This week in Africa

In Ethiopia, construction is about to start on the Grand Millennium Dam, on the Blue Nile. This will be the largest evaporation pan in the country - larger even than Ethiopia's largest natural lake, Lake Tana. The objective is ultimately to generate 5.25 GW of electricity. Now, I'm not a dam(n) engineer, but I fail to understand why it is necessary to store 65 billion cubic metres of water behind a power station that really only needs constant flow, and not a huge volume of reserve. I know that the Blue Nile is subject to somewhat seasonal flow, but surely all that one needs is a bit of gravity feed, and furthermore, water that has passed through one small turbine can go on to pass through another and another lower down. Why the need to (further) destroy a river system and flood millions of hectares of land when multiple sympathetically designed systems can be placed in series? I alert you to this because of my obvious bias towards nuclear power generation. The massive sociological upheaval and destruction of the environment brought about by these sorts of projects goes largely unnoticed while the world has its eyes on a little radionuclide leak in Japan.

And in the meantime, it is business as usual in the rest of Africa: In Libya, the king clown continues to use what's left of his military jesters to cling defiantly to his throne. His days are numbered, and he knows it, but he can't seek asylum (he belongs in one) in South Africa until his tax funded mansion has finished being painted. You see, we only recently got rid of Jean Bertrand Aristide and his extended family, who had been our fully funded guests for a number of years, and now the house needs a coat of paint before old funny-face from Libya takes up residence. South Africa welcomes people of dubious character... more on that later.

Off the horn of 'Frica, Somali pirates still have free reign. While most of the world's navies remain limp-wristed over the matter, more than eight hundred hostages and their vessels remain in the custody of a bunch of good-for-nothings. What happened to the traditional method of dealing with problems like this?

In Zimbabwe, TIM (That Idiot Mugabe) seems still to be working from the Idi Amin manual of despotism. That the country hasn't completely ground to a halt is testament only to fact that Zim was once a country that had everything. It had a functional infrastructure, a well educated population (by African standards), minerals, agriculture, and everything else that you'd expect to find in paradise. Last week TIM reiterated his commitment to "indigenise" all businesses with a value of more than 1 US dollar. In the meantime, there are hordes of investors waiting on the border for the day that he finally kicks the bucket or takes up permanent residence with his other delinquent friends in South Africa.

Speaking of South Africa and delinquents and investment, and other such things; you may wonder why the investors are lining up at the door of Zimbabwe rather than investing here. Well you see, South Africa used to have a goose that laid golden eggs, but in the last ten years or so, this goose has had its eggs stolen, its wings torn off, and its feathers plucked. In fact, the goose has been murdered. South Africa, with its unusual mineral wealth and what used to be a first-world infrastructure, has slipped right down, almost to the very bottom of the Fraser Institute's investment potential rating. In Africa, only the DRC and Zimbabwe fare worse. This very sad state of affairs is because of rampant corruption, crime, political interference, "indigenisation", a failing infrastructure and increasingly prohibitive production costs. The likelihood of being able to resuscitate the goose, becomes more and more remote each day.

On the subject of crime and corruption in South Africa, the most amusing (we have to laugh) thing that I heard last week, was our esteemed National Police Commissioner stating that we should not be concerned about the arrest of the head of "police crime intelligence" on a charge of murder, because he did not commit the murder in his official capacity, but rather as a private individual, and he did it in his spare time.... or words to that effect.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention what's happening in Côte d'Ivoire. How silly of me to leave them out, but you must excuse me, since what's happening there is really just another case of c'est la vie en Afrique. Yet another stinky old dictator is making plans to move to the sunny climes of South Africa. Laurent Gbagbo is busy packing his gbags, since he has finally worked out that he no longer has any friends at home.