Month: July 2003

They’re Stealing Our Nurses!

The BBC ran two stories over the last few days that offer an interesting juxtaposition on the source of problems that African nations face.

Today it is running a story about complaints that Great Britain’s health care system is stealing nurses from Kenya. Kenya and other African nations have longstanding complaints that their most experienced nurses leave the continent to work in Western countries where they can receive higher pay.

The BBC quote Evelyn Mutio, who heads up a Kenyan nurses union as complaining that,

The UK is poaching our nurses though agents. The agents are here and they are opening up offices. They say ‘If you want to get a job in Britain, come here’.

So the obvious question is why don’t they simply pay nurses more money in Kenya, and then they wouldn’t all run off to Great Britain. Could Kenya be too poor to increase nurses wages? Perhaps, but Kenya isn’t poor enough that it can’t pay tens of thousands of non-existent government workers,

Kenya is considering a sweep of its civil service to track down “ghost workers”, imaginary employees created on the payroll by corrupt workers to pad their pay packets.

The government was worried that despite a 10% reduction in headcount under the previous government, the wage bill had in fact swelled by 2%, Finance Minister David Mwiraria told Parliament.

Cleaning out these “ghost workers” would, along with tightened tax collection controls, help bring the deficit down from a predicted 62bn shillings to about 47bn shillings (£390m; $621m) for the year to June 2004, he said.

It’s hardly Great Britain’s fault that Kenya would prefer to pay non-existent people to not work than it would on increasing wages and benefits for nurses.

The exodus of the best and brightest out of Africa is just one symptom of the disease of corruption and graft that has taken root in too many African states. If they would tackle corruption with the same zeal that they complain about the brain drain, African states might actually make some progress.

Sources:

UK still poaching African nurses. The BBC, July 21, 2003.

Kenya seeks ‘ghosts’ to ease budget woes. The BBC, July 18, 2003.

Idi Amin Close to Death — Several Decades Too Late to Do Any Good

The BBC reports that Idi Amin is close to death. If only this had happened a lot sooner, like 1970.

The even better news is that Amin is likely to get the Pinochet treatment if he ventures out of Saudi Arabia (imagine that — a former bloody dictator living in exile in Saudi Arabia!) According to the BBC,

According to local newspaper reports, President Yoweri Museveni has rejected a request from one of his wives to let him go back to Uganda.

Deep wounds

However, the president’s press assistant, Oonapito Ekonioloit was quoted as saying that he was free to return if he so wished but did not rule out the possibility of him being arrested, if he was still alive.

“Everyone knows he has a past. If he has any [legal] case to answer, it will be dealt with according to the law,” he said.

Source:

Idi Amin’s ‘condition worsens’. The BBC, July 21, 2003.

Researchers Discover Potato Blight-Resistant Gene

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin researchers announced they had discovered a gene that confers blight resistance on potatoes.

The late blight fungus was partly responsible for the great Irish famine of 1845 in which more than 1 million people died, and blight is still a major source of potato crop loss around the world.

Researchers discovered the blight resistant gene in a wild variety of potato, and then inserted the gene into other varieties. In initial testing, the genetically modified potato was much more resistant to the blight.

Researcher John Helgeson said of the GM potato that, “So far, the plants have been resistant to everything we have thrown at them.”

The availability of a blight resistant potato would dramatically reduce the amount of pesticides that farmers today have to apply to kill the fungus. In warm climates, for example, pesticides have to be applied as frequently as 25 times a year to keep the disease in check.

More research is needed on the GM potatoes, and a blight resistant potato is unlikely to reach market for at least five years.

Source:

Blight-resistant gene ‘could have averted potato famine’. U-TV, July 15, 2003.

GM potato is ‘blight resistant’. The BBC, July 15, 2003.

UW Researchers Develop Blight-Resistant Potato. Wisconsin Ag Connection, July 16, 2003.

Facilitating Accountability in Weblogging

Mark Pilgrim earned a fair amount of both praise and scorn for his now offline and/or defunct Winer Watcher, which monitored Dave Winer’s Scripting.Com RSS feed every five minutes and then showed a nice visual representation of any edits Winer had made.

Some of the criticism directed at Pilgrim wondered how he would like it if somebody wrote an application to monitor his posts for changes. So Pilgrim obliged them by doing it himself. My initial reaction was — I want that!!

One reason I’d like to see something like that implemented is to allow users to edit their posts. At the moment if you post something on any of my sites, it’s pretty much frozen forever. If you really screwed up and have a Very Important Reason(TM) for needing to revise or change comments, I might be talked into allowing this, but I think I’ve only done so 2-3 times. More often, I have to go back and edit someone’s post when a 3,000 letter URL completely screws up the formatting.

If the edits were transparent by making the revision history instantly visible, then users could edit their posts to their heart’s content.

The other major reason is to give me more comfort in going back and editing all of the things I post. I do go back and edit things pretty much all the time — almost exclusively to improve spelling, grammar and sentence construction. But someday someone’s going to notice a discrepancy between what article X says now and a quote from article X two years ago and righfully wonder just how extensive my later editing is.

So why not just make the whole process transparent for the entire world to see?

Norway Proposes to Set Quotas for Women on Corporate Boards

Norwegian legislator Laila Daavoey has introduced a bill that would require Norway’s top 600 companies or so to create a quota system for filling board positions. Comapnies that fail to fill at least 40 percent of their corporate board positions by 2005 would face financial penalties begining in 2007.

This follows an announcement in November by Sweden’s Vice Prime Minister Margareta Winberg that Sweden would begin taking action against companies that failed to increase female representation on their corporate boards from the curretn 8 percent to 25 percent by 2004.

Daavoey offered up a saying which she apparently highlights the need for such drastic actions, but actualy does a nice job of pointing out the idiocy of such quota systems. According to Daavoey,

There will not be equality until you have incompetent women in the boardroom.

That certainly is a lofty goal worth fighting for.

Maggie Gallagher had a better comment on this proposed regimen in an op-ed,

In Europe, it appears that in the name of democracy, elites are pursuing an autocratic centralized power, seeking economic control and social regimentation. They seem to have no hesitation about using the law to forcibly suppress opposition. Call it Eurofascism, lite. Only they call it democracy.

Sources:

Norway eyes law to shatter glass ceiling. Lizette Alvarez, Contra-Costa Times, July 18, 2003.

Eurofascism, Lite. Maggie Gallagher, Yahoo.Com, July 15, 2003.

A Look at Legalized Prostitution in Europe

The BBC carried a report this week about proposals in Belgium to legalize — and heavily tax — prostitution in that country. Faced with a budget deficit, Belgian lawmakers are considering a bill to legalize the world’s oldest profession and, in return, force sex workers to pay a tax that would raise up to 50 million euros for the cash-strapped country.

Both Germany and the Netherlands have similar schemes, but at least one advocate for prostitutes claims that in those countries prostitutes simply exchanged one form of economic exploitation for another. The BBC quotes Marion Detlefs who works at a prostitute advice center in Germany as saying,

It has, however, been very difficult [to make the transition from illegal to legal]. When it was set up there was much talk of securing proper contracts, proper health insurance but a lot of this hasn’t materializes because of big holes in the legislation. At the moment it looks like all the government cares about is getting their hands on sex workers’ money — women who are already hard-up are giving their earnings away and getting very little return.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that in the Netherlands the law legalizing prostitution only allows Dutch and EU citizens to work as prostitutes — effectively keeping immigrant prostitutes as part of the illegal, underground economy without the protections of legalization.

Source:

Making sex pay. Clare Murphy, The BBC, July 16, 2003.