I like this:

CAPE TOWN. After 28 years of silently tolerating it, a group of unemployed local musicians have joined forces to release a Christmas single, entitled ‘Yes we do,’  in response to the Bob Geldof inspired Band Aid song, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’

Thankyou to Tim Worstall for spotting this.

Speaking at the launch of the single, whose proceeds will go towards teaching discipline, literacy and contraception at British schools, composer and singer Boomtown Gundane said that for years he had been irked by Geldof’s assumption that hungry Africans were also stupid.

Sadly, it's a joke. But quite a good one, I think.

Legitimately self-made African billionaires are harbingers of hope. Though few in number, they are growing more common. They exemplify how far Africa has come and give reason to believe that its recent high growth rates may continue. The politics of the continent’s Mediterranean shore may have dominated headlines this year, but the new boom south of the Sahara will affect more lives.

From Ghana in the west to Mozambique in the south, Africa’s economies are consistently growing faster than those of almost any other region of the world. At least half a dozen have expanded by more than 6 per cent a year for six or more years.

The Economist, 3 December, page 77. (Behind the magazine's paywall, so thank me for typing it out for you). The magazine has a nice study of the continent, laying out the continued problems but also the many bright spots. There is a handy map showing which countries have the fastest and slowest GDP growth rates, with the fastest rates in black (Ethiopia, at 7.5 per cent), then red, lighter red, all the way down to the deadbeats, in white. Of course, in looking at percentage rises or falls in growth, it pays to remember that statistics can be highly misleading (hardly a surprise to any skeptics of government, of course) and it is easy to rise fast from a low base. But still, these numbers are indicative of a more positive picture.

Needless top say, Zimbabwe came at the bottom of the growth league. It remains a grim lesson in how collectivism, cronyism and debauchery of money spell disaster. If parts of Africa are beginning to understand the follies of this and start to make serious money, that is excellent news. For a start, refugees from the hellholes of the continent might, instead of entering sclerotic Europe, choose to make a life in a more congenial place elsewhere.

Of course, there have been false dawns before. But with the flood of money entering the continent from China (after all that commodity wealth), I have a feeling that the rise of Africa has some staying power, particularly given the young demographics. Of course, it could all be messed up from things such as a rise of global protectionism.

George Monbiot begins a banker-bashing article in the Guardian with these words,

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

Inevitable result? That is a lot to ask, in Africa or anywhere.

If in most of Africa in the last half-century the probable, or, Dear God, the permitted, result of the hard work and enterprise of women - or men - had been a modest increase in wealth, and not, as it mostly was, the expropriation of whatever you had gained and a chance to be murdered as a hoarder or class enemy by whatever Derg or other bunch of socialist thugs was calling itself the government that week, why, then Africa might have thrown off poverty the way Taiwan and South Korea did.

As Adam Smith said, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." Let us remember those who died in avoidable famines because that "little else" was too much to ask from Africa's leaders, and from their Guardian reading admirers.

Even Africa is now slowly but surely getting richer, now that the worst of the folly has been thrown off. Inevitable wealth as the result of enterprise and hard work was not necessary to bring about this result. Just a half-decent chance at it.

Gaddafi summarily executed by Libyan rebels... the world is a better place today than it was yesterday.

Lets hope this puts the right idea in people's heads elsewhere.

Andy Janes has just bought one of these:

He paid £1.70. Not bad. But how many pounds will such a thing cost in a few years time?

Have a nice weekend.

Following on from Perry's post immediately below this one, I see that Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines), has, by his standards, a pretty long, and more significantly, very strongly worded item pointing to all the various links between the late, unlamented Labour government, and the equally unlamented Libyan dictator. I wonder how Tony Blair regrets that photo of him shaking hands with Gaddaffi?

Maybe not. Maybe, Blair might argue, that yes, the guy was and is a bastard, but he came clean about his own WMD programmes in 2003 after Saddam was toppled and to that limited extent, it was right for the West to "reward" those countries run by people who had shown some signs of seeing sense. But the trouble with this sort of realpolitik is that it requires a country like Britain to turn a sort of Nelsonian blind eye to the manifest wickedness of a regime and its past. And let's not be partisan here: the same calculations have been taken by rightwing administrations as well. Such statecraft is an ugly business, and not a place for high-falutin sanctimony. That said, the deal to release the guy blamed for the Lockerbie massacre, only to see how this release was treated by the Libyan authorities, stank to high heaven. It also unnecessarily has damaged relations between the UK and US.

As for what happens next, I haven't the foggiest idea.

Praveen Swami, diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a good piece - although I might quibble on one or two points - concerning the problem of Somali piracy, about which I have written several times here at Samizdata. I am not going to add further comment to what I have already said, but I was impressed by this article and a longish comment attached to it by a person with the signature of "IgonikonJack". It is pretty good. And another, by "itzman", refers to the issue of "letters of marque".

A related point is that I have been reading Wired for War, by PW Singer, and it has fascinating things to say about some remarkable new technologies as apply not just in areas such as robotics and pilotless aircraft - those "drones" - also in the innovations now under way in the nautical world. They will surely play a part in any move to suppress piracy, but as Singer points out, the bad guys can increasingly get their hands on technology as well, and often by entirely legitimate means. This is all the more reason why libertarians, who are sometimes at the cutting edge of thinking about alternatives to government-imposed laws, as in the case of legal writer Bruce Benson, should get involved in how to address issues such as piracy.

In the Daily Telegraph article I link to, is the fact that, at the time of writing, more than 1,000 people are being held hostage by Somali pirates. If the same amount of people had been taken hostage on civil airliners, say, I think the major powers of the world might have adopted a more robust view by now.

Others have been complaining about how long it has taken, but I have been surprised at the speed with which the West has responded to events in Libya, and have been unable to shake the feeling, until today actually, that the reports I was reading were send-ups for comic purposes of some kind.

I am an agnostic about Western intervention in foreign parts rather than an outright atheist, but I respect the atheist position and deeply fear the true believer, "nation building" idea. Governments are good at destroying stuff, but tend to be shambolic at any kind of creativity. The more creative they try to be, the more destructive they typically end up being. People do creative, not governments.

This operation seems to be mostly destructive, which is all to the good. I think it reasonable to hope that it accomplishes some good, rather than only fearful that it will all go horribly wrong.

The West's leaders are telling Gadaffi that maybe he can rule his country, but not the way he has been for the last fortnight or so. Bombing it and shelling it into submission is not allowed. Do that and we'll do the same to you. Govern your country with riot police. Maybe arrange some elections, and then fix them. Bribe people into supporting you, rather than just killing them like they are armed soldiers. Above all, and now I'm going by what David Cameron said this afternoon, don't announce ceasefires and promise them to your fellow members of the Head of Government Club, but then not deliver them.

This was one of the big things that Saddam Hussein did wrong, as I understand that earlier story. He didn't just invade Kuwait. He told other members of the Head of Government Club that he wouldn't. Lying to your people is okay. They all do that. That's business as usual. But lying to fellow members of the Head of Government Club is not the done thing. Do it and you get blackballed, by which is meant that your armed underlings, the basis of your power, get slaughtered. Provided, that is, you are not bossing a serious power, and Westerners slaughtering your underlings would start a serious war, as opposed to an "asymmetric" war (i.e. a slaughter of your slaughterers).

LOL!!!: Just watched a British military talking-head-in-a-suit on the BBC, when asked to say what success for this operation would mean, say: "removing Saddam", and then hurriedly correct himself.

Some people may remember Natalie Solent writing a post on Samizdata about statist developments in Kenya (a post inspired by a BBC report - of all things).

Predictably a from-central-casting leftist commenter turned up - accusing Natalie Solent (and even nice, gentle, fluffy me) of lies, ignorance...

Well Glenn Beck has actually read the new Kenyan Constitution, passed last week (even I could think of better things to do than read the small print of the new Kenyan Constitution - for example pluck out some of my nose hairs, so if Glenn wants to use his failing eyes to read the thing for the rest us...) and he read out sections of it on Monday, live on his show.

There is a list of "positive" rights (i.e. nice things the government must do for you) - wild promises of health, education, and so on. The idea that these can be afforded even in a developed economy (in the long term) is problematic - as for in an economy like Kenya, the idea is absurd.

Also (as even the Economist magazine admitted - although, of course, it supported the new Constitution) large areas of what are presently privately owned land can now be taken by the government.

Lastly - we have an interesting definition of "freedom of speech" (the very thing that Natalie was pointing to) . "Hate speech" is excluded from "free speech" protection - and hate speech is defined as an attack on a group, or an individual (which just about covers everything one might use a right to free speech to do). I am sure that Frank Lloyd (President Barack Obama's "Diversity" Commissar at the Federal Communications Commission) would love to introduce such a Constitution in the United States (no naughty Fox News, or talk radio or internet to upset him any more), Kenya may even replace the Venezuela of President Chevez as his favourite country.

Although there are no explicit use of words like "Marxism", the style in which the Kenyan Constitution is written (and a lot of the content - see above) is very much like the old Soviet Constitution - not a nasty, negative, set of limitations on government power like the United States Constitution.

Almost needless to say Comrade Barack Obama spent a lot of money making sure the new Kenyan Constitution was passed - although Glenn Beck did not mention that point. Although Glenn did mention that this sort of Constitution was the "Dream" of Barack Obama's Marxist pro Soviet father (not to be confused with his Marxist mother or socialist maternal grandparents, or his Marxist childhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis, or his fellow Marxists in New York whilst a post grad, or the Marxists he worked with for his whole adult life in Chicago, or his Marxist Liberation Theology Minister for twenty years Rev. J. Wright or...), as made clear (if one reads carefully) in Barack Obama's own first book "Dreams..."

A friend of mine has looked into the Kenyan constitution - I hope I do not have to read it (i.e. I am forced to when some moron, or paid hack, comes along and say it is a wonderful example of truly limited government), from the sound of even this bit it seems like the Constitutional document equivalent of a snuff film.

His initial comments were:

I'll stick to other countries' coffee now, the rights enumerated are amazing, even goods and services. Why didn't Marx think of simply enumerating legal rights to plenty? Were the massacres encouraged as a reason for the new Constitution? Clause 10 is bad enough; 34 (4); 43; 66, 73 etc.

How do I enforce my rights (were I Kenyan) under 43 (1) (c): By not paying in a restaurant? Everyone is obliged to uphold the Constitution 3 (1). OK, start saving up for the Famine relief now...

No wonder the Economist magazine supported it (no I am not saying they are Marxists - they are just whores who always try and get into bed with the powerful) and Comrade Barack spent American tax money to make sure it passed.

The BBC reports, utterly uncritically, "Kenya launches text service to stop hate speech"

A new text service to report hate speech in Kenya has been launched ahead of a referendum on a new constitution.

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission, set up after the 2007 post-poll violence in which some 1,300 people were killed, will monitor it.

"If hate speech is reported, we will be able to respond within 12 hours," NCIC head Mzalendo Kibinja told the BBC.

Respond how, exactly? Do they mean issue a statement rebutting the hateful arguments, or do they mean arrest someone?

Mr Kibinja said some people still find it difficult to report their concerns to the authorities.

Because of a commendable reluctance to criminalise speech? Apparently not:

"Sometimes people give up, they don't want go to the police station because they think nothing will be done," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

NCIC's Millie Lwanga said the free SMS number - 6397 - was established thanks to $700,000 (£459,400) received from international donors, Kenya's Daily Nation paper reports.

I would be interested to know who these foreign donors were, and whether they were individuals or organisations. I wouldn't be surprised to see the EU helping Africa to try out systems to control free speech that it would like to introduce in Europe - but this is pure speculation on my part.

It could be that this initiative is being misreported, and that a fashionable concern with "hate speech" has been semi-randomly stuck on the label of what is actually a police hotline for people to report mobs gathering or incitement to specific criminal acts.

I hope so. Yes, I do know that Kenya has suffered severe violence after past elections. No, I do not want a repeat of this. But telling informers that their denunciations will be acted upon within twelve hours is not the way to promote civil society. It does not even succeed in reducing violence. The delator and the mob thrived together in ancient Rome.

Some days ago I went via Instapundit to an article about how the surge of Pentecostalism in Africa may help America in the War on Terror, and from there to this Pew Forum article on the global rise of Christianity, especially in Africa. Very much especially in Africa.

It may even be beating Islam.

I would guess I am a lot happier about Africa's emerging Age of Faith (in its Christian variety at least; I fear Islam) than most of you reading this post. Yet I cannot repress a sense of disquiet when I remember that there are more people in Africa who think the freeing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga a bad thing than think it a good thing. If there is a similar case next year the margin will probably be larger; and eventually that will change what happens. Western pressure will no longer work. Indeed, the boot may be on the other foot: the Pew article also says that there are already something like 2,000 Christian missionaries from Asia and Africa at work in Great Britain. Hard work at the moment, but that could change. Most people in the West assume that religion must inevitably decline as the world becomes richer and better educated. I tend to assume, gloomily, that its decline proceeds as the world embraces state welfare. But even the tide on Dover beach turns some day.

I do rejoice for my African brothers and sisters and my political fears may not come to pass. A fervent Christianity can be and has been a force for political freedom. Vile, cruel and hypocritical as the history of the United States is, it is slightly less vile, cruel and hypocritical than that of most nations - they never quite forgot that the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower were Puritans fleeing persecution rather than instituting it.

Even the teetering balance between Christianity and Islam might do for Africa what the teetering balance between Protestantism and Catholicism did for Europe: let secularism sneak in as the second best option for all sides.

Or we might do a great deal worse. The other rising tide in the world is that of the global progressive elite, the Tranzis. For the first time in human history there is no technological obstacle to a world government. That I have long feared but now a new fear joins it. Barefoot religion meets the bureaucratic, unitary state, how does that work?

Perhaps, led by Africa, we are moving towards something like the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.

So how is Zimbabwe doing these days? According to this article, linked to yesterday by Patrick Crozier, things are actually improving. Patrick quotes this bit:

Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products.

While reading this article, I could not shake the feeling that I was really reading a piece of libertarian science fiction. Could they really have done anything so very sensible, and could things really be improving so definitely? The piece does appear to be genuine, so far as I can tell, but if it turns out to be fantasy-fiction, this paragraph will get me off the credulity hook. File under maybe true but maybe too good to be true.

Meanwhile, if the piece really is true, the best bit of all in it is that there is now no "lender of last resort" in Zimbabwe. Could it be that libertarian economic policy - in particular libertarian banking policy - is about to get a serious test, which it will pass, and hence another serious showcase, highly pertinent given the world's current banking woes, to educate the world with? How will socialism and state-centralism get the credit for that I wonder?

If genuine, this piece reminds me of a vivid British recollection from way back. Someone on the telly asked a City commentator, just after Black Wednesday (the day in 1992 when John Major's economic policies collapsed in ruins), what the prospects were now for the British economy. Well, he said, now that the government has not got a policy, rather good.

The late Peter (Lord) Bauer, a Hungarian-born economist who lived for much of his life in the UK, did outstanding work in demonstrating why markets and trade are superior to overseas aid, and pointed out how aid, and the organisations that often get involved in delivering it, frequently make problems of poverty worse, not better. Even aid advocates like Sir Bob Geldof will readily concede, meanwhile, that aid delivery becomes next to impossible during conditions of war, and when countries are under the rule of armed thugs. So last night's Channel 4 programme on Somalia will have surprised few regulars at this blog.

What was interesting was how local traders were allegedly bribing some aid officials to take sacks of food and then sell it into the market. We were meant to be appalled by this, and part of me was. But also I also could not ignore the fact that this part of Africa seems to be buzzing with a sort of entrepreneurial class of men - one did not see many women - who trade in, and take great efforts to obtain, food and other stuff. That surely suggests that a market, of sorts, works in this part of the world. But what clearly does not work is the rule of law, or the enforcement of property rights. Without due protection for the latter, in particular, then the indestructible desire to "truck and barter" can all too easily degrade into a form of banditry. But let's be clear here: while one can be nauseated at foreign aid being filched by some of the locals, that desire to trade is not, in itself, the problem. It is, in fact, part of the solution to the poverty of Africa.

Meanwhile, I strongly recommend William Easterly's book on foreign aid and the mistakes that well-intentioned folk make about aid.

General Edmond Rasolomahandry . . . President Marc Ravalomanana . . . opposition leader Andry Rajoelina . . . Colonel Noel Ndriarijoana: newsreaders everywhere are praying for a swift resolution to the crisis.

- Mick Hartley notes the possibility of civil war in Madagascar

Chinese crew used beer bottles to fight off pirates

While I salute the captain and crew of the Zhenua 4, I cannot help thinking that guns might have been more convenient. What, exactly, is the difficulty over providing them?

Danny Finkelstein has noticed something highly dubious about the coverage of the Zimbabwe catastrophe by BBC veteran foreign correspondent, John Simpson.

To put it bluntly, Simpson is an over-rated arse who seems to bend over backwards to present Mugabe's actions in a favourable, or at least not unfavourable, light. I have found that too much of his coverage, while affecting the "Our brave correspondent in Godforsaken Country etc" often glides over serious problems and issues. He is often wheeled out by the Great and The Good as the example of the impartial British journalist, so much better than all those simplistic Americans with their strange ideas about right and wrong. Sorry, I am not buying it. For sure, unlike some people, I do not regard the BBC's foreign coverage as an unmitigated evil, but stuff like this does not exactly help.

Thanks for Stephen Pollard for the tip.

There seems, finally, to be a concerted effort going on to rid Zimbabwe of its appalling President, Robert Mugabe. The disgust felt by the entire civilised world at from the farce of the recent Zimbabwean election, won in the first round by the opposition but now about to be scrubbed out by pure force, was too much even for President Mbeki of South Africa to resist. Today Nelson Mandela made a short speech giving voice, finally, to his disgust at Mugabe's behaviour. And now that Mandela has spoken, Britain has felt able to chip in by forbidding a Zimbawe cricket visit to Britain next year, and by stripping Mugabe of a knighthood of a particularly grand and vacuous variety that was conferred upon him some years ago. As the Tesco adverts say, every little helps.

But Mugabe will never go merely because of trivial indignities such as those. He has no better nature to be appealed to, no shame. It is being said that if South Africa pulls the plug in some way on the Mugabe regime, that will finish it. I hope that some time during the next few days or weeks, we will all get the chance to see if that's true. When the lights don't work inside Mugabe's palaces, when the electric fences guarding him stop hurting anyone, when his bodyguards don't know where their next meal is to come from, then that will indeed be the end of him, and this can't come too soon for the wretched people of the country he has ruined. It's all very Shakespearian.

I don't know if Mr Brown will deserve any particular credit for such an outcome, if and when it finally materialises. I recall Mr Brown lining himself up some weeks ago with all this anti-Mugabe activity, speaking out against this grotesque man at the UN or some such place. But I suspect that this was only done then so noisily and so newsworthily because this was about the only uncontroversially respectable policy that Mr Brown still had on his desk at that time, which was, you will recall, a time of impending elections. I remember at around that same time speculating that Mugabe would outlast Brown. I hope that this turns out to be wrong, or, if right, that this is because Mr Brown succumbs to mysterious medical problems brought on by Labour Party fundraising difficulties, some time during the next few days.

We will know that South Africa does not have the stomach to support freedom and democracy for this vulnerable country. Zimbabweans must now exercise their Lockean right of self preservation to exterminate this kleptocratic elite who deny them consent and rob them of their property.

Good luck to them!

But not green television the way you think. South African blogger 6000 is "not sure where this came from originally or if it's true", but he adds: "But you know, this is SA and people are nothing if not resourceful. It's a cool story - I choose to believe." Me too.

Spending fever has reached all walks of South African life. Here's a fellow who lives in a squatter camp beyond Somerset West in Western Cape who now wants a television set – a new one, mind, not that second-hand thing in the pawn-shop window – so he buys one from the High Street furniture retailer.

But he's back next day, saying the things keeps switching off just at the crucial moment. The shop checks it out and can find nothing wrong, but soon enough he's back with the same complaint.

This time the shop sends out a technician to pop round to see what the problem is. When the technician gets there, he discovers our guy's shack draws its electricity from a nearby traffic light, and that the TV only works when the light is green.

Good to know that almost everybody down there can afford to have "spending fever", even if some prefer to economise on their electricity bills. 6000 has this as a mere scanned image of a newspaper report. I think it deserves the .html treatment.

Perry de Havilland of this parish just loves these creatures. Here's a great story to brighten up a rather dull, grey day in London.

I really must go on safari one day.

Glenn Reynolds links to an interesting-sounding book about South Africa's poor whites, a group completely obscured - globally, by the international perception of the apartheid society and locally, by post-apartheid positive discrimination efforts to raise the country's recently oppressed blacks out of poverty. It made me recall a piece I saw some time ago on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's international current affairs programme, Foreign Correspondent, that also examined the lot of disadvantaged white South Africans. It contained a very interesting interview of the ANC government minister Essop Pahad. I have reproduced the business end of the discussion below (the emphasis in bold is my own):

ESSOP PAHAD: What do you understand by socio-economic conditions?

ZOE DANIEL (INTERVIEWER): Well I'm talking about people living in poverty clearly.

ESSOP PAHAD: Yes and where's the overwhelming majority of people?

DANIEL: Look I'm well aware that…

ESSOP PAHAD: No I'm asking!

DANIEL: No I'm well aware most …

ESSOP PAHAD: You see because your questions…

DANIEL: … poor people in South Africa are black.

ESSOP PAHAD: No… look…

DANIEL: What I'm asking is …

ESSOP PAHAD: I don't want to fight with you but your questions are wrong.

DANIEL: … economic..

ESSOP PAHAD: Because all you're doing…

DANIEL: They're questions. They can't be wrong!

ESSOP PAHAD: No but all you're sitting here…

DANIEL: They're questions.

ESSOP PAHAD: … and you're sitting here and worried about whites. I mean no, man sorry. Sorry. Our real fundamental concerns must be the millions of our people who are living under conditions of poverty and under development and they are Africans.

DANIEL: Some of whom are white.

ESSOP PAHAD: Yes but the overwhelming majority – 80/90% are Africans living in rural areas, living in the townships here. You're sitting here and all your questions is about the whites. Sorry, I, you know I mean you may use it. You don't want to use it it's up to you. I don't find it acceptable.

Text alone does not fully convey how remarkably revealing the above exchange was. At the heated part of the interview, Pahad's face radiated profound and complete incredulity that someone would consider that he and his government should be responsible for helping dirt-poor whites, considering that they have taken on the mantle of helping equally dirt-poor blacks (ignoring, for the moment, what we think about such "help"). Is that uncomprehending face really shared by the government of South Africa? Interesting, considering it asserts moral superiority over its predecessor's system with claims of governing for all South Africans. Semantically, I suppose Pahad stayed true to such claims by refusing to describe white South Africans as "Africans". It does not take a genius to realise who Pahad's talking about when he mentions "our people". His choice of words surely demolished whatever morally noble vestiges the ANC retained since the release of Nelson Mandela. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - only the new guy is into majoritarianism.

I am not saying that the modern regime in South Africa is anywhere near its predecessor in terms of evil, however it appears to be some way down that path. The current programme of discrimination and redistribution known as BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) is not going to achieve the levelling of South African society that is demanded by a population egged on by their government. BEE will only generate a small, super-privileged black elite, a widespread culture of incompetence and mediocrity due to underskilled or underqualified people getting jobs that others could do better, and wealth destruction on a massive scale. When this scenario unfolds and the poor majority of blacks realise they are not better off economically under the new system, the government is highly unlikely to discard BEE as a failure and let the market redress the imbalance over time; conversely, it will claim that BEE does not go far enough. And I suspect, at that time, most people in South Africa will agree, eager for a slice of someone else's wealth that they will ultimately never receive. As a substitute, the bitter cake that the politics of envy will inevitably serve poor South Africans is already being eaten by most in present-day Zimbabwe. People like Essop Pahad make me wonder how far South Africa is behind its northern neighbour.

Of the mainstream development charities, Oxfam is one of the better. Yes, it remains wedded to failed notions of 'development aid', but it is less shrill that many of the others. Its Oxfam Unwrapped initiative, where members of the public buy a Christmas present which goes to people in poor countries, strikes me as quite a good idea. Aid sent this way is certainly more likely to get to 'real people', rather than be sqandered by political elites like so much development aid.

But good intentions are not enough. Oxfam takes a perfectly good idea then ruins it by encouraging the gifting of goats. Goats are profoundly destructive to economic progress. They are the animal version of Robert Mugabe, destroying wealth and ripping up property rights, by destroying neighbours' crops. They wreck agricultural land, turning fertile land into dust. As Lord Eden of Winton has said in the House of Lords:

Where there are large populations of goats, there is invariably poverty. Where there is poverty, there are invariably large populations of goats. Goats are marauding and indiscriminately destructive creatures. In his typically trenchant piece in last week's Spectator, Matthew Parris described them as, "rank-smelling weapons of mass destruction".

They destroy all vegetation, they kill reafforestation, they promote erosion and, in the long term, help to perpetuate poverty.

So why is Oxfam encouraging us to buy them for poor countries?

The left may have fun with Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, having died on November 20th - the same day as Franco in 1975, and Primo de Rivera back in 1936.

There was a BBC Radio Four discussion on Mr Smith today, but I do not know whether any mention was made of the date of his death - I turned the show off after it became clear that all the participants in the discussion hated Ian Smith and, more importantly, had no interest in truth.

The obituary of Ian Smith in today's Economist did not make any joke about the date of his death, it just contented itself with accusing him of 'tyranny' and saying the government he headed, and the whole of the Rhodesian effort, was "rather squalid".

However, both the BBC show and the Economist obituary said that Ian Smith had delayed black majority rule for "fifteen years" (1965 to 1980) - this is false.

Some background:

Under the 1923 Constitution of Southern Rhodesia there were educational and property qualifications on voting - which meant that the vast majority of voters (although not all of them) were white. Even under the Constitution drawn up under Ian Smith in 1969 only eight of the members of House of Assembly were to be directly elected by blacks who do not meet the educational and property qualifications (although another eight were to be chosen by tribal chiefs) - whereas the mainly white voters who did meet the qualifications got to elect fifty members. It is true that the Senate was more balanced - with a minimum of ten Senators (out of 23) being elected by the tribal chiefs. But the Senate only had delaying powers.

However, Ian Smith accepted the 1971 deal proposed by the British government headed by Edward Heath - a deal that would have speeded up the process by which more blacks got the vote on an equal basis with whites. But after widespread protests about how it was wrong to link voting with property ownership at all (oh silly Aristotle for thinking that majority rule can only work when the majority are property owners) this proposal was withdrawn - which Mr Smith regarded as a betrayal (one of many). Ian Smith said many times that he would never accept "majority rule" if this meant the rule of non property owners, i.e. the tribal masses, but in the end he did accept it - and his acceptance was not in 1980...so the "fifteen years" is false.

In March 1978 Ian Smith accepted majority rule in a deal with some of the black leaders, including Ndabaningi Sithole, the founder of African nationalism in Rhodesia, and Bishop Abel Muzorewa - who had played a leading role in sinking the 1971 deal. It is true that under the 1978 deal the new 'Zimbabwe Rhodesia' would reserve a third of the seats in Parliament for the mainly white property owners, and it is also true that there were other constitutional protections.

Ian Smith also hoped to be Minister of Defence under a black Prime Minister, but after the elections of 1979 he had to make do with being Minister without Portfolio - a white Defence Minister yes - but not old burnt face, seems to have been the position of the new government.

However, the British government, in spite of the Conservatives having said during the British elections of May 1979 that they would support the internal settlement) undermined the deal and demanded, at the Lancaster House talks, that Prime Minister Muzorewa and the whole government be removed and the country be placed under British control for new elections. Thus Bishop Muzorewa was humiliated in the eyes of his tribe, who made up the majority of the population, and with the British in charge there was nothing to prevent intimidation winning the elections for the most radical elements - as Ian Smith predicted would happen.

So the new Prime Minister in 1980 was the Marxist terrorist Comrade Bob - on the grounds that he was from the majority tribe, unlike the rival terrorist leader, and had the best organized intimidation.

Both the BBC and the Economist choose to date majority rule from this date.

As for the picture presented of Ian Smith as being unwilling to compromise and as having learnt nothing from his experiences in World War II, the Economist obituary makes the latter claim, I do not know whether the BBC show claimed it as well - I do not know for the reason I explained above, well I think what I have already explained casts doubt on this picture.

The Economist posted an article about Zimbabwe this week reporting that Zimbabwe is 'at the end of its tether', with the news that the vile regime of Robert Mugabe has introduced price fixing as a means of legislating away the rampant inflation that has left Zimbabwe banknotes worth less then toilet paper.

Instead the president, who famously despises “bookish economics”, has decided to outlaw inflation. Price freezes have only been enforced through the arrest of scores of businessmen who are accused of profiteering. The result: shops are bare of basic goods, as businesses refuse to sell more than a minimum of flour, sugar, maize and other items at a crippling loss. There has been panic buying all over the country. In Harare, the capital, crowds wait outside supermarkets ready to rush in and grab whatever they can. Where basics such as cooking oil are available they are rationed by shopkeepers. Fuel is in short supply, with long queues of cars reappearing outside Harare’s petrol stations. As factories prepare to close operations their owners, in turn, are being arrested and forced to keep operating.

Some have expressed the hope that the oncoming economic collapse might presage a political upheaval that will remove Mugabe and restore a democratic government in Zimbabwe. There is no doubt that there is a great upswelling of discontent in the country. It has few friends internationally and those are of dubious repute.

But there is faint hope to expect the end of the regime as long as Mugabe has the strength to kill his domestic enemies and hang on to power. There is the dreadful example of Communist Kampuchea as an example of how low a country can go before it becomes extinct. Things in Zimbabwe are going to get much, much worse.

Is Blairism infectious? Our glorious leader (former) waltzed around Tripoli with his grin and imparted wisdom to the monarch of that realm. For we live in an age of usurpers, where dynasties conform to the current demand for popular sovereignty, and sons succeed fathers as Presidents.

Once Gadaffi had talked to the maestro, his own ambitions knew no limits.

Colonel Gaddafi yesterday called for the creation of a United States of Africa, and appeared to be positioning himself to be its first leader.

Flanked by his usual coterie of female bodyguards and wearing a shirt covered in images of African presidents, he said: My vision is to wake up the African leaders to unify our continent. Long live the United States of Africa. Long live African unity.

I fear that he lacks his idol's penchant for suits, ties and hairdressers. But, perhaps his authentic look of the tyrant as scruff and the Byronic hair will open doors that remain closed to the Emissary.

Seen on a street in Addis Ababa, near the interesting Entoto market

I will be travelling (with another esteemed Samizdata editor) to Addis Ababa this weekend and stay in Ethiopia for about a week. I have read many fascinating things about the country but I have no idea what to expect. So tips and suggestions are welcome.

I plan to travel outside the capital - it was a toss up between Axum and Lalibela. In the end the latter won as the rock-hewn churches are amazing. Also it is a shorter flight, which given time constraints is preferable.

Thanks to Graham of Noodlepie I have learnt about the vibrant Ethiopian political blogosphere. Any Ethiopian bloggers worthy of note?

Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's decision to "ban" the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself "Cricket Australia") begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.

In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.

In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined "later". However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC's rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety - tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat - and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.

Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from "decent, but not world beating", to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.

However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been "temporarily suspended" from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.

The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a "third world" versus "first world" divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former "colonial" powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the "first world" bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.

Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would "set a bad example" to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the "We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country" argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation's cricket board too (although not through the army). As for "Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit", well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that "Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles" might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)

Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead.

However, until recently it stated that as Cricket Australia is a private organisation, then it is not the government's job to decide. The Australian board mainly cares about making as much money as possible, but in the crunch it did not want to tour either, and really would have just preferred that the whole issue would go away. However, it did not especially want to upset the ICC, and it did not really want to pay a fine. Quite typically, the board asked the government to solve its problem for it.

When it initially got this request from Cricket Australia, the Australian government made comments about how it did want the tour to go ahead, and about how it might be willing to "indemnify" Cricket Australia against a fine from the ICC. What this means is that Cricket Australia would have cancelled the tour as this is what the government wanted and that the government would then have paid the fine on its behalf. This would have been an easy enough thing for the government to do - after all it was only taxpayers' money,. However, when the government said this, it had not comprehended the full implications, which was that the fine would be paid to the Zimbabwean board in compensation, and that as the Zimbabwean board is controlled by Robert Mugabe, paying the fine would essentially mean giving a gift of $2 million directly to Robert Mugabe.

Once the Australian government comprehended this, paying the fine was not a feasible option. The Australian government was not going to give Robert Mugabe a $2 million gift. The only other option was to take advantage of the ICC's rule that a government ban could stop a tour without a fine. In defence of John Howard, I believe he genuinely did this as a last resort. The alternative was worse.

However, from the point of view of Cricket Australia, there was another alternative, which was to simply withdraw from the ICC. The ICC is very culpable concerning Zimbabwe. The participating teams in the recent World Cup and other ICC tournaments have been given a share of the profits of the tournament. This includes Zimbabwe. The ICC is already partly funding Robert Mugabe, and Australia is partly implicated simply by participating in the ICC's tournaments. The recent World Cup was such an organisational debacle that there is no great loss in not participating in future such events. If Australia were to leave, the ICC certainly could not stop Australia playing its traditional series against England, and if they tried then the national boards of England, New Zealand and probably other nations as well would follow Australia out of the ICC. Australian cricket is also based on expectations of receiving money from playing India frequently (next January's series between Australia and India is anticipated to be extremely lucrative), but it is hard to imagine that India would not find a way to continue playing Australia - they need the revenues they receive from playing such games

What Australia should have done was called the ICC's bluff. It may have suffered some short term financial insecurity as a consequence, but it would have regained control over its own destiny and would have at least fixed these kinds of problems for good.

This would have been good, because there is another cricketing crisis in the background. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered in March after Pakistan's elimination from the World Cup. most of us speculated that the murder was in some way connected with subcontinental bookmakers, as cricket's problems with match fixing and betting were well known. I expected that this would confirm and the details would leak out relatively quickly, but it did not happen. One thing I did not take adequate notice of was a series of strange articles that were published about the religious devotion of certain members of the Pakistan team, in particular captain Imzamam-al-Haq. Apparently a significant portion of the Pakistan team were devotees of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement, which stresses living a pure and authentic Islamic lifestyle and which is aggressively evangelical. Apparently the team was factionalised between devotees of this movement and non-devotees, and there were prayer rooms set up in team hotels and Tablighi Jamaat clerics mingled with the team and were present in the dressing room. Allegedly Bob Woolmer saw this as divisive and detracting from the team performance.

There have been various leaks and observations since Woolmer's death suggesting that he must have been murdered by someone he knew and who was connected to the team. The possibility is very real that he was murdered by someone in or closely connected to the team, and the reason that he was murdered was mixed in with fundamentalist Islam rather than bookmaking. There are now doubts that the final e-mail sent by Woolmer (resigning his position as coach) before he died was written by him (it does not sound like it was written by a native English speaker). which again suggest that the murderer may have been some what connected to the team, and somehow had access to his laptop. (Of course, this story has already long passed six impossible things happening before breakfast, so perhaps it was some bizarre combination of the two). The fact that we still do not know who killed Woolmer after two months does make me wonder if some sort of cover-up has gone in within the Pakistan team, and if so the "Islam" explanation becomes more likely and the bookmaking explanation less so, I think

I do not know what happened, obviously. The story gets stranger and stranger. It may be that the state of the Pakistan cricket team is symptomatic of the decay and radicalisation of the country of Pakistan every bit as much as the decay of the Zimbabwean cricket team is as symptomatic of the decay of that country. If so, countries such as Australia and England should not be playing Pakistan either. However great the rivalry between Pakistan and India, one cannot imagine some of these revelations increasing the eagerness of India to play Pakistan regularly either. If the ICC mandates regular tours of Pakistan, then this may well be another reason why the ICC is not an organisation that it is advantageous for cricketing authorities in Australia, England, or elsewhere to be connected to any more.

John Howard, Australia's Prime Minister, is quite rightly critical of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, and does not like the idea of the Australian cricket side touring there. He has had to struggle with his conscience:

"I am jammed between my distaste for the government getting involved in something like this and my even greater distaste for giving a propaganda victory to Robert Mugabe.

But not that much of a struggle. The next sentence:

Obviously if there is a way legitimately that the tour can be cancelled and there not be an exposure by Cricket Australia to any fine, then we'll go down that path."

Later in the week this was backed by threatening to withdraw the players' passports, and the federal government undertaking to pay any ICC fine.

What a pity. Mr Howard plainly understands that the administration of sport is not the government's business; but he feels bound in the pursuit of maintaining Australia's national image to intervene in private sphere. Talk of the tour being a victory for Mugabe is just justifying cant: a ban is a much bigger target for racialised anti-colonial rhetoric. The quasi-ban - notably exercised by bullying and bribery rather than any lawful power - is a lurch of Zimbabwe-style arbitrary government and propagandising state action.

Western politics is not so far from the world of Comrade Bob, and we forget that at our peril.

I nearly spilled my tea when I read this:

Western countries are concerned about the expected appointment of Zimbabwe to head a key UN body, the Commission on Sustainable Development.

"We don't think that Zimbabwe would be a particularly effective leader of this body". (A US state department spokesman, Tom Casey)

Concerned?! Particularly effective?!!

So this is what they mean by diplomatic language... I think I shall start interpreting people's remarks about my need to be more 'diplomatic' in an entirely different manner. Or is the term 'reality-challenged'?

FYI: Zimbabwe is enduring the world's highest inflation, at more than 2000%, mass unemployment, and there are widespread accusations of civil rights abuses.

Sorry to link to a depressing story on such a beautiful Friday morning here in ol' London town, but this Bloomberg article on what is happening in Zimbabwe is a good read - about the monster who has crippled that beautiful country and the desperation of the people living in it.

Just think of the missed opportunity: a country with some of the richest natural resources in the world, a great climate for agriculture, English-speaking. Zimbabwe, liberated from the worst aspects of white rule and under the rule of law, could have been the Australia or New Zealand of southern Africa. I fear it will serve as a textbook example instead of the evils of political cronyism and warmed up Stalinist economics.

I have heard it said many times that a country with natural resources is almost cursed, while a tiny island with no resources other than the entrepreneurial gusto of its inhabitants is blessed. Zimbabwe certainly adds to that idea.

One of the sad things that happened in the cold war was that the two sides each found allies in the third world, and what was best for poor countries got lost in the global realpolitik. This was saddest in Africa, where in many cases the anti-colonial rhetoric of communism and the money and weapons provided by the Soviet Union (combined with the fact that many of the African colonial powers were American allies of one form or another) led to many countries embracing socialism. This was of course a catastrophe, in that pretty much without fail the countries that took the socialist road were impoverished by it, not to mention being involved in wars that could and should have probably been avoided. The socialist rhetoric is now largely gone, and most African countries are now more over-bureacratic and corrupt than particularly ideological. That said, the ideas live on in the minds of many of the people who were involved in African struggles. Listening to South African government officials talking about appropriating private propery is rather depression. One would hope that they could look north at Zimbabwe and see what is not the solution.

And it lives on in other ways. One way is in the names of streets in places like Maputo. I think it would be a good thing at this point to formally disavow certain aspects of the past. But there seems to be a certain lack of that kind of bravery.

There is perhaps one redeeming feature, however. Near the botanic gardens is to be found a statue of Samora Machel, the first post-independence president of Mozambique. As it happens, this statue was given to Mozambique by the North Koreans and Kim Il Sung, which perhaps explains the slightly wacky style.

However, the statue hasn't received much maintenance, and many of the words on the plaque below it have crumbled away. In particular, the whole section explaining when and how the statue was erected is gone, and there appears to have been no attempt to repair the sign and return Mr Kim's credit. That is something to be thankful of, I suppose.

As advertised, the seafood is excellent.

The colonial archiecture (and for that matter the relaxed friendliness of the people) is Portuguese. A beer costs about 25p,

and Brian is right.

(Actually, there is a book to be written on why mobile phones and their applications in Africa have evolved differently than mobile phones in the rest of the world, and the biggest things (besides their being so useful) is the lack of legacy. That means legacy in terms of business methods as much as legacy in terms of technology. In Europe and (paritcularly) America, mobile phones networks are run by the same old telecommunications businesses as were traditional phones, and these companies are both terribly bad at retail and figruring out what customers want rather than just telling them what they should want. Plus they are far too busy trying to protect their existing business (including their existing mobille phone businesses) to want to innovate, and sometimes they will actively oppose innovation. Africa is much more a matter of "Try and see what works", and that really works. But I digress).

I was in Johannesburg for a few days before coming here, and while the northern suburbs of that city have all modern amenities and in many ways feel like modern American suburbia around a couple of Edge Cities, every building and business in that city is fortified in a way that is not normal elsehwere. It is a dangerous city, and that influences the way that people go about every moment of their lives.

Maputo is not like that. Walking down the street there is no air of threat whatsoever. I feel perfectly safe walking down the street with my digital SLR around my neck and using my iPod, which I certainly would not in Johannesburg. Occasionally people try to sell you things fairly aggressively, but they are simply trying to sell you things.There is no implied threat whatsoever. By the standards of the thirld world this is a very relaxed place. So far I am enjoying it very much.

Rageh Omaar, writing in the New Statesman, makes an interesting observation:

Each time I return [to Somaliland] I am struck by the increasing influence of puritanical interpretations of Islam. [...] Generations of young Somali men have attended seminaries and Koranic schools, but they never used to wear turbans or red and white keffiyehs, increasingly a symbol of Sunni sectarian identity.

Somalis have been guest workers in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, for decades, giving Saudi Arabia considerable economic and cultural influence over the people and institutions of the as yet unrecognised Republic of Somaliland. One influence has been the financing of schools based on the puritanical Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Western governments seem unperturbed. They are more worried, in the case of Somalia, by the emergence of a loose alliance of home-grown Islamists who came to power because they got rid of hated warlords, than with the large sums of money being spent by Saudi institutions to spread an austere version of Islam.

It was ever thus. I know some in the commentariat will dismiss anything Omaar says because he's an ex-BBC journalist writing in a lefty publication. But his point, supported by these facts, boils down to a simple one, with which I concur: Islamism won't weaken in the rest of the world while it continues to be spread from Riyadh.

You would not want to start from here, but the West must find ways to stop sucking up to the Saudis and, more, to begin to counter their theological export industry. 30 years late is better than never. Killing people is beside the point. Offering cultural alternatives is not.

If the report turn out to be true about the success of the US military attack in Somalia, that is good news indeed. It is being claimed that some of the people targeted were those responsible for the horrendous 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and 2002 atrocities on in Kenya against Kenyan and Israeli civilians. If those are the bastards who have indeed been killed then that is a cause for some satisfaction.

It is interesting that the attack, which took place in Somalia, has attracted praise from the Somali president, who is no friend of the Islamists. But rather more baffling is that the EU has criticised the attack, with a spokesman for EU development commissioner Louis Michel saying "Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long term". I wonder how killing members of Al Qaeda is not 'helpful' in a fight against Al Qaeda?

Alex Singleton has been watching the Running Man. I have just been watching a Newsnight report about mobile phones in Kenya. The gist of the report was that mobile phones in Kenya in particular, and Africa generally, are a stunning success. As if by magic, they are transforming the prospects of ordinary people in Africa, and the relationship between ordinary people and their corrupt, aid-gobbling governments.

We watched a deeply impressed BBC reporter, Paul Mason, being told by a black lady, who I rather think may have been one of the authors of this report that indeed, mobile phones are having an impact upon Africa comparable to the switch from dictatorship to democracy - she mentioned other technology as well, like fire, the wheel and the railways - and that the mobile phone industry provided a model for progress in other areas of African life, such as education and healthcare. Her message to the governments of Africa: get out of the way, at let the business people do these things, and the people pay for these things, themselves.

Paul Mason went deep into the Kenyan countryside, braving the chaos of Kenya's government supplied road system, into Masai territory, to study the difference between places where mobile phone technology was working its magic, and where the wretched of the earth did not have mobile phones. He was, in other words, looking for one of those gaps. But he did not find any gap. The Masai already have their mobiles, and they love them.

Not all the news nowadays is good, to put it mildly, but this Newsnight news was very good news indeed, and not just because of its news about Africa. It was what it said to me and to my fellow countrymen, and (via the BBC's excellent internet operation) to the entire world, that really pleased me.

The French involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 has been something about which the chattering classes have been largely indifferent, much to the annoyance of many Rwandans. The Rwandan government recently unceremoniously threw out the French embassy, and any French institutions with links to the French state, after a court in France issued arrest warrants against several leading Rwandans (including the president) for assassinating former President Habyarimana, whose death was the event that sparked the genocidal murder of 800,000 Tutsi. That was rather like France in 1956 calling for the arrest of the few surviving conspirators behind the (sadly failed) plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944.

I cannot escape the suspicion that if somehow, however tangentially, the USA was involved then articles about Rwanda would be a far more common thing in the media. That said, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has concocted a conspiracy theory that it was the CIA, rather than France, who was backing the Bad Guys in 1994, supplying the Interahamwe with machetes from a secret Halliburton machete factory in somewhere in Texas.

Today I received, from the Globalisation Institute, a press release, which began as follows:

Monday 6 November - A new report released today by the Globalisation Institute says that microfinance is not being taken seriously by the Department for International Development.

In October, it was announced that the Nobel Peace Prize would go to the founding father of microfinance, Dr Muhammad Yunus, who created the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. However, microfinance remains tiny in Africa and receives scant support or encouragement from DFID.

Okay, cards on the table. I am a big fan of the Globalisation Institute and of its bosses Alex Singleton and Tom Clougherty. I write quite frequently for the Globalisation Institute blog, my latest posting there, about mobile phones (which makes much of a comment at my blog by Michael Jennings on the subject), having gone up there only last Friday. Tonight, I am attending a Globalisation Institute do, to which I have been invited so that I can take photos. David Cameron will be present, and they want to be sure that his presence there is immortalised pictorially, so that they can blog about it and impress their many donors with their political plugged-in-ness. Very sensible.

But... and you could hear that word coming a mile off couldn't you?... I have severe doubts about these latest pronouncements of theirs.

The point being that DFID stands for Department (as in Government Department) for International Development. And, as a general rule, international development has taken place in spite of – at the very least in a manner that is indifferent to – all such Departments.

Consider those mobile phones, that I wrote about for the Globalisation Institute on Friday (I mentioned them here also). Mobile phones have been (a) one of the very few economic development success stories to emerge from Africa in recent decades, and (b) entirely done by selfish and freely trading tradesmen, all trying to make a buck and generally further their own interests. This is absolutely not a coincidence. Mobile phones have emerged as Africa's way of getting around government departments. The fact that, when mobile phones were first hitting their stride in Africa they were "not being taken seriously" by organisations like DFID is all part of why they were so successful. The right people – the people who really, really wanted them and were willing to pay a lot for them – got them. And the right people – those wanting to make money out of them and hence devoted to the interests of their African customers (note that word) – supplied them, with no input from the likes of DFID whatsoever.
[UPDATE: Er, not so. In fact: bollocks. See first comment. DFID were heavily involved in mobile phone development in Africa. However, I still think the basic argument of this posting just about stands up. Just about. And the final paragraph makes more sense than ever.]

Just imagine what a colossal screw-up mobile phones in Africa might have been if the Development Industry had been in charge of it all, on account of them taking mobile phones seriously. It does not matter nearly so much when these idiots get excited about a bad idea. But when they get excited about what might have been a good idea, they can do serious harm. Development, for instance. That is a good idea. Or, it was.

No, what I want from my politicians is malign indifference. Indifference because I do not want the malignance to be too active, and because indifference means they will not meddle, either by flailing about with regulations or with great and unpredictable tidal waves of other people's money, and malign also because that means that everyone can depend on this indifference - i.e. non-interference - lasting for a decent while.

As for DFID getting interested in microfinance, well, it seems to me that it will be just as easy for a government department to do serious harm to an idea by spending a large number of small amounts of other people's money, as it has long done harm by spending a smaller number of larger amounts.

But, the internet is the of all things the thing that means you do not have to take anybody in particular's word for it. You can read the Globalisation Institute blog posting on this topic here, and the entire report [a 25 smallish pages .pdf file] here.

I have just done a posting on my personal blog about Sierra Leone, where a British Army friend of mine is now working. He is back in London just now, and passed on some photos of Sierra Leone that he and one of his friends had taken, and I picked out my favourites to put on my blog.

They illustrate an idea I have had for a while now that maybe one of the nice little things that digital photography, in combination with the internet, will do for the world is to present to it a slightly more balanced notion of what life in Africa is like just now. On rich country TV we only ever get slaughter and catastrophe from Africa, because only slaughter and catastrophe is news. But now, in addition to superbly photographed famine and mayhem, we get less well photographed ... well, just stuff. Photos that a generation ago would (a) have been far less numerous, and would (b) have merely languished in the photo albums of a certain sort of expat, are now being displayed to the anyone in the world who cares to glance at them.

I do not claim that the slaughter and catastrophe is not happening. Sierra Leone itself had a horrific civil war less than a decade ago. "Worse than you can possibly imagine", my friend said. But now, touch wood, things are going better.

Mobile phones have been a particular success, apparently, mostly because regular landline phones, such as rich countries have long had, have been such an abject failure, but perhaps also because mobiles enable Africans to cooperate much more effectively while still not having to commit to something days in advance. My friend says that Africans, just as Western stereotypes have always said, at any rate the Africans in Sierra Leone, are still very bad at doing this.

That is a mobile phone top-up and recharging booth. Mobile phone companies are now making lots of money in Africa. Good for them.

This morning I visited a Kenyan coffee co-operative (I am grateful to the Ministry of Trade & Industry for arranging this). They explained the liberalisation in the Finance Bill 2005 which came into effect last month, giving coffee co-operatives and farmers choice in who they deal with. Previously, they were not legally allowed to agree to sell coffee at a particular price to a particular company. They were only allowed to use one milling organisation: now they have a choice of three licensed milling organisations which have to compete.

Prior to liberalisation, the co-operative had to sell coffee through auction which is bad for farmers because they have very little idea how much they will get in advance. "The government made sure that middlemen took more money that farmers," one representative said. (I have been told separately that co-operatives have often been swindled because they have no way of them knowing how much was really paid at auction.) Needless to say, the people at the co-operative are very happy at the new flexibility they have been given.

But they told me that farm inputs, which are imported, such as fertilisers, chemicals and machinery are barely affordable, which they blame on high tariffs.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

On Saturday I got into a 4x4 and took part in a 460km road trip around rural Kenya. One of the most notable things in the journey were the frequent police roadblocks, each consisting of two rather sinister looking yellow metal strips on the road with spikes pointing upwards. These were accompanied by at least a couple of police officers.

Government sources tell me that they are essential in the fight against crime. On the other hand, ordinary citizens are rather more cynical, saying that criminals can bribe their way through them and that they are just a way of fleecing drivers who are made to pay fees. 99% of the time no receipt is given.

We were luckly. Apparently the police don't like to try it on with 4x4s containing someone who is white and might be World Bank or a journalist. But for ordinary Kenyan drivers, the roadblocks are a menace, delaying journeys and breeding petty corruption.

(My visit to Kenya is being blogged here.)

If laid end to end, I wonder how far the column inches about the recent war in Lebanon would extend? Would they stretch right around the earth? Would they extend to the moon and back? Perhaps they would only reach as far as Sudan:

Two years ago, the then American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that the killings in Darfur constituted genocide.

Since then, the number of deaths through violence, starvation and disease in Sudan's western region has risen to at least 300,000, and of those displaced to about two million.

Despite the fact that genocide is a crime under international law, both the African Union and the United Nations have proved powerless to stop it.

Notwithstanding these horrifying statistics (which dwarf even the most overwrought claims about Lebanon), the response of the "world community" is very close to pin-drop silence. Apart from the occasional bloodless and anodyne article (such as the one linked to above) the MSM could not seem to care less. Where are the lurid photographs of dead Sudanese babies? Where are the demonstrations by "anti-war campaigners"? Where are the human shields? Where are the demands for a ceasefire? Where are the calls for a change of foreign policy? Where are the Nazi Germany comparisons? Where are the..ahem..'intrepid' Western reporters with cry-me-a-river expressions on their faces? Where are the Church groups organising boycotts?

The answer is the same in all cases and there are no prizes for getting it right. No, the real question is why? Why the ocean of indifference to a sustained programme of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that is, by modern standards (and perhaps by any standards) horrific? It seems that the plight of impoverished Africans is enough to precipitate an avalanche of rock concerts and celebrity blubbing while hundreds of thousands of murdered Africans causes not even the thinnest batsqueak of protest.

I am just speculating here, naturally, but could this conspiracy of silence have something to do with the fact that the perpetrators of this real atrocity are Arab Muslims? Depressingly enough, I think the answer is yes. If even the Telegraph article I have linked to above is too timid to actually identify the aggressors (preferring instead the safe and neutral term 'rebels') then claims of ignorance or laziness simply will not do. I don't imagine there would be quite this level of caginess if it was the Israelis who were laying waste to Darfur.

In my opinion, Darfur is kept off the radar screen because it is too embarrassing for the bien pensent. Having adopted the narrative of Arabs/Muslims as victims of oppression they are pretty much obliged to ignore or dismiss any evidence that might undermine that view (such is the mental paralysis induced by narrative). Besides, Africans living in the West seem disinclined to blow up airliners, so there is no need to waste precious air-time deliberating about the 'root causes' of their anger.

The horrors of Darfur cannot be excused by reference to Israeli or American 'occupation' and so it is locked away in the attic like a mad relative. Yes, it is ugly and unfair but at least we know for sure that there is not one single shred of decency or honesty in the entire (and preposterously misnamed) anti-war movement.

On the surface, the news that the former President of Malawi has been arrested and charged with pocketing £5.5 million of developing aid is good news. It has been a consistent complaint of Africa-watchers for a long time that African elites have been pocketing Western aid-money, and getting away with it, while their subjects suffer and starve.

However, closer examination of this story does make me wonder.

"The former president denies all the charges, and he has invoked his constitutional right to remain silent," said Fahad Assani, Mr Muluzi's lawyer. He expressed confidence that the ex-president would be found "very, very innocent".

Mr Muluzi became president after Malawi had endured 30 years of misrule from Hastings Banda.

He promised to turn Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, into a prosperous democracy. But scandal and corruption marred Mr Muluzi's decade in power. After failing to remove term limits from the constitution, he was forced to hand over to a new president, Bingu wa Mutharika. The two men have been bitter rivals ever since. Mr Muluzi's allies claim he is being persecuted by the new president.

So I wonder, is this a genuine effort to bring a malefactor to book, or is it a case where Mr Mutharika is using the forms of modern political parlance to the very unmodern ends of getting an old rival out of the way?

I doubt that the Afro hairstyle will ever come back into fashion, which is a great shame for all blaxploitation fans. On the other hand, large swathes of sub-saharan Africa may become far richer than they are today, as globalisation deepens. This is worth celebrating.

Grovelling in Zimbabwe takes a different form from the NuLab sycophantism that Brits are used to although a Blair babe may wish to take up the option:

Making a belated birthday message to Mugabe, Senator Chief Musarurwa from Mashonaland East told fellow senators that Mugabe should be allowed to be a life President....The President was anointed to be a leader of this country and we wish that he should grow old to the extent that his back is rubbed with cow dung and until the followers know that his duty is to take care of this country, until there are no such things as corruption and until there is peace and equal distribution of land in this country.

Mugabe follows the strategies of his communist role models, eating the nation from the inside out, wasting away civil society until the power of the party is revealed behind the barrel of the gun, and all opposition is exhausted. In countries where such strategies are undertaken, all political forms are gradually hollowed out by a creeping militarisation as the crisis spirals. The problem is that the pirate state has to ensure that the army gets the majority of the spoils. The war veterans may have been bought off after their chairman, Jabulandi Sibanda, was expelled from ZANU-PF for the heretical thought that benefits should accrue to all Zimbabweans:

Max Mkandla, president of The Zimbabwe LiberatorsVoice which represents peaceful war veterans who believe all Zimbabweans deserve benefits, told us the government is trying to persuade war vets in the association not to walk away from ZANU-PF and follow their chairman Jabulani Sibanda who was expelled from the ruling party last week. Mkandla said the majority of war vets have thrown their support behind Sibanda and the new ‘salaries’ are a bribe to keep them close so their activities can be monitored. Mkandla added that ZANU-PF has lost the support of its own members and is attempting to buy loyalty from the police, military, nurses and now the war veterans.

The armed forces are taking control of state and parastatal institutions as Mugabe's regime attempts to stave off hunger and maintain its core functions:

The use of the army to take control of the countryside has been mirrored by the appointment of military commanders to top positions in the civilian institutions, in an effort to strengthen 82-year-old Mugabe's grip on the country.

Generals, some still on active duty, others retired, now control the reserve bank, the grain marketing board, the electoral commission, the state railway, energy ministry, parks authority and other key institutions formerly run by civilians.

Jonathan Moyo, a former minister of information who quit the Mugabe government and is now Zimbabwe's only independent MP, said: "This is an admission that things have fallen apart and that governance can no longer continue in civilian mode."

Perhaps the generals will tire of wiping Mugabe's behind with cow dung and will feel that they can run Zimbabwe better themselves.

I recently had a very interesting chat with my good friend, Steve Edwards, who is currently without his own blog - although probably not for much longer. He is a regular at libertarian.org.au, however. In the course of our conversation, he informed me that HIV risk-of-transmission rates are not nearly as high as I previously thought. Consider this - for every 10 000 exposures to an HIV-infected source, it is estimated 5 will contract HIV via insertive penile-vaginal intercourse. 10 will contract HIV via receptive penile-vaginal intercourse. These figures assume no use of a condom. Click the link for the risk via other routes of exposure.

This got us both thinking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic epicentre of Sub-Saharan Africa. Given the very low rate of HIV transmission through sexual intercourse, is it really feasible that a country like Botswana has an infection rate of 30%+? If the ratio mentioned above is correct, an African male with an average number of vaginal sexual encounters can have unprotected sex with only HIV positive partners for a lifetime and still stand a reasonable chance of not contracting the virus. How could a virus that difficult to catch spread through a population so comprehensively?

I am not saying that HIV/AIDS is not an enormous problem in Africa - of course it is. And I do not discount the anecdotal evidence of health professionals who report a multitude of AIDS orphans and hospitals groaning with AIDS-riddled patients. I am sure this is the case, however from the limited perspective of a person's experiences, how could they possibly tell if this casualty rate represents 30% of a population of several million or 3%? 10% or 1%? Sick people do tend to cluster in hospitals, and health professionals go where the need is great. Given this working environment for doctors and nurses treating HIV in Africa, they could be forgiven for believing an inflated number. Conversely, if a foreign doctor spent a month in the wealthier parts of Nairobi, they would probably report to the folks back home that they saw no signs of HIV/AIDS at all.

I do not doubt that there is a large amount of research that has gone into producing the figures commonly cited when detailing the scope of the HIV outbreak in Africa. I would, however, ask sceptics to ponder the beneficiaries of an inflated threat of this disease. The NGOs, university teams and (most) African governments are in accord regarding the magnitude of the AIDS threat. To use the old saying; well - they would be, wouldn't they? This issue is a magnet for foreign aid and grant money. After all, African despots need to keep their wives in the style they've become accustomed to. Not to mention one's stooges who require regular buying off. NGOs need to run their fleets of SUVs, hold their conferences in five star hotels and generously employ their "support staff". University professors need grants to carry out their research. I should not forget the UN - regarding that sprawling organisation's potential conflicts of interest, the mind boggles. These people all have a stake in talking up the HIV/AIDS problem. These are also the people who provide us with data concerning HIV rates in Africa.

I am not a scientist, and I have no specific expertise in this field. I could be omitting important variables that make the scale of the HIV/AIDS problem in Africa that we're told about more tenable. However, when considering the far lower than popularly believed HIV contraction rates, I smell a rat. What makes me even more suspicious is the fact that the beneficiaries of an overinflated HIV threat in Africa appear to be African governments, NGOs and foreign researchers. Even in rich nations, resources are scarce. We need accurate information to distribute them in optimal fashion. Please set me straight if I am wrong to question, but are we being lied to about the scope of the HIV/AIDS problem in Africa?

No, George W. Bush's ego has not in fact got out of hand. The US Secretary of State was in fact welcoming the President of Equatorial Guinea, who was described on state radio in that country as "like God in Heaven, with power over men and things".

Lucky him.

Not so lucky are the rest of the people in Equatorial Guinea, who get the short end of the stick when it comes to liberty and the like.

I can understand the need of the United States to maintain influence over a place like Equatorial Guinea, which has a great deal of oil reserves. He's a sunofabitch but he's our sunofabitch. Or something like that. Realpolitik will be with us for a long time to come. However, that doesn't mean that such a slimebag should be given the five-star treatment in Washington. Or, indeed, anywhere outside his own wretched balliwak.

(Via Passport)

Michael Totten seems to be acquiring a taste for visiting totalitarian hellholes. This time he is wanding around the socialist paradise of Libya. As usual he paints an interesting picture.

How quickly this (click on this picture to make the triumph even bigger!) . . .

. . . has turned into this:

After England sneaked the Ashes 2-1, they have now been soundly beaten 2-0 by Pakistan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Warne don't get you then Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria must. I wonder what Al Qaeda will make of that.

All very catastrophic. Until you turn your mind to a real catastrophe. To put all of the above in perspective, spare a thought for cricket in Zimbabwe, a grain of sand through which to see the chaos of the world out there.

A year or two ago, there was a great exodus of international cricketers from Zimbabwe, but they were mostly white guys, with only the occasional black man involved. The Mugabe regime had no problem calling them a bunch of racists and Uncle Toms.

But just over a week ago, the new Zimbabwe captain, the impeccably black Tatenda Taibu, and a thoroughly gutsy cricketer by the way, having already expressed his extreme displeasure at what was happening to Zimbabwean cricket, and having lead another huge player rebellion, by the new multi-coloured lot, remember, resigned:

"I've resigned from Zimbabwe cricket as a whole," Taibu said from Harare on Thursday.

"I've had problems with the way Zimbabwe cricket is being run for the past few years," said the 22-year-old, the youngest captain in Test cricket history when he took over in May 2004.

Maybe that was what decided that Mugabe regime that something had to be done. Basically, a couple of Mugabe-ites had been given Zimbabwe cricket to "run", i.e. ruin, loot, etc., and the Mugabe regime (i.e. Robert bloody Mugabe) decided that they had to stop, or would at any rate make good scapegoats for what even they (Mugabe) now saw as a problem. So, the Zimbabwe equivalent of the men in big raincoats went round at 4 am to arrest the two miscreants. But, they had been tipped off and had fled.

Cricket people are complaining about the uselessness of cricket's global governing body, the ICC, in this matter. But you cannot really expect the ICC to sort out Zimbabwe cricket. The problem is not cricket in Zimbabwe, the problem is Zimbabwe.

Nevertheless, cricket, by dramatising so publicly the horror story that is Zimbabwe now, may actually be contributing something:

John Stremlau, professor of international affairs at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, said the Zimbabwe Cricket meltdown could become the catalyst for a much broader internal revolt.

"Inflation is more than 400 per cent, the US dollar to the Zim [Zimbabwe dollar] is running at 1 to 100,000 [on the black market] and everything's been criminalised and linked to the survival of the Zimbabwe cabal," he said.

"The mystery is when the tipping point will come and it'd be an interesting footnote to history if it was the flap over the cricket team."

Yes it would. The sooner Mugabe is tipped, alive or dead, into the bucket of history the better, and nobody is going to be particularly choosy about what tipped him. If cricket can help to see off this monster, good for cricket.

If that happens, then maybe the apparently myopic policy of other cricketing countries just carrying on playing with whatever cricketers Zimbabwe put into the field against them will have been justified, sort of. Results are what matter when you are dealing with something like Mugabe, not your mere conscience. Had cricket quarantined itself from Zimbabwe, this latest fiasco could not have happened, because any cricket problems in Zimbabwe would (a) not have attracted nearly so much outside attention, and (b) would have been blameable by Mugabe on outside interference.

Had Taibu not had the chance to prove himself to be the formidable cricketer and personality that he is, his resignation would not have counted for much. As it is, it just might count, as Professor Stremlau says, for rather a lot.

In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.

Click on this:

I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.

So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:

Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 - A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.

Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.

Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.

No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.

I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.

In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.

I recall how, a few months back, during all the fuss about Making Poverty History by having a singsong, well dressed and articulate Africans were to be seen on our television screens explaining, throughout the week in question, that, actually, just chucking money at Africa would not really solve the problem. In fact, some of them said, it could well make things worse by making it less necessary for the governments that hoovered up most of the money to earn their money, so to speak, by taxing their own misgoverned and hence impoverished people. (I use the word "earn" in a very relative sort of sense here.)

Last night, the same thing happened again. Kofi Annan had been enthusing about that now quite famous hundred dollar laptop. And once again, well dressed and articulate Africans was summoned to the studios, and they said that, actually, if you are looking for a way to spend a hundred dollars on an African child, you could do a whole lot better than spend in on a laptop computer.

Victor Keegan also waxes enthusiastic about the hundred dollar laptop in the Guardian today, being understandably reluctant to enthuse about the other hot topic at the big UN shindig in Tunis where the hundred dollar laptop was being promoted, which is the UN plan to take over the internet.

But until the UN puts its own house in order by controlling member states imposing censorship on the web, such as China and Tunisia, it won't have the moral authority - let alone the management skills - to do the job itself.

Quite so, although I do not like that "until". My attitude to the internet is simple. It ain't bust. Don't unfix it by putting the UN in charge of it, ever. However, as it says here (you need to scroll past the woes of Sony):

The battle for control of the Net ended peacefully before the fight even began, but some are still unhappy with the outcome.

Me included. What they mean is that lots of people wanted more done on this front. I wanted less than they have already done, which is that they have set up a completely powerless talking shop to discuss "internet governance". And if you believe that the plan is for this talking shop to do nothing but talk for ever and be completely powerless for ever, then you will believe anything.

Although the hundred dollar laptop could not possibly be as big a catastrophe as the UN's planned strangulation of the internet, it could nevertheless waste a lot of money and cause a lot of grief. Imagine not having had any food for two days and being presented with one of these contraptions, as will surely happen to many wretched Africans if this boondoggle goes ahead.

As Tim Worstall explained at the ASI blog over a month ago, a posting that Kofi Annan has clearly not read but should have, that hundred dollar price assumes huge production runs, and also assumes that the various governments who are supposed to pay for these things will also bear the further costs of explaining to people how they work and of mending them when they go wrong. Worse, if these devices are to supply the internet connections that they are supposed to, these governments may have to contrive communicational infrastructure that does not now exist,. As Worstall points out, the kind of people now getting most enthusiastic about this gadget are also the kind of people who are most opposed to the idea of making aid conditional on things like that being done more sensibly.

Even at a hundred dollars, as the well dressed Africans were pointing out last night, these thing are absolutely not a bargain for an African child. Schooling for a year would make more sense. Better food would be nice.

On the face of it, making a kind of global Volkswagen of laptops is appealing. But the more usual method for making cheap stuff is for it to be made expensively first, and checked out by rich organisations and rich people, and then gradually - or, as often happens, not so gradually - cheapened. This is what is happening anyway with computers, and even more spectacularly with mobile phones, which already are hundred dollar portable computers with communication built in, if you think about it. Keegan mentions the success of cheap mobile phones in Africa, but does not seem to have absorbed the lesson of that success, which is that mobile phones are, it turns out, a whole lot easier to use in Africa than laptops. Ah yes, but those mobiles are being used to do business, not being given to the kiddies.

You get the feeling that Kofi Annan is really only trying to make the UN look necessary and useful, instead of a big pointless coagulation of corruption and foolishness which he is now unwilling or unable to clean up. Here, he reckons, is his chance to say that "Business isn't supplying this, but hey! � we can!". The truth is that they can probably not do this but that bad old big business maybe soon will and in many ways already is doing it. If it ever does make sense for Africa's children all to have laptops, this will surely not be until the price of them goes down to something nearer to ten dollars than a hundred. My guess is they will all have mobiles long before then.

I often slag off the BBC, so let me praise them today. The BBC are banned from Zimbabwe. In the best traditions of journalism, back in August correspondent Justin Pearce went there anyway.

Following the mass evictions from and destruction of Harare's squatter camps, hundreds of thousands have been sent to their "home" villages. Never mind that the evictees are city people who may not have seen the village since childhood, or at all. Naturally, they become paupers. The lot of those who do not have even that much of a home village is even worse. People whose parents or grandparents originally came from other African coutries have been left in limbo.

What in this sorry tale can count as a sign of hope, you ask? Only this: even soldiers and policemen go hungry says a more recent BBC report. When even those who take service under the tyrant cannot be sure of their next meal, one may hope the end is near.

Do not expect the good times to roll once Mugabe's obsequies are done - or his noose is cut down. Chaos can be an ugly thing, and Zimbabwe's political culture has been brutalised. But without Mugabe's megalomaniac desire for tidiness, so typical of dictators, this campaign to sweep human beings aside as if they were rubbish will probably lapse.

Well, I can not say this bad story came as a total surprise, given the near-total lack of respect for property rights and the rule of law in Africa:

South Africa says it will for the first time force a white farmer to sell his land under a redistribution plan.

The story goes on to say that the seizure is part of a drive to "redistribute" land to people who lost what was rightfully theirs as a result of the 20th Century apartheid regime. Hmmm. It seems to me that on an abstract level relating to rectification of previous injustices, there is some credibility to this idea. However, the big problem is that the people who will get chunks of this land are unlikely to have much to do with the people who were allegedly robbed of said land in the first place, assuming that such a claim can be validated. (Of course if there are people who could claim that they or their ancestors were robbed of what was rightly theirs, then I have no objection in principle to some restitution).

In practice, as we have seen all too clearly in nearby Zimbabwe, the spoils of any assault on white-owned farmland will go to the political hacks and cronies of the governing regime, and likely bring about a serious, possibly catastrophic loss of economic wealth and food in a part of the world, that is not, to put it mildly, greatly endowed with such things.

Perhaps the president of South Africa should put this book on his reading list. Or perhaps he should remember to heed his own words.

More than anything else, Africa needs stable, enforceable property rights, period, if it is clamber out of its current state. Sir Bob Geldolf and friends, please note.

I like to interrupt TV coverage of test cricket with CEEFAX news of about other cricket matches, and this afternoon the news trickled through that England were (probably) winning � and then that they had finally won � the Ashes!

The ladies of Australia have had the same armlock on the Female Ashes as their menfolk have had on the Male Ashes in recent years, only more so. But today the English ladies beat the Australian ladies by 6 wickets to clinch a series win. With luck, England will get the Male Ashes back this summer as well. The men of Australia followed on today at Trent Bridge, and the men of England are well placed to get a win tomorrow and go one up with one to play in their series. Here's to us limeys making it a double.

I wonder if a lady will ever play international cricket for her men's team, so to speak. Cricket is not a game that is wholly conditional on brawn, although you do have to be fit, of course. Some of the greatest ever batsmen, like Bradman, Gavaskar and Tendulkar to name but three, have been quite small men. And bowlers, even quick ones, do not have to be giants either. And great slow bowlers can be quite small, and even physically handicapped. So, even if a female physique may be a handicap, it may one day be overcome.

Meanwhile the usual low-level politico-sporting storm rumbles and bumbles along about whether Civilisation ought, still, to be playing cricket games against Zimbabwe. At one time I was in the habit of making a bit of a fuss about such games here, because it was a way to make a fuss about Zimbabwe. But all the world that cares now knows that Robert Mugabe is ruining that unhappy country and the only question is whether someone can end his life and/or despotic reign before natural causes finally oblige. Other African rulers do not want anything done, because this might set a dangerous precedent. I mean, what kind of place would Africa become if merely being a thieving and destructive monster meant that you lost your job as tyrant? Very different, that is for damn sure. And since the rest of the world is disinclined to revive White Imperialism and barge in and rearrange matters without lots of local consent � the only new imperialists in Africa these days are the Chinese, and they are there for the minerals, not to take up the Yellow Man's Burden � it really does not matter what the cricketers do about Zimbabwe. Playing against the current politically deranged Zimbabwe team and thrashing it probably does just as much good (and just as little) as refusing to play against it.

What do you do when you have driven your economy off a cliff? Why, you raise taxes.

Zimbabwe's finance minister has imposed a string of tax rises to bridge a huge spending shortfall and the effects of drought and slum clearances. A tax on drinks and cigarettes has been increased by 50% and mobile phone airtime will also be subjected to a 22.5% tax, Herbert Murerwa said.

Zimbabwe is beset with shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, and rampant unemployment and inflation.

An opposition MP said the extra budget showed that the government was "broke".

The title is a forgivable slur on King Canute who recognised the natural limits of kingship. With reference to ZANU-PF, it is perhaps more acceptable to use the diminutive of his name, which is, of course, Cnut.

Franklin Cudjoe, Director of the Ghanaan think tank Imani, who has been visiting the UK in order to contest the nonsense being spouted about how to solve Africa's problems by Live 8 etc., gave a fingerclickin' good talk at my home on Friday. The fingerclickin' being a reference to the amount of money stolen every second � $4,700 � by African governments. My thanks to Helen Szamuely for also reporting on this event.

Ghana sounds like a relatively prosperous and urbanised country, by African standards, and it was interesting to hear an African talking about the complications of airline deregulation and exactly how much members of parliament get paid per day (enough to keep them snugly on board the gravy train, no matter what they may have said at election time), rather than just famine, malnutrition, etc.

The anti-globalisation crowd say that multinational corporations are causing corruption in Africa. Actually, they often find it a huge barrier to trading in Africa. KLM wanted to run some flights from Ghana to neighbouring African countries, but the bribes demanded of them were too extortionate, and they pulled out. Travelling between countries in that part of Africa seems to involve choosing which bunch of state highwaymen you prefer to be shaken down by. It is understandable that, economically speaking, lots of colonial African countries used to look outwards, so to speak, with most of their trade being organised by their colonial masters. It is not so understandable why this is still the pattern.

I asked Franklin who in Ghana he thinks is doing the most to improve the place. His answer was the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development. What Africa needs is good government. And the way to start trying to get good government is to talk and write out loud with anyone who will listen � especially the next generation � about what that is and ought to be. There as here, in enterprises of this kind, the internet has helped

Franklin sounded a lot like Hayek � which is no coincidence, because he talked about how much Hayek had influenced his early thinking � in his insistence upon the intellectual struggle as the first step in trying to achieve anything more concrete. You get nowhere by nagging politicians direct. You have to change the assumptions within which they work. That takes time but it can be done, and by the sound of it he is doing his best.

Michael Jennings pointed out that all over the Far East, lots of those little upwardly mobile trading niches that used to be occupied by the Chinese diaspora are now occupied by the Ghanaan diaspora. Clearly there is nothing wrong with the talents of the Ghanaan people. They just need the right setting to flourish in.

I have been waiting for the left to come out in support of Mugabe. After all, they worship Che Guevara, the warmonger and homophobe. They wear CCCP t-shirts even though that regime murdered 60 million people. So I was not at all surprised to read this John Vidal article in The Guardian this week:

It's open season on the Harare regime and it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the EU, Britain and the US, as well as the World Bank - all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects - have rushed to condemn the "atrocities".

The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000 people.

In other words, the Guardian is saying that Mugabe is not so bad after all. Remarkable.

At Hyde Park, Dido just introduced as the "African Ambassador for Music from Senegal", Youssou N'Dour*, who she was "in awe" of, "not just because he has a wonderful voice, but because of his wonderful beliefs". He came on stage to say:

"The debt cancellation is OK. The aid is OK. But, please, open your markets."

There will be an awful lot of well-intentioned nonsense given unquestioning, reverential coverage today, with ignorance and platitudes dressed up as profundity. Maybe, however, for perhaps the first time at an event of this type and on this scale, a kernel of truth will wriggle its way onto TV.

I consider this a small but notable victory for the notion that, if you permit free speech and are prepared to tolerate every misguided and moronic idea, eventually the truth will out.

* [edit]: add correct spelling and link.

I am watching a news report on Newsnight, broadcast by the BBC, about private education in Nigeria. The report is the work of Professor James Tooley, who I think is one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the world.

Tooley has been roaming the world in recent years, finding cheap, successful, private schools, which are everywhere outperforming the shoddy state provided schools. Nigeria is no different.

It is one thing to see white blokes in suits saying at some pro free market conference that the private sector is better than the public sector. Watching Nigerian parents explaining the same thing, to a BBC news camera, is something else again.

So why, Tooley is asking, is everyone in denial? There is no global crisis in education. The private sector is supplying higher standards at a fraction of the cost.

Now we are in white blokes discussing it all mode, and Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University is explaining that what Tooley has spent the last decade scrutinising with his own eyes is all a figment of his, Tooley's, imagination.

Tooley has the advantage over Lewin. He has been there. He has seen it. He has found schools which, until he and his colleagues found them, nobody not directly involved with the schools in question knew existed. This is market success, says Tooley, and we should celebrate it.

Tooley's report showed an incandescently eloquent private sector teacher in action. And he also showed a state school teacher in a state school classroom, a classroom filled with state school pupils who were busy trying teaching one another, while he, the state school teacher, was fast asleep at his desk.

Lewin says that this is all a tragedy, because he sees state failure. The state is, or should be, the educator of last resort. Market success is important to Lewin only because as far as he is concerned market success equals state failure, and state failure is bad bad bad. Lewin refers to "his colleagues in Africa", who agree with him and do not agree with Tooley.

Those, I would guess, would be the state education bureaucrats who, time and time again, do not even realise that there is a thriving educational private sector in their own country, pretty much right under their noses. The government bureaucrats whom Lewin (I suspect) spends most of his African research time communing with, have little idea about this ferment of private education. Insofar as they do know of it, they do not want to know of it, because it makes them feel irrelevant. This is because they are irrelevant. And if they are irrelevant then so is the living that Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University makes helping to prepare all this state bureaucrats for their careers in state education.

Now Lewin is talking gibberish about why Britain nationalised its schools in 1870. What we have just seen, says Lewin, invites the withdrawal of the state from the provision of all public services. Well, yes.

The thing about Tooley is not just what he says. It is also the sincerity and enthusiasm with which he says it. He will never convert the Lewins of this world. But he does seriously contest what they say, and, just like the numerous private schools which he has found the world over � in Africa, in China, in India, in Pakistan, in fact everywhere he looks � he does it with a fraction of the resources that the Lewin side of this debate now commands.

For more about all this, read this Sunday Times article by Tooley, which I would never have found out about had it not been for the BBC.

The BBC, outrageously biased, rampant supplier of last resort of rampantly pro-capitalist propaganda.

Richard B. North has a terrific set of articles about the current focus on Africa, debt-relief and poverty brought about partly by the efforts of Sir Bob "keep it off eBay" Geldof. It is fair to summarise that North is not totally blown away with admiration by the scruffy former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, or indeed with the grandstanding of our own wonderful PM, Tony Blair.

Definitely not the sort of articles one would expect to get on a college degree reading list. How I wish the weblog existed when studying for my degree back in the 80s.

Laziness in blogging is defined as examining the attitude of the United Nations or any other NGO in regard to some humanitarian crisis caused by your common garden dictator. Easy and rich pickings. For this particular example, let us take Robert "Gay Gangster" Mugabe as an egregious example of dictatorial excess and the World Food Programme as your normal international bureaucracy.

In reality, "Mad Bob" has ruined his country, urinated on the poor and used food aid as a tool of oppression and death. In UNWorld, Comrade Bob is a welcome member of the international community. As James Morris, 'United Nations Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Southern Africa' (such a big title for an oh-so important man), stated recently:

Mr Morris said the President told him that Zimbabwe welcomed assistance that was purely humanitarian.

"We have had a very positive discussion with President Mugabe. We have had a very good working relationship for several years. The President said he welcomed food assistance that comes with humanitarian commitment," said Mr Morris.

He said Zimbabwe and the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, had a good working relationship stretching over several years.

Mr Morris knows that this is the case because Comrade Mugabe is committed to agricultural reform.

The UN envoy said it emerged during his talks with Cde Mugabe that the President was committed to the development of agriculture and ensuring food security in Zimbabwe.

"I thank the President for his commitment to agriculture," said Mr Morris.

The website of the World Food Programme is slightly better (or worse, if you think that a chink of reality can be damned by faint praise). Their "In Brief" on Mr Morris's visit to Zimbabwe notes many contributing factors, but the state is not given the starring role it deserves:

Food production in Zimbabwe is affected by several factors, including erratic rains, shortages of inputs such as fertilizer and inadequate tillage.

It is also affected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, which commonly afflicts people in their most productive years.

Moreover, the centralized pricing structure for maize in Zimbabwe creates a disincentive for production above subsistence levels.

However, a key reason for food shortages this year will be drought.

The commercial farming sector, which declined as a result of land reform, previously provided an important stabilising factor in maize production, particularly during years of erratic rains, as the crop was mainly produced by irrigation.

While communal farms traditionally produce the greater portion of food, they are largely dependent on rainfall.

This post is the product of laziness or the United Nations is a turkey shoot! Take your pick!

There is an excellent article in the print version of The Economist describing the situation in the Congo.

That's the Congo. Private cellphone networks work and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures has been stolen from the trains.

I put this paragraph up for all those people who have not experienced this sort of thing first hand and cannot accept that the single biggest obstacle to ending poverty in Africa is the nature of African nation states. Until that changes, sending aid under all but the most controlled circumstances is more often than not either subsidising the very people who cause the problems in the first place or, at best, flushing 90¢ on the dollar down the toilet in terms of helping the people you really want to benefit from your largess.

The solution? Good question, but it sure as hell is not more of the same. In Africa even more than most other places, truly, the state is not your friend.

Sir Bob "Make Poverty History" Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.

Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.

If Africa's economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.

UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.

UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.

Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa's President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:

foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.

Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.

Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:

Africa's private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others - non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa's private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.

African elites have prevented peasants from reinvesting their earnings in machinery to improve their productivity:

Fundamentally, the political elite uses its control of the state to extract the surplus or savings that if the peasant were free to retain they would have invested in improving their production techniques or to diversify into other economic activities. Through marketing boards, taxation systems and the like, the political elite diverts these savings to finance its own consumption and the strengthening of the repressive instruments of the state.

The economic looting of multinational companies after independence means that international investors are wary of investing in Africa:

When the colonialists retreated from the 1950s onwards, these colonial subsidiaries [Western companies] lost their key protector, the colonial state. Before long they, like the peasants, fell prey to the appetites and whims of the new African political elites who controlled the newly independent African states. The lucky ones were nationalized and their owners were therefore paid compensation; the not so lucky ones were 'privatized' [confiscated by individual politicians without compensation.]

Moeletsi Mbeki's comments are in stark contrast to those of Gordon Brown who thinks that simply throwing more at African governments is going to bring prosperity. Mbeki recognises that the West should be helping get more private investment into African and helping improve the institutions that enable business to thrive.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

The decision to write off billions of dollars in debt for various Third World nations is in effect a subsidy for bad governance. Oh sure, the debt relief is tied to various conditions aimed at improving the kleptocratic ways that are the norm in the world's various hellholes, but it is still just a way of saying that in the final analysis it is western taxpayers yet again who will be the ones picking up bill for the actions of various corrupt WaBenz bureaucrats.

And what of those poor nations who actually do repay their loans? What of those who keep corruption under control and who have a ruling class that does not see private businesses as a personal piggy bank to be raided as needed? What message is sent to them when they see the incompetent and corrupt rewarded with free money so that some celebrity activists can make economic illiterates feel good about themselves?

Which brings me to Geldof. I just cannot figure out this guy; on one hand he says self-evident sensible things like (emphasis added):

Bob Geldof admitted today no amount of aid to Africa could eradicate poverty on the continent while its Governments remain corrupt. The former singer was launching a 170-page compact summary of the Africa Commission's report which will be presented to the G8 summit this July.

And the maverick Irishman repeated his call for 'hundreds of thousands' to converge on Edinburgh to coincide with the summit at Gleneagles. He said: "The issue governance is at the forefront of this compact. You can't give aid to countries when they return it to us in debt payment, especially if you don't allow them to trade with us. None of that will function unless there is a decent Government."

But then says something as preposterous as:

Fears over corrupt African regimes should not be used to delay aid to the poverty-stricken continent, Bob Geldof said yesterday. Less than 48 hours after both Tony Blair and George W Bush insisted that corrupt regimes had to be tackled to ensure that aid was not wasted, the Live 8 organiser told them to "get off the corruption thing" and deliver the promised help.

So what is one to make of that? By his own admission, Africa's appalling governance is a huge contributing factor to poverty and woe (not to mention the continent's horrific record regarding civil liberties) yet we are urged to "get off the corruption thing". So to use Geldof's sort of language... what the fuck?

If governance is perhaps the single biggest factor (amongst several) that makes the Third World so damn poor, surely the Western taxpayers whose money Geldof is to keen to give away should indeed be asking if they really want their money to end up in someone else's Swiss bank accounts via Kinshasa or Freetown.

Sadly for Africa, most of the things written about the causes and solutions of poverty in the Third World, or at least the articles that get serious column inches, are drivel by 'celebrity activists' who are ill-informed and arrogant in equal measure. A prime example being the mind numbingly ignorant Chris Martin for example, who thinks 'shareholders', the people who provide the capital to wealth creating businesses, which are the "great evil of this modern world" rather than, say, the governments of North Korea, Cuba and Burma. But then such folks do not concern themselves with actual benefits to poor people in various far off places but rather with pithy soundbites and causing emotional surges brought on by 'doing something', regardless of whether or not it actually improves anything for anyone other that a few Mercedes Benz dealers in sub-Saharan Africa and some portfolio managers in Zürich.

No, none of this really has anything to do with helping common people in the Third World.

A general strike now... will it evolve into more forcefukl resistance to Mugabe's thugs? I certainly hope so but do not underestimate the violence that Mugabe and his cotery will use to hang on to power (and their lives).

Many of the commentariat in my previous post on the ongoing horror that is Zimbabwe indicated that the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) were a poor choice for me to suggest sending arms to in order to oppose the ZANU-PF tyranny. The MDC are purely a movement dedicated to bring about change democratically via the ballot box, right?

Then please explain this rather inspiring outburst:

The people of Zimbabwe have a right to defend to themselves and to rise up against the oppressive Mugabe regime, Tendai Biti, the MDC member of parliament, has said. Speaking in a radio interview with SWRadioAfrica�s Violet Gonda, he said leadership would emerge to direct popular uprisings.

"I can�t tell you by who, but I can assure you that there will be decisive action against fascism and I can tell you that the next few days are going to be interesting," said Biti.

Pressed to identify the leadership, Biti replied: "I can't tell you - and the hundreds of Central Intelligence Organisation officers who I know are listening to me right now � about who is going to provide the leadership, who is going to do what, and so forth � but what I can guarantee you is that the anger is overflowing in the veins of the average Zimbabweans. They will defend themselves. The time for smiling at fascism is over."

Sounds to me if someone would just provide them with enough guns and a few truck loads of ammunition, these boys are well and truly good to go. Well Godspeed, gentlemen, may you all soon be celebrating together in Harare whilst Mugabe hangs from a nearby lamppost.

Robert Mugabe continues his insane demolition of houses and businesses as he increasingly starts to look like Pol Pot reborn, seeking to depopulate the cites and drive the now homeless and unemployed population into the countryside to eke out an even more miserable living, thereby dispersing and isolating people from communities which might oppose his tyrannical rule.

And where are the marchers in the west? Where are the protesters calling for justice in Zimbabwe? Where is the outrage from those tireless tribunes of the Third World, the UN? Why can I not hear the snarls of fury from the alphabet soup of NGOs? What of the legions of Guardian readers finding out about all this? What are they going to call for? Amnesty International is getting a lot of (bad) publicity from having called Guantanamo Bay 'a gulag' whilst now admitting they do not actually know what is happening there, yet why are they not straining every fibre of their being in opposition to this African horror? There is tyranny aplenty to be opposed without having to invent any.

Clearly the only chance for the people of Zimbabwe is for someone, anyone, to help them to rise up and meet violence with violence. They do not need aid, they need guns and ammunition so that supporters of the MDC can start shooting at anyone associated with ZANU-PF or the 'security' services. Time for Mugabe's swaggering police thugs to be met with a hail of gunfire rather than terrified sobbing. But of course the South African ANC government, far from being a possible solution to the rapidly deteriorating situation across the border, is aiding and abetting in the Cambodia-ization of Zimbabwe. I look forward to Saint Nelson Mandela taking a loud, public and sustained stand against Mugabe's madness. Yeah, right.

If Tony Blair was serious about doing something about poverty in Africa, he would be sending guns to the MDC and to anyone else who is willing to resist and threatening to have some gentlemen from Hereford put a .338 hole between Mugabe's eyes unless things change radically. What a pity Zimbabwe does not have oil or maybe more people would give a damn what is happening there.

Mass starvation in Zimbabwe has not discouraged the British government from funding a campaign which promotes anti-white "land reform" in Africa. The UK's Department for International Development gave �338,000 last year in "civil society" funding to support War on Want, a hard-Left campaign group formerly run by George Galloway.

War on Want has been central in setting up the Landless Peoples' Movement in South Africa. The Movement says it supports "the gallant actions of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe" in taking land from white farmers. According to War on Want: "The LPM is still at the early stages of mobilising people. It is working on building up the movement's leadership and profile, and developing ways to attract new members, and build relations with government and other movements. War on Want supports and assists their work."

War on Want says that white people own too high a percentage of African land and it says WoW is "at the centre of the tough battle for land."

It is unclear why the Department for International Development has anything to do with War on Want, given that the policies it supports have led to Zimbabwe becoming the fastest shrinking economy in the world.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

The Globalization Institute's crack of dawn email of links continues to arrive, every week day, and continues to be well worth getting.

One of the recent links thus promulgated was to this editorial, from Kenya.

First few paragraphs:

With all the money they get as emoluments, one would have expected that our Members of Parliament would strive to ensure that they do an honest day's job all year round.

But a report on their performance released yesterday shockingly says that the legislators only did 57 full working days the whole of last year. Allowing for public holidays, weekends and the days Parliament was in recess, this translates to less than two months of work.

Yet, these are people who are enjoying a salary package of Sh500,000 and other perks. They are the people who have been entrusted with articulating the needs of their people in Parliament.

Despite this, the study conducted by the Institute for Civic Affairs and Development says, there are some MPs who never brought any Bills to the House, never contributed to any and never raised a point of order.

In plain terms, this could be called incompetence.

One of the more depressing and destructive assumptions now rampaging about the world and doing damage to it is that the basic job of politicians is to pass laws. The more laws they pass, the better they must be doing.

But would Kenya really be a better governed country if all its members of parliament were to bring Bills to the House, instead of only some? Is it really the ultimate criticism of a politician that he never tries to pass any new laws. If politics means passing more laws, then maybe Kenya is lucky that it is not getting as much politics as it is paying for. There are far worse political vices than laziness.

I get the rough idea. Kenya's parliamentarians are not the greatest, and I am sure that is true. But this is a very bad way to explain what is so wrong with them.

Surprise surprise:

President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party today emerged victorious in the official results of a Zimbabwean parliamentary election criticised by the opposition and western powers as fraudulent.

With 84 of the contested 120 parliamentary seats declared, Zanu-PF took 51. Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 33, according to results on the official counting screen at the Harare election centre.

The ruling party entered the race needing only 46 seats to obtain a simple majority in the 150-seat parliament, where 30 members are Mugabe appointees.

Still, at least this election has given everyone something to grab hold of, and it surely counts for something that Mugabe feels that he needs to fake the result he wants.

It is interesting how much more interest the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is paying to Zimbabwe now. It is all because of the Iraq election. Until that happened, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere was understandably pre-occcupied with Iraq, and other misery-spots tended to be neglected. But since the election, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is interested in any circumstance which seems in any way to be being influenced by that election. Suddenly, all political badness everywhere is part of the story, provided only that some locals are making democratic noises, demonstrating, etc.

I am not complaining. This just goes to show how right they were when they said, those that did, that the election would make a huge difference. It has.

However, this is interesting. It is a piece by S. J. Masty at the Social Affairs Unit blog, trashing the whole idea of spreading democracy hither and thither, in countries to which it is not suited and who have not evolved it at their own speed and in their own way. Instead of having one relatively staid kleptocracy in permanent charge, says Masty, democracy is liable to replace that one kleptocracy with two or three competing kleptocracies. "Predator democracies", he calls these unfortunate countries. This is well worth a read, and a think. (Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link.)

What I think is that Masty may be confusing the messenger (democracy) with the message (lots of people are now rowing about who gets to rule the country). An old fashioned monarchy, by definition, would put an end to the rowing, but can an old-fashioned monarchy survive in a country where so many more people want a slice of the action than in the old days?

UPDATE: This is the kind of thing Masty has in mind.

Here are the first two paragraphs of a BBC report about a report, from a Commission:

The UK-led Commission for Africa has urged wealthy nations to double their aid to the continent, raising it by £30bn ($50bn) a year over 10 years.

African leaders need to root out corruption and promote good governance, the commission's final report says.

I cannot help suspecting that there may be something of a contradiction there, between paragraph one and paragraph two.

Is the way to root out corruption to double the amount of money you are chucking at it? This, it seems to me, might be problematic.

I mean, how do they intend to persuade Africans to refrain from being corrupt? Bribe them?

I have long believed that Robert Mugabe, ruler of the hapless Zimbabwe, will die before he ever admits to having made a mistake. Yet the Telegraph now offers this report, about how Mugabe has admitted to making a mistake!

President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers are now lying empty and idle.

Confessed.

After years spent trumpeting the "success" of the land grab, Mr Mugabe, 81, admitted that most of the farms transferred to black owners have never been used.

Admitted.

But what did Mugabe actually say?

� in his home province yesterday, Mr Mugabe chided the new landowners for growing crops on less than half of their land.

"President Mugabe expressed disappointment with the land use, saying only 44 per cent of the land distributed is being fully utilised," state television reported. "He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised."

In other words, Mugabe admitted no wrongdoing at all. He made the right decision. It was the people who were charged with implementing the decision who did wrong, by failing to grow as much food as they should have.

Plenty of other people are saying that Mugabe made a mistake with this larcenous policy:

Critics said Mr Mugabe's admission exposed the land grab's "failure".

"It has been a phenomenal and absolute failure on every level," said Tendai Biti, secretary for economic affairs of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "It has failed both in terms of production of crops and in terms of the occupation of the land."

And what is more, they seem to have supplied the Telegraph with a reason for the failure of the new farmers to farm successfully:

The new farmers are unable to raise bank loans because their properties are formally owned by the government and they have no individual title deeds. Without loans, they cannot buy seed, fertiliser or farming equipment and the regime has broken a pledge to supply them with tools.

Some farmers have resorted to using horse-drawn ploughs. Many have given up trying to produce anything at all.

So Mr Mugabe has made yet another mistake, this time in mishandling the arrangements for the new farmers with whom he has replaced the previous ones he stole from. But has he admitted it? No. Has he shifted the blame onto the hapless farmers? Yes. I would not want to be in their shoes now.

Par for the course. Mugabe is infallible. Reality is unworthy of him and has let him down.

But more importantly, this is a revolution that is starting to devour its own, to implode. Those "new farmers" are, or were, enthusiastic Mugabe supporters, were they not?. Now they are being blamed for the failure of a Mugabe policy. With luck, this means that this vile regime is now starting seriously to weaken itself, rather than merely to weaken its enemies.

If that is right, it might help to explain this:

Zimbabwe will hold parliamentary elections on March 31 and, for the first time in 10 years, Mr Mugabe is no longer holding out the offer of white-owned land as a vote-winner. Instead, his speeches are dominated by attacks on Tony Blair, who he claims is plotting to recolonise Zimbabwe.

I daresay many of his listeners are thinking: that sounds good. When is the Great White Blair due?

As I have said before, Robert Mugabe is now the leading spreader of the idea that Africa should be reconquered by white people.

We curse and rage at the BBC here, a lot, but you have to admit that this is a great story.

Even Ghana's director of tourism may have to admit that Accra has its work cut out competing with other tourist destinations in Africa. Yet just outside the capital, is the suburb of Teshi and it is here that tourists are coming to look at a relatively new tradition � the fantasy coffin makers.

So how did this happen?

The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions.

When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a cocoa pod. A major crop in Ghana.

However, the chief next door died before the bean was finished and so it became his coffin.

Then in 1951, the grandmother of one of Owoo's apprentices died.

She had never been in an aeroplane, so he built her one for her funeral.

And a tradition was born.

The only bit of what might be BBC politically correct boringness that I could detect in this report came a few paragraphs before that last quote, where it said:

Many of their clients want to bury loved ones in something that reflects their trade.

Even if that means being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle.

Even? I suppose if you are the BBC, that is the ultimate horror. But, if being buried in an airplane or a car or a cockerel or a cocoa pod is okay, then what on earth is so wrong with being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle? (Not Diet Coke obviously. That would be stupid.)

Something tells me that in these post-Christian times, this might spread to other parts of the world. Our boring British death industry could certaionly do with a shake-up. What kind of giant object would you like to be buried it?

It is good to read some good news coming out of Africa. True, African people are dying, but they are mostly dying of natural causes and are going out in style.

Further to this posting and previous postings involving Zimbabwe, the England cricket tour of Zimbabwe, etc., this story is the kind of reason why I am not that bothered about this apparently very stupid cricket tour that is now going ahead. No tour, and there would be that much less reportage of Zimbabwe and its disgusting ruler. What has happened is that about half the media have been banned from entering Zimbabwe, to write about the cricket! I suppose the fear is that they might wonder what all that shouting and screaming and people bashing is that goes on outside cricket grounds (and everywhere else � except in Safari parks apparently, see the comment on that previous posting) in Zimbabwe these days.

All the same, the ICC, cricket's global governing body, is making itself look ever more ridiculous:

For most countries, intervention from the government in this manner would be grounds enough for withdrawing from the tour but the ICC gave Zimbabwe special dispensation because of the situation in the country under the regime of president Robert Mugabe.

Well, exactly. A normal government cannot be allowed to behave like this. The Mugabe regime, on the other hand, must obviously be spared the interfering attentions of inquisitive journalists. How else can this disgusting regime grapple unhindered with all of the many, many problems caused by its own disgustingness?

There was debate here about just how bad the situation is in Africa in general, just how corrupt African governments now are, and just how pointless and/or harmful it may now be to send them charitable aid, etc. But I take it that no one will claim that matters have improved very much, in particular, Zimbabwe during the last decade.

Up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe's workforce, some 3.4 million people, has fled the country to escape the political oppression and collapsing economy under President Robert Mugabe's rule, according to research by an independent church study group.

The South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that most of them had crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, with an estimated 1.5 million skilled and able-bodied workers arriving in South Africa to seek work to support families left behind in Zimbabwe.

"An estimated 25 to 30 per cent of the entire Zimbabwean population has left the nation," the Peace Trust reported.

"Out of five million potentially productive adults, 3.4 million are outside Zimbabwe. This is a staggering 60 to 70 per cent of productive adults."

Zimbabwe's economy is in its most dire crisis since independence in 1980.

But do not worry. Some skilled workers are about to go to Zimbabwe, in the form of a visiting England cricket team.

Which might explain why someone thinks it worthwhile to place adverts featuring this website, next to the Telegraph piece quoted from above. I cannot think of any other reason to want to visit this dreadful place.

Looking for ZIMBABWE flights? Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? Check availability for all airplane tickets and flights to ZIMBABWE airports, then compare discount airfare rates to find the cheapest airline tickets and ZIMBABWE air travel from Kelkoo UK.

Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? That would be a real fun holiday. And business? What on earth business might that be? Nothing very civilised I should imagine. Selling cheap bus journeys out of the damn place, perhaps.

What a horror story. Death to Mugabe. Seriously, the sooner that stubborn old bastard drops dead the better, from whatever causes God (in the insurance sense of that much overused word) chooses, the better. This will probably be the next good thing that happens to this wretched country, and if he is as stubborn about clinging on to life as he is in clinging on to his idiotically destructive policies and damn the consequences, then the people of Zimbabwe could be in for a long wait.

I know that many who read this blog might feel that I ought to be angry about those cricketers, but honestly, I cannot see their visit making much difference one way or another. After all, nobody in a position actually to improve matters in Zimbabwe seems at all inclined actually to do that. In South Africa, for example, the big debate now seems to concern whether or not to be nasty to the millions of refugees from Zimbabwe, not about whether anything can or should be done to improve things in Zimbabwe itself.

Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC's website about Somalia, I wonder:

Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker's paradise about homosexual rights: "There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease."
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU's regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?

I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?

The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein's depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.

A remake of Do They Know It's Christmas? has just been recorded.

Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.

[�]

Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.

It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.

Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:

Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator � as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors � might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.

As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984�85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray � the epicentre of the famine � was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as 'wheat militias'.

Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory...

And so on.

And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.

Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the 'aid' goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his 'aid' may indeed do some serious harm.

I have no definite opinions about this alleged coup attempt that alleged Sir Mark Thatcher allegedly aided by alleged Jeffrey Archer (and alleged others) allegedly plotted. I have only now learned that the object of their disaffections was the government of Equatorial Guinea. But I have seen big headlines, and big pictures of Mark Thatcher looking furtive and ashamed. Thatcher himself now apparently denies having anything to do with the alleged plot, but then he would, now.

However, I cannot help noticing that it is being taken for granted that a coup in Equatorial Guinea would have been a self-evidently bad thing.

What kind of place is this? Well, I found some answers here.

The country's current president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, came to power in 1979 by leading a self-initiated coup that overthrew Francisco Macias Nguema, Obiang's uncle and the country's first president. In 1992, the government adopted legislation establishing a multiparty democracy. Since then, Obiang has been re-elected twice, most recently at the end of 2002, but both times amid opponents' allegations of election fraud.

Charming. You can see how this guy would be sensitive about coup attempts.

Despite rapid growth in real GDP, there is strong evidence that oil revenues have been misappropriated by the government. Furthermore, the government's failure to direct oil revenues toward development � especially to fund urgently-needed infrastructure improvements � has undermined economic and social progress in the country. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in public sector spending has increased inflationary pressures, translating into average growth of the consumer price index (CPI) of about 7% annually for the past few years.

Not exactly paradise on earth, is it?

All I am saying is: maybe a coup might have improved things.

I am thinking of starting a campaign to establish an internationally-recognised system of 'War Prizes'. It may seem more than a trifle insensitive but, really, it is the perfectly rational thing to do. After all war is a difficult and dangerous business and I think it is only fair that its most skilled practitioners are accorded some due level of public acclaim. We could even have categories of award such as 'Most Devastating Air Strike' or 'Most Creative Use of Field Artillery'.

You may think I am being morbid but at least my 'War Prizes' would prove a darn sight more interesting than those wretched and depressing 'Peace prizes':

A Kenyan environmentalist and human rights campaigner has been awarded the Nobel peace prize, becoming the first African woman to win the prestigious award since it was created in 1901.

Mrs Maathai, 64, received international acclaim in 1998 when she stopped the then Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi from building a luxury housing project after he had cleared hundreds of acres of forest.

The green belt movement in Kenya, which she founded in 1977, has planted more than 10 million trees to prevent soil erosion.

Why, exactly, is this person getting a 'peace' prize? A horticultural prize? With pleasure. A landscape gardening prize? For sure. But how, precisely, does a lifetime of professional tree-hugging qualify her as a preventer of armed conflict? As far as I can tell, Mrs. Maathai is being rewarded for being a female, African version of George Monbiot.

And, excuse me, but surely the last thing that Africa needs is more sodding environment? They have got environment up the ying-yang. In fact, they have got bugger all except bloody environment and most of it is wild, dangerous, parasitical and extremely detrimental to human life. What Africa needs is machine tools and lathes and tarmac roads and heavy trucks and great, big smokestack factories turning the sky black with their belched-out fumes. Given her commitment to maintaining the untamed savagery of that continent, I would judge that the most suitable award for Mrs. Maathai is a Serious Pain in the Arse Prize. People who build tarmac roads and heavy trucks no longer qualify for prizes. They only qualify for taxes, regulations and internationally-recognised opprobrium.

Call me old-fashioned but I always thought that 'peace' means the absence of war. Now it appears to mean something entirely different. Just like the word 'liberal' (in the US context and, increasingly, in Britain too) has become a label to describe people whose ideas and attitudes are anything and everything but liberal, so too the word 'peace' has now become a synonym for anything which is suitably and loudly primitivist, anti-development, anti-prosperity, anti-progress, nihilist, communist or just plain nuts!

I suppose that is why the remaining children of Lenin and raggedy, ageing Che-worshippers can still march around the thoroughfares of Western cities masquerading as 'peace campaigners'. 'Peace' is the fig-leaf behind which they can try to hide their godawfulness and pretend that they are struggling for a better world.

'Peace' is a discredited bromide. All I am saying is give my 'War Prizes' a chance.

One of the more shameful aspects of the British civil service is the contempt and indifference that it often shows towards former servicemen and women, often viewing their demands as an anachronistic embarrassment. This partially explains the lack of action given the foreseeable plight that over one thousand Commonwealth veterans now face in Zimbabwe.

This article in the Sunday Telegraph detailed the sad plight of veterans whose savings have been wiped out by Mugabe's hyperinflation, whose lands have been confiscated by the war veterans and whose very lives are subjected to intimidation by ZANU-PF'S thugs. Their cause has been taken up by Col. Brian Nicholson of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League, who has observed the impoverishment of the middle classes under the Mugabe regime.

Mr Mugabe has already closed many of the best schools and forced most of the white farmers out of the country. Now Col Nicholson fears Zanu-PF supporters will turn on the British war veterans, ransacking their homes, intimidating and possibly killing them.

Some may argue that many of the veterans were supporters of Ian Smith's regime and UDI in the 1960s. As such, they deserve no further support or succour from HMG. These arguments have no bearing on the current vulnerability of this group who are now being targeted because of their origins.

Col Nicholson is circulating his report to senior military figures and other "influential people" and wants them to press the Government to offer immediate financial help and to implement an evacuation plan.

He said: "We are doing our best but we can't do it alone. If nothing is done these brave, elderly people who fought for the Crown in the Second World War, defending the freedoms we enjoy today, will die an ignominious death."

A Foreign Office spokesman said there were "no plans" to evacuate British war veterans in Zimbabwe. He added: "If people are impoverished we would offer the appropriate consular assistance on an individual basis."

They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me. - Sydney Tshepiso Pilane

This is an account of my wildly fluctuating sympathies as I gradually found out more about a legal case launched by the Bushmen of Botswana.

I first saw the story on Ceefax. It's disappeared from there, so I can not quote, but I got the impression that the Bushmen had been evicted from the Kalahari game reserve and that the (possibly dishonest) reason the Bostwana government had given for evicting them was that it could not afford to provide services. Riiight. I powered up for Welfare Rant #2 on the way that welfare systems start by offering their clients services and end by making the 'services' compulsory and demanding that people live their lives in such a way as to allow the government to fulfil its side of the forced exchange with minimum inconvenience.

Then I thought, not so fast, Natalie.

Turning from Ceefax to the BBC Online story linked to above, it now appeared that the Botswanan government wasn't evicting the Bushmen but merely refusing on cost grounds to continue to provide services to remote places. Not the same thing at all. The Bushmen were free to continue to dwell in the same place and manner as their ancestors, they just had to jettison modern conveniences to do it. Well, said I, there is no reason why other Botswanans, themselves most likely poor, should subsidise the Bushmen's lifestyle choice, is there?

In the 1980s there was vast resentment here in Britain at the supine way in which mobile social security offices were set up to follow New Age traveller convoys to keep paying them their benefits; resentment redoubled when it was reported that the travellers seemed immune from many burdens that the state imposes on the rest of us. Their vehicles were frequently untaxed, and the drug laws and the requirement to be 'actively seeking work' if on benefits were left unenforced. (For something of the other side of the story, see the account by a traveller linked to further down.) The Bushmen seemed a similar case. They wanted it both ways: piped water even though they had chosen to live in the back end of nowhere.

But the ride was not over yet. My sympathies swung back once more to the Bushmen as I read another BBC account: 'Botswana's bushmen battle for land.' Maybe I had been revving up for the wrong rant. Now it seemed like a case of Welfare Rant #1: Dependency. Maiteela Segwaba, the old chief profiled here, presents a sad picture; a man for whom the first sip at a government-provided waterhole turned out to be almost the equivalent of the first injection of heroin.

Thousands of bushmen used to live traditional hunter-gatherer lives inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but now there are just a handful. And few still wear their loincloths or use bows and arrows to hunt game.

The waterholes the government provided years ago changed them gradually into farmers - ironically the authorities' refusal to continue supplying that water is now driving the bushmen from their land.

Not ironically. Predictably. Furthermore this account says that my first impression was right after all: the Bushmen were forcibly evicted, with threats and violence, possibly because there may be diamonds under their land and certainly because the government wants to tidy them up and make them proper modern Botswanans. Rants #1 and #2 fused into one when I read this attempt at justification by a government official, Sydney Tshepiso Pilane. It is sickening.

"Every government in every country formulates a policy for the development of all its people. They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me," he said.

Doublethink is not dead: the use of force to make a minority live like the majority is dressed up as a pseudo-indignant declaration of their equality with that majority.

One of the myriad reasons for thinking that it is an evil for the government to lay on services for one is that when the services are withdrawn it hurts, just as part of the evil of drugs is that withdrawal from them hurts. The hurt has two components: first the fact that something you have come to depend on goes away at all, and secondly that the way that the end comes tends to be chaotic and acrimonious.

The reason that withdrawal is rarely phased and planned comes from the politics of the attempt to make services universal. At first the government provides some service or other to most people, those it can reach easily. Then it gets a little richer and has enough spare capacity to get logical. It makes strenuous efforts to provide the service to everyone, whatever the expense. Officials often display a sort of manic determination akin to that of a mother determined to ensure none of her children will ever have cause to complain of fewer ballet lessons or football coaching sessions than another. The first stirrings of resentment from the paying majority start now. They will be ignored because the principle of universality seems so important. But resentments ignored have a way of building up. The pressure rises and rises and then explodes. Suddenly politicians are clutching their parliamentary majorities. Something has to be done to appease the ordinary folk, and quick! But because the minister placed in charge of withdrawal does not wish to have his own universalist platitudes of ten months earlier quoted back at him he has a strong motive to avoid debate. Thus it is Cold Turkey when you are lucky, force and fraud (as seems to be going on in Botswana) when you are not.

Some of the same themes emerge in this account of the New Age travellers (pdf document) by a man who was and is proud to be one. (The author, known as "Tash", would very much dispute some of my interpretation below.) The traveller movement seems much reduced since the eighties. Do those mobile Social Security vans still trundle devotedly on? I doubt it - and that may have been the gentlest of the methods the State used to break up the peace convoys and the festivals. One does not have to be sympathetic to New Age stuff to feel disturbed by accounts of police brutality at the "Battle of the Beanfield."

'Tash' also contends that in the early halcyon days the travellers had a functioning mini-economy of their own that was broken up by government action, pushing them onto benefits. Frankly I do not believe that they kept going solely by handicrafts, barter and busking. I did not dream those mobile social security offices, and a Joseph Rowntree foundation study says a later generation of travellers are somewhat welfare-dependent - but perhaps not as much as the press make out.

On the one hand, state welfare, along with the indifference to trespass, undermined the travellers' claim to be living sustainably and independently. On the other hand, many travellers were liberated and sustained by the freedom to choose their own neighbours and live in their own way and who can argue with that? (Answer: loads of people, starting with Sydney Tshepiso Pilane, but not me.) I can well believe that politically-motivated disruption of the festivals circuit did push people who had been making something for and of themselves into complete dependency. Then that dependency was used to stoke up more anger against them and that in turn embittered the travellers.

Something like the traveller life ought to be an option. But for it to work it has to be visibly non-parasitical. It is not fair that this requirement should be so much stronger for them than for settled people - any libertarian worth his or her salt will point out that people in houses and boardrooms often have their noses in the government trough more deeply than the travellers. It is not fair, but it is true. Metaphorically, those mobile social security vans carried the riot police and the bailiffs within them. They rankled too much to last.

Turning to the Bushmen, perhaps their ancient way of life was doomed anyway by contact with modernity, but any slight chance it may have had to either adapt organically or fade away by consent was finished, and its end made more bitter, by government efforts to help.

The odious dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has long been able to rely on the lack of loud criticism from many of his neighbouring African neighbours, afraid perhaps that they are seen to be lining up with their old white colonial oppressors against Zimbabwe. Well, if this report at Reuters is any indication, the coyness on the subject may be changing. More and more African nations are speaking out at the murders, pillage and looting carried out by Mugabe's henchmen.

Zimbabwe is a humanitarian catastrophe, occuring in slow motion before our very eyes. The sooner that the more decent regimes in that troubled continent apply the necessary pressures to help bring this bastard down, the better.

Surprise, surprise:

President Robert Mugabe's rosy forecast of a bumper harvest in Zimbabwe was contradicted by his own government yesterday, when an official report said 2.3 million people needed immediate international food aid.

The seizure of white-owned farms has combined with drought to cripple agriculture in Zimbabwe. But Mr Mugabe's official message is that his land grab has markedly increased production and made Zimbabwe self-sufficient. Last month, he refused help from the United Nations World Food Programme, saying: "Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked."

He brushed aside the fact that Zimbabwe has lived on food aid since 2001 and that 6.5 million people, more than half the population, depended on international help last year. By contrast, his office forecast a maize crop for this year of 2.4 million tons, more than enough to meet domestic needs.

Yet a report from the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee provides a strong antidote to the president's optimism. It concludes that 2.3 million people in rural Zimbabwe "will not be able to meet their minimum cereal needs during the 2004/05 season".

The report adds that food aid "for the most vulnerable people" should be sought immediately. The UN, aid agencies and Zimbabwean government departments compiled the assessment based on a survey completed in April. Mr Mugabe's officials appear not to share his optimism.

Food aid be damned. Someone should invade the place. Almost anyone would now be an improvement. Handing food aid over to the existing regime will not feed the "most vulnerable". It will merely feed the existing regime, and allow them to shove some more people into the most vulnerable category.

With the minds of the world's intervening classes fully occupied elsewhere, Zimbabwe is now a problem too small for those who might otherwise have done something about it to be bothered with, yet still too big and difficult for anyone else to be able to handle. So, Robert Mugabe's monstrous and murderous political machine will continue to churn its way through what remains of the country and its institutions.

If the anguish of the cricket world serves to draw some of whatever international attention is left over from Iraq to the anguish of Zimbabwe, then so much the better. Personally, I do not give a damn about cricket, or England cricket, or Timbuktooan cricket, as such. Cricket will stagger on, no matter how this Zimbabwe row plays out. But if cricket helps to keep Zimbabwe and its misgovernment in the headlines, then the more and more continuous is cricket's anguish, the better.

Cricket-wise � and this is the new development in this particular bit of the story � the state of the Zimbabwean cricket team has become so disastrous that even the International Cricket Council has started to worry about it. Until now, the ICC has only been concerned with (a) money, and with (b) making England's cricket administrators squirm, pretty much for the sheer fun of it (but also because of (a) money), by demanding that England send a touring team to Zimbabwe later this year, no matter what. But now, the Zimbabwe team is such an embarrassment, and the continuing schedule of so-called Test matches between the Zimbabwe also-playeds against Sri Lanka, and soon, even more embarrassingly, Australia (the best cricket team on earth just now), that even the ICC has realised that cricket as a whole is being, as sporting administrators like to say from time to time but usually only when someone cheats, Brought Into Disrepute. ICC administrators are thus inexorably being brought into personal contact with the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket.

I do not know for sure what is going to happen any more than any one else knows for sure, but here, for what it is worth, is my guess about how events will now unfold.

Since the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket are thugs operating under the personal orders of Robert Mugabe, contact between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC can only be a good thing, and all the better because it is potentially so newsworthy. I expect the ICC people to discover (as they already sort of know) that these Mugabe Cricket Thugs are indeed Thugs, and what is more that they are Mugabe Cricket Thugs whose word is worth nothing from one day to the next and with whom it is impossible to do coherent business of any kind. Robert Mugabe does not care about the ICC, any more than he cares about the rights and wrongs of murdering people, and the Mugabe Cricket Thugs know this. All that Mugabe now knows or cares about cricket is that some uppity white people ("rebels") have been making a nuisance of themselves, and they must be taught a lesson, at no matter what cost to Zimbabwe.

Now some more damned foreigners are interfering in Zimbabwe, taking it upon themselves to tell Zimbabwe how to do things, and my guess is that they too will get a right messing around from the Mugabe Cricket Thugs, who are now far more terrified of Robert Mugabe's wrath than of a little thing like Zimbabwe being threatened with expulsion from Test Match Cricket. So, such expulsion will be duly threatened. And then, when whatever deal has been made between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC has been solemnly sworn to by the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and then welshed on within a few hours, Zimbabwe will be duly expelled from Test Match Cricket. The more humiliating, public, dramatic, acrimonious and downright unpleasant this process becomes, the better, because the more humiliating (etc.) that it is, the more it will broadcast the vileness of the Mugabe regime to the world, and more to the point to parts of the world which have until now regarded England's imperial past as more important than Zimbabwe's mass murderous present. If the many cricket-lovers of India (which is a lot of people) could be persuaded, perhaps as a result of a slanging match between one of the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and one of India's ICC reps, to decide that Mugabe Should Go, well, then he will indeed go, a little tiny moment sooner than otherwise, and a few thousand lives may be spared.

It would appear that this process of mutual recrimination � of deals and then withdrawn deals, of consultations and then recriminations � is well under way.

As I say, if all this foolishness serves to draw some more attention to the sorry state of Zimbabwe, then it will have done some good.

I've been flagging up England versus Zimbabwe cricket here because I anticipated that the row about whether England ought to be playing cricket against Zimbabwe, given the state of Zimbabwe, was not going to go away. What I had not anticipated was that Zimbabwean cricket would itself be wrecked by the same processes which are destroying Zimbabwe in general. I should have, but I failed to.

The Zimbabwean cricket team (like Zimbabwe itself) is now a racially and politically polarised shambles:

Zimbabwean cricket will reach meltdown this morning when 15 rebel players and their lawyer draft a letter rejecting the board's offer of mediation and renewing their boycott. This time they will walk out for good.

"This will hopefully be our final letter," one of the rebels said. "We'll probably be set free in about 14 days when they fire us." The Zimbabwe Cricket Union will be forced to pick Test sides from the willing but hopelessly inexperienced young players who crashed and burned to a 5-0 one-day series defeat against Sri Lanka.

So what have these "rebels" been rebelling about. Well, their problem is that the Zimbabwe cricket team is now being selected, not by people who know their cricket, but by people who know their Robert Mugabe.

As Michael Jennings (who did see this coming a year ago) said on Ubersportingpundit about three weeks ago:

As far as I can see, any argument for continuing to play Zimbabwe is based on the idea that cricket and politics have been largely separated, and that the strongest team is being fielded. This is now manifestly not so, as players are being selected (or not) on racial and political grounds. �

And things have not got any better since then, as Scott Wickstein explained on Ubersportingpundit today.

Tony Blair has said that England "shouldn't" tour Zimbabwe in the autumn. But he isn't willing to decide the matter, and I can see his point.

The problem is that the ICC (International Cricket Council) has dug itself into a position of insisting that England must tour Zimbabwe, on the grounds that (now that South Africa has been sorted) politics and cricket must be kept separate, and the dominant ICC voices (i.e. India, and also Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are from countries whose citizens are extremely reluctant to admit to white people that they might have made a mistake. Although actually, they could change their policy now, on the grounds that Zimbabwean cricket has also changed. The Zimbabwean team used to be selected on cricketing merit. Now it is not.

Kofi Annan has perfected the Holy Man style of public performance. He speaks very quietly, in that exquisitely enunciated African accent, and people just take if for granted that he is a Good Man and a Good Thing. But Per Ahlmark (linked to by Instapundit) shows him to be a less than perfect human being. He describes the inaction and treachery of the UN, as lead by Annan, in first promising, and then failing, to protect the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs. But, he continues:

No one should be surprised by the UN's inaction, because only the year before it had demonstrated utter incompetence in facing the fastest genocide in history � the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in just 100 days. UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 were Annan's responsibility before and during the crisis.

Annan was alerted four months before Hutu activists began their mass killings by a fax message from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding UN forces in Rwanda. Dallaire described in detail how the Hutus were planning "anti-Tutsi extermination". He identified his source "a Hutu" and reported that arms were ready for the impending ethnic cleansing.

Dallaire requested permission to evacuate his informant and to seize the arms cache. Annan rejected both demands, proposing that Dallaire make the informant's identity known to Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, even though the informant had expressly named the president's closest entourage as the authors of the genocide blueprint.

This is the man who is being seriously proposed as the next ruler of Iraq, because he would be an improvement.

Annan, Ahlmark makes clear, is an object of religious worship, a human repository of millenarian hopes, rather than a man who has earned the adoration he basks in.

A similar error of false adoration was made by the more elderly admirers of Kofi Annan, when younger, with that other African Holy Man of severe actual unholiness, Julius Nyerere. As with Nyerere, it is hard to tell what proportion of Annan's catastrophic blunders to attribute to sheer stupidity, and how much to actual wickedness. I suspect a combination of the two in the form of a murderously stubborn stupidity, which combines intellectual mediocrity with an immoral unwillingness to admit to error, possibly all floating in the same delusions as those that engulf the minds of his worshippers, but perhaps caused by mere vanity.

Robert Mugabe is another such. Although, having a slightly more severe and steely public persona, he is more readily identified as the mass murderer that he is. He should have gone to RADA. At the very least he should lose the Hitler moustache.

The vision Kofi Annan personifies with such theatrical precision is that of a single, infinitely benign World State, which will cure all ills, correct all injustices, right all wrongs, and put down the mighty from their seats. Allelujah. Especially those horrid Americans. That this same man might be an ill, a perpetrator of injustice, a wrongdoer and far too mighty one, and that the vision he personifies might be a road to ruin of our entire species, starting with its poorest and most unfortunate, and that those ghastly Americans may in fact be energetically rescuing the human race from a great and self-sacrificial folly with no good purpose to it whatever, is a thought that is simply not bearable to the World Statists. So they caste it aside. Mere evidence has nothing to do with it. To cease from the worship of Kofi would mean changing their entire way of thinking and believing and feeling, and that they will not do, no matter how much blood soaks their altar.

Two news stories caught my eye today.

Firstly B.B.C. Radio 4's Today show reported that the authorities in the People's Republic of Scotland have noticed that sport is unfair - there are winners and losers and sometimes the winners win big.

To deal with this problem the local authority in Edinburgh has declared that if a team in a children's football match are winning by 5 to 0 (or more) at half time the ref should be allowed and encouraged to declare the score to be 0 - 0.

In this way the losing children can have another chance - and their self esteem will be protected.

Soon the careful minds of the Scottish authorities will work out that a better way of ensuring equality would be to declare that all matches end in the score 0 - 0.

Oh well, whilst the English taxpayers continue to fund the Scottish government (latest example - a 400 milion plus Paliament building that was supposed to cost "a maximum of 40 million") such sillyness will continue.

Also today I got to see this week's Economist... and I spotted a report on Somalia that I think will be of interest.

As is well known most of the nation of Somalia does not have a formal government. Now opponents of anarchism (or perhaps "anarchocapitalism" as "anarchism" is a word that is sometimes used to refer to some forms of collectivism) have pointed at Somalia and said "see anarchy - it really is vile, bloodsoaked chaos" and defenders of anarchy have claimed "no - Somalia does have a government (indeed it has multiple governments), the Warlords are all statists acting as warring governments".

The Economist report does not settle the dispute between anarchists and non-anarchists, but it does provide some information.

Firstly that paying the Warlords money to protect oneself and property does not work very well as (unlike the "protection agencies" of anarchist or anarcho-capitalist theory) the Warlords will take the money - but their men will tend to rob and murder you anyway.

However, hireing and organising one's own troops seems to work better (as does owning, and learning how to use, weapons oneself).

Also, as there are now about two dozen warlords and none of them (up until recently anyway) has a very well equiped force, a troop of even ten men can give one security against most road blocks and other such (the Warlord gangs just see it as just two many armed people to fight - and the armed guards tend to be fairly trustworthy).

This is clearly not much good for very small business enterprises or (POOR) private individuals. But some large companies are actually prospering in Somalia.

For example the largest mobile phone company may employ 300 armed guards on top of its 500 working staff, but neither the company or its employees have to pay taxes to anyone or obey any regualtions. They just have to respect the property of other people and keep their agreements with them (otherwise the reputation, and therefore the profits, of the company would go down the drain).

Although many of the working (or perhaps "non security workers" would be more polite - after all the armed guards are doing a job) staff consider it wise to own weapons themselves and to know how to use them (which is a cost - in both money and time), for added security.

And, the Economist (no friend of corrupt business folk)reports, the company provides charitable gifts to the local people (schools, hospials, roads and so on).

Sadly neither the American government or the "International Community" are interested in this.

The Americans are supplying favoured Warlords with money and weapons (in return for help in hunting terrorists) and the International Community is obsessed with a "peace process" in which the various crimial gang bosses, or proto governments (or whatever you want to call the Warlords) are gathered together in the hopes they will form a formal government for the area of Somalia that does not have one. In which case (of course) the Warlords would be strong enough to rob and murder as much as they liked.

Almost needless to say, the private companies are not invited to these talks. Perhaps if the private companies robbed and murdered people they would be invited.

One reason for not wanting England to go ahead with its projected cricket tour of Zimbabwe this winter is that the despotic ruler of that unhappy land, Robert Mugabe, will undoubtedly regard such a tour as proof of his own international magnificence, and of the indifference of all people in Britain to his many murders and other atrocities.

Things in Zimbabwe are so bad that even the UN has noticed, and wants to throw other people's money at the problem.

The United Nations is appealing for more than $94 million to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. The United Nations says economic mismanagement has brought Zimbabwe to the brink of a serious humanitarian crisis.

Yes. Things are about to get really bad out there. Hurry. Give money, before people start to die.

The United Nations says Zimbabwe's economy is a shambles and getting worse. It says inflation has shot up from 100 percent in 2000 to 600 percent this year. And, last year, it says, the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 13 percent.

When I say throw other people's money at the problem, I actually mean throw other people's money at Robert Mugube, for it is undoubtedly he who will hoover it all up.

Money isn't going to solve this problem. In fact that kind of money is the damn problem, or at any rate a big slice of it. Serious international pressure, on Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, and on all the scumbag politicians in other countries who are protecting Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, might make some small difference by speeding the collapse of that disgusting regime by a few months and hence saving a couple of hundred thousand lives, or whatever it would be. Anything which might draw attention to this horror story, such as a nice little row about the England cricket tour, is all to the good.

But now here is another reason to hope that the England cricketers cancel their trip. If they do, it may mean that London will not get the 2012 Olympics.

If England boycott their tour of Zimbabwe this winter, it could have a knock-on effect on London's prospects of hosting the Olympic Games in 1912...

... and they seem to have lost a century there, but never mind...

...according to a report in Friday's edition of The Guardian. What is more, the potential costs to the England & Wales Cricket Board are spiralling by the day, and if they are suspended by the ICC for their moral stance, they could lose up to �50 million in gate receipts, sponsorship, and TV revenue.

"The ECB is once again in an invidious position because of the utterly tragic situation in Zimbabwe," said John Read, the board's director of communications. "A one-year ban would cost the ECB tens of millions of pounds, and would have a devastating effect on all aspects of the game, including our ability to help nurture and develop the two million schoolchildren that play cricket up and down the country. It is difficult to envisage a more serious scenario facing cricket in England and Wales."

The ECB's stance has also caused widespread distrust among African IOC members, whose votes will be crucial when it comes to deciding which city is awarded the 2012 Olympics. It has been noted that there was no such opposition to Zimbabwe's participation in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, partly because of a fear of an African boycott.

Rejoice David Carr.

Maybe the ECB should start a "Boycott the Tour" fund, to cover the cost to them of pulling out of this abominable expedition. I agree that it is tough on them to be used as a political stick to beat Mugabe with. So, all those of us who think their tour should be used as a stick anyway, because every stick helps, should be asked to pay for their opinion. One thing is for sure. Money spent that way will do a whole lot more good than UN "humanitarian aid". Plus, it would publicise the whole disgusting mess very satisfactorily.

Armed humanitarian aid, that went in there and actually helped all the afflicted Zimbabweans and cut out the middle man (Mugabe), preferably by apprehending him (dead or alive), would be a different matter.

The way to tell what is really happening by reading newspapers � which is not always very easy, is it? � is to look for what both sides in arguments agree about. And in Africa the reports which I read from time to time all seem to agree that educational standards are falling. The only argument is about whose fault that is.

Take this report, which I found on a google hit list from typing in, as is my occasional wont, "education":

Principals in secondary schools in Ebonyi State have been identified as responsible for the falling standard of education in Post-Primary schools as they contribute significantly to examination malpractices in the state.

This was the view of members of State House of Assembly who spoke when the planning committee on the forthcoming Ebonyi State educational summit paid advocacy visit to the House in Abakaliki on Monday.

The House members frowned at the prevailing situation where many principals allegedly collect money from students and aid them during NECO and WASC examinations and even negotiate deals between the students and examination supervisors.

Sounds like Nigerian business as usual is proceeding as usual. I do not know anyone with direct experience of Nigeria who does not regard the place as the world capital of anarcho-capitalism, in a bad way. In London � which is now, like the Internet itself, infested with dishonest Nigerians � our default attitude is: crooks the lot of them, until an individual can prove himself an exception to the rule. Anyone not totally prejudiced against Nigerians, from the trust point of view, is totally ignorant.

At first the link to this report didn't work, and my immediate inclination was to blame a Nigerian somewhere for taking a bribe instead of doing his job, but that may have been somewhat unfair. (And when I checked the link again before posting this, it was back to not working again. Bloody Nigerians!)

Not that those "House members" who "frowned" at all this are going to do anything about it. They are just higher up in the bribery chain.

My solution: make Nigeria anarcho-capitalist in a good way. Stop trying to have a government that does anything, because whatever government there is will be totally corrupt. Make the system that everything is for sale and everything negotiable official, including law and order. Then the place might work semi-reasonably.

But then again it still might not.

It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU.

As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place.

As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at.

This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe's rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe's police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections.

As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:

Hilary Andersson, of the BBC's Panorama programme, reveals how thousands of youths are being taught to rape, maim, torture and kill in Zimbabwe's terror training camps - and now Robert Mugabe intends to make the camps compulsory for all the country's young men and women

[...]

A former official with the Ministry of Youth, Gender and Employment Creation that oversees the camps, explained the government's thinking. "You are moulding somebody to listen to you, so if it means rapes have to take place in order for that person to take instructions from you, then it's OK," he said. He was so horrified that he left his job with the ministry in disgust. Rape is just one of the ways camp commanders are able to turn their charges into unquestioning automata. The training methods vary from camp to camp, but the pattern is consistent.

If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to 'help stamp out poverty in the third world', then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept 'North Korea Lite', the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through.

Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people's money to begin with.

So which is it?

Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.

One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970's with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.

The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one's hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.

Do you remember Liberia? There was a big fuss about it awhile back. Yeah, that one, the place in West Africa. The one with the bridge surface scattered with enough brass to build a Napoleonic cannon. The one with the guys who couldn't hit a barn door at point blank range with a full AK47 clip.

It seems the post-Taylor era is working out as well as could have been expected. The violence has subsided, bands of marauding 'rebels' are disarming, loads of aid is flowing in and the new government is in place. Unknown to most of us, due to lack of media interest, US President Bush found time to keep on top of the affair and meet with Liberians.

Colin Powell says the former 'President' of Liberia will eventually pay for his crimes.

You can catch up on it here. You have not been hearing much because without doom and gloom, where is the story?

If you believed the media you would think there were no place in the world without a dead body or two casually laying about.

As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.

The rebellion by 6,000 black workers is the first in nearly four years of state-sponsored terror on the country's white-owned farms. Kondozi's 1,500 profitable acres provide huge quantities of runner beans, mange tout and red peppers for stores including Safeway, Sainsbury's and Tesco.

But the minister for agriculture, Joseph Made, wants the business for himself. A few weeks ago, he arrived at the farm with colleagues and ordered out the workers and the white owners. A fortnight later, scores of ruling Zanu-PF party loyalists were sent in but around 200 women workers fought back with broken tiles, stones and broken bricks. Shots were fired, apparently by pro-government thugs, but they were forced to flee. Mr Made was not available for comment.

As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the 'aid lobby' was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World.

One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe's victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand 'something be done', but I guess that only applies when the designated 'bad guys' are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists.

The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe.

Arm the workers of Kondozi!

I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as 'surveys'. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.

However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:

Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.

The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.

I know exactly who those 'dismayed' people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that 'AIDS' is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.

Africa still has that 'dark continent' quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.

I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80's. From out of nowhere came legions of 'experts' to assure us that it really was the new 'Black Death' and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.

It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.

I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I'm glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)

To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:

It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people�s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.

Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.

As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we're as bad � But, if we don't, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.

Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn't lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.

Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:

He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.

Good point. And come to that, what's the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?

I also liked Mark Doyle's nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people �

Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates � whether they agreed with him or not � were impressed by a lively speech.

� but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.

It scarcely counts as news:

Herbert Ndlovu, 43, who retired from the Zimbabwean National Army in August after 23 years service, said he had been ordered to put a cross against Mugabe's names on ballot papers that should have been sent to soldiers.

Instead, the papers were resealed in envelopes and driven to Harare where they were used to support claims that Mugabe won the controversial presidential poll in March last year.

There were numerous secondhand accounts of vote rigging and gerrymandering, but the statement in Johannesburg by Ndlovu, who was tortured by the regime and has fled Zimbabwe fearing for his life, is the first personal account.

Accusations of electoral fraud were so convincing that the Commonwealth expelled Zimbabwe, and the United States and the European Union imposed travel and financial sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.

Mr Ndlovu, said: "I filled in hundreds of ballot papers, maybe thousands. There were six of us working from early in the morning."

The real shock would have been if this kind of thing had turned out not to have been happening. If Mr Ndlovu has said: "I know everyone assumes there was cheating, but there wasn't. I know. I was directly involved. Everything was done correctly, with no shady business." If he'd said that, and been believed, that would have been a story. But "yes there was cheating"?

Put it this way. I don't know where this story was in the paper version of the Telegraph, but not on page one would be my guess.

Time for me to take a break from all this lofty philosophising about the state of the world and indulge in a little bit of schoolboy humour, made possible by this BBC report on the death of the former Zimbabwean President, Canaan Banana:

A former Methodist minister, professor of theology and diplomat, he was 67 years old. He leaves four adult children and a wife with whom he separated in 2000.

The Bananas Split!

In Zimbabwe, things are just getting worse and worse:

An estimated three million Zimbabweans are seeking sanctuary in neighbouring South Africa, while 400,000 have gone to Mozambique. Anything from 10 to 20 per cent of the Zimbabwean population have left their homes to seek job security and wages in neighbouring lands.

Trains, buses and lorries have been used by the South African authorities to deport 498,321 since the crisis began in 2000, according to official figures, although it is believed that only one in six illegal immigrants is caught.

Even desperately poor Mozambique is now attracting Zimbabweans. Thousands have streamed over the mountainous eastern border into Manica province, hoping to be paid in any currency other than the Zimbabwean dollar.

Ironically, many black Zimbabweans are leaving for Mozambique to work on farms being run by the same white farmers kicked off their land by Mr Mugabe.

Zimbabwe may hate the white farmer, but scores have been welcomed into Mozambique by the authorities keen to lure agricultural specialists, especially in the tobacco sector.

Botswana, too, has also been inundated. A rare African economic success story, it is now under threat from hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. It is dramatic proof of the regional chaos caused by Mr Mugabe's chaotic rule.

So is anything being done about this horror story? According to Zimbabwe "Information" Minister Jonathan Moyo, something is being done:

"Britain, America, Australia ... and New Zealand are truly and seriously committed to regime change, they seek a regime change in Zimbabwe," he said.

"They are pursuing it through acts of economic sabotage and they use weapons of mass deception, (under the cover of) instruments of democracy, human rights rule of law, good governance, to sound reasonable," Moyo said.

"They steal our foreign currency earnings, they attack even our own currency to the point of saying it's scarce, to blame the government, to seek regime change, and they drive the parallel market," he told top government, economic and civic officials seeking solutions to the economic malaise.

We can hope, I suppose. But you get the feeling that although lots of people know what's going on out there, nobody important in the world has this horror story near enough to the top of their to-do list for anything to be done about it at all soon. Only when, having destroyed Zimbabwe itself, the Mugabe regime destroys itself, as it presumably will when there's nothing else left to destroy, will this horrible chapter in human affairs draw to a close.

The final paragraph of this second story, originally from Agence France-Presse, is a classic of Gallic gallows humour:

The two day conference convened by government and business heard yesterday that Zimbabwe's economy was being undermined by contradictory and ineffectual government policies, corruption, greed and the country's negative image abroad.

Yes how true. Government policy isn't being imposed nearly firmly enough. If government officials were murdering people selflessly and ungreedily, instead of how they're doing it now, and if Zimbabwe could shed its negative image abroad, all would be well.

For some people, Africa is the conscience of the world. For others, its a land of milk and honey:

Kenyan women with mixed-race children claim activists encouraged them to lie about British soldiers, reports Adrian Blomfield in Nanyuki

Human rights activists have encouraged Kenyan prostitutes to submit fake rape claims against British soldiers, according to allegations made to The Telegraph. They were allegedly promised a share in any compensation payments.

At least three witnesses claim that representatives of Impact, a Kenyan organisation working with a British lawyer to prepare the lawsuit against the Ministry of Defence, have approached impoverished prostitutes in the town of Nanyuki, in central Kenya, with a tantalising proposal.

Angela Muguri, 24, claims three Impact activists sought her out and promised to make her a millionaire. All she had to do was pretend that British soldiers raped her - and then give them a cut of any forthcoming compensation.

Those 'human rights activists' are just concerned, caring people who are fighting for social justice and a better world.

According to the Independent, Robert Mugabe is being bought out of office by President Bush.

Robert Mugabe will relinquish his leadership of Zimbabwe's ruling party by December, paving the way for his exit as President and new elections by June 2004, the South African President Thabo Mbeki has told George Bush.

The Independent has established that Mr Bush has pledged a reconstruction package for Zimbabwe worth up to $10bn (�6.2bn) over an unspecified timeframe, if a new leader takes over.

Unwrapping the delicate wordage of the Independent story, Mbeki told Mugabe to go, and now he's going (which obviously has something to do with this). But why? What's in it for Mbeki?

Privately Mr Bush is said to have exerted pressure on the South African President by indicating that South African companies would benefit from the aid package for Zimbabwe, since many of them would be well placed to bid for contracts. South African firms are owed huge amounts of money by Zimbabwe, mainly for fuel and electricity supplies.

Ah.

Oh well. Better than nothing being done at all. I think. I hope.

Just when you think that the world could not possibly get more insane:

President Robert Mugabe's regime pulled off an extraordinary diplomatic coup yesterday when it was given a senior position within the African Union, the grouping set up to promote good governance in Africa.

What are the odds on Mugabe being appointed as the next UN Commissioner on Human Rights?

George W Bush has agreed to send up to 1,000 troops to Liberia. CNN reports that he took the decision after a meeting of his National Security Council. An announcement was expected, possibly today, that the US troops will head an international peacekeeping force.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, had urged the UN Security Council to dispatch a force "to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy" in an upsurge in fighting between factions engaged in a 14-year conflict that has killed a tenth of Liberia's population.

Apart from embassy protection detachments, the marines will be the first American soldiers deployed in Africa since the withdrawal from Somalia nearly a decade ago. Britain, France and some African countries had called on America to lead it because of its historical links with Liberia, founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed American slaves.

Comments by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Bush was considering sending troops provoked a nearly instantaneous reaction in Monrovia, where thousands of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy to cheer a possible American presence. One man said:

We feel America can bring peace because they are the original founders of this nation, and secondly, they are the superpower of the world.

Strange, Liberians do not seem to have a problem with that...

Paul Staines ponders the grim events unfolding in Liberia and wonders who is going to support what action... if any

The Left seems strangely quiet about Liberia. Bad things are happening in that inappropiately named land, Liberians themselves�are calling for intervention - US intervention. Various European foreign ministries hint that they think US intervention might be a 'good thing'.

The UN offices and food programs have come under attack form Liberian government forces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urges the Security Council to dispatch a multinational intervention force to Liberia to prevent 'a humanitarian catastrophe'. Annan�hinted a strongly worded letter to the Security Council president, that this should be led by�the United States. He also said it should be authorised under chapter Vll of the UN Charter which permits the use of force to restore order. (Why didn't we use that in Iraq?)

Even�France urged Washington to take the lead on military intervention in Liberia. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is brokering peace talks between the Liberian government and rebels in the Ghanaian capital Accra, has also urged the United States to take a leading role in the dispatch of peacekeepers.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, said during a visit to Ghana on Saturday that Britain and France had "assumed their responsibilities" in two of Liberia's neighbours, Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, where they had led recent military interventions to halt civil war. Villepin said it was now time for the United States to do the same in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.

The Left here faces a tricky dilemma - unable as 'anti-imperialists' to ever give the US the benefit of the doubt they prefer, I suspect,�to let Liberia go up in flames rather than sanction a US led intervention.

Paul Staines

Some further evidence for that buzz I thought I detected a while ago in favour of re-conquering Africa.

A consortium of mercenary groups has made the UN a deceptively simple proposal: give us $200 million, and we'll help bring an end to the war in the Congo.

Tribal militias are running rampant in the eastern part of the central African nation, slaughtering hundreds of villagers at a time. Since 1998, the violence there has claimed 3.3 million lives.

The world's response has been, to say the least, underwhelming. A few thousand UN peacekeeping troops have been stationed there since 2001. But these brave souls watched helplessly last month as the militias murdered 430 innocents in the provincial capital of Bunia.

The killings shamed the European Union into sending 1,400 French and British soldiers into the area. But they'll operate only in Bunia -- no matter how bloody things turn in the countryside. And on September 1, the troops are going home. End of story.

What happens then? The UN Security Council is trying to decide that now. �

Personally I would be amazed if anything as sensible and humane as this were actually to happen in the near future.

I mean, think of the embarrassment that would be unleashed if such an operation were to be triumphantly and quickly successful. The private sector, even if only as a World Government contractor, succeeding where the World Government itself had failed? This would never do. Next thing you know, they'll be cutting out the middle man, and just going around rescuing countries anyway, whether the UN approves or not, and then just bullying the UN into approving it afterwards. Unthinkable. Couldn't happen.

And since most of that money would eventually come from the Americans, why not ask them to pay for it direct, instead of if being fed through all those sticky fingers at the UN? And although two hundred million dollars is quite a lot compared to what I have in the bank, it doesn't sound like much for liberating and pacifying an entire resource-rich country. Before you know it, regime change could become a profitable business, financed, as they say at the RNLI (a not entirely dissimilar operation by any means), "entirely by voluntary contributions".

Impossible. Couldn't have that. Far better to let the Africans go on killing one another and spray the mess with bank notes and food parcels, paid for by the resigned taxpayers of the West.

So it may all stay at the level of talk for some time yet, but I can see all sorts of people getting behind such talk and bouncing it around, if only to embarrass the United Nations.

This from today's (well yesterday's now ? I was trying to get something up before midnight) Telegraph:

Robert Mugabe is considering stepping down as Zimbabwe's president within a year under "certain conditions", South African government sources said yesterday.

His demands include the right to nominate his successor and international and local recognition that he remains the country's properly elected founding president to enable him to enjoy "honourable retirement", they said.

The 79-year-old autocrat, whose obsession with clinging to power has brought his once-prosperous nation to the edge of economic collapse and political chaos, is said to have assured President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa of his retirement plans in a telephone call last week.

Mr Mbeki sees Mr Mugabe as a major impediment to his dream of successfully launching Nepad - the "new partnership for Africa's development" under which African nations commit themselves to good governance in return for international financial aid.

Mr Mbeki was said to have been enraged by images emerging from Zimbabwe of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change being hauled before court in chains to face a second charge of high treason for organising protests against the Mugabe government.

According to sources, Mr Mbeki told Mr Mugabe of South Africa's "displeasure".

What a world of misery and sleaze is captured in these few paragraphs.

And how about Nepad? Don't they realise that "Nep" is the start of other words, which suggest anything but "good governance", but which instead involve such practices as nominating one's successor from within the ranks of one's own family?

This whole Zimbabwe mess makes me think that actually something much bigger may be going on than merely the struggle between these bad guys (in power) and these good guys (not yet in power). What if things in Africa just keep on getting worse and worse, and what if the decision that we all, in our nice safe countries, have eventually to make about Africa is not which ones are the nice Africans whom we should be helping, but whether to try to rescue the entire place by conquering it, again.

We're decades away from any such plan emerging in all seriousness, but I can see us starting to think about this sort of thing, any year it now. Regime change, is, after all, now on the menu of things that are thinkable. The USA and the UN would have to be more in tune than they are now, but I can see that happening.

South Africa, from what I've read, is losing its professional classes inexorably. This article was published in 1998, and according to a piece by R. W. Johnson in the last Prospect but one (paper only), things haven't improved any since, in this respect. The haemorrhaging of professionals of all colours from that increasingly unhappy country continues relentlessly, which at least counterbalances the refugees now flooding in from Zimbabwe. And as for the Congo ?

Many might say that to even hint at the notion of a future reconquest of Africa is cruel and frivolous. But I think that such talk might actually do some good. The present line taken by the likes of Mugabe is that the problems he is facing now are all caused by white interference in the past, and by continuing white interference now, and that any black Zimbabwean who protests against him is just a tool of imperialism. Yet the truth is that one of the men now doing most to revive the idea of another wave of imperialism in Africa is Mugabe himself, and telling him this just might stir up a bit of embarrassment around him. Best of all, it might make the bastard suffer:

Mr Mugabe, people are saying that Africa ought to be reconquered by White Men, partly because of how you do things. Any comment on that?

And the opposition to Mugabe could say that because of Mugabe, White Men are talking of reconquering Africa. He's the friend of White Imperialism, not us. And it would be true.

On the other hand maybe Kim du Toit has a clearer fix on what we should do.

Thousands were slaughtered on the streets of Liberian capital of Monrovia during the intermittent civil war in the mid-1990s. Now there is more killing as clashes between troops loyal to President Charles Taylor and the well-armed rebels have intensified. The French military commanders based in nearby Ivory Coast felt they had no option other than to order an evacuation of United Nations staff and foreign diplomats from Monrovia.

But unlike in Sierra Leone in 2000, when British troops remained in large numbers on the ground for months, the French commanders ordered their men to leave Liberia as soon as the foreign passport holders had been rounded up.

Our sole mission is to proceed with the evacuation of Europeans and other foreigners upon the demand of the French government.

The rebel groups now fighting for control of Liberia have been accused of voodoo-driven atrocities that have almost become the norm in west Africa - with prisoners cut to pieces so rebel soldiers can eat their vital organs.

For Liberians who did not have the option of being rescued, the immediate future looked grim and thousands of Monrovians continued to gather around the city's main soccer stadium desperate for sanctuary. Fanny, a Liberian refugee who had trudged for two days to reach the stadium said:

There's no food anywhere. People are dying. The Americans must come. We want peace.

Thanks to Dissident Frogman for the link.

Just watching the cricket between Zimbabwe and England today, I have a couple of further comments to add to what Brian was saying on Thursday.

The background to all this is that Henry Olonga in the recent World Cup wore a black arm band to mourn the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. (Olonga incidentally was in 1995 the first non-white player to play top level cricket for Zimababwe, although there have been many others since) Although he was a member of the Zimbabwe squad for the rest of the World Cup, he was not selected in any further matches in the tournament. Off the record, the team management admitted that they would have liked him to have played, but they were under pressure from the Mugabe government not to select him. The final stages of the tournament were played in South Africa, and it was revealed at the end of the tournament several members of the Zimababwean security forces had travelled to Zimbabwe to "escort" Olonga back to Zimbabwe after the last game so that he could be charged with treason. The South African government should have screamed in outrage at this violation of its sovereignty but didn't. Apparently good relations with the Mugabe regime are still important there.

Unsurprisingly, Olonga went into hiding and left South Africa, eventually turning up in England. Many of us thought that this was so outrageous that cricketing ties with Zimbabwe should be ended, at least for now. Over the past ten years, Zimbabwe had gone to some effort to build up a good cricket team, but by this point things had reached something of a sad, depressing joke. (Of course, the situation with the game of cricket was unimportant compared to the indignities being suffered by the people of Zimbabwe in general, but it was sadly symptomatic of it).

However, the Zimbabwe team's present tour of England went on as scheduled. The England Cricket Board (which isn't in a great financial state) needed the money. The Australian board, which is in a perfectly good financial state, also confirmed a tour for October, so the English board are not alone. The first game between Zimbabwe and England (which goes for five days) is presently being played.

As Brian said, there have been some protests against the game. Brian reported that Channel 4, the advertising funded but technically state owned television network that covers English cricket, used the rain delays in the match to provide some discussion of Mr Mugabe's vile regime, and to interview Henry Olonga.

However, turning on the match this morning, I discovered it was even better than this. Henry Olonga is actually working for Channel 4 as a commentator. I don't know if this is just for this match, or he will be doing it for the whole summer. Like Brian, I was very impressed by him. Olonga is very articulate and knowledgeable, and was doing an excellent job. Many television channels would just cover the sport and pretend that any political controversy was not happening. However, Channel 4, while still providing good cricketing coverage, has not done this at all. Not only have they given the state of Zimbabwe some attention, but they have actually given Henry Olonga some work. This is sporting coverage and not news coverage, so they haven't been overt about it, but in a nicely understated way that doesn't take anything away from the sporting coverage, they have made a statement. This is deeply classy.

We in England have been neglecting Zimbabwe. There have been very few postings on the subject here lately, just this from me since the Iraq war, unless I missed something in my backtracking.

That is now changing. Today is day one of the test match cricket series between England and Zimbabwe. The first test is a Lords, the St Peter's Rome of cricket, and frankly the cricket has been fairly dreary. In a rain interrupted first session England, in the persons of Trescothick and Vaughan, managed 28 without loss. While I wrote what follows, England got to about 100 for the loss of Vaughan. (I could explain, but if you don't know what that means, you almost certainly don't care.)

But of course the real story is off the pitch, and frankly this aspect of the situation is proving a whole lot more satisfactory and less embarrassing than I for one had dared to hope.

Take the TV coverage so far, on Channel 4 TV. There has been some play, so that has focussed some attention on the situation. But the rain interruptions mean that Channel 4 have been wheeling out all their if-it-rains plans, and one of them concerns the matter of the, er, regime in Zimbabwe, and any demonstrations against and reactions to that regime.

There have already been demonstrations, both inside (one gutsy demonstrator made her point and got herself shepherded out) and outside the ground. And more to the point, much more to the point, Channel 4 have pointed their cameras at some of this.

If you know anything about TV sports coverage, you'll know that it can be very misleading when a real world news item erupts in its midst. The tiresome habit of certain English exhibitionists invading sports events in the nude was inflamed by the promise of TV coverage, and is now being suppressed by TV coverage of these idiots also being suppressed. When British soccer fans behave really, really badly, they don't always make it to the TV shows either. What actually happens between rival fans at Celtic v Rangers soccer matches in Glasgow, for example, is nobody's business, and certainly never gets to be the business of TV viewers in anything like its full lack of glory. All of which means that the Channel 4 recognition of the "regime problem" is very significant. An enthusiastic pro-Mugabe-ite watching the TV coverage here today would not be a happy bunny.

Pitch invader, demos outside the ground, mainstream news coverage of demos outside the ground, above all the prospect of this relentless drizzle of media focus going on and on throughout the tour, destroying all attempts to suggest that things out there are in any way normal � it's looking a lot worse than such a person would have been hoping for.

It may even be that the tour going ahead, but surrounded by the ever louder claim that it shouldn't have, is the worst possible media outcome for the "regime". I surely hope so.

Above all, there is Henry Olonga.

Olonga it was who, along with Andy Flower, wore a black armband in protest at the policies of his country's government in the first Zimbabwe game of the cricket World Cup, recently concluded in South Africa. It cost both of them their international cricket careers, certainly for the time being.

Olonga has just himself been interviewed on Channel 4, by TV pinup boy and cricket commentator Mark Nicholas, and he came across both as a formidably articulate critic and as a shrewd media operator. He thinks the tour shouldn't be happening at all, but now that it is, he is going to make as much media fuss around it as he can.

It turns out that Olonga is very British educated, having been born middle class in Zambia, brought up middle class in Kenya, and only arriving in Zimbabwe in the mid nineties. He is going to make an impact in England, I'm sure of it, if only because he's a character, his hair being African street but his voice being English posh.

Olonga is also a musician, which will add to whatever media fusshe manages to stir up. I really, really don't want this to be embarrassing. Embarrassing or not, if we want to piss off Robert Mugabe, we can all buy Henry Olonga's CDs. We don't have to listen to them, any more than we had to read The Satanic Verses.

Well it seems to be kick-Mugabe-until-he's-down time here at Samizdata, and I'd like now to add my little thousand Zimbabwe dollars' worth of additional reportage. There's nothing to link to, because I found out what follows for myself.

A few years ago I and two other persons were cooperating on a project of mutual concern to us. One of my colleagues, the boss of the enterprise, was and still is a good friend of mine. The other, a black lady friend of my friend, I'd not met before. But her face seemed familiar as soon as I met her. Who was it? Some film star? Then � bingo. Robert Mugabe. She was the spitting image of Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe wasn't her name. She had an English married name and had been in England for the last twenty years or so. So far as I knew, there could be a whole tribe of Mugabe lookalikes out there, and maybe she and he were not in any direct way connected or related. But it turned out, I can't remember how, that she was Robert Mugabe's niece. She was in no way responsible for or in involved in the present horrors being suffered by Zimbabwe. She had a life of her own in England. She was also a most likeable, attractive and decent person. But she was also very � how shall I put it? � determined. Once she was set on a course of thought or action, that was it, that was what she was going to think and to do, no matter what.

Such determination as hers can be a virtue in all kinds of circumstances, and I'm sure that many times in her life it was. Wherever events are too uncertain and too fluid for comfort, an individual who knows exactly what he or she is doing and who sticks to it can be a great blessing. Such people can radiate security and safety and certainty like the rays of the sun, especially if what they have decided upon is good in other ways also, but often just because it is at least certain.

But in other circumstances such determination can be a real problem. In the project the three of us were working on, it became a serious liability, for the simple reason that what she had decided upon was wrong - not wicked wrong, you understand, just foolish and mistaken wrong. No matter how much trouble her determination to do things her way and in no other way seemed to the two of us to be causing, and in defiance of the expert guidance we were all getting, she never deviated from - as we and those experts all saw it - folly. That she might be mistaken simply never entered her head. She did things her way and that was it. Nothing could stop her short of overwhelming force, in the form of the refusal of her colleagues to work with her any longer, which is eventually what we had to inflict upon her. At which point she remained convinced that she was the only one in step. She was genuinely baffled at the foolishness of the world in failing to see the wisdom of or to fit in with her preferred methods.

If Uncle Robert Mugabe is anything like Niece Never-you-mind, then any plan for sorting out Zimbabwe that is in any way dependent upon Mugabe coming around to seeing even tiny glimpses of the many errors of his ways is doomed, utterly doomed.

This thought occurred to me as soon as I became acquainted with the Niece and learned who she was, so to speak. Her Uncle has since done nothing to change my understanding of his character. I'm open to persuasion, of course, in the face of