Loomnie

I just read an article in The Economist-published More Intelligent Life about Adolf Hitler’s problem of uncontrallable flatulence, an issue on which the article says medical historians agree. The article discusses in some detail Hitler’s search for control over his bowel’s behaviour, starting from his conversion to vegetarianism, and continuing well into his relationship with Dr Theo Morell, a man who eventually became his personal doctor. In his capacity as the Führer’s doctor, Dr Morell administered ‘Dr. Köster’s Anti-gas pills’ to him, a drug that is said to contain strychnine, a chemical Wikipedia describes as capable of ‘producing some of the most dramatic and painful symptoms of any known toxic reaction’. The writer goes on to say that some of Hitler’s health condition, something that affected his behaviour, could be attributed to strychnine poisoning, as well as to antropine, another active ingredient in the drugs Dr Morell administered to him.

The article also talks of the injection of Hitler with amphetamine every morning before breakfast, a ritual that started in 1941. It was found, after the war, that Dr Morell was administering eye-drops from a mixture that contained 10 percent cocaine up to 10 times a day to Adolf. Now, take all these together, add to it a dash of absolute dictatorship and you get the man currently known as Hitler.

Showing Hitler
As I was reading the article I remembered Der Untergang, a movie that showed the last few days of Hitler and the Third Reich. The movie was condemned by many as showing a human side to the monster Hitler, and making it possible for people to probably sympathise with him rather than despise him as the true beast that he was. People of that opinion would find a conclusion that one could draw from this article really alarming. For, according to evidence provided in the article, one could say that much of Hitler’s later life was lived as a man under serious medication, as a man who should have at best been sent to undergo detox, and at worst condemned to some recovery home for drug addicts. That sure will not go down well with many people. It would have made for a more informative read had Tony Perrottet, the author of the article, been clearer on some of these issues.

BBC’s programme, From Our Own Correspondents, a programme that is a compendium of ‘personal reflections by BBC correspondents arround the world, features a special edition of the programme, presented by Alan Johnston, the former BBC Gaza correspondent who was help by the Army of Islam for 114 days. Click here to listen to the programme, and here to download the podcast.

How would you describe the weather in FedSpeak? Owen Bennett-Jones asks Alan Greenspan and this is what he says:

I would generally expect that today in Washington DC. the probability of changes in the weather is highly uncertain, but we are monitoring the data in such a way that we will be able to update people on changes that are important.

This is part of the press rounds that Mr Greenspan has been making since he published his memoirs “The Age of Turbulence“. Actually, I don’t know if I should say he has been making a press rounds or if the press themselves have been seeking him. When one is a former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the United States, one hardly has to court the press when one publishes a book. You can listen to the interview here, or download the podcast here.

Have a nice week!

Eldis is an arm of the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex. The managers of the website collect development related articles, publications and general information. According to the website, the managers of Eldis ‘focus on materials which are of strategic, policy or practical interest for development practitioners based in both the North and South.’

I have added an RSS feed of the Africa section of the site to my blog. Links to the latest Eldis entries on Africa appear at the upper right hand side of the blog. The links will take you to the articles as they appear on the Eldis website.

I downloaded Andrew Mwenda’s TEDTalks presentation and watched it last night. One of his main arguments was that aid makes the government fat, and that because of aid, governments are more attentive to the World Bank and the IMF than to their own citizens. Let’s elaborate on the argument a bit: governments know from whom they get money, and so strive more to satisfy their benefactors than their citizens. Mwenda makes the point that governments do not call the entrepreneurs among their citizens to discuss the development of the economies of the countries; instead, they listen to the people from whom a large chunk of the budget comes. I thought about this in relation to my country, Nigeria. I tried to imagine what percentage of the budget aid is. Just as I started thinking about this I remembered that Nigeria has oil, and that oil keeps the government rich.

Oil and Democracy
A political scientist, Michael Ross, wrote an article about resource curse. In the article, he builds a case for his argument that resources – chief of which, by the way, is oil – retard the development of democracy, partly because it frees the government of any dependence on the citizens. To bring this point home, let’s think about the percentage of Nigerians who are not employed in the organised private sector or in government, and then let’s think about how many of them pay any tax. Now, a government that does not have any resources has to depend on taxation from its citizens, and so has to look inwards. This is where aid comes in. If a country does not have resources but has a large chunk of its expenses taken care of by aid then that inward look does not seem to be needed

Another thing Mwenda pointed out was that government is the most attractive business in Africa. Again, let’s look at this in relation to Nigeria. There are people who get a job with a government ministry, go to work at about 11 in the morning and leave at about 1 in the afternoon. (I should throw in a quick word about many of the workers here. Most of the people who work in the ministries have to earn some money by the side to be able to take care of their families. Ingenious people that they are, while not working at the ministries most of them are busy at work on their own, most often trading.) The point is linked to a point made by Ross in his article: a government with resources is a rich government, something really attractive to a young person. The same point is also made by Mwenda in his presentation: since government makes money from aid, it is a rich and attractive option for young people who want to money. This point also ties in with the rent-seeking argument. With resource money, people in government can afford to keep a loyal team around themselves. If aid money provides more money for government it stands to reason to think that it might provide more money for politicians to attract more hangers-on.

Fears and Overreactions
If there are this many similarities between resources and aid, are there going to be more fatal similarities? Are we going to have people struggling to control government so that they can have access to aid (like in the case of civil wars that break out because of the desire of factions to control resources in a country)? Are we going to have governments buying arms and ammunitions with donor funding for the suppression of oppositions? Do we already have these situations? Am I simply overreacting. Actually, I hope I am overreacting.

Many people have described Sarkozy as a hyper-active (think of his near-attack on paparazzi in the USA last week) and power drunk politician, but not many have described him as racist. Well, we now add that to many of the adjectives that describe him. On July 26, 2007, on a university campus in Dakar, President Nicolas Sarkozy, as part of his speech said, ‘The African peasant only knows the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.”In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress.’

Is he simply stupid? I think that whatever abuse one chooses to rain on him one should be seriously worried that the leader of a former colonial power in African would think like that. Achille Mbembe has quickly written a rejoinder.

Sarkozy’s article is here, the French version of Achille Mbembe’s reply is here, and the English version of the reply is here.

Discours raciste de sarko à dakar – 26 juillet 2007
Uploaded by henneji

Sorry, the video is only in French

It is well known that Nigeria has the largest population in Africa, and the largest economy in West Africa; it is fairly well known that Nigeria’s military has been intervening in hot spots in the region; it is perhaps even less known that Nigerian movies are now, all over Africa, what bollywood movies were in Nigeria when I was growing up in the 80s. Add all these together you get a Black Superpower. Or so says the BBC in this documentary. There is a podcast on the page. you can also listen to it online.

I don’t know if you guys know, but my research is on informal economy in West Africa…. This morning, I got a confirmation that I am on the right track. I saw George Ayittey’s Ted Talk presentation and it reinforced what I always thought: the real economy in most African countries is the informal economy. MacGaffey, who did a lot of research on the informal economy in Central Africa has already called it the real economy in one of her books, but I think this needs to be said more often. Think about this: most of Africans are rural dwellers… then wonder about how much government and the formal economy ever penetrated into rural Africa. People have been, and still are, involved in economic activities that are not captured by the official economic figures of the government. Even researchers into the informal economy in African countries, who have devoted much time to studying the informal sector in urban areas, have not paid sufficient attention to the livelihood of rural dwellers. I would not be as dramatic as to say that Africa’s ‘development’ – whatever that much abused word means in this context – is to be found in the informal economy; what I would say is that if we are interested in African economies, and in knowing more about how Africans make a living despite the dismal economic figures we know so well, we better take a look at the informal sector.

I am off to Berlin today. I am going in the company of one of my colleagues and his son. So, in effect, I am going as a ‘proper’ tourist.

By the way, have you guys seen Letters from Iwo Jima? I saw it yesterday and I really liked it. It is a very nice presentation of what on an Island during WWII, from the Japanese side. Clint Eastwood did a good job. You might want to check it out.

I watched Dreamgirls last night, and it was so funny to hear Curtis Taylor, Jr.(Jamie Foxx) tell Deena Jones (Beyoncé) ‘Your voice has no personality, no depth.’ The funny thing is that I never thought much more than that of Beyoncé.

Jeff Koinange, CNN’s Africa correspondent was fired by CNN on May 29. Many people have said that it was because it was found that he fabricated a large part of the story on MEND in Nigeria. I am still wondering what he fabricated. Was the display of the hostages also ‘fabircated’? I think that CNN owes us the duty of explaining if this story was actually fabricated, and if so to what extent. I didn’t particular like the story when I saw it because it was a characteristic Jeff Koinange story – lacking in depth and melodramatic, giving one the impression that the journalist, Jeff, is doing it just for the fame. But then, equally lacking in depth was the Frank Nweke rebuttal. I saw that too, and it got me really disgusted. The truth is that there is no way one can defend the mess in the Niger-Delta region, just like we rarely need a fame-seeking, I-won’t-look-beneath-the-surface journalist to tell us about the mess in the region; every right-thinking Nigerian, at least, knows that. And for the rest of the world, we know the ‘they’ll watch the footage while eating dinner, feel bad that people can be treating each other this bad, and then go on to finish the dinner’ line. If this is really the reason he was fired, CNN, we need more information, not just the dismissal of a journalist.

I first got to know first about his dismissal from the NVS. That story itself is a poster for what can go wrong when we let purported patriotism blind us to reason. Anyway, after I saw the story, I looked closer at the Koinange issue and found that a lot had been going on that I had not known about. For one, Koinange has been caught in a date rape mess, involving a kenyan who wrote a book about a murdered Kenyan politician. The woman sent an email to Jim Watson, President of CNN-Worldwide, making a formal complaint against Jeff. The text of the mail can be read here. The woman also went on to create a blog, posting correspondences between the two of them. Really steamy, those emails. You can check them here. I wonder how much this particular part of the story influenced the decision to have him fired.

Just realised that some people have not seen the Niger-Delta story. You can click here for the story, and this is a link to Nweke’s rebuttal.