Month: April 2016

Of Shoes & Planes

Of Shoes & Planes

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slave-statesWhile one current election debate is about the immorality of American multinationals using slave labor abroad, it’s time to understand how entire societies are now doing this.

America’s alliance with the Gulf States is preeminent foreign policy. But the Gulf States are enslaving Africans as if it were the 18th century, again.

Gulf States need labor. They are cash rich and muscle poor. Seventy percent of Kuwait and 84% of Qatar’s population is composed of foreign laborers who have no rights, lured by the prospect of a job – any job.

An Ugandan journalist, Yasin Kakande, will soon publish a scathing account of such African labor in a new book, Slave States: The Practice of Kafala in the Gulf Arab Region.

In the preview to publication one of several personal stories is being circulated, that of “Harriett” from Uganda.

Harriet earned an advanced degree at a respectable Ugandan university but could find no job. Lured by recruiters from the Gulf States, she paid an agent $600 for a visa and air ticket to Dubai.

Part of the agreement includes a “sponsor.” This is very similar to what is required by immigrants into the United States. In Harriett’s case, it was a company, an airline.

The airline needed lots of unskilled laborers to clean its aircraft between flights. Kakande doesn’t name the airline, and he I think he should, but virtually all the Gulf airlines are expanding incredibly rapidly.

With fares and service that the more established carriers are finding hard to match, these companies do not use other Gulf States citizens for their employees because … there aren’t any.

So to give you the fine service and remarkable fares, these companies hire people like Harriett.

Harriett was offered a salary of $215 per month. That isn’t bad by Ugandan standards so she took it. What she learned, though, was that it hardly kept her alive in Dubai.

The only lodging she could find was to share a one-room apartment with three other foreign workers. The apartment didn’t allow any cooking, so all meals had to be purchased as take-outs, and that was expensive.

The apartment didn’t allow any laundry, except when using the apartment’s laundromat, and that was expensive.

When Harriett developed terrible rashes determined to come from the harsh cleaning agent the airline was using, Babacon, she was taken to a hospital and treated. When she left the hospital, the airline reduced her salary from $215/month to $54/month to cover the medical treatment.

The only way she could try to get another job was to get a “NOC” letter from the airline. This “No Objection Consent” from the sponsor was required, but the airline refused.

Harriett’s personal story actually ends better than this, but many don’t. Few workers have the savvy, intelligence or skills that Harriett had.

So I find it annoying that while our current election debate properly engages the question whether Nike is using Bangladesh labor, the liberal reply that they oppose such policies doesn’t address the current liberal administrations alliance with the Gulf States.

Much less the increasing number of Americans using Gulf States airlines.

Hypocrisy seems a part of all politics, but in today’s age a clarity of meaning is being demanded. Some say that’s why Trump is so popular – he might be wrong, he might be dangerous or dumb, but he says what he means.

I’m not sure I agree with that. But I understand the thirst for clarity of meaning, and criticizing American multinationals for subcontracting foreign labor is no more important than recalibrating our immoral alliance with the Gulf States.

Or deciding which airline you’re going to fly.

The Year of the Beast

The Year of the Beast

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impeachzumanow“T’is the autumn of treason.” Things are heating up in South Africa:

“Twenty-two years into democracy and nearly three years after Mandela’s death, the air is again thick with political paranoia… of high treason … sedition and betrayal, with talk of mysterious foreign… agents who have “infiltrated” the mass media, business, foreign multinationals, NGOs, religious bodies, opposition parties and student movements and who … threaten the state.”

The administration of Jacob Zuma is running scared and has begun to defy democratic institutions. This is new. Previously he was something of a lone gun. Now, he seems to be organizing his government into a fortress of ignominy.

From afar one wonders if a global malaise is sweeping the world. Demonstrations, impeachments and lots of name shouting in South Africa is exactly what’s happening in Brazil.

But the South African story has been building for a longer while, and I think that Jacob Zuma and the ANC party that led the country out of apartheid is sinking fast.

Here’s a quick timeline:

The current president, Jacob Zuma, was pegged a failure from the start and it was remarkable that the ANC actually brought him to power. He was instrumental in the revolution and Mandela originally named him a Deputy President.

But he was sacked from the government in 2005, ostensibly when prosecutors charged him with rape (acquitted by the High Court) but more so because he nearly destroyed a Burundi peace process that was underway at the time.

Two years later in 2007 a high court rules that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute him for a variety of corruption charges, including bribery. Most people thought his story was over.

Then, remarkably, the ANC nominates him into a position to become the third president of the country after the end of apartheid, after Mandela and Mbeki.

Although South Africans were aghast I saw it very much as our first several presidents who all came from the revolutionary movement. Maybe, I thought, he’d now clean up his act.

Anything but. He built himself a gigantic mansion using public funds in broad daylight, flaunted his public duties and appeared like playboys all around the world with a different girl at his elbow every night, sacked and appointed people at will and let cronies siphon off millions of public funds and probably worse of all, ordered in police to massacre mining demonstrators.

To call the man a buffoon is generous. What he is a too typical African potentate dictator, and that doesn’t fit modern South Africa.

Jacob Zuma is now officially on the way to being impeached. Not quite as far along as his colleague in Brazil, but far enough that he’s now lashing out, threatening arrests and implying even more if the opposition continues with its program to get rid of him.

Even more severe, the ANC is considering “recalling” him, which in the arcane and rather old-fashioned communist way forces his resignation. The ANC would do so to avoid the more public impeachment.

Like elsewhere around the world, the ANC as a dominant political party may be in trouble partially due to this global political malaise. It may indeed be “down and out” in the same way the American Republican or Brazilian Worker’s Party seem to be tumbling down. And that is, of course, an incredibly interesting story.

But the main story in South Africa is squarely the story of Jacob Zuma. Whether it’s coincidental that his buffoonery dove-tails with global revolution, or whether he is organically a part of the virus bringing revolution to the world, right now Jacob Zuma is in deep trouble.

And for the good of South Africa and its revolution, he better fall quick.

Symbol Savvy

Symbol Savvy

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Trump as a symbolAccording to a successful white South African male progressive, “Anyone who cares about gender equality [should vote for] Hillary Clinton, irrespective of her policies and …whether Donald Trump is the alternative.”

Jarred Cinman argues on a number of fronts, but the one that struck me right away was, “Her symbolism is more powerful than her presidency ever will be.”

Cinman is head of NativeVML, an up and coming South African ad agency whose impressive clients include many of the high-end spirits (like Chivas Regal) and several important banks (like Nedbank). His Hillary endorsement appeared yesterday in South Africa’s most popular, out-of-the-mainstream digital media, the Maverick.

Few understand discrimination as those who live in South Africa, and few can wrestle with their guilt as well as a white South African male.

But Cinman’s principal argument, that Hillary Clinton is a symbol of womens liberation, is the sort of the argument I’ve been using for Bernie: Don’t despair that he won’t get anything done, it’s what he represents.

So if we reduce our support to symbols, then which is more important? A Woman President. Or a Socialist President?

Cinman comes from a part of the world considerably more socialistic than we are. That might explain why he doesn’t see the matchup as I do.

Many, many well educated people I meet around the world don’t know, for example, that America doesn’t provide universal health care.

But for the sake of argument, presuming Cinman is not one of these foreigners with American starlight in their eyes, what is so powerful about the symbol of a Woman President?

First, he presumes correctly that the “male power elite” runs everything, runs the whole world for that matter. Well if a Woman President is so powerful, why is the male power elite still running India and Brazil, or framed a different way, how much really will a single Woman President change this?

Slap, slap. How much would a single Socialist President change this?

Symbols often fade quickly when too easily thrust into importance. Cinman himself discusses this unintended emasculation. When symbols finally make it, they:

“do not have the resources, self-esteem, networks and context to actually take control.”

Further he argues that this starts to institutionalize the original discrimination:

“The truth is many black people in South Africa still believe themselves to be inferior.”

The oppressed take on the character of the oppressors: “They strive toward the same prizes… This striving often benefits the very people they sought to outmanoeuvre.”

So let me get this right.

Vote for Hillary because she’s a woman. You don’t need any other reason. The symbol of a Woman President is so important, that:

1) She won’t be able to accomplish anything.

2) Other women will be marginalized or ensconced in their previous roles.

You see, this isn’t totally fair of me. Cinman’s argument is poorly made and ridiculously vacuous. Mostly, it’s incomplete.

Had he simply also pointed out that Hillary is an incredibly accomplished person, whose list of political accomplishments is very impressive and who has bucked the establishment and won (Benghazi Hearings), the symbol starts to shine.

And because he neglected doing this, even eschewed doing so, I think his brand of thinking may be similarly being applied by Bernie’s opponents to Bernie.

So let’s move beyond the symbols, OK?

Bioinformatics BS

Bioinformatics BS

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talkingtoomuchRemarkable disarray at the moment among paleontologists, a virtual Guy Fawkes day for creationists.

Findings about homo naledi, continuing excavations at Dmanisi, even a new thesis that dinosaurs started to die before the meteor struck have just been waiting for something for creationists to exploit. Well, they got it.

Last October the respected journal Science published evidence that our closest ancestors didn’t migrate out Africa into Europe, but rather, migrated out of Europe into Africa.

In other words, white men came from white ground.

Here’s the point: it was wrong, a “bioinformatics error” according to the authors.

But now the authors are refusing to retract it, claiming instead that their original thesis was “not affected.”

That would be true if the original thesis had not been quantified. But the headline on the original research, “First ancient African genome reveals vast Eurasian migration,” is totally and completely and absolutely wrong.

“Vast” it can no longer be. There is indeed evidence for this tantalizingly fascinating “reverse migration” of some early men, but it might just be itty bitty.

Since the “respected” journal “Nature” has not decided yet whether to publish a retraction, it’s clear that all science is treading compromised.

I don’t see any disarray in paleontology, quite to the contrary. What I see is growing evidence that our previous models were far too simple.

The greatest taxonomist of all times, Ian Tattersol, recently explained it this way in Discover Magazine:

“In the 1990s, on the family tree of hominins, we had maybe 12 species. Now there are 25…. The family tree is even more bushy than that, but people are still trying to fit things into pre-existing categories.”

Things get bushier and bushier all the time, and that’s exciting and reflects how fast science is advancing. The fact that new research at Dmanisi suggests the first early man migrant was habilis not erectus, or that dinosaurs started to die out before the meteor … that’s all wonderful news for those of us who have always believed that paleontologists were reductionists.

It’s understandable. Galileo thought that the sun was the center of the universe even as he recognized himself as a heretic for his radical discoveries.

The problem occurs when a mistake made is not fully owned up to.

We aren’t splitting hairs, here. Research is not just in the neurons of scientists. It is the culmination of their thinking, of course, their toil and tools and neutral computer analysis, but it’s more than that.

It’s what it says it is.

“First ancient African genome reveals vast Eurasian migration,” is incorrect. It needs to be retracted or restated and republished and not sugar-coated in self-aggrandizing hyperbole about “what we really meant.”

COP21 Obfuscation Detritius

COP21 Obfuscation Detritius

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COP21Today on Earth Day only one major head of State (from France) attends the signing statement at the United Nations of COP21, the breakthrough global climate agreement negotiated in Paris last year.

French President François Hollande is the star. He was instrumental in negotiating African developing countries into the deal, but there aren’t any African Heads of State here to sign with him.

John Kerry signs for the U.S. Obama is not here as he’s telling Cameron who’s not here, either, not to leave the EU.

Should we worry?

COP21 is good, but its worst part is another acronym, INDC, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, that was created at the behest of the developing world and negotiated principally by Hollande.

The premise is that development cannot be compromised in the poorer countries of the world.

As Bolivia and Ecuador explained in a joint statement during the negotiations, “These climate reparations would give to economies relying on progressive extractivism the necessary resources to transition to clean energy without having to sacrifice their social and redistributive policies.”

Translate: pay us not to burn fossil fuels. The implementation in nicer language will be written in each country’s INDC.

In other words, Kenya will forge head with additional solar, wind and other non-fossil fuel methods of making power, but primarily only if Britain, the U.S. and Japan – its principal aid givers – pay them to do so.

I think this is remarkably fair. But it’s politically dicey.

Most Americans (69%) now support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, BUT … they do not believe (45%) that climate change is a “serious problem.”

What was that?

That’s the same position in 10 of the major 17 countries who pushed through COP21. Only in India, Germany, Canada (only barely, 51%), Mexico, Brazil, Italy and France does the public accept that climate change is a “serious problem.”

So that’s how dumb the world is, and that’s why Hollande is at today’s signing ceremony. France, he is saying, is not as dumb as America or China where (get ready to scratch your head) 71% of the public supports international treaties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but only 18% believe that climate change is a serious problem!

I would love for some data from Africa, but except for South Africa (56% support reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but only 45% believe climate change is a serious problem) polling in other African countries doesn’t exist.

You see if you stripped out the motive for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, then what replaces it?

In developing countries it’s pollution. Pollution is as much an issue in Nairobi as Beijing.

In the developed countries it’s … what? Support for fracking? I just don’t know.

Here’s another take. It’s likely today that most Africans, and maybe even most Americans, recognize that climate change is real. Whether you elevate climate change to a “serious problem” is the key.

There are so many problems in Africa with greater priority, like food and water and poverty, that even if it’s plausible climate change contributes to these, it isn’t as important so the moving goal post of “serious” might not be reached.

In America I think it’s more contentious: it’s political.

Alas for the straight-talker Trump and the clear-headed Sanders, our only solutions to sweeping away the detritus of obfuscation?

Facebook Reject

Facebook Reject

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mohawkWhen a wild animal kills a person, should it be killed?

Kenyan park rangers killed the lion Mohawk last week after he killed a man. But zoo authorities in Palm Beach didn’t dispatch the tiger that killed its keeper.

The protocol especially since the days of the Man-Eaters of Tsavo has been to kill any wild animal that kills a man. Presumption: it likes the taste.

The 35 or so lions that live in Nairobi National Park are very unusual. Their territory is strictly defined — something truly wild lion would never accept — and many, many photos exist of these lions testing this limit otherwise known as Ngong Road.

Rarely yet nevertheless captured on at least 200 cell phones at the same time, the lion stroll out of the forest onto the street during rush hour! Cars stop – which they do routinely in Nairobi’s rush hour anyway – and the lions pad their way down the highway for a while before returning to the forest.

Last week one of these celebrity lions attacked a man in a market and was then shot by a ranger.

Mohawk it was, indisputably. His name comes from his unusual hairdo (naturally, by the way, not as sculpted by Nairobi mall professionals). He had wandered ten miles out of the park, the opposite direction of Ngong Road.

Mohawk traveled out of the park onto a prairie which more or less begins a massive wilderness that stretches into the great Tanzanian parks of Ngorongoro and Serengeti. But then, he made a sudden left turn and strutted into a very distant suburban/rural town called Isinya. Truly wild lion would never strut into a town but Mohawk’s a celebrity. He needs people!

The rural people of Isinya aren’t like the Benz-driving, hipster Galaxy Tablet crowd commuting on Ngong Road who need increasingly imaginative excuses for being late too work. Maybe the farmers of Isinya weren’t quite as “enthralled” as the young execs in Nairobi? Nobody took his picture? So …Mohawk killed a man!

And rangers then killed him.

Half way round the world at about the same time a much larger cat bit the neck of its young woman keeper.

Authorities didn’t kill the tiger but tranquilized it, and so it took up to five minutes before medics could untangle the cat from its prey.

The multiple investigations now going are specifically targeted to the question whether the keeper died while waiting for the tranquilizer to take effect.

African lions will soon be listed as endangered, because their population has decreased from 30,000 to 9,000 in the last two decades. There are fewer than 400 Malaysian tigers, already listed as endangered.

In my opinion both cases are the result of humanizing wildlife, which we snobs prefer to call “anthropomorphizing.”

Mohawk directed traffic. He posed at last count for more than 100,000 photographs. His death is now a Twitter hashtag, #JusticeForMohawk, there was a Memorial Service for him, and today’s opinion page in Nairobi’s major newspaper vilified the public for not giving wildlife enough space.

Less aplomb among the Palm Beach Zoo authorities who are in a terrible balancing act between conservation and common practice. Few wildlife authorities will dispute that the Palm Beach Zoo tiger is now more dangerous, but with so few left…

And … was trying to save an endangered species justification for delaying saving a human?

These should not be the enigmas they seem. If we didn’t think then treat wild life with human considerations and affection, if we accept the common sense that because wildlife cannot save us but we can save wildlife that we are more important, then we might move out of this fairy tale universe of pirouetting hippopotamus and friendships between warthogs and hyaena into the reality of ecological wonderment.

By believing we “love” the lion, we never really learn what a lion is. We bury its awesome behaviors and biological complexities under notions of humanness.

Humanizing wildlife invites them onto highways and disarms their keepers. Flash: Don’t try, Mohawk didn’t have a Facebook account.

Discounted Business Class

Discounted Business Class

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eastafricanboatThe Somali war began in 1993; Ethiopia’s various versions of terror started in 1979. Yesterday, more than 450 mostly Somalis and Ethiopians drown in the sea when their refugee boat capsized near Greece.

It seems this is the first large “migrant” incident with mostly East Africans.

Why now?

I don’t doubt that many of those on board led lives as tenuous as those fleeing Syria. Over many past decades we’ve grown calloused to the sufferings in Africa. Many westerns think it’s just a “way of life” for Africans.

But on the other hand there’s no actual fighting or bombing in Ethiopia right now. Particularly why in Somalia – where it’s more peaceful than in the last 30 years – are people taking these huge risks now?

It’s simple. Europe has opened its heart, since it was unwilling or unable to open it’s military hanger. Europe is passing through a period of great guilt and it’s a piece of melancholy but hope as well for mankind.

Another reason is that ever so slowly East Africans are amassing bits of wealth. Under reported almost to the point of immorality, every migrant you hear about or see flailing in choppy seas has paid upwards of $10,000 for the chance of making it to Europe.

Many Americans couldn’t wrestle up that cash. Syrians were a rich people. Doctors, lawyers, professionals of all sorts compose the migrant diaspora.

Last August I wrote fondly of a young, educated and professional Somali refugee who made his way all the way to South Africa.

The risks he took were manifest and he undoubtedly had quite a stash of bribes available.

Now, the prospect of reaching a welcoming European coast despite all the tragedies we hear of daily is worth a man or woman’s life savings and possibly, life.

We’ve got to understand this story. We’ve got to think about why someone, anyone – anywhere in the world – would leave the place they were raised or born in and risk everything, that they would pay the equivalent of a roundtrip business class air fare from New York to Sydney to be packed into putrid suffocation on a rickety boat likely to capsize in high seas.

It’s not so far fetched to imagine a Latino American citizen, a professional with some wealth and status, fleeing a Trump America.

But how would they get over the wall?

Conservation vs. Development

Conservation vs. Development

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Mom.gorillaIs conservation just? Not always, according to a study in Uganda’s Bwindi National Park.

“Conservation [needs] to get serious about environmental justice,” a September study from the University of East Anglia claims, one of the world’s top universities for developmental studies.

This is just one of lots of recent intellectual fistfights between sociologists and conservationists. Conservationists, on the one hand, are presumed to want to protect the earth at nearly any cost. Sociologists, on the other hand, put people first and claim that contemporary conservationists don’t.

The argument surfaced at the beginning of this decade but by 2014 the New Yorker called the debate “vitriolic.”

Finally at the end of 2014 the highly respected scientific publication, Nature, allowed two scientists to publish an article about the fight: “We believe that this situation is stifling productive discourse, inhibiting funding and halting progress,” they wrote.

Stop whining. This is an important debate and nothing that I’ve seen is offensive or immature. Quite to the contrary: The East Anglia study continues this debate on the side of sociologists, and I believe appropriately so.

I know Bwindi pretty well. It is the Ugandan section of the volcanoes national park in which the mountain gorillas live. Like the other sections in Rwanda and the DRC-Congo, mountain gorillas have enjoyed a wonderful rebound from near extinction at the end of the 1970s.

The main reason is tourism. It will cost you a hefty $750 for one permit to be with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda for one hour, and one of the 56 daily permits are often hard to get.

It’s less expensive in Bwindi, but that reflects the unsettled political situation in Uganda. But even in Uganda’s untroubled days, Bwindi’s operations were never on the up-and-up.

Bwindi was terribly corrupt. If you had trouble getting a permit, the right bribe to the right ranger would get you one, and if in fact the day was truly booked up, someone would find a way to take you to a gorilla research group which was technically off-limits to tourists.

The East Anglian study touches on this but in fact sticks mostly to the non-corrupt, stated policy issues. Their main criticism is that the original peoples of the area, the Batwa, have been intentionally excluded from the benefits of Bwindi’s growing gorilla population.

The main benefit to the growing gorilla population is tourism: revenues from the permit tax which supposedly go directly to the government; and jobs created in the tourist industry: staff for lodges and transport and guides.

The Batwa do not benefit from any of these. The Ugandan government has always been openly hostile to these progeny of “pygmies,” their land was never properly deeded to them so they were unable to participate in the leasing arrangements for the tourist lodges, and few if any tour companies hire them at any level.

Prior to the interest in conserving the gorillas, the Batwa’s lifeway was bush meat hunting in the forest – not gorillas, but mostly monkeys, and also duikers and other small forest creatures. This is now prohibited in the interests of gorilla and ecological conservation.

So without benefitting from the growth of tourism and conservation while being restricted from the forest which was their traditional lifeway, the Batwa have grown more poor and more estranged from modern society. Implicitly, of course, it’s presumed they become poachers.

“Successful” conservation policies lead directly to poaching.

The East Anglia study suggests that scientists should adopt certain principals of manifest justice that could delimit conservation goals, but which in all cases would ensure justice for the local peoples like the Batwa.

This no-brainer is often neglected, the authors claim, because conservation goals appear “to be driven by faith in a particular (utilitarian) model of justice that holds that conservation consequences justify their means.”

I’m glad to have this “vitriolic” debate: I’ve always believed in Africa that people must come first, that conservation is not anathema to that at all, but that stitching the two together is imperative.

Imperative to conservation, not to the peoples’ will and that’s the key. The people have the sovereignty. Conservationists do not. It’s clear who must sew the seam.

Acting Right

Acting Right

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groove theoryWhy in America do we have national student sports contests, national science fairs, national spelling bees … but no national performance contests?

Africans know why: Because the American entertainment industry is a monopoly of big money and nepotistic connections and the arts are no longer being taught in schools.

“In Kenya,” Dr. Hassan Wario explains, “students become performers because of talent” nurtured in school.

Dr. Wario is the Kenyan Minister for Sports, Culture & the Arts. His portfolio in the cabinet is equal to that of any other cabinet minister.

The devastation Americans have wrecked upon the public school system in my life time is equivalent to the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In fact, forget about the arts curriculum. America “is $46 billion a year behind what it should spend on building and repairing K-12″ just to have safe school rooms!

This week ended the massive student national drama festival in Kenya. In February my safari was passing through the town of Nyeri north of Nairobi and I wondered if there was a revolution going on.

It turned out it was a regional high school drama festival! It was the middle step in national competition held annually, just like for soccer and science.

Today the President of Kenya greets the national winners at Statehouse to congratulate them. This year’s national contest just ended yesterday.

The final round of plays, films, dance and musical performances drew 50,000 contestants! According to a local paper, it turned the relatively sleepy town of Meru in the Kenyan highlands into a “beehive of activity with hotels being fully booked and businessmen making a kill.”

It was, simply, as important a function of student growth as sports or science.

But in America we’re now decades away from this conversation. Kenya spends 21% of its federal budget on education. In America it’s less than 13% of the total budgets for the federal and all state governments.

So, yes, too little money is a part of the problem. Putting it a different way Americans believe that less of their resources should be spent on educating their children than Kenyans do. Finally, arts gets the shaft in America.

As a father and uncle to several successful entertainers I’ve often been grateful to their schools for getting them going. But they were among the privileged. They attended schools that – at least back then – sustained the arts. Even back then, many schools didn’t.

So Americans bifurcated potential entertainers into the haves and have-nots. This created a homogeneous pool of individuals from the privileged classes that now dominate American entertainment. No wonder we blame our media for our politics!

No question that the American performance industry is mammoth compared to Kenya’s, for example. But neither in my mind is there any question that today dramatic arts in Africa are more creative, less prone to formula, capable of greater risks and ergo, greater rewards. Moreover, the average Kenyan consumer nurtures an incredible range of performance, from lining up for Shakespeare festival tickets or improv comedy, or falling in love with vampires and Nobel Prize laureates at the same time!

I’m no entertainment critic, but I’ll tell you, Kenyan TV is much more creative and fun to watch than American TV.

Kenyans, well, just love …the arts!

Because – like here – it all begins in school.

Let the Animals Live

Let the Animals Live

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girlionFor sure a melancholic tale: Lions survive by growing tame enough to live side-by-side with people.

Last night’s PBS premiere of ‘Wandering Lions’ is one of the best nature documentaries I’ve seen recently. It tells a hopeful story of India’s critically endangered lions.

The lion population in India for my entire life time has been contained to a small 100 sq. mile sanctuary in southern Gujarat state called Gir. Also over my life time a huge periphery, another 400 sq. miles, was created where people and wildlife coexist. So today you’ll read of the 500 sq. mile park, somewhat misleading.

But it worked is the point. In 1968 the number of remaining lions in India was 168. Gir lions today number around 540, a remarkable success story that seems on track to continue.

Gir lion have been snatched from the brink of extinction into a genetically diverse enough population to be self-sustaining.

The Nature film documents a few days in the life of these lions, which also documents the life of Indian farmers who coexist with them.

I’m a bit skeptical about the partnership between man and beast that the film tries to convey: that Indian farmers have come to rely on the beasts to kill the antelope that would otherwise maul their cows or eat their grain crops.

It’s not possible for even the most demanding lion to harvest enough of Gir’s wildlife to make any kind of significant dent in the boar’s or antelopes’ effects on farming. I think that the real story is that the farmers won’t kill animals, whether antelope or lion.

A more important scene in the film documents a night of three Indian farmers who walk into their fields with sticks ostensibly to chase the antelope away. Instead they watch lion do it.

I don’t think that establishes the relationship the film suggests.

What is more telling is another part of the film that describes a lioness who killed a person, was captured but then released and not herself killed as would be the case almost anywhere else in the world.

The reason given was that the investigation determined that she was not, in fact, a “man-eater” but simply a mother protecting cubs.

I suspect that was determined during the deposition part of the investigation?

Regardless the outcome is absolutely positive for lion. And apparently over my life time nowhere near the animosity towards lion developed in Gujarat as in sub-Saharan Africa.

Why? Not because of tourism. As the film points out there’s no tourism in Gir: no lodges, no tour companies, no vehicles, and the difficulty in getting to the area is manifest.

That isn’t to say the people living there wouldn’t love to have tourism. It’s just that the place is too remote and the animals … well, in a sense, too tame. The film has numerous scenes of cars, motorbikes and even villagers on foot right next to lions.

Prior to 1968 there may have been animosity towards lions, because the numbers of lion were tanking then. Shortly thereafter the Indian government began partnering with a number of wildlife organizations to save the wildlife. The numbers attest to this success.

But let’s go further, be clear: Government programs in India are notoriously unsuccessful. What’s different about this one?

The film and virtually all the materials that promote Gir National Park always reference the fact that Gujaratis are vegetarians. It’s actually a bit more serious than that: they’re vegetarians because their culture forbids killing life even for food.

That’s the key to this successful interdependence: a culture that has existed forever, a first principal of Gujarat peoples: let the animals live.

* * *
When I first started in this business the Gir lion was presumed a separate sub-species.

But “Asiatic lions” don’t actually exist, according to the world’s authority on taxonomy, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

DNA research proves they are not a sub-species. There is a yet to be confirmed suggestion in that research that the Gir lions when viewed with the handful of northern African lions that still exist might then constitute a subspecies, but that remains unsettled.

Fanciful photos of thirty years ago tried to portray Gir lions as physically different, with strange manes that didn’t begin until their neck, but those photos have now been debunked as anomalies. Genetically for the time being all lions on earth are close enough to be lumped into the same species.

Click or Bang

Click or Bang

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NorthLuangwaThe tug between conservation and hunting has reached a crescendo in Zambia where 30 years of effort by the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) is in jeopardy.

The vast wilderness of eastern Zambia is divided into two great reserves, North & South Luangwa. Like the Serengeti some of the land at the periphery of the these national parks is used for sports hunting.

But unlike the Serengeti Luangwa can well nigh afford hunting. While it contains the richest biomass in Zambia, it’s scant compared to the Serengeti. So as tourism demand increased over the last thirty years Zambian officials correctly reduced leases for hunting.

But in the last 4-5 years tourism has declined continent-wide while there has been a marked increase in demand for sports hunting. So Zambian officials are reversing themselves and allowing more and more hunting.

The most dramatic reversal came in August, 2014.

There was an outcry from the public. This remark taken off the Zambia National Park’s Facebook page is representative:

“Trophy hunting for rich foreigners will not bring tourists to Zambia, it will deter them from coming… I can assure you, I will not visit any country which squanders its wildlife for the pleasure of a few disturbed individuals.”

Immediately the parks authority reversed the reversal, but immediately after that the umbrella state agency above tourism reversed back to the original reversal. The state of confusion has never been resolved.

I see two obvious forces at work here: The first is that sports hunting is on the increase, particularly from Russia and the United States, with very strong increases from a number of South American countries like Argentina. The revenue lost from tourism hurts. From a business point of view, it makes sense to increase capacity in response to increased demand.

But second is probably more significant: the rank confusion reigning between Zambia’s various authorities suggests corruption is rampant. Hunters tend to be quite rich and professional hunting guides are the government pay masters.

Three weeks ago the German embassy hosted a party in Lusaka to celebrate three decades of partnership between FZS and the Zambian government conserving North Luangwa.

A recent elephant survey showed that North Luangwa has the densest elephant population in the country and the most promising black rhino programs.

“I think it is fair to say that 20 years ago no one would have anticipated this development,” the project leader, Ed Sayer, told the guests.

In fairness one of the reasons North Luangwa’s elephant population is the most dense is because there has been so much poaching in the country’s other reserves.

According to Katarzyna Nowak, a South African elephant researcher, Zambia’s Kafue reserve lost almost half its elephant population to poaching since 2004.

North Luangwa is the most remote of Zambia’s reserves. That applies equally to tourists, hunters and poachers. Kafue is much more accessible.

Moreover, hunters themselves are disparaging of Zambia’s reduced game:

“…the quality [of lion and leopard hunting in Zambia] is on the decline due to hunting pressure and one needs a good deal of time to be sure of a good trophy,” writes safariBwana.com which labels itself “The African Hunting Authority.”

Last year neighboring Botswana banned all hunting, and until then it had been a significant hunting destination.

Scraping the old barrel to get the last bit of honey out of it might just crack the barrel.

Shell Games in Africa

Shell Games in Africa

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panamapapershidemoneyEver since the leak last week Kenya’s Daily Nation has published multiple stories of hanky panky exposed by the Panama Papers. One of their best is about a shady Danish character who has terrorized Kenya for some time, and the story makes Agatha Christi look like a children’s author.

Peter Bonde Nielsen arrived in Kenya some 30 years ago and learned quickly the political racket. (In the U.S. we call it “lobby.”) He was often seen among the most powerful politicians.

Then, he was rich.

His penultimate scandal was a few years ago just as Kenya was designating a huge amount of land near the town of Kajiado for a massive industrial and high-tech development scheme. Surprise, Nielsen owned a lot of the land.

But as often happens with tricky surveys, the airstrip was laid over various plots owned by different people before they were contacted or bought out. Nielsen, who had built a luxury private lodge in the area to woo his politicians was so furious that he turned his anti-poaching unit into a fully armed militia.

Meanwhile the true owners of the place, two different clans of Maasai, began to argue over the ownership of this increasingly valuable land and challenged Nielsen’s militia. Skirmishes, gun battles and fatalities ensued.

Not good for PR. Nielsen’s influence began to slip.

Nielsen’s official Kenyan company was called Avon.

[Important Digression: there are more “Avon” companies in the world than under any other name. Guess why?]

The address of Nielsen’s “Avon” was Titan Hangar, Wilson Airport. As the heat on Nielsen increased he bought a company, called Titan Worldwide Ltd. (TW) [no website] through Mossack Fonseca, the law firm central to the Panama Papers.

Don’t confuse TW with Titan Aviation that owned the hanger which was the address of Avon, and please don’t confuse it with Atlas Air Worldwide, the actual owner and parent company.

Backed by references from Kenya’s reputable Stanbic Bank Nielsen transfers the shares of the companies that previously owned Titan, Europan and Lespian [no wesbite], to Avon. So he now owned Titan, technically didn’t own Avon, which was now owned by the people who previously owned Titan.

Confusing? Intentionally so.

Then two years ago Avon is sold to a Mossack Fonseca law firm in the British Virgin Islands, Harneys, allowing Avon to remove all its assets and records from Kenya. There is now nothing left in Kenya with which to investigate Nielsen.

This story shows that illicit fund transfers aren’t simply theft, but masterful paths for all kinds of deceit.

Developing countries – especially those in sub-Saharan Africa – are losing a greater percentage of their GDP to illicit financial transactions than any other part of the world.

As journalists throughout Africa delve into the Panama Papers it becomes clear once again that Africa’s being hurt the most. And it’s not as detractors would presume only or even mostly African potentates stealing people’s money, although they figure well enough in the scandal.

Instead it’s mostly shady foreign investors like Nielsen taking advantage of Africa’s weak currency and financial laws.

“African states need cash for development, but their tax revenues are lower by the billions than they should be because of illicit financial flows,” South Africa’s Daily Maverick explains.

It’s absolutely true that it takes two to tango. Nielsen needed corrupt Kenyan politicians, and they are – or at least were, a dime a dozen. But Africa is replete with these morally depraved opportunists from the western world. They come in all forms from evangelical preachers to crooks like Nielsen.

But note: Without a Mossack Fonseca skilled in taking advantage of the terrible weaknesses of our global capitalist system it would be a lot harder for these guys to make their scam.

Revolutionary Religion

Revolutionary Religion

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mboroThe world is itching for a fight. Not another war – although they seem inevitable – but fights within societies, bangers and busters, revolutions, civil wars. This is how some South Africans see the world today.

Recently Nechama Brodie of South Africa’s “Mail & Guardian” charged a highly respected American research organization with promulgating controversy and hate through media manipulation.

M&A charged that the widely respected Pew Research Center inflamed religious tensions in the U.S. by republishing a research study they didn’t do and giving it a more provocative title.

Pew – which concentrates much of its research on social and religious trends – reported on a 2015 study by the Demographic Institute and retitled it as a Pew Report, “Why Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group.”

M&A pointed out that the original studies – a behemoth of research by a huge collection of social scientists – had no intentional focus on what particular religion might or might not become the dominant one. The report’s mission was specifically to study persons who consider themselves unaffiliated to any religion.

But PEW took that research and rebranded it in an inflammatory way. It didn’t skew or misinterpret the research, it simply looked at it from an unusual angle differently from what the original designers intended. Brodie calls this “hyperbole” and I agree.

I expect Pew will simply argue this is creative mining of data. But to what end? To the same end that media excuses itself from all such inflammatory reporting: it’s what the public wants.

That means the public wants inflamed religious tension. That means the public wants disruption, bangers and busters, revolutions, civil wars.

In another closely related South African story, Pastor Mboro was snatched from his Easter service in Johannesburg by a beam of light that took him to heaven where he took selfies of himself and Jesus ‘hot’ Xhosa wife.

The Prophet Mboro later recanted his story when confronted by South Africa’s CRL Commission. The Commission was set up specifically to counter the growing fanaticism among South African religious groups.

So South Africans know a little bit about religious ridiculousness and we should take heed. Prophet Mboro earned a tidy sum from his journey to heaven by selling a lot of his selfies for $350 each!

That exceeds most Americans’ monthly tithing to their churches, but it’s a lot less than Pew researchers get paid daily! By the way, Pew is funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, an endowment of oil company heirs.

Got enough kindling? Feel the Bern?

Pesa Millions!

Pesa Millions!

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wherehasallthemoneygoneThe third major bank within a year has gone bust in Kenya, further evidence that global capitalism has serious problems.

The main cause for the bank’s failure was over lending. That doesn’t sound too onerous to us maverick socialists until you realize that most of that over lending was to the bank’s directors.

Big bonuses for failing performance. Heard that before?

Kenya’s economy is teeny-weeny : roughly the size of St. Louis’. But proportionately banking is just like at home. The seven largest Kenyan financial institutions hold 80% of the country’s cash.

Whether in the U.S. or Kenya human beings who call themselves bankers find themselves swimming in a bunch of money and getting giddy or scared or both and start to gulp some of it in especially after the pool cracks and the water’s pouring out.

Capitalism isn’t what it’s ranked up to be when left uncontrolled whether in Kenya or the U.S. But because Kenya is so small relative to the U.S. the shenanigans are easier to see.

According to Bloomberg, Chase Bank-Kenya restated its liabilities Wednesday: twice as high as filed under tax law less than a week ago. Half of the exploding debt was to directors and employees, originally filed as $3.2 million revised Tuesday to $13.6 million.

Chase is the third large Kenyan financial institution to go belly up recently: Imperial Bank and NBK fell earlier last year. (Chase is not linked to any American bank. Its private stockholders come mostly from Luxembourg and Germany.)

It’s remarkable how this is being explained in Kenya.

The country’s main newspaper simply reported official bank statements claiming that underperforming loans and high interest rates implied as government policy, compounded by “rumors” of the bank’s imminent demise were to blame.

One of the bank’s former executives blamed corrupt government executives who have been charged with stealing an educational agency’s funds, which were held by the bank!

As always the small depositors are the ones to suffer. The Kenyan Government would give no date for the bank’s reopening.

(Bills due Friday.)

In July Global Credit Ratings, a reputable South African financial rating institution, assigned Chase Bank an A- rating with a stable outlook. Heard that before?

This little story in little Kenya won’t gain much traction in the world press. The accumulated losses of this one bank in Kenya are less than what my state loses every five hours.

But we should take note. Big scale or little scale, capitalism kicks the little guy in the butt with a Salvatore Ferragamo. Justice won’t apply, because justice is funded by the same foot. So no one goes to jail, no one does anything but start the whole thing over, again.

I’m not blaming Zafrullah Khan or Jamie Diamond. They’re just necessarily plug-ins to a rotten system. The hydra’s head has many buds.

Kenya and the U.S. have upcoming elections. The U.S. is first. Kenya modeled its banking system on America’s, so maybe it will follow the U.S. election outcomes in the same way. Always has in the past.

Ray of hope? Feel the Bern?

Our Endless Drought

Our Endless Drought

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ennuitrumpLike Donald Trump unexpected and near violent political events across Africa are dying down but not going away.

I suppose it’s natural to make comparisons between where you’ve been for a long time and your home, but I’m incredibly struck by how Africa and America seem to have stopped moving. At least the places I know:

Lots of poignant news in Africa – like Donald Trump running for President in the United States – broke around the middle of last year:

Student protests across South Africa, the final end of ebola, the certain pacification of Mali and Somalia, the certified end to Boko Haram’s rule in northeast Nigeria (in fact, the possible essential ending of terrorism continent-wide), the final criminal verdicts in Kenya’s leaders’ trials, and perhaps most representative of all: the imminent death of 92-year old Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe is not dead, although he’s uncharacteristically quiet.

Student protests continue in South Africa, although no longer as disruptive. There is certainly some peace in Mali and Somalia, but there are also incessant suicide attacks. Today the criminal court in The Hague will likely string out further the Kenyan Vice-President’s trial.

And so it goes. Donald Trump is still in the race, but … less so?

What is it about our times that reflects such ennui? “Are everyday women suffering from a bout of fashion boredom?” a reporter in South Africa asks.

“There is a sense of ennui and foreboding,” one of South Africa’s tourism consulting companies says.

It elaborates:

“Last year’s feel good combination has now changed to one of wait-and-see in the United States… Experts indicate that there are multiple clouds on the horizon: …an unstable European economy, recession in Brazil, low employment rates, a slowing down of the Chinese economy.”

I randomly picked a grad student’s dissertation at Stellenbosch University, submitted in December. Stellenbosch was where some of the most violent and successful student protests were launched last year:

“…many of us are struggling with the questions of meaning and purpose. And, like the Hamlet from Act One, we conclude that there is no meaning, no purpose, only vague and arbitrary laws and expectations (formed by God or society, which may end up being the same thing) that keep us on the beaten track of existence.”

A tad grim.

One of Africa’s most vocal revolutionaries is a professor at Rhodes University in South Africa. I have followed Richard Pithouse for years. He is quick witted, extraordinarily articulate and until recently … hopeful.

But lately his calls-to-arms have morphed into unsettled poetry that belies malaise:

“People are gathered on the street, the street that became the primary site of insurgent student assembly over the last week. Four women, two students, an academic and a priest speak on… The ancient, it seems, is entwined with the hip.

“New possibilities are opening, new possibilities forged in struggle by courageous young people, new possibilities that, like the songs of sadness, are as real as the promise that comes with the smell of rain on dry earth.”

There is a lingering drought in South Africa. There is no new rain on the dry Karoo.

Let’s hope this is simply all impatience and not dismay. Today is yet another media-insisted Waterloo Day for Donald Trump. Jacob Zuma might wake up tomorrow and resign. Students at Stellenbosch might have their fees waved. The real culprits of Kenya’s 2007 violence might confess. Tanzanian legislators might pass a new, wonderfully democratic constitution.

It will start raining, again.

Or not.