I have set up two more blogs.
The first is dedicated to events in Africa. It’s called
The second is concerned with discussions about business and strategic management topics. It’s called
Don’t forget to pay either or both of them a visit.
… the answer is no one knows – yet!
But let’s see what we do know. Relations between president Nina Vieira, and army chief-of-staff Batista Tigme Na Wai have been strained for a long time. The reasons may be personal, but then there may have been suspicion on the part of one or other of the actors of collusion with drug traffickers who’ve been using the impoverished nation as an entrepot between Latin America and Europe. Even though Vieira was an army man himself and came to power in a coup in 1980, there’s never been too much love lost between him and his top soldiers.
So, early in the morning of March 1st a bomb goes off at army headquarters, killing General Tigme Na Wai. Some of his officers smell a rat and drive to the president’s private residence with a rocket, which they fire at the house after polite knocking failed to raise the occupants. They go in and challenge the president as to whether he had anything to do with General Tigme na Wai’s death. Here details become a bit sketchy. According to one account Vieira said something like “It’s a fair cop, it wus me wot did it!” whereupon he’s shot by the soldiers and his body was taken away.
Has a military coup taken place? Who’s in charge? The radio station’s off the air, apparently under military control and the people are scared. Schools are closed, as are most shops, and it seems Bissau’s residents want to sit out the crisis. They’re afraid of getting caught in the cross-fire if a shooting war breaks out among sections of the armed forces.
This present turn of events is shocking in its violence, but then institutions are so weak in the country that anyone with a gun – whether loaded or not – can cause a lot of mayhem. Vieira may well be the “democratically elected” head of state, but he’s far from popular. A coup against his rule has been anticipated for years. Still pity the poor people.
I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging for a while. In truth, I’m too exhausted to write much; even an e-mail seems to take it out of me. Anyway I’ve got the feeling that nothing I say matters much. The world continues turning, war and distress multiply and I seem to earn nothing but the smirks of Cavan’s corner-boys.
In Somalia the ship MV Fain that was taken hostage by pirates is being released by its captors, no doubt after the payment of a huge ransom. Anyway what were the pirates going to do with the cargo? You can’t really get rid of dozens of tanks on the “black market”. A new president has been elected but whether he can make a reality of the Somali state, ruled by anarchy for nearly two decades, is anyone’s guess.
In Guinea Dadis Camara seems to be pursuing a policy of questioning the way in which the country’s wealth has been siphoned off, usually into the pockets of multinational mining companies who throw some baksheesh to local officials who ferret the sums away in foreign bank accounts.
And in Zimbabwe a national unity government has finally been agreed between the autumnal patriarch Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai. The country is fucked, there’s 90 per cent unemployment and a major cholera outbreak. What’s more inflation has rendered the national currency into a joke. The perpetrators of political violence still walk tall and their directors are sitting down at last with their victims. The decision by Mugabe to grant Tsvangirai the job of Prime Minister is a little like an offer of a lift in someone’s broken down car.
There are so many wars and conflicts. We all know of the genocide in Gaza, but other wars go unrecorded, such as that in Sri Lanka, which sees the civilian population often made into unwilling human shields by either the Sri Lankan government or the ever more desperate Tamil Tigers.
In the borderlands of Uganda and the Not-So-Democratic Republic of Congo (NDRSC), the grim antics of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has spread from its original nursery bed in the north of Uganda the northeast of the NSDRC. This leaves in its wake burned villages and massacres of church-goers. The LRA has a “no-frills” approach to recruiting soldiers; no one can accuse them of ageism – the younger the better. Indeed their approach to winning friends and influencing people is basic – after seeing your loved ones raped and chopped into pieces, you’ve got two choices – join us or join them.
And as for events closer to home all I can say is that they’re just like a demented pantomime. But then everyone knows this. I don’t know whether anyone else has noticed how incredibly well-fed the pantomime managers are. Our Minister for Finance, for example, who may well tell everyone else to tighten their belts, but can he without giving himself a hernia? The same is true of our prime minister. None of them are showing any signs of the financial squeeze – far from it. A few weeks’ ago there was an edition of RTE’s rural programme Ear to the Ground, in which it was mentioned that the present financial straits affecting many people had led to greater demand from Irish butchers for cheaper cuts of meat. I was glad to see a restaurant critic who said that many of these cuts have a far better taste than the more expensive joints. But something tells me that none of our senior politicians or civil servants are tucking in to oxtail stew. And as for our minister for health! Look, no more nudge-nudge, wink-win, sexist jokes about fatsoes. But the fact is she is obese. Obesity is a medical condition which can be alleviated, but what’s she doing about it? And then there’s her husband, the man who was for so long implicated in the exorbitantly costly mix of Hi-De-Hi and Absolutely Fabulous which was FAS. They were supposed to be finding jobs and training opportunities for the unemployed, but I feel that if Mr Harney had ever been told that he might meet an unemployed youth, maybe from “the wrong side of the tracks”, his response would have been “Heaven forbid.”
Our rulers try to look statesman-like, but they always come across as at best incompetent idiots, at worse as three-card cheats. There was a particularly heart-wrenching interview with a senior banker today in which he revealed that due to the economic downturn his “disclosed” renumeration package would probably be less than 2 million euro this year. Think of it – less than 50 thousand euro a week, ten thousand a day. How can anyone survive on that? Picture his poor children, his desperate spouse no doubt tearing her false blond hair from its roots as all of them have to wrestle with the indignity of approaching the local Vincent de Paul. And with everybody in a bind there is no possibility of picking up some week-end work mowing grass, while the little chizzlers will look in vain for any paper rounds.
We have all heard about how the wages of sin are death, and that he who is consumed by greed ends up being literally consumed by it? Very biblical, almost worth of the Martyrs’ Memorial Church in Belfast, but an event in Somalia shows just how true these adages are.
Two months’ ago the pirates operating with apparent impunity off the coast of Somalia hit the big time when they captured the Saudi oil tanker Sirius which was estimated to be carrying one quarter of the Saudi kingdom’s daily oil output. Well it seems a ransom was paid – in the region of $3m last week. Certainly a helicopter was seen hovering over the ship and dropping a bag. After this the ship and its crew were released.
Then greed got the better of the pirates. They decided to make a rough division of the spoils, pocketing something like $150.000 each, and jumped into a speed boat with the intention of disappearing with their loot. Sad to say the sea was, as they say in Cornwall, a bit lumpy, and their speed-boat capsized. Some of the pirates managed to swim to shore, but alas their money was gone. One pirate sadly didn’t make it; his body has been washed ashore but with the money in his pockets. Some of it is okay but the rest has to be separated and dried, something his family say could take weeks.
Where did the wave come from? Was it not a reminder that man may count himself materially rich but he is as nought when compared with the forces of nature or, dare I say it, the wrath of the Divine?
There is a lesson here for those greedy bastards who arrogantly claim to govern us and who are at this moment cooking up new schemes to steal the widows’ mites so that they and their relatives can live like princes.
This world is such a sad place; who’d want to go on for yet another awful year on it?
Over Christmas it is estimated that 400 innocent people have been massacred by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in the north east of Congo. The LRA, incidentally, claim to be fighting to create a state based on The Ten Commandments.
There has also been heavy fighting in Somalia, but perhaps the most egregious example of evil this Christmas is in Gaza. Those poor innocents slaughtered in a Congolese church died at the hands of crazed madmen with weapons, no doubt pumped full of drugs, whereas those who have died in Gaza have perished at the hands of a state which is allowed to belong to the international community. I’m no anti Semite but the state of Israel is a terrorist state, which belongs on that hypocrite George W. Bush’s axis of evil as much as Iran or North Korea.
You hear Israeli spokespeople trying to defend what they’re doing and you ask yourself: Is this the blackest of comedies? Do they really believe their own crap? Yesterday the Israeli foreign minister blamed Hamas for civilian deaths, because Hamas had their offices and buildings in civilian areas. Hold on now Tzipi Livni, who’s dropping the bombs? Is it not Israeli artillery which is blowing people up? Such a statement might be used in a court of law by the defence as evidence of the defendant’s insanity and how far they were affected by a disease of the mind. Let’s take the argument out of Israel to, well, anywhere with a bank. It is held up by a group of robbers who, intent on getting their hands on the money decide to shoot their way in, killing customers who just happen to be there, or maybe they decide to use explosives. The results are the same: a high body-count. The robbers are caught charged with robbery, but no less so with the murder of the innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The robbers deny murder, claiming that it wasn’t their fault that the people were killed but rather the bank’s for having civilians in the building.
Reasoning of a sort – the reasoning of terrorism.
Some of the questions posed by the coup in Guinea are being answered, yet some of the biggest remain unresolved.
Captain Camara is not a stalking horse for the whole military establishment, but it is unlikely he was acting solely on his own initiative. He may still therefore be the front man for a faction of the armed forces. It is interesting that the headquarters of the coup appear to be at the Alpha Yayo camp. This is where members of the former regime have been requested to come for their own safety. It is also the headquarters of the elite paratroop BATA batallion, headed by Commandant Sekouba Konate. It is now clear that the Guinean military is far from being a homogenous monolith and is faction-ridden. The head of the armed forces, Diarra Camara (no relation of the coup leader) is a long-time Conteh loyalist, has distanced himself from the coup and had repeated a more-or-less identical mantra that the leaders represented a disgruntled minority.
Yet the situation is very fluid. The plotters did not act with the support of the whole of the army, but they don’t represent a small faction. They are in the process of negotiating with other sections of the military to throw in their lot with them.
Little is known about Captain Dadis Camara. He has told Radio France Internationale that he is a graduate of Conakry University and that he has spent time training in Germany.
But is he really in charge? It is interesting that he is hardly mentioned by name in any of today’s communiques. Is this a sign that the coup plotters are falling out amongst themselves?
The biggest unresolved question is what will happen next? The army is divided; both factions claiming to hold power. Unless one side gives in, which seems unlikely, or is able to persuade the other of the rightness of its position, the horrible spectre of armed conflict, maybe even civil war underlain by ethnic cleavages, appears on the horizon. The coup leaders have already spoken about certain “loyalist generals” who are planning to regain power with the help of mercenaries from neighbouring countries, some of whom they believe are already in the country. This is worrying for Guinea’s neighbours,, many of whom have only just stepped out from the shadow of bloody civil wars, often engendered by unresolved power grabs. It was a coup on Christmas Eve many years ago led by the late General Robert Guei which plunged Cote d’Ivoire into paroxysms of violence.
The next big turning point for Guinea will surely be on Friday when General Conteh’s funeral takes place. Who will turn up and what will they do?
Last night (December 10th), while trawling the wavebands I picked up the radio station in N’Djamena on 4905 khz. Reception was fair until sign-off at 22.30. I also picked up the government station in Lhasa, Tibet which was playing Tibetan vocal music. Certainly more entertaining than Northern Sound.
Why am I writing this? In the distant off-chance that someone out there might be interested.
Last Saturday night, while trawling through the airwaves I came upon a station in the 31 metre band at 9705 khz to be precise. It was playing African music, however I assumed it must be a big international broadcaster, as they predominate in that frequency range. However, the music sounded too authentic and the broadcast was not exactly strong. I looked up the frequency in a list and to my surprise I discovered that it was La Voix du Sahel from Niamey in Niger. The broadcast was in an African vernacular, possibly Zarma, and was certainly stronger than the frequency I’ve usually caught La Voix du Sahel on in the Tropic Band.
Thinking of next year’s holidays but looking for a get-away with a difference that takes you off the beaten track? Why not come to Eyl on Somalia’s sun-kissed Puntland coast. There aren’t enough hours in the day to capture the whole Eyl experience. Your holiday starts before you arrive when you’re sailing along the Somali coast when some of our hospitality crews arrive to take you and your ship back under armed guard to Eyl. They look fierce and blood-thirsty, but behind the automatic weaponry and RPG launchers you will find people seriously dedicated to your comfort who want to insure that your stay at Eyl’s -5 star luxury resort and spa will be a time you’ll never forget.
When you’re brought ashore you’ll have plenty of time to relax by the swimming-pool. Sorry no martinis – no booze full stop, it’s a Muslim country Maybe take a dip in the mesmerising blue waters lined by miles of beaches – oh, sorry, don’t be put off by people saying the seas are shark-infested. Sure, there’s the odd shark but they’re friendly. Like resort staff they have only one thing on their mind – (lunch) – no, your satisfactilon. Why not dine in one of the many resort restaurants, where the menu changes according to what resort staff have been able to hijack on the high seas. Today’s menus have a wheat theme. As for entertainment you can chill out driving a tank. But the staff want you to relax and take it easy while your employers come to their senses and agree to pay the ransom we demand. And forget about all those other holidays which always seemed to be well spoiled by the realisation that they would come to an end. You can stay here for as long as we like.
Last week Rupiah Banda was declared the winner of Zambia’s presidential election. The poll had occurred because of the death of Levy Patrick “Cabbage” Mwanawasa, one of the most upright of Africa’s statesmen. The election was close and this has led the losing candidate, Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front to call foul, saying they were rigged. Observers from neighbouring countries described the polls as free and fair, but then they said as much about the elections in Zimbabwe, didn’t they.
In recent days a Catholic priest, Fr Frank Bwalya was arrested while presenting a radio programme in which he said the elections were iffy. This happened in Kitwe, an opposition stronghold, and his arrest sparked riots by disgruntled supporters of the detained priest, chanting “We want change”. I know the felling when all you’ve got is a big note like a 20 or a 50.
