Its Historic-Moment week again

Or, how to destroy History using adjectives.

April 18, 2008 – Cabinet sworn in  -  “Grand coalition cabinet sworn in…historic ceremony…”

Recap of previous episodes of “Historic Moment week” :

• April 12, 2008 – Oooops - “Today is the historic day that never was…”
• March 17,2008 – President attends parliament – “Yesterday was a historic moment…Never in the history of this country has a sitting president attended parliamentary sessions and sat as a Member of Parliament…”
• March 2, 2008 – Parliament about to be opened -” …what could be the historic week in which the power sharing deal President Kibaki and Mr Raila Odinga signed…”
• Feb 29, 2008 – Governance agreement signed - “…The signing on Thursday of a historic governance agreement to resolve the crisis sparked off…”
• Jan 24, 2008 – Shook hands and smiled – “…a landmark first face-to-face meeting, a month after the disputed presidential polls.”

All bets are off. The next historic moment could be just around the corner.

Digital Village – 2

As this old news story says, the World Bank is funding the digital village project:

Call centres will start drawing financial support from the Government next month as part of a Sh78 million project supported by the World Bank.

Of course, the brain-dead editors who run the Business Daily, made a mistake in the article by reporting Ksh 78 million instead of US$ 78 million (part of a bigger funding tranche, described below).

So that took me to the World Bank website, and to this page :
World Bank Approves US$164.5 Million for Connectivity to Make Kenya, Burundi and Madagascar More Competitive

The amount approved for Kenya is US$ 114.4 million. It will be used to facilitate connectivity for the country’s emerging business process outsourcing industry, support the creation of digital villages in rural and urban areas, and upgrade the regulatory environment. It will also promote good governance and transparency through initiatives such as digitizing and indexing land and court records, and automating the filing and analysis of wealth declarations by public officers.

(All the bolding is mine)

The loan is in terms of IDA “credits”, which is an interest free loan arrangement.

On the World Bank site, there is a project description document (contains a roadmap), an implementation arrangement document, and a detailed project appraisal document (WARNING: 9MB PDF file, but worth reading for the details)

And here is a list of various documents and reports related to the project.

So why doesn’t the enfant fourbe Writer-Al simply talk in terms of the details provided in these documents (“implementation arrangement” document… ??) instead of dwelling on tired shoe-salesman cliches. And why don’t the Kenya ICT board provide the same details on their site — isn’t that the basic purpose of having a website ? Tant Pis.

Piggy bank, the flu make headlines

Yesterday must have been one of those slow news days.

The highlight of KTN Saturday news was a long news item about a child and his piggy bank. Interview with mother, interview with child, eulogies about wonders of a piggy bank, camera out-takes of the sacred piggy bank.

This was followed by a eight minute item about the flu. Began with: what is a flu? how to know when you have a flu? Followed by a long interview with a marketing agent from Sanofi Pasteur (a pharma company making flu vaccines). Eulogies about the wonders of taking a flu vaccine.Nice steadicam shots of the company’s packaged brand of flu shot.

Where is the First Lady when you need her?
Nothing beats a well planned, punitive raid on the studios of KTN for promoting general delinquency.

Media pimping itself

Where exactly is the fine line between “news” and “advertisers announcement” ? The Business Daily in Nairobi has this story that raised my eyebrows :

Attack on Patents hurts the Poor

April 9, 2008: Activists have been trying for years to bring down the pharmaceutical industry. Their “patients not patents” campaign has a simplistic appeal but will only make things worse for the poor, as well as distracting attention from the real causes of ill health: poverty and corruption…….

The premise of the article, which tries to pass itself off as news, is simple but devious : “The fight against pharmaceutical patents is bad because it distracts attention from basic provision of medical care”.

The authors of the news item are listed as :

“Written by Alec van Gelder & Franklin Cudjoe….
…Franklin Cudjoe is director of Imani, an independent policy think-tank in Ghana.
Alec van Gelder is Network Director at International Policy Network, a development think-tank in London.“

What are these “independent” think-tanks ? Are they really independent ?

This think-tank : International Policy Network (IPN), is a corporate funded think-tank (with funding from the pharmaceutical industry) with a long rap-sheet involving the tobacco, nuclear energy, and anti-global-warming lobby

The other think-tank Imani-Ghana is a partner organization of IPN, and presumably motivated by the same interests.

Do papers like the Business Daily take money to publish what is clearly an advertisement, as news ? Or are they just stupid to print PR releases sent to them ?

Note:
More evidence that the Business Daily is pimping itself, note the theme of the following articles published in the newspaper, written by intrepid reporters from the “International Policy Network” :

• Alarmists wrong on Global Warming ( says, Global warming isn’t really true)
• Protectionism harms consumers (says, developing countries must also take on emission quotas )
• Warped policies plant hunger (rails against african govt. barriers and tariffs, and makes a case for GM seeds)

Traffic #2

Bizarre article about resolving the transport crisis. I know sometimes the media needs to extrapolate and forecast the future. But talking about 350 km/h French trains in the context of proposing a solution to the transport crisis  is like saying : “in the future its possible that Sarkozy could become the prime minister of Kenya”.

Though, I am sure some NGO will get funding to do a study of some sort about using TGVs to solve transport problems.

Why was the railway left to go to seed anyway?