Zimbabwe ordinarily does not much register on the cultural radar in the United States. But just to show how worthless Zimbabwe's surrency has become, The Washington Post's travel section this week wrote the following: These days, however, frequent-flier miles are looking a lot like Zimbabwean dollars. The currency is being devalued with spirit-crushing regularity. There's […]
Two stories from IRIN underscore one of the big public health issues in Africa today. Maternal and infant mortality is not just a problem in Congo-Brazzaville and Ghana, though those two countries are attempting, as are so many sub-Saharan African countries, to get to grips with the reality that the birth of a child is […]
Jacob Zuma would like to have the corruption charges against him thrown out. Barring that, he hopes that a policy of delay will buy him time to find a way out of his crisis. He knows that in some circles among his allies and among those who have not taken sides there is a hope […]
Well before 9/11 the terrorist bombings in Niarobi and Dar es Salaam gave indications as to the severity of the threat that the then obscure organization al Qaeda posed to the west and its allies. One of the masterminds behind those attacks, Fazul Abdullah, has proven elusive. But Kenyan authorities have arrested members of a […]
Jacob Zuma desperately wants to avoid the corruption charges that he faces. The talk when I was in South Africa was that the charges would be thrown out, less on the merits than out of a sense of expediency. At the same time, Zuma needs the charges either to go away or to be weakened to […]
Morgan Tsvangirai is walking a delicate balance for very high stakes in Zimbabwe. While trying, ultimately, to unseat President Robert Mugabe (and let there be no mistake that this has been his goal all along, with the negotiations for power sharing merely a stopping point and not an acceptable final resolution) he also has to […]
Two headlines about South African emigration from Independent On-Line appeared within the same week. The first: “Whites Leaving SA in Droves.” The second: “Whites Return to South Africa.” Is this schizophrenia at work? Shoddy journalism? Or, as I believe, an example of South Africans perceiving a problem and generally believing the worst even when there is contravailing […]
In the sort of sound economic reasoning that we have all come to expect from Harare, the Zimbabwean government plane to chop a bunch of zeroes off of the country's currency, thus re-denominating, though not re-valuating the plummeting Zimbabwean dollar. Beyond making math a little easier for people carrying around bricks of the country's virtually […]
Three stories caught my eye this morning, all of which fall into the category of disappointing, but not surprising. 1) The power-sharing talks over Zimbabwe have broken down over the question of what role Morgan Tsvangirai will play. The sides appear to have rather different conceptions of the role the Movement for Democratric Change leader will […]
This is a bit belated, but I wanted to share my Cape Argus Zim Op Ed from June 25 in which I lament Morgan Tsvangirai dropping out of the race and utilize an example from the American Civil Rights Movement as an example of what I worried that his departure from the race might mean.
There is a reason why economics is known as the “dismal science.” For all of the accoutrements of precision and exactitude, the reality is that much of economics is at least as much alchemy as science, and the supposed “laws” of economics are more like guidelines than immutable realities. It is thus not surprising that […]
Tony King, a professor at the University of the West of England, uses this Guardian article on the currency crisis as a springboard to what strikes me as some reasonable commentary at H-SAfrica: . . . The government is running out of paper for banknotes, and is facing the prospect of losing the software licence […]
A key rule in understanding politics is to take with a grain of salt when one party tries to define, contextualize, predict, or provide historical context for another. Another key rule is to make sure that other parties are not in a position to define yours. I thought of (read: made up) these iron-clad rules […]
Even as Kenya moves forward from the political violence that set the country alight at the beginning of the year after the fiercely contested netional elections, there are still hundreds of people who were displaced as a result of the violence living in camps around Nairobi. Chaos that takes just days or weeks to flare and abate […]
Tired of rising electricity and food prices, 25,000 members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) marched on Eskom's Johannesburg offices today. The march sounds as if it was almost festive, with a holiday mood prevailing among the marchers. But beneath the surface there is real anger. I heard it when I spoke […]