The World Bank on Piracy

Last Friday, I appeared on Monacle 24 Radio in London to discuss the World Bank's recently released report on piracy, exhaustively compiled by some of the most qualified experts in the field.



While I believe that two-thirds of what I said during the interview was accurate, I must apologize to the report's authors for misrepresenting their methodology. In the interview, I refer to the difficulties of calculating the cost of piracy to the world economy, in particular because data from the global shipping industry is scarce and unreliable. Specifically, I referenced the obstacles to arriving at an accurate figure for total industry costs for insurance premiums, fuel, and armed guard detachments. I further suggested that many of these costs are lumped together as zero sum losses to the global economy, ignoring the fact that such "costs" fuel other sectors of the economy. In other words, acting as if the pirates were, metaphorically speaking, removing nuggets of gold from a giant pot marked "Global Economy."

While this was the methodology employed in two similar previous reports by the think tank Oceans Beyond Piracy, the World Bank report uses a different tack: estimating piracy's downward effect on world trade, and extrapolating backwards from there to calculate the degree to which costs must have risen. In essence, the report conceptualizes piracy as an ad valorem tax on global trade.

While I still hold that the model is ultimately not so helpful, due to its large number of assumptions (the report itself gives a margin of error of $18b +/- $6b), I regret not fully understanding the report's methodology before discussing it on national radio. My sincere apologies to each of its authors.

The IEBC Has Some Explaining to Do

Yesterday, Raila Odinga launched his Supreme Court petition to challenge the results of the March 4th Kenyan general election. Topping Raila's list of grievances is his allegation that the voter registry, sometime between the December 18th final registration deadline and election day, was manipulated to favour his opponent, president-elect Uhuru Kenyatta.

He has a point.

From March 4-9, as I was tracking the progress of the election on Excel spreadsheets, inconsistencies between the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission's (IEBC) December 18th registered voters list and whatever the organization had used on election day were already apparent. Indeed, there was no publicly accessible voter registry on election day; whatever changes were made to the rolls from December 18th to March 4th (during the IEBC's "cleaning up" of the registry on February 23rd, for instance) weren't posted to the IEBC's website, as pointed out in a brilliant article in yesterday's Daily Nation.

The official post-election IEBC voter registry, finally published in last Friday's Nation, was significantly different than the December 18th rolls, both in absolute numbers of registered voters and in their distribution across the 47 counties. In 11 counties, voter registration numbers shifted by 3 per cent or more; in one case, the figure was as high as 12.13 per cent.

My latest Excel spreadsheet shows that the changes almost universally benefitted Uhuru, and probably denied Raila a chance at a run-off.

Amnesty for Pirate Kingpins?

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mahmoud recently announced plans for an amnesty program for "young pirates," while explicitly clarifying that "kingpins" would be exempt. 

Yet two top pirate kingpins, Mohamed Hassan Afweyne and Mohamed Garfaanje, met with Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon in the second week of February to discuss an offer of amnesty. If President Mahmoud is serious about granting no quarter to pirate kingpins, why are two top bosses running around Mogadishu meeting with the PM? Why aren't they under arrest?

These are questions I raise in my latest article for The Daily Beast: 

Somalia’s federal government is offering amnesty to junior pirates in an attempt to end the hijackings of merchant vessels that have plagued international shipping lanes off the coast of the East African nation, according to Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.

Although the amnesty offer supposedly does not extend to top pirate bosses, The Daily Beast has learned that two pirate leaders—including Mohamed Abdi Hassan Afweyne, one of the founding fathers of Somali piracy—met with Somali Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon in early February to discuss amnesty conditions. Afweyne is one of three pirate bosses whose assets the U.S. Treasury has targeted for freezing.

...

The full article is available here. 

Kenyan Politics and the Fall of the Republic

I'm a bit of a Classics geek, with a particular affection for Roman history (in my book I limited myself, with great difficultly, to only four Roman references). Thumbing through the pages of the Nation the other day, filled with the usual dispiriting tales of Kenyan politics—backroom deals, tribal pandering, and other general skullduggery—an odd thought struck. The Kenyan political scene bears strong similarities to the dirty Roman politics of the 1st century BC, a time when Rome's republican system of government, which had functioned more or less effectively for four hundred years, began to completely unravel. 

The Roman political system, after all, has drawn endless comparisons to the American, whose founding fathers famously modelled their nascent republic on the Roman preoccupation with checks and balances. So why not Kenya's?

With the Kenyan elections only a week away, I submit to you, then, a few outsider observations gleaned from my year of living in the country:

The Land's the Thing

Jomo Kenyatta

After Kenya attained independence in 1963, Kenya's ruling elite moved to appropriate much of the land formally part of the colonial possession. The Kenyatta family alone currently owns an estimated 500,000 acres of fertile land (~2,000 km²) in a country that is largely classified as semi-arid or arid, according to The Standard newspaper. Many believe the figure may be twenty times as high. It's difficult to know for certain; much of this land was snatched up through corrupt dealings by Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, who took a loan from a guilt-ridden British government and used it to buy up large tracts of land through Settlement Transfer Fund Schemes.