The sOccketball is an invention by a bunch of American college kids, aimed squarely at the sub-Saharan African market. It just got a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award. The problem? It’s useless, and the idea that Africans can’t look after themselves is supremely condescending. I explain why in today’s Daily Maverick column: Let’s return the beads

I have long been skeptical of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. Not because I think selling cheap computers to poor people is a bad idea — I think that’s a brilliant idea. But because Negroponte’s non-profit whines endlessly that poor people don’t buy it, that poor governments won’t buy it for them, and that other companies have the temerity to try to sell competing products for profit. As if that makes a cheap laptop any less valuable.

His protest went something along the lines of: it’s not about the kit, it’s about education, and only the pure-of-heart, i.e. we, care about that. Intel and Asus and all those corporate scumbags are just trying to undermine my noble vision and prevent me reaching economies of scale.

Now, one ex-employee is calling Negroponte’s bluff. When Ivan Krstić resigned, he said only that, “OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.”

But this past week, he explained just how drastic that change really was. In a long blog post mourning the faded glory of the OLPC, Krstić writes that the project is all about the kit, after all. It’s not about education. It’s about selling lots of cheap laptops. Negroponte couldn’t beat the corporate scumbags, so he’s joining them under the cover of his noble vision.

Quotes El Reg:

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Now perhaps Krstić is exaggerating. Perhaps he’s just appalled that the project backtracked on a “clarification” made last year, and just did a deal to offer Windows on the machine, with Negroponte going so far as calling it “key to the OLPC philosophy”.

I can see how this might annoy people involved with the open-source project. Maybe he’s just a bitter liar with an axe to grind. But his story confirms, in uncanny fashion, what I thought I read between Negroponte’s lines last year.

If you’re going to diss the profit motive, have the courage of your convictions, and the honesty or your vision. If a not-for-profit can’t compete with for-profit companies, it clearly isn’t delivering anything anyone needs or cares about. Which means that it only swindles cash out of the gullible with sweet-sounding lies, and exploits the poor to do so. OLPC wouldn’t be the first non-profit to demonstrate why, for all their noble intentions, so few deliver on the reasonable expectations of trusting donors and needy beneficiaries.

Hey kids, how’s it feel to be unpaid advertising execs for Negroponte’s neo-colonialist ego trip?

Last night, I found a neatly printed-out and stapled copy of Beware the Alchemists, by Ludwig von Mises. Detritus of good intentions some time past.

Transcribed by Bettina Bien Greaves from notes taken during a lecture tour in the 1960, the style is somewhat clunky, somewhat simplistic, somewhat imprecise, and somewhat repetitive. But though she says Mises didn’t like being quoted for that reason, I found his informal style a strength, not a weakness. Mises was the 20th century intellectual giant of the Austrian School of economics. He wrote his first major work as early as 1912, and died in 1973. Reading this, however, brings the old man alive again. You can picture speaking in somewhat clumsy English, patiently explaining the blindingly obvious, throwing up his hands with an exasperated sigh or sardonic grin as he points out the economic blunders of one government after another.

Beware the Alchemists is surprisingly accessible. It takes what appears to be a complex topic, encrusted with 100 years of Keynesian pollution and toxic government waste, and turns it into something simple and intuitive. I wish I had learned what I understand today about interest rates, monetary policy and inflation from this text. I wish I had been around in the 1960s to attend these New York lectures, so that I could have spent the four decades since going, “See? He told ya so.”

Today’s food price crisis? The oil price? The credit crisis? The weak dollar? St Alan “this was an accident waiting to happen” Greenspan? Mises explained all of these many years ago. And Greenspan, for all his claims to understand why Keynes was wrong (as a proponent of Hayek and Friedman’s Chicago School), not only waited for it to happen, but drove the bus to the scene of the accident.

Some quotations to pique your interest, perhaps:

The market is precisely the freedom of people to produce, to consume, to determine what has to be produced, in whatever quantity, in whatever quality, and to whomever these products are to go. Such a free system without a market is impossible; such a free system is the market.

We have the idea that the institutions of men are either (1) the market, exchange between individuals, or (2) the government, an institution which, in the minds of the many people, is something superior to the market and could exist in the absence of the market. The truth is that the government — that is the recourse to violence, necessarily the recourse to violence — cannot produce anything. Everything that is produced is produced by the activities of individuals and is used on the market in order to receive something in exchange for it.

It is important to remember that everything that is done, everything that man has done, everything that society does, is the result of such voluntary cooperation and agreements. Social cooperation among men — and this means the market — is what brings about civilization and it is what has brought about all the improvements in human conditions we are enjoying today.

Money is a market phenomenon. What does that mean? It means that money developed on the market, and that its development and its functioning have nothing to do with the government, the state, or with the violence exercised by governments.

The problem [that human action seeks to solve] is not to increase the quantity of money. The problem is to increase the quantity of those things which can be bought with money. And if you are increasing the quantity of money, and you are not increasing the quantity of things which can be bought with money, you are only increasing the prices which are paid for them. And in time, if the increase in money continues, the whole system becomes a system without any meaning… Prices are going up because there is an additional quantity of money, asking, searching for a not-increased quantity of commodities. And the newspapers or the theorists call the higher prices, “inflation.” But the inflation is not the higher prices; the inflation is the new money pumped into the market. It is this new money that then inflates the prices. And the government asks, “What happened? How should one man know? …” The government is very innocent. … And the governments try to find somebody who is responsible — but not the government. They consider the man who asks for higher prices responsible. But he must ask for higher prices because there are now more people wanting to buy his produce, you know. … Now we have the inflation.

Everything that is done by a government against the purchasing power of the monetary unit is, under present conditions, done against the middle classes and the working classes of the population. Only these people don’t know it. And this is the tragedy. The tragedy is that the unions and all these people are supporting a policy that makes all their savings valueless. And this is the great danger of the whole situation.

The book isn’t long. It’s an evening’s read. It’s an excellent way to spend the May Day holiday weekend, and is a lot easier than reading Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action (though the latter also comes highly recommended, for the philosophical grounding it gives economics).

An accessible introduction to elementary economics, as Mises offers in Beware the Alchemists, should be required reading for anyone hoping to serve in, vote for, or write about government. Sadly, those are the three occupations for which no qualification or experience is required at all.

Maybe this is related to the concerns about degenerating water infrastructure, about which I wrote some months ago. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? It’s not like they told us much more than “don’t drink the water“.

Residents in Northern Johannesburg areas were on Friday warned not to drink tap water as the quality was not up to standard, Johannesburg Water said.

Spokesperson Baldwin Matsimela said during routing (sic) sampling on Thursday it was found that the water supply was not up to standard and people in the Northern Johannesburg areas should boil their water before drinking it.

The areas affected are Northcliff, Linden, Cresta, Blairgowrie, Fairlands, and the areas immediately surrounding them.

That’s me, and the areas surrounding me. Sounds like a single incident, not a general problem. It may or may not be the result of old and decrepit water pipes (or “reticulation”, as bureaucrats call it for the sake of clarity), we aren’t being told.

“The water quality has been compromised and we are conducting more tests to find out the source of the problem.

“We do not know as yet what effects or symptoms it would have on people who have already consumed the water,” he said.

So, uh, how do you know the water quality has been compromised? What with? Mud? If so, I’ll take my chances. Sewerage? If so, I might increase my electricity usage contrary to the explicit instructions of minister Buyelwa Sonjica. Or I might avoid it altogether. The beer is still safe, I assume?

According to Johannesburg Water if there is a serious problem with the water, residents will be brought water through alternative methods.

“Lab results of water samples taken yesterday [Thursday] will be known by 1pm and from there we will know how to proceed,” said Baldwin. — Sapa

Well, it’s past one, and on cue, the news is coming over the radio that the tests came back negative. Nice to know.

Now here’s some advice for our public servants and their public relations staff. Stop scaring the living bejeezus out of thousands of people, half of whom drank the water before they heard the warning. Perhaps a little more clarity about what exactly happened and why — which I still want to know, by the way — would go a long way.

As I said, I still want to know what happened, where and why. Is this an idiot with a big machine who broke a pipe? Hey, it happens. Is it a pipe that spent the last 40 years rusting in peace? Why wasn’t it replaced at the end of its design life? Was it a sewerage spill or pollution incident? What did you do about it, and have the guilty parties been fined or fired?

People deserve to know these things. Especially when their health depends on this infrastructure.

It used to be a matter of pride to tell foreigners that unlike in some first world countries, our tap water is not only potable, it actually tastes good.

It would be nice if we could keep it that way. It would be nice not to have to listen to more humiliating comments from president Thabo Mbeki like his recent explanation that many other African countries also suffer serious electricity crises. We weren’t going to be like them, remember? I felt for him, at that moment. That comment must have been heartbreaking.

On the other hand, we still have lions, you foreign people. And elephants. Not in the streets, mind you. Not yet, at least.

Prompted by the debate David Bullard tried — but probably failed — to stir (as I argued on Friday), I wrote a short opinion on colonialism, which I reckon is worth posting separately. Thanks to Dawn for the comment that prompted this thought.

My own view on colonialism is that it was a logical development in a world that had until then been isolationist and mercantilist. At the time, trade with enemies or foreign countries was often embargoed, subject to high tariffs and duties, or simply forbidden. Establishing friendly trading colonies was a necessary step on the way to building global trade.

Though deeply marred by illiberal practices such as corruption, annexation, slavery and war, such practices do not negate the mutual benefits of trade expansion, which was the primary purpose of colonial expansion by the major economic powers. One could argue that some (though far from all) colonial trade was involuntary, and that some colonialists did not respect the property or political rights of indigenous peoples. Inasmuch as this was the case I’d agree that an honest case for “mutual benefit” cannot be made, but then, inasmuch as this was the case, the trade wasn’t free at the time.

These are among the reasons that colonialism would always have to be superceded, and why it couldn’t be anything other than a step towards a freer, more modern world in which the benefits of trade can be enjoyed by all its citizens. However, that it did expand the world’s horizons and build the world’s institutions to a level at which capital could be more efficiently deployed and resources more efficiently harnessed, is hard to dispute. Without the expanded production base created by growing trade, I doubt we could have supported the unprecedented population growth of the 20th century. In fact, I doubt that growth — and the concomitant growth in global prosperity and quality of life indicators — would even have been possible without growing global trade.

That we’re in a better world now than under a colonial trading system is indisputable. The advance of liberty is always an improvement in society, as is the growing sophistication of governments, markets and the institutional structures that support it.

That a colonial trading system was a useful step on the way to today’s increasingly free and prosperous world is perhaps more controversial, and whether its benefits exceeded its obvious costs is less immediately clear. But it’s a debate worth having, if only so that in focusing our efforts on an increasingly free and prosperous future, we can learn valid lessons from our less free and prosperous past.

“What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit,” writes Janet Daley in a column prompted by a report that finds “fair trade” to be fundamentally unfair. Thanks to Alex Matthews, over at the excellent classical liberal blog AfroDissident, for alerting me to his own post on the subject. (Granted, he did so two weeks ago, but I have been very patchily connected, thanks to the electronic-frying power of blackouts.)

As you glide along the supermarket aisle past the smartly packaged Fairtrade coffee and guiltily slip the cheaper arabica into your trolley instead, you may ask yourself how much good your overpriced purchase of the Fairtrade stuff would have done anyway.

Well, now you know. Today’s report from the Adam Smith Institute [summary here, or full report in PDF here] will probably confirm your suspicion: Fairtrade labelling is largely a marketing ploy, which makes clever use of the almost infinite capacity for guilt harboured by the residents of wealthy countries over the condition of those in poorer ones, even though that condition is, in no rational sense, their fault.

But rational thinking does not come into this: you and your heaped shopping trolley represent wealth and security, which you have a vague but pretty firm notion that the people who harvest the coffee beans do not have. So maybe you are persuaded to make a gesture: a small strike against “exploitation” and global greed and (if you are old enough to remember this epithet) “corporate capitalism”. And you feel better about yourself.

It transpires that a very small number of farmers are getting a subsidised fixed price for their produce under Fairtrade franchises and that this is at the expense of most other farmers in their regions, who are actually worse off as a result.

But even more serious, the Fairtrade operation helps to keep poor countries and undeveloped economies exactly that — poor and undeveloped.

By sustaining agricultural activity that would not otherwise be sustainable in the global marketplace, it keeps backward populations from developing other forms of modern economic activity that might help them climb out of their backwardness. In order to permit wealthy people to indulge in a bit of sentimental largesse, it effectively preserves an anachronism that locks some of the poorest people in the world in backwaters of primitive economic existence.

What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit. And the greatest aid to real development — and the proven route out of mass poverty — is through free trade, not Fairtrade.

All of which should cause us to reflect on the various misuses of the word “fair”, and its even more pernicious noun form “fairness”, as it is bandied about in political discourse. As received opinion has it, “fair” means “equal” - in the strict literal sense of the word. Distribution of wealth in a society is “fair” if nobody has much more than anybody else - however much harder they may have worked, or however singular and disciplined their talents may be.

The corollary of this is that taxation helps to ensure “fairness” by seeing to it that those who earn more than others have more of their income confiscated. On this formulation, disparities of wealth are inherently wicked. This is a moral philosophy that you may or may not find attractive. But if you do, you will have to accept that it is fundamentally totalitarian. Disparities of wealth are a sign of a dynamic free-market economy in which some sectors are invariably expanding while others contract: at any given moment, some people’s lot will be improving ahead of others’.

[…]

It is ironic that the very same people who are committed to the idea that “fair” must mean “the same” talk endlessly about “opportunity”. Nothing is a greater killer of opportunities than uniformity.

[…]

How have we come to accept such vindictive uses of the word “fair”?

Of course it was initially the fault of the Left and its special pleading lobbies, which — like some Fairtrade promoters — had a lot to gain. But the Right has been complicit: it has surrendered words like “fairness” and “opportunity” — and accepted caricatures of other words such as “selfish” and “greedy” — with scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Romantic notions of the noble savage, of the beauty of the supposedly traditional pursuits of poor people, are very common. Many developing countries actively play into this misguided view Westerners have of them. I cannot count how often I’ve seen beadcraft workshops in South Africa, as if this is the route out of poverty, or wire sculptures in museums, as if simple crafts are thereby ennobled. The only effect of indulging this romantic, condescending image of Africa is to create an industry that produces singularly uniform curios that delight clueless rich people. Absurdly tall wooden giraffes may be a wonderful way to part a fat prat from his dollars, but it is hardly the best route out of poverty.

Do read the full report (PDF), it’s worth it.

In fairness, here’s the rebuttal by the Fairtrade Foundation. It may not surprise you that it finds the report to be utter rubbish, motivated by evil agendas.

It says, “Releasing this report when thousands of people are trying to make a difference to global poverty by promoting Fairtrade products, is an insult to the effort and commitment of Fairtrade producers and their supporters in the UK.” Ag shame. Good intentions are so, well, good.

“Moreover, the opinions in this report will be rebutted by the producers themselves during Fairtrade Fortnight…” Well sure, but those producers are of “the very small number” cited in the Adam Smith Institute report. Besides, they comment on only a very limited fact: that they get paid more for their coffee. Of course they’re going to say that’s a good thing. They’re hardly likely to consider their personal windfall in the context of the macro-economic impact on development.

“Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing and hearing at first hand the difference that Fairtrade makes to poor communities are not going to be persuaded otherwise by the rehashing of simplistic economic theories.” Indeed. Economic theory has seldom stood in the way of socialist, statist, collectivist or protectionist preachers. Especially not when there’s money to be made from gullible saps.

Update:A fellow calling himself Angry African posted this link to his own post about Fairtrade as a comment to this piece over at the Mail & Guardian Online’s blog site.

It’s well worth a read, especially since it claims Fairtrade not only charges consumers more for the label, but charges participating farmers for the priviledge of being Fairtrade certified. If true, Fairtrade starts to sound more like a protectionist cartel — no, worse: a protection racket — in the Proudly South Africa vein.

“Pay us and we’ll put our label on your products, mark it up sky-high, and give you a small kickback,” then comes to mean, “Pay us, or we’ll guilt-trip people into not buying your products, so you can be sure you won’t get your products to market in our rich countries.”

By “global warming”, I mean the wider orthodoxy not only that warming is happening, but that it is caused by human activity, that it will lead to catastrophic consequences, that action to change the climate is urgent, that said action consists largely of limiting CO2 emissions and reducing energy use, that such action will be effective, that such action is required of developed and developing countries alike, and that it can only be achieved by using taxation, legislation or other forcible, government-imposed means to make people comply.

A while ago, I listed ten reasons to reject global warming. I’d have to be wrong on all of them before I could rationally consider measures such as cap-and-trade, carbon-tax or other elaborate, invasive and expensive government measures to combat climate change.

A comment by a retired geology Ph.D. on this well-considered piece on the irrationality of the climate change debate (from the felicitously named Rightwing Nuthouse) lists ten more reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming:

1. It has all the marks of a religion; skeptics are treated like heretics and the spokesman is a Baptist lay preacher.
2. Global warming is now called climate change so it can embrace global cooling, also.
3. It is anti-American since America is biggest producer of CO2.
4. I’ve been through this before in the 1970’s with Global Cooling.
5. As I geologist I know that climate changes take a long time since the earth has a very large thermal mass.
6. Humans have adapted to colder and warmer conditions. Manhattan’s average temperature has increased 7°F in the last 50 years but New Yorkers are not wilting.
7. The data for the earth’s temperature for more than 100 years in the past are very sparse and unreliable.
8. The data for the earth’s temperature for the last 100 years is not much better and practically all of it has to be compensated for the urban heat island effect, vide Manhattan.
9. Other measurements of the earth’s thermal condition, for example, shrinking growing season lengths, are not consistent with global warming.
10. Concomitance is not causation.

I don’t agree with all of them. Point three, for example, should in my opinion read, “It’s anti-development, since development, poverty reduction and prosperity growth are big producers of CO2,” but it makes some good points, especially about the quality of the climate record, the selectivity of factors considered in the overall models, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the failure to adjust correctly for urban heat islands.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit site has been documenting many of these data and statistical problems, prompting in some cases corrections to the official records. See this post on urban heat island adjustments, and see these posts on temperature record errors and corrections, for example. (I covered some of his work inter alia here and here.)

So while Rick Moran makes some good points about our ability to evaluate the scientific basis for climate change theory, even the notion that we just don’t know enough suggests that expensive programmes of enforced action are imprudent, at best. Not to mention that they’re philosophically repulsive to anyone who values individual freedom and bases their views of how best to minimise poverty and maximise prosperity on the vitality of free markets and innovation.

Economist David Hale includes some fascinating statistics in a recent WSJ op-ed piece. He notes that the rise of emerging markets and their growing ability to finance American debt and current account deficits, is “a complete reversal of 20th-century history.”

The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old industrial countries to the emerging market countries. During 2007, the developing countries produced over 52% of global growth, compared to 37% during the late 1990s. China alone produced 17.8% of global GDP growth last year, compared to 14.6% for the U.S. economy. The developing countries’ share of total world output has risen to 29% this year from 18% in 1995. The World Bank is forecasting that the economies of developing countries will grow 7.4% this year, compared to 2.2% in the old industrial nations.

As a result of their large current account surpluses, the developing countries also account for 75% of the world’s $6 trillion of foreign exchange reserves. They also have sovereign wealth funds with assets of $2.5 trillion. And there has been a huge expansion of developing-country stock markets during the past decade. Their market capitalization now exceeds $17.8 trillion, compared to $2.2 trillion in 2000. The capitalization of the U.S. stock market is $17.5 trillion.

In the decade before 2005, American consumers were the growth engine for the world economy, accounting for more than half of global consumer spending. The balance of power is now shifting.

In 2000, the consumer spending of the world’s 17 largest emerging-market countries was equal to 48% of U.S. consumer spending; last year it was equal to 65%. At current growth rates, the developing countries could exceed U.S. consumer spending by 2015.

This consumption boom is changing global trade patterns. America’s share of global imports has fallen to 14% last year from over 20% in 2000. The import share of the developing countries has grown to 40.6% last year from 33% in 2000.

This disconfirms the popular left-wing trope that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. In reality, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor. It suggests even that “inequality”, the fall-back number on which Western neo-socialists alight whenever they realise they simply cannot claim the poor are worse off than they were 50 years ago, is a fallacy.

These numbers remind me of the spectacular presentation Hans Rosling gave at TED in 2006, and a follow-up in 2007. If you haven’t seen his presentations, do yourself a favour and take the time to watch Rosling make data come alive:

Myths about the developing world, Hans Rosling, TED 2006

Watch the end of poverty, Hans Rosling, TED 2007

“The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world,” he concludes, before debunking the image of the Swedish academic and statistician by swallowing a bayonet.

Prompted by Wessel van Rensburg’s comment on another post, I dug through my archives to find a story I wrote for CIO Africa in September 2004, on Somalia’s telecommunications industry. It is not available online, but I have permission to quote it here in full:

Absent rules, luxuriant growth
Somalia’s telecom sector: a case study in anarchocapitalism
By Ivo Vegter

“A wild rose roofs the ruined shed / And that and summer well agree.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Day Dream

The most unlikely places throw up the most unlikely tales. Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.

When Somalia’s former ruler, General Muhammad Siyad Barre, was ousted in January 1991, the country rapidly degenerated into turmoil. The country has been fought over by secessionist factions and warlords ever since. A shortlived attempt at US intervention led to a famous withdrawal, and more recent peace negotiations in neighbouring Djibouti have spluttered fitfully without achieving much by way of either peace or effective government.

Before the collapse of the Barre regime, there had been 8 500 fixed lines, most of which were in the capital, Mogadishu. Even that meagre public switched telephone network was destroyed, leaving the country entirely bereft of telecommunications of any description.

Yet, when Walter Brown, an African telecommunications expert with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), was asked by the Ugandan delegation to a 1999 conference on rural telecoms about the best way to introduce a mobile phone operator, he suggested talking to the Somali delegation. At the time, the Somalis had a deal on the table for a tenth of what the Ugandans could extract from likely equipment vendors.

Speaking to CIO Africa at Johannesburg’s Kind of Blue, the jazz restaurant to which he has since retired, Brown says, “My presentation to the ITU conference said that technology lends itself to a private sector approach, by moving away from circuit-switched telecoms to packet-switching even in rural areas. It can be done cheaply, using any bearer you wish – radio, powerline, satelite, copper, fibre – and you can deal with any vendor you like.”

He recalls: “I made many friends, but made enemies of large industry players who needed to dump circuit-switching technology somewhere. Many delegates said the environment didn’t allow them to speak out.”

Not so the Somali delegation, which had no government to answer to, no vendors to mollify, and no legacy systems to consider.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the small industrial sector has been looted for scrap metal – among the country’s chief exports – and there is no formal banking sector. Yet despite this seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow.

“Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent,” it states.

Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a situation as fluid and chaotic as Somalia.

While the ITU estimated there to be about 10 000 main lines in operation at the end of 2000, the latest World Factbook figures, which date to 2002, estimate that there are 100 000 main telephone lines, 35 000 mobile phones, and 89 000 Internet users.

Writing in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) magazine, Choices, reporter Finbarr O’Reilly quotes Abdi Karim Mohamed Eid, manager of private telecommunications company Telesom, as saying, “If you add up the other companies, there may be around 20 000 Internet subscribers in [the northern region of] Somaliland. That’s much more than we anticipated initially and it’s a remarkable achievement given that there is no backing from the international community. This is solely done by the Somali business community. We are really proud of that.”

According to O’Reilly, 87% of the country now has telephone service, and some operators claim to be able to install fixed lines withing two days of applying, and establish Internet accounts within 24 hours. His figures of 105 000 fixed and 39 000 mobile lines back up the CIA’s numbers. An older report from the Somali Telecom Association (STA) state that 47 out of 74 towns have telephone service. And international call rates are as low as $1 per minute.

“It was clear supply and demand,” says Brown. “There was a need, and it got supplied. The service is reliable, because operators know if there is no service, there is no money. And you can get service within days of applying.”

The STA was formed at the behest of the UNDP and the ITU, in order to address the problem that to reach all people will telephones in Somalia, people had to subscribe to at least three different networks.

“With no government, no regulator, and no policy, they formed interconnect agreements,” says Brown. “Vendors didn’t take them seriously, until they started making money. Now companies like MCI help broker deals for Somali operators. Tariffs are set according to supply and demand, and are the cheapest in Africa.”

He adds: “They did well, and were able to advise Uganda to get rid of their oversight yokes.”

Not that complete anarchy is necessarily a good thing, of course. Though nobody imposes taxes on telephone calls, protects incumbent monopolies, demands exorbitant licence fees or imposes counter-intuitive technology restrictions, nobody collects refuse, supplies reliable electricity or provides adequate security either.

But Somalia’s experience with free-market telecommunications shows that the continent’s penchant for regulation, red tape and big government is not the solution to local development challenges.

It adds a new dimension to the existing weight of evidence that argues the benefits of telecommunication for the developing world.

“Consider the ITU study on the transport sector in Yemen,” explains Brown, “where simply providing communication long highways cut the costs of trucking companies by as much as 80%. Or the study in Sri Lanka, where farmers improved their income by 70% simply using a public telephone box.”

Somalia is a case study for the truth Brown learnt in a career spent at telecoms operations ranging from Zimbabwe’s PTC to the Iridium satellite venture to the ITU: “Oversight should not manage. It should lead, encourage and incentivise.”

Left free to innovate, an entrepreneurial people will find ways to succeed despite the most adverse of circumstances. Development goals foisted upon them by supranational organisations merely sound lofty. Liberalisation plans managed by government merely sound responsible. What makes the difference, in the end, is mere supply and demand.

2004 (c) CIO Africa, BDFM Publishers

“I can categorically say that we are not facing a water crisis, or a water-contamination crisis,” Lindiwe Hendricks, the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry told a media briefing in parliament yesterday. “The water that comes out of our taps is among the best in the world.”

That may well be true. But who can believe her? After all, we weren’t facing an electricity crisis either, remember? Our own president told us so.

Steven Lang wrote a damning report in October 2007, for the Inter Press Service that:

Sewage plants in South Africa’s northern Gauteng Province poured millions of litres of untreated waste into three rivers between the capital, Pretoria, and the commercial centre of Johannesburg earlier this month. National power utility Eskom cut electricity to the treatment plants, which were then unable to process the waste water before it was released into the rivers. […]

Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s Themba Khumalo attempted to downplay the gravity of the spillage [of 200 million litres of untreated sewerage from eight treatment plants into the Apies, Hennops and Pienaars rivers, which flow into the Hartebeespoort Dam]: “It is a catastrophe, but certainly not a national crisis.”

He went on to place the responsibility for averting similar crises on the shoulders of individual municipalities, saying they should negotiate directly with Eskom and tell the power utility which sanitation works should not be included in power cuts.

Ah, so it’s not a national crisis because you can shift the blame to local municipalities? Good to know.

Such problems aren’t isolated, however. In Cape Town, last month, raw sewerage overflowed into the Milnerton lagoon when the Koeberg sewerage pump was shut down. A similar thing happened near Simon’s Town. Cape Town reports having 30-odd generators, half of them fixed, to keep 395 sewerage pumps going.

According to minutes of a January 2008 meeting of the Blesbokspruit Catchment Forum, in the Vaal catchment area (PDF):

Eskom load shedding had stalled all instrument analysis causing damage and work had to be outsourced. Erlab [the East Rand Water Care Company Laboratory] will resolve this problem as analysie (sic) for some of the important sewage works will not be done. […]

[The forum] noted again that the pump stations in the Ekurhuleni region are of major concern particularly with regards to the latest problems of load shedding caused by Eskom. […]

All members present at the meeting agreed that the continued practice of load shedding will have a serious and significant impact on wastewater treatments not being able to operate and meet discharge requirements.”

Ja, people, but only in the Vaal Dam, not nationally!

The problem is also not new. After the 2006 power failures, Cape Town was warned that sewerage was being pumped into the sea.

Derek Bock, chief operations officer for the Central City Improvement District, said the CCID had warned the city eight months ago that the sewage pumps were inadequate and contingency plans for such emergencies as the power cuts were unsatisfactory.

And here we are in 2008, and still they have only 30 generators?

Not only is problem not new, it is not superficial. The cause goes deeper than recent blackouts that caused sewerage spills or industrial contaminants in source water. Almost a decade ago, this article by Peter Wellman for the African Eye News Service documents problems with water reticulation and drinking water delivery problems, and a note is added:

It is clear that all is not well in the water supply and sanitation sector in South Africa.

A great deal was sacrificed in the interests of accelerated delivery, mainly in the form of community engagement, consumer education and a disregard for the hard learned lessons of development from around the world.

The article particularly quotes the Director General, Mr Mike Muller, as effectively blaming the communities and consumers for the failure. However, sustainable services have not been delivered, whether the cause of failure is technical, social or financial. It is not as though these issues are new or a surprise in the South African situation. It is not as though the circumstances leading up to the failure have not been highlighted on dozens of occasions over the past few years. What is surprising is that all the warnings were not heeded.

It is a double irony and extremely cynical to blame the people for the failure.

The Mail&Guardian article, in which Minister Hendricks says “there is no crisis”, continues:

She also admitted that there has been a problem with ageing infrastructure, because no provision was made in the past for upgrading infrastructure. “Repair and refurbishment haven’t kept up,” she said.

As a result, some dams and rivers have been polluted where informal settlements have grown up on their banks. This too is being dealt with, she said, “but infrastructure construction takes time”.

What? No provision was made for upgrading infrastructure? One can safely assume, then that water reticulation is both over-stressed and under-maintained.

I’ve lived most of my adult life in the north and north-west of Johannesburg. In just the last decade, entire landscapes have been turned into fields of ticky tacky houses stretching to the horizon. Thirty years ago, Midrand and Centurion didn’t exist, and the road between Johannesburg and Pretoria was 70km of… well, there was the Snake Park. Twenty years ago, they put up stop signs at an intersection in the back of beyond, and called it Fourways. There was nothing but dark two-lane blacktop north of Corlett Drive on the M1. Ten years ago, a trip to the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens was a trip to the country, and driving to Kromdraai was to venture into the deep hinterland. Not so long ago, Diepsloot was little more than a small rural settlement for a few thousand families. Several hundred thousand people now live there, many moved there by the government from Alexandra township near Sandton. Roodepoort’s population grew by 50% in the last decade.

Given all this helter-skelter development, why on God’s green earth was no provision made in the past for upgrading infrastructure? True, many of the early residents of these areas are snooty mink-and-manure types, but do they not shit?

It’s not even like the municipalities had to single-handedly keep up with rampant growth and development despite stretched budgets and capacity, or fail. They didn’t have to do it all themselves. A lot of this is new-built stuff, sold to middle- and upper-class residents. Surely a prescient city planner somewhere could have required that developers upgrade electricity, roads, sewerage and water reticulation plant before issuing planning permission? The municipalities themselves could then focus just on urban renewal, township rehabilitation and upgrading, idealistic public transport development, and pipe dreams of mixed-income integrated housing developments.

I used to laugh, proudly, at foreign visitors who arrived here with bottled water. “Rand Water makes the best tap water in the world! It’s Paris water that’ll kill an ox.”

Our tap water appears to be largely okay, for now. But there’s only so much that Rand Water and its equivalents elsewhere can do in the face of aging infrastructure that has not been upgraded to keep up with development, and decaying power infrastructure that interrupts critical pumping and treatment facilities. This adds up to only one conclusion: buy shares in companies that make polyethylene terephthalate. That’s what water bottles are made from, and we’ll need at least 400 million of those for the 2010 World Cup.

In 2006, Thabo Mbeki told us, about electricity, that “there is no crisis”. Now Lindiwe Hendricks tells us, about water, “there is no crisis”. My question is, why would anyone believe her?

Here’s a fascinating story. Inspired by Nickel and Dimed, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich that told of her experiment of living a lower-class life and how hard it was to escape poverty and pursue the American Dream, Adam Shepard decided to repeat the experiment. Denouncing his former life as a well-off college graduate, he entered a homeless shelter with $25 and the clothes on his back. His goal was to have a furnished apartment, a car and $2 500 in savings within a year, without calling on his former contacts or education. Ten months later, when he had to quit the experiment, he had a pickup truck, a job, and $5 000 in savings. He wrote a book about the experience.

CSM’s interview with him suggests that the left-wing generalisations about class structures, the accident of birth, and poverty traps don’t always stand up to real-life experience. Shepard’s story suggests that character, responsibility and self-discipline have a great deal to do with how “privileged” you end up being. He not only shows this from his own experience, but also from his characterisation of some of the people with which he shared his poverty and life on the street, some of whom were upwardly mobile, and others not.

It confirms the notion that few people are doomed to poverty by the rigid dictates of a cruel society dominated by uncaring capitalists. In fact, especially in more prosperous countries with a well-established middle class and healthy economy, there’s a lot of churn in the ranks of the poor. Some people rise out of poverty, and others fall into it. The poor of today aren’t the poor of five years ago, nor the poor of five years hence. One estimate I read a while ago said that the small percentage of Americans who earn minimum wage on average do so for only two or three years. The churn is high, yet the percentage remains stable, suggesting that the class of minimum wage earners consists of a combination of first-time employees who soon step up the ladder, and people who fall into low-wage jobs, but soon work their way back out of their relative poverty.

Shepard’s story offers yet more support for a society in which individual freedom trumps social engineering. Not only is such a society able to build higher average prosperity and quality of life, but it offers a better chance to its poor and unemployed, too.

(Hat tip: GeekPress)

It’s unnerving how often one is faced with declarations about the desirability of fewer people on earth, in response to criticisms of environmentalist politicking. Fewer of us, so the reasoning goes, would improve quality of life, and would be good for the environment.

Forgive me for not joining this little death cult. Forty years ago almost to the day, an obscure lapidopterist named Paul Ehrlich generalised Malthusian theories about population growth in butterflies, and published a book which essentially replaced all occurrences of the word “insect” with “human”. The Population Bomb exploded (sorry) upon the world. It made hysterical predictions of exponential population growth that would inevitably lead to catastrophic resource depletion and mass starvation in the 1970s. As if the coming ice age didn’t cause enough stress. Ehrlich’s book advocated radical population control measures. The apocalyptic over-population vision was reinforced by a best-selling book published by the Club of Rome in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth, in which the collapse of human development and population was predicted as a result of exponential growth in demand for limited resources. The failure of these prophesies of doom hasn’t changed the authors’ minds. They went on to write further books, renewing their end-of-the-world predictions, the most amusing being Beyond the Limits, published in 1993.

Yet resources stubbornly refused to be exhausted. In 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed economist Julian Simon a cheque for $576.07, as a result of a 1980 futures contract on five metals of Ehrlich’s choosing. Both agreed that market prices were an adequate proxy for scarcity, and since Ehrlich predicted more scarcity, he would have made a profit on the $1 000 futures contract had prices risen. Instead, all declined, by an average of more than 50%, and Ehrlich spectacularly lost his bet.

Likewise, people stubbornly refused to starve en masse. Not only has the proportion of people suffering malnourishment declined to a third of the 1970 level of 35%, but the absolute number is down from over 900 million to 400 million, despite the inconvenient truth that the world’s population doubled over the same period, and despite the fact that this population growth was heavily biased towards to the poor world to boot.

Thanks to the consistent and often spectacular failure of such predictions of developmental disaster, it has become clear that the earth can sustain rather more people than expected. Why is this so? Because population growth isn’t exponential after all. It doesn’t simply grow until resources are depleted, at which point Gaia takes Mathusian revenge and decimates the parasite that is homo sapiens. (This suggests that terms like “parasite”, “virus” and “cancer”, which are habitually used by Gaia’s death cultists to describe you and me and humanity in general, might not be entirely fair either.)

In fact, global human population is likely to stabilise over time. Already, global population growth is slowing, both in relative and absolute terms, and the UNDP estimates that the total population of Earth will reach a plateau of around 11 billion people, ca. 2200. Why is this so? Because as more people get more prosperous, life expectancy increases and mortality rates decline. As a result, people tend to have fewer children, and the children they do have contribute to this prosperity, rather than detract from it.

And why can the earth sustain this? Why have resources become less scarce rather than more scarce? Because Earth is pretty large, for one, and because production isn’t a zero-sum game that simply depletes resources in a one-to-one relationship with population size. What Julian Simon understood is that the price mechanism militates against the uncontrolled exploitation environmentalists fear, because scarcity is priced into our ability to use resources productively. And again, the more prosperous we get, the more we invest in sustainability, the more sophisticated and technically skilled we get at resource management, the more we care about a healthy and productive environment, and the more we value future sustainability over present consumption. And the fewer children we have.

As the rich world amply demonstrates, successful economic development is not the problem, it’s the solution to uncontrolled population growth and unmanaged resource exploitation. There’s no reason why the same would not hold true for the developing world. Opposing their development, on mistaken sustainability grounds, is not only a selfish type of neo-colonialism on the part of the rich world’s environmentalists, but it strikes me as pretty misanthropic.

Yet Gaia’s suicide cultists sound like they would consider a culling spree desirable. They sound like they want to stop the developing world from either developing or growing. Not to say that industrial development is desirable at any cost. That’s clearly not true. But the Gaiists are always willing to sacrifice any industrialisation, development or human activity in favour of environmental protection, no matter how necessary the development is, or how tenuous the environmental danger is. Many of them stand ready to use any means — vandalism, legislative force, high seas piracy, emotional blackmail, outright lies — to achieve their anti-social aims.

Even assuming that one can handle the rather sociopathic notion of reducing the earth’s population by a few billion and leaving the remainder poorer than they are today, such a situation would be unlikely to relieve the pressure on animal populations and environmental resources that really are deserving of protection.

On the contrary. Some of the worst historical environmental damage was caused on a planet peopled by only a fraction of today’s population, at only a fraction of today’s living standards. The evidence simply doesn’t bear out the theory. With fewer people around, well-meaning do-gooders would still be fretting about some messianic mission of “saving” the planet, but ironically, they’d have a harder time doing so.

The environment turns out to be pretty robust. In general (as opposed to localised exceptions) the image of a fragile, super-sensitive system that could be tipped into disaster by the slightest human (as opposed to natural) disturbance, is simply false.

The environment is, of course, very much worth caring about and investing in, even if only for purely selfish reasons of maintaining a productive resource base. One doesn’t, however, achieve this by getting hysterical about human population and its use of natural resources. One doesn’t save, say, the tiger, by discrediting endangered species protection with ill-conceived, politically-motivated and unnecessary listings of emotional-appeal icons such as the polar bear. One doesn’t achieve a better world by activist obstructionism, designed solely to limit the economic development the world, and halt the modern world’s remarkable progress towards longer, healthier and more prosperous lives for all.

And one certainly doesn’t earn the buy-in of other people when you’re telling them that the world would be better off without them.

The other day, I encountered a new mother, who was all apologetic for having contributed to the population. I told her that her kid would either produce more than it would consume, or die. Therefore, it would be a net benefit to the world. How tragic that she couldn’t conceive of her child being anything other than a burden to humanity.