I start from diminished expectations.

My first experience with the UK was registering my company and opening business bank accounts. In South Africa, as a local, it takes two months to register the company and another three months to then open the bank accounts.

In the UK, it took 24 hours. And I walked away with a personal credit card, despite having no credit history. This, by the way, after the collapse of the credit industry. Not that I’m complaining.

This vote of confidence allowed me to rent a small apartment just outside the centre of Oxford. I was told that, living alone, I could apply for reduced rates. I’m used to dealing with municipalities. So, I fortified myself with a jug of coffee and a book, and phoned. Full Story »

In January of 2009, it snowed in Oxford. Deep drifts covered the meadow outside my study window. I watched as a fox, stark red against the pillow-white, tensed-and-leapt tensed-and-leapt through the fluffy deeps. It landed easily on a tree trunk, recently fallen across the river at the bottom of my tiny garden, and then ran along the informal bridge to my side before disappearing into a hedge.

I have seen snow before, but never lived in a place where snow thrusts itself into your daily life. The familiar landscape of fields, farmlands and wilderness was utterly transformed. I could see just how much wildlife lived around me. Bunnies hopped. Deer loped. Birds scratched.

I took a morning off, just to go see what the massive Port Meadow would look like. I got only a few yards on my bicycle before becoming glued in the snow. So I walked. It was magnificent. Full Story »

These are from the weekend paper.  Actual quotes from South Africa’s minister of foreign affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife, and the ex-ex-minister of health who introduced the idea that AIDS is simply a disease of poverty, easily cured with garlic and African potatoes)…

“A judge is not supposed to do that. It’s not for judges to decide on foreign policy. They don’t run government and they don’t run foreign policy. There is separation of powers. They run the judiciary. I don’t comment on the judiciary.” (This after a judge in SA’s constitutional court sided with the current minister of health that it was unadvised to prevent the Dalai Lama from visiting).

“Tutu does not run government. Remember, he said he was not going to vote. If it were up to him, there would be no elections next month.” (In response to Archbishop Desmond Tutu declaring that he would now boycott the conference.) Full Story »

Damn straight.

Yeah, the last person you want loitering around a freakin’ PEACE conference and mucking things up is the D-Lam.

Dirty goddamn hippies.

Those who own a property have the right to continue owning that property, and what they do with their justly owned and acquired property is entirely their own look-out.

If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property.  No government should ever have the right to intervene.

Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity.  You can argue the reasons.  Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide.  Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice.
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[P]erhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.

— from a report by the American Association of University Women, “whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity,” that debunks the notion of a “boys’ crisis,” saying, “Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense”; May 20.

I would say the president really has a choice here to show how much he values military service.

— Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who has led the Senate’s efforts to expand education benefits for veterans, on President Bush’s threat “to veto a bill that would pay tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for anyone who has served in the military for at least three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001″; May 22.
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“Who killed her?” asked the five-year-old daughter of an acquaintance upon being told that her granny had died. That she could have died of old age and natural causes never occurred to the little girl. It is a chilling reminder of the type of society that South Africa has become.

The last few days, the world’s murder capital has cemented its place as the country where you are most likely to die in a violent attack. 22 foreign African economic migrants have been murdered by rampaging mobs around Johannesburg. Full Story »

One makes a life-changing decision for some time in the future and then … And then time goes by. The shock wears off. Denial (or futurism) creeps in.

It wasn’t until I was emptying my flat as my cleaning lady took possession of most of my bits and bobs that it really hit home.

The life of a cleaning lady

There are around 15 million South Africans of working age (out of a population of 41 million). Around 8 million have jobs. The rest don’t.

For 2 million uneducated, barely literate women there really is only one choice for earning a living. They clean the homes of the people who do have jobs. These are the cleaning ladies, or “Domestic Workers”. Maids, in other words.

Sometimes they live in and cook and clean and wash. Sometimes they turn up once a week to do some ironing and basic cleaning. They’re not paid much. The minimum Government-mandated wage is less than $1 per hour.

Since most white English-speaking South Africans battle with African names, these women call themselves mundane platitudes, like Beauty, or Faith, or Monica. I think half the cleaning ladies in Cape Town are called Monica. Full Story »

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, believes that a Yahoo / Microsoft tie-up would be awful for the Internet. Schmidt issued the vague sequitur that we should all beware of, “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that Microsoft is the Great Satan, so it stands to reason that anything they do should be regarded as automatically the equivalent of making baby stew.

Here, though, it is Google – owner of 62.9% of all Internet searches ($16.4 bn in ad revenue) – which dwarfs any tie up (Yahoo-Microsoft have a combined search share of 15.7% and $ 9.8 bn in ad revenue). Could it be that Google is trying to pull a Microsoft and protect its home-turf advantage from a healthy rival? Full Story »

Maybe you once cared for a drug addict? What led them there, what keeps them there? Not your problem. And you believe in all that “tough love” shit; you know that they must make the decision to come clean and live responsibly.

But you also believe that you can make that journey easier for them by showing them how an addiction-free life can be, and by offering them the advantages that make it worth going cold to achieve.

At some point, though, maybe you get an inkling that the process isn’t working. Maybe it’s after they’ve come out of rehab once too often, only to go on a binge again, that you start thinking that the effort isn’t worth the stress.

Countries are like that too.

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Aid and trade are essential to Africa’s further development. The US dollar declined by 30% during 2007. This has an effect both on the real value of aid and on the world economy.

Scholars and Rogues is pleased to introduce the first in a series of talking and speaking type Scrogues. This Scrogcast was presented by Gavin Chait at an informal interactive gathering of analysts at Frost & Sullivan. The seminar is about 11Mb, is in MP3 format, and is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License

Download the Scrogcast: The US dollar in Africa.

Africa has a problem with causality.

Not that the rest of the world consistently gets the idea either, but there are no other regions that so consistently mess up the nature of cause and effect. The source of this confusion is the economic boom that results from the mere good fortune of having some valuable resources.

In both Russia and Venezuela the near vertiginous rise of oil prices has stimulated economic growth; which is a good thing. It has also led the Big Men in power to associate that boom with their own blunt political ministrations. Both Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin have perverted their constitutions to ensure their continued control. “After all,” they think, “if it weren’t for me the economy wouldn’t be doing so well.”

Sadly – for themselves – this is a woeful fantasy that the citizens of these oppressed lands are willing to go along with. They remember the poverty of previous leaderships and confuse democracy with economic neglect.

Lest you think this is mere speculation, consider the following: In 2003 Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, took control of his country’s oil production after declaring his lack of faith in private endeavour. It is difficult arguing that Chavez’ nationalisation was a bad thing when daily oil revenues have risen from $ 50 million in 2003, to $ 190 million in 2007. Yet it has been an appalling disaster. Full Story »

Imagine you were corrupt, and imagine you were a politician. But I repeat myself.

Jacob Zuma, the women-abusing, criminal thug darling of the African National Congress, has become the new president of the ANC. Since, in South Africa, it is the party which runs the country (rather than, in more civilised lands, where elected politicians run the country) this – effectively – puts Zuma in charge.

The Scorpions are South Africa’s elite police service, a version of the US FBI. They are tasked with tackling corruption at the highest levels. They are about to file criminal proceedings against Zuma on bribery charges related to the government’s multi-billion Dollar arms deal scandal.

The first act of Zuma is to scrap the Scorpions. The unit is to be disbanded within months. Full Story »

Ronald Suresh Roberts, sycophantic biographer of Thabo Mbeki

Jacob Zuma, some-time rapist, multi-million dollar arms-deal fraudster, populist, and permanently in search of his machine gun, declares that he is ready to “rule” South Africa.

This man is likely to be South Africa’s next president.

This is quite a departure for the African National Congress, the ANC, the party of Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela; both Nobel Peace Prize winners.

The noble ideal of setting aside the politics of race in search of a new, unified, representative nation has given way to the politics of race, nepotism, corruption and dictatorship.

As Kent Durr, South Africa’s one-time ambassador to the UK put it, “The ANC appears to have gone from struggle to corruption without an intervening period of service to the nation.” Full Story »

Definition: Hollywood Helicopter Hero – a famous personality who uses charitable and / or popular social / environmental / economic issues to burnish their professional credentials and boost their celebrity status.

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Cast your mind back. Some banana republic. Perhaps it was Cuba, or some backwater in India, definitely anywhere in Africa.

You were traveling in one of those beat-up old vehicles that passes for public transport in the most impoverished parts of the world. And they had only one album playing at that tree-splitting volume so necessary for third-world travel.

It was Bob Marley playing, wasn’t it?

Except, sometimes, they had a second tape that would also be played. Round, and round, and round. Also reggae. Also loved beyond the singing of it. Maybe you never knew who that was?

That was Lucky Dube. Full Story »