Investment Times Newspaper 2023 Edition | Issue 39

Telecoms chamber to comply with NCA’s directive regarding SIM registration exercise

Ofori-Atta concerned about “systemic bias” of credit rating agencies

By Eugene Davis

Aker Energy submits Deepwater Tano /Cape plan of development to Energy Minister

The pitfalls of dollar hegemony

GSE delists Sam-Woode Limited

In Money and Empire, Perry Mehrling of Boston University recounts the remarkable moment, in 1965, when Congress summoned international monetary economist and historian Charles P. Kindleberger from MIT to testify on the troubling US balance-of-payments de cit.

After World War II, the United States had persistently exported more than it imported. But by 1965, the reverse was true: West German goods were ooding the US domestic market, and Japanese imports were soon to follow.

With dollars owing overseas as payment for these imports, many had begun to ask if it was time to reform the post-war Bretton

Woods international monetary system, which had pegged the US dollar directly to gold and tied other currencies more exibly to the dollar.

Kindleberger’s answer was no: US trade could be nanced, and the dominant international status of the US dollar secured, he argued, by an alliance of central banks led by the US Federal Reserve. “Many of my colleagues are terri ed at the thought of collaboration of central bankers superseding [national] economic sovereignty and so on,” he observed. But central bankers “are technicians,” he said, “and this is the kind of problem they can

Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) has delisted Sam-Woode Limited (SWL) from the Main Equity Market of the Exchange, due to company’s cessation of operations. The company will be taken o the O cial List at the end of trading April 14, 2023.

A release from GSE said this decision is based on Rule 13(1) of the GSE’s Listing Rules

which provides that “the Council may at any time and in circumstances as it thinks t, suspend or cancel a listing and shall do so to protect investors and to ensure an orderly market”.

Among the reasons for which the Council may delist a company is where the company has ceased to be an operating company, as provided under Rule 13(4)(a) of GSE’s Listing Rules.

In September 2020, SWL informed the Exchange of its intention to delist from the Exchange and re-

By Eugene Davis

Ofori-Atta concerned about “systemic bias” of credit rating agencies

Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta says a key challenge with Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) is the “systemic bias” in their rating methodologies, procedures, practices, and processes towards Africa.

Speaking as a panelist on ‘The impact of credit ratings on the costs of development nance in Africa’, Ghana’s nance minister said “There is a consistently unfavourable credit ratings, negative outlook potentially to impede growth and it negatively undermines the ability that we have.

So today with this poorly crisis the pertinent question remains is how will Africa mobilise our resources required when we are essentially written o as markets that are riskier.” he said this on the margins of the 2023 World Bank/IMF Annual Spring Meetings in Washington DC.

Mr. Ofori-Atta said the unfair ratings a ected developing countries' access

to credit. He also adds that the “whole system is geared towards making the use of our resources di cult to justify.”

Mr. Ofori-Atta had said since 2003 to date, Ghana had three upgrades and nine downgrades and though between 2017 and 2019, the country had successive rating upgrades, with a "track-record" of safeguarding macroeconomic stability, it was questionable that the country was downgraded during a pandemic

"Unless we prioritise reform now, the divergence between developed and developing nations will become a toxic recipe for instability, crisis, and forced migration,"

For him, the continent remains poor due to factors such as illicit nancial ows, surcharges being paid to multilaterals and reckons the African Union can do more to

support African economies to stand on its feet with policies.

UNDP report notes that the combined cost of credit ratings issues cost Africa around $75b, money that could have been used for 80% of Africa’s annual infrastructure investment needs.

The event, which took place on the margins of the 2023 World Bank/IMF Annual Spring Meetings in Washington DC, featured ndings from a new UNDP report that analyzes credit ratings methodologies in Africa, discusses nancial and development rami cations, and proposes alternative approaches for countries where relevant data is scarce.

The role of credit rating agencies is critical in determining sovereign creditworthiness and, consequently, the cost of debt for both sovereign and corporate borrowers..

Aker Energy submits Deepwater Tano/ Cape plan of development to Energy Minister

Aker Energy, the operator of the Deepwater Tano/Cape Three Points (DWT/CTP) block o shore Ghana, has submitted a Plan of Development (PoD) to government.

It did so on behalf of its partners, a statement from the rm revealed.

“The oil rm said “this is a major milestone for us. We are proud to say that together with our partners and the Ghanaian authorities, we have submitted a comprehensive plan of development that will form the basis for the sustainable and efcient development of the Pecan eld,” said Kadijah Amoah, Chief Executive O cer of the operator.

The PoD was presented to the Minister of Energy, Matthew Opoku Prempeh, at the Ministry of Energy in Accra.

The PoD presents an overall plan for a phased development and production of the resources in the DWT/CTP contract area.

The phased development plan will start with the development of the

Pecan eld as a rm phase one, being the largest of several discoveries in the contract area.

The main Pecan eld, located in ultra-deep waters ranging from 2,400 to 2,700 meters about 115 kilometers o shore Ghana, will be developed with a Floating Production Storage and O oading (FPSO) vessel and a subsea production system (SPS).

The operator and partners expect the Pecan eld development and subsequent phases to provide signi cant proceeds to Ghana.

“This has been a team e ort and despite the signi cant challenges we faced, we have shown once again our resilience and un inching commitment to the project. We now look forward to the approval of the PoD so we can get to work, developing and producing the resources for the ultimate bene t of the Ghanaian people,” said Ms. Amoah.

Andrew Takyi-Appiah, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Zeepay

The pitfalls of dollar hegemony

handle easily.”

In hindsight, Kindleberger’s comment is uncanny, considering that central banks have since become economic policymaking’s “only game in town.”

Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s  1979-82 interest-rate shock, which halted the high in ation of the 1970s, was followed a decade later by the ideological and policy triumph of “central bank independence,” with Fed Chair Alan Greenspan becoming something of a nancial industry folk legend.

During the 2008 global nancial crisis, central banks took charge again. Under Ben Bernanke, the Fed extended “swap lines” of dollar credit to other central banks around the world, and these were soon followed by “unconventional” monetary policies like quantitative easing – trillions of dollars in asset purchases over the course of more than a decade. In 2012, the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, famously backstopped the euro by pledging to do “whatever it takes” to ensure its survival.

All these unconventional and extraordinary measures turned out to be merely a dress rehearsal. When COVID-19 struck, central banks unleashed even larger waves of liquidity, and most governments opened the scal spigots. But then came the in ationary surge of 2021, and monetary authorities have found themselves tasked once again with restoring price stability, à la Volcker.

THE MIT CONNECTION

Neither Kindleberger nor anyone else could have seen all this coming. Back in 1965, the only game in town was scal policy: the US economy was roaring in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson’s vaunted income-tax cut ( rst proposed by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy). This is also the moment that economist Alan S. Blinder  chooses as the start of his A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021. In the late 1960s, Blinder was a doctoral student in the MIT economics department, where he presumably took Kindleberger’s classes in economic history. Today, Blinder warns that economics has become ignorant of its own past. Since his student

days, the discipline has become more mathematical and less historical, and Kindleberger has been read less and less.

Following his retirement in 1976, and until his death in 2003, Kindleberger devoted himself to writing history. According to Mehrling, “Charlie” (as he calls him) knew something fundamental about how the global economy works that many mainstream macroeconomists have never absorbed, partly because they have insisted on viewing macroeconomics within a strictly national context. Here, he has in mind those generations of economists who earned their PhDs from MIT in the decades after World War II under the supervision of lions of the discipline like Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani (Draghi’s doctoral adviser), or Robert Solow (Blinder’s doctoral adviser, and a member of Bernanke’s dissertation committee).

Back in those days, MIT was the center of American Keynesianism, and its economics PhDs were poised to rise to powerful government positions – as Draghi, Bernanke, and Blinder’s career paths all attest. Yet, as Mehrling shows in his own subtle critique of this school, even if Kindleberger’s economics is not what men like Draghi and Bernanke profess, it is what they practiced as central bankers – thereby creating the world we live in today.

Mehrling, by contrast, has never occupied a government post. Instead, he has tirelessly developed his own distinctive “money view,” claiming Kindleberger as a direct antecedent.

Though his positions are not obscure (he has a substantial following in nancial and online circles), they tend to receive much less consideration within mainstream economics departments, such as at Princeton, where Blinder has long been based.

Hence, in his recent book, Blinder has 19 citations to works by the conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman – the foil to his own liberal Keynesianism – but no reference to Mehrling’s scholarship, and only one passing mention (in a footnote) of Kindleberger’s 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History

of Financial Crises.

So, while both books are about the same subject – monetary policy and history – they are like ships passing in the night. The question, then, is what might be learned from reading them together. If Mehrling’s book is a love letter to Kindleberger, Blinder’s book could be called a love letter to Kindleberger’s MIT colleagues – that is, to Blinder’s teachers and the architects of post-war American Keynesianism. These men, Blinder contends, basically got it right.

THE OTHER GAME IN TOWN

Fiscal policy is a powerful instrument, and it is often an appropriate way for governments to intervene in the business cycle to manage macroeconomic conditions. When national economies are in recessions (or depressions), a “ scal multiplier” validates countercyclical government spending aimed at increasing aggregate demand, output, and employment. According to Keynesian theory, each dollar of additional scal stimulus (spending or tax cuts) will yield more than a dollar in economic output, because the extra dollars in people’s pockets will create demand for even more products and services. But, of course, scal-led expansions run the risk of causing ination. Thus, the job of monetary policy is to manage the tradeo – depicted in the classic “Phillips curve” – between price stability and employment by positioning the economy at a point on the curve where there is neither too much in ation nor too much unemployment. This is the admittedly simplistic distillation of both post-war American Keynesianism and Blinder’s view. In his book, Blinder goes much further to o er a judicious assessment of the many historical events and intellectual fads in mainstream economics that have challenged its basic framework between the 1960s and the 2020s. Through it all, he concludes, the original framework held: “Rival doctrines to Keynesianism have come and gone over the decades covered in this volume: monetarism, the new classical economics of ‘rational expectations,’ supply-side economics, and others. But only one survived.”

Competitors to Blinder’s Keynesianism either stumbled on their own, like Friedman’s monetarism, or were absorbed into the “New Keynesianism,” which incorporates rational expectations. Today, supply-side economics lives on only as an embarrassing political canard. MIT Keynesianism survives, but with an important twist: the game shifted from scal to monetary policy. The three milestones were the in ation of the 1970s, President Ronald Reagan’s budget de cits in the 1980s, and the triumph of “central bank independence” in the 1990s, which set the stage for the “unconventional” monetary policies that have de ned the post-2008 era. In macroeconomics, the double-digit in ation of the 1970s was a boon for monetarism, which held that “in ation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” Blinder counters this famous remark by Friedman by noting that the in ation of the 1970s resulted largely from energy and food “supply shocks.” Still, other critics of Keynesianism, like Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, correctly criticized its standard models for not su ciently considering the expectations of economic agents.

When Volcker was appointed Fed chair in 1979, in ation had been running high for almost a decade. In a show of resolve, he pivoted US monetary policy toward Friedman’s preferred approach: managing the quantity, or stock, of money. By targeting a lower stock, Volcker relinquished the Fed’s discretionary control over short-term interest rates, which duly skyrocketed. But Volcker soon abandoned that e ort, partly because the US economy had fallen into a steep recession by 1982, and partly because it had proven practically impossible to measure – let alone adjust – the stock of money. After all, the quantity of money is determined as much by the elusive demand for it as by its raw supply. Although price in ation was reined in, monetarism was discredited, and liberal Keynesianism learned to appreciate

the importance of “in ation expectations.”

THE DEFICIT FACTOR Volcker ended his term as Fed chair under Reagan, who subsequently appointed Greenspan. Reagan’s focus was not on monetary policy but rather on taxes. Invoking the supply-side gospel, he promised that tax cuts would increase business investment and lead to higher rates of productivity, economic growth, government revenue, and hence lower budget decits. But none of this happened after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Instead, budget de cits ballooned.

When Bill Clinton took o ce in early 1993, Blinder joined the administration as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and the budget de cit took center stage. Robert Rubin, a former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, took charge of Clinton’s economic team and convinced the president to balance the budget to assuage the bond market. A bond-market rally, he reasoned, would cause long-term interest rates to fall, inducing greater private investment in the “New Economy” of high tech. Clinton balanced the budget, and investment surged, owing partly to accommodative monetary policies from the Greenspan Fed, which wisely bet on the power of the New Economy to increase productivity growth.

It was in this context of catering to nancial markets that the Clintonites trumpeted “central bank independence.” Blinder, defending his brand of Keynesianism, insists that the 1990s boom was an exceptional occurrence, while many liberals, like Rubin, mistakenly took it as an indication that the scal multiplier was “negative,” implying that it is always best to balance the budget to win private investors’ con dence.

delists Sam-Woode Limited

structure its operations.

It had suspended its operations, as it had been hard hit by the introduction of the new Ghana Education Service curriculum, which had led to a subsequent obsolescence of its textbook inventories and the

stoppage of its book sales operations.

Its shareholders had therefore voted to delist from the Exchange and restructure the company. Following this, the Exchange noti ed the public and, per Rule 13(4)(a) of the GSE’s List-

ing Rules, suspended the listing status of SWL on the basis of SWL’s cessation of operations, in September 2020.

The Exchange has since then, followed up several times with SWL to commence the delisting process, with the expecta-

tion that SWL will carry through the voluntary delisting successfully, but the company has failed to do so.

To ensure an orderly market, the GSE Council has thus directed the compulsory delisting of SWL due to the cessa-

tion of the operations of the company with reference to Rule 13(40(a) of the GSE’s Listing Rules. SWL will therefore be taken o the Main Market of the Exchange at the end of trading April 14, 202

Telecoms chamber to comply with NCA’s directive regarding SIM registration exercise

The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications says it will comply with the recent directive from the National Communications Authority (NCA) regarding the ongoing SIM registration exercise.

The Chamber said its members have been blocking services for subscribers since November 2022, who have not completed both stages of the SIM registration process, as directed by the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation.

The directive issued on April 13, 2023, by the NCA indicated that all disconnected SIMs are

to be delinked from all databases by tomorrow April 17, 2023.

For the avoidance of doubt, this included SIMs that were blocked in November 2022 for not having completed both stages of the SIM registration. Again, all SIM cards registered after the limit of 10 per individual are to be delinked, deactivated and removed from all databases by Monday, April 17, 2023.

The Chamber of Telecommunication, therefore, encouraged all subscribers who have acquired Ghana cards but are yet to complete registration to

do so before April 17, 2023.

It added, “All subscribers with more than 10 SIMs registered to themselves should also visit their nearest mobile network operator’s service centres to urgently verify their SIMs on record.”

Furthermore, the Chamber said, “Our members are obliged by the directive to completely deactivate all impacted subscriber SIMs which have not completed the registration by the said date without any further notice or extension of time for subscribers.”

It noted, “It is important that

the cherished customers of the networks are not barred from using voice, data, USSD, mobile money services and continue to have access to emergency and other important services.”

It added that subscribers with Ghana cards can avoid this inconvenience by completing stage 2 (the biometric capture) of the registration process.

Continuing, it said since the start of the SIM Registration Exercise, the members of the Chamber have invested heavily in arrangements to ensure that subscribers who have their Ghana cards and are

ready to register, get registered at any of our several touchpoints across the country.

“For those that require some special assistance to carry out the registration exercise, kindly contact your service provider.

“Our members remain committed to supporting the efforts of all stakeholders to ensure that every customer in every part of the country is able to register their SIM card(s) with the Ghana card”.

NPA to regulate bitumen supply chain to ensure quality and efficiency

The National Petroleum Authority (NPA) is developing a framework to regulate the importation, storage, processing and marketing of bitumen in the country. The framework, which will have inputs from the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), the Ghana Highways Authority (GHA), and the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), is to streamline the bitumen supply chain and ensure compliance with quality standards speci cations.

The NPA Chief Executive, Dr. Mustapha Abdul-Hamid, and Management members of the Authority made this known on Wednesday during an inspection tour of a bitumen storage and production plant at Tema jointly owned by

Goil Good Energy and Societe’ Multinationale de Bitimumes (SMB) of Cote d’Ivoire.

The facility with 7,500 metric tonnes installed capacity takes delivery of bitumen from Cote d’Ivoire.

One component of the facility produces polymer-modied bitumen and bitumen emulsions, which are combinations of bitumen and some chemicals.

Operations started in September 2022, and arrangements are underway for the o cial commissioning of the plant, possibly by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his Ivorian counterpart Mr. Alassane Ouattara this year.

Per the law establishing the NPA, it has the mandate to

regulate all petroleum products, including bitumen, which is mainly used for road construction.

Dr. Abdul-Hamid a rmed the commitment of the NPA to streamline the bitumen supply chain to ensure compliance with industry standards.

Giving details of the NPA’s actions, the Head of Planning of NPA, Mr. Dominic Aboagye indicated that the NPA constituted a committee a couple of years ago to look at the entire bitumen supply chain to see how to streamline the sector.

Consequently, he said, the Authority engaged players in the bitumen value chain to understand their operations, and it turned out that much of the supply was from Cote d’Ivoire.

With that information, a team from the NPA led by Dr. Abdul-Hamid visited Cote d’Ivoire in 2021 to study the operations of Societe’ Multinationale de Bitimumes (SMB), the main exporter of bitumen to Ghana.

Mr. Aboagye said the NPA committee had since been developing the framework, and indicated that the Authority would engage the GHA, the GSA, the Customs Division of GRA, and players in the bitumen supply chain to nalize the framework to regulate the sector. He said all players in the bitumen supply chain would be licensed by the NPA to streamline their operations. In their presentations, the Group CEO of Goil Company

Pensioners bondholders demands outstanding coupons by April 28

reached.

It therefore expressed much surprise about the misleading statement contained in paragraph two of the Ministry of Finance Press Release of April 14, 2023.

“We wish to state nally that if the payments of all outstanding coupons and principals are not made by April 28, 2023, we shall be left with no other option than to resume our picketing at the premises of the Ministry to further press home our demand for the payment of all coupons and principals in arrears, and an end to payment delays”.

Limited, Mr. Kwame Osei Prempeh said the plant had been selling the bitumen, polymer-modi ed bitumen, and bitumen emulsions on demand for road construction.

He welcomed the move by the NPA to regulate the bitumen supply value chain as it would ensure the supply of quality products in the country.

The NPA team that participated in the tour included the Director of Economic Regulation and Planning, Mrs. Alpha Welbeck, and the Director of Policy Coordination, Dr. Sheila Addo, the Head of Quality, Control, Mr. Ubeidalah Kutia Saeed, and the Executive Assistant to the CE, Mr. Faisal Ibrahim Cisse.

ment of the outstanding debt obligations by April 28, 2023. We wish to state that no such agreement contained in paragraph two of the Ministry’s Press Release was reached”.

the Ministry waits to receive a con rmation from him on the one-week extension after he has consulted with members of the Forum”, the statement continued.

The Pensioner Bondholders Forum has threatened to resume its picketing at the premises of the Ministry of Finance if the government fails to pay all outstanding coupons and principals of bond investments by April 28, 2023. This it believes will put an end to the payment delays.

Dr. Adu Anane Antwi, said it expressed disappointment about the government’s inconsistency regarding assurances to pay all pensioners their outstanding coupons and principals of bond investments.

A Press Release dated April 14, 2023 from the Ministry of Finance indicated that a meeting held with the leadership of Coalition of Individual Bondholders groups and the Pensioners Bondholders Forum indicated that the Joint Technical Committee constituted on January 18, 2023 reconvenes and agrees on a pathway, towards the settlement of the outstanding debt obligations by April 28, 2023. However, the Pensioners Bondholders Forum denied that no such decision was

Pensioner Bondholders Forum rejected Finance Ministry proposal Furthermore, the Forum said “our attention has been drawn to a Press Release of April 14, 2023 from the Ministry of Finance on a meeting held with leadership of Coalition of Individual Bondholders groups and the Pensioners Bondholders Forum on April 14, 2023. Paragraph two of the Press Release contains a statement to the e ect that the meeting agreed that the Joint Technical Committee constituted on January 18, 2023 reconvenes and agrees on a pathway, towards the settle-

It added that “at the meeting, the Ministry proposed that the Joint Technical Committee constituted on January 18, 2023 be given a period of four weeks to work and agree on a pathway, towards the settlement of the outstanding debt obligations by the government. The proposal from the Ministry was not accepted”. The statement further reiterated the Convener of the Forum position that some pensioners were going through a lot of pains and nancial hardships, and therefore want the payments to be made by April 21, 2023, as demanded in the Forum’s letter of March 30, 2023 to the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta.

“The Convener however promised that he will try and convince members of the Forum to grant the Ministry a one-week extension of the April 21, 2023 deadline for the payment of the Government’s outstanding debts obligations. The Convener advised that

Additionally, the statement said “the Convener requested that upon the receipt of a conrmation from him, the Ministry of Finance should respond to the Forum’s letter of March 30, 2023 and indicate that after further engagement with the Forum, the Ministry agreed to pay the outstanding coupons and principals by April 28, 2023. The Deputy Minister agreed to do as requested”.

After the meeting, the statement pointed out that the Convener sent this text message at 4:25pm to the Deputy Minister through two of the Ministry’s sta who were involved in facilitating the meeting, reading, “This is to conrm the one-week extension I proposed at the meeting, to the 21st April 2023 deadline demanded by the Pensioner Bondholders Forum for the payment of outstanding coupons and principals. Please convey the con rmation to the Deputy Minister. Thanks. Dr. Adu A. Antwi”.

Jael, a trailblazer in hospitality industry

One of the industries that’s thriving post-covid is the hospitality, travel and tourism industry and there are very few personalities that are making a remarkable impact in this booming sector.

Jael, a Certi ed Hotel General Manager CHGM and an award-winning female hospitality professional, and is regarded as a trailblazer in Africa's fast-growing tourism & hospitality industry.

She is the Director of Administration at African Association of Women in Tourism & Hospitality (AAWTH) and the General Manager of RB PARK- HILL HOTEL Ghana.

With over 10 years of active operational experience in the tourism and hotel industry, Jael is also the country chair for G100, a group of signicant women leaders from around the world with powerful advocacy and awareness across governments and worldwide organizations for a gender equal future.

Having worked with a number of travel agencies in the UK after she successfully completed her internship with JW Marriott in Central London, she came to Ghana to work with Marriott Hotel Accra.

Jael is the founder and CEO of The Haven Honeymoon Concierge (Travel Company) and also the Teens Tourism & Hospitality Club.

She has numerous achievements which include Top Ten Hospitality In uencer Africa by Hospitality Awards Africa 2022; 100 Most Powerful Hospitality Female in Africa by International Hospitality Institute 2022; Most Outstanding Female in Hospitality by Feminine Ghana Achievement Awards 2022; Most Admired Female Hospitality Professional by Hospitality Awards Africa 2021; and Travel & Tourism Excellence Award by the College of Eneld, Haringey and North East London.

Amidst all the success, Jael has had a few challenging moments which she says include long, erratic hours, frequently including evening or overnight work, which are also a

common feature of hospitality management work.

She said: “promotions frequently entail moving as well as assuming new, time-consuming tasks. It is challenging to combine personal and professional life."

She says her rst goal in line of her business is to create branches of her travel company across the regions in Ghana and also to become the major honeymoon travel company.

I would love to serve as a role model to young women within the hospitality industry by providing coaching sessions and assisting them with their career paths, she added.

In few years to come, Jael discloses she envisions to own various boutique hotels across the country.

She stated that the strongest known economic factor in Ghana right now is entrepreneurship and in order to steer the next generation in the correct way with regards to entrepreneurship, she stressed that “we need more positive role models who can advocate for more wholesome principles.

"To achieve the objective of having entrepreneurs emerge and have an impact on the next generation, our government should aggressively support young people to develop their ideas and create businesses within our nation.”

Jael shares a few words of wisdom to the youth and the younger generations, everyone has heard the adage, "In every caterpillar, there is a butter y ready to stretch its wings, ourish, and soar to greatness."

She concludes that every young person has greatness inside them that's just waiting to be released, similar to butter y. By guiding a young person in creating goals and inspiring them, mentors can act as a source of support and direction in helping to achieve greatness. Find a Mentor. A responsible adult who knows what is best for your well-being

CIDAN INVESTMENTS LIMITED

WEEKLY MARKET REVIEW FOR WEEK ENDING

April 06, 2023

What will it take to prevent future pandemics?

Although COVID-19 restrictions are rapidly fading around the world, we are still reeling from the impact of the past three years. More than  6.8 million deaths from COVID-19 have been ocially reported, but the true number may be closer to 15 million. There has been immense su ering and social and economic turmoil, and the virus itself still poses a clear and present risk, with one in ve Americans reporting ongoing “long COVID” symptoms. Worse, COVID-19 is far from the last zoonotic disease with the potential to devastate the global population. Innumerable other viruses – many of which remain understudied –have been discovered in animals. Any of them could serve as a source of new human viruses, which often originate from repeat-o ender virus families such as coronaviruses, orthomyxoviruses, and loviruses. When viruses from these families show up in mammals or birds, there is always a risk that they could develop the potential to infect humans. And

By William A. Haseltine

when that happens, the fact of globalization means that those viruses can spread faster than ever before.

A key challenge, then, is to discover and identify which viruses pose the greatest risks to humans. If we can detect a new human virus in the earliest days of a disease outbreak, we will have a much better chance of implementing the measures needed to prevent another global pandemic.

To that end, a recent article  in Science proposes setting up an experimental pipeline whereby researchers can test animal viruses for four crucial properties consistent with human infection.

By identifying the viruses that pose the highest risk for zoonosis (transmission across species), we can then rapidly roll out diagnostic panels to detect new human infections.

Serology- and polymerase-chain-reaction-based diagnostics are currently the most practical solutions for health-care settings around the world. But they are pathogen-speci c, so they are e ective only when clinicians and scientists know which pathogens they should be testing for.

An animal virus needs four essential biological properties in order to infect humans: it must use the human version of its cellular entry receptor

to gain access to human cells; it must use human intracellular proteins to replicate and exit human cells; it must overcome humans’ innate immune responses; and it must evade pre-existing human adaptive immunity functions such as antibodies and T cells.

Animal viruses that have most of these properties – such as primate arteriviruses – obviously warrant targeting by new diagnostic tools. Such tests can be grouped into regional panels for use in diagnosing unusual or unattributable human illnesses, as well as to monitor healthy populations for virus-surveillance purposes.

The rst zoonotic property –an ability to enter human cells – is often the easiest to study, because we can test the surface protein of an animal virus by engineering it onto a reporter virus. (A reporter virus genome lacks genes essential for viral replication, making it safe for research and surveillance purposes.) This method has been shown to demonstrate that some poorly studied tibroviruses from the Rhabdoviridae family can enter human cells, though their multiplication within human cells is uncertain.

The ability to multiply – the second biological property viruses need to infect humans –

involves a complex process that requires interactions with several intracellular host proteins. Even a single incompatibility can prevent an animal virus from multiplying in human cells. There is scarce research on the third property: how animal viruses interact with human-innate immunity beyond the interferon response. This is a rst line of defense against virus infections. It functions by generating an intracellular environment that restricts virus replication and signals the presence of a viral pathogen to the adaptive arm of the immune response. Further study is needed to determine, for example, why some ebolaviruses can multiply in human cells, yet rarely infect humans in nature. In these cases, there seem to be powerful innate immune mechanisms protecting animals, including humans, from cross-species transmission. The nal property is an ability to overcome pre-existing human adaptive immunity, such as neutralizing antibodies and cytotoxic T cells.

While human responses raised against one virus can be tested for reactivity against a second virus, it is unknown how much cross-neutralization would be enough to protect humans from infection or severe dis-

ease if exposed to potentially zoonotic viruses.

To detect outbreaks at their onset, clinicians and scientists must be able to track animal viruses in human populations. Yet our health-care systems currently struggle to provide testing even for well-understood viruses. We urgently need greater investments in universal and accessible health care, which would have the added bene t of enhancing our virus-surveillance abilities.

But in addition to more comprehensive surveillance protocols and stronger health systems, we also need to address  underlying causes of zoonotic-disease emergence, such as deforestation, the wildlife trade, and climate change. While implementing a comprehensive pandemic-prevention framework will require signicant investment, the cost of inaction is sure to be far higher. Population growth, expanding urbanization and encroachments on nature, and the resumption of regular air travel mean that infectious-disease outbreaks will continue to plague us.

They already are. New cases  of highly pathogenic avian inuenza across the United States and in other parts of the world are a wake-up call. We should always assume that the next pandemic is closer than most people think.