Sound Of Cannons

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Without Free-0Market Reforms, They're Going To Be The Chinese's Bitches

Africa needs to 'control its own destiny'
The continued control of African countries by their former colonial masters was one of the main contributors to crises on the continent, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.Addressing parliamentarians from African countries at the 38th Commonwealth Parliamentary Association meeting in parliament, Mbeki said there was an urgent need for Africans to take full control of their own destiny."..After the wave of independence, manly in the 1960s, a combination of factors that brought about numerous crises in our countries ensured that our continent was placed under de facto trusteeship, with programmes and policies for Africa's development drawn-up by people who were not only not African, but were, in many instances, those who had been our colonial masters."To defeat this neo-colonial stranglehold, we have developed our own path of development, as reflected in the Constitutive Act authorising the establishment of the African Union, and the AU development and reconstruction programme, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)," he said.The continent's members of parliament, Mbeki said, had an important role to play in ensuring the implementation of these programmes."This must surely mean that your oversight function as parliamentarians includes oversight over the implementation of the Constitutive Act," he said.He hailed the setting up of the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund as one of the most important milestones in the continent's march to independence."Of critical and historic importance is the fact that the entirety of the capital of the fund, currently amounting to $625-million, originates exclusively from within our continent."We are confident that within the next 12 months the capital base of the ...fund will reach $1-billion," he said. - Sapa

Taiwan, Still Plucky

It speaks TRUCKLOADS that Taiwan was rejected from entering the UN. It says China is more powerful than ever, and that the US's worldwide influence is waning. Read between the lines people, China is going to kick everyone's ass.
Official backs Taiwan referendum
Staff and agencies27 July, 2007
By PETER ENAV, Associated Press Writer 10 minutes ago
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Brushing off threats from rival China, Taiwan‘s foreign minister said Friday a planned referendum on membership in the United Nations will go ahead because it reflects the "overwhelming sentiment" of the island‘s people.
Tension over the referendum has pushed relations between the longtime antagonists to their lowest level in more than a year, and raised concerns in Washington that the fragile status quo in the western Pacific — the enduring basis of American policy in the region — is at serious risk.
"It is the overwhelming sentiment of Taiwanese people to request their nation to become a U.N. member," he said.
The self-governing island was expelled from the U.N. in 1971 after its seat — which it held under the name Republic of China — was transferred to the Beijing-based government of the People‘s Republic of China.
The sides split amid civil war in 1949, and China has repeatedly threatened to attack if Taiwan ever moves to formalize the de facto independence that its exercises through issuing its own currency, governing its own territory, and maintaining its own armed forces.
"It is far from our intention to provoke the Chinese," he said. "We want peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait more than anyone else in the world."
"We should not stop doing anything because of rejection from the Chinese," he said.
The referendum idea was initially raised by Chen several months ago as campaigning for Taiwan‘s legislative and presidential elections — set for the first quarter of 2008 — began to heat up.
In his comments to the AP, Huang acknowledged that even if the referendum passed, it would have little practical effect.
Some Taiwanese analysts believe that a major reason for holding the referendum in tandem with either the legislative or presidential elections is Chen‘s desire to motivate the base of his pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party as the polls approach.
In contrast to the DPP, the main opposition Nationalists support eventual unification with China, and are fighting hard against DPP attempts to label them a Chinese rather than a Taiwanese political party.

There's An Investment Opportunity In There Somewhere

Energy shortage hampers development in Africa
By Michael Wines
Sunday, July 29, 2007

LUSAKA, Zambia: It is not that Jacob Mwale minds irrigating the 11 acres of land he farms just east of Lusaka, Zambia's capital. It is irrigating his 11 acres in the dead of night that angers him.
Two or three times a week, the Mwale farm abruptly loses power, like the homes and businesses of some of Zambia's 300,000 other electricity users. When the power returns, sometimes late in the evening, Mwale's farmhands work overtime, watering the four-and-a-half hectares of fields by moonlight.
"If they shut down the whole day, I have to work nights, and pay extra," Mwale, 39, grumbled. "It's killing us."
Power blackouts - "load shedding," in utility jargon - are hardly novel in sub-Saharan Africa, where many electricity grids remain chewing-gum-and-baling-wire affairs. Even so, this year is different.
Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented.
The causes are manifold: strong economic growth in some places, economic collapse in others, war, poor planning, population booms, high oil prices and drought have combined to leave both industry and residents short of power when many need it most.
"We've had no significant capital injection into generation and transmission, from either the private or public sectors, for 15, maybe 20 years," said Lawrence Musaba, the manager of the Southern African Power Pool, a 12-nation consortium of electricity utilities at the continent's tip.
The implications go beyond candlelight suppers and extra blankets on beds. The lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the region's development, clipping more than 2 percent off the annual growth rates of the worst-hit African economies, according to the World Bank. Some nations, like Ghana, have tried to deal with their power crises by leasing huge teams of gas generators, producing emergency power at exorbitant rates until power plants can be built.
In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening pollution.
In normal times, South Africa's muscular chain of power plants fills the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures have persisted since.
The gravity of this year's shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other nations', the region's remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland.
Much goes to industry: a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique's capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest of Mozambique. On average, the World Bank said, fewer than one in four sub-Saharan Africans are hooked to national electricity grids.
Moreover, some grids are so poorly maintained that electricity suppliers get paid for as little as 60 percent of the power they generate. The rest is either stolen or lost in ill-maintained networks.
For decades, the region had enough generating capacity - and few enough customers - to tolerate such waste. No more: Sub-Saharan nations are adding about a thousand megawatts of generating capacity each year, World Bank experts said, but need up to twice that to keep pace with demand.
Some governments privatized chunks of their power industry in the early 1990s when free-market solutions to public-sector problems were in vogue, leaving it unclear who is ultimately responsible for providing power.
Other governments, as in South Africa, failed to build power plants that experts warned were needed. The government monopoly Eskom, the world's fourth-largest power utility, was advised in a 1998 report that it would run short of power in 2007, but planning and financing problems - not all within the utility's control - stalled upgrades.
The forecast was actually optimistic: Eskom began running short in 2006.
Yet South Africa's woes pale beside those of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. Only 19 of 79 power plants work, the government said in April. Daily electricity output has plunged 60 percent from its peak, and blackouts cost the economy $1 billion a year, the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria said.
Poor management is but one problem. War has devastated the power grid in Congo, in Africa's heart, and stalled plans to develop its vast hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of West Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin, which buy power from Ghana.
Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two 50-megawatt generators, burning diesel at a time of record oil prices.
The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, also with drought, is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest.
Zambia, where power to customers like Mwale is rationed almost every day, is a template for such problems. Barely 20 percent of households are wired for power - only 3 percent in rural areas - but the Zambia Electricity Supply Co., known as Zesco, is signing up 10,000 new customers a year, said Christopher Nthala, the utility's transmission director.
Now Zambia is getting a push: A global commodities boom has jolted its moribund metals industry to life. Investors are building two smelters, and doubling the capacity of another, to handle the boom in copper, nickel and other metals, taxing the nation's power supply.
"We've never seen this kind of growth before," Nthala said.
Once the utility could make up shortfalls by buying power from other utilities in the Southern Africa Power Pool. But now, Nthala said, neighbors have little surplus to hand out. "Sometimes we get it," he said. "Sometimes we don't."
None of that mollifies customers, who say blackouts are so common that service in much of Lusaka has become totally unreliable.
Many power failures seem to hit Matero, a poor township that is home to maybe a million of Lusaka's estimated three million residents.
"Every day - it's either in the morning, when people are going to work or preparing to cook, or in the evening, the prime time when I'm tired and I need to go home and listen to the news and cook my supper," said Bishop Peter Ndhlovu, who leads the 250,000-member Bible Gospel Church, an evangelical movement.

And To Think The Ruling Elite Support This Bozo

Y'think England will take away his knighthood?
Mugabe Says He Will Print More Money

Jul 28 01:41 PM US/EasternBy ANGUS SHAWAssociated Press Writer
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - President Robert Mugabe has promised to print more money to fund municipal projects, a government newspaper reported Saturday. The pledge came despite hyperinflation that has created severe shortages of cornmeal, meat, milk and other staples.
Meanwhile, water shortages worsened due to pump breakdowns, and a senior government official said kidney patients were dying for lack of dialysis machines.
The offical Herald newspaper reported that Mugabe told a meeting of local councilors they should put more pressure on government ministers to improve services.
"Where money for projects has not been found, we will print it," Mugabe was quoted as saying.
The printing of money is generally regarded as a recipe for inflation—which is officially at 4,500 percent in Zimbabwe, though private economists estimate it to be least twice as high. The government last month ordered sweeping price cuts of around 50 percent, accusing store owners and businesses of fueling the inflation.
Zimbabwe is in the grips of its worst crisis since independence from Britain in 1980. Power, water, health and communications systems are collapsing, and there are acute shortages of staple foods and gasoline. Unemployment is around 80 percent, and political unrest is high.
Mugabe blames Western sanctions and rejects criticism that the meltdown is the result of mismanagement and the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms he ordered beginning in 2000.
The biggest government hospital group acknowledged Friday that 10 of its 18 kidney dialysis machines were awaiting repair and imported spare parts needing scarce hard currency.
Vice President Joyce Mujuru said kidney patients had died for lack of dialysis machines, and lambasted the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare for not fixing the problem.
Mujuru accused officials at one hospital of not installing the machines in the first place, even though she personally requisitioned the equipment from abroad in 2004.
"This is the sort of ineptitude that we have always been complaining about," she told The Herald.
Lack of hard currency for imports is crippling the health sector.
Pharmacists on Friday advised AIDS patients to stock up on their drugs after local manufacturers warned they would soon run out of imported raw materials. Some 20 percent of Zimbabweans are infected with HIV.
In a sign of other serious problems, water storage drums were sold out Friday in one main Harare hardware store as water shortages worsened. The state water utility said it suffered new breakdowns at its pumping stations.
The government-ordered price controls have denuded stores across the country, with businesses saying they can't afford to sell at the new prices. Some 5,000 managers and gas station and store owners have been arrested and fined for defying the price controls since the order was issued June 26.
Daily power outages are forcing Zimbabweans to light fires for cooking and heating water. State radio reported Friday that a woodlands park used for conservation classes faced collapse because wood poachers had stripped nearly 500 acres of its indigenous msasa trees and other long-burning hardwoods.

Hillary: We Already Have Gov't Sponsored Schools..........

Clinton: Create Public Service Academy

Jul 28 02:38 PM US/EasternBy PAGE IVEYAssociated Press Writer
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton told college Democrats on Saturday she would create a national academy to train public servants.
"I'm going to be asking a new generation to serve," she said. "I think just like our military academies, we need to give a totally all-paid education to young men and women who will serve their country in a public service position."
An older woman carrying a sign that said "She doesn't care, all she wants is the power" yelled at Clinton while the New York senator was speaking in a ballroom on the University of South Carolina campus. Students attending the College Democrats of America convention shouted down the woman down and pushed her from the room.
"One of the things I love about politics, you never know what the day will bring," Clinton said.
Several people at the convention said they were inspired by Clinton's speech and her experience in public service after law school.
Clinton was an intern with the Children's Defense Fund, which advocates for minority, poor and disabled children.
"I loved her personal stories. ... It wasn't her generic speech," said Katelyn Porter, president of the College Democrats chapter at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.
Porter, who is from Boston and works for a nonprofit organization that helps low-income families, said she has not decided which Democratic candidate she will support. "But Hillary is definitely at the top of the list," she said.
Clinton spoke about her conversion during college from a born and raised Republican to a Democrat.
"I woke up in my dorm one day and I thought, 'Well, I'm not sure I am a Republican,'" she said to enthusiastic cheers. "I was at the time, embarrassingly enough, the president of the Wellesley College young Republicans."