Reasons To Be Long On SA
This is the elephant that greets you when you visit Maponya Mall in Soweto. It’s an impressive statue, fit for an impressive place. Maponya Mall makes the average big box shopping precinct in an affluent American suburb seem rather drab and lifeless by comparison.
Today’s Soweto is not the Soweto captured in the heartrending black-and-white images shot when the segregated township’s schoolchildren rose up against apartheid in 1976. Thanks to those children, Soweto is today the pulsing heart of a dynamic democracy at the gateway of a transforming continent.
Maponya Mall and its elephant give you an inkling of why Wal-Mart understands it has to get into the African market, why the $20 billion Harvard endowment’s fourth largest single holding in 2010 was a South African index fund, and why JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently described himself as “incredibly impressed” by the opportunities he saw in South Africa and its region.
In picking its metaphor for Africa, McKinsey and Co. chooses another animal. It talks about “lions on the move”, and figures that by the end of this decade consumer-driven industries in Africa — agriculture, resources and infrastructure — will be generating $2.6 trillion a year in revenue, over two and half times the current figure.
South Africa will be a big part of the story. PriceWaterhouseCoopers projectsthat between now and 2050 South Africa will be the world’s seventh fastest growing economy, with an average real annual growth rate of 5%.
Judged strictly in terms of GDP and population, South Africa may not automatically be ranked among the BRIC nations — to use the acronym for the big emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India and China coined by Goldman Sachs. But the BRICs themselves see South Africa as a peer and have invited us to join their club.
What South Africa may lack in size, it more than makes up for both as a connector with a region that is being called the world’s last great investment frontier and from the respect the country of Nelson Mandela commands on the international stage. The way we prepared for and hosted the 2010 Fifa soccerWorld Cup hasn’t hurt our reputation, either.
Under the World Economic Forum’s rating system, South Africa’scompetitiveness score is all but indistinguishable from those of Brazil, India and Russia. In many areas of importance to investors, including strength of institutions, protection of property rights, quality of infrastructure, strength of investment protection and corporate ethics, we are ranked ahead of all the BRICs, sometimes by a wide margin.
In a comparison of 92 countries, South Africa’s budget process was recently ranked number one for transparency. The World Bank says that, overall, it is far easier to launch and run a business in South Africa than it is in any of the BRICs.
An important part of what gives South Africa its competitive edge is the quality of our people and the way we do things. And we do a lot more than many imagine.
Boko Haram And US Plans In Africa
ABUJA, Nigeria, Jan. 9 (UPI) — Oil-rich Nigeria is gripped by an escalating uprising by Islamist militants that has triggered massacres of Christians, including a Christmas Day suicide bombing blitz, which the federal government seems unable to contain.
Amid deepening suspicions the Islamists are aided by al-Qaida’s North African wing, which has been extending its operations southward of late, there are fears the bloodletting could plunge Africa’s most populous state into a sectarian civil war.Nigeria is a major oil producer that provides 8 percent of U.S. crude imports and there are signs that Washington is growing concerned about the swelling crisis there.
In October, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed to take action against the main Nigerian Islamist group, Boko Haram, which until a few months ago was widely seen as a northeastern Nigerian sect primarily concerned with domestic issues.But as the group, whose name translates as “Western education is a sin,” has escalated its religious war from drive-by shootings and killing Christians to more sophisticated operations and suicide bombings, it has evolved into a serious threat to Nigeria’s stability.
Formed in the 1990s, the group demanded Islamic Sharia law to be introduced into northern Nigeria, which is predominantly Muslim. But in recent years it has repeatedly clashed with Nigeria’s Christians in the central region where the two religions collide.Nigeria’s population of 150 million is roughly split evenly between the two faiths.
But the country’s oil wealth is in the Christian-dominated south and little has reached the long-neglected north, which has fanned regional resentment.Boko Haram’s growing expertise in terrorist attacks, in which hundreds of people have been killed, has deepened suspicions it has developed links with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, the jihadists’ North African arm.
In November, it was disclosed that the U.S. Army has sent 100 Special Forces soldiers to Nigeria to provide counter-insurgency training for national troops engaged against Boko Haram, the country’s largest military deployment since the 1967-70 Biafra war.This opened up a new front in the U.S. administration’s shadow war in Africa, where U.S. Special Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency are engaged in countering jihadist groups in the north and east, particularly Somalia.
On Nov. 30, the U.S. House of Representatives’ subcommittee on counter-terrorism and intelligence identified Boko Haram as an “emerging threat” to the United States and its interests and called for greater interaction with Nigerian security forces.
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