1 Out of Africa: More fossil fuels (The New York Times) The world’s largest energy companies have big plans for Mozambique. Until recently, the East African country was better known for its long civil war, and had few energy resources compared with regional heavy-hitters like Nigeria and Angola. But in the last 10 years, companies like Exxon Mobil, the BG Group of Britain and Eni of Italy have used the latest technologies to find new natural gas resources that are turning Mozambique into the center of an energy boom. Countries like Tanzania and Kenya also are attracting billions of dollars in investment from the world’s largest energy companies as they search for new oil and gas reserves.
The quickening pace of exploration in East Africa is part of a wider shake-up in the global energy industry as it scrambles to adapt to a series of major changes. Those range from the nuclear disaster in Japan last year, to slashed subsidies for alternative energy amid Europe’s economic crisis, to a boom in unconventional fossil fuels like shale gas that has spread across continents. The changes have been particularly drastic in fast-growing China, now the world’s largest energy user and emitter of carbon dioxide. It has fast-tracked oil production, as well as newer technologies like shale gas, and hydroelectric and wind power, to maintain its high levels of domestic growth.
With demand from emerging economies continuing apace, the quest for new fossil fuels is opening up unexplored territories for production. That may help to offset the effect of rising oil prices, which have reached almost record highs.
2 Swaziland’s hunger for democracy (The Guardian) Culture and tradition are big selling points for Swaziland. Tourists looking for "the real Africa" are encouraged to see the big five wild animals on safari, visit villages or witness the annual reed dance, in which more than 20,000 bare-breasted young maidens hope to catch the eye of the king, should he wish to add to his present tally of 13 wives.
What few admirers of the mountains, forests and valleys hear are the voices of discontent: those who call King Mswati III a despot and dictator; the allegations of extrajudicial killings and torture; the civil society activists who live in fear of tapped phones and snooped emails; the journalists and judges who toe the line of state control; the suffering of a people, 63% of whom live in poverty and 26% of whom are HIV positive; the protests planned for Thursday, the 39th anniversary of absolute rule; and the whispers of revolt that could emulate the Arab spring by toppling the king.
These voices portray a darker side of Swaziland's "unique and ancient traditions". They call Mswati an African Nero fiddling while his country burns, an arrogant playboy relishing banquets, fast cars and private jets while many of his million subjects go hungry. Swaziland gained independence from Britain in 1968 under Mswati's father, King Sobhuza II, whose nominal reign of almost 83 years was a world record; he had 70 wives and 218 children. On 12 April 1973, he repealed the constitution and banned political parties, making himself absolute ruler. One right the king does not enjoy is the choice of his successor from his plethora of children.
3 Losses warning from Nokia (BBC) Shares in Nokia plunged 17% after the mobile phone giant surprised investors by saying it expected to make losses in the first half of 2012. The Finnish company said competition in the industry had led to lower sales particularly in India, the Middle East, Africa and China. Nokia had previously expected to break even in the first quarter. The statement, issued in the middle of the day, surprised the markets and prompted an immediate sell-off of Nokia shares, pushing their value down to their lowest level since the late 1990s. In February, Nokia announced the details of 4,000 job cuts, two weeks after posting a $1.4bn loss for the three months to the end of December 2011.
4 Another disarmament war (Khaleej Times) On April 13, Iran is scheduled meet with representatives of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – plus Germany (the so-called “P5+1”) in an effort to decide the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme. If the talks fail, and military action against Iran becomes more likely, no one should be surprised. Over the past decade, a new kind of war has been invented: a war designed to stop a country from obtaining nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The first “disarmament war” was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its goal, spelled out plainly by US President George W Bush’s administration to the Security Council and the US Congress, was to destroy Iraq’s WMD stockpiles and production facilities. Of course, as it turned out, no such stockpiles or facilities were found, and the war proved to be an exercise in bloody futility. This experience illustrates one of the great drawbacks of the use of force as a tool of disarmament. An attack must be timed to perfection, and it must be launched after the WMD programmes are in operation and evident, but before they have produced any weapons. If the attack comes too early – or if, as in Iraq, the programmes are not there at all – people will die for nothing. But if the weapons have already been produced, the attack could prompt their use and, possibly, counter-use by the invading party, leading, conceivably, to the world’s first two-sided nuclear war.
5 People in the wrong places (Rahul Singh in Khaleej Times) There is a demographic paradox in the world that is affecting our lives profoundly: The population of some countries – mostly developed – is declining, whereas in others – mostly developing – it continues to soar. India, for instance, adds around 20 million more people, an entire Australia, to its population every year and by 2050 is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation. Pakistan’s population growth has been even more dramatic and unsustainable. When it got its independence in 1947, West Pakistan (as it then was) had just 35 million people. Today, there are 185 million Pakistanis, over five times as much!
A recent conference in Brussels brought together delegates from Eastern Europe and from what had been the Soviet Union, but were now independent republics. The countries represented varied from large ones like Poland (38 million) and Kazakhstan (16 million), to much smaller ones, such as Moldova (3.5 million) and Lithuania (3.2 million). But they had one factor in common: A declining population, either through natural decrease, or from migration to other countries where there were more opportunities. This decline has become a matter of great concern, as they have been unable to find a solution to it. Werner Fornos, recipient of the prestigious United Nations Population Award, cited some telling statistics: “It took all of recorded history for us to reach one billion by 1832; in another 100 years, we doubled to two billion; in 1960, three billion; then, five billion, in 1986. If we continue growing at the current rate, we’ll reach 9.5 billion by 2050 – all competing for the same resources needed to sustain life.” One billion to almost ten billion in just two centuries! No wonder the ecology is in such bad shape and sustainable development just a nice sounding phrase, not a reality.
6 The other India that eats toxic roots to survive (The Wall Street Journal) One afternoon last November, 10 people in Hindiyankalan – a drought-stricken village in Chatra district in India’s Jharkhand state – sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? Hindiyankalan, which has no electricity and is six miles from the nearest paved road, was a good place to examine how the weakest communities in Indian society, the indigenous tribes, are confronting chronic hunger.
Families described how difficult it was to get government-subsidized grains and how poorly other government welfare programs were functioning. They told us that children only receive government-mandated mid-day meals in school four or five days per month. (The village school is closed on the remaining days, partly because of a lack of staff.) They told us how family members were forced to migrate to far-away states in search of work as contracted laborers because there were no local jobs.
Sahria Devi, a 65-year-old widow, recollected the days of October 2008. Ms. Devi’s family’s only source of income in 2008 was from selling soops. The rate then was seven rupees (14 cents). She, her three sons – Lalan, Anil, and Sunil – and two daughters-in-law could make two or three per day. It was never enough to feed the household’s eight people, including her grandsons, Kuldeep and Korhiya, who were two and four years old at the time. Sometimes, the family would trade in soops for one kilogram of rice.
Ms. Devi’s family, like the rest of the Hindiyankalan Birhors, survived on next to nothing: a bit of rice, which they would eat once daily with chakora, a local spinach, and a wild root known as gethi. Gethi is poisonous. The toxins are drained by steeping the root in water for 24 to 40 hours. On the night of Oct. 1, 2008 villagers were so hungry they could not wait to detoxify the gethi, so 20 to 25 people ate the raw root and fell ill. They vomited and suffered bouts of diarrhea. The nearest hospital was just 13 kilometers away, but villagers couldn’t get the sick people there. None of the Birhors in Hindiyankalan have a motorized vehicle. They generally carry patients to the hospital manually on a cot, but the journey, which involves navigating unpaved roads with deep ditches and sharp rocks, is too dangerous to do at night. Eight people died in the village that night. Among them were Ms. Devi’s two grandchildren and her daughter-in-law, Jethi Devi.
7 India’s bizarre tsunami warning systems (The Wall Street Journal) The least you would expect in coastal areas hit by the deadly tsunami of 2004 is for people to stay clear of the beaches. Not so in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Even after police called on people to evacuate the area, television footage showed fishermen busy untangling their nets and crowds of people, unperturbed, staring at the camera crew. And this was happening hours after India’s National Center for Ocean Information Services, the body in charge of issuing tsunami warnings, placed the city under tsunami alert following an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, on Wednesday. It’s clear that many people are still dangerously unaware of how to behave when a tsunami warning is in place. When asked why he wasn’t fleeing the coastline, one of the onlookers in Chennai told reporters that he wasn’t worried because he knew “the Indian government is taking the right safety measures.”
In the Andaman capital, Port Blair, the siren that is supposed to alert people to a potential tsunami is three kilometers from the coast, meaning fishermen can’t hear it, according to Denis Giles, the editor of the Andaman Chronicle newspaper. We noticed a few more flaws in the warning system. The website of the ocean information center, which posts the official tsunami bulletin, was often down in the hours immediately following Wednesday’s quake, making it very difficult for people to figure out whether there was a tsunami risk in their area. It was also difficult to reach officials on the phone. No one from Tamil Nadu’s disaster management department picked up the phone and we got through to staff at the ocean information center only after several attempts.
8 India’s unravelling (Shankar Acharya in Business Standard) India's progress has fallen victim to multiple ministerial fiefdoms and an ineffectual Cabinet. The disarray in policy and performance is not limited to the economic domain. After the prolonged and bizarre legal tussle over the army chief’s birth date, last month saw disclosures of attempted bribing of the chief by a recently retired general over a defence contract and the puzzling decision by the chief and the defence minister not to pursue the matter.
Many strands of history, politics and economics have led to today’s sorry state of national affairs. An important one must surely be the novel and peculiar structure of post-2003 governance where the prime minister has been appointed by the head of the dominant party in the ruling coalition and has little, if any, authority over his Cabinet colleagues. The Westminster model of parliamentary democracy depends critically on the prime minister’s power to appoint and sack his ministers. Manmohan Singh has clearly lacked that crucial authority, which has been wielded by the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. So, as many have noted, he has the formal responsibility for the government’s actions but is bereft of real political power. She has the power but not the responsibility.
After eight long years, it is painfully evident that this peculiar form of diarchy has served India ill. It has utterly undermined the principle of Cabinet responsibility. Ministers have felt free to run their ministries as autonomous fiefdoms. The less scrupulous have exploited such freedom to extort huge rents from governmental decisions in their domain. And let the devil take the hindmost, in this case the people of India and their collective national interest. So where do go from here? There is no silver bullet. Ultimately, in a democracy, people get the government they elect. Some say they get the one they deserve! I hope we Indians deserve better…
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