Word: africas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Loans Peter Gumbel's "IMF 2.0" fully captures the sentiment and distrust of developing economies toward the IMF, and the negative impact on people's lives of corrupt and inept government officials' dealings with the IMF [April 20]. Certain governments in Africa took IMF loans on behalf of their people who then suffered the debt with neither accountability nor the hoped for development. Now the loan conditions are being relaxed, the IMF must ensure that loans do not get to corrupt governments anymore, and where they do, the loans must be accounted for with development projects and fiscal responsibility. Obinna...
...know a fair amount about South Africa's new President as a man. Jacob Zuma has six wives and 19 children, and he has been tried for rape (acquitted) and corruption (case dropped). His party, the African National Congress, sells him as an affable consensus-builder and a champion of the dispossessed - and on both counts, it's true, he scores. But we know very little about him as a policy-maker. Zuma has consistently refused to answer questions of policy, describing himself as a cipher for his party. After he was elected President last month, that argument became...
...news? The big news is that Trevor Manuel, finance minister since 1996, stays - but in a new role, as head of a new planning commission which will act as watchdog and overseer of all government departments. This is good. Manuel is widely respected inside and outside South Africa and is credited as the man who created the conditions, before the global downturn, for South Africa's economy to grow by close to 5% a year. Manuel has long complained that while he built government resources, other departments squandered them. Fifteen years since the end of apartheid, the big questions facing...
...replaces Manuel at Finance? Pravin Gordhan, former head of South Africa's tax authority. This is more good news. Tax compliance has long been a problem in South Africa. But Gordhan has got more people to pay more tax, raising the tax base by around 10% every year since he was appointed in 1999. He is respected by the markets and his appointment should go some way to reassuring them that Manuel's departure won't spell chaos...
...heavyweight. Many see him as the ANC President that never was (he was Nelson Mandela's preferred successor; the job went to Mbeki instead). The corporate sector, which admires his accumulative skills, would have seen his inclusion as further reassurance. Still, Ramaphosa has been out of South Africa's political scene for a long time. A cabinet position would have been something; his absence is merely more of the same...