Sudan's warring generals extend theoretical truce but keep fighting

Sudan's warring military factions agreed to a new and longer seven-day ceasefire from Thursday, neighbour and mediator South Sudan said, even as more air strikes and shooting in the Khartoum capital region undercut their latest supposed truce.

Previous ceasefire pledges have ranged from 24 to 72 hours but there have been constant truce violations in the conflict that erupted in mid-April between the army and a paramilitary force.

South Sudan's foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that mediation championed by its president, Salva Kiir, had led both sides to agree a weeklong truce from Thursday to May 11 and to name envoys for peace talks. The current ceasefire was due to expire on Wednesday (today).

It was unclear, however, how army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary Rapid Support forces (RSF) leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo would proceed.

On Tuesday, witnesses reported more air strikes in the cities of Omdurman and in Bahri, both on the opposite bank of the Nile River from Khartoum.

Al Jazeera television said Sudanese army warplanes were targeting RSF positions, and anti-aircraft fire could be heard from Khartoum.

India's embassy in Khartoum was stormed and looted, Sudan's army said in a statement, citing a report from the ambassador. Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry said early on Wednesday that the building in Khartoum that houses its cultural mission was similarly vandalised and looted by an armed group. No casualties were reported.

Army jets have been bombing RSF units dug into residential districts of the capital region. Conflict has also spread to Sudan's western Darfur region where the RSF emerged from tribal militias that fought alongside government forces to crush rebels in a brutal civil war dating back 20 years.

The commanders of the army and RSF, who had shared power as part of an internationally backed transition towards free elections and civilian government, have shown no sign of backing down, yet neither seems able to secure a quick victory.

REGION AT RISK

Prolonged conflict could draw in outside powers.

Fighting now in its third week has engulfed Khartoum - one of Africa's largest cities - and killed hundreds of people. Sudan's Health Ministry reported on Tuesday that 550 people have died and 4,926 injured.

Foreign governments were winding down evacuation operations that sent thousands of their citizens home. Britain said its last flight would depart Port Sudan on the Red Sea on Wednesday and urged any remaining Britons wanting to leave to make their way there.

The conflict has also created a humanitarian crisis, with around 100,000 people forced to flee with little food or water to neighbouring countries, the United Nations said.

Aid deliveries have been held up in a nation where about one-third of people already relied on humanitarian assistance. A broader disaster could be in the making as Sudan's impoverished neighbours grapple with a refugee influx.

"The entire region could be affected," Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said in a Japanese newspaper interview on Tuesday as a Burhan envoy met Egyptian officials in Cairo.

The U.N. World Food Programme said on Monday it was resuming work in the safer parts of Sudan after a pause earlier in the conflict, in which some of its staff were killed.

'THE SITUATION IS A CALAMITY'

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it had delivered some aid to the capital from Port Sudan, a road journey of about 800 km (500 miles).

Some 330,000 Sudanese have also been displaced inside Sudan's borders by the war, the U.N. migration agency said.

"The situation is a calamity," Hassan Mohamed Ali, a 55-year-old state employee, said during a stopover in Atbara, 350 km (220 miles) northeast of Khartoum, en route to the Egyptian frontier.

"We suffer from power and water cuts, our children have stopped school. What's happening in Khartoum is hell."

Displaced Sudanese families have also made their way, sometimes on foot under scorching desert sun, hundreds of kilometres (miles) to Chad and South Sudan.

About 800,000 people could eventually leave, according to the U.N.

More than 40,000 people have crossed the border into Egypt over the past two weeks but only after days of delays. Most migrants have had to pay hundreds of dollars to make the 1,000-km (620-mile) journey north from Khartoum.

It took Aisha Ibrahim Dawood and her relatives five days in a rented car to get from Khartoum to the northern town of Wadi Halfa, where the women and children crammed into a back of a truck that brought them to a queue at the Egyptian border.

"Our suffering is unprecedented," she said.

Reuters

A firm belonging to the son of Nigeria’s president-elect bought an $11 million London mansion that his predecessor’s government was seeking to confiscate as part of a probe into one of the biggest corruption scandals in the West African nation’s history, according to previously unreported UK company documents.

There’s no suggestion that President-elect Bola Tinubu was personally involved in the acquisition of the UK property in 2017. Current President Muhammadu Buhari visited him there in August 2021, nearly four years after the purchase took place. Tinubu, who will take over as head of state this month, has long been questioned about the source of his family’s wealth, including throughout the recent election campaign, when he and his representatives were pressed about it by local and international media. 

He and his campaign have said he made his fortune before going into politics by inheriting real estate, investing well and working as an accountant at Deloitte LLP and an executive at the Nigerian subsidiary of Mobil Oil in the 1980s and early 1990s. In an interview with the BBC in the run-up to the election, Tinubu cited Warren Buffett as an example he followed to become rich.

The corporate documents seen by Bloomberg show for the first time that Tinubu’s 37-year-old son Oluwaseyi is the main shareholder of Aranda Overseas Corp., an offshore company that paid £9 million ($10.8 million) to Deutsche Bank for the property in north London in late 2017. The private three-floor residence in St. John’s Wood — a district favored by American bankers — is equipped with an eight-car driveway, two gardens, electric gates and a gym.

Bola Tinubu’s spokesman and Oluwaseyi Tinubu did not respond to emails, phone calls and text messages seeking comment. A British lawyer listed as Aranda’s agent in the UK declined to comment citing confidentiality rules. 

At the time of the purchase, Nigeria’s government was seeking to arrest the house’s former owner, accusing him of going on the run while owing the country an oil-trading debt worth more than $1.5 billion. The state was also attempting to confiscate the upscale real estate and other assets it suspected had been acquired by the businessman — Kolawole Aluko — with the profits of crime. Aluko denies all allegations of wrongdoing and says a court judgment earlier this year acquitting a former business partner has cleared his name. That ruling is being challenged by Nigeria’s anti-graft agency.

Tinubu, 71, won an election in February as the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress and is scheduled to succeed his political ally Buhari on May 29. He was a key powerbroker in the merger of opposition parties that brought the current head of state to office in 2015.

While Buhari was elected on a pledge to tackle widespread graft, the country’s ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index has deteriorated over the past eight years. 

Buhari Visit

A former governor of Lagos state, Tinubu has long been dogged by allegations of graft and rule-breaking, which he denies. In 1993, he forfeited $460,000 to resolve a lawsuit in Chicago after US federal authorities said that bank accounts in his name held the proceeds of heroin trafficking. Tinubu’s lawyers have said he was never charged over the matter.

While staying at the 7,000-square foot London home in August 2021, Tinubu received a visit from Buhari there, according to the Lagos-based Premium Times.

The online newspaper — using documents obtained from the Pandora Papers leak of offshore companies data — revealed that the shareholders and directors of Aranda from its formation 24 years ago until at least 2010 were Adegboyega Oyetola, the former governor of Osun state, and Elusanmi Eludoyin, head of a Nigerian property group. Oyetola’s spokesman and Eludoyin did not respond to requests for comment.

Documents filed this year in response to new anti-money laundering rules in the UK and seen by Bloomberg show that Tinubu’s son — an entrepreneur active in advertising who played a prominent role in his father’s presidential campaign — has been in control of British Virgin Islands-registered Aranda since June 2011. The company registered as an overseas entity in the UK on Jan. 20.

Aluko Allegations

Early in Buhari’s first term, his administration initiated legal cases against Diezani Alison-Madueke, who served as oil minister for five years until 2015, and two businessmen — Aluko and Olajide Omokore — who won lucrative contracts during her tenure. The US government said in a 2017 forfeiture lawsuit filed in Texas that the pair bribed the minister by funding her “lavish” lifestyle and failed to pay the state energy company for most of the crude they received.

Alison-Madueke, who is based in London, has denied the allegations. She is challenging multiple forfeiture orders issued by Nigerian courts and has accused the anti-corruption agency of blocking her efforts to defend herself in criminal proceedings.  

In June 2016, a federal judge in the capital, Abuja, granted a request by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to seize more than a dozen properties that Aluko had acquired in Nigeria and abroad, including the one in St. John’s Wood. That forfeiture order was still in force when Tinubu’s son bought the house out of receivership 16 months later. 

The ruling was made on an interim basis pending the conclusion of an investigation into Aluko that was still ongoing as of at least the end of 2018, according to court filings. Aluko can’t comment on the forfeiture case because it is still “sub-judice,” his lawyer Tokunbo Jaiye-Agoro said by email.

Deutsche Bank had foreclosed on the house and appointed receivers to sell it in late 2016, though there is no indication in court filings that the Nigerian government was aware the lender had taken over the house from Aluko as it proceeded with the seizure process. Aluko took out loans using other properties as collateral, according to the US Justice Department.

The EFCC said the buildings “were suspected to have been purchased with the proceeds of crime” and Aluko “fled the country” to avoid answering the fraud allegations against him, according to court filings.

Omokore was acquitted in February by a Nigerian court of charges related to the same allegations. The EFCC – which accuses him of defrauding the state energy firm of $1.6 billion – has said it will appeal. The judge removed Aluko and Alison-Madueke from the indictment because they were not in the country. Aluko’s location is unknown.

The acquittal of Omokore “puts to rest all the false allegations” about his and Aluko’s wealth, according to Jaiye-Agoro. Despite the appeal, “the current state of affairs” is that Aluko’s income was “legitimate and not from any corrupt practice,” Jaiye-Agoro said.

Omokore “objects to the continuous link of his name to any corrupt practices,” his lawyer, Rafiu Lawal-Rabana, said by text message. The court decision earlier this year discharged Omokore on all counts and any hitches in the implementation of the oil contracts were “purely technical not criminal,” he said.

Buhari’s spokesman and Alison-Madueke’s lawyer declined to comment. Spokespeople for Attorney General Abubakar Malami, the Nigerian National Petroleum Co. Ltd. and the EFCC did not respond to requests for comment. 

Yachts, Penthouses

In October 2017, as the government that Tinubu played an instrumental role in bringing to power was chasing Aluko and his assets, his son’s company bought one of the targeted properties. Aranda still owns the building and there is currently no mortgage registered to it, according to the UK land records.

The firm didn’t purchase the house directly from Aluko, but from a UK unit of Deutsche Bank AG that held a mortgage on the property and had appointed receivers to sell it a year earlier. Aluko acquired the mansion via a BVI company in 2013 and, according to Premium Times, paid £11.95 million. Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Aluko has no knowledge of Aranda or the individuals behind the company and “was not privy to the sale” as the bank had foreclosed on the house, Jaiye-Agoro said. The UK’s National Crime Agency did not respond to questions about whether it had ever received a request from the Nigerian authorities to freeze the property. The UK Home Office declined to comment. 

The US Justice Department announced on March 27 that it has recovered more than $53 million by confiscating assets bought by Aluko for more than $160 million with what it considers to be the proceeds of corruption — including a 65-meter superyacht and luxury homes in California and New York.

Bloomberg

The federal government recently unveiled new Fiscal Policy Measures (FPM) outlining the rates of taxes and excise duties for the current year.

The new FPMs, which consist of Supplementary Protection Measures (SPM), revised excise duty rates, and green taxes; were recently approved by President Muhammadu Buhari.

According to a recent circular signed by Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and national planning, the 2023 FPMs supersede the 2022 FPMs and will be published in the official federal government gazette.

Already, stakeholders are having a grouse with the policy.

For instance, Taiwo Oyedele, Africa tax leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), highlighted key issues that should be addressed in the recently introduced fiscal policy measures.

He said “there is no information to suggest that a proper impact assessment was carried out to determine the impact of the new taxes on affected stakeholders across the value chain”.

The tax expert also censured the government for its consistent inconsistency in its policies.

Here are some of the new policy measures.

SUPPLEMENTARY PROTECTION MEASURES

The SPMs relate to the implementation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Common External Tariff (CET) 2022-2026, which is the application of the same customs duties and import quotas by member states.

They (the SPMs) include an import adjustment tax (IAT) list with additional taxes (levy) on 189 tariff lines of the extant ECOWAS CET; an import prohibition list (trade), applicable only to certain goods originating from non-ECOWAS member states; and a national list consisting of items with reduced import duty rates.

According to the circular, the approved SPMs took effect on May 1, 2023.

However, a grace period of 90 days is applicable for importers who opened “form M” before the effective date (May 1) and those who must have entered into irrevocable trade agreements before the circular came into effect.

Some of the items included under the revised IAT list are rice, electric generating sets and rotary converters, motor vehicles, smartphones, wheat, and glazed ceramics.

The federal government tariff on new passenger motor vehicles — four-wheel drives with cylinder capacity greater than 1500 cubic capacity(cc) — remains unchanged from the 2022 FPM at a rate of 40 percent.

However, it exceeds the recommended rate of 5 percent of the ECOWAS CET for the years 2022-2026.

The tariff on passenger motor vehicles (including fully built units), four-wheel drive motor vehicles, and station wagons also remained at 40 percent, but still higher than the ECOWAS CET recommended 5 percent.

On containers for compressed or liquefied gas, the tariff remained unchanged from the 2022 FPM at 60 percent. This is also higher than the recommended 40 percent of the 2022-2026 ECOWAS CET.

A tax of 70 percent was placed on wheat or meslin flour (unchanged from 2022) as opposed to the ECOWAS CET’s recommended rate of 50 percent.

REVISED EXCISE DUTY RATES

The revised excise duty rates are additional taxes levied on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, and tobacco products. In accordance with the current implementation period, the new rates will take effect on June 1, 2023, and they will be revised upward by June 1, 2024.

Excise duty is a form of tax imposed on the production, licensing, and sale of goods.

In 2022, Ahmed announced that the federal government introduced an excise duty of N10/litre on all non-alcoholic, carbonated, and sweetened beverages.

In the latest the circular, the excise duty rate was upheld in the 2023 FPM.

Similarly, an excise duty of N10/litre was imposed on aerated water.

Meanwhile, beer, stout, and alcoholic wines will be subject to a N75/litre excise duty, while a N150/litre excise duty will be imposed on whisky, brandy, and vodka.

Tobacco, including cigarettes, will attract an excise duty of N8.20 per stick.

A N1,500 per kilogram or N3,500 per litre excise duty will also be applied to any additional products that contain tobacco substitutes in any proportion.

REINTRODUCTION OF 5% TELECOMS EXCISE DUTY

In July last year, the minister of finance had said the government would begin theimplementation of the 5 percent inclusive excise duty on telecommunications services, which was introduced in the 2020 finance act.

Isa Pantami, minister of communications and digital economy, faulted the timing and process of implementation, saying he was not informed.

Ahmed’s statement also drew widespread criticism from Nigerians, including telecom operators.

But she insisted that the federal government would go on with the implementation of the 5 percent excise duty on telecommunications services.

Ahmed noted that all relevant agencies, including the communications ministry, were informed of the implementation of the tax as approved by Buhari.

In September 2022, Pantami announced that the excise duty on telecommunications services had been suspended.

Two months ago, he reiterated that Buhari had approved the exemption of the telecommunications sector from the proposed 5 percent excise duty.

However, the circular stated that the excise duty rate on telecommunication services  “remains as approved by the president and published in the official gazette no. 88, Vol. 109 of 11th May, 2022”.

The surcharge applies to mobile telephone services (GSM), fixed telephone, and internet services — postpaid and prepaid — at the rate of 5 percent.

GREEN TAX

Meanwhile, as part of Nigeria’s commitment to climate change adaptation and mitigation to environmental degradation, the federal government introduced a green tax made up of excise duty on single-use plastics (SUPs), including plastic containers, films, and bags, at a rate of 10 percent.

Also, an IAT levy of 2 percent on motor vehicles of 2,000cc to 3,999cc was introduced, while 4,000 cc and above will be taxed at 4 percent.

This excludes vehicles below 2000cc, mass transit buses, electric vehicles, and locally manufactured vehicles.

The excise duty on SUPs will take effect on June 1, 2023.

The Cable

My father was the epitome of the liberal individual, a splendid irony for a lifelong Marxist. To make a living, he had to lease his labor to the boss of a steel plant in Eleusis. But during every lunch break he wandered blissfully in the open-air backyard of the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, where he luxuriated in the discovery of ancient steles full of clues that antiquity’s technologists were more advanced than previously thought.

Following his return home, at just after 5 p.m. every day, and a late siesta, he would emerge ready to share in our family life and to write up his findings in academic articles and books. His life at the factory was, in short, neatly separated from his personal life.

It reflected a time when even leftists like us thought that, if nothing else, capitalism had granted us sovereignty over ourselves, albeit within limits. However hard one worked for the boss, one could at least fence off a portion of one’s life and, within that fence, remain autonomous, self-determining, free. We knew that only the rich were truly free to choose, that the poor were mostly free to lose, and that the worst slavery was that of anyone who had learned to love their chains. Still, we appreciated the limited self-ownership we had.

Young people today have been denied even this small mercy. From the moment they take their first steps, they are taught implicitly to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity. (And that includes potential employers: “No one will offer me a job,” a graduate told me once “until I have discovered my true self.”) Marketing an identity in today’s online society is not optional. Curating their personal lives has become some of the most important work young people do.

Before posting any image, uploading any video, reviewing any movie, sharing any photograph or tweet, they must be mindful of whom their choice will please or alienate. They must somehow work out which of their potential “true selves” will be found most attractive, continually testing their opinions against their notion of what the average opinion among online opinion-makers might be. Because every experience can be captured and shared, they are continually consumed by the question of whether to do so. And even if no opportunity actually exists for sharing the experience, that opportunity can readily be imagined, and will be. Every choice, witnessed or otherwise, becomes an act in the careful construction of an identity.

One need not be a leftist to see that the right to a bit of time each day when one is not for sale has all but vanished. The irony is that the liberal individual was snuffed out neither by fascist brownshirts nor by Stalinist commissars. It was killed off when a new form of capital began to instruct youngsters to do that most liberal of things: be yourself. Of all the behavioral modifications that what I call cloud capitalhas engineered and monetized, this one is surely its overarching and crowning achievement.

Possessive individualism was always detrimental to mental health. The techno-feudal society that cloud capital is fashioning made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that provided the liberal individual with a refuge from the labor market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprising choices expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate in ways no human mind can grasp. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of self-possession. It has diminished our capacity to focus by co-opting our attention.

We have not become weak-willed. No, our focus has been hijacked by a new ruling class. And because the algorithms embedded in cloud capital are known to reinforce patriarchy, invidious stereotypes, and pre-existing oppression, the most vulnerable – girls, the mentally ill, the marginalized, and the poor – suffer the most.

If fascism taught us anything, it is our susceptibility to demonizing stereotypes and the ugly attraction (and potency) of emotions like righteousness, fear, envy, and loathing that they arouse in us. In our contemporary social reality, the cloud brings us face to face with the feared and loathed “other.” And because online violence seems bloodless and anodyne, we are more likely to respond to this “other” with taunting, demeaning language and bile. Bigotry is techno-feudalism’s emotional compensation for the frustrations and anxieties we experience in relation to identity and focus.

Comment moderators and hate-speech regulation can’t stop this brutalization because it is intrinsic to cloud capital, whose algorithms optimize for the cloud rents that flow more copiously toward Big Tech’s owners from hatred and discontent. Regulators cannot regulate artificial-intelligence-driven algorithms that even their authors cannot understand. For liberty to have a chance, cloud capital needs to be socialized.

My father believed that finding something timelessly beautiful to focus on, as he did while wondering among the relics of Greek antiquity, is our only defense from the demons circling our soul. I have tried to practice this over the years in my own way. But in the face of techno-feudalism, acting alone, isolated, as liberal individuals will not get us very far. Cutting ourselves off from the internet, switching off our phones, and using cash instead of plastic is no solution. Unless we band together, we will never civilize or socialize cloud capital – and never reclaim our own minds from its grip.

And herein lies the greatest contradiction: Only a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication can rescue the foundational liberal idea of liberty as self-ownership will require. Reviving the liberal individual thus requires precisely what liberals detest: a new revolution.

Project Syndicate

The pursuit of venture capital can distort a company's growth trajectory. During the boom period from 2010 to 2021, many startups used venture capital to finance loss-making rapid growth – knowing the market for initial public offerings would enrich the investors and founders before the startup burned through its cash. 

In 2022, all that ended. The plunge in venture capital investment – down 35 percent in 2022, according to Crunchbase – revealed the perils of unbridled growth. CB Insights found that 47 percent of startup failures in 2022 were due to a lack of financing (in 2021 that percentage was a mere 24.) 

Many startups ignored the advice I gave in Scaling Your Startup: don't skip the second stage of scaling – Building a Scalable Business Model – in which you redesign your business processes to grow profitably when you take on more capital in the third stage – Sprinting to Liquidity. 

One company that did not skip that second stage is Cupertino, Calif.-based Splashtop, a service that lets businesses provide employees with fast, simple and secure remote tech support.

With more than 30 million users and 250,000 business customers, Splashtop was valued at over $1 billion in 2021 when it raised $60 million in capital. 

Here are five takeaways for business leaders from Splashtop's sustained success. 

1. Change your product as technology leaps forward

Business leaders should recognize that it is OK to launch a product that fails to scale as long as they cut their losses quickly and repeat the process until they have a product that catches on. 

Splashtop's product mix has changed several times in the last 16 years. As Mark Lee, Splashtop CEO, told me in a March 24 interview, the company went through many such pivots: Building a browser for netbooks, offering software to speed up the time for a Windows PC to boot up, and enabling consumers to access PCs from their iPhones. 

Ultimately, Splashtop pivoted to its current business – building software for remote IT support. 

2. Make happy customers your most effective sales force

To keep paying the bills during the search for a fit between their product and market needs, business leaders must run a tight ship. 

To do that, Splashtop sells while controlling sales expense by providing such a great user experience that customers tell their friends.

"To create customers who are excited to share our product with friends we deliver a wow user experience. They swipe their credit cards to buy. Our products have reliability and performance and our customers tell other people," Lee said. 

3. Use profits to finance your growth

If you have capital when your competitors are running out, you may be able to profit from the misfortune of poorly managed rivals. 

Splashtop did this by running a cash flow-generating business. As Lee told me, "We grew 200 percent in 2020 and raised $65 million in 2021 but we haven't spent it.

We make $10 million in cash flow a year. For many years, we had to bootstrap so we had to be efficient. Other companies are laying off people now to reduce their costs. We are looking at possible partnerships with some of them." 

4. Succeed as a big, happy family

Happy employees help your business to get and keep customers. 

To do that, Splashtop thinks of itself as a happy family built on trust. Lee explained: "We are like a family. We all graduated from MIT and have worked together for 30 years. We are still together – we have friendship and tightness. We believe that happy employees make happy customers." 

Building trust is the foundation for keeping customers and employees happy. "If people trust you, they buy more. We offer the best value, reliability, a good user experience, response to a customer question within a minute – faster than one to two days for the competition," he said. 

5. Build, partner or acquire to keep customers buying

Leaders must invest to keep their customers buying over time. 

Splashtop does this by encouraging customers to use its product well. "We guide users to try new features. That makes the product stickier," Lee said.

The company builds new products when it finds customer pain points where Splashtop can rapidly deliver a much better user experience. 

Splashtop recently acquired San Francisco-based Foxpass, a service that secures remote network access using identify management. Foxpass passed three tests: 

• Its product satisfies an important unmet customer need.
• Its customer-centric culture fits well with Splashtop's.
• Customers give its products high marks.

These five things can help your company sustain rapid, profitable growth.

Inc