A devastating loss

South Africa has reacted with numbness and shock at the death by shooting on Sunday of Senza Meyiwa, the Orlando pirates captain and goalkeeper, and also the sometime Bafana Bafana captain. It reminds us of the killing of Lucky Dube almost exactly seven years ago,and hard on the heels of the Pistorius trial and the current 'Indian bride' murder trial, it is yet another reminder of the levels of gun violence and stratospheric murder rate in South Africa.
Was it just one of the all too common violent botched burglaries in South Africa, or something more directed and sinister?  Was is a bungled kidnapping, or have the local lowlife come to the conclusion that celebrities especially sports stars are rich, and are thus ripe for targeting?  Everyone must have known where Meyiwa lives and whee his girl friend's house was.  Should sporting celebrities be provided with police protection?

No comeback for Nokia

Last year, Microsoft threw Nokia, the cellphone maker, a lifeline, by taking over its cellphone operations, and most importantly, their software, with the idea of making Nokia's phones mini-Windows devices, with 'seamless' integration with Microsoft office programs running on other machines.  just a few days ago, however, Microsoft announced the dropping of the Nokia name, so no more Nokia Lumina's - just Lumina's, if Microsoft even decide the keep that name.

The trivia question in the mid 2000's was : Who is the worlds' largest manufacturer of camera?  Not Canon or Nikon, but in fact Nokia, because most of the cameras made, and certainly the most cameras bought , were in Nokia of which millions were sold

What went wrong? 

Nokia cannot be blamed for 'not seeing the ccoming of the smart phone', because if fact they 

Almost simultaneous with Microsoft's announcement came news of the final demise of anotherof the founding icon's of handheld devices - 'personal digital assistants', later to be integrated with phone facilities.  This was Palm, which ruled the roost in this market in the mid 2000's, later Palm One, and ultimately taken over by Hewlett Packard.  Thee was the incredibly innovative Treo series, complete with full keyboard, touch screen and stylus, with loads of supporting software, sorry, 'apps'.  All these devices had their individual accounts, connected to the HP 'cloud', which provided universal backup in the event of less of data, updates and an app catalogue.  This week, HP announced the termination of support: the apps catalogue service was to be closed and the HP cloud finally shut down as of next January. 

The blades stop turning

So the Oscar Pistorius trial is over - the immense relief not only of the participants but also of the media, who have had to sit in the courtroom or stand outside that damn courthouse, day after day, month in, month out, trying to think of something new to say each time - a trial supposed to take three weeks which dragged out over seven months.

Tens of thousands of words have already been spewed over the verdict.  But what I was reflecting on, is what the trial reveals about the new South Africa.  What would have happened, if a similar incident had happened under apartheid?  Well of course there would have been no Olympic champion, because South Africa was banned from the Olympics.  There were plenty of Springbok rugby heroes though.  What if one of them had shot his girl friend?  The courtroom would have been the same - the system of a judge and two assessors would have been the same, since the democratic SA government has not re-introduced thee jury system.  The judge would of course been an elderly white man, not an elderly black woman, but even the 1970's law under which Pistorius was charged would have been the same.  Under apartheid there was of course the death penalty, and the jail to which Pistorius has been taken - the former Pretoria Central - was where the hangings were carried out.  But, though the present judge said that there cannot be one law for the poor and disadvantaged, and another for the rich and famous, there definitely was one under apartheid - a white man under a capital charge was about 50 times less likely to be sentenced to death than a black man. So the fate of a 1970's Pistorius would likely have been fairly similar to the 2014 one - a moderate jail sentence, with no doubt special conditions vastly better than than of the ordinary inmate.

Actually, many of the high-profile homicide cases in late apartheid South Africa remained unsolved, perhaps because they had political involvement - for instance the grisly murder of the economist Robert Smit, despite a raft of conspiracy theories.  Anybody remember any others?

A country of 170 million 'free of Ebola'

There are many observers - mostly outsiders but plenty of residents as well - who regard Africa as a continent of  derelict infrastructure, where corruption rages and horrible diseases spread unchecked, until Western aid intervenes. 

To those observers today we commend the news item: "Nigeria officially free of Ebola" - with its Ebola treatment centre now standing empty.  How did this happen?  Well, an Ebola sufferer did fly into Lagos from Liberia in July - he was an American-Liberian diplomat, Patrick Sawyer, ostensibly on his way to a conference, but probably to seek one of Nigeria's pentacostal 'miracle' healers. 

Somehow he was spotted as being unwell, and taken to a hospital (not a specialist isolation facility) where he came under the supervision of one doctor Stella Ameyo Adedevoh, a lady who treated him, but who, much to the patient's fury, refused to let him leave the hospital.  The Liberian government petitioned to have him released - so did a cohort of lawyers and pen-pushers.  The doctor stood firm.  After a few days, the patient died of Ebola and sadly, the doctor and eight of the other carers of the patient, who had not been equipped with space suits, became infected.  Outside the hospital, in the teeming 20 million city of Lagos, anyone with whom the patient might have been briefly in contact with, was tracked and after three weeks, shown to be negative from the virus.  The net result was that, although in the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the death toll passed the 4000 mark, the grand total in Nigeria was 20 cases and 8 deaths. Sadly, Dr. Adedevoh and three of her assistants were among the fatalities.

Had the Liberian been allowed to leave hospital, as many bureaucrats wished, and allowed to roam free in Lagos while he was highly infective, the consequences might have been catastrophic.  The virus could have spread uncontrolled among Nigeria's 170 million people.  There could have been hundreds of thousands of cases and tens of thousands of fatalities.  The actions of Dr. Adedvoh prevented this.

To this end Dr. Adedevoh's achievements and service to humanity should stand out in medical history to rank with the greatest women of the profession: Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.  Don't forget her name.

The last generation?

At the end of August and beginning of September, my grown-up married daughter who lives in the UK, in the very pleasant rural western county of Devon, came out to visit with her husband and her two children, the first time in Namibia for her children - my grandchildren - and the first time in 9 years for them.  So recent, yet as time rushes by, seemingly so long ago - the sole memento of their visit being my grandson's punctured football still lying in the garden - my garden unfortunately being replete with spiky cactus plants.

They did all the normal tourist things, accompanied by me - and of course we went to Etosha, which I myself had not been to for ages.  This is the best time of year, the end of the dry season, with animals clustering around the few waterholes, and no white mud which sets like cement in the engine compartment of your car! The amount of animals we saw was phenomenal - being literally mobbed by hundreds of zebras, and later, a quartet of lions sitting idly by the side of the road with two perched on top of a small bridge, just like carvings at the entrance to some stately home, and nobody in sight.  Then, as a finale, we almost literally ran into a herd of elephants, on the normally uneventful tar road exiting the park via the Anderson gate. 

The most moving image for me was at the Halali waterhole late one night.  From out of the darkness into the patch of yellow sodium light around the inky black patch of water came an elephant and a rhino.  They drank, almost motionlessly -  for large animals does time run slower? - for half an hour.  Again, there was nobody else watching - it was past the bed time of most doughty tourists.  Then, equally slowly, they turned and walked solemnly away, the rhino first, then the elephant, until the darkness swallowed them.  Was this a melancholy metaphor for extinction, and will my grandchildren be the last generation to see these monumental beasts in the wild?

We are lucky to live in a country where, just a few hours drive from the capital city, such sights can still be seen, and where poaching is to some extent controlled.  My suggested solution to the rhino horn trade is to manufacture a synthetic horn - if synthetic diamonds now can routinely be produced I cannot see how this could be so difficult - indistinguishable from the original article, and then flood the market with it.

On the way back to Windhoek we took a detour to see the dinosaur footprints, about 60 km off the B1 between Otjiwarongo and Okahandja, on a farm which regrettably I cannot spell or pronounce.  The farm is very isolated, owned by an eccentric German couple, as you might expect.  Yet again, not another soul was around.  You take a short walk to a sandstone river bed, and all of a sudden, quite unmistakeably, there are a set of three-toed tracks leading down into the grass, and a short distance away, a set of smaller tracks, which I took to be the footprints of a baby animal.  Not so, they were made by two completely different species of dinosaurs.  The impressions, in darker stone, look like tracks in the mud made only yesterday, but it is numbing to realise that the animal which left the marks did so 200 million years ago.  Have you seen anything 200 million years old?  

The same strands of life - literally, the DNA, connects eons of life in Africa, except of course it wasn't even Africa then but Gondwanaland - a vast chunk of continent comprising Africa joined to South America.

Do you need an MBA (or even an Executive MBA)?

Last week I attended a breakfast presentation to launch a new Executive MBA programme run by the Harold Pupkewitz Graduate School of Business.  First, there is an intrinsic problem with breakfast functions.  Either people are really busy and have to get early to work, in which case they have no time to go to 'breakfasts', or they don't have to get up early, in which case they may skip breakfast also. 

So that with most of these '7.30 for 8' functions in Namibia, at 7.35 someone has to waken the security guard to unlock, and turn on the lights. By 8 there are usually more organisers than attendees and only by 830 may proceedings get started.  The Rector of the Polytechnic, with his well-known waspish sense of humour, pointed out that the targeted audience for this presentation was presumably either senior management or those interested in obtaining a higher qualification in senior management: both of whom  really should, for starters, have a sense of time management.

But on to the more serious things.  How important is an MBA?  Even the brochure accompanying the function was a trifle defensive, admitting that many traditional MBA programmes centre on formulaic classroom treatments of highly simplified business problems.  So every new MBA tries to be different, to stand out from the rest, to be more 'practical' and management oriented.  The head of the Harold Pupkewitz business school, Professor Grafton Whyte, took the floor and in his engaging British accent, reminding me of that of the comedian Lenny Henry,  gave an entertaining presentation of the programme - which is to be an EMBA - an 'executive' MBA - the HP graduate school of business already has an 'ordinary' MBA.  This programme is to be given in block release format, only admitting top management with extensive business experience - not to students just looking to take some postgraduate business degree.  To sceptics, Professor Whyte declared : "Ignorance is not Bliss", and promised that if participants in his programme get it right, "their salary will double in 5 years".  But we are still talking about 'salaries' I wondered, i.e. employees, no matter how senior in the hierarchy.  What about the top guys?  Are they 'ignorant' and is an EMBA the right way to escape from a state of ignorance?

I thought of Peter Thiel, the iconic billionaire who invented Paypal and had a substantial hand in the founding of Facebook, who has just published a fascinating book called From Zero to One.  He is famously dismissive of conventional business education, and offers $ 100 000 grants to the brightest IT and entrepreneurial prospects provided they ignore college and go straight into business. What would he say about MBA programmes? I think we could guess.

Of course good management training is essential to national development, and the growth of competent middle managers at least.  But another anonymous quotation came into my head: the definition of an economist - the guy who know more about money that the person who has it.

It was an excellent breakfast though.

Whither Hong Kong?

The international news channels the last few days have been full of the crowds of hundreds of thousands of young people in Hong Kong - except of course on the China state-run CCTV where the subject was barely mentioned.  All 'revolutions' have to have a colour or symbol - this was the 'umbrella' revolution, in contrast with the ill-fated orange, rose and other movements.  The umbrellas of course were also practical in warding off police pepper spray and tear gas, as well as guarding against Hong Kong's stormy weather.

Many people may have been surprised that such mass dissent is allowed in China.  The answer is course is that Hong Kong is a (very) special Administrative Area.  For nearly 100 years it had been a British colony, an unsustainable situation with the rise of China as a global power, but when the territory was handed back to China in 1997, it was under a rather strange agreement of "one country, two systems", which meant that Hong Kong was allowed a degree of economic and political independence not enjoyed or even dreamt of on the 'mainland'.

China has honoured this agreement surprisingly well, appointing a 'chief executive' for Hong Kong but otherwise allowing the territory to do its own thing - it is after all the financial centre of China.  Until now?
The present street demonstrations are about electoral procedure in Hong Kong - a universal suffrage electrion was agree for 2017, but candidates had to be per-screened by Beijing,  This is what the first demonstrations were about, but the arguments have shifted, and now the demand is for the Beijing appointed chief executive to step down.

Slightly older people, at least older than students, will remember Tienanmen square of 1989, when, in the midst of the meltdown of most of the soviet block states,  many hoped that China would evolve also into a free democracy. The immense square was full of thousands of excited people, waving banners and holding a white statue of the 'lady of liberty' aloft.  The authorities seemed to be tolerating the demonstrations. Then, late one evening, the tanks rolled in.  Hundreds, maybe thousands were killed (it will never be known) and the democracy movement was crushed.

The scenes in Hong Kong are now ominously reminiscent of Beijing 25 years ago.  Could the central Chinese government crack down again?  China is a very different place now - 25 years ago it was an emerging giant, but a largely unknown wild card in international politics, and with its huge economic potential as yet unrealised.  Now it is the world's second largest economy, and the United States' largest creditor, a prediction that would have seemed fantastical in 1989.  China places supreme importance, on order, conformance and stability, but will it crack down again?  The eyes of the world are upon Hong Kong.  Normally, China does not care what the rest of the world thinks, and has zero tolerance for any inference in its domestic affairs, but does it have too much to lose this time, economically and politically?

Last night, it was feared that things would come to a head - an irresistible force meeting the immovable object of Beijing.  The demonstrators gave an ultimatum for the chief executive to step down - of course he did not, but instead offered talks with the student leaders (with his deputy!) - probably the most he could offer them, but as of this morning apparently enough to split the demonstrators slightly between moderates and hard-liners, and the situation seems to be defused to some extent. 

Meanwhile did the government (either Beijing or Hong Kong) either make concessions or send in the tanks?  It did neither - it 'encouraged' gangs of anti protestors, aka hired thugs, to break up at least some of the demonstrations.

The mainland communist party of course will tolerate nothing which might threaten its absolute grip on power.  The main achievement of the demonstrators is that they succeeded in holding their protest, over many days, disrupting daily life in one of the world's most expensive business districts, and showing that mental independence is still very much alive on Chinese territory.