Afro-pessimism or rational observation?

Sometimes I worry (just a little) that I might be overly cynical or Afro-pessimistic. At the moment, I don't know if it is just me seeking justification for taking up employment in the USA, or if Africa really is sliding yet deeper into the abyss. I have a strong suspicion that the latter is at least 80% of it, as my tune hasn’t really changed much over the years. I have tried hard to sing a positive tune at times, but the accompaniment has invariably floundered after the first bar or two.  Am I a cynic, or am I just anti political correctness? Frankly, I think liberal political correctness has a lot to answer for in the lack of accountability that besets Africa.

In my previous posting, I was going to include a few more paragraphs on some of the other pathetic goings-on around the continent. I was going to include a paragraph on Yoweri Museveni’s recent claim to yet another term as president of Uganda (he’s held the title for 25 years already), and how he threw himself a thirteen million dollar inauguration party on top of it.

I was going to write about that pea-brain king of Swaziland, Mswati III, who, together with his fourteen current wives, regards himself as, and lives like an absolute monarch. He is head pea-nut of probably the poorest nation on Earth, and his personal fortune runs into the hundreds of millions of US dollars. This is in addition to the family trust of about ten billion US dollars. Actually, I’m holding thumbs that talk of an April 12 uprising in Swaziland isn’t just a rumour. I’m hoping that at last, the people of Swaziland will discover their spines and send Mswati back to the maize-fields where he belongs. The uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have more than one despot a little worried down here.

I was going to write about the nation of 419 scamsters, and about.... oh, just put your finger on the map, and there’s a smelly story to be told, but it is boring, and the stories can be read elsewhere.

What is it that causes Africans to remain loyal to “leaders” that have gone so far off course as to drag their countries over the cliff and into oblivion, and only then might the people realise that something is amiss (and then blame it on colonialism)? Obviously a lack of education must be the single biggest cause, but there also seems to be some sort of tribal instinct that prevents the people, the workers, the tax payers, the citizens from questioning the authority of their once elected chief. Some of these “leaders” (I don’t know why they insist on calling them leaders) started out well, like Robert Gabriel Muggalugs, who was once hailed as an educated and intelligent man. For a while, Zimbabwe was seen as the post colonial hope of Africa. Look at it now. Museveni has had it easy. Anyone taking over from the likes of Idi Amin could only be an improvement, but that doesn’t mean that once you’ve got the country more or less on track again, that there aren’t other people more suited to administering it. Surely!

The lust for power and money appears overwhelming among African politicians, and when presidents become dictators, they have no option but to stay in power, because the crime and corruption that they have to use in order to stay in power will land them in jail if they step down. Very clearly, there is a point of no return that is reached by the end of no more than two terms in office, or ten years at the most.

It’s all a great pity, because Africa is beautiful:

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.

Letting off steam

Well, I suppose I didn't need to be any sort of prophet to foresee that the uranium market would crash as a result of what's happening at Fukushima Dai Ichi. So now I'm feeling both poor and despondent. I hold significant (for me) uranium stocks, and I'm supposed to be heading over to the USA to work on some uranium exploration projects. In the meantime, I'm learning heaps about reactors and the nuclear fuel cycle, and I find it fascinating, so that's some consolation.

It is no surprise that the stock market, which seems to be populated largely by ignorant speculators, would react in this way to an incident of any sort in any nuclear power plant anywhere in the world. It is a universal fact that when people lack understanding, they replace knowledge with emotion on sometimes religious scales. The anti-carbon lobby is an excellent example of such ignorance.

But in an attempt to retain some level of optimism, I feel it is important to look at a few fundamentals:

• The first fundamental is that in spite of the scale of the "malfunction" at Fukushima Dai Ichi, the operators appear to be handling the matter extremely well, and radiation levels aren't anywhere near "disaster scale". So this has the potential to show that a serious malfunction at a nuclear plant doesn't have to mean holocaust. Of course it does help that the steam is being blown offshore.

• The most fundamental of the fundamentals in the uranium market are that there are currently 62 new power reactors under construction around the world, and this construction will not be halted because of the current negative sentiment - that you can be sure of. There are a further 158 reactors on order or planned, and 324 proposed. This is in addition to the 443 currently operational reactors (minus a few in Japan), most of which will continue to operate for decades to come. So the demand for uranium is not going to go away. On the contrary, as long as people insist on breeding, populations will need increasing amounts of energy, and there are very few ways of generating the sort of base-load capacity required.

So, if you have some spare cash lying around, may I suggest that you keep a close eye on uranium stocks in the next few weeks. There are already some bargains out there, as share prices continue to be decimated.

Seismic percussions and repercussions

By now we're all aware of the seismic event that took place 130km off the coast of Honshu, Japan, on Friday 11th March. The magnitude 8.9 (that's a big one) event occurred at a depth of roughly 24km in the subduction zone interface of the Pacific and North American plates.

Japan operates a number of nuclear power stations that have been affected by the resulting Tsunami, and although they have been shut down, at least two of them are reported to be having cooling issues. This makes me nervous, because if a nuclear "incident" of any kind results from this, it is likely that it will have a disastrous effect on the industry as a whole. Thousands of people can be killed in the coal industry every year, and nobody thinks twice about it, but if one person gets a radiation burn, the entire planet goes into a flap and nuclear power generation is set back another 30 years. It's absurd, but that's the way it is, and if the uranium price takes a dive, then I will not need the much awaited visa. I will be out of a job, and significantly out of pocket too, as all shares and share options will become worthless overnight.

It is fortunate that unlike the Ukrainians, the Japs are both technologically advanced, and non-secretive. If anyone has the ability to maintain the integrity of these systems, it is they who can be relied on. So I'm holding both thumbs.

Why blog at all?

It's a good question. I suppose it is simply a means of communication that is consumed on a completely voluntary basis. In the past one might have sent postcards, or emails, but while these are more personal, they are not always appreciated. We are constantly bombarded by information these days, so we have tended to develop (frequently judgemental) filters that are often not very discerning when it comes to personal communication.

So here it is; an alternative to emails, where, I hope I will be able to give an insight, only to those that want it, into the sometimes odd thoughts and places that an itinerant soul finds himself.

The very last thing I want this to be is like a FarceBook page. It will not be about ME, and it will not be yet another travelogue. I will retain my anonymity as far as possible, and only those that know who Nomadix is, should..... well, should know who I am.

Extrasolar visitor

So, while I was sitting and waiting for my visa, I looked out of the window and saw some things in the sky that look like stars. I'm pretty sure most of them are stars, but apparently there will be something else for us to look at, up there in the firmament, in a few months time: Comet Elenin, which was discovered last December by a Russian amateur astronomer, Leonid Elenin, is coming in on a hyperbolic orbit, the perihelion of which will be roughly halfway between our Solar orbit and the Sun, and will occur in September. The comet's closest approach to Earth will take place on 17 October, when it will be roughly 0.232 AU (35 million km) from us. If this comet doesn't lose too much in the way of volatiles before it gets to us, we should be able to see it with binoculars, and perhaps even with the nude and unclad eye for a good month either side of this date! Well actually, since it will be between us and the Sun before about 1 October, we may only be able to see it some time thereafter.

New horizons

Inertia is a measure of the reluctance of a body to change speed or direction. We all suffer from inertia from time to time, and of late, I have been quite severely afflicted by it. But now......, I await the documentation that will allow me to "get on my hoss and go west"!  New horizons await.