Chinese "king" in NIgeria

A leader of the Chinese community in northern Nigeria has been crowned, or "turbaned", as a chief by the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

The emir holds a lot of influence and is a religious and cultural leader in the region.

At a traditional ceremony in Kano Mike Zhang took the title of Wakilin Yan China, meaning the leader of the Chinese residents, as his head was wrapped in a turban.

Mike Zhang

This ceremony is a recognition of the growing importance of the Chinese community in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, BBC Hausa editor Jimeh Saleh says.

There are a lot of Chinese businesses and traders in the city who are sometimes accused of taking other people's jobs and engaging in unfair competition.

Mr Zhang will be a vital link between the Chinese community and the locals.

Mike Zhang

Labels: cleavages, demographics, Nigeria, political culture

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Mobile campaign signs or political spiff?

Rotimi Akeredolu, Governor of Ondo State, has ordered the withdrawal of all the branded vehicles he donated for the re-election bid and campaign of President Muhammadu Buhari ahead of the 2019 general election, SaharaReporters can exclusively report.

The vehicles donated by Akeredolu before the election were presented to some leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state…

As of press time, the motives behind the withdrawal of the branded campaign vehicles were not known to the party leaders/members, who have been grumbling underground since the decision was effected.

To further confirm withdrawal of the branded vehicles, SaharaReporters exclusively obtained a terse memo calling on leaders and members of the party in possession of the branded vehicles to return them…

Multiple sources in the ruling party in the state, who spoke with SaharaReporters, expressed great dissatisfaction with the order for return of the vehicles.

These sources wondered why Akeredolu would abruptly call for the return of vehicles that were given to them as gifts…

When SaharaReporters contacted Alhaji Yusuf Sanya Isiaka, the Senior Special Adviser on Political Matters to the Governor, he said the vehicles were not really "gifts" but were only given out to aid campaigns.

"What the Governor did was to give those buses for campaign purposes; it was not a gift," he said.

"It was just to aid their campaign programme during the electioneering period, and the arrangment was that after the election, it should be return. So, that was the arrangment between them and the MHAs (members of the House of Assembly).

"So, they were aware... before these buses were handed over to them, they were all told that they would return them after campaign. And they have actually complied. If it was a gift, nobody would comply. it was not a gift."

Labels: campaign, corruption, elections, leadership, Nigeria

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Red tape in China. Patriotic? Necessary?

China’s war on bureaucratic window dressing has been stepped up, with 2019 declared the year of reducing the burden on grass-roots officials.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is counting on the millions of junior party cadres across the country to implement his ambitious campaigns to end corruption, alleviate poverty and rejuvenate the nation. Instead, they often find themselves entangled in endless meetings and exhausted by the mountains of reports they are required to prepare…

Li, a staffer at a county-level legislature in the southern province of Guangdong… said his fellow cadres also lamented that their appraisals were based on “ridiculous” check-the-box indicators instead of meaningful measures of their performance…

In a March directive announcing the latest crackdown on “formalism” – as the flurry of meaningless bureaucratic activity is known in China – the party’s Central Committee warned against evaluating cadres’ performance solely on the basis of photos or videos taken of their work.

The directive, which declared 2019 the year for reducing the grass roots burden, also called for governments to cut down on meetings and guidelines by 30 to 50 per cent.

The number of meetings being held is staggering. Last week local state media reported that the public Security Bureau in Tianjin City, northeast China, had convened more than 160,000 meetings in recent years for its officers to learn from past corruption cases involving the city’s former mayor and police chief…

The March directive to chip away at redundant files and meetings showed the central government realised that bureaucrats could hardly focus on their real tasks with all that red tape, Zhuang said…

Since coming to power, Xi has made repeated efforts to chip away at the stubborn sloth of China’s bureaucracy. He declared war against “formalism” almost immediately after becoming the party’s general secretary in 2012…

Nor is Xi the first Chinese leader to tackle the issue. Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao all tried to fix the problem, with varying degrees of success, only to see the problem emerge once again, seemingly stronger than ever…

To many civil servants, the campaigns – many aimed at curbing formalism themselves – have only meant more meetings, more documents, more peculiar evaluations, in which they are required to repeatedly reflect on their mistakes, and endlessly rewrite most of their reports…

And, just days after Beijing’s directive, Li received a new guideline from the municipal party cell, handed down at 10am.

“May all counties submit documents on discussions about ‘curbing the burden of grass roots governance’. The voice of the front line needs to be heard,” it read.

“All materials shall be sent to the municipal party cell’s mailbox by three this afternoon,” the guideline continued.

Labels: bureaucracy, China, democratic centralism, regime

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

The biggest part of the regime?

Iran’s supreme leader has replaced the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps… two weeks after the Trump administration designated the elite force of the Iranian military as a foreign terrorist organization…

Gen. Salami

Mr. Khamenei replaced General Jafari with a deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen Hossein Salami, and elevated his rank to major general.

General Salami takes over a 125,000-member branch of the Iranian military that has grown into a vast military-industrial complex since it was created by founders of the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah 40 years ago.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps reports directly to Ayatollah Khamenei, exerts deep influence in politics and the economy, and has its own air force, navy and intelligence service.

It also is in charge of Iran’s ballistic missile development and operates a subsidiary known as the Al Quds force, which carries out clandestine operations and other activities in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq…

General Salami has been outspoken recently in expressing Iran’s antipathy toward Israel, which regards Iran as its most dangerous foe in the Middle East…

Labels: Iran, politics, regime

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Chinese rock and roll

The indie bands of the Chinese capital, Beijing, have their own raw, distinctive sound, says the BBC's Stephen McDonell - partly because they are so isolated from the rest of the rock'n'roll world…

Of course you can hear outstanding symphonies or jazz here. There are plays, there's dance, and there's still traditional Chinese music like Peking opera on offer. But the country's indie bands are dealing with the China of today - meaning, they know they have to be careful what they say and how they say it…

But Beijing's music-bar owners seem pretty blase about the prospect of being closed down or arrested because of subversive lyrics. Most musicians seem to know, somehow, the limits of what can be said. They push up against the edge - and when they cross the line, they usually do so in a clever, cryptic fashion…

And let's not forget, most artists here sing mostly about young love, heartbreak, hangovers, the streets where they live, the people they miss.

Some will wonder what's so special about Beijing and bands. It's not as if the city invented rock'n'roll. What created what we might describe as a "Beijing sound" has been isolation. It's not that the young rockers of China have never heard of David Bowie or the Foo Fighters, it's that few international bands play here. So, if you want to go and see some live music, it's odds-on to be a Chinese band.

The sound itself is raw, less polished, with mountains of enthusiasm and commitment to nothing more than the love of music for its own sake.

Ricky Sixx (Prince wannabe)

Players know they're never going to be on television in China, never going to be played on the radio here. Their fans hear their music by coming to the gigs. Popularity spreads by word of mouth.

There's a sense that everyone is equal. The most famous band will not necessarily be the headline act. The line-up is often drawn out of a hat and the set lists can be completely random…

I remember the first time I saw PK 14 play. They'd turn heads at any international music festival. Who did they remind me of? Was it early Talking Heads or Joy Division?

Not really. This nerdy, cool, shaking, high-energy, poetic explosion of music was all their own, with Chinese lyrics pelting out over syncopated drum rhythms and thrashing guitars.

You can't get this anywhere else: you have to come to Beijing…

Labels: China, music, politics, popular culture

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Is this political culture?

It has been one big party this week in the town of Arondizuogu in southern Nigeria, with feasting and parades to give thanks for the last harvest and to usher in the new planting season.

The Ikeji Festival, which last for seven days, brings together many thousands of ethnic Igbo people, from far and wide, to the town in Imo state.

During the festivities, some men are authorised by secret cultural Igbo societies to dress up as ancestral spirits in what is called a masquerade.

They are accompanied by a bell bearer, who explains to the crowds the messages the spirit world wishes to pass on - usually blessings for a bountiful harvest to come.

The masked figures perform for the crowds as they go down the streets - and as part of the rituals, chickens and goats are sacrificed to the ancestors to encourage them to grant their blessings.



[A dozen photos by BBC Igbo's Chiemela Mgbeahuru]

Labels: demographics, history, Nigeria, political culture

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Nigeria's Chief Justice Onnoghen Gets the Boot

Nigeria: CCT Convicts, Sacks Onnoghen As Chief Justice, NJC Chairman

Labels: leadership, Nigeria, rule of law

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Old news revisited

Monday [marked] the publication of lengthy excerpts – 6,000 words in total – from a speech Xi gave in January 2013, less than two months after he became party chief and two months before he was confirmed as the state president…

Though innocuously titled “A few issues on upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics” and made public six years later, those excerpts… are still significant and relevant today, because of their timing and content.

On January 5 six years ago, Xi gave that speech to about 300 newly appointed members of the party’s Central Committee with the rest of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee – the country’s highest governing council – present at the auditorium of the Central Party School.

Some of the Chinese leadership

That was probably the first time Xi had revealed his intentions in detail to China’s political elites…

According to the excerpts, Xi struck a forceful but frank tone in laying out his vision for the party and the country and warning of the dangers ahead.

Citing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Xi said socialism would triumph over capitalism but cited Deng Xiaoping as saying that it would be a long historical process, which would probably take several dozens of generations.

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union served as a painful lesson for the party. The underlying reason for the collapse was that the Soviet Communist Party had lost its ideological controls, he said.

[H]e said the party’s decision to pursue reform and opening up in 1978 had ensured the country would achieve stability and prosperity without copying the Western system…

Even more interestingly, he recognised that Western developed countries would maintain long-term economic, technological, and military advantages and China must be fully prepared for the two systems – socialism in its primary stage and a more advanced capitalism – to cooperate and struggle for a long time to come.

As China must learn and borrow from capitalism, it must face the reality that people would compare the strong points of Western developed countries with the shortcomings of China’s socialist development and be critical, Xi said…

The timing of the release [of the speech] is also significant as several politically sensitive anniversaries are coming up.

June marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests and the subsequent bloody government crackdown. Efforts to mark the occasion will again focus the international spotlight on China’s political system and spur calls for political reform.

In October, China will hold elaborate ceremonies to mark the 70 anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. While China has lots to celebrate – its economic strength and its lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, for example – Chinese leaders will be reminded of the enormous domestic challenges ahead…

China’s economy may be the world’s second largest already and Xi has undertaken comprehensive and forceful steps to strengthen the party’s control at all levels of society, but its leaders are still smarting from the collapse of the then 69-year-old Soviet Union in 1991.

The release of Xi’s six-year-old speech is aimed at sending a clear message on where he stands on these thorny political issues.

The analyst who wrote this essay is Wang Xiangwei the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post. He is now based in Beijing as editorial adviser to the paper. The South China Morning Post is an independent newspaper that almost always follows the Communist Party line.

Labels: China, history, ideology, leadership, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Sliding on Chinese ice

IN THE PAST athletes in China had a particular image problem, reports Lei Yi, a sports official. Almost universally, she regrets to say, people thought that sports were for strong, fit people who “don’t have a brain”. Happily, views have changed. Specifically, says Ms Lei, sports are seen as a way to teach young Chinese useful lessons about working hard, believing in themselves and in their team, and not giving up easily.

If Ms Lei’s case for sports sounds a little light on fun and heavy on improving virtues, she has an excuse. She is a team leader from China’s General Administration of Sport, and has less than four years to prepare a dozen perfectly trained athletes for the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. Her domain is curling, a team game played on ice that was almost unknown in China 20 years ago. Almost five centuries after matches were first recorded on the frozen ponds of Scotland and the Low Countries, curling has been declared a sport that plays to China’s strengths.

Curling is a bit like lawn bowls, except played on ice with a lump of polished granite that can, as it glides, have its trajectory altered by team-mates madly scrubbing the ice in its path. The stone’s squat shape gives the sport its Chinese name of binghu, or “ice kettle”. The central authorities… hope to build [rinks] in every province, says Ms Lei. During the Winter Olympics in 2022 a swimming arena from the Beijing games of 2008, the Water Cube, will host curling matches as the Ice Cube.

Kate Caithness, president of the World Curling Federation, the governing body based in Scotland, has become a frequent visitor to China. She found officials drawn to curling’s reputation as “chess on ice”—a brainy sport best mastered by years of dogged practice…

The aim is to meet two distinct goals set by Xi Jinping, the country’s leader. At the elite level, China has a reasonable chance of winning Olympic medals in curling, says Ms Caithness. That would fulfil Mr Xi’s quest for grand sporting achievements, of a sort that would bring closer his “Chinese dream” of prosperity and national pride. At the amateur level, the game is accessible enough to help meet another of Mr Xi’s stated targets, namely to turn at least 300m Chinese into winter-sports enthusiasts.

Just in case the squad that Ms Lei oversees was not feeling enough pressure, in February Mr Xi dropped in on their camp at the National Winter Sports Training Centre. “Strong sports make the country strong and a strong country makes sports strong,” he declared. The squad could be a metaphor for a rising China. It is part of a national programme for high performance in sports…

Asked about curling’s appeal in China, Ms Lei notes that it is one of very few team sports in the Winter Olympics. That matters, because in Chinese culture “we always advocate that you need to put your country’s interest over your personal interest, and your team’s interest over your personal interest,” she says. She describes how, in curling, a skilful player may have to bow to the team’s interest and take a boringly safe shot, rather than “have a showtime” and try for personal glory. She describes an almost military chain of command, with the “skip” or captain at the top.

If some sports reward individual creativity, even a touch of wildness, others favour discipline. Ms Lei says there is creativity in curling, but concedes that “discipline is more important”. Patience, too, is needed to endure three-hour games, and tournaments that could involve 33 hours on the ice, or “torture”, as Ms Lei cheerfully calls it.

The junior game is a bit more joyful, as a visit to the Xuhui District Youth Sports School in Shanghai shows. In China winter sports are associated with the country’s bluff, hard-living north-east. But affluent Shanghai, as if eager to shed its business-obsessed, slightly effete image, has invested in three curling rinks since 2012. In all 1,500 students have signed up. It helps that curling is less dangerous than ice hockey and speed skating, says Zhou Wenjia, general secretary of the Shanghai Curling Association. “Shanghai parents are quite protective of their kids,” she explains. Her association assures anxious parents that sports will develop their children’s willpower, as well as their physical fitness. “I don’t know if it’s authoritative, but I have heard that Chinese and Jewish people have the highest IQs,” adds Ms Zhou, venturing that this gives Chinese players “quite the advantage”…

To date Canada is the world’s curling superpower, with over a million regular players. China has a long way to go but—as in other areas—its ambitions already reveal a lot.

Labels: China, political culture, sports

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Regional discrimination in China

Han Chinese are more than 90% of the population and their prejudice against ethnic minorities is well documented. In Tibet and Xinjiang it has reinforced the Communist Party’s repressive tendencies. Discrimination by Han people against members of their own ethnic group is less well-known, but also common. Its consequences are not as appalling, but it makes life tough for tens of millions of people. Over the past three decades it has been fuelled by the migration of more than 200m rural dwellers into cities, which has turned urban areas into mosaics of people from hugely varied backgrounds.

Urban Chinese are often contemptuous of these internal migrants, wherever they are from. But people from certain regions suffer higher than usual levels of negative stereotyping. Regional discrimination “is hard to see and touch” yet its impact is as painful as getting “a bloodied face”, said an academic quoted by a north-eastern newspaper. Yang Yong, a migrant worker from Henan who lives in Beijing, has felt this. He says he was once refused a construction job in the capital because of his home province. “When I answered I’m from Henan the boss said goodbye,” he recalls. Online job advertisements for domestic maids in Beijing often specify that “applicants from Henan and the north-east need not apply.”…

People from Henan and the north-eastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning are among those most commonly targeted, partly because those areas are such big sources of migrants…

Even among better-educated urban residents, north-easterners are often stereotyped as quarrelsome and pugnacious, and Henanese are commonly regarded as thieves and cheats… Some regional stereotypes are harboured only by people from a particular area. In a book published in 2015, Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi of the University of Zurich says that Shanghai residents sometimes describe people from northern Jiangsu, a province that borders on the city, as “boorish” and “unkind”. However, people from that region are not so despised in Beijing…

In China’s state-controlled media, diyu hei, or “regional blackening”, is occasionally condemned. In an article about [an] episode a newspaper controlled by the prosecutor-general’s office quoted a lawyer as saying that such discrimination had probably occurred in tens of thousands of companies but had never come to public attention. Beijing News last year quoted Bai Yansong, a Chinese television anchor, as saying that regional discrimination was getting worse. If allowed to continue, he said, the problem could turn into “a huge cause of social instability and division”…

Some lawyers say a legal loophole is partly to blame. China’s employment law prohibits discrimination on grounds of ethnicity, sex, religion, disability, social background and health. Regional origin, however, is not mentioned. Some legal scholars and legislators have called for a wider law that would prohibit all kinds of unfair discrimination, including the region-based sort. The government, however, does not appear enthusiastic. Some conservative officials may fear such a law would also have to specify gay rights… they may also worry about a clash with the country’s hukou system, which allows officials to discriminate openly against migrants from other parts of China in government employment and the provision of public services.

It may be that the problem of job discrimination will be alleviated by a growing shortage of migrant workers. Employers will find it harder to act on their prejudices… But region-based prejudices will long remain. In an open-air dating market in Beijing, where parents gather to try to arrange matches for their adult children, some participants admit they would not welcome a Henanese in the family.

Labels: China, discrimination, political culture, prejudice

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Forward to the past?

China is planning to send millions of youth “volunteers” back to villages, raising fears of a return to the methods of Chairman Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution of 50 years ago.

1970 poster from chinaposters.net

The Communist Youth League (CYL) has promised to despatch [sic] more than 10 million students to “rural zones” by 2022 in order to “increase their skills, spread civilisation and promote science and technology”, according to a Communist party document.

The aim is to bring to the rural areas the talents of those who would otherwise be attracted to life in the big cities, according to a CYL document quoted in the state-run Global Times daily on Thursday…

Students will be called upon to live in the countryside during their summer holidays, although the CYL did not say how young people would be persuaded to volunteer.

Former revolutionary bases, zones suffering from extreme poverty and ethnic minority areas will receive top priority, according to the CYL…

Users on the Twitter-like Weibo social platform reacted warily. Many evoked the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao sent millions of “young intellectuals” into often primitive conditions in the countryside, while universities were closed for a decade…

President Xi Jinping, known for his nostalgia for the Mao era, himself spent seven years in a village in the poor northern province of Shaanxi from the age of 16.

Labels: China, political culture, political socialization

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Touchy, touchy

Police surveillance around the late Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang’s family residence was tightened on Friday, as friends and relatives paid tribute to the purged Communist Party leader on China’s tomb sweeping day, ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen student-led protests…

“Police security is tighter this year [than in previous years]. The monitoring area stretches from the hutongs (alleys) around our home to the main road,” said Wang Yannan, Zhao's daughter, on Friday…

Zhao, who was purged for siding with the students in 1989, spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest. He died on January 17, 2005.

The Communist Party has branded the student-led movement a rebellion and barred any public commemoration…

Labels: China, history, leadership, politics, Tianamen

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Shiny new app, same old propaganda

If there’s one thing we know for certain about China in 2019, it’s that people there love their apps. They use WeChat to talk with friends; they spend hours battling virtual enemies on PUBG; they binge-watch short videos on Douyin. And so why shouldn’t the Communist Party get in on the action?

Xuexi Qiangguo — “study and make the nation great” — has become ubiquitous in China, an instant messenger, news aggregator and social network all in one introduced by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in January. The first and second characters in the name, when combined — xuexi — mean “study/learn”; the same character, xi, also happens to be the character in President Xi Jinping’s surname. The app’s name, thus, can also be read as “study Xi and make the nation great.” And the Chinese are doing so, by the tens of millions.

As of late March, Xuexi Qiangguo had been downloaded over 73 million times on Huawei’s app store. It’s also currently the most-downloaded app on Apple’s Chinese app store, which is hard to reconcile with its average rating of just 2.7 stars out of five, until you take into account that all government and state-owned-enterprise employees, along with tens of millions of party members, have been “encouraged” to use it…

I wanted to experience Xuexi Qiangguo for myself… So last month I downloaded it and signed on. Suddenly there I was, immediately connected to my friends and colleagues. In the weeks since, I’ve been receiving several notifications a day; they include news coverage of Mr. Xi’s activities, a “golden quote of the day” from our president, “red patriotic songs” for me to listen to and links to online courses on traditional Chinese cultural heritage.

To do well on Xuexi Qiangguo requires a serious time commitment; those under peer pressure to use the app are typically expected to score two or three dozen points a day, and sometimes more. “Thirty points per day would only put me at the bottom among the members of the party branch I belong to,” one user on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, told me. “My colleagues are so passionate about competing,” the user said…

But to really score highly, I needed to take the quizzes — to answer questions on Mr. Xi’s speeches and works. That was where the real points were: If I correctly answered all the quiz questions, I could earn 24 points total.

And the questions were easy. The first one I encountered: “(Blank) is contemporary China’s Marxism, the 21st century’s Marxism, the guidance for our Party and our people to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, a proven, practically great, powerful ideological weapon, and must be persisted in and developed consistently over a long term.” The answer? “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” of course. What else?

Another question looked trickier at first glance: “Sticking to the Party’s overall leadership and coordination among different sectors, to build up a system with the Party’s full leadership role, and guarantee that the Party’s leadership is carried out in domains such as (blank), (blank), and (blank)”. Luckily, it was multiple choice. Among the answers were (A) Reforming, development and maintaining stability; (B) Domestic politics, foreign policy and defense; and (C) Governing the Party, the nation and the military. The answer was all of the above; the party is omnipotent, our leader in all arenas.

I gave up after about half an hour, earning a measly nine points. “Post your point of view and collect one point,” the app prompted. Why not? I thought, and moved into the comment section, only to be greeted with instructions like “only valid points of view will be awarded points” and “good comments will be prioritized for display.”…

Developed by the tech giant Alibaba, Xuexi Qiangguo has a certain polish to it. And it comes with some additional perks: Users can redeem their study points in businesses across the country for gifts like pastries, tablets, restaurant discounts and even free sightseeing tickets.

But no matter how fancy the new products look on the surface, at their core they remain the mandatory study of ideologically correct materials and the demonstration of allegiance to the central government. The minute I entered the quiz section, memories of my middle school years in Chinese classrooms came flooding back: the grandiose language, the endless repetition, the fixed answers, the publicly displayed class rankings — the collective memories of Chinese students across several generations. Many Weibo users have pointed out the parallels between Xuexi Qiangguo and the fervent “Little Red Book” campaigns of the Mao era.

And as with so many instances in which the government demands correct thought, there are already those who have learned to cheat the system. There are a sizable number of articles on how to earn credits efficiently circulating on WeChat, while tech-savvy users have turned to GitHub to download software that will earn points for them on the app automatically while they spend their time elsewhere…

So how effective has this new app effort been? Online user feedback is currently prohibited on the Apple app store, so we can gauge user’s reactions only through their earlier comments, before feedback was turned off. “Good, good, good,” one reviewer wrote. “Whatever you want me to say.” “We voluntarily downloaded this,” wrote another reviewer, who gave the app one star. “Truly.”

Labels: China, ideology, leadership, political socialization, propaganda

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Nigeria isn't waiting for global warming

Nigeria has been in the grip of an intense heatwave over the past few weeks, with meteorologist saying there is no relief in sight until the seasonal rains set in next month.

The extreme heat has been in place since March, with the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) saying last week that the heatwave has been affecting most parts of the country, including coastal areas, with temperatures well above 35 degrees Celsius [95°F].

On Friday, the temperature touched 42.2C [107°F] in Minna, 120km northwest of Abuja. Meanwhile, Kano, 345km north of the capital, has notched up highs in excess of 40C [104°F] every day since the beginning of April.

As people struggle to cope, authorities have been issuing warnings about the dangers brought on by the excessive temperatures…

The severe heatwave is expected to continue until May when the seasonal rains are expected to spread north across the country.

Environmental experts have called on authorities to make long-term plans to slow down the effects of climate change by reducing carbon emission and impose bans on tree-cutting.

Labels: climate, Nigeria

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

High water challenges capacity of Iranian regime

Authorities in Iran are evacuating six more towns in the flood-hit south-western province of Khuzestan, Iranian state TV has reported.

Flood waters in Khorramabad in Lorestan

Gholamreza Shariati, the provincial governor, said rescue teams were taking residents to nearby shelters on Saturday, including three army barracks.

The evacuation orders came as a new round of flooding was expected.

Shariati said emergency discharges from dams and reservoirs were adding to the high floodwaters, but such measures were essential to prevent catastrophic breaches, with river waters continuing to rise upstream from the province…

The interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, told state TV that about 400,000 people were at risk out of the province’s population of 5 million.

Eleven towns and scores of villages have already been evacuated. There have been no evacuation orders for major cities, including the province’s capital, Ahvaz…

There have been no reports of damage to the province’s petroleum facilities, which account for roughly 80% of Iran’s oil production…

Heavy damage from the floods has been blamed in part on widespread disregard for safety regulations in the construction of buildings and roads near rivers.

Labels: capacity, Iran

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Promises from a former military dictator

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari has said he would not waiver in his commitment to due process and preserving the sanctity of the rule of law.

The President made the statement at the final day of the 50th Convocation Ceremonies of the University of Lagos…

Buhari's speech read: “With the 2019 general election that have come and gone, we as a nation have once again reiterated our choice of democracy as the system of government by which we hope to imbibe an all-round development.

“Our administration is committed to ensuring that the sacredness of that choice is preserved. With this policy enunciated and every programme instituted, we shall ensure that our democratic culture takes firmer roots and legacies further consolidated.

“Let me reiterate that my administration will not waver in its commitment to following due process, preserving the sanctity of the rule of law, battling grand corruption, securing the lives and property of our people and rehabilitating or upgrading our critical infrastructure.

“We will continue to be unrelenting in enthroning hard work, honesty and place the welfare of our citizens above everything else… "

Labels: leadership, Nigeria, rule of law

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

The demands of democratic centralism

A total of 15 teams of disciplinary inspectors have been dispatched to three central government departments and 42 state-owned enterprises (SOEs)... said an official statement Tuesday.

This is the third round of routine disciplinary inspections launched by the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee, the statement said.

The three central government departments were the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, the National Energy Administration, and the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

The 42 SOEs were administrated by the central government, including the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and China State Shipbuilding Co., Ltd.

The inspection teams will be stationed at the departments and state firms for two and a half months, and will receive complaints about violations of Party disciplinary rules from the public.

Labels: China, democratic centralism, ideology, politics, regime

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Nigerian statistics

From Premium Times, Abuja

The National Population Commission (NPC) has said that the current overall life expectancy of Nigeria stands at 52.2 years.

The Acting Chairman of NPC, Hassan Bashir, stated this in New York while delivering Nigeria’s statement at the 52nd Session of the United Nations Commission on Population and Development.

According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy refers to the average number of years that a newborn is expected to live if current mortality rates continue to apply…

Mr Bashir added: “As you may be aware, Nigeria estimated population is currently at over 198 million with an annual growth rate of 3.2 per cent.

“The total Fertility Rate remains at 5.5 per woman; 63 per cent of the entire population is under the age of 25; 42 per cent is under the age of 15 years…



Life expectancies from ThoughtCo

• Monaco 89.5
• UK 80.5
• USA 79.7
• Mexico 75.7
• China 75.3
• Iran 71.2
• Russia 70.5
• Nigeria 52.5
• South Africa 49.7

Labels: demographics, Nigeria

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Failed in place?

The whole world of Britain’s Parliament — its effete codes of conduct, its arcane and stilted language, its reunions of Oxbridge school chums — seemed impossibly remote from the real, unfolding national crisis of Brexit, the process of extricating the country from the European Union…

Over the past weeks, as factions within the British government have grappled for control over the country’s exit from the bloc, the mood among voters has become dark.

Those Britons who wished to remain are reminded, daily, that a risky and momentous national change is being initiated against their will and judgment. More striking is the deep cynicism among those who voted to leave, the group that Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to satisfy. They are now equally bitter and disillusioned, as the government’s paralysis has called into question whether Britain will ever leave.

Parliament’s rejection of Mrs. May’s withdrawal plan… — for the third time — means the turbulence will continue.

In interviews, many Britons expressed despair over the inability of the political system to produce a compromise. No one feels that the government has represented their interests. No one is satisfied. No one is hopeful.

It has amounted to a hollowing out of confidence in democracy itself…

“There’s a fin-de-siècle sense that modern British politics has run out of road,” said Mr. Davies, author of “Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason.” “Maybe the best thing to come out of this is the recognition that the political elites — people just want them to get off the stage. I don’t know who they want to replace them. But there’s a sense that a reboot would be something people would be in favor of.”…

The referendum question has divided Britain into warring tribes, unable to settle on any shared vision of the future. An ancient, robust democracy is groaning under the weight of conflicting demands — on the executive, to carry out the will of the people; and on the members of Parliament, to follow their conscience and to act in what they believe to be the people’s interest…

“I think people have totally lost confidence in democracy, in British democracy and the way it’s run,” said Tommy Turner, 32, a firefighter. He was perched on a stool at the Hare & Hounds, a working-class pub in Surrey, where nearly everyone voted to leave the European Union. Among his friends, he said, he sensed a profound sense of betrayal that Britain was not exiting on March 29, as promised.

“You’ve got egotistical people in politics, and they want to follow their own agenda,” he said. “They don’t want to follow what the people have voted for.”…

Polling has borne out his worry. Britons’ assessment of their leaders is scathing, with 81 percent saying that Britain has handled Brexit badly, and 7 percent saying it has handled it well, according to data released recently by NatCen Social Research, an independent agency…

Particularly drastic, researchers said, is the souring of Leave voters in the past six months, as Mrs. May concluded her negotiations on the withdrawal agreement and shared the terms of departure with the country. Expectations that Brexit would have concrete effects — by lifting the economy or slowing immigration — have diminished sharply, the data show…

[A]t The Highbury Barn, a pub in North London that offers haddock from the fishmonger across the street and provides pans of water for visiting dogs. In this neighborhood, Islington North, in the constituency of the opposition Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the number of signatories on a petition asking the government to revoke Article 50, the part of the European Union treaty that lays out the terms of Britain’s exit, reached one-quarter of the population.

But people here took an equally dismal view of the government’s performance…

Aidan Hughes, 58, who works in finance, was waiting for a cab in the back of the bar.

“What we’re seeing is that the process the government’s involved in has been effectively hijacked by an even smaller segment of the ruling government, the right-wing element of the party,” he said. He blamed the first-past-the-post voting system, which tends to increase polarization between two large parties and exaggerate geographical divides, setting up stark conflict between sections of society.

He said it was time for Britain to move toward a system of proportional representation, common to democracies that evolved later than Britain’s, which allows smaller parties to enter Parliament more easily.

“We would then have people with different views coming together to compromise, to find a way forward,” he said. “Whereas whoever wins an election now can currently push their views, irrespective of support.”…

In a landscape of pervasive gloom, Mr. Hughes, the finance worker, did see one reason for hope: That Britons, young and old, were passionately engaged, as never before, in the inner workings of their own government. Even if it was because they were so angry.

“This is starting to drag people into an interest in what’s actually happening,” he said. “Clearly it’s a total mess and it’s been handled appallingly by the government. Be that as it may, at least it’s gotten people animated in talking about these topics.”

Labels: Brexit, politics, regime, UK

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments