Month: February 2020

On Monday, the South Africa’s rand firmed back to below the key 15.00 per dollar mark, which is mostly on profit-taking and month-end positioning after a sustaining a steep slide triggered by the Wuhan coronavirus shaking the world, Reuters reveals.

At 0700 GMT the rand was 0.43 per cent firmer at 14.9650 per dollar, having ended at 15.0300 on Friday. The coronavirus dragged the currency to its weakest level in three months—traded at 14.4800 last Monday, which was 0.59 per cent lower than its New York Close on Friday, January 24.

Reuters reported that investors concerned about the spread of the coronavirus wiped more than $400 billion off the value of China’s stocks in the first trading session in two weeks after an extended Lunar New Year break as the death toll from the epidemic rose to 361.

READ:Coronavirus and the Implications for Emerging Markets

The rand has tumbled …

Tanzania, one of East Africa’s largest economy is executing a phase-based sim cards shutdown across the country, following the set deadline of biometric sim card registration.

The procedure comes at hard times when, only 28.4 million sim cards have been registered by January 19, while Tanzanian Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) statistics show 48.8 million active sim cards are active in Tanzania.

In a nation with more than 55 million people, mobile services have become the most pervasive communications platform in Tanzania; by 2007, over 5 million people, representing a 10^th of the population, subscribed to a mobile service. Hence—the 2019 GSM report on Digital Transformation in Tanzania, showed that today, the number of unique mobile subscribers has grown five-fold to 25.2 million.

This means that Tanzania’s current sim card lock could lose a significant portion of the tax and cripple money transfer income to mobile money agents and services …