 All right I'm gonna go ahead and kick us off then as maybe one or two other people are trickle in but I welcome everyone to today's lecture of opportunity on African security issues in the Biden era featuring our very own Naval War College adjunct professor Dr. Richard Loeben. Richard is a professor emeritus of anthropology and African studies from Rhode Island College. We taught there for 35 years and his journey has also taken him to teach at the University of Khartoum, American University in Cairo, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon and Dartmouth. I'd like to sort of portray Richard as a Rhode Island's version of Indiana Jones as an expert in archaeology and a field researcher. He spent a lot of time in Tunis and Egypt and Sudan. He was in Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2011. He's done firsthand reporting of guerrilla conflicts in Eritrea and southern Sudan and Guinea-Bissau. He is fluent in Arabic and French and he also has quite a bit of Spanish and Portuguese and Russian and by the way he's just now at Salva Regina teaching a course in introductory hieroglyphics. So let's count that as another language as well, Richard. And you're also teaching a course on how to run an archaeological dig at Salva. Dr. Loeben has authored many books and articles. Books include Sudan Security, a book on Libya, a book on African insurgencies and those last two were co-written with a Naval War College graduate. He has two new books out, one on ancient Nubia and one on medieval Christianity in Nubia. He added the U.S. Air Force's expeditionary manual on Sudan and South Sudan. He contributed to the do not bomb list in Sudan and in Libya and he admits that he has utterly and entirely failed at retiring. But I think at Richard, actually this is what Wright looks like in terms of retirement because you haven't really retired. He's writing books, he's teaching courses, he's a court-appointed expert witness for political asylum cases for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. He is an active Naval War College adjunct professor, has been with us for 15 years in that role, recently taught courses on ISIS and Al Qaeda and all of this expertise brings us to today's Lou on African security issues in the Biden era. Dr. Loven, sir, over to you. Well, thank you very much and I sure do appreciate Tim's support and Laurel's critical backup. Thank you for the remarks and that lets you students know that I've been doing this for a long time, maybe about, well, I think it's more than getting on to 60 years. I first went to Africa in 64 or so. It's been a while and I haven't been there since last, well, since last January when I was excavating. But anyway, let's start to look at this program. It's African security issues. It's very comprehensive. Usually I do deep drilling into specific issues, particularly counterterrorism or climatology or something like that. But since we have a new administration, this will be things which issues which President Biden could put in his inbox. His inbox is already pretty filled up. But anyway, we can go through these and then when we get to the end, we should have time. There's an error, by the way, on that slide because it should be 1315, not 1350. So we're not going to be spending almost two hours, just an hour and 15 minutes and maybe just one, less than one hour. So there'll be time for comments and questions. Okay, so the bottom of that slide says this is just my ideas. It's not US government or Biden's or anybody's ideas. It's just my ideas. So you can be as critical as you like. All right, Laurel, maybe you can shift to the next slide. Now, because I'm an anthropologist, I think about security in a holistic and comprehensive and integrated way. All of them do relate and do interconnect one way or another. Because of COVID these days and air pollution, I think about health issues as pretty much the most significant. That would be COVID and other water pollution and so forth. We do have terrorism, of course, widespread, particularly in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Needless to say, also in Egypt, we have Ansar Beytel-McDeus and even some cases in eastern Congo. Some of the lubrication for terrorism is from trafficking. Trafficking feeds directly into criminal activities and into terrorist activities. Human trafficking across the Sahara and down the Nile are really particularly evil with many thousands of casualties on the way and crossing the Atlantic in the case of Morocco and of course crossing the Sahara to Libya. Drug and small arms and light weapons and pretty much almost anything can be trafficked to the animals and the bushmeat problem and so forth. Geopolitical issues are certainly high on the security list and some of my students like Jason and Julio and some of the others who are with us today did take my course on Russia and China in Africa this last semester. There are many regional issues and I do think that African security rests on a strategic table of Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and Nigeria and how those countries go. Those regions which they dominate also will be influenced and those four countries today are not doing that well to be frank about it. On a larger level we have many geostrategic issues. Papyracy which has been pretty well tamed in Indian Ocean but still widespread in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Nigeria. Strategic issues about oil bunkering and of course strategic minerals especially like coltan are important. Governance is critical right now Africa is on the kind of a seesaw between abusive power and dictatorships that are coming back and the struggle on the grassroots level for human rights and democracy. Certainly cyber security is a major factor as well and we have somewhat neglected the manipulation of information as well as criminal conspiracies in particularly Nigeria and South Africa. Military security of course both regime security as well as border stability and external security. Frequently military security is focused on protecting the elites particularly if they're military elites and then economic security is of course critical for preservation of markets and meeting the critical needs for employment for the huge youthful population. So there's a very comprehensive understanding that I have for security. Next one please. Now in my classes on security I am inspired by the so-called Maslow hierarchy of human needs and you can see at the bottom physiological or health needs. These are frequently not even resolved so safety and security and so forth and if we can't get above those levels in this hierarchy of human needs there's no way we're going to get to the higher levels of writing constitutions and having due process and civil society or writing poetry. So unfortunately Africa is heavily locked in the bottom two layers of this Maslow hierarchy or Maslow human needs and health security is really foundational and there is a kind of dominance of health security in this particular PowerPoint. Okay next one. So that's what I say the biggest one for Africa and maybe for the world particularly with COVID is human health and diseases kill far more people than the wars or terrorists and it's really critical for readiness military readiness so we can have I remember during the height of COVID in the Pacific there was a whole aircraft carrier with nuclear weapons but it couldn't leave port because there was a COVID epidemic on that ship so we have to be absolutely convinced of the primacy of health security. Next one. And just to put it into a military context to paraphrase Klausowitz who that you've all been reading at some point the battle against COVID is just a war by different means and so if there's a health problem there's a social problem and generates conflicts and thus a military problem and if you think about the Thucydides trap we have the dominant USA is not able to confront this extremely tiny enemy of COVID. Nuclear bombs clash and the cops aren't going to defeat COVID so we have you know this Thucydides trap of course has the dominant power must be defensive and the insurgent power must be on the offensive the insurgent power of course is COVID in this particular case so it might be a way to think about it. All right next one. Now none of these problems the health problems are anything new. COVID is just especially problematic these days but Africa is heavily infested with parasitic diseases waterborne particularly through snails and so forth, bacterial infections especially cholera and these kinds and then the viral diseases that of course that's what we have these days and even Africa has already sourced one of the new forms the new variant forms of COVID-19 from South Africa and it seems like it might be heading to the US as well as the new English variant. Okay next one. So for the parasitic diseases we got all these nasty things the skin diseases ectoparasitic that affect the skin surface of the skin then the waterborne ones that come out through your eyes and through blood vessels and are transmitted through like a scariest worms through contaminated meat and then we have the protozoan varieties these are in almost entirely in have a water vector malaria of course is through the mosquitoes but they have to have a water waterborne period trapanosomiasis sleeping sickness leishmaniasis there's a lot of nasty diseases and anytime militaries either african militaries or american you know african visiting militaries they have to be concerned about these because they will become problems next one so african mortality there are a lot of ways to be sick you can see that some of the big ones are cholera and meningitis maybe next one measles and so although this is declining COVID was not known until 2019 of course how it got its name AIDS has also been a very big problem and still can be managed but it hasn't yet been cured so there are many ways to be sick and visiting soldiers and sailors have to be alert to that otherwise they will diminish their security readiness next one please so the bacterial this is not really a health course you can see the bacterial infections in unclean dusty unsanitary environments stds for example upper respiratory and gastroenteritis are extremely significant factors that can destroy armies destroy populations and cause a great deal of insecurity so we won't dwell on all those but plenty of things to think about in terms of health security next one if you have some spare time although i think the war college keeps everybody pretty busy and if you're either french or english is okay you can read camoos novel about algeria the plague that they had in 1947 just after world war two and there were many other cases of plagues and so forth algeria has one of the most serious cases one of the high incidents algeria south africa in egypt are some of the more seriously affected so that's for your spare time reading next one the all these nasty diseases remember how we heard about ebola and marburg well it's not solved there have been some recent outbreaks in eastern congo maybe western uganda even in the last few days rabies it's extremely can be stopped but it's extremely deadly if it's not addressed rapidly from either wilder dogs or other kinds of things hiv aids still a big problem in africa although it can be now managed polio and smallpox should be over but there are places where the public education epidemiological education is not inadequate for example in afghanistan and nigeria and then we have some of these other nasty things zika we remember how we were all worried about zika and ebola going to take over the world well they have been you know managed and limited but take note of of these diseases okay next one and so here's our favorite current disease remembering that it's novel because it wasn't seen before and we're already replacing it with other variants it's co maybe because it's corona shaped like a sunshine it's a v because virus and it's d because it's a disease and it's got 19 on the end of it from 2019 when it's out of control when it's under control tests are critical for tracking when it's out of control like it basically is these days particularly in brazil in some countries in africa that i mentioned and in the u.s then we just have to have the herd immunity by widespread vaccination so if you haven't had your first shot go get it if you need your second shot go get it because it's in everybody's interest okay next one so many implications for coven because the infrastructure in africa is weak informational infrastructure the practical infrastructure ventilators icus all these things which are needed to to fight against coven are in weak supply in in africa health pre-existing health conditions which you know are co covariant with coven are also widespread diabetes in particular in obesity malnutrition those are going to make more serious problems for the spread of coven in africa one maybe slightly good news is that there's not a large senior population because short life expectancy and so mortality in africa is pretty high because of all the infrastructural weaknesses but it's a very serious problem next one so because of the health insecurity political security has to be addressed we found that coven even in our own country in the u.s became a political problem and so effective political leadership and public education are critical to have trust and an effective delivery of vaccines otherwise we get into political destabilization i haven't seen any really good evidence yet in the world of counterterrorism kinetic issues but you know many of the terrorist insurgencies in the saw hell and horn of africa shabab al qaeda and all these others probably have less infrastructure and so maybe we'll see if they become even more desperate with more deaths just because they have even worse infrastructure so not to say i'm wishing you know poor health to them but that's a factor which might be worth worth looking at the effects of uh of coven 19 on the terrorist groups next one so economic security needless to say with our own countries facing economic problems because of coven unemployment has skyrocketed ditto for africa businesses will close in america and in africa uh manufacture has declined as companies can't uh function and the direct implication of that taxes and tolls will be reduced because the economy is reduced sales disrupted and for africa all these things are already under stress and consequently we can only imagine uh that they will get worse if i didn't make it clear enough already uh coven and all the other health security dimensions are global and we cannot deal with them uh regionally or just but country by country we have to have a framework which is integrated comprehensive and globalized okay next one needs us to say uh food security is going to be disrupted populations are displaced populations cannot uh meet the meet the markets and since food is at the bottom of the maslow hierarchy of human needs we need to address this with uh effective logistics measures uh with uh looking at the disease vectors in particular right next one thank you um so needs us to say because of my view that this is holistic and integrated uh cultural security is going to be uh required um cultural security bringing uh you know um dominant groups have to be checked against the subordinate groups who will be more displaced and displacement from uh cultural from health and epidemiological and particularly climatological displacement are very much a factor as we know in poor populations domestic abuse alcohol abuse drug abuse all these things will be increased when there are social cultural stress uh and of course social distancing which is required for addressing uh some controls of coven it's very difficult in the increasingly urbanized countries where we have many mega cities chiro uh you know legos and and and so forth mega cities it's very difficult uh to have the social distancing to control uh disease okay next one so um with poor governance uh we find poor control over air and water pollution that's for sure uh some of the roadways are poor so we find one relatively high cause of death in africa are tracked traffic accidents um so all these things have to be to be addressed with poverty we find poaching and trafficking especially of bushmeat latest research in china seems to indicate that one of the principal sources of uh of covid-19 was eating bushmeat while meat particularly uh you know bats and other animals like that that was how Ebola started by eating eating bats in Liberia and Guinea Conakry okay next one now uh having had malaria three times myself I can say one time I just about to make it but this is one of the waterborne diseases which are uh epidemic in uh in Africa it can be treated with chloroquine by the way not so good for covid-19 and there are negative effects of any of the chloroquine or quinine derivatives but if you get deployed either on a partnership basis or whatever make sure you do take your pills although I must say I'm a bit cynical about that because I was taking my pills every time that I got malaria anyway take note of that next one and AIDS we can see uh maybe it's not so well reported uh but we do know that southern Africa is the worst case for uh for AIDS it is managed with the uh various cocktails but certainly in poverty conditions where we find prostitution is required to sustain the economy then we find uh high incidents of of of AIDS HIV AIDS particularly in central and southern Africa so mind your manners if you happen to be deployed to those areas okay next one so urbanization um and population security does connect I think every single solitary problem in the world and in Africa has a covariant with population increased populations uh should not necessarily cause problems but they often do because it means resources housing resources road resources food resources water resources every kind of resource is going to be stretched that much more by population insecurity either to say you've got cultural variables about fertility and mortality and birth control and family planning and so those have to be handled with uh care and caution uh relative to cultural sensitivity uh but of course we do find that uh large families were favored in the past in the past decades because there was such high mortality so if we can reduce the high infant mortality in particular and replace it by family planning then we can get some uh handle on the issues of population which do of course stress absolutely every single other factor okay next one so in the case of COVID this is from almost a year ago and a few things have stayed the same and a few things got worse for the last data that I could see just before the class started Algeria is actually much worse South Africa is still really bad Nigeria is probably getting worse and parts of East Africa particularly in the Horn of Africa getting worse because there has been so much conflict now in Ethiopia against Oromo and against Tigray with populations drifting in refugee populations into Sudan and then we have the failed states for example Somalia's Republic of South Sudan and Libya all failed states and maybe eastern Congo is pretty much almost a failed state with war also in Cameroon these are going to just make the situation for COVID and all the other vectors of health much worse next one so this was a year ago and these countries were with the exception of Sudan which just seems to be about stabilizing it's not really good but Nigeria big population coastal population of Algeria big those top three or the top four really stay very high in terms of casualties and infection rates for for COVID next one by comparison the 10 worst cases were these on the on the on the left and number four and five US and South Africa are still extremely high Israel is from all state but it has cultural factors of some of the orthodox are very reluctant to to get vaccinations that's pretty high rate in Brazil also very high and increasing Oman was terrible but at various points we had a whole bunch of American states you know Florida Louisiana Mississippi and so forth which had actually worse states worse rates of COVID even then Oman which a year ago was one of the worst for capita okay next one so I think this is pretty much covered and the only thing I want to mention in this is that last line that we when we rely on World Health Organization data we are hoping that the data are accurate but we actually know that that's not the case poor data collection and sometimes political repression from making high COVID rates politically unacceptable so we really don't know with great precision so we have this sort of the tip of the iceberg and anytime you have over let's even say 8% or 10% infection rates we got a serious problem and those are some of the countries where that's the case besides North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, South Africa, Egypt next one now finally I think we've covered the health adequately but I just wanted to give it a priority and in this chart I'm sorry it's not very clear but you can see that the frequency of conflicts especially across the Sahel do correlate with desertification and climate change every one of these across the Sahel is the conjuncture of the desert Sahara desert or other deserts like in the Ogaden and the rainforest and it's now a surprise I'm not a climatological determinist but you have to have your head buried in the Saharan sand to fail to see that that there is a strong correlation between desertification climate change and impactation of climate with conflict so for example in Nigeria we've got Boko Haram in Mali and Burkina Faso we've got Ansar Adin and MLA and then Al Qaeda and of course in Ethiopia we have these new movements with Oremo, North South Sudan is just never really settled and in Shabaab in the Horn of Africa it's still destabilizing the Somalia so climate climatology epidemiology population pressure desertification all do triangulate if you make a Venn diagram you can see that when all those things converge we're almost guaranteed to have conflict okay next one so I think we've covered this in earlier slides but I think it should be really clear that when these factors are convergent it's going to be a serious of course health problem but then we have to have both defensive and offensive tactics to deal with the counterterrorism that does emerge to confront in African insurgencies all right next one and on this topic I do have you know a whole book on African insurgency that was written by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Dalton former War College student and myself and this is an inventory from the colonial to the era to the present time and we can talk a great deal about these I usually have a whole course just on on these groups ISIS clones al Qaeda and Maghreb Ansar Sharia in Egypt Paul Isario in Western Sahara Boko Ram in Chad Basin Lake Chad Basin Nigeria and Niger and Bosonia insurgency amongst Anglophone against Francophone people in Cameroon the ADF it's a ISIS-based group in the eastern Congo the LRA seems to be a bit quiet but anyway and Dominic Angwin of the LRA just has been sentenced to life in the Hague the NMLA the national liberation movement for Azawad the Berber group they are still functioning and we find even in eastern Senegal some clones of those guys are around Ansar Betha Maghdees in Egypt in Sinai Darfur insurgency is not completely solved Shabab of course in Somalia so these if you are interested send me email and and you can buy this book it's a sort of encyclopedic on all these particular groups but they do descend from the convergence of all the factors which we've done the deep drilling into in the first part of this elective opportunity next one now as I mentioned this is just on cocaine trafficking but doesn't make much difference you can change it to marijuana change it to cocaine change it to heroin particularly from South America from Colombia from Brazil from so forth and it goes up the Atlantic coast past Canaries to destabilizing that area the Transaharan routes and then of course we have East African counterparts so any of these trafficking mission trafficking enterprises whether it's drugs the south bound small arms and light weapons from the collapse of the Libyan state and then human trafficking up especially these days through Libya where thousands of people have already died in the Mediterranean and then they in turn destabilize Italy France and England to become my clients frequently for political asylum cases so all of these things feed the degradation of human rights feed slavery feed neo slavery feed terrorism because these are all criminal outright criminal operations or actually organized insurgent groups that I've just mentioned next one so this is just a little bit more about the trafficking statistics and you can see that particularly for women they're heavily involved in prostitution because they have no resources to do anything else and the well the largest number of people are actually in Asia Southeast Asia Africa certainly has its sad share of trafficking and of course mostly their economic refugees political refugees climatological refugees that causes the displacement and people willing to subject themselves to abusive and repressive measures the sort of neo slavery next one so here's another example you can see that the western part is as a result of Boko Ram and Amazonia DRC in the middle has got people coming from Uganda Rwanda Burundi and going back to Rwanda and Burundi and that so-called darkest spot of Africa South Sudan bordering DRC Central African Republic and Ethiopia is highly destabilized it's a truly a failed state I was recently in Ethiopia and Somaliland Eritrea as well and it wasn't particularly stable then relatively repressive struggling to be democratic but not having a big success and this region of Africa is one of the most neglected the most difficult to solve we'll look a little bit more closely at the Central African Republic when we get to Russia and Africa next one so here's a visual image of how these overcrowded vessels try to go from Libya to Italy to to Lampedusa and so forth with of course thousands dying and particularly abused on the on the way held in ransom and so forth very very tragic in the human terms next one so needless to say in this fairly grim picture with so many convergent negative things water security for drinking for agriculture and for good health is highly vulnerable look at that diagram on the on the upper left fresh water is just 2% of the world's water so hardly have any and then where is most of that fresh water it's locked up in ice maybe some melting these days so we have just a very very small fraction of available water for human needs which is fundamental and critical back to the Maslow hierarchy of human needs and you can see in this conflict picture on the right hand side that it correlates strongly with with the climatological variables of desertification if you don't have enough water you don't have enough food if you don't have enough food you have famine famine gives rise to crisis and displacement and then there we go back to trafficking that circle is completed once again next one since I love looking at climates and this is after all an American naval college in case you thought African climates weren't related here's a history of hurricanes hitting the in the north Atlantic only all starting in Cape Verde islands in west Africa never going east always going west because of the Coriolis effect which the globe is rotating eastward so the hurricanes go westward and always having the intertropical convergence zone the ITCZ always causing that's high pressure from the north and low pressure from the south always causing counter-psychotic a rotation and this of course also represents rotate movements of the north Atlantic gyre which if we go back into history this was the middle passage and the Gulf stream for the triangle trade of the slave trade the slave trade of course was just trafficking which made America rich okay next one now I mentioned in the Central African Republic we have some pretty alarming cases of the Wagner group the Wagner group is directly under control of Vladimir Putin and if you get any pregosin who's above above him and then Dimitri Utkin on the top these are the sort of private mercenary army they were heavily involved they still are heavily involved in Syria but in the case of Central African Republic Putin has invested his elements these mercenary groups to look into diamond and gold business and when some reporters were sent there to investigate they were assassinated by assassins from the Wagner group uh they are their biggest involvement right now is in Libya and they have been key in backing the government well the attempted government of Khalifa Heftar in eastern Libya where most of the oil is I have a great deal of anxiety about them there's there's no democratic control they usually go with no insignia on their uniforms and they are directly responsive to to the FSB which you can see the Russian version and the GRU basically CIA and and military intelligence of Russia so this is something that has to be put into the equation next one so this is there is uh on the top picture there's one of the generals of Putin meeting Khalifa Heftar Libya is a big prize small population massive amounts of of oil strategic position in the Mediterranean and of course uh Putin is a big supporter of Egypt and Heftar partly because they are major rivals to Turkey and so on the geostrategic level native Turkey is still in our NATO alliance although maybe sometimes not so helpful uh and they have their own rivalry to to um to Russia for their own geostrategic reasons so at the macro level in Africa we have some very important things to keep into the equation okay next one uh in case you didn't know and probably every one of you has a cell phone and uh within the cell phone besides the gold and copper is Coltan and Coltan is heavily from Africa uh it's mined under terrible conditions uh it's trafficked it's one of the valuably uh trafficked minerals and um and of course Coltan and of course blood diamonds are also heavily trafficked and not well maintained easily transportable in small scales high value so take note about that I'm not sure how we can fully address Coltan Coltan is columbium tanzanite if you'd like to know the full uh mineral name of it next one uh now of course we have had so much discussion about fake news and hoaxes and all this big problem in Africa too we have uh the normal criminals like the 519 schemes in Nigeria and South Africa where they're just a bunch of self-serving crooks uh you know with different fraudulent schemes but then when we get to the informational security and control of information I think we're familiar with that as a domestic issue or European issue or Asian issue it's also an issue in the less uh democratic regimes in Africa where there's not freedom of press and so forth so uh this is at the at the 10 000 foot level of major issues that have to be addressed and we do now have within our DOD we do have a cybersecurity branch and maybe AFRICOM will have to upgrade uh its role uh relative to Africa next one so these are some of the you know this is from South Africa but this is uh some of the uh issues that have to be addressed uh and if they're neglected then of course we have serious problems both in uh in information control and of course in criminal conspiracies and and such next one now it may be forgotten but on that lower left you can see that there are many undersea cables around Africa and they have to be monitored particularly in the places that are very deep and we have Russian and Chinese probably submarines looking into that and of course where they come out of the uh of the undersea you know landings these are highly vulnerable and they can can completely shut down uh cyber networks I remember when I was living in Egypt well during the Arab spring uh there was a ship that had accidentally just dragged across one of these cables dragged its anchor and all of Egypt internet was shut down until they could identify the problem so clearly this is a for the naval war college is something that has to be addressed and understood as a serious vulnerability next one I think that we we need with uh maybe re strengthened the Department of State and the whole of government and with african having the whole of government all of the various ministries health education so forth needs to be redouble there were some unfortunate remarks made about Africa by the past administration and if we hope to get uh those four strategic countries Egypt Ethiopia Nigeria and South Africa back on a reasonable uh path towards democracy and human rights so that we can fight terrorism and fight trafficking then we need to have strong leadership in the United States government in these soft power dimensions Russia needs great caution in my opinion China needs serious competition we're more or less 20 years behind China if we can get going again the failed states and troubled regions need much more stability dictatorships need to be isolated and sanctions it's a gigantic menu for the biden administration next one next here we are so bottom line we're getting to the towards the end so we'll have enough time for some questions and comments sure biden's got so many things on the inbox but africa cannot be neglected by us uh government by department of state by do d do e all of the uh branches of our government some security problems in africa are global and need global attention climate and health that we've been emphasizing uh today other securities are regional and they can also be addressed by by african which does in principle have a whole of us government and then by the partnerships for example the state uh international guards and so forth that partner with african countries some of course are just national and the us needs to lead on these renewed and credible supports for the national problems problems so the first step for the biden administration is what what are the problems i've given a big inventory of those what are the global ones and for that taxonomy what are the regional ones and what are the national ones and if you begin to differentiate uh the security issues on those three levels global regional and national then at least you can prioritize and figure out the right tools which could be applied to addressing these security issues uh next one so uh a little bit cynical conclusion people are asking these days who's still doing uh nails and hair uh your local mortician is doing them so stay home keep your masks on i have kind of taken mine off a little bit uh keep social distance wash your hands and get your vaccine i think that might be the last slide let me see go ahead if it's the last one then it's time for your comments