Medina Palms has purchased one of these model lions, pictured below with The Born Free Foundation, Nairobi office staff and Medina Palms Corporate Affairs Executive, Ben Kaparo.

Pictured above from left to right

Victor Mutumah, Noni Mruttu, Ben Kaparo - Medina Palms Corporate Affairs Executive, Iregi Mwenja, David Manoe, Pheobe Achieng and Cecil Waruinge.

The Medina Palms ‘ Ole Simba’ model lion will be travelling to Watamu to be part of a community project to decorate the lion for display locally.

The 2010 Rhino Charge was successfully held a week ago in the Londuroj Hills near Lake Magadi, deep within Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Sean Avery in Car 38

We have very good news.  The 2010 Rhino Charge raised Kshs 72.5 million (almost US$ 1 million), and thanks to you all we were amongst the Top Five fundraisers with Kshs 2.5 million raised for Rhino Ark.  Thanks again to you all for making this possible.

The other good news is that the Car 38 team of Sean, Patrick, Kuki and Kieran Avery Plus Harry Brainch and Kiran Jethwa was the Overall Winner of the Rhino Charge in an old Series Land Rover, and best of all, the team was awarded the coveted Rob Combes Memorial “Spirit of the Charge” Trophy.  It was a great day for us.  Everything went well and we are delighted and very grateful for all your support

By Paul Vallely    Friday, 11 June 2010 The Independent

Not far from Soccer City, the stadium which will today house the opening ceremonies of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, stands the Maponya shopping mall. There you can buy Versace sunglasses, eat sushi, smoke a £20 Havana cigar and even purchase a car from the resident Audi dealer. But this is no smart up-town white suburb of Johannesburg. This is black Soweto.

It is as potent a symbol of a changing African continent as the stadium itself, which was built in the apartheid era as a football venue for South Africa’s black population. This was where Nelson Mandela addressed 100,000 ecstatic supporters soon after his release from prison as apartheid crumbled. For the past three years it has stood empty as African workers refurbished it for today’s launch. But more than a football stadium is being reborn.

The image of Africa in many minds, elsewhere in the world, is of a Hopeless Continent. It is a place of disease, famine, poverty, corruption and war. There is some truth in all stereotypes but never the complete truth. A single story is a dangerous thing, as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it. Life is composed of many overlapping stories which can be used to malign or dispossess but which can also empower and humanise. A story can demonise. Or it can repair a broken dignity.

So Africa is a tale of two continents. Or perhaps more. But the story that we in the West resist is the story of an Africa whose moment may be about to come.

Where, we might ask ourselves, does the future lie? Here in the old world of Europe, with its currency crises, national deficits, denuded natural resources, high expectations and ageing populations?

Or in Africa with its vast mineral and oil reserves, under-exploited agricultural expanses, huge potential to tap the sun, wind and water for renewable energies and biofuels - and a burgeoning population of young people eager to work for low wages and consume?

That is not mere fancy. Over the past few years economic growth in Africa has surged to more than double of that in the developed world - averaging a whopping six per cent between 2003 and 2008. Its inflation rates and budget deficits have declined. Its foreign exchange reserves have grown 30 per cent since the 1990s. And its national debts have sharply decreased.

Trade and foreign investment have quadrupled since 2000. Dictatorships have largely been replaced by democracies - there are 30 proper democracies today, compared to five at the end of the Cold War. Epitomising that was the peaceful transfer of power in Ghana, where the result could hardly have been closer.

No major new wars have begun in the last five years and, according to data from the OECD’s latest African Economic Outlook reported incidents of civil tension in sub-Saharan Africa decreased by a third between 2004 and 2008.

Political stability has increased. Telecommunications, banking, and retailing are flourishing. Construction is booming. And investment in infrastructure and education are paving the way for as many as 200 million Africans to be rich enough to enter the market for consumer goods market by 2015.

Africa is becoming the new economic frontier.

A number of factors were involved. There was, until the global financial meltdown, high demand for African resources and high prices for its commodities. Reforms by African governments have made their countries better places to do business. The debt relief agreed by the G8 at Gleneagles in 2005 has come on stream; instead of using their income to repay interest they are spending on schools, hospitals, power plants, gas pipelines, roads and teaching improved agricultural and marketing skills to small farmers.

They are also recovering from the economic crisis faster than the developed world with its reliance on financials services and industry. “The economic slowdown in sub-Saharan Africa looks set to be mercifully brief,” says the latest report by the IMF. “Recovery is now under way across the region.”

This is because, thanks to debt relief and increases in aid, African governments were able to keeping spending - “countercyclical macroeconomic policies” to use IMF jargon - so their economies did not slip into recession. And the fact that they were not deeply integrated into the world economy - normally a brake on development in Africa - insulated them from the worst effects of the global financial seizure, though it has also set back progress on the Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015.

But what is most striking is that this great surge forward has not come chiefly on the back of the continent’s traditional economics. Africa boasts an abundance of riches: 10 percent of the world’s reserves of oil, 30 per cent of the world’s mineral reserves, 80 per cent of its chromium and platinum - and much of the coltan and uranium that may shape the world’s high-tech future. It holds the raw materials demanded by the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and China, with whom its trade has increased tenfold in the last decade. Demand for all these products is predicted to double by 2020.

Yet according to figures to be published next month by the McKinsey Global Institute all this accounts for only a third of Africa’s newfound growth.

The rest is in tourism, textiles, telecoms, construction and banking - and has been unleashed by reforms in African domestic economies. A survey by the World Bank found that 28 African countries had adopted 58 business-friendly measures last year: privatising state-owned enterprises, reducing barriers to trade, lowering corporate taxes, strengthening regulatory and legal systems, and providing key physical and social infrastructure. Nigeria privatised more than 116 enterprises in just seven years. The number of stock markets in sub-Saharan African has more than trebled. The world leader in private sector development reforms is Rwanda.

Africa has the highest fertility rates and the youngest population on the planet. The billionth African was born recently. But population, which is routinely portrayed as a burden, is a double-edged sword.

It means that Africa has many cities of one million and is now nearly as urbanised as China. That can mean the misery of massive slums, but it also spurs construction of buildings, roads and water systems, which creates jobs. Since 2000, Africa’s annual private investment in infrastructure has tripled, averaging $19 billion from 2006 to 2008. And big cities mean that companies achieve greater economies of scale by spreading their fixed costs over a larger customer base: Africa’s top 18 cities now have a combined spending power of $1.3 trillion.

In 2000, roughly 59 million African households broke through the $5,000 a year income barrier above which they start spending roughly half their earnings on non-food items. By 2014 that figure should reach 106 million. And Africa already has more middle-class households (with incomes of $20,000+) than India. Consumer spending has grown by 3 to 5 percent every year since 2000. The retail, telecom and banking sectors have burgeoned.

In 1998 just 2 million Africans had mobile phones; now the figure is 400 million today. They have transformed the economy. In Senegal fishermen at sea phone the various ports to find where they can get the best price for their catch. Rural folk phone clinics to find where the doctor is. Camera phones are used by human rights activists to hold police accountable.

And everywhere people bank by phone. It has created a virtual infrastructure which McKinsey estimates can lower previous costs by as much as 90 per cent. Africa has become a substantial player in emerging-market banking.

The other Africa has not gone away. There have been, thanks largely to Gleneagles, great strides forward on education and health. A decade ago, only 58 per cent of African children went to primary school; today nearly 75 per cent do. Spending on health increased in real terms in 20 of the 29 poorest countries in 2009, the IMF reports. Where in 2002 only 50,000 Africans at the epicentre of the AIDS pandemic could get antiretrovirals today 3.7 million people are on them without payment.

Africa’s poverty rate has been declining by 1 per cent annually since the 1990s. Yet that only means that the proportion of people living on less than £1 a day has fallen from 57 per cent to 51 per cent of the population. That figure should fall to 38 per cent by 2015, according to the UN’s Global Monitoring Report, but that still leaves a huge number of individuals who endure a grim hunger on a daily basis.

There is still a lot for Africa’s leaders - and for Western governments and activists indignant at obscene want in a world of plenty - to do. And the challenges of climate change will make things harder.

To say that, however, is to take nothing away from the miracle that is slowly transforming Africa. A continent once branded a basket case now has a collective GDP of $1.6 trillion - roughly the same as that of Russia. It is on the verge of joining the Bric nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - as a destination for investment. It is already attracting more in direct foreign investment than it does in aid.

Next year its economies, which maintained two per cent growth while everywhere else was in recession, are projected to grow by 4.5 percent - faster than the United States, Europe, Latin America and Central Asia.

“Africa’s future is up to Africans,” said President Barack Obama in a speech in Accra, Ghana last year. They no longer need to be told so by outsiders.

The Financial Times recently reported on 500 African companies that have been growing at more than 8 per cent a year for over a decade. Nigeria is aiming to be among the world’s top 20 economies by 2020. after the Asian Tigers there may well come the African Lions.

“Africa is rich and its stock is rising,” said Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, and an African, last month.

Africa Rising, now there’s another story altogether.

Paul Vallely was co-author of the 2005 report of the Commission for Africa

May 9, 2010 

OFFICIAL election monitors from the developing world have warned that the British voting system is less secure than their own and possibly the most vulnerable to corruption in the world.

Lisa Hanna - MP for Jamaica

Observers from Kenya and war-torn Sierra Leone, who spent the past week in Britain, said the integrity of the general election was at risk because it was based on trust rather than proper identity checks.

They questioned the legitimacy of the result after thousands of voters were turned away from crowded polling stations. The observers were also shocked by allegations that the electoral roll was being filled out with “ghost” voters.Ababu Namwamba, an MP in Kenya, said: “The allegations of fraud and of voters being turned away threaten the integrity of the vote, especially in marginal constituencies where candidates have a majority of less than 1,000.

“The number of seats the Tories needed for an absolute majority is not that high - this could have made the difference. One candidate told me that the British system is possibly the most corruptible in the whole world.”

Marie Marilyn Jalloh, an MP from Sierra Leone, said: “There has to be doubt over the legitimacy of the result. Where people have been disenfranchised or cases of fraud are found there should be another vote. In my country this would be very controversial. “Your system is a recipe for corruption; it was a massive shock when I saw you didn’t need any identification to vote. In Sierra Leone you need an identity card and also to give your fingerprint. Here you need nothing. In this respect, our own system is more secure than yours.”

Lisa Hanna, an MP from Jamaica who won Miss World in 1993, said: “I was shocked by the lack of checks.”

Namwamba, Jalloh and Hanna are part of an 11-strong observation team from Commonwealth countries including Bangladesh, Malaysia and Nigeria.

Pictured above left to right

Councillor Ibrahim Abdi Matsumbo .  Dispensary Treasurer - Abdul Rahim Hamza,

Watamu Chief - Miochael Katana, Doctor Rosemary Kitheiga, Councillor Mohamed Menza, Councillor Barke Ali Mohamed.

Back Row

Watamu Chief Miochael Katana, Wat Dispensary Chairman Shaibu Shosi, Vice Chairman Chrysostom s Gonah, Womens leader Amina Mzee. Treasurer Watamu Dispensary Abdul Rahman Hamza.

Front Row.

Councilor Barke Ali Mohamed, Dr Rosemary Kitheiga, Councilor and Former Mayor Mohamed Menza, Councilor Ibrahim Abdi Matumbo, Councilor Anderson Nyundo.

Many Thanks were given to Medina Palms and best wishes given to the project

The Gedeure Centre Accademy School taking deliver of a laptop computer donated by

Medina Palms in April 2010.

Photo shows left to right

Rose , The School Principal , along with some of her students

Team Bundufundi Car 38 - Sean Avery and Family

and

Team Car 39 - Ben Woodhams, Knight Frank Kenya

The Rhino Charge 2010 is scheduled for the last weekend of May…and for the 15th time in a row, Car 38 will be entering a team to raise funds for Rhino Ark and to have another hard go at the winning slot!  With over KSh 17 million / £140,000 raised so far, we hope to continue our strong record!

More details to follow on both teams and their funds raised.

More news on Rhino Charge - www.rhinoark.org

Whether in Nairobi for business, pleasure or both, The Windsor offers a breathtakingly beautiful oasis of comfort and tranquility - perfect for a getaway

 The Windsor Gold Hotel and Country Club is just 25 mins drive from the centre of Nairobi city and 45 min drive from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.  The hotel can provide airport transfers to and from the airport if required. 

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www.windsorgolfresort.com

 Saturday 20^th February 2010

Watamu Villagers Back Sh1bn Villas Project

By DANIEL NYASSY

Villagers have resolved to support a Sh1 billion tourism project in Watamu, Malindi District. At a public hearing organised by the National Environment Management Authority, the residents said the Medina Palms Luxury Residential /Commercial Project will bring economic benefits to the area. 

The meeting, at Watamu chief’s office grounds, threatened to turn rowdy as the project’s critics tried to disrupt it but district commissioner Arthur Mugira saved the day.

“If you have no business other than to oppose the project for the sake of it, go home. I won’t tolerate any nonsense. We came here to hear views from stakeholders, wananchi and professionals and not hooligans,” Mr Mugira said. Calm was restored and the majority of residents supported the project, which had received a go-ahead from Nema earlier. But some residents petitioned the National Environment Tribunal, leading to a fresh environmental impact assessment (EIA) report.

Supporters of the project argued that it would create employment for more than 200 local youths, open up Watamu as a tourist destination and encourage subsidiary activities such as boat operations and wood carving.

Those supporting it said all environmental issues had been addressed and a waste management plant was in place. The proprietor, Mr Nigel Rowley, told the meeting he would employ 70 per cent of the workers from the area.

“The rooms will be occupied throughout the year by holidaymakers. All matters pertaining to the law and environment have been put in place for this project. It’s not a backdoor investment but a lawful undertaking,” said Mr Rowley.

Nema deputy director Betty Nzioka said they will study the new EIA and give their verdict on the project in two weeks.