MozCam

2008-02-29T22:59:00.002+02:00

February
The fifth of this month will always be remembered in Mozambique. It was a kind of Bastille Day in which the people, for the first time in so many years, were able to make the single-party elite listen. In the western press the event was either not reported or simply mentioned as "food riots".

These reports totally miss the shockwaves this event caused both at the time, and the long-term ripple effects which are still making themselves felt through the Mozambican political economy.

Demonstrations and riots started on tuesday the 5th over the rise in chapa (taxi) prices and the govt. was completely unprepared. so business kind of ground to a halt for a few days and now we are catching up.

another knock-on effect is that they couldn't fill up the petrol pumps which set of a wave of panic tank-filling the next day. kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

The govt. are in a bind because all the solutions are long term or at least medium term. But the govt. are not capable of managing anything that is not immediate. So a few years ago they promised to restart train services - but they only run twice a day through certain areas. They promised to renew the transport fleet of the city bus company - and even "bought" some chinese made LPG-powered modern buses. One of these then blew up so they grounded the whole fleet.

They promised to regulate the Chapas so they actually run the route they promise and don't cut the route - but that just gave the transport cops another excuse to take bribes from the Chapa-drivers. Most of the Chapas are owned by MPs anyway.

Its a pity as this story is a good counterpoint to World Bank president Bob Zoellick's flying visit on Monday 4th Feb. He complimented Moz on its macroeconomic success and pro-poor policy reforms la la la etc. The next day the powderkeg of angry poor people who aren't invited to the workshops and don't have expense accounts, finally exploded.

Why it happened: today everyone was supposed to go back to work after the long weekend but it was also the day on which the government had agreed with the Chapa (Minibus taxi) association, for a 33% increase in transport fares, based on the rising price of oil. Of course the govt. made no attempt to sound out public opinion on this, and this morning when the first chapas tried to do their rounds, there was an explosion of public anger.

Demonstrators blocked all the entrances and exits to Maputo, and of course there was some opportunistic rioting and looting to go along with it. In fact rather good-natured, as very few people were hurt and the demonstrators appeared to be genuinely trying to make a point - they only blocked road traffic, pedestrians were in general left alone. The police responded with cowardly ineffectiveness sprinkled with bursts of excess brutality. The govt. has said basically nothing yet. But night fell and the roads were still blocked. During the city business basically ground to a halt as goods and staff can simply not get from A to B.

The most important point is that the demonstrations were SPONTANEOUS - however much the elite try to make out that shadowy agitators from outside were responsible. For years mozambicans themselves have complained that they are "too passive". On the 5th they finally woke up. It is difficult to protest in Moz - if you do it alone you are ignored. If you try to organize a group, your association will never receive legal status, or its leaders will be co-opted with sinecures. If you really do manage to make your voice heard you will be killed very publicly and those who ordered the deed will never be prosecuted.

In other words, the elite thought they had it all worked out, how to keep the lid firmly on the pot. And the donors, to their collective shame, quite happily turned two blind eyes. They all forgot that if you keep the lid on, the water boils!

2008-01-31T22:25:00.002+02:00

January
We passed the year end at Nina's house, the neighbours gaily letting off all kinds of of dodgy fireworks from their rooftops in a happy display that reminded me of the safety adverts we used to get at primary school. Reminded me of what they said not to do.

Nina's niece Jessica got startled at first, remembering the Paiol - the arms dump explosion a year ago which killed so many people. The sad thing is, at the time people thought the sound those obsolete soviet munitions really were fireworks - until they started coming in through people's roofs and cutting them in half.

Before we went to sleep there was a fun hour digging my car out of the sand so we could park it in the driveway - apparently mine was the first car to actually park there since the concrete was laid and a big chunk of it promptly shattered under my Mark II's 1300kg.

2007-12-24T18:56:00.000+02:00

Great story about 419eater.com, fighting against the neverending Nigerian scams. Now all we need is someone to blog the endless V!agra and Pen!s extension mails that (I at least) get millions of.

2007-09-05T22:49:00.002+02:00

Brothers in arms?

In recent years the Mozambican leadership (along with all their pals at the head of the other SADC countries) have bent over backwards to avoid criticising old Uncle Bob, even as he runs his country into the ground and right through it. The independent press here have for several years carefully and forcefully separated the headline-grabbing "white farmer issue" from the dreadful and ever-increasing economic mismanagement and brutal oppression.

However, the elite have either ignored this or said they are "studying the matter". Just a few days ago, however, I saw a wee article in the business section of Savana (a leading independent newspaper), which mentioned that a massive shipment of grain bought by Zim from Argentina, had arrived at the port of Beira but was stuck there because the Zim govt. has no hard currency to pay the applicable customs duties.

And today I saw this article which suggests that unless the shipment is released, Zim has only 2 days flour supplies left. So the glorious leaders will not criticize Dear Robert, but if the cash ain't forthcoming it is another story. On the other hand, it is the people who eat bread so who cares. As a pupil of mine in Harare, 1993, said "Mugabe is rich - he does not eat sadza (maize porridge) or bread - he eats spaghetti - EVERY NIGHT!"

2007-07-25T22:07:00.001+02:00

1. Tech. Here is an article I just had published on ZK "Rich Client" technology.

2. More Tech. Have installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my new Acer TravelMate 4200 laptop. I have been happy with Ubuntu for servers since 5.10, but for PCs it has always had some hassle or other. But this time they seem to have done it. I initially installed it just because the Acer came with, bizarrely, Windows installed on top of FAT32 instead of NTFS. Thanks but no thanks, Acer!! So I had to reformat the disk anyway, and while I was at it installed Ubuntu. And I haven't booted back into Windows. The suspend, hibernate, power management all work perfectly. The only tweak was downloading linux drivers for my graphics card from Intel, but they were very easy to find and install.

3. Crime again. The police effectively appear to have lost control of Maputo, pretty much every day some armed gang assaults a bank or big shop - and gets away with it. A couple of weeks ago, the police in one station heard about a stolen car - and went to get it. Some hours later, the gang who had stolen it, assaulted the POLICE STATION, killed one officer, and stole it back!!

Last week, one of my staff was walking to the bus stop at about 7pm and had to run for his life as a rolling shootout between cops and robbers came round the corner.

Meanwhile, in one of the provinces, a policeman on patrol discovered two men raping a teenage girl. He shot one of them dead. When they came to collect the body, they discovered that it was an off-duty policeman! The shooter, a cop who was actually protecting civilians for once, is now languishing in a cell while they decide what to do with him.

2007-05-26T15:49:00.000+02:00

Yesterday morning a mysterious fire broke out at the Ministry of Agriculture (a huge, curved building that any visitor to Moz will pass as they drive in from the airport). It started at about 6am so no one was hurt (state functionaries start work at 7am).

Given that it only destroyed the economics, finance and accounting departments, the general opinion here seems to be that it was set on purpose, to cover up misuse of funds.

Now, of course, the government will plead for (and get) from the donors, a big handout to rebuild a spanking new ministry. Instead of, say, doing anything useful like:
- rural feeder roads
- rural marketplaces
- provincial main roads
- agricultural extension
- regulating oligopolies in the distribution and wholesaling of agricultural produce

ho hum...

2007-05-06T20:13:00.000+02:00

VIGILANTE KILLINGS PUT TWO ARMS OF THE STATE AT ODDS WITH EACH OTHER

A refreshing change from the normal tide of "the badder you are, the more likely you are to get away with it", which is the usual rule here in Moz.

A week or so ago three supposed criminals were taken from their homes by the police and held without charge in cells. One of them managed to get a call to his lawyer but by the time the lawyer got to the station, the guys had been moved to location unknown. A few hours later, they were taken to the area of Triunfo, Maputo's north-east corner, and shot several times each, in the back of the neck. Many residents who observed parts of what happens, went to the press (the independent press, obviously) to complain.

The case became a scandal among Maputo's equivalent of the chattering classes, and the PGR (equivalent of the Attorney General), for once investigated the subject thoroughly and soon emitted a report stating categorically that the killings were illegal executions, perpetrated by a death squad within the police. Based on this, the PGR emitted arrest warrants for the 3 police officers involved.

In response to this...
a. The police simply refused to arrest their own men and emitted their own report saying that the 3 criminals had somehow managed to break their handcuffs and escaped while trying to flee.
b. The Minister of the Interior (responsible for the police), categorically denied that death squads.
c. The vice minister of the interior admitted that actually they might exist.

At least, with this kind of public outcry, we have less risk of creeping into a Rio de Janeiro style situation where the police still perform dozens of extra-judicial killings every year.

One would hope, however, that the head of state would step in to remind the Police that, according to the constitution, they do not have any option about executing the arrest warrants issued by the PGR.

Meanwhile, the donors gave the government a generally glowing report, although they moaned a bit about the feeble progress in combatting corruption. But since they all live in fortresses in Somerschield and will certainly get somewhere classier on their next promotion, who's to rock the boat.

2007-04-02T00:52:00.000+02:00

...and implosions

Finally, someone has decided what to with the 20 storey concrete skeleton of the 4 Seasons Hotel, which had loomed over Maputo's north-east corner for more than a generation.

They blew it up. Very neatly and properly, with the public watching from a safe distance, and cleanup teams standing by to wipe up the enormous pile of dust release. A charming change from the Paiol (arms dump - see below). One of my Mozambican colleagues (a young, black, switched-on professional) said beforehand "don't worry - nothing will go wrong - they got the americans in to do it." Don't know if this is actually true, but his comment says a lot.

2007-04-02T00:15:00.000+02:00

...excuses...

A week after the explosions, and the death toll is reported as 128 civilians and an unrevealed number of military personnel - the rumour is 85. Another 500 people were injured, and several hundred houses destroyed.

All this in one of the poorer outskirts of Maputo, so taking into account the average family size, perhaps 10,000 people will be pushed across the line between "keeping it together" and desperation. One of the households next to Nina, lost their mother to a shell which came through the wall. Another woman spoke of her baby being dashed from her back - she turned around and it was already dead. Moments later, another piece of shrapnel sliced her husband's legs off. She did not know where the rest of her family were.

And the government? A shameful (or perhaps shameless) continuation of business as usual....

NO-ONE in the government has said sorry or accepted the blame

NO-ONE has resigned

NO-ONE has confirmed whether or not any compensation will be offered to the victims

Many eyewitnesses reported that, at the first sound of blasts from the dump, the entirel military contingent supposed to be guarding it, "legged it" over the fence and dissappeared to parts unknown. They didn't even warn the local people.

One positive effect for the long term, is that many ordinary citizens have woken up to the utter disdain the ruling elite have for them. There was a lot of abnormally outspoken public anger at what happened and the stubborn refusal by the elite to accept any blame. There was even a demonstration outside the Ministry of Defence on saturday, calling for the resignation of the Minister of Defence (who also happens to be related by marriage to the Pres). Small, but it existed. The police declared that they weren't sure if the demo was legal or not, so they arrested a dozen people for good measure.

Omar went round a few days ago (his girlfriend lives in one of the affected areas) and took dozens of pictures of the damage and munitions (both exploded and unexploded). Here are just a few

2007-04-02T00:12:00.000+02:00

Another C in Mozambique:
http://charlotte-in-africa.blogspot.com/

2007-03-22T18:16:00.000+02:00

Explosions!

Today I had to abandon my class at the university for a new reason - a military arms dump 10 miles away started exploding, and as the explosions grew in intensity and began to shake the building and rip out the mosquito nets on the windows, the staff and students universally decided to evacuate the building.

The streets were full of people streaming away from the explosion - but later on we saw on the TV news, the neighbourhood of Malhazine where the arms dump is located. It is covered in a mushroom cloud filled with tracer ammo flying in all directions. Nina's family, who live in the next neighbourhood along, have all evacuated on foot, to a relative's house 3 miles further away from the explosion.

No reports of fatalities yet, but the houses near the dump appeared to have been flattened. Meanwhile, burglars will be having a field day as they clear out the abandoned houses near the blast zone.

Interestingly, the state broadcaster, TVM, sent a camera crew to the area right at the height of the explosions, and allowed it to broadcast direct. So the usual censorship and sycophantic editing didn't apply. The reporter, sitting in the back of a pickup as it fled the blast zone, was quite clear in her disgust at the authorities for letting this happen. Because the sad fact is, there were minor explosions of a similar nature a few months ago, again apparently caused by a heatwave. Of course, the responsible minister promised to "take measures", but in true Single Party Style, sweet F*ck All was actually done, and now the people are suffering.

Here is a photo taken from the university campus at the start of the explosions (before the worst). Remember that the campus is at least 10 miles from the dump!

2007-03-03T22:49:00.000+02:00

A wee update on the crime situation. The police recently "turned" one of the leaders of Maputo's big heist gangs, and used the information he gave up to catch and machine-gun to death the other leader, in a full-on high speed chase in the suburb of Matola a couple of weeks ago. Apparently when they raided his house afterwards, the police discovered four wives and two plasma TVs. Obviously, the plasma TVs where the talk of the town here.

The "Mambas" unit I mentioned in my previous post was disbanded on the quiet, and it seems that the flying squads have stopped shooting each other at least for the moment.

Meanwhile, the current black comedy being shown by the Gungulinho theatre group (who always focus their plays on up to date social issues), focuses on the sad story of public lynchings which I mentioned previously. The story takes place in a typical "bairro" on the outskirts of Maputo, where the residents suffer from a rising crime level - several rapes are horrifically depicted on stage - and eventually, in despair at the lack of action from the undermanned and underequipped local police station, they take the law into their own hands. At first everything goes well, and several "bandidos" are caught by the collective action of the residents, and burnt to a crisp while the police hide in their squadroom. But in the closing scene of the play, one of the young guys from the neighbourhood is attacked, as he comes home from work, by a "ninja" (street thief). He cries out for help, and it comes, but in the ensuing struggle and confusion, the thief escapes and HE is grabbed and set alight. The people at first rejoice, but as dawn breaks, they realise their mistake and the play ends with the audience quiet in anguish. If the government do not wake up and realise how explosive this issue is becoming, I reckon that they will regret it sooner rather than later.

2006-12-19T13:41:00.000+02:00

Mr. Blair's legacy

2006-12-14T22:06:00.000+02:00

Interesting post about the perils of having a TOO-democratic approach to the development of software...

2006-11-23T21:27:00.000+02:00

SIN CITY
I haven't blogged decently for a wee while but there are a couple of social phenomena, increasingly virulent here in the last few months, that the rest of the world really should know about. They are to a certain extent related, and although they are apparently "bad things", they may yet bring about some fundamental changes in the way the Mozambican state (dis)respects its people.

The first is the almost exponential rise in public lynchings. Just to be clear about terminology here, in the Maputo area, a "lynching" means that a crowd of locals chase, grab, beat (if he is lucky, into unconsciousness) someone, then give him a tyre necklace, douse him with petrol, and burn him alive. No-one survives. Basically, once you have been accosted, you are already dead, the only question is how and how agonisingly you die. Several hundred of your assailants will keep any nearby police at bay, should they even want and have the courage to try and intervene.

This may seem horrible, but when you see at first who started off the lynching frenzy, you can understand, even if you don't agree. In one case, a man who had brutally raped three women in his local area, and three times been caught and taken to the police station, was always set free soon afterwards after paying the appropriate bribes. The fourth time he raped someone, he was caught and once again taken to the police station and put in a cell. Once again he got out in short order after greasing a few palms. But this time the locals ("populares" in Moz portuguese) were ready. 300 people had waited outside the police station because they knew he would get off Scot-free. As soon as he came out, the police were warned off and he was apprehended and lynched. The next day, the private TV stations showed his burnt corpse, although the state broadcaster managed not to.

In a second "trigger" case, a known local gangster was caught for the nth time, after holding up a market stall. As he and his sidekick were being frogmarched to the police station, they started to laugh, insulting and threatening their captors - "just you wait - we'll be out in a jiffy - and then we'll come back and get you, really f*ck you up". At some point someone snapped, frenzy set in, and the two never made it to the station alive.

What do I mean by "trigger" case? Well, the first few were all like the examples I gave above - "cut and dried" cases of well known evil fucks getting their just deserts. But since then, the phenomenon has taken off - petty thieves, suspect characters walking around at night, whatever - as soon as someone shouts "thief", doors will spring open all around and poor, enraged locals will rush out armed with whatever they can find.

And of course, if you ever study this kind of thing in history, it always ends up being abused. The Inquisition, scottish witchhunts, the Indonesian slaughters, even in some parts of Rwanda during the genocide - once the vigilante mood sets in, the sharp guys quickly start using it to get rid of rivals - and women to get rid of their husband's mistress - etc.

Even more worrying, it has happened before here - in the early nineties when the civil war ended and the country was struggling to get back on its feet, this phenomenon was very common. Nina and many of my friends and colleagues have all confirmed, too, that abuses of the system and false accusations were indeed commonplace.

The sad thing is, it was all very foreseeable. I remember distinctly one of my colleagues shaking his head, a couple of years back, as we discussed yet another violent crime on the outskirts of Maputo.
"You mark my words", he said "if this doesn't get sorted out soon - the lynching will come back - just you wait and see".
Others nodded their heads in agreement.

And now it is here. Why? The core reason, is the fundamental incapacity of the Mozambican state either to reform the police, or at least to get them to do something - ANYTHING - useful, instead of preying on society. They really are a national joke, loathed, feared, derided and yet in some ways pitied, all at the same time. And unlike in many other more established nation-states where civilian alternatives have grown up, here the ruling (read: single) party has such a fear of anything which might challenge its grip on power, that it has blocked any such initiatives. A few years before I got here, the govt. sponsored a neighbourhood watch program. At first it went well, and several local associations were formed. But soon afterwards, the gangsters regrouped and began to fight back. Not surprisingly, the neighbourhood associations demanded the right to carry guns or at least sticks on their night patrols. The govt balked at this thought and the initiative was quietly left to die.

Which brings me to my other topic - the spiralling internal war within the Maputo police force. There are many other indicators of the desperate state of the police all over the country -
- 4 cops from Maxixe currently on trial for stealing TWENTY TONNES of dope from a confiscated stock they were supposed to be guarding. They bundled it into a transit van and drove it off. They were only caught by chance.
- 80 police trainees who were sacked before completing their course, after it was discovered they had falsified their entry documents (ID card, school certificate, etc.)
- several hundred candidates for the police who were forced to do an HIV test, despite the fact that in 2003 Moz passed a law explicitly forbidding such testing for an employer. When questioned by the press, the city police chief just talked about everything but the actual law.

...however the most systematic and worrying trend is the dozen or so apparently related shooting deaths over the last 4 months, which have taken place almost exclusively within a specialist brigade - the Mambas - rather akin to the UK's Special Branch crossed with MI5. Consistent facts are only gradually coming to light, but what appears to have happened is that this squad - the "heavy mob" of the Maputo cops - enjoyed a long heyday under the previous-but-one minister of the interior. They were the dudes, they had the dirt on everyone, and they walked the walk. Rather like Kurt Russell's LAPD hard squad portrayed in the film "Dark Blue".

Anyway this minister was eventually replaced after enormous public pressure given that he was basically a bad mofo. His substitute, although as it turned out perhaps did more long term harm to the country, was a more suave and subtle operator. He didnºt want trouble and was building up his own structures - so he saw the Mambas as a threat to all this. Gradually he weakened them and brought them down from their privileged position.

The upshot was, the Mambas turned to other sources of power and privilege - most notably, alliances with the gangs they were supposed to be chasing. Basically they got a montly retainer for never managing to seriously catch anyone. This became fairly common knowledge. Serious criminals were only caught when they had the stupidity or temerity to rob a Judge's house or rape a minister's daughter. Then they were magically caught and shot to pieces within days.

Recently all that changed, as the new president replaced even this minister (after discovering that he could not account for EIGHTY PERCENT of his department's budget during his tenure). The current minister appears to have a genuine desire for reform, but at the same time be WAY out of his depths in the sea of competing organized crime outfits that is the Ministry of the Interior.

With all this confusion with the police, the gangsters appeared to want to get their own back on the Mambas and assassinated their boss very publicly a few months back. After this, the various subgroups within the squad seem to have started striking out on their own, and are competing - violently - for the protection racket business. Just in the last month, there have been 3 mysterious drive by shootings in the suburb of Maputo. In all cases, armed out of uniform police, waiting in a certain place in a certain car, have amazingly been victims of drive-by machine-gun slayings, by other policemen both in and out of uniform who bystanders never seem to be able to identify.

Hmmm. At least for the moment they seem to be leaving non-cops out of it.

Rule number #1: if you see a cop on the streets of this town, cross the street as soon and as discreetly as possible. Walk past calmly, without looking in his direction. To speak in american, "you never know what shit he's going to pull, and you sure don't want to find out either". Upon reflection, very like avoiding neds in glasgow in the wee hours of sunday morning. Except they generally only have chibs instead of AK47s.

Well, that's it for today - have just finished upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, so will go and try it out.

2006-10-17T22:52:00.000+02:00

Nice post about setting up a shiny gamer version of Ubuntu on your PC. Make sure you have a broadband connection first. http://tazforum.thetazzone.com/viewtopic.php?t=2189

2006-09-27T21:37:00.000+02:00

Google 'eager' to work with Republicans. Nice.

They have already proved themselves "Eager to work with the CCP" when it comes to cracking down on dissidents. To be fair, it is fairly normal for any market-leading firm to make sure it gets into bed with the right people. What is irritating in the Google case, is that they try and put across the "message" that they are new, different, modern, above that, etc. Better if they took the line which has worked for, say, Exxon, for years "we are a big bad motherf*cker of an oil company, so shut up and stop bothering us".

Hmmm. Since Google hosts this blog for free...

2006-09-11T11:53:00.000+02:00

British officer resigns over 'grotesquely clumsy' war in Afghanistan

"We've been grotesquely clumsy. We've said well be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them"

2006-09-06T00:25:00.000+02:00

Looking south across downtown Maputo at the weekend., from a tall building at the heart of the business district. A beautiful blue sky, marred only by the huge, polluting particulate plume pouring out from the cement factory across the river in Matola. Looks much worse with the naked eye.

2006-09-01T00:35:00.000+02:00

My parents' house was full for some of the time we were en Ecosse, so me and Nina stayed in this nearby shack...

2006-08-25T23:45:00.000+02:00

Long time no blog! Spent a month in sunny (honestly!) Scotland, am now back in Maputo which is still at the tail-end of winter.

2006-06-27T12:40:00.000+02:00

A great pity, that the PM of East Timor has been effectively de-throned by an Australian-backed putsch. The western press has typically reported this through a western/australian lnes, but in Mozambique, which for a long time hosted East Timorese exiles during the struggle against Indonesian occupation, the commentary has a lot more depth.

The only more balanced piece I could find on the BBC was here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5117510.stm

I hope one day someone analyses the facts behind the problems of the last few months. Certainly, western governments and their cronies have withstood much larger and more sustained demonstrations and riots, without anyone calling for the PM to step down. There are certainly shades of Haiti (where the US's client groups fomented unrest to allow the 'unacceptably left-wing' Aristide to be shunted aside), and even Iran in 1953 (where the CIA backed a coup against the democratically-elected moderate nationalist, Mussadiq).

Anyway, if Australia did play as dirty as it seems (not forgetting its sickening complicity in the original Indonesian invasion of E. Timor), then it will not necessarily profit from the operation. 53 years after the US intervention in Iran, one of the few consistent observations you could make about politics there, is that no-one likes the US. The price of interfering in the natural political development of a nation ten times older than the US itself.

In the case of E. Timor, it is a much smaller and younger country than Iran, but Australia has now interfered to "arrest its development". Like Prozac, I believe that this intervention will simply hide, suppress and defer key social and political problems, rather than resolve them.

2006-06-05T15:50:00.000+02:00

INTERLUDE: had to mention this...
http://www.notrly.com/jackbauer/index.php?tophundred

For anyone who has seen 24 (either the first one, or 2-4 which are the same as the first one except everyone but Jack changes roles).

2006-05-16T15:26:00.000+02:00

Blister man! I am limping still from walking 70km in one go at the weekend, on the pilgrimage to Namaacha. This is a popular event which takes place every may, and is very much Mozambican (unlike, for instance, Christmas). Over friday and saturday, hundreds of pilgrims walk out of Matola, the western satellite town of Maputo.

They walk along the road west, and then north, climbing up 1000m to the border town of Namaacha on the edge of Swaziland. I am not quite clear why, it is supposedly related to the prophecy of Fatima but as far as I know that happened in 1930s Portugal. In any case, its a very popular event in all senses of the word, and many walkers are not catholic, or even not religious (like me). The idea is to get to Namaacha by the time of the big mass on saturday night, outside the cathedral. Some people leave on friday morning, and many on friday lunchtime, but Sérgio and Décio (the friends I went with) are eight-time veterans and reckon you should avoid the sun as much as possible.

So we ambled out of Matola a little after 4pm, 5 boys and 3 girls in all. After crossing the bridge over the Matola river we picked up the pace. The sun dissappeared quickly and we quick-marched through the rapidly-cooling evening, arriving in Boane (20kms from Matola), in about 2h30mins. We sat down with the other travellers in the grounds of the little church and ate our various packed lunches. I have to admit that I was thinking "this won't be too hard after all!!" but I kept this sentiment to myself, something I was very glad of later.

At 8.15pm we upped and hit the road again, quickly separating into the very fasts and the pretty fasts. I was in the very fasts along with Décio, Sérgio, and Eunice (another first-timer), as I had decided to follow the veterans' strategy of doing it as fast as possible, with no stops, to avoid falling asleep or muscle cramps. Eunice is only 17 but was tanking it along with us at first, refusing all offers to carry her pack etc. But at about 35km she suddenly stopped and sank onto one knee with an air of desperation.

Sérgio and I looked at each other for a moment, and visualized having to stop for an hour with a crying girl, until her brother caught up. No way, José! We each grabbed a hand and yanked her along. Décio came up with a stream of anecdotes about any old random shit, just to keep her occupied. To her enormous credit, after 2km, she recovered her swing and walked the next 20km without a peep. In fact, she was so quiet that S & D reckoned she was really a Makonde, an ethnic group from northern moz, renknowned for their taciturnity.

...more to follow...

2006-05-04T17:20:00.000+02:00

Some pics of me and Colin on the set of Blood Diamond, currently being filmed in grand style here in Maputo. You can see me complaining about the disruption they caused here.

One of my colleagues is an extra in some scenes, and according to her:
- Leonardo di Caprio is an arrogant self-centred nonce, very much on the chubby side when you see him in the flesh
- whereas Jennifer Connelly is polite, down-to-earth and genuinely beautiful when you see her up close.

So there you are! My brush with Hollywood!

2006-04-27T10:16:00.000+02:00

Some of the contradictions of Mozambican society:

I pay my electricity bills by mobile phone now, and cuts are extremely rare in the part of the city where I live.	Many areas of Mozambique are still not connected to the grid, and others have been let out to rip-off concessionaires, linked to government bigwigs. Inhassoro, the small coastal town where we stopped for a night on our way back down the coast last November, is a case in point. Residents and small businesses there pay charges way above the national norm, and often have to wait many months for a connection. According to the papers, civil disobedience is in the offing.
Mozambique passed a law three years ago, forbidding compulsory HIV/AIDS testing by employers. Many industrialized countries still do not protect their citizens civil rights in this way.	Last month, the Maputo PRM (Police Force) selected 170 of 300 candidates, to be recruited as new Police Officers. They were immediately sent for compulsory HIV tests. When questioned by journalists about the legality of this measure, the Police Chief said words to the effect of "we don't to hire sick people and have them die off on us".
Customs officials are tall, strong and their bellies and faces have a well-rounded appearance. They stride about talking loudly	Beat policemen are short, rather skinny and often look almost like dejected schoolboys as they mope around the rainy streets. No prizes for guessing which job gives more opportunities for 'eating

...and some consistent elements...

There is a rubbish tip outside my house. It is always overflowing, and the rubbish stinks its way on to the pavement, onto the street. Despite the Mayor's solemn promise, when "elected" 3 years ago, to make it a top priority.	In Nina's "bairro", there are not even any rubbish tips. People dig holes in their yards and burn it there, or just dump it on the street at the dead of night. But every household there still gets USD 1 a month charged out of their electricity payments for the so-called "rubbish tax".
Corruption - its everywhere, and a whole new generation of university graduates are slowly being sucked into it. I see it before my eyes.	U.K. Development Minister Hilary Benn made a big speech about it recently, but at least in Moz, the UK govt, along with the other "donors", does not lift a finger about the many many well-known cases of corruption. Why? Because Moz is a "good boy" and takes his IMF medicine in whichever hole he is told to stick it.

2006-03-31T13:12:00.000+02:00

Some interesting articles about software architecture issues. Non-IT people (I HATE the term "techie") are unlikely to find them interesting - except the first one.
http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/060328_blue-is-the-new-green.html
http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html
http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/030701_dreaming_up.html
http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/060117_laptop-service-providers.html

2006-03-30T13:39:00.000+02:00

A worthwhile read for "Enterprise Architects". Or people who like to call themselves that. The Massachussetts State Government has created a set of Technical Standards for IT. There are millions of such standards around, the advantage of these is:
- they're short and clear
- they're based on real experience of a large, long-running organization with thousands of users of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds
- they reference other existing standards and best practices as much as possible

So next time someone in your organization says "lets use XYZ because I read an article about it in a magazine last week, and it sounds cool", refer him to these standards first. Of course, in many if not most IT shops, that will not help you much, because said bullshit-talker will be one of:
- the boss (IT)
- the big boss
- the boss/big boss's bumchum from way back
- the guy in charge of procurement who wants to make a buck
- a long-term consultant on loan from the firm which makes XYZ (normally IBM, Sun or Oracle)

...but that's another story!

2006-03-30T13:36:00.000+02:00

WAROPOLY - "the game for budding neoliberals aged 5 and over!!

2006-03-28T12:56:00.000+02:00

CNN saw this story: http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/2001/12/17/bare-knuckle.html
...thought it was true, and sent this email to the publishers:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/18/reg_hack_helps_cnn/

My, aren't they clever and discerning? Don't I want to stop reading newspapers and other websites, and just get all my information drip-fed to me, in excruciating perm-haired repetitive detail, by the CNN clowns?

2006-03-23T10:45:00.000+02:00

Yet more quake action! Look at this map and note the following:
In the first map, it seems like central-southern Moz (Latitude 21' S) has been seismically busy since at least 1990.

But in the second map, you can see that almost all this quakerizing has happened in 2006!

...and in the third map, you can see that the only major quake since 1900 was the 7.5 from last month! So something is happening.

2006-03-15T17:00:00.000+02:00

Another earthquake! A little to the south of the last one, somewhat weaker. Perhaps a giant mole followed the Rift Valley down from Sinai and just kept digging when he hit the end. More details here

2006-03-15T09:13:00.000+02:00

Two interesting sites if your PC is in a mess. I would have added a personal firewall site except that since Service Pack 2, Windows XP seems to come with a reasonable built-in firewall.

1) AVG Free AntiVirus - a genuinely free virus scanner, that in my opinion, also works better than the much heftier Norton/Symantec solution. Note that it is only useful if your PC has a regular internet connection, so that you can download the updates.

2) Malware Complaints - where to go if you think your PC has been infected by Malware. This is a generic term for all those annoying little programs that seem to install themselves without asking, and although they don't do any harm, annoy the f*ck out of you via popup windows, changing the address in your browser when you mistype, and putting icons everywhere. They are normally difficult to uninstall, as they were made to stay on your PC for ever. This site has a list of known dodgy products, with uninstallation hints and tips for each one.

2006-03-14T13:59:00.000+02:00

Interesting study here about something I campaigned on for a long time - the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services at the WTO). It is a terrible agreement which aims to "lock in" all countries to eternally neoliberal trade agendas, regardless of whether this is good for any particular country, or what the democratically-elected government of the day thinks.

Anyway, one of the biggest lobby groups for the GATS was the global water multinationals (a group dominated by European firms). It seems like they have suffered a setback, as the water sector has been excluded from the EU's most recent push to force other countries to promise trade liberalization via the GATS. Basically, this is because there have been so many disaster stories in recent years with western multinationals involved in privatization in developing countries: Manila, Jakarta, Cochabamba, Nelspruit (closer to home), etc. In addition, there has been massive opposition from civil society in Europe itself. As Adam Smith warned, don't let businessmen create a monopoly!! GATS is all about clearing the table for them to do just that!

"Water almost out of GATS" tells the story.

2006-02-23T01:14:00.000+02:00

Here is a link to a monitoring centre's analysis of the tremor - it seems to have hit the town of Espungabera (not EspungaberO as the BBC Report says), just north of the Save River, about 1000km north of Maputo. Turns out it was 7.5 on the Richter scale

2006-02-23T00:38:00.000+02:00

The strangest thing just happened! My head is still reeling from it!. I was sitting here typing away at the PC in the corner of my room, when all of a sudden I started to feel woozy. But after a moment I realised that I was fine, that it was not me but the rest of the world that was woozing. The chair swayed beneath me, as did the buildings outside the window. I looked up for some reference that I was not mad, and sure enough the lamp swaying from the ceiling was swinging like a pendulum. I woke Neill up and he had felt it too. I went downstairs and onto the street, and people were bemusedly coming onto their verandahs, looking about them. I shouted up to one "what was that?". "An earth tremor", he replied calmly. "But since when do you get EARTH TREMORS in Maputo", I replied. "Oh, never" he said cheerily, "this is the first time".

Curiouser and curiouser. I shall try and sleep now, with half an eye out for the house collapsing. Hopefully there will be some news about it on the interweb tomorrow. "Geologists notice massive fuck-off faultline just west of Madagascar, that they just 'missed' before", or something like that.

2006-02-17T13:33:00.000+02:00

Going through a massive heatwave here, interspersed with sudden burst of super-heavy rain, which floods most streets very quickly as the drainage is terrible. The other day we had to give up going to work in the morning as we got within about 500 metres and the main street was literally a river, over a foot deep and full of floating, nameless things. But most days (and nights) it is just sheer thick blanket heat. I am definitely more used to it than when I first got here, though.

An interesting brief here by the Oxford Research Group, about the potential consequences of a US-led airstrike on Iran. They quote an earlier study of theirs from 2002, warning about the aftermath of an Iraq invasion, and at least the quoted parts were very prescient. Basically the conclusion is the same as any common-sense one "don't do it!". Really, as long as long as the current hypocritical Nuclear Weapons regime stands....

"we, the guys who have already got Nukes, can keep them and even make more. Oh yeah, and our mates like Israel as well, who pretend they don't have them but make sure everyone knows damn well they do - well they can keep 'em too, being our mates'n'all.
But YOU f*ckers - who didn't manage to get hold of them by the start of the Cold War - well that's just tough - you CAN'T have them and we'll beat you if you try. And not just beat you - shame you and call you terrorist-lovers and everything."

...well this kind of problem is not going to go away. "Nuclear Disarmament starts at home!"

2006-02-14T13:53:00.000+02:00

Operating system news, in one of the projects I am involved with we are switching over from one version of Linux (Mandriva, formerly Mandrake), to another - Ubuntu.

Why? Well, Mandrake was never perfectly smooth around the edges, especially when it came to upgrades. And the last upgrade was a dreadful experience and left the guinea-pig PC in question limping along with several annoying problems that the previous version didn't have. To finish off the "push" factors, Mandriva's customer support is terrible - it seems they have spent all their energy on merging Mandrake (France) and Conectiva (Brazil), and sending endless promotional emails instead of listening to their customers. I am a paid-up member of their "club", for about USD80 a year, but my several posts and emails asking for help went unanswered.

So we went for Ubuntu as a putative replacement, and it seems to be running along nicely so we are going to roll it out to several other machines, including a spyware-crippled windows box. What were the pull factors? Firstly, it aims to be an easy-to-install version - something which Mandriva claimed but never quite acheived in my view (an install which switches off your network card for no reason does not count in my book!). Secondly, it has received a lot of good crits. Thirdly, it is made round the corner in South Africa, which means there are quite a lot of Ubuntu-savvy people just across the border.

2006-01-25T12:44:00.000+02:00

An online Amnesty International petition which you should all sign: Million Faces .

It aims to help pressure the UN to control the arms trade, a multibillion dollar a year business in which money flows one way and death the other. There is a lot of noise these days about Weapons of Mass Destruction, but in Africa the weapons which really destroy lives are small arms: AK47s, grenade launchers, machine guns and pistols. With arms like these, even small armed groups can kill, rob, rape and burn villages over a wide area.

This was Mozambique's experience - in the "civil war" from about 1976-92, when the racist governments of Rhodesia and then South Africa promoted a vicious destabilization guerrilla war inside Moz's borders, the estimated death toll was 1 million, almost all civilians. As well as that, perhaps 4 million people displaced internally and externally - out of a population of 12 million by the end of the war. Remember that "internally displaced" in a country which is 3000km long and has 20 different ethnic groups, 4 major river basins and 3 climatic zones, means that for many people, they ended up in what was effectively another world to the one they grew up in. Many people have never gone back to their home areas.

And most of this was done by a very small number of men - the combined armed forces of both sides numbered less than 50,000 at the end of the war. How could they cause such devastation? Not with planes, tanks or nuclear bombs, but with small arms which allowed them to dominate whole areas. An AK47 is enough if the other guy only has a spear - and he is a farmer while you are a full-time bandit. The Akiro Kurosawa film 'Seven Samurai' (the original, not the somewhat cheesy American version) captures the desperation of the peasants in this situation. Although in Mozambique there were rarely such happy endings as in that film.

So, please sign the petition.

2006-01-20T01:29:00.000+02:00

Latest news: my favourite brother has put up his own blog!
And its already got more photos than my one!
Sans further ado, aqui está: KiltedCapoeirista

2006-01-12T12:37:00.000+02:00

An interesting follow-up to the Cahora Bassa dam story. I just read a long article in the Mozambican monthly "Mais", by a guy who was "close to" the negotiations. He points out that the current president of Moz (Guebuza) should not get all the credit - his predecessor (Chissano) did a lot of the ground work. In fact, he says that a few years ago, the deal was effectively closed by Chissano and the then portuguese PM. As a matter of courtesy, and following portuguese political tradition, they then presented the deal "behind closed doors" to the leader of the opposition, and he indicated that his party would not oppose it.

...but - the very next morning he hit the headlines, denouncing the deal as a "sellout" of portuguese national heritage, etc. etc. The deal collapsed and lay where it fell, during the next few years of turmoil in portuguese politics. In fact, this leader of the opposition not long afterwards got into the PM's office himself, in part helped by the "political football" of the Cahora Bassa incident.

The interesting thing is, who was this man who played so fast and loose? None other than Manuel Durão Barroso, the man who "jumped ship" after less than a year in the PM's job, for greener pastures as President of the European Commission. Not such a trustworthy fellow, you might think. Certainly, if you look at his record, he is notvery popular for the following people:

the European Parliament for trying to force a very unpopular set of candidates on them for commissioners. Ultimately they gave him a bloody nose.
the portuguese, for jumping ship just when the country needed clear leadership. He had forced through many unpopular measures but didn't stick around to see if they worked.
the mozambicans, for ruining a deal they had tried so long to sort out - the country's largest infrastructure investment

2006-01-12T12:19:00.000+02:00

Whey-hey! Was just looking at my online bank statement for my account here with Standard Bank (subsidiary of the S.A.-based global bank), and I found out that on one day in December I got a credit of almost USD65,000! Nice. Except that they took it back out the same day - without my permission for the debit, or informing me or apologising or anything.

After checking with some colleagues, they also had the same phenomenon! Luckily for them banking laws in Moz are fairly lax and allow them to take the piss - I can't imagine them getting away scot-free like this in the U.K. or even in S.A! Anyway, I'll be asking them for an explanation and if it ain't good I'll move my squarillions to another bank.

...update just phoned them up, they said it was a bank error affected over 200 accounts! Which works out at over USD13million in total - in a bank which is only the 3rd largest in a country which has an annual GDP of about USD5billion. So that must have caused them a wee liquidity problem then.

More worrying, is the rumour that they are in line to buy out a majority stake in the BIM, the country's largest commercial bank, which already has an over-dominant position in the marketplace. How can they manage an extra 80,000 customers if they can't even handle the accounts for the ones they've got!?

2006-01-04T12:47:00.000+02:00

Interesting developments in the story of Craig Murray, the former British Diplomat who was sacked for speaking up about human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, the country where the Foreign & Commonwealth Office had posted him. You have to wonder why anyone who gave a shit about human rights would get a job at the FCO, one of the most unreconstructed parts of the British state, and bastion through the centuries of endless dirty wars, covert ops, hush ups, blind eyes and back-handers, etc.

He has apparently been ruffling a lot of feathers by spreading his arguments around via various blogs - most importantly, some letters which the UK government has tried to prevent the publication of, as they show the FCO's senior staff not tacitly but openly condoning the use of torture to gain evidence. More on the story...

On a separate note, but still running with the FCO theme, they are proving to be rather incompetent when it comes to renewing my colleague's passport. He handed in all the documentation to the High Commission in Maputo in early November, and paid extra to get the "fast" service. 2 months have now passed, and the Comission staff say they have no idea where his process "is at". A pity as 2 days from now he will be effectively illegal. Also embarassing when you compare it to our Brazilian colleagues - their embassy emits passports directly within 5 days, for less money!

It appears that the bottleneck is caused by a "rationalization" carried out a few years ago - all passports in the Southern African region are now processed in South Africa, not in individual countries. This means your application documents have to be sent by Diplomatic Bag to London, then out again by Bag to Pretoria. A round trip of about 20,000km just to submit the application when in fact Pretoria is less than 600km from Maputo! Although it might seem more "businesslike" to centralize operations like this, it certainly does not help "UK plc" - my colleague, who regularly sends money back home, is effectively an exporter of services for the UK economy - but at least the FCO is hindering rather than helping in this case.

2005-12-31T12:00:00.000+02:00

We have 5 more minutes before we leave, so here are some "best of-worst of" awards for 2005:

Hooray for:

The Spring framework for J2EE development. There are so many "frameworks" in the Java world, each one claiming to be better than the last, but this one really is well-thought out, consistent, well-documented, and above all, HELPFUL to the developer. I also recommend the book by Rod Johnson who "founded" this framework: "J2EE without EJB" - despite him looking awfully foppish on the front-cover photo, he explodes a lot of myths pumped out by the Sun marketing machine over the last 5 years, and really points out that sometimes, the Emperor's new clothes are so heavy that they prevent him from moving.

The President of Mozambique for finally striking a deal to bring the Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambeze, this country's biggest single infrastructure asset, into Mozambican hands. And secondarily for getting the actual building of the new bridge over that same huge river, underway. These are projects his predecessor faffed about at for 15 years without success

Boo too:

The WTO Ministerial Negotiations in Hong Kong, for keeping the bullshit "Doha Declaration" alive, with big concessions made by developing countries in return for a few more half-promises by the big boys. The rich countries are only storing up trouble for themselves, if you look at the "Sine Wave" of WTO Ministerials since the organization was founded in 1994, they alternate "good-bad-good-bad". This year was a "good" one, but it was still pretty terrible for the rich hypocrites (the G7, basically). So 2007 is going to be a blinder, just wait for it!

The Mozambican Police and Justice systems, for being the most corrupt institutions out of a very corrupt state, according to a national survey in 2004, which was only released by the government recently after they edited out the worst bits. My personal experience and that of everyone I know here, foreign or moz, bears out these results. The police are SICKENING. And the justice system - well as long as the man who ordered the death of Carlos Cardoso walks free (I sat two tables away from him at a society wedding last month!), then there ain't much else to say!

2005-12-31T11:38:00.000+02:00

We are just off to Swaziland, to spend the long hogmanay weekend with an old friend from "darn sahf" who is touring South Africa. Was at work till 11pm last night helping with "closing off the year" activities so it is nice to get away. It has been rather cold the last few days, Swazi may be colder still. Certainly not a very festive feeling so far, but not bad either. Happy New Year to everyone!

2005-12-28T17:12:00.000+02:00

Der classe ist im der glasse! For all readers who are A-Team fans, check out this fabuloso site: http://members.aol.com/immurdoc/a-team/writestuff.htm

2005-12-07T12:18:00.000+02:00

A few foties from Darth's goodbye party. As I write, he is winging his way across the Atlantic. Maybe a turnup for the books - although he has left behind him a great collection of small and medium-sized demons of various nationalities.

We had to dress formally, as the Finance Minister was supposed to come, and nowadays my only formal gear is the Kilt. In fact his Excellency didn't show, but everyone wanted a photo with me anyway. Nina couldn't come as better halves weren't invited, so I have included a photo of her + me + kilt for good measure...

2005-11-08T16:00:00.000+02:00

Interestingly enough, the following week was crime central for me and pretty much everyone I know...
- a guy came to my house one morning while I was at work and tricked my maid into letting him in - he said he was from the Electricity Company. He beat her up, tied her up, threw her in a cupboard and stole anything light and valuable from my flat. Luckily nothing irreplaceable, and she has no bones broken.
- a colleague of mine got home to find that would-be robbers had drilled a hole through one of his front-door padlocks. Luckily they had been disturbed before getting through the second padlock.
- two other colleagues had their cellphones stolen while out walking - one at knifepoint, the other at gunpoint
- another colleague's wife was robbed of everthing she was carrying, at knifepoint
- another, newly-arrived colleague went out to a club with her digital camera. Bit stupid I agree. Her handbag was soon relieved of this heavy burden, despite never leaving her shoulder.
- robbers in Nina's neighbourhood (which is clustered around a large Police Station!) came to a house to rob its building materials - the owners were building an extension. They tied up the owners' 13-year-old daughter so tightly that her circulation was cut off. She died before the neighbours could get her to a hospital.

As Nina says "if the police don't do something soon, the population will start killing thieves again" - referring to the fact that up until about 6 years ago, anyone caught stealing in her area was automatically given a tyre-necklace, no questions asked. In fact, the families in her area did try and form an officially-sanctioned neighbourhood watch organization - but it all came to nothing because the Council wouldn't authorise them to carry weapons - the State is TERRIFIED of letting any countervailing power grow up - even if it is not able to prevent the most basic of violent crimes in the capital city.

2005-10-19T09:40:00.000+02:00

Another contrast that I think illustrates well the flavour of life in Maputo today. In Khongolote, a newly-sprung up settlement on the outskirts of Maputo, the TV News showed the body of a young man, stripped to the waist, lying face down amidst the maize stalks by the side of the main road. He had tried to steal a woman's cellphone but she had managed to shout for help. The locals caught him and simply beat him to death. The police, or any other representative of state power, had still not come to even look at the body by the time the camera crews arrived the next morning. When they interviewed some locals, a young housewife put the situation very clearly:
"Every week, people are attacked by gangs here who rob their cellphones and money. There are no lights here, so at night when people get off the bus and walk home they are easy targets. The gangs beat them and hack them with machetes. The police never come." She then indicated the body with a flick of her eyes, and you could quite understand why she had no sympathy for the ex-mugger. Behind her, people went about their daily business as usual, passing the body without so much as a glance.
The first elements of contrast are that: people are poor, but they CAN afford cellphones. They are now so cheap and ubiquitous that even people living here have them. As well as this, the TV crews can arrive on the scene within hours of the incident, with high-quality cameras, and have the freedom to interview the locals. 10 years ago this would not have been permitted. Finally, the TV crews arrived but the police didn't. They weren't there to stop the crime, nor did they come to clean up after it. And remember, all this is on the outskirts of the capital, within reach of a tarmac road!.

Right here is the contrast: the same weekend, we went to an open-air concert by a famous Mozambican guitarist, Jimmy Dludlu. It was held in the grounds of a swimming pool which sits just outside the boundary of Maputo City proper, with a temporary stage. The thing is, the fields outside the gig were PACKED with cars. Normally, they are just an abandoned wasteground but that night it was full of shiny 4x4s and not-so-shiny bangers. Also swarming with police - beat cops and traffic goats (goats because they eat so many bribes). So a concert for middle-class up-and-comers gets heavy state protection - mainly because half the audience are the sons of the elite.

2005-09-17T22:13:00.000+02:00

Posting on a quiet saturday night. There is now almost ideal weather here: hot and sunny in the day, cool at night. Only down side is it is v. windy so no-one goes out much. Soon it will be hot and steamy all day long...

This post is about contradictions between word and deed, promises and actions - which, when they are intentional, we call hypocrisy.

First off is the Mozambican state. Heinously, turgidly corrupt in pretty much every corner, and at every level (but most of all at the top), a new hope was breathed through the country when the new President took power at the beginning of 2005, on a strongly anti-corruption platform. I and many Mozambican commentators were sceptical - how could a guy straight from the heart of the single-party old guard, who was chosen by them as the "prince-in-waiting" to the previous president over reformist candidates, suddenly turn and cut off the hands that fed him? Not to mention that he does very well himself, with his many business interests, out of his exalted position.

Well, sad to say that the results are as we feared. Despite a lot of rhetoric and some public excoriations of low and medium-level officials, the big fish who EVERYONE KNOWS are up to their necks in shit, have been left basically untouched. That is, those Ministers, Senior Civil Servants and high heejins in the party who have, by hook and crook, reached the rank which Mozambicans call "The Untouchables", go on just as before. At the very worst they will be retired from their main jobs and given a slightly less-prominent post elsewhere in the Nomenklatura.

But the worst happened just this week. In a classic piece of doublethink, the government "upgraded" the national Anti-Corruption Unit to a a Cabinet-level Agency, supposedly to "strengthen the fight against corruption. Days later, they announced that with the change in name would come a change in management. Out went the old director, a crusading judge famed as an "iron lady" for opening cases even against untouchables. In came a lickspittle apparatchik, famed only for "burying" three of the country's most famous cases of blatant corruption and political murder, so that they never got to court.

No-one was fooled, of course - but NO-ONE can do anything. To all intents and purposes, Moz is still a one-party state, and the only people who count outside the party - the IMF, World Bank, and the Aid departments of the industrialized world - don't give a sh*t about corruption because Moz is a poster child for bending over and taking their Macroeconomic reform just as its told. I

OK, second on the list is the recent UN super-summit, billed by many as "make or break" for this sucessor to the ill-fated League of Nations. If you read this summary by the BBC of what did and didn't get agreed, you can see that pretty much every "tough" question was just dingied by the big players. Especially the Big Player of A. No surprises there then.

Finally, something a lot of people have been asking me about: the G8 summit. Click here for a great little document by WDM (World Development Movement, a campaigning group I was in for a long time until I jumped off to Moz), comparing the big headlines which were recently spun at the end of the conference, to the nitty gritty details. Not very happy reading, except for the debt cancellation. But even that is overshadowed by the failure to end "conditionality" - the terrible practice whereby countries who want to get rid of an immediate problem (debt) have to mortgage their long-term future by adopting detrimental economic and social policies, especially in the area of industrial policy (aka you can't have one, multinationals will build all the factories) and trade policy (aka you can't have one, multinationals will sell you everything).

2005-09-09T11:05:00.000+02:00

I am well but generally pretty knackered. This is a result of taking on an "extra, extra" job of teaching a one-semester course in Internet Applications and Services to a final-year class at one of the Universities in Maputo. It has two especially knackering aspects:

the huge amount of preparation involved. I have 2 x 2-hour classes a week, for 15 weeks. In total, somewhat under 60 hours of contact time when you subtract breaks and delays etc. Not really much time to teach something I started learning in 1995 and only felt solid in by 1999.
the classes start at 08.10 which means getting up at 06.50 two days a week. This was the only slot I could do which would not cause too much disruption to my main job at UTRAFE. It seems strange that in 1994, when I was signing up for my second-year classes at Edinburgh Uni, I wanted to to Economics, but decided against it because the lectures started at 9am and I knew I would just miss almost all of them by sleeping in.

As an aside, Neill pointed out an interesting first (apparently) for Scotland, being the first place to teach "Rails", the latest must-have technology of the web programming world, on an undergraduate course. See here for the original post. The blogger, one of the key boosters of Ruby (the programming language which underlies Rails), asks "Is anyone else out there teaching Rails?". By coincidence, only yesterday I mentioned it in a lecture, as a popular alternative to the technology I will be teaching on the course, which is JSP (based on Java as the underlying programming language, which fits with the other courses in my University).

JSP does have certain deficiencies as a beginner's tool for web-programming. Perhaps next year, if I have enough time to learn it properly myself, I could consider integrating Rails in the course.

2005-08-16T12:41:00.000+02:00

Now, here are a few more photos from this year's backlog. The common theme is the dodginess of my beard. In order:

Me and Angelo about to run: I put this so you can see the running track in the background. It was here, on another night, that my documents etc. were robbed from the car
Me after running
Me and Nina by the sea

2005-08-16T12:32:00.000+02:00

Interesting blog by one of the key people on the Mozilla project (born out of Netscape, who now make the almost-famous Firefox browser). She is especially good on:

dearth of women in Open Source projects (seems even worse than in general IT)
need for a more structured approach to cooperation (not just relying on goodwill)
need to understand better the interrelation between Open Source projects and the commercial world (after all, many Open Source programmers have a day job)

2005-08-09T07:53:00.000+02:00

Here are some more pics, see I'm getting better. From top to bottom...
- some Glaswegianos visitando...
- Nina showing the new car: 1993 Toyota Mark II, 2.0l, 6 cylinders, automatic gearbox, 205mm wheels....
- Nina showing new car again, this time spot missing indicator light, nicked 3 days after I bought it. Will go to market and buy it back, probably sourced from the guy who stole it....

2005-07-08T17:22:00.000+02:00

Great news about the Software Patents Directive (aka directive on computer-implemented inventions). It has been overwhelmingly rejected by the European Parliament, and the Comission having finally learned its lesson after 4 years of ignoring democratically-elected representatives, has no plans to try and resurrect it.

2005-07-08T17:06:00.000+02:00

Here is a photo of my birthday cake being waited for...

...and approved...

2005-07-06T02:20:00.000+02:00

Have just read Tini´s latest blog update which has shamed me into trying to keep up. As I can�t safely talk about work, except in cryptic allegorical ways, here is a an anecdote about trying to recover my car ownership papers. I had not thought this was so important, since they were robbed out my car boot a month ago (I was running on the city track). But on Sunday night, coming back tired from visiting Nina�s friend who has just had a baby in the smallest, most hard-to-get-to "Maternity Hospital" I have ever seen, I was shaken down by a police roadblock in a very unpleasant fashion. My only crime was having no docs: my car is in good nick, I wasn´t speeding or drinking or anything, but the bloodsucking f*ckers gave me a nice "fine". I have NEVER seen or heard any of them catch, or even try to catch, a criminal. Maputans joke that if anyone tough-looking starts making trouble, the police are the first to dissappear round a corner.

Yes, they are underpaid and see their bosses driving around in 4x4s and expropriating state assets on a regular basis, but they are definitely the ugliest face of the corruption that has already rotted the state to the core and is spreading its putrid tentacles through society as the country "modernises". Anyway, rant over, here is "Cameron´s Guide to Recovering Car Docs in Moz". Times include transport to/from relevant public service building. Each step happened at least one day after the previous, just to give you an idea.

Visit Maputo II Police Station to report crime which tells me to go to Maputo I - 30 mins
Visit Maputo I to report crime and collect tiny hand-written chit. NOTE: the sub-inspector who took down my statement was great, the only decent copper I have encountered in 2 years here - hope he gets promoted - 1hr 30
Visit Maputo CID to request official crime report, but not ready yet - 1 hr
Visit Maputo CID to request report - told its ready but to get a copy of it I must formally request it. Nice bored lady at PIC hammers out a request letter (for free!!! wow) on pre-WWII typewriter, which I sign. - 1 hr 30
Visit Maputo CID to request report - not ready yet but at least I find the exact office where I must collect it - 1 hr
Visit Maputo CID, finally collect my report. I then ask the Detective, in my most innocent dumb-foreigner voice (so as not to cause offence), what the prospects are for catching the Artful Dodgers who broke into my car, as by all accounts they are well-known. He just looks at me like I have no marbles, so I leave it at that - 1 hr 30
Visit Maputo Vehicle Registry, wait in queue to buy official form, only to be told that I first have to visit the Matola Vehicle Agency to get some other document. Matola, a satellite city of Maputo, is the capital of Maputo Province. Its about as far out as Kirkintilloch compared to Glasgow.

This is where I had got to when I first wrote this post. Now I am finally on the home strait, see actual details below.

So all that remains is...
16. Go back there "10 days" later to pick up my ownership document.

2005-06-25T12:42:00.000+02:00

It is the Mozambican day of Independence - in fact the 30th Anniversary - but we are going to a Brazilian traditional festival where everyone has to dress up as a stereotypical peasant from the Northeast. I am improvising with a Kilt and Nina is going to wear capulanas (aka Kikoyis/traditional cotton wraps), since that is what Moz peasants wear.

The cold weather is hanging on unexpectedly long (also started unexpectedly late, so fair dos). For the first time since I�m here I found myself actually wanting the heat to come back, even though I know that within days of its appearance I�ll be cursing the sweltering impossibility of sleep and bedding down on the verandah even if it means succumbing to the mosquitoes.

2005-06-13T10:48:00.000+02:00

An interesting change of heart: 'Freedom fries' lawmaker's U-turn

2005-05-22T11:09:00.000+02:00

Here is an interesting article about how Amazon is getting incredibly expensive for out-of-print and hard-to-find books:Minimum Amazon Shipping Costs

2005-05-21T15:38:00.000+02:00

On the eternal story of the photos, Neill has posted some great ones at his flickr site, just look at: http://flickr.com/photos/neillzero/

2005-05-21T13:56:00.000+02:00

Once again I am writing here at the window on a saturday afternoon, the sun coming past the window and the lazy traffic swishing by on 24 de Julho below. A pity that the sun barely lasts till 6pm these winter months.

2005-05-20T18:10:00.000+02:00

Wow the last few weeks have passed very quickly, no blogging once again. Am about to go home having everything once again under control only at 6.15pm on a friday. Although this week things weren't helped by having to take two days off to visit Nelspruit and get a visa. Happily, once there, it was 10 times easier to get a 6-month visa than in the headquarters of Migration Affairs here in Maputo. Obviously.

Although the visa requires me to go out of Moz at least once a month. Which, as Nina gleefully pointed out, means we will probably have to make shopping trips to Nelspruit every month. Not if I can help it. But she has a point - the only country which is easy for her to visit is SA, as they recently lifted the previously cumbersome visa restrictions for Mozzers entering as tourists. Swaziland, Malawi etc are still much more complicated...

2005-04-30T17:47:00.000+02:00

Here is a link to the EuroLinux page, one of the key partners in the movement to save the European Union from becoming a place where it is impossible to legally develop or consult about software without being in a big company with a massive legal department. I`ll post more about the background soon, but basically the several-year long struggle will come to crisis point in May. The European Commission, backed by most EU member governments, is pushing a new Directive which will allow the patenting of, not just specific software programs, but the algorithms and logic which they implement. In other words, a patent on good ideas and common sense. The IT industry already suffers from a chronic lack of this - now it will become illegal as well. Despite a massive, sustained, and well-researched movement by small businesses and tens of thousands of software professionals (like me) against this movement, the Commission, as is its wont, wants to carry on regardless. Last month the European Parliament (the only directly-elected part of the three-part EU government, and the weakest!) rejected the Directive in its draft form, proposing several sensible amendments. The Commission does not want to accept this, and in May will propose the Directive again. This second time, only a full majority of all members of the Europarl will be enough to stop the crazy law getting through.
Those readers who think this is just a bunch of bearded geeks getting their knickers in a knot should think again. For instance, there has been a lot of noise in the press over the last 2 years about low-end middle class jobs in data processing, IT and other back-office functions being shipped off to India etc. Well India will be laughing if the EU passes this directive, as it will just add one more comparative advantage to the Indian IT industry - in this case, the ability to think about the customer`s business, and come up with a reasonable solution, without having to worry that Cap Gemini Ernst & Young came up with something vaguely similar a few years back and managed to patent it. If you want to know more, have a look at this site: http://www.eurolinux.org/

2005-04-28T14:09:00.000+02:00

"Unreasonable Veto" was the phrase Mr. A(rrogant) Blair used to undermine the UN Security Council veto system which has worked for over 40 years. Now it's come back to haunt him: look at this leaked transcript of the the attorney general's legal advice about the decision to go to war on Iraq. Although the most publicised part of this leak has been paras 26-30 which show that the UK Govt's chief legal adviser had serious doubts about any move to war based purely on UN Resolution 1441, the last para (31, go to the bottom of the page), shows that he also politely but firmly pointed out that Blair was talking shit when he suggested that the US and UK had the right to ignore any veto by a permanent member of the security council, however 'unreasonable'.

2005-04-24T14:55:00.000+02:00

My first post using a new little program I have written to let me post directly from a window on my computer without going via the v.v. slow blogger web interface.

Regular readers will be pleased to know that this is the first part of a program which will make it easy for me to add pictures to the blog, without all the current hassle, but also without having to sign up to Flickr or that kind-a-stuff.

2005-04-23T20:05:00.000+02:00

Galinya dji dozi miu

This was the title of a recent op-ed piece about the effects of globalization on the Mozambican chicken-rearing industry. The four words really say it all - they are a literal translation of ´A Chicken for 12,000 meticais´, as said in a heavy Brazilian accent. The article bemoans the fact that, since import restrictions were loosened, the local market has been flooded with incredibly cheap frozen chickens from Brazil. The writer asks ´how can the wholesale price be so low (about 60 US cents) when they have to raise, slaughter, pluck, package, freeze the chickens and then ship them 5000 kilometres across to here?´. Its a good question, and the writer suspects that the ´galinhas´ arriving in Maputo are of a quality that would never be allowed into Europe.

Quite apart from the fact that the surge of imports is slaying yet another local agricultural industry. The author wryly notes that if the trend ever expanded to ducks it would be a different story, as the new president himself, who somehow became very wealthy over the last 15 years, famously attributes his success to his duck farms.

Language note: the title phrase in ´proper´ portuguese would be written:
galinha de doze mil
...which in Mozambican accent would be pronounced
galinya di dozi mil

2005-04-22T00:33:00.000+02:00

Got in the house half-drunk this fine night and rocked through to the kitchen seeking a glass of water. Into the cup it sloshed, as I raised it to my lips I noticed three brave ants still a-crawlin´ round the rim. How they got there I don´t know the glass I took straight from the washrack, and now the weather is colder anyway, they are supposed to disappear gracefully for a few months. I drank it anyway.

2005-04-12T23:58:00.000+02:00

Here is a depressing note from a guy who spent over two years, along with his mate, developing a piece of Open Source software. http://www.etomite.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=2209 Eventually the application got really popular and ´took off´. The author eventually decided to create a new, commercially-licensed application from scratch, leaving the original Open Source application to the community. But the response he received from some of his users was so virulent that he ended up closing down the project completely.

In non-software terms, this would be like the owner of a free soup-kitchen setting up a café on the same street with the intention of handing the kitchen over to one of the employees. But then he sees the original soup-kitchen burnt down by his enraged former customers. Not necessarily a great explanation but anyway, it reinforces my belief that Microsoft doesn´t have to panic about the ´Open Source Threat´ just yet, there are too many real human organizational questions to be worked out bit by bit first. That said, I think in 50 years time Microsoft will just be a memory.

2005-03-13T13:06:00.000+02:00

Finally getting round to post something more here. Spent yesterday and today morning reading all the papers, trying to get a sense of whether the new president is showing signs of doing something good. Certainly some Ministries have been shaken up, but whether this is genuinely needed or just throwing out the old guy´s cronies and putting in your own its too early to say.

As for corruption, one of the provincial governors made a surprise visit to a bunch of Transport Police (the notorious white-shirted bloodsuckers who line the main roads and insist on their cut from public transport, private cars and South African tourist alike). He gave them a lecture that their games would have to stop. I imagine quite a few bricked it but only time will tell if they do what he say.

Meanwhile the never-ending round of more organized, high-level corruption cases which the newspapers manage to dig out continues. Up to now, they are all things which happened under the old administration but it is sad to see that the new guys all seem to share the same arrogant attitude towards the media as their predecessors. Whenever they are asked to put their side of the story, they always come back with one of 3 responses:

I´ve got nothing to say, go away
Its not my brief to talk about this, speak to [INSERT LETHARGIC STATE ORGAN HERE]
I have just come back from holiday and I don´t know anything about this subject

Option 3 is a Moz classic but it is used a lot, especially by spin doctors, which is dissappointing as its their JOB to know what´s going on.

Anyway enough about politics, here is a quick precis of my party, in the style of a military briefing (at least how Tom Clancy makes them seem as I have never been in the military):

2000 hrs - Cameron, Nina et al. arrive to setup. Previous occupants dinner party still in full swing, although they´re supposed to be out by now
2100 hrs - Omar arrives, as do the speakers. Enough of the previouses leave to allow us to start setting up. Drunken previous runs through our patch and into one of our the massive speakers our DJ has setup, knocking it into flowerbed, then collapse asleep on the floor. Cameron asks Maitre d´ to kick him out before guests start arriving.
2200 hrs - food and drink finally setup as last of previouses leave.
2230 hrs - people start arriving (official start time was only 2100 so not bad!). Brazilians all strip off to speedos and jump in swimming pool, Mozs are more reticent
2245 - rains for a bit but soon stops, most people just keep on dancing
2300 - Maitre d´ tells Cameron I have to pay extra to use swimming pool. Cameron tells him to ´get te´ as this is not what was agreed. We eventually settle on paying half the normal price.
2400 - everyone gets drunker, and at Omar & Cameron´s insistence, strips to bikinis. Mozambicans forget earlier reticence and jump in pool, some of them spending the next 3 hours there chatting each other up.
0015 - beer runs out and Cameron drives off to night market to fetch more crates (REPEAT EVERY HOUR)
0030 - Cameron throws Edgar in the pool. Youssouf throws Cameron in pool. Youssouf throws Gabriel in pool. Cameron + Gabriel throw Youssouf in pool and jump on top of him. (REPEAT EVERY 10 MINS WITH DIFFERENT NAMES).
0100 - finally we cut the cake etc.
0230 - Maitre d´ tells Cameron we have to close up and leave at 0300. Cameron begs to disagree since that was not the deal when he signed the hire agreement. Eventually 0400 is agreed as a compromise.
0300 - servant comes up to Cameron saying that some randoms are beating them and trying to steal all the beer. Sure enough, they are not our guests but the drunken previous from 2100 and his mate. Cameron asks them to leave politely but is threatened in response. Cameron + judo team wrestle, shove carry and kick the previouses up the path and out the gate, while Maitre d´ and Security Guards mysteriously make themselves scarce.
0310 - outside the gate, previouses continue to threaten until one of the servants whose tooth they knocked jumps on one and punches his head into pavement
0311 - we pull servant off previous
0312 - previous stupidly starts fighting again
0313 -we let servant back onto previous, whose head meets pavement again
0314 - we pull servant off previous and previous, this time with my arm round his throat less gently than before, finally calms down
0317 - Maitre d´ finally reappears and reluctantly takes charge of situation so we can go back to party
0430 - all booze has finally and definitively been drunk, the girls have put their clothes back and we can close up. Colin who is ridiculously pissed is fished out the pool 3 times and eventually dissappears (we learned later that Marco as he was driving away remembered to turn back and get him).
0500 - Cameron, Nina, Neill and Bia carry 8kg of leftover food into our kitchen and collapse asleep

Right now I am going to run...

2005-02-28T15:31:00.000+02:00

Just a quick note to say a big THANKYOU to everyone who sent me a birthday email. I am STILL reading through them all. I am going to reply to each one separately, as I know everyone doesn't read the blog so I need to go back to oh-so-1990s communications like actual direct emails.

Later on will post about my party, was a fairly eventful affair involving drink, bikinis, far too much food, also of course music, fighting and dance. For the moment you can see some photos here - see if you can spot me...

Fortes family in Africa

2005-02-19T19:43:00.000+02:00

Churrasco blogging

Writing this on Georgia's computer as we try and figure out how to change the date which appears on a post. Neill will turn up soon and I'm sure he'll know, being blogtastic'n'all.

2005-02-14T14:16:00.000+02:00

A visit to Namaacha.
Last weekend Nina and I had planned to visit sunny Xai-Xai by the sea. But after quite a lot of beers (mainly drunk by me) on Friday night, we woke up on saturday morn and balked at the 3+ hours on ropey roads. So we ended up visiting Namaacha instead, which turned out great.

It is right at the border with Swaziland, on top of some low mountains so the temperature is cooler and even almost cold at night. We had a whole apparently 3-star hotel to ourselves. Someone has built this huge modern hotel there, but from the main road it is almost impossible to find. We did not complain as the rooms were still new and we effectively had our own private swimming pool. The food was terrible, however - my ´sirloin´ was in fact a tough old boot - only differing from the other steaks on the menu in terms of price.

Anyway we walked around the paths which criss-cross the hillside between the trees (mainly still native, with Eucalyptus creeping in here and there). At one point we came across the local store and tiptoed in to buy toothpaste which we had forgotten. I say tiptoed because the whole floor was covered with local kids gawk-eyed at the telly on the edge of the counter. The occasion was saturday´s episode of ´Novela da Preta´ (lit. ´The Black girl´s soap´). This is the latest Brazilian megasoap to hit Moz, the official name is ´Passion of a Woman´ or Passion of somethingorother but here it is universally known as ´Preta´, after the star. She is black which is a rarety in these soaps, generally full of rich, upper-class, and very white brazilians. Just to make sure you notice, the scriptwriters also named her character ´Black´ (Preta). In fact she mainly seems to rush around weeping a lot, but whatever the reason, this soap is ´unmissable´ here.

All this meant that once I reached the counter I had to stretch around the telly screen to avoid scowls from the locals, as I attempted to converse with the half-asleep shopkeeper. Eventually I got my colgate, and was able to move away from the vicinity of the screen. At this point I was let off, and for a moment the gawk-eyes took in me and Nina, in our city clothes etc. Then we said ´good afternoon´ to which everyone replied very politely, and we dissappeared out the door, leaving them to Preta.

On the way back on sunday, we passed some hills that were so nice I just had to stop the car and walk around on them. Hence a pic of Nina pretending to come out of a mud hut which as any fule kno is where everyone in Africa lives. In fact her feet were being attacked by vicious ants and she was not v. impressed at being asked to pose for photo so she is not pretending very well.

2005-02-07T18:04:00.000+02:00

Ha! Still haven't got round to putting up more photos, too much sun to sit fiddling with knobs on the computer...

2005-01-15T02:52:00.000+02:00

Have finally got round to sorting out photos (without needing a funny chat client thing). Here goes.... It is me and Virgílio, with another colleague, Danilo, giving a helping hand(s) in the background. At least he is not ´looking on´ like managers do in the newspaper whenever a minor celeb opens a new building.

2005-01-15T02:36:00.000+02:00

Writing this on a late hot noisy night - music coming from all directions including my stereo, mixed in with random shouting from the street. I have finally got round to doing some heavy programming without any distractions. Yes may sound the first thing you would want to be distracted from but in my job it pays to keep your hand in, plus its quite relaxing when you can do it at your own pace.

Anyway, before I go any further I just have to tell you about this hilarious (for some people) site I found yesterday. Just to keep you salivating I will meander around the background context for a bit before getting to the point. Not that I ever do that when I´m speaking... Well, I managed to half-knacker a computer the other day in a place I work, while trying to upgrade the operating system, and so when I got home I had a look on the internet to see if anyone else had encountered the same problem. In fact no one else had FOR DEFINITE what I did, but there were several useful suggestions.

The most useful came from a gentleman who was apparently a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Military. His ´signature´ included a link to a website for ´Civilization Fanatics´. For those of you who ain´t herdjit, the game known as ´Civ´ to its fans is a hugely addictive strategy game in which you control the destinies of a people from the dawn of time, through history, to the modern age. Yada yada. Obviously while bashing all other rival nations, states, villages and ´furriners´ in your path. I was never a ´fanatic´ about this game, but I certainly used to play it a fair bit. Several years ago I banned myself as it is just TOO EASY to get HOOKED when you just think you will play it for a SECOND. [Prose momentarily slipped into the style of Stan Lee there].

Still, I was interested enough to follow the link, and have a poke around on the website. Most of it was players chatting to each other, exchanging tips about how to beat the game. Since any game was only dreamed up by.... other humans... that has never really appealed to me. Play it like it is or go do SOMETHING ELSE, dude.

But one bit of the site was a set of ´stories´ by players, narrativizing in a dramatickal fashion the games they had played, turning the countless hours of staring at a screen - ´Just one more turn then I will go to bed/do a pee/get a glass of water/phone that person´ etc. - into something even NON-PLAYAs could read. [Sorry will stop with the capitals now, getting a bit much].

The one I picked at random turned out to be, in a hit-and-miss (but mainly hit) way absolutely hilarious - for anyone who´s ever played the game - it went on for ages, and poked fun at all the stupid frustrations and completely unrealistic things in a way you never thought would actually be possible when the subject was just a ´stupid game´. Basically, it was like playing a whole game in only 2 hours instead of 20, and without the eyestrain either. Here, then, without further ado, is the link:
Out of the Rubble I - The Byzantine Empire

2005-01-07T22:32:00.000+02:00

Just about to fly back from sunny Escocia (joke: it was super-rainy and overcast), where I have spent a couple of weeks of the festive season. Actually it did snow on Christmas day which was nice for Nina. Unfortunately it then melted so we couldn't try snowboarding on the hill or anything.

Am just rearranging all my baggage, and ripping all the packaging off the many consumer electronic items I have bought for myself and colleagues. That way, Moz customs will hopefully not slap me with a 40% import tax.

2004-12-16T01:15:00.000+02:00

Have been meaning to post about the elections for a while but its just too depressing. Apathy was enormous, especially in the urban areas. You-know-who are on the brink of declaring victory with most of the votes counted, but on a 40% turnout its not exactly the best mandate ever. Especially considering that only 10 years ago, in the first ever free and fair elections, turnout was over 80%, as everyone was so keen to consolidate the peace after almost 30 years of various kinds of war and civil strife.

Perhaps worse are the subtler points, as they so that not only did this election change nothing, but that there is almost no discernible improvement towards a genuine multi-party system:
- both major parties kept their stronghold areas and most other people didnt seem to bother voting.
- the current bosses succeeded in effectively disabling voting posts in various areas, all of which, strangely enough, were in opposition strongholds
- none of the smaller parties will even get a seat in parliament on current projections. This is a pity, as these parties are some of the hope for the future, as they actually have policies instead of the mixture of truisms, threats and bland lies which the two main parties throw at each other.
- political campaigns are still based around mass rallies and driving round in trucks full of unemployed people paid to sing your party songs. Kind of Weimar Germany without the trade unions, socialists, communists, or economic infrastructure.
- the disillusionment among the many young, educated Mozambicans I know is MASSIVE. They are quick to point out the problems, the corruption, the mismanagement when among friends, even elaborating very subtle analyses of how the system works. But none of them see any point in voting, because:
a) everyone knows who will win anyway
b) the opposition are a poorly-organized mess who have barely evolved from the murderous scumbags they were as guerrilas into a genuine organized political force

Well, I just found out that this blog comes up in 3rd and 4th place on google if you type U-T-R-A-F-E so I had better not say too much in case the wrong person reads it...

2004-11-26T18:20:00.000+02:00

Great article here about disastrous government IT project - has three good characteristics for a screw-up:

UK Government - especially in Whitehall, no end of dreadful mega-projects
Microsoft Windows - 'nuff said
EDS - bidding for, winning, and trashing huge IT projects for decades now

Meanwhile, the ruling party here has used a more direct route to screw up the running of government services: last week ALL health service staff in Maputo (pop: 2mn) - from doctors to janitors - were obliged to attend a 'special meeting' with the outgoing president that lasted almost a whole day, and was supposed to encourage them to vote 'the right way' in next month's elections. Result: chaos in all hospitals and clinics, appointments trashed, surgical operations cancelled. Corruption is one thing, but this little abuse of state power shocked even mozambicans - how arrogant can you get?

I only hope that for every doctor or nurse who obligingly 'votes correctly' on 1st and 2nd December, several of their disgruntled would-be patients think a bit more clearly about the future of the country.

2004-11-15T09:52:00.000+02:00

Some depressing things which have happened in the last few weeks:

the election campaign suggests that the ruling party has, if anything, only increased in its one-party-state arrogance since the last elections. State funds, organizations and media are continually used to blast the opposition as unreformed armed bandits, and there is almost no debate about policy. Outside the capital, local administrators and police often take it into their own hands to intimidate opposition campaigners, via such means as beatings, confiscation of materials, and even house-searches of villages through which the opposition have passed. Anyone who has accepted things (T-shirts, toothpase, baseball caps) from the opposition is beaten and the items burned.
Meanwhile, billboards across Maputo declare the rulers as 'The Force for Change'. Considering they have ruled the country for almost 30 years, that's a bit rich. When I pointed it out to my girlfriend (who is hardly a political firebrand), she laughed with incredulity and said 'the force of inertia, more like'. Certainly, the president-in-waiting is unlikely to do anything radical, given that he comes right from the heart of the party's old-school centralist wing, and is actually older than the current president!

2004-11-03T11:52:00.000+02:00

While I'm waiting for the dreaded result, here are some stories from Indonesia:

on the way back from Flores (Tini's island), I had to spend a night in Bali, to make sure I didn't miss my flight back from Denpasar due to dodgy local airline timetables. After I had checked into my hotel, I went on a shopping spree in Kuta. This is the touristy area which was bombed in 2002. They have made a big effort in rebuilding it and, at least at night, it looks pretty good. One great advantage over similar streets in Britain is that the road is still very narrow, plus one-way, so it is very pedestrian friendly. It is full of restaurants and shops - from tiny Balinese-run batik shops to massive outlets for global 'surf' brands like Billabong and Quiksilver. Prices for clothes are cheaper than UK and MUCH cheaper than Moz.
Anyway, after several hours of trying to guess which tshirts would fit Nina, and then eating a massive steak (instead of rice, oh joy), I finally was ready to go home. The street is filled with taxis cruising at low speed, so I just walked off the pavement and got into the nearest one. We were soon on the way to Jimbaran, which is south down the peninsula from Kuta. The journey takes a while so we soon got talking. After exchanging some chit-chat in Indonesian the driver cut to the chase. The conversation below was mainly in Indo, with the driver breaking into occasional English for emphasis:

"do you want a woman?"
"no thanks, I'm alright"
"are you sure, I can get you a woman right now"
"no really, I have a girlfriend"
"hmm"

he would not accept defeat, however, and after 5 more mins:

"your girlfriend, is she here?"
"no, she's back at home"
"in Bali?"
"no, in Africa"
"so why don't you let me arrange you a woman, Bali is fully of pretty girls"
"I'm sure it is, but really I don't want a woman"
"I'll find you a really pretty girl and you can jiggy-jiggy all night with her"

this last was in english, and I burst out laughing:

"who told you to say 'jiggy-jiggy'? that's a rubbish word for sex! was it some australian tourist?"

the driver gave a look which was a mixture of grumpy and nonplussed. I suggested a few other, more mainstream words for him to use in future but he refused to come out of his huff. The plus side was that he didn't try any more pimping and we got to the hotel in peaceful silence.

2004-11-03T11:46:00.000+02:00

Am monitoring the US election results on the BBC website. In another window I am looking at xe.com, the currency converter, which refreshes automatically every minute. The more that 'mad monkey dubya' appears to close in on winning a second term, the weaker the dollar gets against the pound (and thus the less my salary is worth back in Scotland).

On the other hand, European stock markets appear to be jumping up at the prospect of a Bush win...

2004-10-29T16:41:00.000+02:00

Back in the land of the prawns.

We have a big day for the project on monday, so things are very hectic for a friday. But mostly things seem to be under control, so lets keep our fingers crossed. It is nice to have an air-conditioned office (unlike poor Tini) but the downside is that once you step out onto the street the heat is FEARSOME.

2004-10-15T13:48:00.000+02:00

Writing this from a (for Ende) cool night on the first day of Ramadan. Even though most Florinese (those from the island of Flores) are Catholics, there are enough Muslims taking time off etc. to set the general flavour of things - i.e. everyone seems to be enjoying their fair share of not working too hard.

Downside was that calls to prayer, and last superbig meals before sunup, started about 2.30 am last night so both me and Tini got hardly any sleep. Hopefully that won't be a problem tonight as am so zonked.

On wednesday I ran in the district's annual 10km road-race. They were delighted to have a 'bule' (white person) running and consequently mentioned me by name in the half-hour speech we had to endure before the race actually started, to cheers (and a few jeers) from my fellow runners. We had already walked 2km in the blistering heat just to get to the start line so said speech was not exactly welcome but anyway.

I managed about 20th out of 150 which wasn't too bad, given that almost all my competitors were between 14 and 20 years old. I felt I could have done better as 10km isn't that far but the heat was STIFLING I just didn't have any energy for the last 4 km. I reckon at least half of the competitors dropped out before halfway and got lifts on trucks or their pals' motorbikes. I didn't mind this until right at the end when I realised that some of them were getting off the vehicular transport just before the home strait and then sprinting the last 500 metres in fine style.

A bit of a con, but the majority of these skullduggers did actually get spotted by the stewards and crossed off the list. Now that I reflect, in fact, I can't complain at all because in my last year at school I cheated on the annual cross-country run and never got caught. I had got hold of a map of the park where we were racing, and worked out a route which shaved off 3km without looking obvious. My master plan almost fell through though, because since I am actually OK at running I ended up coming into the scoreboard, so obviously they had to check up. Mr. Gibb, the P.E. Teacher, phoned me up at home that night because he suspected my scam:

Mr. G - so you ran today Cameron?
Cam (bricking it but maintaining calm voice) - yes, yes, of course
Mr. G - its just that I didn't see you run past my checkpoint
Cam (sweat breaks out on forehead) - yes, I did, I think you were just looking the other way or something
Mr. G - are you sure? Its just that I know your face so I was sure I'd have seen you
Cam - yeah, yeah I'm sure
Mr. G - OK then (hangs up).

I half expected to get done when I came into school the next morning but I think in the lack of hard evidence they decided not to bring me to trial. Quite lucky as I am a pretty shit liar so am surprised he didn't smoke me out.

anyway, my calf muscles are still stiff from this race which I certainly did run all of, now we are going out to eat at a restaurant, it will not doubt be some rice-based-delight.

2004-10-03T01:54:00.000+02:00

Writing this from Singapore Changi Airport at 6.45 local time, they have a very fast free internet access room and since its so early its completely unbusy. Heathrow could take a leaf out of this book (see one of the first posts on this blog about the 5 pounds for 2 minutes on metal keys extravaganza offered by the world's busiest passenger airport).

In a few hours I fly to Bali, then spend a day there and monday morning take a regional flight to Ende.

Quite glad to leave work for a while, the craziness continues. One of the biggest spanners on the project trashed a Sun server last week by accidentally running a command which told it to wipe its own hard disk - an embarassing thing to do even for a Computer Science student but pretty unforgivable for an 'international consultant' who earns 100 times the annual GDP per capita every month (seriously, I worked it out).

To make it worse, the guy tried to hide his mistake by shouting at the infrastructure department to 'fix that server, it just stopped working suddenly while I was running some tests'. Only when they corrected insisted on diagnosing what had gone wrong before jumping at premature solutions, did it emerge that our superbly arrogant colleague had issued the infamous 'rm -rf /' command.

For the non-techies among you, this basically means 'start at the top directory in the filesystem and remove everything under it, recursively....'

2004-09-19T23:41:00.000+02:00

Go to Indonesia in 2 weeks, it is now beginning to sink in. Started moving my stuff out to Neill's flat, we had a delicious 'mixed take away dinner', and then watched the Scorpion King (with proper subtitles this time). Dad not too impressed.

Spent most of the weekend in Bilene (Cam, Nina, Dad, Mat). Very hot, slow drive up with judiciously-spaced timber trucks keeping the average speed down. Then on one stretch, the northbound section of the road, which is being rehabilitated, was potted with regularly-spaced rectangular cutouts, sporting nice sharp tyre-ripping edges. They went on for about 10km, and were cunningly laid out to leave not quite enough passing space on the left, so you basically had to drive down the middle of the road and swerve back into lane if something came along in the other direction. Pity as otherwise the road is in quite good nick. Any transport engineers who want to tell me what the holes are for is welcome.

Spent day on beach and then attempted to have a civilized dinner. Slightly spoiled as I was pretty feverish and had to go to bed early - think a combination of a cold, too much sun plus sheer exhaustion from too much work and family over last two weeks, have just not been getting enough sleep. So last night slept for about 10 hours and that seemed to do the trick, am almost back on form today. It was overcast from about 9 in the morning so the drive back to Maputo was much pleasanter, plus the road almost empty.

Nina lives on the northern outskirts of the city so we stopped by at her house so Dad could 'meet the parents'. Everyone managed to join in the conversation in a mixture of English and Portuguese, with some French and Machope thrown in for good measure. In the background Mozambique got beaten by Angola in an extremely violent 'friendly' - at least 5 players were stretchered off.

Well, I'll try and put the paragraphs in my next post in chronological order...

2004-09-10T13:42:00.000+02:00

Did Bourne ever spin on his heel? That is the question. Those of you who have read the book will know what I mean.... Now Neill has read it but claims that, despite all the other kidney-punching malarkey, JB never once spins like that. Votes please.

2004-09-03T17:24:00.000+02:00

Have added another link to an english-language Moz blog, this time the culprits actually live in Maputo. See Moving to Africa on the left-hand-side. Off to the FACIM now, then having a big party, apropos of nothing much, tomorrow night.

2004-09-03T13:28:00.000+02:00

And then there were three. Luiz has gone - still kind of getting to grips with it mentally as although it has been coming for a while, when he finally decided to go it was very sudden. Can't go into all the details but basically, when the Mozambican State decides it doesn't want you to work here anymore, it can make things very unpleasant. More later.

2004-08-25T16:59:00.000+02:00

A hectic few weeks since the last post, I...

bought my tickets to Indonesia (I'll collect them tomorrow)
bought a PC for the house finally, so I can have something permanently connected to the internet instead of the cracked-screen DHCP madness that is my laptop
spent a wednesday night in Nelspruit, that clean but oh-so-dull town in South Africa, to get my visa renewed, as the Ministry had got themselves into such a mess it was better to sort it out myself
visited South Africa again to spend the weekend at Gilly's farm near Dullstroom. Nina came with me, which I suspect is the first time a non-white person has stayed at that particular farm as a guest (though to be fair I didn't ask). Even though its the New South Africa, its interesting that she's a Mozambican...
discovered that new PC was missing 512Mb of RAM (a lot), have now phoned the supplier and they will bring it round on friday. Their office is just down the road from my house which is handy (and one of the reasons I chose them).
gave UTRAFE an ultimatum: if I don't have a contract by the end of September then i will leave their employ

2004-08-11T18:24:00.000+02:00

Just found a great site set up by DfID (the UK's Overseas Aid Department). It is not very pretty but has some oh-so-true-ringing case studies of real Government IT projects in developing countries that went horribly wrong:
eGovernment for Development - cases of Success and Failure.

2004-08-09T21:58:00.000+02:00

The heat is on! It switched on like a switch 3 days ago and I went from going round the house shutting doors to keep the wind out, to going round the house opening them to let it in. Maybe its only a few degrees but it feels really different. I ran 16km on saturday at 8pm at night. Even though it had been dark for 2 hours it was still sweat-tastic. Mmm I'm sure y'all wanted to hear that.

The elections are coming up, the ruling party will obviously win, but in any case will stop at nothing just to make sure. The donors are still holding up Moz as a poster-child of macroeconomic reform so they will tacitly turn a blind eye to any irregularities so as not to rock the boat. Nina (who works a 48-hour week and spends maybe another 18 hours getting to and from work) managed to go to the electoral registration post in her area FOUR TIMES in the two weeks it was open - and EACH TIME, after she had waited ages in the queue, they stood up and announced "the registration materials have run out and you all have to go home".

So, at the end of all that, she can't vote if she wanted to (and many people her age won't even bother to try they are so turned-off by the massive gravy train which is Moz politics). And she lives in Maputo - imagine what its like in the rural areas! Although on the other hand, the results of the last two elections showed that (as in other sub-saharan african countries) urban voters are less likely to vote for the rulling party, so it may well be intentional on the part of the supposedly-non-party-in-practice-heavily-biased electoral commission.

2004-08-01T15:47:00.000+02:00

Am feeling envious of Tini's blog. Even if I were able to go into the gory details they wouldn't be exciting as almost getting caught in a pig-trap, or walking 20 miles over hills to get anywhere.

Last night I went to a 'Baile de Finalistas' = Finalist's Ball = Prom (in America). In fact it was for the brother of my friend Kika, but she had taken it upon herself to invite loads of her own friends. It was v. glitzy, Nina (girlfriend, we have been going out for long enough for it to be official now) in a ball dress and scary heels, me in Kilt and all the regalia.

After we had managed to find some seats in Kika's family's 'zone' of the massive hall (actually a converted industrial warehouse), I went to get drinks, way down at the far end. The 'bar' was in fact a family operation run out of some hastily-opened drinks crates. Mum fired drinks out in all directions in super-efficient fashion, Daughter sat at the back texting on her cellphone in an unhelfpul fashion, and I was lumped with Son who was useless, despite his ponytail.

While he struggled with complex tasks like opening a bottle, finding glasses, pouring without spilling etc, all the while shouting at Mum for help - sound familiar? - I was engaged in conversation by the Snappily-Dressed-Guy to my right, in English:
SNG: I like your style (eyes kilt etc.)
Cam: thanks very much
SNG: have you got a puss?
Cam: sorry?
SNG: I said, have you got a puss?
Cam: (giving benefit of doubt): oh this? well actually, its not a purse, its called a sporran, really handy actually
SNG: No, no, I mean a PUSS - like a woman!!
Cam: (switching to Portuguese for crystal clarity): you know, if we were in Scotland I'd punch you for that. But since its your country, no problem.
SNG: Hey, no offence, man, I mean, it was just a joke
Cam: mm-hmm, whatever, talk to the hand
SNG: (exit stage left...)

Luckily everyone else thought Scottish attire was enchanting rather than cross-dressing, although one guy enthusiastically said "your outfit is great - where are you from - England??!!". I, along with assembled company, rolled eyes in Unison and someone whispered "escocia".

So it all worked out happily in the end...

2004-08-01T15:26:00.000+02:00

Some more 'hilarious' porn email sender's names. Yahoo's spam filters seem to be on the blinkety-blink, my Inbox had 17 messages today but only 3 of them were real.

Charity Leon
Tabatha Diggs
Edwina Hooker (hmm)
and best of all...
RANDOLPH BARTLEY

How could anyone resist opening a mail from such a distinguished-sounding gentleman as Randolph von Bartlewink?

2004-07-21T12:01:00.000+02:00

"timestamps are exported in an uncertain format, at the mercy of the oracle client installation".

That is a quote from a bug report Neill wrote which I had just had to share (sorry Neill). He always writes very good technical documentation in terms of completeness, but the language is sometimes rather poetic for English-as-second-language speakers. To explain this one to another colleague on the team, I ended up with the 'oracle client installation' (that is, a software program) metaphorised as a big knight in shining armour, with his sword at the through of the poor timestamp who is begging for mercy (a timestamp is a way of representing a particular date and time, in a database).

From time to time I will 'share' more of these classic quotes with you, dear readers.

Meanwhile, the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that I have linked to another blog on the left-hand-side. I don't even know 'John Dutton', but for no apparent reason I did a search for other english-language blogs in Moz and this came up top of the list. Furthermore, he is the same weight as me, has brown hair, wears glasses, and appears not to be a fan of Dubya's foreign policy. However the similarities end there - for instance I am not particularly good at any wheeled sports, plus I have never even tried to carry such a big backpack.

Anyway, from the bits I have read, his blog is an interesting and well-written perspective on Moz so have a read.

2004-07-20T23:21:00.000+02:00

Just read a really good article about the future of Java platform (will Sun corporation keep ahold of it, or will it go Open Source) . It also throws some light on the development of Eclipse which is the principal tool we use for software development here at the Ministry. The article manages to challenge some current myths floating around the programmers of the world without descending to the sort of negative slagging which all too often characterises techie debates.

For the non-techies amongst my no doubt vast readership, here is a quick explanation of why this is important:
1) Java is a programming platform (aka a 'language' plus some other useful bits for making your own programs/systems) which was first created about 10 years ago by the US firm Sun Microsystems. It is the first language I learned and the one I can use with my eyes shut. As such it is one of the principal tools of my trade - even if now I don't write so many lines of it as I used to, I discuss it and explain it to people on my team every day.

2) Because it is free to use, easy to learn, and sturdy, it quickly became very popular, especially on University programming courses. For the first few years, though, it never caught on in any significant commercial projects. One of the reasons for this was that it in comparison to other, more established 'platforms', it lacked supporting tools. For instance I taught myself Java at the beginning of 1998 on my Mum's Windows 95 PC, using MS-DOS 'Edit', a minging program if ever there was one.

3) That all changed with the dotcom boom in the late 90s (oh so far away). Sun, being a firm that grew up around networks, caught on to the potential 'The Interweb, Dude' much earlier than Microsoft, which grew up inside lots of little separate PCs. Therefore Java was readier to build heavy-duty web systems (e.g. online banks, supermarkets, flight-booking) than many other platforms by the time everyone and their dog started blowing money at anyoldloadofwank.com

4) Given the massive demand for Java development work, the tool vendors strapped on their marketing boots (yes, my metaphors are terribly mixed, crivens) and churned out some half-decent tools for programming Java. BUT:
a) They were all OK but none of them were that good if you know what I mean.
b) They all cost a bomb. Like $1-2000 per developer using them, plus $500 a year for 'support'.

5) So things weren't all rosy in the Java world. Meanwhile the Evil Empire was gathering its forces for a fightback on Java's 'home turf' - web systems. After Big Bad Bill Gates famously had his 'road to Damascus' moment in the mid-90s when he 'realised' the internet was 'going to change the universe, etc', he turned his company on a sixpence to take maximum advantage of it. Credit to him. Well in fact he took maximum advantage of people thinking Microsoft knew shit about the internet which is different, so take a bit of credit back off.

6) Anyway the upshot of all this evil empiring was, after a few false starts, the release of what is today called the '.NET framework'. Basically its another programming platform which copied many of the worthwhile innovations of Java and added a few more. BUT there are a few differences:
a) its free to program but not free once you install it in your customer's office
b) it only runs properly on Windows, which is a problem if you want to run it on hefty servers
c) it is spelt in capitals, which is ugly

7) So in the last few years, many big corporate web projects are apparently going the way of .NET and Microsoft. Java is by now fairly well-entrenched but there is no room to be complacent - Bill Gates showed that he can take on the big guys in any market and, by the depth of his pockets and the smartness of his user experience experts, win a war of attrition (with a little help from abuse of monopoly powers, of course) - just look at what Internet Explorer did to Netscape Navigator.

8) Here we finally get to why the article I mentioned at the start of this post is important - because it looks at how two big thorns in the Java communities side may or may not be on the road to resolution - thus allowing all of us to focus our efforts on repelling the massed ranks of the Microserfs.
a) Eclipse has filled the tools gap (see point 4): it is free and good, not just OK. The first really decent version came out last year, and the next major version came out this June - everyone here is busy upgrading to it - a fairly painless experience.
b) There is increasing pressure on Sun to change the license conditions of Java to make it 'properly' Open Source. For the moment, Sun retains certain controls over it, which means that many natural allies of Java (such as the Linux Operating System movement) are uneasy about using it. If Sun does change it, some think that there will be an efflorescence of great Open Source Java software which gets distributed free with Linux.

9) (a) and (b) are related very cleverly by the author of the article, for he points out that Eclipse, one of the biggest success stories of Open Source Java to date, was in fact started off by IBM, who spent $40mn getting it going. Therefore, he says, it is unrealistic to attribute the enormous success of Eclipse purely to the fact that it is Open Source. I think he's right, but I'm still undecided about whether Sun should 'let Java go free' or not.

Hmm, I hope that made some sense - I'd appreciate any feedback on whether or not it did.

2004-07-13T00:13:00.000+02:00

Just watched Spiderman 2, it beats the red-and-blue pants off the first one. The script has occasional gauche moments but is basically class, the plot does actually contain some surprises, and it even manages to be atmospheric at times. Only let down by the over-eager score and the (perhaps on-purpose?) naff worse-than-computer-game animation.

In other news today, I ran very fast as rather unexpectedly I was full of energy on hitting the pavement, my shins finally felt back on form, my heart didn't even break sweat, and my lungs seemed to be incapable of running out of air however much I pushed it. So ran down the hill, zipped once round the track (which I have now discovered is named after Moz's first Marathon champ) and zoomed right back up. Only 5km but it felt better than it has in months. This month I have already run more than in the whole of June. So that's good.

2004-07-10T14:30:00.000+02:00

Sorry been away for a bit - I visited South Africa last weekend and then have been really busy. Still have no contract so since 23rd June I have been effectively working illegally. Needless to say this doesn't worry my bosses a bit, plus they are still paying my salary. However it will cause big problems in August when we have to renew our residence visas, as the Ministry of Immigration insist upon their documentation.

I know that at some point in the next few months I will get fed up of this if its not sorted, and leave the employ of the Ministry. However there are various other things on the cards so I won't be leaving Moz just yet.

...

On the way back from SA I had an interesting experience with the police. They pulled me over at a checkpoint 30km out of Maputo and I groaned inwardly "here we go again". But in fat the guy was very polite and seemed very interested in knowing exactly where I lived. I wasn't about to tell him my actual address but I gave him the general idea. Then he says "that's good, you can give us a lift". I hesitated for a brief moment and then accepted his 'suggestion' as it wouldn't take me out of my way and I didn't really fancy pissing him off.

So him (quite chunky) and a fellow policewoman n(also chunky-ish) get into the car, which sags noticeably. I think to myself "let's see what they're made of" and insisted that they put on their seatbelts (which no-one bothers with in Moz).

Since it was a high-quality toll road all the way back to Maputo, straight with almost no traffic, I tanked it all the way back at 100mph, way above the official speed-limit. Funly enough, they didn't complain as they were getting a super-speedy ride back home, although they did look a bit nervous on the overtakes. Still, it meant they were awfully polite and keen not to distract me from driving - and with 'police protection' I obviously didn't get stopped at any more checkpoints.

2 days later the end-pipe of my exhaust fell off as I was parking, not quite the Blues Brothers, but quite annoying nonetheless. Hopefully they can weld it back on but I haven't got round to taking it to the garage, until then my demure-looking Corolla has a boy-racer like growl.

2004-06-27T22:59:00.000+02:00

Phew just had a completely nightmarish end to a weekend in Macaneta (the beautiful peninsula where Incomati river joins the sea, north of Maputo). The 'Complexo Turistico Macaneta' to be precise. From now on will stay away with barge pole.

Luiz had a fair whack of money stolen from his room, and we spent all of Sunday trying to sort it out, pay the bill and leave (the only way to leave is via a boat owned by the same grossly overweight piggy-eyed guy who runs the hotel), everything that could go wrong did, eventually got home at 8.15pm completely knackered and pissed off. Will try to give an interesting and sociologically aware account of everything tomorrow when I am less pissed off.

2004-06-22T10:02:00.000+02:00

I have been instructed to heavily push and promote my sister's new company's website, so here it is: in the trees. In fact I am very proud of her for doing this so I shouldn't slag too much.