PRESIDENT RAMAPHOSA LAUNCHES FIRST SOUTH AFRICAN SMARTPHONE PRODUCTION PLANT.

Durban, S.AFRICA:

President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday opened South Africa's first smartphone production plant at the Dube TradePort in Durban.

Ramaphosa described the Mara Phones plant President Ramaphosa as a great moment in South Africa's drive to be a producer of goods.

"The highlight of my visit is the Mara smartphone plant. At the investment conference, the chief executive of Mara Phones Ashish Thakkar was willing to set up the factory at the Dube TradePort. The smartphone plant is an outstanding world-class facility. The facility is equal or even better than smartphone factories. With the launch of the smartphone factory we have made history. The launch of the plant shows that South Africa is indeed a place where people should invest,"
said Ramaphosa.

President Cyril Ramaphosa on 17 October 2019 officiated at the official opening ceremony of Mara Group’s cellphone manufacturing plant at the Dube Trade port, Durban, with a ribbon-cutting ahead of the guided tour.
Image: Twitter.

Ashish J. Thakkar, Founder of the Mara Group, initially announced the company's intentions to build affordable smartphones in South Africa during the inaugural South Africa Investment Conference convened by South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018.

Ashish Thakkar, Founder & MD, Mara Group at the World Economic Forum in 2014.

Ashish J. Thakkar is a Rwandan-based entrepreneur.
He is the founder of Mara Group and Mara Foundation, and he is a co-founder of Atlas Mara. Thakkar was born in the United Kingdom, but he moved to East Africa as a teenager before founding Mara Group, a Pan-African conglomerate, at the age of 15.
MaraGroup's operations and investments span 22 African countries.

The smartphone company, which was established in 1996, opened its first smartphone factory in Kigali, Rwanda last week.

Mara Phones will have an initial workforce of 313 in year one but plans to increase its staff complement to 1 369 in the next five years.

At the moment, the plant has 200 formerly unemployed engineering graduates, 66 percent of whom are women and 92 percent youth.

KwaZulu-Natal Premier Sihle Zikalala said the Mara smartphone plant was one of the successes of the Ramaphosa’s investment conference drive last year.

"We will continue to support foreign and local investors to ensure that they succeed. Make eThekwini more vibrant. Investment conference has yielded the result of SA's first smartphone production plant,"
said Zikalala.

Ramaphosa launched his drive last October to attract $100 billion foreign direct investment into South Africa by 2024.

In March, the SA Reserve Bank said that investments direct investment inflows in South Africa had increased to R70.7 billion from R26.8 billion in 2017.

Mara Phones chief executive Ashish Thakkar said the company had delivered on its promise to open a smartphone plant in South Africa.

"It is Africa, South Africa and Mara's dream that has been fulfilled. We have finally launched smartphone factor that will create jobs for South Africans. It is high tech manufacturing in South Africa by South Africans,”
Thakkar said.

"This our first investment in South Africa and it has been phenomenal. We are proud to contribute to South Africa's fourth industrial revolution. The project has happened in record time due to support form the government. Let's celebrate Africa and South Africa."

The company will roll out 200 Mara stores across the country. Part of the revenue from sales will be used to support youth empowerment, women empowerment and job empowerment.

Proudly SA chief executive Eustace Mashimbye said the opening of the plant represented an opportunity for the replacement of nearly 4 million smartphones that the country imported in 2017 alone.

“The establishment of Mara’s smartphone production plant here in South Africa sends a very strong message of confidence for local manufacturing in our country,”
Mashimbye said.
“This operation has an extensive and diverse supply chain for which Mara has committed to sourcing from other local enterprises, creating many much-needed jobs in the process. We need many more Maras to see the advantages of setting up bases in South Africa, and of being part of the Buy Local movement.”

Comments

CUBA CLAIMS CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS FIDEL CASTRO'S SON.

The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro. The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970. “ Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning ,” Cubadebate website reported. The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “ explosive ” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana. Amid a wide-ranging barrage of compl...

MALARIA VACCINE PROVES HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IN BURKINA FASO.

A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year. The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months. The hunt for a malaria vaccine has been going on the best part of a century. One, the Mosquirix vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been through lengthy clinical trials but is only partially effective, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years. It is being piloted by the World Health Organization in parts of Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. The Oxford vaccine is the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy against the mosquito-borne parasite disease. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries. Prof ...

NAMIBIA VOWS TO GRAB FARMS FROM WHITE FARMERS.

Okahandja, NAMIBIA: Vibrant rows of neatly lined plants grow on a patch once trampled by the cattle of a large commercial farm run by a family of German descent in Namibia. From that 2,400 square-meter rectangle of sand in the northern Otjozondjupa region, Kornelius Hamasab, 69, now produces spinach, onions and tomatoes. Hamasab is among the 16 percent of black Namibians owning arable land in the semi-desert southwest African nation. White Namibians, who are descended from former colonizers Germany and South Africa and make up six percent of the population, own 70 percent of the land. "It doesn't seem right to me," said Hamasab, who acquired his land as compensation five years after the farm downsized into a guesthouse in 2000 and laid off its staff. "The government should do something about it," he added, while his family picked and rinsed collared greens to be sold in the capital Windhoek, 150 kilometers away. Namibia adopted ...

McDONALD MARIGA EXPLAINS WHY HE DUMPS SOCCER FOR POLITICS.

Nairobi, KENYA: McDonald Mariga has announced he has quit active football in a decision that brings down the curtains on a glittering career spanning 16-years. Instead, the 32-year old has joined active politics and is set to contest for the Kibra constituency seat in the forthcoming by-elections in November. He was on Monday evening unveiled as Jubilee Party's candidate for the mini-poll. Earlier on Monday, he had gone to the party's offices in Parklands for the interviews accompanied by dozens of his supporters donning his political party's red and yellow colours t-shirts and waving placards which bore messages supporting his candidature. Former Kenyan international McDonald Mariga with supporters at Jubilee Party headquarters on Sept. 2, 2019. Image: Citizen. "I have retired from football and have decided to go and give back to the community," he told journalists. Son of football great, retired coach and adminis...

4000 ZIMBABWEANS TO GET KENYAN CITIZENSHIP.

Nairobi, KENYA: The dream of recognition for at least 4 000 members of the Zimbabwean community living in Kenya came closer to reality at last as the government began issuing them with birth certificates. For years, the ‘Shonas’, whose forefathers originated from Zimbabwe, have lived in Kenya without legal documents, denying them basic rights including education. While they still do not have identity cards, which would make them legally Kenyans, they celebrated this as a step closer to citizenship. In front of invited guests, a group of women sang a Kikuyu song in praise of those who have made it possible for them to reach this milestone. Nothing unusual about that; only the group are not members of Kenya’s Kikuyu community. They are Shonas whose forefathers originated from Zimbabwe. In 1961, the first members of the Shona community arrived in Kenya as missionaries and settled in the central part of the country without any form of identification. Th...

A MODEL SOLD HER VIRGINITY FOR $3 MILLION TO THE ARABIAN BILLIONAIRE.

A model claims she has auctioned her virginity for nearly $3million (£2.2million) - and says it is a 'dream come true' for her. Giselle, 19, who is based in the US, says she decided to sell her virginity through the notorious German-based website Cinderella Escorts. The agency claims the highest bidder was a businessman from Abu Dhabi, with a bid of 2.5m Euros ($2.9m/£2.2m), while a Hollywood actor was said to have made the second highest bid of 2.4m Euros ($2.8m/£2.1m). Giselle says she will use the money to pay for her college fees, buy a new house, and go traveling around the world. Watch the Video below: The model said: 'I am happy to have decided to sell my virginity through Cinderella Escorts. 'I would never have dreamt that the bid would rise so high and we would have reached 2.5million Euros. This is a dream come true.' Giselle said she was 'shocked' by the outrage against women selling her virginity, describing it as...

POPE FRANCIS COMPETES WITH PABLO ESCOBAR FOR REVERENCE.

Medellín (Colombia) (AFP): In her hair salon, Yamile Zapata is taking advantage of Pope Francis's visit to sell key rings with his face on it. But that's not where the real money is in Medellin. Most of the gifts she sells in this Colombian city bear the mustachioed face of its own saint and anti-hero: Pablo Escobar, late boss of the cocaine cartel immortalized in the hit Netflix series "Narcos." While Francis was ministering and teaching as a Jesuit priest in the 1980s, Escobar was killing hundreds of people and trafficking billions of dollars' worth of hard drugs. "Everyone wants a pope souvenir right now. But Pablo sells better," said Zapata, 34, as the city prepared for Francis's open-air papal mass Saturday. Souvenirs with the images of Pope Francis and late Pablo Escobar for sale at a store in Medellin. Francis offered words of sympathy for victims of drug-related violence in the city. But in spite of it all, some in Medellin r...

STUDY SHOWS "DTP VACCINE" KILLS MORE BABIES THAN IT SAVES.

A shocking 2017 study published in Ebiomedicine (a peer-reviewed open access online-only medical journal) reveals that the DTP vaccine kills ten times more babies than it saves. Researcher Søren Wengel Mogensen examined the mortality rates of infants between the ages of 5 and 5 months who were given early vaccinations for DTP (Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis) and OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine). They found that there was a 10-fold mortality rate compared to infants who did not receive the vaccine: Results Among 3–5-month-old children, having received DTP (± OPV) was associated with a mortality hazard ratio (HR) of 5.00 (95% CI 1.53–16.3) compared with not-yet-DTP-vaccinated children. Differences in background factors did not explain the effect. The negative effect was particularly strong for children who had received DTP-only and no OPV (HR = 10.0 (2.61–38.6)). All-cause infant mortality after 3 months of age increased after the introduction of these vaccines (HR = 2...

DEREK CHAUVIN TO BE CHARGED OVER ANOTHER 2017 INCIDENT.

New York, U.S: The Department of Justice is reportedly considering charging Derek Chauvin in a 2017 incident involving a Black teenager that came to light while prosecutors were preparing the George Floyd murder case against the former Minneapolis cop. The DOJ’s investigation focuses on footage of Chauvin striking a 14-year-old so hard that he needed stitches to close the wound, then kneeling on him for almost 17 minutes — mostly putting pressure on his upper back — as the youngster complained he couldn’t breathe, ABC News reported. Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes before the 46-year-old Black man died May 25, 2020 after begging for air. Chauvin was convicted of his murder Tuesday. Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder on Tuesday. (AP) A state prosecutor wrote of the 2017 incident that “videos show a far more violent and forceful treatment of this child than Chauvin describes in his report,” yet no action was taken against him. ABC News reported t...

THE REASON WHY GRACE MUGABE FILES FOR DIVORCE.

Grace Mugabe files for Divorce after Robert Mugabe resignation – Grace Mugabe Wants Divorce After Mugabe Offered To Send Grace To Exile In Order To Remain As President. Zimbabwe’s First Lady Grace Mugabe Files For Divorce. Zimbabwean First lady, Grace Mugabe is leaving her twenty one year marriage over concerns about her role as an irresponsible former First Lady of Zimbabwe and a bane on the nation’s economy. The world is in shock today after sources close to the Mugabe family confirmed that Grace Mugabe has filed for divorce on Wednesday. The South African born woman has voiced concerns over her role as the former First Lady of Zimbabwe, claiming that it’s about time she enjoys some peaceful life and she is not prepared to be ridiculed for the years ahead, her ostracism and her husband’s resignation as the leader of Zimbabwe have gradually grown into life threatening headache. The South African born woman has voiced concerns over her role as the former First Lady of Zimba...

Kioo17 Journal

Search This Blog