Weekend Box: It’s Sall Over, Risqué Business & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
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IT’S SALL OVER
President of Senegal Macky Sall announced earlier this week that he will not seek a third term. This comes as welcome relief for the west African country, where political violence has broken out in recent months triggered in part by concerns Mr Sall was pushing Senegal into autocratic territory by refusing to give up power.
Senegal is one of west Africa’s most successful democracies and so the threat of a president making unconstitutional moves was met with dismay. In June, a wave of deadly protests broke out in the capital Dakar following the sentencing of the main opposition leader Ousmane Sonko for ‘corrupting youth.’ Sall’s government responded to the riots by deploying the army on Dakar’s streets and suspending mobile internet access.
Mr Sall’s downfall comes after 11 years in office, during which he has received praise for numerous achievements. The country’s energy, transport, and digital infrastructure have improved dramatically under his leadership. Agriculture has also increased in efficiency. Senegal’s stability has helped it earn a reputation for being one of the best African countries in which to invest. However, the president’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies were proving too much for many Senegalese to stomach.
In his statement, he said: “Senegal exceeds my person and it is full of leaders who can manage it.” His decision to stand aside won praise from fellow African leaders and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who commended Mr Sall’s “statesmanship.”
With violence subsiding, there’s hope for a peaceful, free, and fair process when the presidential election takes place in February.
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TWITTER PUSHED TO THE LIMIT
It’s not all fun and games being the richest man in the world. Although, with the disastrous changes Elon Musk continues to make to Twitter despite having passed on the CEO title to Linda Yaccarino, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s just messing about with the platform. Case in point: the newly instituted rate limits.
On Saturday, Musk announced limitations on the number of posts a user can read in a day, with verified users – for the most part, those who pay $8 for Twitter Blue – enjoying the upper limit of 6000 posts per day. Unverified accounts enjoy 600 posts per day before their ‘rate limit’ is exceeded, while new unverified accounts are allowed half that figure.
Musk explained that the limitations were a “temporary” solution to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” However, an alternative explanation is gaining traction online, which suggests that the problems with the company’s servers originate much closer to home.
Sheldon Chang, a user of rival platform Mastodon’s San Francisco-specific server SFBA.social, has shared two videos that appear to show Twitter being overloaded by requests for data. Chang claims this is a consequence of a recent change to block people without accounts from viewing the platform, causing Twitter to put pressure on its own servers due to being flooded by requests to access the platform that it can no longer fulfil.
Chang compared the malfunction to a DDoS attack, where a server is deliberately overloaded with requests in order to shut a website down, normally with malicious intent. In this case, however, it appeared Twitter was performing an unintentional DDoS attack on itself.
This would be bad enough without a rival announcing a new competitor to Twitter in the same week. However, Musk can take some comfort in knowing that those who migrated to Meta’s new app Threads returned to Twitter within 24 hours to air their many grievances with it.
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THAMES IN HOT WATER
This week saw further concern about the state of the UK’s water companies, following Thames Water CEO Sarah Bentley’s abrupt departure and revelations about the finances of Thames and other companies. As the same companies warned that future bills will have to rise by up to 40% to address huge remaining infrastructure gaps, many have been asking how we got here, who should fit the bill, and whether it might even be time to renationalise the sector.
Where regulator Ofwat holds that a company’s debt to assets balance should be around 60% debt, Thames’ £15.5Bn is about 80% due to dwindling investments in the last decade. Thames’ investors, many of them foreign institutions like ‘the vampire kangaroo’ Macquarie, also drew dividends and replaced assets with debt; £72Bn flowed out, replaced with £60Bn of debt.
Ofwat, widely criticised for being asleep at the wheel, is demanding Thames finds the necessary funding from its investors. Should they fail, the available measure is for Ofwat to put the company into a ‘special administrative regime’, a formal insolvency procedure for businesses that provide a statutory or public service or supply, via temporary public ownership.
Many, including some Labour MPs, have called for wholesale renationalisation of the water companies. Others argue for listing at least some shares on the stock market, pointing to how this has kept Severn Trent and United Utilities in better shape. Severn Trent’s chief executive Liv Garfield has meanwhile proposed repurposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of ‘declared social purpose companies’ which are mandated to adopt longer term planning, more stakeholder representation, and greater environmental responsibility. Whether this, along with her £3.2m pay package due this year, withstands greater scrutiny remains to be seen.
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THAT ORK-WARD MOMENT
This week, councillors on Orkney Island followed in Scotland’s footsteps and passed a motion to “explore options for alternative models of governance” for the island community.
Prompted by an ageing ferry fleet and lack of funding for investment, Council Leader James Stockan MBE argued that the island is being ‘failed dreadfully’ by Scottish and UK governments. He said: "We have been held down and we all know most of what I could say today in terms of discrimination against this community from governments. We all know how much less we get compared to other island groups."
Stockan’s motion was not the first of its kind, but it was the first to explicitly mention “Nordic connections,” a reference to Orkney’s historic ownership. The island was controlled by Norway and Denmark until 1472 when it was used as the wedding dowry of Margaret of Denmark in her marriage to King James III of Scotland.
However unlikely this move actually is (the PM reminded us “there is no mechanism for the conferral of Crown Dependency or Overseas Territory status on any part of the UK”) it points to a weakness in the SNP’s cries for devolution. As John McTernan points out, Orkney has a very distinct politics to Scotland. It has been held almost solely by Liberal Democrat / Liberal MPs since 1859 and Orcadians voted 67% against independence from the UK in 2014. Much of what the SNP has financed (tuition fees, prescriptions) has come at the expense of local council support – local councils which are now making themselves heard.
When the only binary is Scotland vs England, it is easier to argue with the politics of separation. Without that binary, the Orcadians’ cry “exposes the nationalist fiction of a united Scotland on behalf of whom only the SNP can speak.”
Image credit/David Barrie on Flickr/License
RISQUÉ BUSINESS
Quite the storm brewing in this week’s teacup of news: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received five (yes, five) complaints for a woman advertising her OnlyFans account across four London billboards – and two in NYC. The tabloids are following every lead!
Eliza Rose Watson, who paid for the billboards herself, described the advertisements as “less racy even than the ads you see for lingerie within big shopping centres.” While they might not look out of place next to an M&S swimwear campaign, criticism is also being levelled at them for publicly advertising the OnlyFans platform, which enables sex workers along with a variety of other creators including musicians and personal trainers to sell content featuring themselves.
Some have also raised issue with the billboards being located near primary and secondary schools. Amplified, the owner of the billboard spaces, claims that it has stuck to the “strict advertising guidelines.” While noting that children recognising the OnlyFans logo was a ‘wider issue’, Ms Watson has suggested that the billboards will help to destigmatise sex work, reasoning: “is applying shame and stigma to something the best way to be dealing with something that is everywhere?"
While this neglects to address the potential questions that may arise from children asking what OnlyFans is, the furore around the billboards shows that when it comes to sex work, we remain as a society conflicted. Interestingly, our research has shown that Ms Watson’s NYC billboards have experienced no such backlash, although the New York Post has reported: “1 in 5 people considering OnlyFans to afford living in NYC – as rents skyrocket.”
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.