Otiato Guguyu
I first saw Mr Jibran Qureishi, about a half a decade ago during an annual economic forecast, which had become almost ritual as business journalists trouped to high end hotels in Nairobi to meet with bank economists.
It had been a good Public Relations ploy, that gave international banks a chance to communicate beyond their client base to potential investors, that they had their thumbs on the macroeconomic pulse.
For the media, these meetings provided an annual forecast for the year and trends to look out for.
A market gap
Mr Qureishi, of the then CFC Stanbic Bank was making inroads into Africa Global Research Standard Chartered Chief Economist, Razia Khan’s playground. Ms Khan had specialized in providing annual deep stick analysis into Kenya’s economy while Citi Bank would also fly in their Chief Africa Economist David Cowan to give the annual outlook.
Economist talk and his boyish looks however, seemed to come in between his authority. The first thing you noticed was the good looking Indian face hiding behind, dark framed spectacles, a cultivated beard and moustache.
Having risen to regional economist at Stanbic Bank’s at just 26, he was probably one of the youngest analyst in Nairobi which somehow made it difficult to take him too seriously. The confidence of his charts predicting the future needed a little more convincing than his peers.
However Mr Qureishi had noticed a market gap, the international bankers, just like the IMF, sent economists to African capitals for a few days of economic assessments. What was lacking was insights from within Nairobi. Mr Qureishi was more local, in touch with Kenyan nuances made him more believable, and for me more relatable.
And he filled this gap, he helped create Kenya’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) in 2014 which today is the most reliable tracker of the performance of the private sector, and as his profile grew, South Africa’s Standard Bank Group appointed the young Kenyan to head its Africa research services.
49.5 Jan 2024 PMI
But not everyone took his model positively. For an administration that wanted to maintain an image of economic growth to international creditors betting on African bonds, dissenting opinion became increasingly unacceptable.
Even as a Christian sect Central Banker, Dr Patrick Njoroge could not see through Jesus words that ‘a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.
At first, Dr Njoroge began asking journalists covering ‘these analysts’ whether they showed us their workings when they made predictions about the trajectory of the shilling. These suggestions soon turned coercive and slowly the analysts stopped giving this country an honest assessment of what lay ahead in the year.
Censorship
The censorship spread fast and in a couple of years journalists were unable to quote any economist commentary on the shilling. Stories went with the caveat, ‘The source did not wish to be named for fear of repercussions’.
In hushed tones we learned that there were threats on bankers with foreign passports, threats of withholding approval on financial results and banks even got penalized for genuine currency trades and ordered to pay the fines without protest.
To the outside world this war on financial information was sold as clamping down on an errant market of evil speculators. Until Mr Qureishi dared to reveal the growing black market and a fracturing of the forex market, that remains disjointed to date.
The Central Bank shed its veiled hand, and all gloves were off, it compelled Stanbic Bank to disown an analysis of its top economist forcing them to issue a press release to that effect. They would have asked for his head on a plate, were it not for the fact that Mr Qureishi had transitioned to the South African Standard Bank where he had been promoted to the Pan African lender’s Head of Africa Research.
This intimidation, shutting down market analysts and bankers accusing them of speculation while dishing out public fines on dollar trades, has later been called out as currency manipulation.
For the media the intimidation was monetary, early one morning, the management of a leading newspaper was summoned to the Central Bank and bullied about reporting on the currency ostensibly to put pressure to stop negative coverage.
The next thing, Central Bank pulled out the weekly advertisement of treasury bonds sales, ‘in a ploy to go digital as a cost saving measure’. It was meant to send the message that unfavorable reporting would result in direct financial costs.
I was slightly honoured that the little barefoot boy from Madame Rose composition classes at Mayenje Primary school in Busia had had made part of that conversation. My name came up at the seat of monetary policy monolith of Kenya’s Central Bank for among other things, attending MPC briefings in football t-shirts.
Read Part II; Flying blindly
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