Loomnie

I just learnt of an association called Berliner Unterwelten (Berlin Underworlds, in English), through the New York Times In Transit blog.

Founded in 1997, Underworlds is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and preservation of Berlin’s vast network of subterranean spaces. It funds its projects by giving tours of bunkers, sewers, air raid shelters and catacombs. The tours are offered in a variety of languages, including English.

From the website Berliner Unterwelten:

Experience the history of Berlin from an unconventional perspective! Since 1997, the Berlin Underworlds Association has been offering regular tours into some of the most important underground structures in the city. Although the majority of our tours are in or near the Gesundbrunnen station in the north of Berlin, we also offer tours in several other subterranean complexes that are otherwise not publicly accessible.

I am thinking of adding a tour to my to-do list for 2010.

I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of doing some pre-fieldwork study before going back to graduate school to write a dissertation on Wall Street culture. She got laid off after six months into her job. The experience of being laid off became one of the central things she studied during her fieldwork.

The book is not so much an indictment of Wall Street as it is a presentation of the way the Street understands its place in the scheme of things. She highlights the self-understanding of investment bankers as ‘being’ the market, an understanding that goes as far as to justify, on the one hand, receiving insanely huge bonuses, and on the other, being very liquid individuals themselves. The rate of staff turnover on Wall Street is extremely high.

Perhaps the point that I found most instructive is the way Wall Street has changed corporate American culture in the past 25 years. Corporations, which were seen as part of the welfare capitalism of the post 2nd World War era gradually lost their status as social institutions. Shareholder value has become naturalised as the sole reason for the existence of corporations, and anything that can improve shareholder value, no matter how short that increase in value lasts, is encouraged. This sometimes includes hostile takeover, and almost always demands massive job cuts and downsizing. Once corporations are no longer seen as social institutions that provide jobs and care for customers, those are rather easy things to do. Perhaps inconvenient, but easy.

The emphasis on shareholder value has led to short-term thinking and has often robbed corporations of the ability to make long-term plans. If a group of investors buy up a company by leveraging that same company on the junk bonds market, with the plan to cut spendings on R&D and cut jobs in order to ‘improve’ the shareholder value of the company before selling it off, how would they make long-term plans for such company? This could happen to corporations that are healthy, all things – including stock price – considered.

This leads me to thinking about what is currently happening in the Nigerian banking industry. I blogged about it when five banks were taken over by the Nigerian Central Bank. Shortly after, that the Central Bank published a list debtors of the banks. In all that, what was not mentioned was the corporate practices of those banks during the Nigerian stock market bubble. Actually, the practices of the banks was what created the bubble. Increasing their own shareholder value became the main job of the banks. Of course, in a weird way, this is understandable. Wall Street could claim to work on increasing shareholder value of corporate America; in Nigeria, the banking industry is corporate Nigeria.

It is not by chance that it was after the bubble burst that the Central Bank took over the banks. Before then, the profits banks were declaring were highly manipulated figures that bore no relationship to the actual condition of the banks. Now, they have to find a way of reconciling their balance sheet, somehow. I was in Nigeria a couple of weeks ago, and the cry was, and still is, that banks are laying off staff in droves and closing up branches.

It is perhaps obvious from this post that a lot of things are still not clear, at least to me. Newspaper commentaries I have been reading since the banking crisis started have not helped me much. This is probably due to the fact that we are always too quick to resort to simplistic explanations – one of which was the publication of the list of debtors – that we (the public, and even journalists) stop asking questions that might lead to a better understanding of what happened. As if the only reason the banks are in trouble is because they gave out too much in loans.

I am now thinking that it might be a nice idea to do an ethnographic study of the Nigerian financial sector when I am done with my second-hand clothing dissertation.One of the biggest strengths of anthropology is the fact that anthropologists ask basic and simple questions, questions whose answers are sometimes assumed, until they are asked. Wouldn’t it be interesting to turn that kind of attitude towards the Nigerian banking industry?

You can listen to Karen Ho on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed programme on the BBC.

In the BusinessDay of December 29, 2009

There is a thing about being so close to something that one does not see it anymore. Anthropologists normally refer to it as going native. You have gone native when you no longer see the obvious things anymore, when the things that an outsider notices stares you in the face but you are no longer able to see them. This is usually because you have developed a blind spot for them, and they have become normal, almost natural.

There is also the other kind of blind spot, the kind that comes from being native. Anthropologists know about that too very well. Since we study people, we know that studying people of ones kind comes with the added requirement of being able to stand back and look critically in order to see things that would be obvious to foreigners, but that are not obvious to the native.

This is because we anthropologist normally study the everyday mundane things; we try to understand how people live their lives, how people make sense of things, understand, interact and deal with day to day issues. Sometimes something impressive and unusual happens; most times they don’t.

Unlike history, anthropology favours the everyday. History, on the other hand, is not very kind to the ordinary. Journalism too. News is a break from the ordinariness of the day, that is why no news is good news. It normally means that the day has been, well, normal. Of course, one can debate what normal means.

These things came to my mind after reading an Amnesty International report on police brutality in Nigeria. They report on the frequency of extra-judicial killings, on torture, on the refusal of counsel to detainees, and on the refusal to allow those who have been injured during torture access to doctors.

To underscore this, let me give an instance. When I was a teenager, I was at a hospital when a police pick-up van drove up, legs sticking out of the back of the van. They brought the naked, dead bodies of six persons to the hospital morgue. I remember wondering whether those people might have left home that morning not realising that they would turn up as bodies at the back of a police van. I don’t remember thinking about how they died and questions around justice or the use or abuse of police powers. These are the issues raised in the report.

The Amnesty report gives detailed examples of people who have left home to be shot down by the police in the course of the day. To be fair, one has to acknowledge the fact that the police is massively underfunded and probably underpaid. It has almost become normal for the police to never come, or, like the lines of a Tracy Chapman song, to always come late, if they come at all.

And those who look like they might have some better training are busy guarding ‘important dignitaries’ (read those who are rich enough) and foreigners. I recently read about a foreigner who complains about being followed around by her MOPOL escort. Her employer does not allow her to leave the Island area without a team of MOPOL escorts. Of course she cannot refuse them, otherwise the company would not let her stay in the country. The interesting thing is that the sight of guarded foreigners actually promotes the impression that ones life is in mortal danger unless one is being guarded.

We have become blind to a lot of these things because we are used to them, because they have become part of us. We have become used to our commuter bus drivers handing out that note to the policeman at the roadblock, to reading in the newspaper about a number of extra-judicial killings by the police, to hearing about ‘accidental discharge’. We are also used to the sound of a certain kind of hoot in heavy traffic, a hoot that signifies that an important dignitary is being ferried across in an important car, escorted by a van-full of MOPOL. Of course, the main reason the person is important is either because they are a foreigner, or because they are rich enough to afford a van-full of MOPOL escorts. We are so used to these things that we have become numb to them.

We must begin to rouse ourselves out of this complacency and ask questions. Are bribes openly given to or extorted by the police and extra-judiciary killings normal in a democracy? What is the government doing about them? Will any political party make them campaign issues in 2011?

An interesting list from Der Spiegel.

Niall Ferguson, in Financial Times, ascribes the rise of the West in the past 500 years to “six killer apps”:

the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, a legal and political system based on private property rights and individual freedom, traditional imperialism, the consumer society and what Weber probably misnamed the “Protestant” ethic of work and capital accumulation as ends in themselves.

And how is China faring?

Some of those things (numbers one and two) China has clearly replicated. Others it may be in the process of adopting with some “Confucian” modifications (imperialism, consumption and the work ethic). Only number three – the Western way of law and politics – shows little sign of emerging in the one-party state that is the People’s Republic.

But does China need dear old democracy to achieve enduring prosperity?

The full article.

• In mobile phone journalism, Africa is ahead of the west | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Headlines are simply sent out as text messages, and texting is used to report the news in as well. Although the mobile phone penetration is far behind Europe or Asia, it is rapidly growing. In Africa, four in 10 people now have a mobile phone.

  The mobile phone is in some ways the PC of Africa, and creative ways of using it are emerging.

From NYTimes: TRUNG SON, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the residents hoped.

Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing completion. But only a few hundred Vietnamese ever got jobs. Most of the workers were Chinese, about 1,500 at the peak. Hundreds of them are still here, toiling by day on the dusty construction site and cloistered at night in dingy dormitories.

“The Chinese workers overwhelm the Vietnamese workers here,” said Nguyen Thai Bang, 29, a Vietnamese electrician.

China, famous for its export of cheap goods, is increasingly known for shipping out cheap labor. These global migrants often work in factories or on Chinese-run construction and engineering projects, though the range of jobs is astonishing: from planting flowers in the Netherlands to doing secretarial tasks in Singapore to herding cows in Mongolia — even delivering newspapers in the Middle East.

But a backlash against them has grown. Across Asia and Africa, episodes of protest and violence against Chinese workers have flared. Vietnam and India are among the nations that have moved to impose new labor rules for foreign companies and restrict the number of Chinese workers allowed to enter, straining relations with Beijing.

In Vietnam, dissidents and intellectuals are using the issue of Chinese labor to challenge the ruling Communist Party. A lawyer sued Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung over his approval of a Chinese bauxite mining project, and the National Assembly is questioning top officials over Chinese contracts, unusual moves in this authoritarian state.

Chinese workers continue to follow China’s state-owned construction companies as they win bids abroad to build power plants, factories, railroads, highways, subway lines and stadiums. From January to October 2009, Chinese companies completed $58 billion of projects, a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

From Angola to Uzbekistan, Iran to Indonesia, some 740,000 Chinese workers were abroad at the end of 2008, with 58 percent sent out last year alone, the Commerce Ministry said. The number going abroad this year is on track to roughly match that rate. The workers are hired in China, either directly by Chinese enterprises or by Chinese labor agencies that place the workers; there are 500 operational licensed agencies and many illegal ones. Continue reading.

• Camel caravans fading from salt trade as Timbuktu slowly modernizes – washingtonpost.com
• FT.com / China / Economy & Trade – China eyes industrial bases in Africa
• What is holding back African exports? | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

• Can the EU and NATO bring Russia in from the cold? | World | Deutsche Welle | 09.12.2009
• Nigeria: Hints of a new chapter | The Economist
• BBC News – Drug trafficking fuels Africa terrorism and crime: UN
• Challenging times lie ahead for the shipping industry
  and the global economy
• Op-Ed Columnist – Taxing the Speculators – NYTimes.com
• Drugs, Racism, and Capitalism
  Capitalism plus dope equals genocide
• The Problem With Derivatives | Mother Jones

From the BBC: Nigerian police killing at will, says Amnesty

Nigerian police are carrying out a shocking level of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, Amnesty International says.

The rights group’s three-year inquiry details cases of prisoners tortured to death and shootings at roadblocks.

Amnesty says the police complain they are poorly trained and that criminals are often better armed than they are.

On Tuesday, a hospital in Enugu told the BBC it was overwhelmed by bodies being brought to them by police.

The BBC visited the hospital’s morgue in the south-eastern city and took photographs, showing piles young men, lying on top of one another and strewn about on tables and floors.

It was established that at least seven people were last seen alive in police custody, accused of kidnapping.

Enugu State police commissioner Mohamed Zarewa told the BBC he was too busy to talk about their cases.

‘Brutalised’

“The Nigerian police are responsible for hundreds of unlawful killings every year,” said Erwin van der Borght, director of Amnesty International’s Africa programme, said in a statement.

“The majority of the cases go uninvestigated and the police officers responsible go unpunished.

“The families of the victims usually get no justice or redress. Most never even find out what happened to their loved ones.”

A corrupt police culture, little training or competence with firearms, and the legacy of Nigeria’s military era are all contributing factors, the report says.

Nigerian human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, believes police officers are being brutalised by their training regime.

“Police are not trained to respect human beings. They are not taught about human rights of citizens and other people in Nigeria,” he says.

“They are not taught that they have a duty to prevent and arrest criminality in the society.”

Justification

The Amnesty report’s authors are demanding an end to a culture of impunity.

They say police guidelines called Force Order 237 – allowing police to fire on civilians fleeing arrest for serious crimes – must be changed.

Amnesty says the order justifies firing on anyone resisting arrest.

The BBC’s Caroline Duffield in Lagos says gauging the scale of police violence is difficult – there is no proper data on civilians killed by police.

Two years ago the authorities announced they had shot dead 785 armed robbers over a 90-day period, she says.

Amnesty says about 110 police officers are killed in shoot-outs with criminals every year.