the shares at NSE. Doing ok perfomance wise without being exciting. Its niche of long-term financing is now occupied by many other banks...
New KCC-though 2010 is more likely. And couldn't find a website so something for Mwangi to think about.
Consolidated Bank- again probably one for 2010, though GoK finances may force issues. Made Ksh25m in 07 and Ksh16m in '06 so I really don't see investors queuing up to grab a stake...

Strategic partners:
NBK-though doing well now, I doubt if it GoK can just offload additional shares in the market without it having a strategic partner who will help ease out Marimbi.

Consolidation category:
The sugar companies should be merged to see if economies of scale will alliviate the torrid state of play.
Kenya Meat Commission should look either to acquire players in the market or go new KCC way.

Diverstiture:
Kenya Wines, hotels owned by KTDA

NSE weekly catch up: Results season kicks off

If you were looking to buy to take advantage of capital growth induced by the results season which kicked off yesterday until end of March, then you may well have missed the bus on some shares:

Equity was up 22% from Monday and there was this intriguing foreigner sale which no Media house or broker seems to have commented on...
AK was up 12% and has a lot of momentum for the rest of the year in my opinion
EA Cables was up 11% and is another (together with Centum-up 10%) which I see having a solid year shareprice-wise
Unga with results already out and its 1 for 5 bonus issue closure day behind it (30/12), will probably slide slowly (down 7% since Monday).

AIM corner:
Any prospective shareholders of Limuru Tea? I forgot to mention that the Tea firm (which now belongs to Brooke Bond given Unilever had a 54% holding), is doing a 1 for 1 bonus share issue. For which the books closed on the 18th of Dec :-(
However, City Trust (minority shareholder of fast rising I&M bank), is also doing a 1 for 10 bonus share issue and this is still open.

AOB: Nice of Reuters to highlight what a miserable yr 2008 was for us NSE investors. Not sure though where BDA got its 3.3% rise for Equity in 2008 (opening price was Ksh150, closing was Ksh176).

Macro view: I still read press reports that peeps are not getting the cheaper Ugali, so who is? Hopefully, we'll get a decent finance minister this year though that will have to wait for the old man to wake up.

Kenyan Banks and BASEL II: Review

At its heart, the current credit crisis is about reckless risk management, failure of risk management regulation and credit ratings...
Basel2 is in my humble opinion one of most complete approaches to risk management designed for the banking industry or any other industry. So what is it and how would it affect Kenyan banks were they to adopt it?

The Basel (Basle) in Basel II is the name of a Swiss town where bank international settlements are done. Its the son of Basel I, which was created back in 1988 as a recognition by the G10 nations plus two other nations that banks required a common approach to risk (credit & market) management and capital set aside to mitigate that risk. Being an initial effort, it was very broad brush and BII was therefore designed to add detail in terms of credit and market risks; cover off other risks (specifically operational risk) and other issues such as disclosure and regulation.
All these facets are covered in 3 pillars. For each of the 3 key banking risks (credit, market and operational), BII recommends a menu of approaches that banks and their regulators can adopt, but importantly specifics for each sub-type of business.
Credit risk: Risk that borrower (counterparty in banking-speak) defaults.The trio of approaches are :
(i) standard: allocate capital based on credit rating of counterparty;
(ii) internal rating-based- where bank uses regulator-sanctioned internal ratings models. Can either be foundation IRB i.e. just use internal model to estimate probability of default
or Advanced IRB where bank is allowed to use its model to estimate PD as well as loss given default and exposure at default.
Market risk: Risk from changing market factors(interest /fx rates; share/commodity prices). VaR for value at risk is the preferred approach.
Operational: Risk arising from banks’ way of doing things. BII recommends either basic indicator approach i.e. capital set aside must be the average of last 3 yrs annual gross income OR standardised approach which divides banks business into 8 different lines, takes their gross income and multiplies with a beta factor OR advanced measurement approach where the bank can use its own model.
The other two pillars deal with how the regulatory approach and in particular ICAAP which is the internal capital adequacy assessment process covering the bank’s approach to pillar 1 risks and other risks and disclosure of the same.

In terms of impact of regulatory capital, the experience in G10 nations has been that capital required is either the same or lower because banks can leverage broad credit rating coverage or strong internal models. As you’d expect, there have been criticisms of Basel II, but most have actually focused on what went wrong to spark the current credit crunch namely very ropey credit ratings and regulators evaluation of internal models used by banks. So far, many countries have taken up Basel 2.

In Africa, South Africa is far ahead having started using B2 in Jan 2008. In most other countries, B2 is only mentioned in passing. However, as a general rule, those nations with presence of international subsidiaries stand a better chance of early adoption. As do those with banks interested in going abroad. To bridge the knowledge and resource gap, some like Egypt are sourcing help from EEC. Adaption is now seen as given banks a competitive advantage.
Turning to Kenya, CBK has handily released a survey of 31 of our banks showing their awareness, intent, understanding and preparedness towards adopting Basel2. The survey fitted neatly with a review I was doing of how the listed banks do risk management. BDA has focused on the so-called talent war but there is a lot of other issues.
Here are my salient points:

• CBK wants to start adopting Basel II from 2010
• Banks have not yet adopted Basel1 wholly e.g. none actually allocates capital against market risk
• Awareness of BaselII is medium, less 5 than have done any assessment for B2 purposes
• Only 5 banks have in place a Basel II steering process
• The 7 subsidiaries of international banks were ready to adopt Basel II from 2008
• Only 3 local banks had any budget for Basel II in 2008
• CBK does not yet do risk-based supervision of the banks-uses Prudential rules
• BII is not seen as a competitive tool-parochial view
• Only 5 of the 31 deal in any non-plain vanilla financial instruments
• In UK, most banks took 2 to 3 years to prepare
• For credit and operational risk where there is a menu of approaches on offer, most prefer internal models
• Majority of local banks have an IT and human resources constraints (hence the BDA headline)

From annual reports, KCB seems to be ahead of the game in terms of its coverage of Basel II ( it was the first to appoint a CRO, already calculates probability of default and Temenos, its new IT system will at least give it the centralised banking data view)

Next post will look at the implementation process for Kenyan banks...

Happy 2009: some predictions

Investments
If you were to go from the Lenana peak at the top of Kirinyaga Mountain and walk across to the top of the Aberdare Ranges, that would give you perfect feel for how most stockmarkets will move to 2010. Assuming Q2 2007 to be the Lenana peak, I expect:
NSE- will not go beyond 4,500 weighed down by economy morass and newish listings (KPC, KenGen, NSE, Nakumatt, DPL Festive)
Access Kenya, Safaricom, Equity in that order will be top performing NSE shares in 2009
FX: $/Ksh will close below Ksh70; £/Ksh will close at Ksh115-20 both driven to the floor by arbitrage
LUSE: Has lost almost 30% this yr primairily driven by foreigners exiting but will stablise in 2009
FTSE: Will not go beyond 5,000 as unemployment, company defaults, housing depression continue to depress

Economy

Inflation: Will be re-calculated but reality is that it'll remain very high unless rains are very good
Economy: 4.5% growth will be recorded for 2009 i.e broadly similar to this yr, the result of lower international receipts, inflation espicially fuel an electricity.
KRA: will miss it target for yr.
BoE rate: will close at 1%
UK unemployment will rise to 3m

Politics
Different yr, same BS

• The local tribunal will get bogged down from the start. The investigations will clear most of the "10" for lack of sufficient evidence.
• Constitution review will get stuck on the same two issues namely parliamentary/presidential system (excellent explaination of the diffs) and devolution (or is it ujimbo/ugatuzi/ukabila/upuzi?)

And finally, Liverpool FC will win the Premier League in May.

2008 Blogging Highlights and others

2008 for us Kenyans started off nightmarishly and disappointingly us bloggers retreated into our tribal cocoons or kept quiet as our nation tore itself apart. So from a Kenyan blogging point of view, its difficult to pick any blogger.
It was the year bankers proved they were human and there was no better blogger at explaining how human than Robert Preston. This is a compelling read of the week the whole UK banking system was a hanging off a cliff.

Thank you to Koffi Annan (I am sure at the end he must have beeen thinking how do Kenyans cope with these guys?) and Kikwete for the peaceful solution.
And to ”our cousin” Obama for another positive.
There were also positives for Kenya in the sporting arena with Harambee and our runners at the Olympics.

From a personal pt of view, the 2nd half of 2008 was fairly challenging. I lost some close relas and a friend. My employer went bankrupt. I know many others went thru far far more challenging circumstances so as I look back on the full yr, I thank God for being in my corner kabisa and bringing us thru…

As a blogger, I am sure there are ways that I could improve the blog and I really welcome any suggestions/topics from readers...

2009 is shaping up excitingly for me

I want to wish you all a happy, prosperous & adventurous 2009.

2008 at the NSE: Contrasts

2008 Investing Highlights

This was me end of June, this is me today:

Kenya
Sold: In the money (NMG, TPS, ARM, NIC) & Out of the money (BBK, EA Cables)

Reduced: KCB

Switched to: Equity, Cash

Hold: Equity, AK, miniscule KCB (2,500 shares) & Safcom & Cash

TZ
Bought: Dar es salaam Community Bank

Zambia
Bought: Pamodzi Hotel

Theme has been to move from diversification of risk to concentration of gains. Has it worked? Yes and would have been even more fruitful if I had kept to one of my golden rules of never adding more shares unless the price of the said stock is lower than my average cost so far. I got punished for buying AK at Ksh33.50 thus driving my average for it to early 20s and Equity at Ksh301 and Ksh250 thus driving average to mid 120s.

Overall for the year: average i.e. below 30% gain. Had to rush out of BRIC nations just to stay in the money and NSE has been so-so but thankfully my offloads were all in July/Aug time.

Other investment decisions:
Good ones: Missed out on SIB’s private placement. Having opened a trading account and just about to send the funds to buy some shares at Ksh120, I once more request ed a copy of its accounts. Still not received even today. In the meantime, I now hear that the initial placement failed and subsequently the shares were retailing at ksh30!
Tough ones: After sweating to set up the investment club, I decided to move on because of strategic differences. So why I my still blogging as KCIG? Investment club changed its name.
Bad ones: Hesitated when was Equity was Ksh116…

Investing resource: Thanks Aly Khan for the live prices streaming. Some of my last minute price adjustments relied on the live feed.

Key learnings: Self-discipline, early bird mentality and thereafter liquidity and investors confidence are the key ingredients that turn good company/market fundamentals into investor bounty.

Equity's large share trade today

A big Ksh2.5bn worth of Equity stake exchanged hands today. Based on mystocks live stream , it almost certainly looks like one of its foreign shareholders selling to a domestic shareholder. Helios I believe has a 3-5yr lock-down clause. So that leaves either Africap (which is no longer bound by the initial 2yr lock-down) or some others who were scooping up those shares sold in batches oif around 800k around the time of the August lock-down.
The transaction equates to 15m of Equity shares or 3.88% of its total shareholding which I believe falls under the 5% threshold upon which Equity is obliged to lay bear the details.
It'd however be of interest to the shareholders and I am sure the NSE at large, if the details of the transaction were to be made public. For the FTSE, I think the threshold is something like 1% before this information is revealed.

Several other shares also saw foreigners exit for what I believe are year-end book closure purposes.

NSE catch up: Co-op lands makes a splutter

A mild short week at the bourse with all eyes now on Feb/March results season. It was thus a good time for Co-op to list. Funny games as always. The stock was under-subscribed and the minute it lands, you have investors buying Ksh11, 10 i.e. above the Ksh9.50 price. Does it make sense? As mentioned last week, real price will be discovered in the next two months as the immobilised (exchanged from certificates) shares find their way into the market. Most were bought or valued at the equivalent of Ksh1.10 earlier this year...

In other news, NIC is going into TZ. It has put in a bid to acquire 51% of Savings & Finance, a medium sized bank in TZ. A word about TZ banks. Most tend to belong either to community groups or certain locales. They therefore rarely have the extensive branch network that one will see with Kenyan banks (only three have more than 10 branches). S&F only has 3 branches but these are in the main towns. NIC becomes the 3rd Kenyan bank to step into TZ after DTB and KCB.

The battle for the Mutomo coal deposits continues. Why do investments such as these which will provide much-needed employment take so long to get off the ground?

And finally: Xmas away from Kenya tends to be a fairly downbeat affair especially when as I did I spoke to relas back home who were just finishing some mutura. So its just as well that Mr & Mrs Muiru have made sure Kenyans can at least get some of their favourite foodstuffs locally via their Wahu Foods shop. Wishing them much success...

Merry Xmas

Enjoy your goat responsibly,,,

Why I blog about Africa

The nairobi banker has tagged me on why I blog about Africa...

I blog about Africa or more accurately Kenya, because despite living in the UK for 10+ yrs, I am the quintessential homebody. You can take me out of Kenya but you can't take Kenya out of me. So today I blog about Kenya and Africa because its one of the best cures for homesickness that I know.

I blog about Kenya and Africa because I want to strongly counter the negative vision of Africa that the West and its media likes feeding us. Some of it maybe true, but there is much more positive stuff that they could also report on, but don't have the gumption to.

• What about the Kenya/Africa that has produced Mpesa the first of its kind in the world?
• Or even Equity, a bank that has literally turned Kenyan banking upside down so that banks are now genuinely interested in the low working class?
• How about the upcoming fibre optic cable and consequent explosion in internet penetration?
• The rejuvented economies of Ug, Angola, Mozambique
• The peaceful, democractic and prosperous Botswana
• Or the fact that for every Kenya/Zim election fiasco, there is a Ghana/Zambia election pass?

I blog about Africa because it’s the future, most other places have already peaked and we are just building up...

I also blog as a way of networking with fellow Kenyans/Africans and specifically those interested in investing and growing our economies.

And now I pass the button to:
friend and fellow blogger, Ssembonge;
missing in action Pesa-tu/Realist;
And new comers Hatua and Huduma Bora