Where Is The Africa Cup of Nations?
I’ve always enjoyed this football tournament, as I said here.
But this year it’s on Eurosport and the only way to see that is by using Sky. All you get is highlights on ITV4 and that’s not in my guide.
Nairobi’s Two-Wheeled Taxis
I like this story.
We must think creatively about how to deal with young offenders.
Beware of Baboons
Baboons are the hooligans of Africa, and as this story from Cape Town shows they can do a lot of damage to get what they want.
I was first made aware of the habits of baboons in of all places, Penang in Malaysia. C and I were waiting for the cable car, when we met a friendly Canadian couple and their three early teenage children. The couple, who were both teachers, had sold everything and were taking a family trip round the world, staying generally in a couple of dollar a day guesthouses. They had crossed the Sahara in a truck, travelled overland to Kenya by a variety of means and then from Tanzania, they’d crossed to India in a dhow. I asked if they’d had any problems and they said no, except for the baboons. They told of how they could open the most secure of cases and would do anything to steal food. They had had another problem incidentally, when their son had broke his humerus in Nigeria, only for it to be set perfectly, by the local bonesetter.
Ever since that conversation I’ve always been wary of baboons.
I remember an incident at Cape Point, near Cape Town in South Africa. There is a tea bar there and the baboons were all on the roof, trying to steal food, as they always do. But they had found that if they put their backside over the edge of roof and defecated, they could get a lot of laughs and hopefully someone would drop a burger or a sandwich. I have seen some revolting behaviour in my time, but this ranks with the worst.
Their behaviour was little better in Gambia on one of my last holidays with C and in Kenya, they were always looking to create some trouble.
So keep clear of baboons.
I’ll always remember that charming Canadian family and wonder if they ever wrote a book about that adventure of a lifetine.
Who do I Support in Angola?
It is strange the rules you apply to decide which team to support in the Africa Cup of Nations in Angola.
Take Egypt against Nigeria.
Egypt is a country, where I enjoyed a good gluten-free holiday at Luxor and is somewhere I’ll go to again. Nigeria on the other hand is a country I’ve never visited and from which I get endless spam, named after article 419 in their penal code. (To be fair to Nigeria, they are doing their best to stop the spam!)
But I supported Nigeria for no apparent reason!
Now, I’m watching Benin against Mozambique.
Here it’s Mozambique.
I was in Trinidad and happened to be staying at a hotel, where there was a Speakers’ Conference of all the Commonwealth countries. At breakfast I was in the queue with a guy whose badge said he was an official of the Mozambique parliament!
But then they aren’t in the Commonwealth are they?
Oh yes they are! And when I questioned the guy about it, he told me how important the Commonwealth were to his country in providing aid and specialist advisors. He made some comment about the Commonwealth sending a sole advisor who knew his stuff, whilst the UN sent one who didn’t with a useless entourage.
Another thing I remember at this conference was Betty Boothroyd, who was doing a sterling job at making everybody’s time a good and productive one. She was always immaculately dressed and at breakfast I asked my wife, a barrister, who was the scruffy bloke with Miss Boothroyd. She choked on her muesli, laughed and said it was Derry Irving. He was definitely second class to Miss Boothroyd!
Africa Cup of Nations
Two years ago, I was very lonely, miserable and possibly desperate, as my wife had died. If anything helped to get over the loneliness, it was football and in particular the Africa Cup of Nations.
For many nights in that January, there was entertaining football every night, played by countries who had a lot more problems than I had. So I watched and enjoyed. It helped!
This year, I was looking forward to the 2010 cup in Angola. In just ten years since one of the most nasty and vicious of African civil wars, Angola has progressed enough to be awarded the finals. With Africa in the news so often for the wrong reasons, here was a reason to be cheerful.
But then we had the attack on the Togo players as they drove to Cabinda. Perhaps they shouldn’t have driven through one of the most dangerous parts of Angola. But they did and three people died. It is easy for us to say they should have flown, but then we don’t know the finances of the Togo team and flying is not as safe in some parts of Africa as it is in Europe and the US. Remember too, that the Zambian team was wiped out in an aircrash in 1993. Did this influence the decision?
We will probably never know, but sadly the attack has cast a very sombre gloss over the tournament.
This quote from Thomas Dossevi of the Togo team will be remembered as it has a dignity and a maturity.
We are all heartbroken. It is no longer a party but we want to show our national colours, our values – and that we are men.
I can feel their pain and my heart goes out to everybody.
But football is proving to be one of the values of Africa. It might even be some of those footballers, who in the end, lift some of the more troubled countries out of their problems of poverty, disease, famine, bad government, dictatorships and corruption. Many are doing a lot more than their governments.
We must support them in every way possible.
Paul and Rachel Chandler
Paul and Rachel Chandler are the couple who were seized from their yacht by Somali pirates. This is the last piece of news about them in The Times on the 13th of December.
These two paragraphs admit the truth about the Navy’s non-involvement.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) yesterday admitted that Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, had authorised a Royal Marine unit that witnessed the kidnapping to intervene. But it said it was the ship’s commander who decided it was unsafe to attempt a rescue.
The RFA Wave Knight was within 50 yards of the pirates and had a marine unit and a Merlin helicopter aboard. But Sir Mark Stanhope, the first sea lord, claimed the ship did not have the expertise required for a hostage rescue.
After that nothing has been reported!
Whether or not the commander should have intervened is open to question, as every squaddie I’ve ever met, would have been up to do it.
But perhaps the question that should be asked is why were the Marines on that ship without the equipment and training to intervene in a safe and successful manner?
On a wider point, Somalia is an absolute basket case and is yet another legacy of the incompetent Dubya. Read what was said in The Times yesterday.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Britain.
It has delivered a people that practised a moderate form of Islam into the hands of religious extremists. Its efforts to combat terrorism have turned Somalia into a launchpad for global jihad. Somalia is now the ultimate failed state whose mayhem threatens to destabilise the region and whose pirates maraud the vital shipping lanes off its shores. Its people endure Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
What I find so sad about Somalia, is that in the past I’ve done business with quite a few Somalis over telephone billing systems. I’ve always found them a quiet and mild people, who were a pleasure to work with.
What went wrong?
Let’s hope that the Chandlers get a quick solution to their ordeal.
But I suspect that will not happen as the impass between the British Government and their kidnappers is just too great.
Should we pay a ransom? I’m afraid that I agree with the Government here, in that if we do, then any UK national will then be at risk. And not just in the troubled parts of the world, as there an awful lot of criminals all over the world, who would see kidnapping as a nice little earner.
Politicians Have Little Effect
I found an article, by Matthew Paris in The Times on Saturday, entitled What have politicians done for them? Zilch.
He was referring to Malawi and Zimbabwe and it is a profound article by someone who writes with thought and also knows that part of Africa.
What with the farcical non-binding agreement at Copenhagen and Prudence’s efforts to try to help the economy, I would suspect that it doesn’t just apply to Africa.
The Anonymous Widower 