The bustling kitchens of Baby Grand are a long way from Malawi, but it is here, in one of Glasgow's busiest restaurant chains, that Dumisami Kapanga and Shadreck Helepa are hoping to learn the skills that will help kickstart their tourism industry back home.
The students have been brought to Scotland as part of a vanguard of gifted entrepreneurs who it is hoped will provide expertise, enthusiasm and business acumen to transform the economic fortunes of Malawi - one of the world's poorest countries.
As part of their stay, they are spending 18 hours a week learning customer care skills, cooking and working as waiters at Brel and Ad Lib, both part of the Baby Grand Group in Glasgow. They will also be enrolled on four-year tourism undergraduate degrees at Glasgow Caledonian University.
According to Mr Kapanga, 23, the options in Scotland could not be more different from his home country. "Life is hard there. You don't know how you are going to get by each day. There are huge problems with HIV. If you are not infected, you are affected," he said.
Mr Kapanga, who was born and grew up in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, was well-educated and worked as a graphic artist after his parents died when he was a teenager, but his job paid the equivalent of £15 a month and opportunities were limited.
Now halfway through his degree, he said he wants to instill the professionalism learned in Glasgow back home. "The thing I notice here is how much pride Scottish people have in their own culture. I would like to see that in Malawi." The students' stay in Scotland has been sponsored by the Moffat tourism centre at Caledonian University and Billy McAneney, owner of the Baby Grand Group.
Malawi is ranked as the 10th poorest country in the world by the United Nations and has been ravaged by Aids/HIV, unemployment and difficulties in its agriculture sector. Tourism is seen as the way forward, but training people to run bars, hotels and attractions to standards expected by wealthy tourists in the West is not easy.
The Scottish Executive, which has formed strong links with Malawi, provided £250,000 to upgrade the African country's Institute of Tourism and bolster skills of people working in tourism. The Moffat Centre, which is administering the fund, is refitting the institute, providing books and up-to-date technology to replace its one, clapped-out PC.
John Lennon, professor of tourism at the Moffat Centre, said he also hopes to bolster the academic rating of the institute and will be enrolling eight people on distance-learning masters degrees.
"This is one of the most rewarding projects I have been involved in," he said. "Malawi has great potential for tourism. It is beautiful, safe and the people are incredibly friendly. If you want to see an authentic piece of Africa, it is the place to go."
Mr McAneney, who founded the Malawi Tomorrow charity which spends around £50,000 a year on projects in Malawi, said: "We are not simply going to train these people up and leave them to it'. We want to make sure that when they leave us, they not only have jobs to go to but play a role in transforming the fortunes of tourism in Malawi."
Country profile
Malawi's economy is said to be half the size of Falkirk's - or 1% of Scotland's
The country's population is 12.6 million people
More than half the population lives below the poverty line
Most Malawians rely on subsistence farming but the food supply situation is precarious
Moves are under way to exploit uranium reserves to boost meagre export earnings
Since the mid-1990s the country has privatised many loss-making state-run corporations
Tens of thousands of Malawians die of Aids every year and a programme to tackle HIV-Aids was launched in 2004
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Madonna Must Be Stopped - Before It's Too Late
She beams with the kind of self-satisfaction that can only be acquired after years of being convinced you're never wrong. She doesn't just visit the little African orphans - she bestows her presence on them, like a veiny-armed angel descending from some kind of gay-nightclub rip-off heaven. Stripped of glamour and artifice, she tries to seem like a child of the earth, a beneficent force of nature - and yet cannot escape seeming utterly artificial. It nags at you, this sense that she is only about the image, the surface. You want to believe there is real charity in her soul - she cares about the orphans, and wants to give them a better life - but you've seen her on TV too many times, you've lived too long with the calculations, the shrewd manipulations. This product of modern-day media - who also had a hand in inventing those media - has undergone a long and winding evolution: she flaunted her non-virginity, snarling half-ironically, tweaking the same sensibilities Elvis naively offended decades before; she fomented controversy, even taking on her own religion; and now she has decided, logically I suppose, that being an icon isn't enough - she wants to be a full-fledged Messiah.
No, Madonna is no ironist - she may want us to think she is, as she dangles from that disco-cross, but the outward appearance of playful facetiousness has always been her cover; underneath she believes every word her own ego whispers in her eager ear. And lately it's been whispering something grander than usual - it's been telling her there's something more for her out there than stardom; that she's always been destined for something greater than mere idolhood. Anyone can be a pop-star now - even Sanjaya, who doesn't know that he's a joke. The true stars have to reach beyond making audiences cheer - they have to make all the world their stage, and all humanity their idolaters. And naturally, for these purposes, the powerless are always the ideal victims. Hence the trip to Africa - the adoption, the orphanage visit, the ceremonies; as if this were some foreign dignitary visiting, and not a mere singer. Oh - but she is a foreign dignitary; one with Messianic delusions, and a lot of money to spend.
The reports are coming out of Malawi now, that Madonna isn't only interested in picking up another adopted baby, isn't only interested in taking over the orphanage in Mchinji (where the pastor is old and sick and willing to hand her the keys). For a little over a year now, Madonna has been pumping money into the country - through her charity, Raising Malawi, which has allowed her to acquire a stake in numerous orphanages, hospitals, even whole villages. But there's more to this story than meets the eye. Raising Malawi has been responsible for distributing food, medical supplies, and other health-related items throughout that impoverished nation - but Raising Malawi is co-run by Michael Berg, the son of Philip Berg, who is rabbi and Dean of the Kabbalah Center. Of course, Raising Malawi itself is not being used as a means of spreading Kabbalah, Madonna's adopted religion - that task belongs to another of Madonna's endeavors, the euphemistically-named Spirituality for Kids program. Through this course, Madonna hopes to indoctrinate thousands of Malawian children into the ways of Kabbalah. An inside source put it bluntly to the Daily Mail, "When you get right down to it, she is looking to have her own state with her religion."
But what is this Kabbalah, that Madonna has so famously become the face of? Strictly speaking, it is an ancient set of Jewish teachings, which have traditionally only been transmitted by Jewish sages. The aim of Kabbalah is to "bring man spiritually closer to God, and empower man with higher insight into the inner-workings of God’s creation, effectively enabling prophecy and even control over nature." At least, that is Kabbalah as it was known for centuries. In recent times it has become a fad religion; like Scientology, it has many adherents among Hollywood-types, and has benefitted by all those wealthy people injecting it with money. Of course, when Hollywood-types get their hands on something, it has a way of mutating - and this has been true of Kabbalah, whose modern-day permutation has little in common with ancient Jewish mysticism.
The man behind the new Kabbalah is none other than rabbi Philip Berg, who founded the famed Kabbalah Center in L.A. Perhaps hoping to spruce up a dusty set of beliefs, Berg has introduced some new-fangled, some would say bizarre teachings into the faith - for instance, that mentally ill people are actually possessed by evil spirits, and that "unseen extraterrestrial forces affect terrestrial affairs." It is the Kabbalah of Philip Berg - and Madonna - that's being taught in Malawi - spread to the vulnerable young of that country, by ministers who were taught in America. And what exactly are these children being told by these ready-made wise-men? Reportedly, the new Kabbalah preaches a simplistic form of karmic tit-for-tat - if you do something bad, the children are being taught, something bad will happen to you. No, not sin leading to hell - but a bad act leading directly to some earthly misfortune. As one student of Spirituality for Kids wrote: "I had a bicycle accident because I did bad things"; and a second: "When travelling I hit my foot on a stone because of the bad things I did." Of course this leaves open the question - who decides what is a bad thing? God? Philip Berg? And, as Daily Mail reporter Natalie Clarke asks, what effect could this sort of teaching have on the impressionable young of a nation long-plagued by disease and famine?
Madonna, it is clear, wants to adopt the whole nation of Malawi - and re-make it in her grandiose image. Of course, not everyone in Malawi is fooled. The Roman Catholics there have raised objections to Madonna's Kabbalah-spreading activities, and many of the "Kabbalah bibles" Madonna sent remain undistributed. It seems that the long-established hold of Christianity may be slipping in Malawi however - and is it a coincidence that Madonna is largely responsible for this usurpation? Madonna, who has made a career out of being sacrilegious - always behind that veil of chintzy irony and commercial ambition. What really motivates this woman, named after the holiest female in all Christendom? This child of a Catholic upbringing who has openly criticized that church, finally rejecting it? And what are we to make of these Kabbalah teachings, which seem specifically calculated to engender feelings of guilt? A wise man once said that, in a dictatorship, the nation takes on the personality of the dictator. Germany became homicidally racist because Hilter was. The Soviet Union became paranoid because Stalin was. If the entire nation of Malawi becomes guilt-ridden and de-Christianized, whose personality will this mirror? What's really going on behind that deglamorized glamorous facade of Madonna's?
No, Madonna is no ironist - she may want us to think she is, as she dangles from that disco-cross, but the outward appearance of playful facetiousness has always been her cover; underneath she believes every word her own ego whispers in her eager ear. And lately it's been whispering something grander than usual - it's been telling her there's something more for her out there than stardom; that she's always been destined for something greater than mere idolhood. Anyone can be a pop-star now - even Sanjaya, who doesn't know that he's a joke. The true stars have to reach beyond making audiences cheer - they have to make all the world their stage, and all humanity their idolaters. And naturally, for these purposes, the powerless are always the ideal victims. Hence the trip to Africa - the adoption, the orphanage visit, the ceremonies; as if this were some foreign dignitary visiting, and not a mere singer. Oh - but she is a foreign dignitary; one with Messianic delusions, and a lot of money to spend.
The reports are coming out of Malawi now, that Madonna isn't only interested in picking up another adopted baby, isn't only interested in taking over the orphanage in Mchinji (where the pastor is old and sick and willing to hand her the keys). For a little over a year now, Madonna has been pumping money into the country - through her charity, Raising Malawi, which has allowed her to acquire a stake in numerous orphanages, hospitals, even whole villages. But there's more to this story than meets the eye. Raising Malawi has been responsible for distributing food, medical supplies, and other health-related items throughout that impoverished nation - but Raising Malawi is co-run by Michael Berg, the son of Philip Berg, who is rabbi and Dean of the Kabbalah Center. Of course, Raising Malawi itself is not being used as a means of spreading Kabbalah, Madonna's adopted religion - that task belongs to another of Madonna's endeavors, the euphemistically-named Spirituality for Kids program. Through this course, Madonna hopes to indoctrinate thousands of Malawian children into the ways of Kabbalah. An inside source put it bluntly to the Daily Mail, "When you get right down to it, she is looking to have her own state with her religion."
But what is this Kabbalah, that Madonna has so famously become the face of? Strictly speaking, it is an ancient set of Jewish teachings, which have traditionally only been transmitted by Jewish sages. The aim of Kabbalah is to "bring man spiritually closer to God, and empower man with higher insight into the inner-workings of God’s creation, effectively enabling prophecy and even control over nature." At least, that is Kabbalah as it was known for centuries. In recent times it has become a fad religion; like Scientology, it has many adherents among Hollywood-types, and has benefitted by all those wealthy people injecting it with money. Of course, when Hollywood-types get their hands on something, it has a way of mutating - and this has been true of Kabbalah, whose modern-day permutation has little in common with ancient Jewish mysticism.
The man behind the new Kabbalah is none other than rabbi Philip Berg, who founded the famed Kabbalah Center in L.A. Perhaps hoping to spruce up a dusty set of beliefs, Berg has introduced some new-fangled, some would say bizarre teachings into the faith - for instance, that mentally ill people are actually possessed by evil spirits, and that "unseen extraterrestrial forces affect terrestrial affairs." It is the Kabbalah of Philip Berg - and Madonna - that's being taught in Malawi - spread to the vulnerable young of that country, by ministers who were taught in America. And what exactly are these children being told by these ready-made wise-men? Reportedly, the new Kabbalah preaches a simplistic form of karmic tit-for-tat - if you do something bad, the children are being taught, something bad will happen to you. No, not sin leading to hell - but a bad act leading directly to some earthly misfortune. As one student of Spirituality for Kids wrote: "I had a bicycle accident because I did bad things"; and a second: "When travelling I hit my foot on a stone because of the bad things I did." Of course this leaves open the question - who decides what is a bad thing? God? Philip Berg? And, as Daily Mail reporter Natalie Clarke asks, what effect could this sort of teaching have on the impressionable young of a nation long-plagued by disease and famine?
Madonna, it is clear, wants to adopt the whole nation of Malawi - and re-make it in her grandiose image. Of course, not everyone in Malawi is fooled. The Roman Catholics there have raised objections to Madonna's Kabbalah-spreading activities, and many of the "Kabbalah bibles" Madonna sent remain undistributed. It seems that the long-established hold of Christianity may be slipping in Malawi however - and is it a coincidence that Madonna is largely responsible for this usurpation? Madonna, who has made a career out of being sacrilegious - always behind that veil of chintzy irony and commercial ambition. What really motivates this woman, named after the holiest female in all Christendom? This child of a Catholic upbringing who has openly criticized that church, finally rejecting it? And what are we to make of these Kabbalah teachings, which seem specifically calculated to engender feelings of guilt? A wise man once said that, in a dictatorship, the nation takes on the personality of the dictator. Germany became homicidally racist because Hilter was. The Soviet Union became paranoid because Stalin was. If the entire nation of Malawi becomes guilt-ridden and de-Christianized, whose personality will this mirror? What's really going on behind that deglamorized glamorous facade of Madonna's?
IMF plutocracy condemns developing world to misery
LONDON: The disease that afflicts all British governments is an inability to let go. Unable to accept the end of empire, they cling to past glories. However much they speak of modernity and democracy, they cannot help managing other people’s lives, preserving foreigners — often at gunpoint — from the mistakes they would make if they were allowed to govern themselves.
I was going to call this an imperial delusion, but Britain has been remarkably successful at defending its powers. The UK government has retained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Its membership of the G8 is unchallenged. Most important, it has preserved its unwarranted share of the vote on the boards of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. And it has no intention of giving this up.
In advance of the IMF’s spring meeting (just concluded in Washington), France and Britain rejected any political reform to the organisation, which is charged with maintaining global financial stability.
It is true that the fund’s proposals are feeble. It is true that even after far more ambitious reforms the IMF would remain the wrong body, constitutionally destined to fail. But this is not why the British government is holding out. It is resisting change because it wants to preserve its imperial rank.
Britain, with 1% of the world’s population, has 5% of the IMF’s votes. Sub-Saharan Africa, with 12% of the population, has 4.6%. Britain’s share equals that of China and India put together. It is five times as big as Argentina’s, 19 times Bangladesh’s, 35 times Kenya’s, 124 times bigger than Malawi’s.
The G7 nations — Britain, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Italy — together possess 45% of the vote. The other 177 members are left to squabble over the remainder.
Even these numbers tell only half the story. The five countries with the biggest quotas — the US, Britain, Japan, Germany and France — are each allowed to appoint their own executive director to the IMF’s board. The rest must submit their candidates for election. Because poor nations don’t know what’s good for them, they are assigned to the tutelage of richer ones.
The votes of the English- speaking Caribbean countries are given to Canada. Mongolia is represented by Australia, Kazakhstan by Belgium. The reason that Britain and France are resisting even the most timid reforms is that these would tip them below the threshold for automatic election: like the other countries, they would be represented on the board as part of a bloc.
Power is distributed like this because the IMF is a plutocracy. A country’s vote represents its ‘quota’, which is allocated according to its gross domestic product. In theory, the quota reflects countries’ financial contributions to the fund. But this is no longer the case, as the IMF receives much of its income from loan repayments from poorer nations.
But the old formula has resisted 60 years of complaints. The result is that governments that are never made subject to the IMF’s strictures control it, while those whose countries have been reduced to an IMF franchise have no say in the way it is run. The allocation of votes is a perfect inversion of democracy.
A new report by ActionAid gives us a glimpse of how this unfair distribution of power affects the poor. After years of protest by poor countries and their supporters in the rich world, the IMF and the World Bank at last permitted the provision of healthcare and education without charge.
The rich nations also promised, in 2000, to ensure that by 2015 every child in the world would have primary education. It looked like a great victory for the global justice movement. But the IMF is ensuring that the promise won’t be met. It has, in effect, forbidden the poorest nations to hire sufficient teachers.
No one disputes that public-sector wage rises can contribute to inflation. No one denies that governments have to exercise some degree of restraint. But the paternalists who run the IMF — who are fixated on creating safe havens for foreign capital — cannot help micro-managing the economies of the poor nations, without reference to the needs of the people who live there. The limits they have imposed on the bill for public-sector pay ensure that schooling can’t be improved.
ActionAid studied three very poor countries with major education problems: Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. After fees were abolished (and when the civil war ended in Sierra Leone), vast numbers of pupils enrolled. But a combination of the rich nations’ failure to provide the foreign aid they had promised and the restrictions imposed by the IMF has prevented these countries meeting the new demand.
As a result, the pupil to teacher ratio in Sierra Leone is 57:1; in Malawi 72:1 and in Mozambique 74:1. That’s the average; in rural areas it can be much higher. Many of the teachers are untrained, and many give up because they cannot survive on their wages. In Malawi, the goods required for the most basic level of subsistence cost $107 a month. A trained teacher receives $55.
So crowds of pupils strain to hear a scarcely literate teacher somewhere in the middle distance seeking to instruct them without books, chalk, paper or pens. We should not be surprised to discover that 40% of children fail to complete primary school in Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and 70% in Malawi. Most of the drop-outs are girls.
As a result, these countries are stuck in a vicious circle of misery. Until education improves, GDP remains low. Until GDP rises, there is little money for education. As one of the agencies charged with rescuing countries from poverty, the IMF should be seeking to break this circle.
But the conditions it attaches to its loans keep these countries in their place. In Malawi the IMF sets the ceiling for public-sector wages directly; in Sierra Leone and Mozambique the broader macro-economic rules it imposes have the same effect.
ActionAid argues that these fiscal targets are outdated and unnecessary: all these countries have now achieved sufficient stability to start raising teachers’ pay. But in no case did the IMF consult either the public or the state’s own ministry of education before laying down the law.
The amount of money a teacher in rural Malawi is paid is decided by the men in London and Washington. Except for the district commissioners in pith helmets, little has changed since the country was called Nyasaland.
Last year Tony Blair acknowledged that the IMF “must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries.”
But he just can’t let go. The proposed reforms do nothing to democratise the IMF: by linking the quota to purchasing power parity rather than raw GDP, they simply turn it into a more sophisticated plutocracy. But they could have the effect of very slightly empowering some middle-income countries while taking a few votes away from some of the rich ones. And even that is too much for the Emperor of Africa.
If the British government wants to help the poor, it must first give up its power to tell them how to live. Until that happens, everything the prime minister says about “partnership” and “solidarity” with the world’s oppressed is humbug. – The Guardian News & Media
I was going to call this an imperial delusion, but Britain has been remarkably successful at defending its powers. The UK government has retained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Its membership of the G8 is unchallenged. Most important, it has preserved its unwarranted share of the vote on the boards of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. And it has no intention of giving this up.
In advance of the IMF’s spring meeting (just concluded in Washington), France and Britain rejected any political reform to the organisation, which is charged with maintaining global financial stability.
It is true that the fund’s proposals are feeble. It is true that even after far more ambitious reforms the IMF would remain the wrong body, constitutionally destined to fail. But this is not why the British government is holding out. It is resisting change because it wants to preserve its imperial rank.
Britain, with 1% of the world’s population, has 5% of the IMF’s votes. Sub-Saharan Africa, with 12% of the population, has 4.6%. Britain’s share equals that of China and India put together. It is five times as big as Argentina’s, 19 times Bangladesh’s, 35 times Kenya’s, 124 times bigger than Malawi’s.
The G7 nations — Britain, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Italy — together possess 45% of the vote. The other 177 members are left to squabble over the remainder.
Even these numbers tell only half the story. The five countries with the biggest quotas — the US, Britain, Japan, Germany and France — are each allowed to appoint their own executive director to the IMF’s board. The rest must submit their candidates for election. Because poor nations don’t know what’s good for them, they are assigned to the tutelage of richer ones.
The votes of the English- speaking Caribbean countries are given to Canada. Mongolia is represented by Australia, Kazakhstan by Belgium. The reason that Britain and France are resisting even the most timid reforms is that these would tip them below the threshold for automatic election: like the other countries, they would be represented on the board as part of a bloc.
Power is distributed like this because the IMF is a plutocracy. A country’s vote represents its ‘quota’, which is allocated according to its gross domestic product. In theory, the quota reflects countries’ financial contributions to the fund. But this is no longer the case, as the IMF receives much of its income from loan repayments from poorer nations.
But the old formula has resisted 60 years of complaints. The result is that governments that are never made subject to the IMF’s strictures control it, while those whose countries have been reduced to an IMF franchise have no say in the way it is run. The allocation of votes is a perfect inversion of democracy.
A new report by ActionAid gives us a glimpse of how this unfair distribution of power affects the poor. After years of protest by poor countries and their supporters in the rich world, the IMF and the World Bank at last permitted the provision of healthcare and education without charge.
The rich nations also promised, in 2000, to ensure that by 2015 every child in the world would have primary education. It looked like a great victory for the global justice movement. But the IMF is ensuring that the promise won’t be met. It has, in effect, forbidden the poorest nations to hire sufficient teachers.
No one disputes that public-sector wage rises can contribute to inflation. No one denies that governments have to exercise some degree of restraint. But the paternalists who run the IMF — who are fixated on creating safe havens for foreign capital — cannot help micro-managing the economies of the poor nations, without reference to the needs of the people who live there. The limits they have imposed on the bill for public-sector pay ensure that schooling can’t be improved.
ActionAid studied three very poor countries with major education problems: Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. After fees were abolished (and when the civil war ended in Sierra Leone), vast numbers of pupils enrolled. But a combination of the rich nations’ failure to provide the foreign aid they had promised and the restrictions imposed by the IMF has prevented these countries meeting the new demand.
As a result, the pupil to teacher ratio in Sierra Leone is 57:1; in Malawi 72:1 and in Mozambique 74:1. That’s the average; in rural areas it can be much higher. Many of the teachers are untrained, and many give up because they cannot survive on their wages. In Malawi, the goods required for the most basic level of subsistence cost $107 a month. A trained teacher receives $55.
So crowds of pupils strain to hear a scarcely literate teacher somewhere in the middle distance seeking to instruct them without books, chalk, paper or pens. We should not be surprised to discover that 40% of children fail to complete primary school in Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and 70% in Malawi. Most of the drop-outs are girls.
As a result, these countries are stuck in a vicious circle of misery. Until education improves, GDP remains low. Until GDP rises, there is little money for education. As one of the agencies charged with rescuing countries from poverty, the IMF should be seeking to break this circle.
But the conditions it attaches to its loans keep these countries in their place. In Malawi the IMF sets the ceiling for public-sector wages directly; in Sierra Leone and Mozambique the broader macro-economic rules it imposes have the same effect.
ActionAid argues that these fiscal targets are outdated and unnecessary: all these countries have now achieved sufficient stability to start raising teachers’ pay. But in no case did the IMF consult either the public or the state’s own ministry of education before laying down the law.
The amount of money a teacher in rural Malawi is paid is decided by the men in London and Washington. Except for the district commissioners in pith helmets, little has changed since the country was called Nyasaland.
Last year Tony Blair acknowledged that the IMF “must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries.”
But he just can’t let go. The proposed reforms do nothing to democratise the IMF: by linking the quota to purchasing power parity rather than raw GDP, they simply turn it into a more sophisticated plutocracy. But they could have the effect of very slightly empowering some middle-income countries while taking a few votes away from some of the rich ones. And even that is too much for the Emperor of Africa.
If the British government wants to help the poor, it must first give up its power to tell them how to live. Until that happens, everything the prime minister says about “partnership” and “solidarity” with the world’s oppressed is humbug. – The Guardian News & Media
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