| Comment Thursday, August 14, 2003 CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO Racing for naked ambitionWhy? Because he insists on walking across Britain stark naked! However, he does it like no other cross-country walker – or rambler, as they call – has ever done before. Gough has been on the road since June 16 and expects to end his trek late in September. The police have interrupted his journey with arrests and people have hurled abuse at or attacked him. But, asks the father of a seven-year-old daughter: "How can our bodies be illegal or disgusting?" Undeterred, then, by these and people who complain about "middle-aged ramblers with their bits swinging in the breeze" – as The Independent reported it – Gough soldiers on. What does his mother think? She was dismayed and dressed down her son for his "naked ambitions". But mothers will be mothers, so we learn that when the journalists got to her, she still "could not hide a tinge of maternal pride in [her son’s] new-found fame". In Monrovia, though, women have reason to fear naked men. Last week The Guardian wrote about the orgy of violence and rape in the war-ravaged capital of Liberia. It was the kind of story you don’t forget quickly. As the peacekeepers arrived, rebels and government troops decided it might be their last chance to exploit the anarchy. They went on the rampage and committed hundreds of rapes. "Esther Macauley, 40, was gang-raped by Lurd fighters in front of her four children", The Guardian said. "She lost count of the rapes after five, but remembers that the rapists were young: ‘Small baby men’. They disembowled her husband. "They said they were looking inside for Charles Taylor’". One can only ask helplessly: Why? Why? But before we despair, consider the same Monrovia which offers us a most remarkable insights into human enterprise and the allure of the free market. Amos Wesseh was a plumber before war came to Monrovia. Then the fighting knocked out water supplies and no one wanted Wesseh’s services any more. He had a family to feed, so he went into a new line of business to make a living – clearing bodies from the streets. He turned his coal house into a makeshift mortuary. Orders from people wanting to clear bodies from their drainage and the humanitarian agencies working in the city have overwhelmed Wesseh. The beauty of it all is that if peace returns, he will still make money – as a plumber. Talking of the free market, from Iraq we have got glimpses into how to rig a tender. The Americans and Britons wanted to exclude other companies, especially Arab ones, from bidding for lucrative contracts to provide mobile phone services in Iraq. Among the rules, they required any company in which a government directly or indirectly owns more than 5 per cent not to qualify to bid. The result is that it’s mostly American and British firms that qualify . Iraq, however, seems to be a bonus for US business only. The real bacon was back home. America’s defence spending grew so strongly in supplying the war against Iraq that it propelled the economy to a spring boom. War output grew at an annual rate of 44 per cent in the second quarter, its fastest expansion since the Korean war in 1951. And the most unlikely Iraqis are getting some of the cash. Three months ago, American troops killed 15 people in the town of Fallujah. The incident sparked a wave of bitterness against American occupation, and attacks on US troops soared. The Americans eventually did something rather "unAmerican" to cool tempers. They paid "blood money". Or, as someone put it, they bribed the bereaved families, paying out $500 for the wounded and $1,500 for the dead. Muthana Salah, wounded in the Fullajah incident, had sworn revenge. He was one of the people sorted out and has now mellowed. "This is the only way. It is in our religion – I have no grudge against them any more", he’s reported to have said. Otherwise, the world continues with the incestuous investigation into itself. Thus we learn that arts students are 60 per cent more likely to die prematurely (after college) than their peers in the sciences, according to a study reported in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Medical students run the highest risk of succumbing to an alcohol-related death. The research was thorough. It followed more than 8,000 male students who attended Glasgow University between 1948 and 1968 and had died by June, 2000. It found that engineering students had the best health prospects. The high death rates of arts students was blamed on bad job prospects, a high rate of smoking and poor backgrounds. Science students, in general, live longer, helped by good employment prospects and an ascetic lifestyle. I am not sure this is true in Africa as well, because there are hardly any decent science jobs about. But, for what it’s worth, parents might just want to advise their children to look for a spouse more at the Kenya Power and Lighting Corporation than at Nairobi University’s History Department. They have to take only a small fact into account. The poor arts fellow is less violent and less likely to beat your daughter to death or pour hot water on your son in a fit of anger. Another study of 4,300 teenagers in Edinburgh, which started in 1998, has just reported that teenage boys have a natural tendency toward violence and aggressive behaviour, which "may be part of being male", The Observer says. It predicts that this finding will "reopen the fierce debate over nature and nurture". Interesting, because our grandmothers and elderly aunts always told us that boys were this way, didn’t they? Let’s spare a moment for the tiny and remote South Pacific island state of Tuvalu. It’s facing an unusual type of threat, according to The Times. Many of its islets are simply being swept away by cyclones or disappearing under water. Half a million years of culture and history are dissolving away – just like that. Hearing the doomsayers speak, it seems the Anglican Church is facing a similar threat. An African bishop was quoted in the British press issuing threats over the heated matter of homosexual bishops in the Anglican church. Warning that the African communion could even break away from the church over the election of the openly gay Canon Gene Robinson to be Bishop of New Hampshire in the US, he said: "We don’t need to go through Canterbury to get to Jesus". Such fine words. Pity he spoke on condition of anonymity. With the scandals in the church, Father Stefano Garzegno is the kind of priest you’d think no longer existed in the Catholic Church. The Italian priest rescued seven boys from drowning – then collapsed and died on the beach. True Christ stuff. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mr Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for media convergence and syndication. |
|
Front Page | News | Business | Comment | Letters | Sports | Cutting Edge | Feedback |
Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger
