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 at