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POPSReckless rhetoric or freedom of speech? South Africa has a democratic constitution that protects freedom of speech. In saying things like this is Bishop Tutu trying to place an unconstitutional limitation on freedom of speech?
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POPSSouth Africans pay more for electricity As shortages of things like electricity, oil and even food grow, so will conflicts of interest. Ideally, southern Africa should try to produce its own electricity for the whole subcontinent. As supplies of coal and other fossil fuels dwindle, there will be increasing reliance on hydroelectricity from the Zambezi and the Congo -- but countries along those rivers will want to serve themselves first, and sell the surplus to others -- while there is a surplus. So which rout to go -- cooperation in the subcontinent, or autarky?
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POPSStorm in an aluminium smelter Valli Moosa, the chairman of the Eskom board, and former Minister of Environmental Affairs, said at a meeting last night that South Africa would not have a power crisis if there were no big aluminium smelters, but said that this as a sensitive matter, as the row between Standard Bank and BHP Billiton shows.
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POPSBuilding society eats building society I don't know much about financial institutions in Britain, but I found it encouraging that they still apparently have building societies. In South Africa all the major building societies demutualised about 20 years ago, suckering their members with stories of "windfalls", which they have since lost many times over in the bank charges levied by the commercial banks that replaced the building societies. Am I right in surmising that Northern Rock, which recently had a big bail out at the expense of the taxpayers, was also one of these demutualised ex-building societies? And what are these Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac that have had similar bail-outs in the US? The first sounds like an escort agency rather than a financial institution. I realise that "image" is deceptive, but who in their right mind would lend to or borrow from an institution with a name like that?
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POPSThe "third force" behind xenophobic violence? Could the ugly face of capitalism be behind the violence against foreigners that we have seen over the last couple of months? There have been taxi wars in the past, now it seems to have spread to other businesses.
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POPSGordon Brown boycotting EU-Africa summit in Lisbon British Prime Minisrter Gordon Brown is boycotting the EU Africa summit this weekend because of Zimbabwe's poor human rights record. It is good to see political leaders taking a principled stand for human rights, and it would be nice to see more do so. Unfortunately, however, Mr Brown's stand is somewhat hypocritical, as he is still in favour of introducing 90-day detention into Britain. When Tony Blair tried to inrtroduce 90-day detention two years ago some Labour MPs, to their credit, rebelled and blocked it. No kudos, however, to the British media, which continually rederred to Mr Blair as occupying the "moral high ground" on the issue. If that is so, the ground Mr Mugabe occupies must be stratospheric.
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POPSSchadenfreude? For the last three months South Africans have been complaining about Eskom's failures in planning and bad management, as if it is the only organisation to suffer from such incompetence, and as if South Africa is the only country to suffer from such misfortunes. So perhaps there was a certain sense of relief, not to mention malicious glee, to see that British Airways seems to be unable to organise a piss up in a brewery. And there was the gent of Sky News muttering at 20 minute intervals about the damage it was doing to "brand UK". At least we're not alone.
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POPSJurisdictionalism hits Anglicans Anglicanism in the USA seems to be on its way to becoming a tangled mess of separate jurisdictions even more complicated than the jurisdictional mess in the Orthodox Church there. Some US Episcopalians have linked to Anglican dioceses in various parts of Africa, and now South America has jumped in. For the last 150 years or so the Orthodox diaspora has led to competing episcopal jurisdictions in places like Western Europe, North America and Australia. One can find overlapping juriisdictions of Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian and other bishops. Now the same thing is beginning to happen among the Anglicans, with Kenyan, Ugandan, Nigerian and now Argentinian bishops having overlapping jurisdictions. At least among the Orthodox, despite language and ethnic differences, there is the same faith.
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POPSNo more child witches in DRC? Whether the law can be enforced in such a fractured country is indeed a moot point, but so is the idea of these "deeply-held" beliefs. These beliefs, to all accounts, appeared quite suddenly in recent history. Perhaps they could disappear just as suddenly. What we need to find is what it takes to make them disappear, and perhaps it could help to find what caused them to appear in the first place. The DRC, like other African countries, has long had many people who believe that misfortunes are caused by witchcraft and sorcery. What appears to be new is the belief that these witches are young children, and that it is occurring on such a scale. Perhaps it is the very fractured nature of the society that is causing these beliefs to spread and be deeply held.
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POPSBritish control orders Any hopes that the replacement of Tony Blair by Gordon Brown might arrest Britains slide towards a fascist police state have been dashed. Brown's recent defence of "Control Orders" sounded just like Vorster's defence of banning orders against government opponents in apartheid South Africa. And the British Control Orders are virtually indistinguishable from South African banning orders, and in some ways even more restrictive.
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