Owor Kipenji <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Comment
Thursday, October 16, 2003
CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO / WHAT OTHERS SAYThe West despises the pro-boy favouritism of African and other Third World cultures. Are they any different? Two researchers, Enrico Moreti of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Gordon Dahl of the University of Rochester, New York, decided to investigate. Preference for boy-child universal?
The results of their study, which examined American census data from 1994 to 2000, shocked them too. The economists found that men are less likely to seek divorce if there is a boy in the family, and more likely to marry a pregnant mother if they know she is giving birth to a male baby, The Sunday Times reports.
Parents who have just one girl are 44 per cent more likely to divorce than those with one boy; those with three girls are 86 per cent more likely to split up than those with three boys.
Dahl likens it to a "Henry VIII" syndrome. The Tudor king divorced his first wife and had his second executed after they bore him daughters. The third finally produced a son and heir. She survived.
The Guardian dwelt on a different syndrome. This is the time that develops when the children grow up, go off to university; or graduate and start their own lives, and you are left with a huge empty quiet house � just you and your husband (or alone).
The feeling of emptiness sometimes results in depression, requiring treatment by a psychologist.
Some of the research reported last week also had serious scientific inquiry confirming some common-sense notions. A study out of the UK found that a parent who takes an active interest in a child�s education is eight times more important in securing good exam results than wealth or social class.
Children whose parents are involved in their schooling do up to 25 per cent better than children with families who are not involved.
Those who don�t take that lesson to heart do so at their own peril. The mother of a 15-year-old boy in Northampton was jailed for repeatedly failing to prevent her son from dodging school. Under Britain�s 1996 Education Act, a parent who fails to work with school authorities to deal with their truant child commits an offence.
In addition, the government has now published plans to give headteachers, police, and council officials the right to impose on-the-spot fines of up to Sh13,000 on the parents of persistent absentees!
Reading about the flood of research in the US, one wonders why the government doesn�t hire investigators who can save it embarrassment. Early this month, a CIA-led Iraq Survey Group went combing Iraq in another frantic effort to find weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was accused of having stockpiled, leading to the American invasion.
The Survey Group didn�t find the weapons. However they stumbled on some biological laboratory equipment that they said could be used to build the destructive weapons.
American incompetence can sometimes be mind-boggling. Immediately after that report, a Congressional office said it had found that the Pentagon had all the time been selling such surplus biological lab equipment for give-away prices on the Internet without doing background checks on the buyers!
Someone ought to go to jail for things like those, a prospect that would not scare some criminals in South Africa.
This country, if you didn�t know, has two of the biggest private jails in the world. The new Mangaung Maximum Security Prison in Bloemfontein, and Katuma Sinthumule Maximum Security Prison were built by private British and American consortiums.
Unlike other prisons where there are 40 prisoners in a cell, at these private jails, they are only four. The prisoners get extensive rehabilitation and vocational training.
So what crime do you have to commit to serve your term in relative luxury? Well, you need to be convicted for something serious like murder, rape, violent robbery and so forth.
The private firms have been contracted by South Africa�s Department of Correctional Services to run the prisons for 25 years. Though the prisons were completed on time and on budget, there is a whiff of scandal blowing around them. A number of government officials who drew up the contracts left soon afterwards to take up lucrative posts in the prison companies, provoking allegations that they got "kitu kidogo".
This item had escaped my eye, and I report it not just for its tribal value (after all The Independent saw it fit to publish it on page one).
Black artists filled all top 10 spots in the first week of October�s American Billboard's singles chart. Nine of the 10 were rappers, while the number one was Baby Boy, a joint track from the R&B singer Beyonce and the reggae star Sean Paul.
The lock on the charts was taken as proof of the popularity of rap among teenagers, both white and black. It was the first time in the history of the American Billboard that the brothers and sisters made a clean sweep of the charts.
No one is happier about the Rugby World Cup than the bar owners of Britain. Last weekend when England�s football team faced off with Turkey, and the England and Wales rugby sides began their campaign for the World Cup, the Brits downed 70 million pints of beer in the pubs. That was an increase of 16 million on an ordinary weekend. Rugby fans in Britain are expected to drink 300 million pints during the tournament, according to The Times. There are losers, and there are losers.
But rarely do they come like the American doctor, Raymond Damadian. When the Nobel Prize for medicine was given to Dr Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and Dr Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, Damadian took out a full page advert in both the New York Times and Washington Post, denouncing the Nobel committee�s choice. He argued that he should have shared in the prize because the two had made technological advances based on his work.
"Jealousy and complaints over Nobel laureates are common, but public displays of disappointment and criticism such as Dr Damadian�s are not," said The Independent .
On to other winners. Liberia recently joined the long queue of countries breaking off diplomatic links with Taiwan, and establishing full consular relationship with mainland China instead.
Make no mistake, these fellows have been looking into the crystal ball. The Chinese economy, The Times citing a report from Goldman Sachs says, is poised to overtake France next year, and Britain in 2005. In 40 years, or possibly less, it will replace America as the world�s largest economy.
India will surpass Britain within 20 years, and Japan in 30 years, becoming the world�s largest economy after China and America. Time to open a department of Chinese Studies at Nairobi University, and Hindu Philosophy at Kenyatta, I say.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mr Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group�s managing editor for media convergence and syndication.
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