Cogito, Ergo Sum.
Joined September 2023
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Chisanga retweeted
Zambian football has lost of its finest. Fred Mwila is no more. Was fortunate to interview Mwila last year in his house near Chilanga. First ever Zambian to play in English football when he signed for @AstonVilla in 1969. Hope to include anecdotes from Mwila in my coming book.
Chisanga retweeted
American military spending is only possible because the dollar is the reserve currency.
This is not an opinion. It is arithmetic.
The United States runs persistent deficits that would be unsustainable for any other country.
It finances those deficits by issuing Treasury bonds.
Foreign central banks buy those bonds because they need dollar-denominated assets for their reserves.
They need dollar-denominated reserves because the dollar is the currency of global trade.
The circle is closed.
Military spending → deficit → Treasury bonds → foreign purchase → dollar demand → reserve currency status → military spending.
Break any link in that chain and the whole logic shifts.
This is why dedollarization is not just an economic story.
It is the foundational strategic threat to American military primacy.
Not Russian missiles. Not Chinese carriers.
Foreign central banks deciding to hold a more diversified reserve portfolio.
The most important battlefield of this century looks like a spreadsheet.
The side that understands this is already fighting.
Chisanga retweeted
They will tell you dedollarization is impossible because there is no alternative.
The yuan is not freely convertible.
No other currency has the depth of the U.S. Treasury market.
The network effects of the dollar system are too powerful to overcome.
These are real constraints. They are not wrong.
What they miss is that the project is not to replace the dollar with a single alternative tomorrow.
The project is to reduce dependency enough that the weapon loses its edge.
You don't need a world reserve currency to build a sanctions-proof economy.
You need bilateral currency agreements with enough trading partners.
You need commodity pricing in multiple currencies.
You need payment infrastructure that doesn't route through New York.
You need central bank reserves diversified enough that freezing your dollar holdings doesn't collapse your economy.
None of that requires a yuan-based Bretton Woods.
It just requires enough countries deciding that dollar dependency is a strategic liability and acting accordingly.
That decision has already been made.
The acting accordingly is already underway.
Chisanga retweeted
The British starved Ireland and then cited Irish poverty as evidence of Irish inferiority.
The Belgians extracted the Congo’s resources for a century and then cited Congolese underdevelopment as evidence that Africans needed to be governed.
The Americans sanctioned Cuba for 66 years and then cited Cuban economic difficulties as evidence that socialism doesn’t work.
The structure is the same.
It has always been the same.
You remove the conditions necessary for success.
You wait.
You point.
You conclude.
The only thing that changes across centuries and continents is who’s being pointed at.
Chisanga retweeted
I really appreciate the time you took.
AI did an interesting theoretical review. Over coffee I’m happy to run you through what we are doing and aspects of the proposal the system has missed or misinterpreted, probably because it’s configured to analyze US stocks.
Chisanga retweeted
Here is my view of One Square K. I used a number of tools to create this. The most important being an Analysis Skill that I created. A skill is basically an MD (Markdown) file that contains precise instructions on how a task should be performed based on Warren Buffet's investemnt style. My md file has 16 stages and part of stage 1 is below. I then used Obsidian to ingest the prospectus and apply the rules in my skills md file
Stage 1 — Understand the business
Before any numbers, answer:
What does this company actually sell or do, and to whom?
How does it make money? (revenue model in one paragraph)
Who are its main competitors?
What would have to be true in 10 years for this business to still exist and be profitable?
If you cannot answer these questions confidently from the available information, say so plainly. Buffett's rule: "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing." It is better to say "I don't have enough information to evaluate this business" than to hallucinate.
The first version is about 7 min 30 sec or you can play the second version that is almost 3 min
Remember, these are just my opinions and not investment advice
Chisanga retweeted
Hello lovely people. I have taken up the task of helping UTH’s neonatal intensive care unit with their fundraiser. They’re trying to raise money to get equipment. If you or your organisation are interested, please reach out to me. And please retweet this for me ❤️
Chisanga retweeted
Come check out some live Zamrock this Saturday in New Kasama.
🎸11 PERFORMANCES
⛩️ FREE ENTRY
🕒 15:00 to 21:00
🍻🌮 Food and Drinks on sale!
📍 Albatross Rock Den maps.app.goo.gl/TdSQjE1NbAuv…
Zambia Daily Mail have apologized for what was clearly an embarrassing mistake.
We expect no such stupid mistakes next time.
That is that and lets move on.
Chisanga retweeted
The EU Sanctioned a Chinese Fabric Company. China Squeezed a German Supplier. Guess Who's Blinking
Principles Are Wonderful—Until Your Rare Earths Run Out: A Brussels Fable
Picture the scene. Brussels, October 2026. A committee room smelling of espresso and existential dread. On the table: a sanctions list. On the list: Yusha Group, a Chinese textile company accused of the heinous crime of selling fabric to Russia. The horror. The sheer, unadulterated audacity of commerce.
But wait! A whisper arrives from Beijing. "Funny thing, that list of yours," says the messenger, casually. "We've got a little list of our own. Sindlhauser Materials. Twelve employees. German. Makes the fancy coatings ASML can't live without. Shame if something happened to their rare earth supply."
Silence. Somewhere, a German diplomat chokes on a pretzel.
You see, dear reader, the EU had a plan. A beautiful, principled plan. Sanction anyone who trades with Russia. Except, of course, when that someone is a twelve-person German company that happens to be a chokepoint in the global semiconductor supply chain. Principles are wonderful things—until they collide with a sputtering target.
So now Brussels is "considering a reprieve." Translation: they're looking for a ladder tall enough to climb down from their own high horse. The deal is simple: we delist Yusha, you unclog Sindlhauser. Everybody wins! Except, you know, credibility.
And here's the beautiful part. The EU spent years lecturing the world about the rules-based order. About how sanctions are not bargaining chips. About how Europe stands firm. Then China—calmly, methodically—found the one loose thread in the entire semiconductor supply chain and pulled. And the whole "principled stance" unraveled faster than a cheap sweater.
Eastern European hawks are furious. "This sets a precedent!" they cry. Yes, it does. The precedent is: if you sanction a Chinese company for doing legitimate business, China will find something you can't live without and squeeze. That's not a bug in the system, my friends. That's the system.
Washington is watching, reportedly "concerned." Translation: "We told you so." The Americans have been saying for years that Europe's supply chain dependencies were a strategic vulnerability. Brussels called it "engagement." Beijing called it "leverage." Turns out Beijing was right.
So the next time an EU commissioner solemnly declares that Europe will never trade principles for profit, remember this little fable. Remember Yusha and Sindlhauser. Remember the twelve German employees whose rare earth supply brought the mighty European Union to the negotiating table, hat in hand, asking politely if perhaps we could forget the whole sanctions thing.
Because the truth is simple: you can't sanction the world and then act surprised when the world sanctions back. The rules-based order works both ways. And right now, Beijing is holding the pen.
scmp.com/news/china/article/…
Chisanga retweeted
In February, Kenya’s pension schemes were reportedly pushed into an IPO. In October they sold to Dangote, and the trade was cheered. I ran the numbers. It returned less than a treasury bill.
The comparison is the whole test, because a return means nothing on its own. Some funds sold bonds in February to raise the cash. The one-year bill, the gentlest benchmark, would have earned about KES2.4bn on that KES40.5bn block by 19 October. The reports disagree on the sale price, but even the best reading gives a gain of about KES2bn, and the lowest nearer KES90m. Every version falls short.
Money could do three things with February’s offer: stay out, go in and hold, or go in and sell. At this week’s prices the holder leads, the saver who stayed out earned the bill, and the schemes, the only money whose owners were never asked, did worst. The holder’s gain exists because Dangote came, and nobody deciding in February could have known he was coming without inside information.
Uganda’s national oil company bought into the same offer and negotiated two board seats and a veto over the chief executive first. Kenya’s schemes put in more money and took no terms at all.
The owners are the clerks, teachers, drivers and nurses whose payslips built these funds. Nobody asked them in February. Nobody asked them in October.
This week’s Friday Reflections returns to six questions I asked in 2023, written from Zambia. Kenya answered them this week, without meaning to.
Ask your scheme one question: what was my money earning before it moved?
canarycompass.com/p/friday-r…
🤖 Made with AI
Chisanga retweeted
The biggest mistake I ever made in business was not hiring competent accountants from the start especially when we registered for VAT to supply the chain stores. Didn’t realise how grave the mistake was or how incompetent the accountants were until the 1st & then 2nd second ZRA VAT audits & by then the damage had already been done. When it comes to VAT, ZRA does laugh chimbuya. They don’t care about your ability to afford a competent accountant as an SME.
Whatever you do as an SME/start up, get competent accountants from the start. Not just because someone is an accountant.
Now that you say, @ngomabest196 , wherever you might be, We hope you are safe countryman.
Remember this next time you hear about that Lobito corridor.
You want to know what "underdeveloped" really means?
It means: your economy was organized around someone else’s needs for so long that it now functions badly for your own.
It means: your agricultural sector produces cash crops for export rather than food for your people because that is what the colonial economy required and the post-colonial debt structure reinforced.
It means: your best-educated people leave for the countries whose universities were built with the wealth extracted from yours.
It means: the infrastructure that exists connects your resources to the port, not your villages to each other, because it was built to extract, not to develop.
"Underdeveloped" as a natural condition, as a starting point, as evidence of cultural or civilizational inadequacy:
That is a lie.
"Underdeveloped" as a produced condition, as the result of a process, as the predictable outcome of what happens when your economy is organized for two centuries around someone else’s enrichment:
That is history.
The word stayed. The history got edited out.
Chisanga retweeted
Nobody said: "Europe must end."
Nobody needed to.
You don’t announce strategy at that level of clarity.
You build architecture.
You create dependencies.
You make certain futures structurally impossible and certain alignments structurally inevitable.
You expand NATO to Russia’s border and produce the crisis that makes European rearmament necessary and American hardware the obvious solution.
You undermine the energy infrastructure that made European-Russian economic integration viable.
You build a financial system that makes European banks subject to Washington’s sanctions decisions.
You spend nearly eight decades making European security so dependent on American guarantees that European strategic thought atrophies, that an entire generation of European leaders grows up not knowing how to think about security without asking Washington first.
And then you don’t need to say: "Europe must end."
Because "Europe", as a genuinely autonomous pole of power, as a civilization capable of making its own strategic choices about its own continent’s future,
Has already ended.
Quietly. Without announcement. Through the accumulated weight of architecture that was built, piece by piece, to make it impossible.