siphoning off a few thoughts

Together with the terrible news in Pakistan from last week, Kenya seems to have had lots of election fraud and violence in its presidential election last Thursday.  Here are a few bits from a BBC article:

On the violence:

Scores of people have been killed across Kenya in violence blamed on the disputed presidential election.

A BBC reporter has seen 43 bodies with gunshot wounds in a mortuary in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu. A witness said police shot protesters.

There have been running battles in Nairobi slums. The local KTN television station says 124 have died nationwide.

And the fraud:

European Union election observers have raised doubts about the officially announced results.

The government has banned live broadcasts linked to the election.

Chief EU election observer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told the BBC that his monitors had been barred from counting centres in the Central Province.

He also said that results from one constituency had been declared by the Electoral Commission of Kenya in Nairobi, which were different from those announced in the same constituency at local level.

He said the anomalies amounted to 20,000-25,000 votes in just one constituency.

Mr Kibaki’s national margin of victory was 230,000 votes.

Sad days.

I’m riding home from work with a wild driver in an SUV filled with potted plants. If this gets posted, it means I was neither killed in a car crash nor consumed by carnivorous plants.(If you don’t know why I’m riding home with strange drivers and strange plants, read this.)

Chris Blattman offers interesting advice for those interested in using a PhD to help the poor.  Worth reading.

I just saw, on EW.com, an interesting interview with Dave Eggers, who wrote What is the What – the fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng. He answers the questions of how much is fact and how much is fiction as well as discussing many other interesting aspects of the book.

Last year I posted about books dealing with Africa in the Economist’s list of Books of the Year.  Four dealt with Africa, and I have read two: both worthwhile.

Here are the Africa books in this year’s list: only two!

Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe. By Judith Garfield Todd. 472 pages

A harrowing tale of courage and betrayal by a white heroine of the liberation struggle against Ian Smith who has been punished (and stripped of her citizenship) with extraordinary vengefulness by Robert Mugabe for speaking out about the regime’s abuses of power.

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

By Paul Collier. Oxford University Press; 224 pages
Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, this book, by an economics professor at Oxford University, should be compulsory reading for anyone embroiled in the thankless business of trying to pull people out of the pit of poverty.

I read the latter and quite enjoyed it (here are my thoughts), although Bill Easterly makes a very good critique (too bad he never feels very constructive).

Last week’s This American Life podcast tells the story of John Nash Pickle, who ran a factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He went to India, hired 52 skilled and experienced workers with the promise that they would work in the USA for two years and eventually get green cards. When they arrived, he and his wife took their passports, provided them food for 27 men (rather than the 52 there were), forbade them from leaving the factory premises, paid them $2 an hour, and on and on.

This is terrible.  But what I find amazing is that many people – including some of the Indian guys – really believe that Mr Pickle believed that he was doing these Indian guys a giant favor, that he was saving them from starvation in India.  If this is true, then either Pickle is delusional or it is a demonstration of wild ignorance: this assumption that everyone in poor countries is starving. (It’s like in that Do they know it’s Christmas? song when they sing about Africa, where “nothing ever grows.”  Most people in Africa are subsistence farmers.  Hello?)  I fear that some form of this ignorance (thankfully not the extent that it brings people to human trafficking) is too common among us.

I highly recommend this podcast.