Wednesday, September 22, 2010

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Sheila Barradas.

Making headlines:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has acknowledged in a new report that South Africa's real exchange rate could be between 5% and 15% overvalued. But it also asserts that the size of the currency market and the dominance of nonresidents in that market, will limit the government's ability to influence the level of the rand.
In its ‘2010 Article IV Staff Report', the IMF highlights that nonresidents account for nearly 75% of the daily turnover of $10-billion to $12-billion in the South African foreign exchange market - daily trade in all currencies has been estimated at close to $4-trillion. The IMF, therefore, supports the continuation of a floating exchange-rate system, which has been "an important absorber of shocks, enabling the economy to adjust in the face of the global financial crisis". However, the strong recovery in the rand during 2009 and 2010, fuelled by portfolio inflows, and a 20% deterioration in South Africa's export performance in 2009 "point towards exchange rate overvaluation".

It will cost $36-billion a year to enable the world's one-billion energy-starved people to access energy supplies at home by 2030, said the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2010 World Energy Outlook.
Some 1,2-billion would still have no electricity by 2030 if governments make no change to existing policies, down from 1,4-billion currently without access to electricity. The $36-billion a year represents only 3% of global energy investments projected by the agency to 2030. IEA chief economist Fatih Biro says that "this is peanuts compared with other investments..."
Achieving universal access to energy supplies will only boost oil demand by less than 1% and carbon dioxide emissions by 0,8%, Biro said, adding that this is because most people who lack access to electricity live in rural areas. "Since they are not connected to the cities, in most cases decentralised systems such as wind, minihydro or solar, will be used."

The government's proposed media crackdown should be seen in the context of its own crisis of legitimacy, said Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes on Tuesday.
Speaking at a panel discussion on the Protection of Information Bill hosted by the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, Dawes said that the issue is "not about metropolitan journalists trampling on people's rights, but of control" within the ruling alliance. "Some of [the pressure on the media] ... is from individuals who feel hurt and injured by things that the press has done to expose their misconduct," he said. "But the wider question is about democratic legitimacy and the survival of the current arrangement."
Offering a different perspective, University of the Witwatersrand political analyst Steven Friedman criticised what he said was the "intense middle-class elitism" of South African media. "The lives of South Africans who are not middle class do not count in the South African media," he said. "As long as that is the case, what we are looking at here, is not an attempt to preserve the freedoms of the people of South Africa, it's an attempt to preserve the freedoms of a very narrow group of people." This did not alter the threat to the media, and the fact that those freedoms ought to be preserved, but it challenged people to ask themselves how they and the media saw democracy, and who democracy was actually for.

Also making headlines:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tells Sudan that the door is open to better US ties, seeking to coax Khartoum into cooperating with referendums next year that could split the country.
The African National Congress sheds light on its planned National Health Insurance scheme, with an initial price tag of R128-billion.
The Democratic Republic of Congo will soon lift a short-lived ban on mining in its troubled eastern provinces, as the ban on conflict minerals is considered almost impossible to enforce owing to the involvement of government troops.
And, African leaders pledge to do more to meet United Nations Millennium Development Goals and urge stronger leadership among developing countries to tackle hunger and disease and attract investment.

That's a roundup of news making headlines today.