Banking on Disaster

To understand how little the World Bank has really changed, one has only to look at the recently approved Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project.Ý The Environmental Assessment for the project runs to an excruciating 19 volumes, yet still leaves many important questions unanswered.

The World Bank has presented the project as an opportunity to help one of the poorest countries in the world.Ý Yet a closer look shows that its most likely result will be an environmental mess and a huge subsidy for three large oil companies.Ý The largest of these, Exxon, has revenues of around $130 billion a year, about 26 times greater than that of Chad.

The total cost of the project will be $3.7 billion, most of which will be borne by the companies concerned, Exxon, Chevron and Petronas.Ý The World Bank has only contributed $193 million; however, the oil companies would not have been able to raise the rest of this without the World Bank's backing.Ý The money will be used to develop 300 oil wells in Chad, build a 1070 km (650 mile) pipeline through Cameroon to the Atlantic Ocean, and set up an off-shore terminal facility.

Chad stands to gain about $2 billion in oil revenues over the next 25 years, while Cameroon will get about a quarter of this figure.Ý There is no doubt that this money is badly needed: social indicators in Chad are among the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa.Ý Per capita income is just $230 a year, life expectancy at birth is 49 years, and access to safe water is limited to about one fourth of the population.Ý Cameroon's per capita income is ten times greater, but still only one fifteenth that of the US. .. More


G21 AFRICA:

Serving Up Home Truths

WHEN I started to teach myself about African food, I found myself hitting a barrier: a lack of information.

There isn't even one comprehensive source of information for any of the individual countries in Africa, yet alone one covering the diverse foods of the continent.

Searching on the Net proved not much better. On the World Wide Web, where you can have a conversation with an alien or learn everything there is to know about the eating habits of cockroaches, there is hardly any information on African cuisine. All I ended up with were millions of web references to starvation in Sierra Leone and food riots in Somalia.

Then there were the travel stories about runny stomachs and icky food, with the occasional comment by an "Africa expert" like: "There is nothing for the gourmet, most Kenyan cuisine is 'stomach-filling fodder', mainly a gruelly substance called ugali."

Or: "Outside of the coast, most African food is bland and uninspired."

It is easy to take offence at such statements and, like many on this continent, I guess my reaction could have been, "Why bother?" It is safer to ignore the whole thing, and drink my coffee without caffeine. After all, like many of my generation, having never left this continent, I define myself as a follower of the popular culture of the western world before I am African. A sad state of affairs, but a truth. I blame "Dallas" and Tom Sawyer....More


MY GLASS HOUSE:

Fire Bringer

While on the most recent of my habitual pilgrimages back to Manhattan, I saw my friend Barbara, from California. She was out here on business. During our conversation, she confided to me that she had begun to see people as they should be. How could I resist the temptation to ask, "How should I be?"

"Married," she said.

Two qualifiers:

1. In my case, the correct phrase would be "Married again," and
   
   
2. I was flummoxed that anyone would still consider me, clearly an inveterate bachelor (if you've followed this saga of loves lost,) as having ANY marriage potential.

Which brings us to the tale(s) of women I almost married...h makes me wonder how to classify Henry James, James Joyce and John Steinbeck, not to mention Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy.

I thought of them all recently when I deliberately stopped reading a novel that was so well written that I could not bear to end the affair by finishing it.

If proof is needed that the tradition of the novel flourishes and even blooms then you need go no further than A.S. Byatt's series of which Babel Tower is the latest.

This debate, like those which caricature modern art as incoherent, modern music as alienating and modern architecture as ugly, conflates two issues. Namely, whether the works are well conceived and well wrought and whether they are 'relevant' to our times... KEVIN CAREY, "ART: The Novel" More


POWERSSOUND: "Almost Famous" tells the almost-true story of Crowe's precocious entry into the world of rock journalism at the age of 15. Crowe received an assignment to write a profile of a struggling rock group. The editors at Rolling Stone had no idea of the youth of their new writer, dealing entirely with him by phone.

Sparked by brilliant acting, especially by youngsters Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson --- who plays a groupie with a set of personal standards that make sense to her if not to others, "Almost Famous" lays down two hours of compelling drama, some big laughs, and excellent music of the era... BOB POWERS "Ruby Braff: Another Gem" More

RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT: Take my next door neighbor - please. She's a single mom with an apparently good enough paying job to drive a brand new Land Rover ($50k U.S.A.) and take several trips each year; yet she doesn't own any yard implements, say a leaf rake or a simple garden hoe for weeding her flower bed, whatever.

It started out with her using one of my garden hoses to water her lawn for the first month after she moved in (it did seem a little odd since she had just moved from a house). No less than once a week she's over borrowing some tool, or the proverbial "cup of sugar."