Here are a few more stories that have caught my eye today:
Yesterday Eliphas Mukonoweshuro, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Public Service, announced that civil servants will receive wage increases with some receiving as much as double their current US$100 allotment, a figure far too low to allow most Zimbabweans to take care of the bare necessities, never mind to assure much quality of life. This is, at best, a glass half empty situation, but it does represent some improvement for Zimbabweans who have suffered most during their country’s spiral into hellishness.
Are the resources devoted to the preparations to host the 2010 World Cup so great that South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) has cut funding for research? It appears so. Academics and others, especially in the sciences, are understandably outraged.
On a brighter football-related note, Manchester City, one of the richest teams in all of global sport, barely eked out a 1-0 win over South Africa’s Kaizer Chiefs in their Vodacom Challenge matchup at Durban’s ABSA Stadium on Tuesday night. This came just days after Orlando Pirates gave Man City a 2-0 hiding in Polokwane.
In The New York Times, the author Tracy Kidder uses a tragic death in Burundi to honor the efforts of Village Health Works. In Kidder’s words:
They started by trying to bring decent public health and medicine to a rural village named Kigutu. The system they created now provides, among many other services, food to the hungriest people in the area and clean water to all of them, and it is also a medical center that in its first year and a half has treated 28,000 patients, most of them without charge.
The sick come there not just from the local area, but from all parts of Burundi and even on weeklong treks from other countries, from Congo and Tanzania. And some visitors have come, not for medical help, but only to look at the clinic. When asked why he was there, one of these travelers replied, “To see America.”
Not enough good can be said about an organization such as Village Health Works.
Finally, a new report from the International Trade Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce indicates that United States trade with sub-Saharan Africa increased by 28% in 2008. I am sure there are plenty of critics of neo-liberalism or neocolonialism, or whatever other barbarous neologisms they want to use, but on balance this strikes me as good news for Africa and for Africans. Let us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
