In the wake of last week’s riots in Maputo against price increases, the Mozambican government has done a U-turn and agreed to reduce the fuel prices and subsidise bread.  Whilst there is a lot of debate to be had about the supply and demand and the resultant speculation of food stuff, maybe the government will learn to increase prices gradually to allow people to adjust to new prices – price hike wherever they happen in the world are hard to swallow especially for poor people.

I do feel for them through – the increases have to be paid for and the government has to find the funds somewhere.  With one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, one is hopeful that the costs can be borne from growth rather than by borrowing.

allAfrica.com: Mozambique: Government Backs Down On Price Rises.

Apparently Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe’s health is deteriorating and now the analysts are predicting a chaotic handover to whoever follows him.  You don’t need to be an analyst to work that one out!  Any chance that the ZANU-PF factions would resolve the issue internally and relatively peacefully is no longer possible with MDC in the picture.  The army is likely to be the king-maker.

via allAfrica.com: Zimbabwe: Analysts Predict Chaos If Mugabe Dies in Office.

“The current financial crisis could bring about a change in the international economic order with countries like China and India becoming the dominant global economic powers.   The Chief Economist of one of the world’s biggest banks, HSBC, believes Asia’s rise poses a threat to prosperity in the West.”

via BBC News – Hardtalk – Will a rich China make the west poorer?.

Really? Who would have guessed?  Be nice if he could tell us something we don’t know.

Fast food outlets should hand out  a statin pill, a cholesterol-lowering drug, to customers to combat the effects of fatty food, say an Imperial College London team. 

I say the team need to take their summer holidays and rest, the poor dears.

via BBC News – ‘Give out statins with junk food’.

I am currently working on a new project that is taking up all my writing time.  I hope to be re-posting soon.

With many young people leaving the education system this summer and many not realising the pain that awaits them in the real world due to the new Government’s policies, it would be very irresponsible of us not to tell our young hopefuls some home truths.  Hell, some of us, if we were lucky to escape relatively unharmed from the effects of the man-made recession, are still not sure what Government sponsored hardship holds for us in the very new future.  Many of us don’t even realise that it’s not just others that are going to sweat but us too (Leading article: The worst could be yet to come – Leading Articles, Opinion – The Independent And Sean O’Grady: This seems like good news – but the cuts will soon bite).

What a lot of us know, though we would hate to admit it, is that the banks own our butts;  the mortgage, the loan taken out for this year’s holiday and the recent graduate’s little run around and the gold and platinum cards proudly displayed in the wallet but used up to the hilt.  Deep down we know that if the sh*t hits the fan, the collectors will be at the door.  The ease of how you got into this position, the promises of how your interests are being take to heart, the sweet sound of our kindly financial institute assuring us they will be with us through thick and thin are likely to be distant memories.

If you’re lucky, the apple of your eye may have had some money management lessons at school or college – but wait, wait a minute, usually it is banks that sponsor those programs.  So all of us with fresh faced, ‘raring to go‘ younger people have to have the talk.  Trust me if the ‘the bird and the bees’ talk was hard for you, this one will be more painful.  How do you explain your financial predicament without the clever product of your loins looking at you like you are a total idiot?

But it has to be said – no candy floss – rule number one when you step outside be more wary of the suited man with the briefcase of cash than the low jeans ganja smoker on the corner.  “Banks are not your friends, my son.”

Homeless in Dubai: One man’s story

Banks continue to rip customers off

We have been slating teachers for years.  Many of us believe that the schools, especially inner city ones are staffed by a bunch of incompetents that fail to discipline the hordes that descend on the building for some 9 months of the years.  We slate them for failing to engage our children with the result that a large majority of our kids cannot read and write as well as we remember we used to when we left school.

On the other hand we have forced our government to meddle in teaching methods and curricula so much that we cannot decide if A’ levels are harder or easier than when we went to school.  God forbid that we discover like we did last week that a head teacher has the audacity to earn £200K –  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10609273) which gasp, is more than the Prime Minster and despite him being a kind of magician, we would rather give that kind of money to our kind bankers!

So is it a surprise that we have taken it upon ourselves to instruct teachers what to teach our children.  Any attempts to engage these  children, must be met with a 400 person petition, after all school is not meant to be fun, nor is work for that matter.  Even if the school claims that the use of the opening credits and one episode of the  popular cartoon, The Simpsons, is being used to teach your brat satire, irony and parody, it must be resisted and pointed out that not the right quality of learning material BBC News – Petition to stop schools lessons in The Simpsons.

Why would you want to do this for a living?  I don’t care how clever the Teaching Agency’s ‘Use your head, teach’ advertisements are, I’d rather be on the parent side of the fence.

Single parent charity Gingerbread recently published a nationwide league table of child maintenance debt showing a child maintenance ‘debt mountain’ of £3,761 million owed to children by non-resident parents, mostly fathers, across the country.   Gingerbread’s Chief Executive Fiona Weir urged the ‘Child Support Agency has to do its job too in collecting debts and enforcing payment’ .

The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission responded by ‘strongly cautioning’ that the quoted arrears figures do not represent money ‘owed to children’ by non-resident parents. Around 50% of the total outstanding arrears is owed back to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and not to ‘parents with care’.    The press release goes on to outline the successes that the Commission is having in reducing arrears and in ‘using tough enforcement measures, including deducting money directly from bank accounts and the seizing of some 500 properties through Order for Sale action’.

This huge amount branded about by the charity is a culmination of the Child Support Agency’s 17 years of operation with nothing written off and that half of the total represents income related benefits paid to parents with care.  It is expected that a substantial element of the arrears which are likely to be adjusted significantly downwards when the estimates are proved incorrect when absent partners income details are provided. 

It is very significant that these two (three??) organisations slugging it out in justifying their existence both fail to mention what is wrong in the system.  What we do know is the system is broken as the mainly absent fathers try and point out to us through Father’s rights organisations.   Until we socially accept The Changing Face Of Marriage and families and until we get past the strong bias to women in the system, this situation will never improve.  You have to ask hard questions and forget political correctness in discussing:

• What makes it so difficult to collect these payments? 
• Why does it get to the point that people are losing their homes ?
• Are the high maintenance estimates made before proof of earnings encouraging the ‘ducking and diving’ avoidance?
• Are the maintenance amounts reasonable – does it leave the absent partner enough to actually have a life?
• Are women obviously and blatantly using the system to extort funds entitled to maintenance?
• Are some absent parents with-holding payment due to the absence of child access rights?

 And many more.  Family break up is hard enough as it is and it would help for the blame game to stop and someone take the time to investigate the root causes of non-payment.  We need a generally acceptable solution for the matter and until such time, we have to take the figures with a huge dose of salt.

“Set me free so that I may do to others what you did to me.” 

With South Africa celebrating the successful hosting of the World Cup below the surface of the celebrations lurks an ugly and scary scenario. Scary for the some 120 or so foreign workers from neighbouring African countries taking refuge at police stations; so scary that many Zimbabweans immigrants fleeing the threatened  xenophobic attacks are willing to take their chances squatting along the main Beitbridge highways to Harare and Bulawayo (Zimbabwe Nationals Left Stranded After Fleeing South Africa).  Even the security forces have moved into townships in the Cape Town area to protect the migrant workers (Security Forces Move to Protect Migrants).

The xenophobic attacks in the townships are only added to the misery many of those migrants have faced to get to South Africa.  Stories abound of robberies and rapes along the borders with little or no protection for the immigrants.

The xenophobic threats have been hidden under the shadow of the World Cup but many migrants already feared it from long before the first game was played.  In the euphoria of the major event, South Africa’s large crime rate seems to have been controlled at least in the areas where the world’s eyes have been.  However, this situation will highlight, just as the attacks did previously, the lack of control the security forces have of a population that previously used that weakness to undermine the Apartheid government.

In there lies the problem,  everyone wants a piece of the golden pie and many of those who will attack foreign workers will fail to understand the part played by other African nations which with the internal pressures brought Apartheid to its end.  The South African government will say the right things and admonish the perpetuators of the attacks but how many of these people trust the government to look after their interests?

This kind of xenophobic can only be tackled by education.  It is that lack of education that allows many of the foreign workers to obtain the better paying jobs that fuel these unsavoury sentiments.  However it is not likely that the educated immigrants will feel the backlash but the desperate ones living there in the townships, seen as undercutting the locals, in their desperation to stay alive and feed those who they left behind.

The whispers are going to turn to shouts and shots and fires but you cannot but help feeling that someone has a vested interest in either the removal of foreign workers (unlikely) or the chaotic situation that will prevail.  What is obvious those looking in are that the poor South African in the townships will gain nothing from it all.

How very sad.

A “big budget” pornographic film was shot in a London hospital when it hired out one of its wards to a film company.  The movie generated “substantial income” for the hospital, Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt said  BBC News – ‘Big budget’ porn film shot in London hospital.

Can we expect more of this when the budgetary cuts start biting?