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How this 26-year-old went from running bitcoin trading desks in Taco Bells to creating the largest crypto exchange in Africa – CNBC
– Yellow Card is the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa.
– For its nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to Block’s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money.
– Co-founders Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux launched the exchange from their dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.
ACCRA, GHANA – On the afternoon of Dec.26, 2022, Chris Maurice finally capitulated and went to the emergency room at Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, just west of the city’s gothic quarter.For roughly ten months, the 26-year-old CEO of the largest centralized crypto exchange in Africa had ignored many of the symptoms consistent with malaria as he bounced between 21 different countries on the continent, advising heads of state on bitcoin adoption and setting up institutional accounts for his business, Yellow Card.
By the time Maurice was admitted to the intensive care unit, plasmodium parasites had been wreaking havoc on his red blood cells for nearly a year, multiplying in his liver and threatening to shut down many of his major organs, including his kidneys.His face and eyes were yellow from jaundice.As his hemoglobin levels plummeted in response to the intravenous meds administered as treatment, four days of blood transfusions helped save his life.
But to Maurice, his brush with death was simply the price of doing business.Since graduating from Auburn University in Alabama with a finance degree four years ago, he has traded security and stability for a career on the road, all with the goal of fundamentally disrupting Africa’s broken financial system.
“I’ve slept more nights than I can count in the Joburg airport,” Maurice told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana.
“I’ve mastered the art of where to go to find chairs with no armrests.I’m six-foot-five, so I need my space.”
For nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to
Block‘s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money.
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for anybody to be able to come on and buy crypto within three minutes,” explains Maurice in an Uber ride cutting due south through the Ghanaian capital of Accra.
From there, Yellow Card users can send or receive digital cash in eligible markets.
But unlike a centralized exchange like
Coinbase, where many customers store their tokens for an extended period of time hoping that their digital assets will appreciate in value, the average customer on Maurice’s exchange keeps money on the platform for under five minutes.People take their local fiat currency, turn it into bitcoin or a U.S.dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether to send it across a border, and the recipient instantly cashes it out.
“It’s literally like, I deposit a million Francs in Cameroon, I buy USDT or BTC, and then I send it off,” continued Maurice.
Yellow Card customers can receive cryptocurrency from anywhere in the world and pay only a network fee, which typically ranges from 5 cents to $1, according to Maurice.That is especially helpful for people who would customarily turn to a money service provider like Western Union and MoneyGram, which sometimes charge heavy commissions on remittances.
The service is a game-changer for many Africans, who rely on money sent home from abroad, especially in countries where unemployment and inflation is rife.
The latest data from the World Bank shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa –
where up to 65% of adults are unbanked – remittance flows reached $50 billion in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.The actual number is likely much higher when you factor in money transferred over informal channels.Meanwhile, World Bank data shows that it is more expensive to send remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa than to any other region in the world.On average, it costs $15.60 (7.8%) to send $200 to or from Africa.That percentage can be as high as $38, or 19%, in some countries.
Building the crypto payment rails necessary for Yellow Card requires jumping through a lot of legal and regulatory hoops, which is why Maurice spends about nine months a year in the countries where he operates or plans to launch crypto services.He has local lawyers in pretty much every country on the continent, and he meets with elected officials and regulators to further foam the runway for adoption.
The level of hospitality varies widely across the continent.
Maurice stands out pretty much wherever he goes thanks to his height and plume of curly black hair.His speech is punctuated with laughs and smiles, and that friendly demeanor puts people at ease.
But it’s underpinned by an intense work ethic — he’s got a black belt in TaeKwonDo, was an Eagle Scout in his youth and a finalist for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships in college.He also cares deeply about revolutionizing a broken financial system.These traits help enlist supporters for his longshot ideas – like launching a centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa from his dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.
Yellow Card has facilitated $1.75 billion in transactions since launching in 2019 and has about 220 employees – mostly in Africa.The exchange lets users send money to 16 countries on the continent – and crucially, at the other end of that transaction, the platform has streamlined the process of converting crypto back to local currencies.
On a good day, the service will do $5 million in transactions.
On a slow day, it is closer to $1 million, according to Maurice.
The company has also raised $57 million, including from Jack Dorsey’s Block and Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
Maurice says his ultimate goal is to expand service to the rest of the continent and turn Yellow Card into a billion-dollar company, up from its current valuation of $200 million.In practice, that means capitalizing on the exchange’s first-mover advantage.
“I realized very early on that there’s so much opportunity in all these countries and that we needed to be the first one there,” said Maurice.
“I drove from South Africa to Botswana, Zimbabwe to Zambia, then flew up to Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda.In all of these places, I was doing the grunt work – things like company registration and opening bank accounts, so that we would be ready to go.”
Maurice doesn’t stay anywhere for long, but the transient lifestyle suits him.
He’s currently in Barcelona, but it’s just an apartment in a timezone that lets him take his morning work calls from a desk, rather than the shower.
“I can brush my teeth in peace,” Maurice says with his trademark smile.
How money moves in Africa
Moving money in Africa is an expensive and complicated process.
Commercial bank branch access is limited, especially for people living in remote and rural areas.Digital banking options are also limited.
The latest stats from the World Bank show that just 29% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa uses the internet.Tack on rampant hyperinflation, widespread government corruption, and capital controls trapping domestic cash in banks, and money can stop making sense altogether.
“If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border,” explains Ray Youssef, the CEO of Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace where users can exchange tokens with one another.
Companies like Western Union and MoneyGram offer an expansive physical network of storefronts around the world designed to move money for those who are unbanked.
That cash network was extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build, which is why there aren’t a lot of direct competitors.It is also why those cash transfers often incur substantial fees.
“The entire system of cross-border payments is all about rent-seeking.That’s what it’s designed to do,” argues Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the
Human Rights Foundation, an organization that works with human rights activists from authoritarian regimes around the world.
“It’s not designed to help you move money from A to B.
It’s designed by someone who’s going to make money off you moving money from A to B,” continues Gladstein.
If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border.Ray YoussefPaxful CEO
Part of the problem stems from the continent’s quasi-colonial payment framework, in which roughly 80% of cross-border payments originating from African banks are processed offshore, mostly in the U.S.or Europe.That translates to higher costs and processing times that are sometimes measured in weeks.
“The mainstream way of approaching this is, ‘Oh, let’s just Africanize it.Let’s replace the intermediaries over there with intermediaries here,’” explains Gladstein.“That’s probably even worse because they’re going to be corrupt and expensive.”
Across the continent, there are fintech companies built on top of the existing banking system.
These platforms abstract away the complicated back-office processes, but the fundamental problem remains.These businesses go through the same legacy payment networks, where they spend a lot of money settling payments — costs which they then pass on to customers.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, launched in Jan.2022 with a goal of bringing existing payment systems together under one interoperable network.But it’s too early to tell through official metrics whether PAPSS has begun to deliver on its promise of saving African users more than $5 billion in annual transaction fees.
Then there’s mobile money, which has
been around since the early 2000s.Think of it like an electronic wallet tied to a phone number that does not require a smartphone or data to operate.
Users can pay bills and shop with their phone through SMS texting, instead of having to rely on traditional banking options.
Africa’s mobile money transactions
rose 39% to more than $700 billion in 2021, according to data from the GSM Association, a non-profit representing mobile network operators worldwide.World Bank data shows that account ownership at a financial institution — or via a mobile money service provider — has more than doubled in the last decade, rising to 55% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But even as adoption proliferates, mobile money users don’t get the perks of legacy banking, including earning interest on banked savings and building up a credit score based on a history of spending.Interoperability on the continent also remains a major issue with this alternative way of banking.
“The entire banking system in Africa is completely and utterly broken, even amongst the mobile money providers, the telcos,” said Youssef from Paxful.
“Two thousand payment networks and only 2% of them talk to each other.
That number continues to grow.It’s not getting better, it’s actually getting worse,” continued Youssef.
Take M-Pesa, short for “mobile” and the Swahili word for money — “pesa.” It’s Kenya’s version of mobile money, and it’s incredibly popular there.M-Pesa operates in
seven different African countries, but you can’t send money from M-Pesa Kenya to M-Pesa Ghana.
“Even on the same network, owned by the same company, because of regulations, those two networks don’t talk to each other,” said Youssef.
One solution for moving money across borders is the centralized crypto exchange that Maurice built.The Yellow Card CEO says he would ultimately love to tie in with the Western Union network to help bring those costs for the customer to essentially zero through crypto, given that half of all the world’s remittance is still cash on both ends.
Another option for making international payments on the continent are peer-to-peer digital asset marketplaces, like the one that Youssef runs.
“People find each other, they do a trade, there’s an escrow which removes the trust from at least one side, and the deal is done,” Youssef told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference.
Paxful has facilitated $5 billion in transaction volume in Africa since it launched, though Youssef says it’s only a small fraction of the entire peer-to-peer market.
“Most of it happens on instant messenger, or on the street,” he said.“Africans have been doing peer-to-peer finance for a very long time; one might say over 1,400 years.So this is nothing new to them.”
From Taco Bell to Nigeria
On a 15-minute drive from Accra’s embassy-heavy Labone District down to the Atlantic Coast, Maurice describes himself as being as Southern as it gets.
Before touching down in Nigeria in 2019 to launch his company, the New Orleans native hadn’t traveled much beyond the Southeastern seaboard of the U.S.
“My entire worldview was essentially confined to two states – Louisiana and Alabama,” said Maurice.“I had only been on a plane four times before flying to Lagos on a six-day-old passport with no visa and no shots.”
Despite his limited travels to that point, Maurice was no stranger to the difficulties associated with moving money around the planet.
Starting in the fifth grade, he used his father’s eBay account to sell Pokemon cards and other collectibles online – a venture that would ultimately cover his college tuition at Auburn.
But the business of sending and receiving cash internationally wasn’t always straightforward.Some of his customers in Pakistan, for example, weren’t able to use PayPal.Bank wires were also not an option.
To get paid, Maurice instead had to wait in line at a local Western Union branch.It cost the buyer a hefty fee, and it cost Maurice time – and gas money.
At the age of 18, Maurice turned his attention to bitcoin and soon grew convinced that the world’s biggest cryptocurrency was the answer to his problems.It also presented a new business opportunity.
In 2015, Maurice and his freshman roommate’s best friend, Justin Poiroux, decided to get into bitcoin trading by running their own over-the-counter trading desk out of the Taco Bell on South Gay Street in Auburn.
“We started putting out ads on Craigslist that basically said, ‘We have bitcoin.Come give us cash,’” explained Maurice.
Every Wednesday at 7pm, he and Poiroux, a tech-savvy coder, would grab a spot in the back and split a 12-pack of Doritos Locos Tacos while drop-ins would swap dollars for bitcoin.Customers would slap a couple hundred dollars down on the table (bitcoin was trading at around $250 at the time), scan a QR code, and that was it.On the backend, Maurice and Poiroux were using LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer exchange, to carry out the trades.
At the time, Maurice says, his OTC desk offered an easier onramp to crypto than
Coinbase, whose interface was tough to navigate.
Profits came from the arbitrage play between payment methods, since bank transfers and cash had different fees.
As for the location? Maurice says he chose Taco Bell because it offered the “perfect amount of apathy.”
“This operation would have never flown at a Chick-fil-A,” he said.
After two weeks, business was booming, so they decided to expand the franchise.
“We started calling up friends from high school who were now at LSU, Yale, Georgia, Alabama, anywhere that we knew someone,” continued Maurice.“A few weeks later, we had seven Taco Bells on the eastern United States, all within college campuses, where you could walk in and buy bitcoin.”
Four months later, the Taco Bell trading desks were moving thousands of dollars in bitcoin.They weren’t too rigorous on the accounting at the time, but Maurice estimates that roughly thirty thousand dollars was exchanged across the entire franchise.
“Then one day, Justin and I were talking and we said, ‘Man, we should really do something less sketchy with our lives’.”
Then Maurice had a chance meeting at a Wells Fargo near campus that changed his life.
“I meet this Nigerian guy who is sending $200 to his family, and the bank charged him $90,” Maurice recalled.
“I’m like, ‘Man, have you heard of bitcoin?’” continued Maurice.“I explained to him what bitcoin is and how he could try it out by downloading Coinbase.”
There was just one problem: He had no idea what would happen on the other end of the transfer.
“What on earth is this guy’s mom going to do with $200 worth of bitcoin?” he said.
“I started skipping class and researching what the banking system was like in Nigeria – and the currency,” said Maurice.
“Could you buy bitcoin in Nigeria? Could you sell it?’”
Maurice and Poiroux decided that the core market for Yellow Card should be the people who stood to benefit the most from an alternative, international payment network that cut out extra transaction fees and wait times.
While Poiroux stayed behind in Alabama to continue building and maintaining the tech that fueled the entire operation, Maurice set off to Lagos to establish a physical presence, including laying all of the regulatory groundwork needed to get the business off the ground.
Centralizing crypto payments seemed like the obvious thing to do.Up until their launch, peer-to-peer crypto payments on Binance, Paxful, or other more regional exchanges had been the status quo for many wanting to trade and invest in digital tokens.
“Generally, the reason that people use centralized exchanges is for the experience, right? It’s significantly easier to use Coinbase than it is to use MetaMask, which involves trying to figure out how to get your own ethereum and store your own keys,” explains Maurice.
Having the edge on general licensing has also put Yellow Card ahead of the competition.
“The amount of local expertise that is required to get some of these payment service providers signed, as well as registering entities and setting up bank accounts — it is such a different way of doing business than in other parts of the world,” Poiroux tells CNBC.
Running Yellow Card
Poiroux doesn’t crave the limelight — he has always worked behind the scenes, unconcerned with notching public accolades.If Yellow Card were a band, he’d be the drummer or bass player, keeping everything solid in the background while Maurice took center stage as the lead singer.
Poiroux started coding when he was 10, because he wanted to make his own video games.But after reading the bitcoin white paper, he became obsessed with the idea of decentralized, unstoppable software.
The Yellow Card co-founder and chief technology officer dropped out of college freshman year, and instead holed up in his off-campus apartment teaching himself how to be a full-stack developer through a combination of YouTube tutorials and engineering blogs.
It took a year and a half of coding for 16 hours a day for him to build the beta of Yellow Card, and he mostly did it himself.
“If something needs to be built, I will learn, figure it out, and build it,” Poiroux says, with a hint of a Southern drawl.“Fairly confident this comes from my background as a farmboy from Alabama.”
Poiroux, who had been on a presidential scholarship to Auburn before quitting school, said he kept his off-campus apartment all four years so that he could still get the college experience of going to bars and football games.His parents eventually got on board after he and Maurice landed their first $100,000 in venture funding.
Today, Poiroux runs his own fleet of 40 software engineers across 13 countries who are responsible for keeping the entire operation going.His team is in charge of everything from patching bugs in the code to creating technical workarounds for nationwide internet cuts.
“A lot of the infrastructure dependencies in Africa aren’t reliable and so you have to build a lot of logic surrounding it that you wouldn’t necessarily, originally think of,” explains Poiroux.
In Zambia, for example, it is not uncommon for the largest mobile phone network, MTN, to go down for two to three days.Extended network downtime means having to deal with pending transactions and bracing for more extreme edge cases.Third-party infrastructure dependency is another big sticking point, particularly when it comes to the availability of the network and the payment service providers.
Poiroux first went to Lagos in 2020, and he now makes it back to Africa every three to four months, rotating between Yellow Card engineering hubs in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.
Part of what makes Yellow Card so convenient for users is its interoperability with existing banking options, as well as alternative payment service providers, including mobile money.
While the platform will custody crypto assets if users want to keep their tokens on the exchange, very few choose to do so.Poiroux emphasizes the fact that they are really more the gateway to crypto.
As the counter-party for all trades, Yellow Card also market makes on the exchange against African currencies, a feature which proves crucial when it comes to reducing price volatility and fairly pricing assets.
“We’ll buy several million dollars a day worth of naira,” Maurice says, referring to the Nigerian local currency.“We’re one of the few companies that will actually take on local African fiats.”
35-year-old Franklin Okoye, who works in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, earns a living by helping businesses to import goods like clothes and chemicals from China.Okoye says that he and other merchants use Yellow Card specifically because it offers “very competitive” market rates when he has to convert between tether and the Nigerian naira.
“We have difficulty in Nigeria here accessing dollars to make payments abroad.So everyone is looking for alternative ways of making payments,” said Okoye, adding that he swaps more than $1 million worth of naira for tether (and vice versa) on Yellow Card each month.“Everyone is going to crypto.”
Beyond the remittance use case, many customers use the platform to hedge against inflation and currency devaluation by holding some of their local currency in a U.S.
dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether, according to Yellow Card’s director of special projects, Oparinde Babatunde.He thinks that’s a big reason why crypto’s latest bear market didn’t hurt their business — the need to protect against inflation has only gone up as governments around the world began printing cash during the pandemic.
Maurice tells CNBC that Yellow Card’s business customers are also using the platform to pay for expenses like their Amazon Web Services bill, and Poiroux added that they have seen some of their retail customers earn money by informally day trading and trying to find arbitrage opportunities between coins.
“We have tons of people who use Yellow Card essentially as a full-time job,” Poiroux said.
Spreading the bitcoin gospel
Nowadays, Poiroux spends less time in the weeds of coding.Instead, he devotes most of his waking hours to thinking about what comes next and how to scale the business specifically to meet the needs of the people for whom he built the platform.
“Our approach is — and this has been my approach on the technical side — to build one solution, one platform — where we can quickly plug-and-play other functionalities,” Poiroux tells CNBC from Atlanta, where he’s working between visits to his production hubs in Africa.
“Think things like new payment service providers, so that we can scale quickly and make crypto as accessible as possible,” he said, noting that other crypto payment platforms have taken the opposite approach, hyper-focusing on big markets like Nigeria instead of the entirety of the continent.
Poiroux says that in addition to the retail-facing part of the business, the enterprise side of the operation is also a major priority.Yellow Card offers a
Payments API that enables companies around the world to collect and disburse funds in Africa without currency devaluation risk.
“The super-cool part is that it uses the same infrastructure as our retail platform,” Poiroux explains of yet another project he architected and helped to code.“So if we expand our retail business, we can instantly make that available to the companies that have integrated this service already.”
In the meantime, both Maurice and Poiroux are spreading the gospel of bitcoin pretty much everywhere they go.Last summer, for instance, Maurice advised
Central African Republic on adopting bitcoin as legal tender.
Maurice and his Cameroonian lawyer were brought to Bangui to meet with the minister of public works, who is in charge of the country’s crypto strategy.
About halfway through the meeting, the electricity cut out, which meant no AC and no light for the remainder of the conversation.
“We were in a dark room with no windows talking about how the country would be tokenizing everything from their natural resources, to
Makumba gorillas,” Maurice recalls.
The conversation didn’t miss a beat, because everyone at the table was engrossed in the conversation at hand — how other countries had been taking advantage of Central African Republic through currency controls for its entire history and how bitcoin presented the country with its first real opportunity to determine its own finances.
“Bitcoin gives them a chance to control their own destiny — to keep their money outside of foreign banks, in their own country, to use how they see fit,” Maurice said.“It really is financial freedom.”
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File pic: Second Coming of Christ
THE revelation of God is Christ.God came to earthly realm in Jesus Christ.Christianity is the life of Christ in the heart of the believer and results in the manifestation of the presence of Christ in the believer.
It is God’s desire to show forth Himself in Christ and express His being in this earthly realm through those He purchased by the precious blood of Jesus.
Christianity is not a religious system, but the life of God in humanity.The Bible story climaxes in God adopting a family as the Father and born again believers as sons and daughters who are to show forth His glory.As His principles take root in us, we exude His abiding presence as fruit and not works.
It’s an outward expression of the inner being.
For us to understand our subject for today more clearly, we need to appreciate that salvation translates us from existence to life.Before being born again, we are simply present in the earthly realm.It’s only salvation that brings us from death to life.
There is a movement from a satanic kingdom to the Kingdom of God.We read Colossians 1:12-13: “[1] Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light… [13] Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:” We have extensively covered this subject in this column before.
However, suffice to say are the words of Apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:1,4-5.He says (New King James): “[1] And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins… [4] But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, [5] even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved.” By His loving kindness, grace and mercy we are alive.Sin nature kills and killed us before Christ.
Romans 6:23 nails it: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We, therefore, choose grace and not works because Galatians 2:16 clears the air, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” It is not our effort, it is His effort.
Do not choose works, but the free gift of God.
The knowledge of the truth helps us tune in and subscribe to the manifestation and expression of divine life.
When we know the truth, we voluntarily give God, the Father the space to outflow from us.
God has made us alive and it takes our freewill to accept the life.If I were your guest and you give me an ensuite with a bed, I can choose to sleep on the floor and bath in the common quarters.
It takes knowledge and choice.
The whole essence of God is freedom.
He offers us the correct platform, from which we can choose to participate.Salvation is open to all and it is a personal decision to accept.Remember, Jesus says in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Please, note that He says whosoever.
What an open invitation!
Apostle Paul reveals to us in Philippians 1:21: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
MacLaren’s Exposition explains: “Life is to be as Christ, for Christ, by, in, and from Christ.So, shall there be strength, peace, and freedom in our days.”
When this principle settles in us, we will give room to all that Christ wants to do for us, in us, through us and by us.His glory, splendour, majesty, excellence and virtue will pour out of us.
The dominion and authority of His Kingdom will take over in our families, professional life, business and every facet of our being.We shape and influence the world because the Creator is in us.
Jesus says, in Luke 17:21: “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Dear believer, you carry the power.
Jesus assures us in Matthew 28:18: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.”
We are not afraid.He concluded in Matthew 28:20b: “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.Amen.” Please, be comforted; be at peace.
The finished or accomplished work of Christ gives us what God has done in Christ Jesus.We discover and partake.
It is within our power to receive and deny the grace.
We were healed and we can opt not to enforce it.By the time we’re born again, we would have gathered knowledge from many sources that may not necessarily agree with divine wisdom.We, therefore, surrender our hearts and minds to God’s knowledge.
Romans 12:2 teaches us: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Whatever we have learnt at school or by tradition should not override divine knowledge.
We accept transformation and the renewing of the mind in order to experience the good, acceptable and perfect will of God.Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever.
Amen.Grace and peace be multiplied to you through knowledge.
– All Bible quotations are from the King James Version unless otherwise stated.
– Fellowship with Pastor Makarimayi on Facebook and on www.twitter.com/PEMAKARIMAYI.
Related Topics
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), through its Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), intends to freeze suspected ill-gotten wealth belonging to prosperity gospel preacher-cum-diplomat Uebert Mudzanire and politically connected gold dealer Ewan Macmillan.
Mudzanire is also known as Prophet Uebert Angel.
The RBZ announced the move hours before the airing of an Al Jazeera documentary about illicit trade, smuggling and money laundering in Zimbabwe.
The exposé implicates the RBZ and senior government officials in the illegal black-market trade.
Mudzanire and Macmillan are subjects of the Al Jazeera investigation.
The four-part documentary, titled Unveiling Zimbabwe‘s Dark Secrets: Al Jazeera Exposes Looting, Plunder and Money Laundering, was meant to be broadcast earlier this month but was pushed back.
During that time, RBZ governor John Mangudya moved to defend the bank from defamation by those implicated in the syndicate because they risked bringing Zimbabwe to the attention of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), risking potential greylisting.
Greylisting would result in the flagging of all transactions of Zimbabwean companies and individuals as high-risk, resulting in complicated compliance and administrative duties.This would likely result in lower investment and trade opportunities.
Mangudya fell short of calling Al Jazeera fake news purveyors because, in snippets shown during adverts for the investigation, one of the subjects was filmed claiming he had the RBZ governor on speed dial and Zimbabwe was “southern Africa’s laundromat”.
The investigation’s first episode was broadcast on Wednesday.
Asset freeze
In a letter addressed to Zimbabwe’s Insurance and Pensions Commission, the FIU requested the identification of any assets insured in the names of Mudzanire and Macmillan.
Also wanted are properties once owned but disposed of by the two between January 2020 and March this year, “directly or indirectly through companies or trusts”.
The time frame covers the period that Al Jazeera undertook investigations for the four-part documentary.
The letters were also sent to other financial institutions and asset managers such as banks and the information should be submitted by the end of Thursday – a few hours before the documentary airs.
Under normal circumstances, the FIU will request similar information from other countries as they follow the trail of alleged illicit finances.
Comment from Mudzanire and Macmillan will be added once received.
by Gianni Valente
Rome (Agenzia Fides) – Today, March 24, 2023, marks the 31st Day of Missionary Martyrs.
In 1992, the then Youth Movement of the Italian Pontifical Mission Societies (today Missio Giovani) proposed for the first time to the Italian Church the celebration of a Day that would commemorate those who lose their lives each year during their pastoral service.The young people chose March 24 as the date, so that it would be clear that the sisters and brothers killed as faithful to the Gospel.
The celebration ever since was placed on the day of the killing of Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran Archbishop who was murdered on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospedalito in San Salvador.
On January 8, 2015, the Congress of Theologians of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints had recognized by unanimous vote that Archbishop Romero was a martyr, killed “in odium fidei”: what drove the executioners to eliminate him was not the desire to kill a political enemy, but the hatred unleashed by his predilection for the poor, a direct reverberation of his faith in Christ and his fidelity to the Church’s Magisterium.
Faith – the theologians of the Vatican dicastery recognized at the time – was the source of his actions, of the words he spoke and the gestures he made in the context in which he was called to operate and live as an archbishop.
In the El Salvador of death squads and civil war, the Church was suffering fierce persecution from people who were at least sociologically Christian.
It was precisely the work of the beatification process that had confirmed that Romero-as Professor Roberto Morozzo della Rocca wrote-was “a Roman priest and bishop, obedient to the Church and the Gospel through Tradition,” called to carry out his ministry as a pastor “in that extreme and distraught West that was Latin America in those years.” Where priests and catechists were being murdered and in the countryside it became dangerous to possess a Gospel.Where it was enough to demand justice to be branded a subversive communist.
The recognition of Archbishop Romero’s martyrdom was a decisive moment in the path of the process for his canonization.The martyred Archbishop was elevated to the glory of the altars as a Blessed on May 23, 2015, and was proclaimed a Saint along with Pope Paul VI and five other Blesseds by Pope Francis in the solemn Eucharistic liturgy he presided over in St.
Peter’s Square on October 14, 2018.
In recent days, Fides has re-proposed the stories of 5 martyred men and women missionaries, for whom the process of beatification is underway or has recently concluded.In the series of articles edited by Stefano Lodigiani, the martyrdom of Sister Maria Agustina Rivas was retraced, killed on September 27, 1990 in Peru by the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas; that of Italian doctor Luisa Guidotti, a lay missionary killed in Zimbabwe on July 6, 1979; of the young Pakistani Akash Bashir, killed on 15 March 2015 in Lahore by a suicide bomber, and those of João de Deus Kamtedza and Sílvio Alves Moreira, Jesuit fathers kidnapped and killed in Mozambique on October 30, 1985.
The story of St.Romero, and also those of the new martyrs retraced by Fides (a nun, a laywoman, a young man, two priests) help to perceive the luminous warp that along the history of salvation weaves together martyrdom, apostolic mission and holiness.The Church has never complained about her martyrs.
She has never been reticent in proclaiming that it is they, with their lives torn by force and with pain from bloody deaths inflicted by bloodthirsty executioners, who foretaste the glory of Paradise.They attest and testify to a predilection that makes those very lives embraced and clothed in unparalleled bliss.In the incomparable dynamism of grace, scandal and foolishness to the world, martyrdom and bliss become synonymous.
At the beginning of the Christian story in the world, the title of “martyr”, that is “witness”, was reserved for the Apostles and disciples of Jesus.To those who had been “eyewitnesses” to the life of Christ, his Passion, and death, and had encountered the Risen One.But already during the great persecutions of the first centuries of Christianity, those who were condemned to death “in odium fidei,” because of the faith, also began to be called “martyrs.”
The martyrial connotation accompanies and will always accompany the Church’s journey through history.And the Church will always recognize the intimate and special bond of communion that unites the martyrs to Christ himself and to His mystery of salvation.
For this reason, too, the current legislation on the Causes of Canonization, defined on this point by the Apostolic Constitution Divinus perfectionis Magister, promulgated by John Paul II on January 25, 1983, stipulates that in the procedures for the beatification of a martyr, proof and recognition of a miracle that occurred through the intercession of the person to be beatified is not required.
Martyrdom is recognized as such an evident manifestation of one’s love for God and one’s conformation to Christ that the “confirmation” of the recognition of a miracle is not necessary to affirm that martyrs, all martyrs, are in Heaven.
As St.Augustine writes in Sermon 280, recalling the “dies natalis” of the Roman martyrs Perpetua and Felicita, “just as that One gave his life for us, so the martyrs followed his example and gave their lives for their brethren; even for the purpose of raising a most abundant harvest of peoples, almost sprouts, they irrigated the earth with their blood.Therefore we too are the fruits of their toil.We admire them; they have compassion on us.We rejoice with them, they pray for us”.(Agenzia Fides, 24/3/2023)
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