'More than 1,000 new academies'
Michael Gove has invited schools to take academy status
More than 1,000 schools in England have shown interest in becoming an academy, says the education secretary.
Michael Gove told the House of Commons that 1,114 schools have responded to his letter last week inviting applications for independent status.
Among these are 626 schools rated as “outstanding”, who will be fast-tracked to have academy status by this autumn.
The level of interest in becoming an academy is “overwhelming” , says Mr Gove.
These schools have registered an interest in becoming an academy – the next stage would be a formal application following a vote by the governing body.
They could become the first wave in the coalition government’s aim for more schools to opt out of the local authority system and to have greater independence.
High achievers
These will be a different type of academy – drawn from among the most successful schools in their local areas, rather than the most challenged.
Academies under the Labour government were often used to improve standards in struggling schools.
Now this new intake of academies, which will quadruple the existing number, will be the highest achievers.
There will also now be primary academies, with 273 outstanding primary schools set to acquire academy status.
There are also 52 special schools graded as outstanding and wanting to become academies.
“I believe that head teachers and teachers know best how to run schools. Not local bureaucrats or politicians,” said Mr Gove.
“That’s why last week I wrote to every school in the country inviting them to take up academy freedoms if they wished to do so. The response has been overwhelming”
These schools will have greater control over their own finances and curriculum. As outstanding schools they will also be exempt from routine Ofsted inspections.
The government argues that such autonomy will increase innovation, raise standards and create a wider range of choices for parents.
Free schools
This expansion in academies will run alongside plans to encourage the creation of new schools, which will be run by outside providers, without local authority control.
These new schools, created under the free school policy, will also be known as academies.
Mr Gove made it clear earlier this week that he has no objection if companies managing such state-funded schools are profit-making.
Teachers’ unions have criticised the rapid expansion of the number of academy schools as a threat to the state education system.
“These proposals are not about providing high quality education for all. They are purely political ideology and dogma. They are about the break-up of state education,” said Chris Keates, head of the NASUWT teachers’ union.
Reference Link :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/education/10217450.stm
Courtesy:
BBC News
Their Future, Made by Hand
THEY carry home-grown radishes and red-cooked pork. They transport dozens of empanadas, juggling sheet pans on the G train. They pack boxes of butterscotch cupcakes, Sichuan-spiced beef jerky and grapefruit marmalade. They haul boiled peanuts, ice-grinding machines, sandwich presses and at least one toaster oven painted hot pink.
One Saturday morning each month, the vendors of the Greenpoint Food Market converge on the Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn.
“This is my investment in the future right now,” said Fabiana Lee, 26, an interior designer who lost her job in 2009. She has been selling at the Greenpoint market since its inception in October. After experimenting with cookies (too much competition), she has pared her offerings down to two: gorgeously browned empanadas and irresistibly twee “cake pops,” golf-ball-size rounds of cake perched on lollipop sticks. At the moment, they are her main source of income.
Young, college-educated, Internet-savvy, unemployed and hoping to find a place in the food world outside the traditional route, she is typical of the city’s dozens of new food entrepreneurs. As the next generation of cooks comes of age, it seems that many might bypass restaurant kitchens altogether. Instead, they see themselves driving trucks full of artisanal cheese around the country, founding organic breweries, bartering vegan pâtés for grass-fed local beef, or (most often) making it big in baking as the next Magnolia Bakery.
Joann Kim, 26, who organizes the market, cited the intersection of the economic downturn and the rise of the local artisanal food movement as reasons for the recent flowering of small culinary start-ups.
Aspiring cooks (and the adventurous eaters who love them) come face to face at markets like this one, which are opening and expanding at a brisk pace. The Brooklyn Flea, the Hester Street Fair and the soon-to-reopen New Amsterdam Market have become tasting destinations, where handmade food is as much of a fetish as vintage Ray-Bans or bargello pillowcases. The all-food Greenpoint market, which is open to home cooks of all stripes, is one-stop shopping: Mexican-Indian tacos, artisanal soda pop, roof-grown produce, exotic chili peppers, long-brined pickles, Taiwanese street food and retro-Southern snacks under one roof.
“I feel like I’m at a science fair and I get to eat all the experiments,” said Erin Massey, a Chicago native who lives in Brooklyn, looking around the crowded church basement. “It’s like going to a music festival with all the different bands, only here it’s different kinds of kombucha.”
There were almost 50 vendors. Many had been up since dawn, rolling rice balls, filling containers with waffle batter, crimping pie crusts. In headscarves, retro-chic aprons and all manner of eyewear, they skidded around the crowded basement, jockeying for electrical outlets and space.
“We do whatever it takes,” said Nicole Asselin, who brought tiny pies filled with organic rhubarb, chocolate chip cookies (to be warmed in the hot-pink oven) and logs of butter mashed with wild ramps that she had gathered in Vermont.
Each vendor had paid $25 to $50 for a table, with half the money going to the church and half to Ms. Kim. The cash they earned was theirs to keep. At $4 an ice pop or $3 an empanada, the margins on many products seemed high, but some of the vendors who have been operating without official certification may soon see their profits shrink.
On May 28, the New York Department of Health confirmed that all food vendors in the city must have a food handling permit, and may use only approved commercial kitchens. Renting space in a commercial kitchen costs about $200 for eight hours. For some vendors like Ms. Lee, who is in the process of getting her permit, that would mean the difference between making a small profit and just breaking even on a day at the market.
Ms. Kim said that she believed that the fact that the money benefited the church meant that unlicensed vendors were allowed to participate. “I guess we’ve been trying to fly below the radar a little bit,” she said, acknowledging that the bustle of the church basement might disappear under official scrutiny. “It’s been a wild ride.”
Some of the vendors were amateurs there on a lark, to earn brownie bragging rights and a little spending money.
But for many, the stakes were much higher. In these markets, cooks like Laena McCarthy of Anarchy in a Jar, who makes extraordinary preserves from local fruit, have a shot at developing a viable food business without working with a commercial processor, such as the large food companies that she deems “evil agribusiness warlords.” (Her company’s motto is “The Revolution Starts in Your Mouth.”) Ms. McCarthy’s jams have recently been picked up for sale by a Whole Foods store in Manhattan; for her, and others, a national distribution deal is the dream.
But for now, most of the vendors have a “day job” of some kind. Ms. McCarthy works as a librarian and teaches library science. Ms. Asselin is a pastry chef at Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg. Jun Aizaki, who makes Japanese rice balls called onigiri, wrapped in and scented with banana leaves, has designed the interiors of New York restaurants such as Rayuela and Macondo.
Two eminent but unemployed pastry chefs — Fany Gerson and Hannah Goldberg — banded together to start La Newyorkina, making delicious Mexican-style paletas, or ice pops, in flavors like mango, guava and horchata (cinnamon-rice). They have been selling outdoors at the new Hester Street Fair, and handed out mini-paletas to children to draw their parents in.
“If we first build a following at the markets and online,” Ms. Goldberg said, “then we can get the money to open a storefront that much more easily.” Professionals like Ms. Goldberg say that a commitment to marketing, packaging and general hustling are as important — or more so — as kitchen skills. Twitter, Facebook, Etsy, Tumblr and Blogspot are important for spreading the word; so are the city’s many new amateur cooking contests, like the Brooklyn Pie Bake-Off; so are food shops with a commitment to local artisans, like Blue Apron Foods in Park Slope and the Northern Spy Food Company in the East Village.
So is paring down your line.
“I’ve already seen that you do much better if you’re ‘that girl’ who sells ‘that thing,’ ” said Ms. Asselin, who has yet to commit.
Ms. Lee is still deciding whether her business, La Tía Faby, will focus on empanadas or cake pops. Growing up in Buenos Aires, she said, she set her sights early on a life in New York City.
“I was used to being the only Asian girl at school,” said Ms. Lee, whose parents were born in South Korea and now own a knitwear company in Argentina; she is fluent in English, Spanish and Korean. “But I loved the mix of people and food in New York.” Ms. Lee said that her mother, who served steak with kimchi on many nights, taught her the basics of cooking, both Argentine and Asian. Ms. Lee’s chorizo and kimchi empanadas with Korean glass noodles are pleated down the edge, like huge Chinese dumplings; the spinach and mushroom version is folded like a fortune cookie.
Ms. Lee moved to New York to study interior design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; when she graduated in 2006, she quickly found a job at a downtown firm. But in early 2009, she said, the effects of the stock market downturn began to hit. “It was almost a relief when I got laid off like everyone else,” she said. “Better than sitting at my desk waiting for it to happen.” Then she spotted an online open call for vendors at the Greenpoint market.
The recession weaves through the back stories of many of the itinerant vendors, even those who are not new to selling food. Matt and Alison Robicelli had both a fledgling cupcake operation and a specialty foods shop in Bay Ridge until last October, when they decided that brick-and-mortar was a losing proposition. “We sat down with an adviser who looked at our crazy life and said, ‘You have three things to take care of: your shop, your cupcake business and your kids,’ ” she said. “He told us we had to pick two.” Now they sell cupcakes — including a dark, bittersweet “Bea Arthur” number that combines chocolate, coffee and cheesecake flavors — through various cafes, at the Greenpoint market, and at another newly opened Brooklyn venue, the outdoor Red Hook Mercado.
Ms. Lee is still unemployed, but she has never worked harder, she said, trying to build a viable business one bite at a time. The day before the Greenpoint market, in her sixth-floor walkup in Chelsea, Ms. Lee folded hundreds of empanadas and painstakingly decorated dozens of cake pops to look like pale yellow chicks, using sprinkles and edible inks she orders from online candy suppliers. (Cake pops and cake balls, made by mixing fresh cake crumbs with frosting, then dipping balls of the mixture into “candy melt” for a smooth, Ring-Ding-like coating, are up-to-the-minute successors to the no longer trendy cupcake.)
“Transportation is by far the biggest stress,” said Ms. Lee, who must travel by subway or taxi to Greenpoint; there are many casualties among the empanadas. But her wares have always sold out, so far. All day at the market, women exclaimed over the cake pops and asked about custom orders for baby showers and birthday parties; only a few of these inquiries have ever panned out. She took home about $500 in cash, having sold out by 3 p.m.
One of the charms of the food-market scene is an Old World sense of cozy community: everyone seems to know one another. But this also means a race to capture shoppers before somebody else does. At Greenpoint, two vendors of kombucha were stationed right across from each other, and there was more than one seller of pickles, fizzy drinks and gluten-free muffins.
“I didn’t know there would be another granola,” said Alex Crosier of Granola Lab, eyeballing the competition for her ginger-molasses and cranberry-cashew mixtures.
At the end of the day, said Ms. Asselin, the vendors are very tired, very thirsty (much of the food is very sweet, very salty or both) and not much richer.
“It’s hard work,” said Hannah Goldberg, speaking about her time at the Hester Street Fair. “Our ancestors came through the Lower East Side to find a better life, and our parents think it’s crazy that we’re back here selling from a pushcart.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/dining/02vendors.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura3
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
The Way We Design Now
It’s strange to think that just a few years ago, it felt as if design schools and studios nationwide must have been holding special screenings of “The Graduate.” Down the aisles of Target, in the pages of Dwell and the showrooms of SoHo, there was nary a natural material in sight: the future was plastic.
‘Garbino’ trashcan for Umbra.“Plastic was the material that I naively knew was the material of our contemporary world, even at the age of 10,” the designer Karim Rashid said in a 2006 interview. Rashid has certainly been plastic’s most high-profile ambassador, using it for everything from dish-soap containers to the (then) ubiquitous $7 “Garbino” trashcans that made him famous. Many other designers were similarly enamored with the way plastic could become any color or shape, and though products made from the material were offered at all price ranges, plastic delivered on the popular premise of good design for all because it could be used to create on the cheap.
Though our connected culture would be lost without it, plastic assumes a radically different role in the design world: its most high-profile usage of late comes not in throwaway consumer goods but rather in the form of the 12,500 plastic bottles (that’s about the same number consumed every 8.3 seconds in the United States) used to build the Plastiki, a wind-blown, solar-powered boat currently sailing from San Francisco to Australia, stopping at environmental hot spots like the roughly Texas-sized North Pacific Garbage Patch or Pacific Gyre along the way. The goal of the Plastiki voyage is to encourage people to re-think waste: according to Project Aware, 15 billion pounds of plastic are produced in the U.S. every year, for example, but only 1 billion pounds are recycled.
Courtesy Plastiki Crew, top; Adventure Ecology The Plastiki solar-powered boat, made from 12,500 plastic bottles.It would be overstating things to say that Plastiki is helping chart a new course for design, but the vessel and the voyage do provide a nice departure point for discussing the place the discipline finds itself today. Though the expedition leader, David de Rothschild, has in many ways been the face of Plastiki, the project as a whole speaks to the reality of collaboration versus individual creation. The Plastiki site acknowledges a team including diver, documentarian, boat builder and solar array designer. Designers like Philippe Starck may have turned their attention to things like wind turbines now, but most design efforts these days, whether for iPods or affordable apartments, seem to be very much the product of teams. Coming off an era where designers assumed the role of artist/auteur, that’s a big shift.
Plastiki, in engaging with a host of environmental technologies and issues, also mirrors a broad cultural shift in design’s focus. Design now exists less to shape objects than to produce solutions. Instead of creating a desire and designing an object to fulfill it, a designer spotlights a problem or need and solves it. The latter has not completely displaced the former, but it has become the prevailing discourse. So it’s fitting that the newest edition of the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial questions the purpose — and future — of the discipline with an exhibit called “Why Design Now?”
Weil Ausstellungssystem GmbH Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable alternative to plastic.The Triennial, which opened in mid-May, assuages any fears surrounding the capabilities of natural materials. In fact, inventiveness around unremarkable stuff from sunflowers to banana stems has resulted in numerous greener alternatives to plastic on display here, including Bananaplac, an alternative to hardwood and Formica, produced from banana fibers extracted when the fruit is harvested; AgriPlast, made from field grass and polystyrene; Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable fiberboard made from sustainably harvested soft wood fibers, water, pressure and heat; and Flax, a natural fiber typically used to make linen but transformed by designer Francois Azambourg into high-performing recyclable furniture like the Lin94 Chair. But new materials are always being introduced, and their inclusion here is just a small part of a much larger story.
“Why Design Now?” is an important show because design is in a strange place. One always hears talk about the need to not reinvent the wheel; well, the design community — some of it, anyway — has realized the need to stop reinventing the chair. This is not to suggest that design should fully move away from making things — and indeed, the Cooper Hewitt show is chock full of smartly conceived, necessary objects like the AdSpecs, low-cost corrective eyeglasses with lenses the user can adjust to his or her own individual prescriptions; the Modular Prosthetic Limb System, created by a multi-disciplinary team culled from more than 30 American, Canadian and European organizations, and the Zon hearing aid by Stuart Karten Design, a minimalist accessory rendered so elegantly as to erase any need for self-consciousness on the part of the wearer. There are thoughtful, beautiful ones as well, like Karinelvy Design’s blown glass Gripp glasses, so graceful one might not even notice they were designed to function for anyone, even people with limited hand function, and Alabama Chanin’s hand-sewn garments that favor local commerce over overseas production.
Oxford Centre for Vision in the Developing World, left; Starkey Laboratories, Inc., center; Karin Eriksson, right. From left: Self-adjustable prescriptive eyewear created by Joshua Silver; minimalist hearing aid designed by Stuart Karten; universal-design glassware by Karinlevy Design.The show actively engages with the question designers both emerging and established must ask today: If not objects, what? It’s a dilemma closely mirroring that of the larger American economy, which has been shifting steadily from manufacturing to service. In response, design schools are scrambling to offer curricula that moves away from what Jon Kolko describes as “the Bauhaus, form-giving stuff.” Kolko, founder of the Austin Center for Design, a newly formed educational institution that “exists to transform society through design and design education,” believes that our recession-weary era is absolutely ready for this sort of work to thrive. “All the travesty and direness is making all the right things happen,” he says. “Kids today don’t care about the big house, the big salary. At the heart of their value system is ‘I want to make a difference.’”
With an eye to contributing to the greater good, practitioners might design a game, a process, procedure or experience. For example, Emily Pilloton founded the non-profit design collective Project H (the “h” stands for humanity, habitats, health and happiness) after a demoralizing stint designing doorknobs. The 28-year-old now designs projects like the Learning Landscape, which takes a creative approach to math education by installing a public sculpture-like grid of half-submerged tires as a setting for math games. Another example might be Participle, which bills itself as a public service design firm, and has developed and prototyped new services to help combat social isolation and loneliness among the elderly.
Project H Design Adaptable to any setting, Project H’s Learning Landscape uses reclaimed tires, sand, lumber and chalk to create a setting for math games.In showcasing the work of Pilloton and many of her peers, this year’s version of the Triennial feels very much of a piece with another Cooper Hewitt exhibit presented in 2007, “Design for the Other 90%” (now on view at the National Geographic Society Museum, Washington, D.C., through September). The low-cost innovations in health, shelter, energy and transport for the 5.8 billion people globally with little or no access not only to most products and services but also to food, shelter or clean water have become the sort of things young designers want to engage with today. (Though creating smart business models for this work may be the most challenging of design projects they could undertake.) “Why Design Now?” might well have been called “What Should Designers Do Now?”
Reference Link
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/the-way-we-design-now/
Courtesy
The New York Times Compan y
The Crew Behind a One-Woman Show
WORKING VERSION Marilyn Minter with her crew of assistants.
YOU were the child of glamorous but emotionally absent narcissists; your own credo is “Never take advantage of anyone.” You were drunk or high for much of the 1980s; you got sober when you realized that no matter what quantities of drugs and alcohol you consumed they no longer had an effect. You were an art-critical flop who spent decades in the professional wilderness; you were then so suddenly taken up by the establishment that collectors now stand in line for your work. Your pictures sell for $400,000; you insist that you will never give up teaching, so what if it pays two cents?
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
THE SPOT Marilyn Minter’s loft as studio. Her manager calls it “the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop.”
You are Marilyn Minter, a 61-year-old painter with galleries in New York and Los Angeles, a newly published monograph (Marilyn Minter, Gregory R. Miller & Co., $60), a museum show opening Friday in Cleveland and another one-woman show in preparation. Your work, which critics have alternately praised or condemned for the attention it pays to the luster of fashion and pathology of glamour, has seldom been more desirable. And so, on a given Friday — last week, let’s say — six assistants arranged around the perimeter of your Mercer Street loft are helping to make your new work.
“I think we probably have the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop,” said Johan Olander, Ms. Minter’s studio manager, meaning that no person can be considered the sole author of any work bearing Ms. Minter’s name.
And, as if to confirm this, Natalia Yovane, Ms. Minter’s “blocker,” was filling in what looked like a paint-by-number schema devised either to blind a person or drive her onto a ledge. With mindless mechanical delicacy, Jenny Morgan and David Mramor were applying “second coats” to another image, smearing wet enamel on a pair of enormous lips that looked like a pointillist abstraction up close. Chris Oh and Agata Bebecka, the so-called “finishers,” dabbed paint onto a nearly finished picture, patting each stroke with an index finger to create a lustrous sheen.
It was only when a viewer stood away from the paintings that a mouth, or an elegantly shod foot splashing through silvery liquid came into focus. “We used cake decoration, that silver powder they use to decorate fancy cakes, suspended in vodka,” Ms. Minter said, referring to the liquid depicted in one painting. “Water wasn’t viscous enough.”
Tall, pale-complexioned and with sharply blue eyes, Ms. Minter has a disarmingly candid manner, a ready laugh and a painting style that defies easy characterization. Some consider her work photo-realism; she prefers to call herself a “photo-replacer.” Shooting the staged images for her paintings with analog film, she then subjects them to 80 or more rounds of PhotoShop manipulation before transferring the results to aluminum panels and handing them over to Team Minter, her crew.
“At this point, my primary job is as a generator of imagery,” Ms. Minter said. “If I did this alone, it would take me a year and a half to finish one piece.” And that would doubtless trouble her passionate collectors, among them Madonna and Tom Ford.
It is no secret that artists rely on armies of assistants to facilitate their output. Jeff Koons, for instance, employs scores of fabricators, conservators and technicians. By contrast, Ms. Minter’s production amounts to a cottage industry. Like the owner of a mom and pop deli, she lives above the store, or rather, behind it, her domestic life wedged into the perimeter of a loft she has occupied since the bicentennial. “I’m a late bloomer in the art world,” the artist said as she laid out paper plates and cloth napkins for lunch.
It was 2 p.m., time for the weekly Friday pizza delivery. “I was basically in a coma for 15 years, and then spent the next 10 being told I had nothing to offer,” Ms. Minter added. “So by the time so-called success came along, I had the tools to stay right-sized.”
Asked what exactly that meant, Ms. Minter said: “I can still hear it when someone says something’s a stupid idea.”
This does occur.
“Remember when you made that horrid wet drip on her chin?” Mr. Olander asked, referring to a painting Ms. Minter created from a photograph of Pamela Anderson with some unidentifiable liquid running from her open mouth.
“The water didn’t look like water,” Ms. Morgan said. What it looked like was … well, never mind.
“They were fighting me constantly and kept adding more and more wetness” to the image, Ms. Minter added, until finally the water looked less suggestive. Thus Ms. Minter managed to skirt any unwanted associations with the hard-core pornographic imagery she deployed early on in her career — to the distaste of collectors and general feminist scorn.
“The most debased imagery around is pornography and fashion,” said Ms. Minter, who has probably done as much as any painter to exploit the distinct visual vocabulary of commercially stimulated desire. “The problem was, in the beginning I was touching on things that were way too loaded and it almost killed my career.”
In the case of the Pamela Anderson picture, shot from a portrait commissioned to celebrate a marriage that never took place, Ms. Minter decided in the end that her assistants were right. The drip was all wrong.
“Everybody around here has an opinion,” Mr. Olander said.
“But,” Ms. Minter said, “I have the final say.”
That goes for pizza as well, since Ms. Minter, who is as good at abstinence as she is at succumbing to pleasure, quit eating meat at about the same time she stopped doing drugs. There were three pies for lunch on Friday and not a pepperoni in sight. As the painters put down their brushes and plastic palettes and came to the table, Ms. Minter conveyed the impression, unusual in the atelier of a successful artist, of being equal parts den mother and benevolent despot.
“I choose people to work for me based on integrity and good energy,” she said. “Also,” she said brightly, “everyone in here had a painful background.”
“Not really,” Ms. Bebecka, the finisher, demurred.
“What do you mean?” Ms. Minter said. “You were abandoned by your parents in high school.”
“I wasn’t abandoned and I was in college,” Ms. Bebecka said, shrugging off Ms. Minter’s dramatic reimagining of her Polish girlhood.
“Pay no attention to her, she’s in total denial,” Ms. Minter said amiably.
At that Ms. Bebecka shot Ms. Minter a look of affectionate indulgence, with an expression that said: “Love that nutty broad.”
Still, as the clichés suggest and Ms. Minter insisted, it may be the setbacks, the childhood dysfunction, the battle for sobriety and critical approval that forge the spirit of an artist. At any rate, hardship does tend to winnow out the committed from those seeking art careers because they’d like a job where you get to work in a T-shirt and sweats.
“I really never had any money until recently, and I’m still not sure I have it,” the artist said, pouring herself a Diet Coke. “For years my income from art was $16,000 a year, so believe me I don’t take any of this for granted. But I’ve been around long enough to understand the role of artists in our culture, who we are and what job we perform.”
And what is that, a visitor inquired?
“We’re the elite of the servant class,” Ms. Minter said. “I know my place.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/fashion/03Gimlet.html
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Brazil's footballers make Zimbabwe smile again
I have never seen so many smiles in Zimbabwe. From the lady at immigration to the minibuses packed with cheering football fans to the normally grim-faced intelligence officials guarding President Robert Mugabe as he strolled into the packed national sports stadium here in Harare on a sunny afternoon and greeted the visiting Brazilian team.
During the warm-up, Kaka waved to the crowd and was answered with a deafening roar from about 60,000 happy Zimbabweans who had each paid $10 for an experience for which almost everyone I’ve spoken to has described as a “dream” or a “once-in-a-lifetime” moment.
The World Cup may not have started yet, but you wouldn’t know it from the giddy excitement here. After years of economic and political chaos very few Zimbabweans have the money to head across the border and experience the tournament kicking off in neighbouring South Africa next week. “This match is our World Cup” is something many people have told me today.
I’m writing this now on the touchline deafened by the roar of vuvuzelas with Zimbabwe’s Warriors starting to flag after a very impress start. There’s a man in a giant green and white eagle costume beside me, a slightly dysfunctional Mexican wave wandering around the stands, lots of adverts for the giant mining company Zimplats which is sponsoring the event, dozens of Brazilian journalists and a military brass band warming up for another performance.
It feels – at least today – like a refreshingly normal, happy country.
Reference Link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/andrewharding/2010/06/brazil_make_zimbabwe_smile_aga.html
Courtesy
BBC News
Donor darling: What Ethiopian poll can teach Africa
What other African countires can learn from Ethiopia
Ruling party supporters have been angered by foreign criticism of the polls
What do a sports car and the Ethiopian opposition have in common?
They both have two seats.
This joke is doing the rounds in Ethiopia after an almost embarrassing landslide victory for the governing EPRDF party and its allies left the opposition with just a lonely brace of seats in the 547 member parliament.
There is no word for “landslide” in the local Amharic language, but they need one now.
The European Union said the polls were marked by restrictions on political freedom and the unfair use of state resources, and there is international concern over increasing repression in Ethiopia.
But Prime Minister Meles Zenawi will not be losing any sleep.
A thorough trouncing is much better for the nerves than a nail-biter and it is unlikely that Ethiopia’s relationship with donor countries will change significantly even if a few fingers are briefly wagged.
The money will keep flowing.
“The United States has every right to use its tax payers’ money as it sees fit,” Mr Meles told reporters after his victory.
“If they feel that the outcome of the elections are such that they cannot continue our partnership, that’s fine.
“We shall be very grateful for the assistance they have given us so far and move on. Clearly we are not a protectorate,” he concluded.
Such comments are easier for Mr Meles to make now that he has a new friend in China – it will not utter a squeak over the elections.
Islamist buffer
China is helping with many infrastructure projects in Ethiopia – including an offer of a $500m (£344m) loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for the construction of the controversial Gibe Three hydroelectric dam.
Ethiopia receives aid worth around $2bn a year, mostly from the US and the UK.
The feeling amongst many donor countries is that the country desperately needs help in fighting poverty, and the money is being spent relatively wisely by Mr Meles’s government.
They see real progress: For example, a recent report by American researchers pointed to success in reducing child mortality.
China is behind many infrastructure projects in Ethiopia
The report said that in 1990, 202 Ethiopian children per 1,000 died before the age of five. In 2010, the rate had halved to 101 deaths per 1,000.
Of course, Ethiopia still has a long way to go in comparison to somewhere like Singapore, where there are just two deaths per 1,000 children under the age of five.
Ethiopia is also a donor darling because it is seen as an invaluable buffer against the growing Islamic extremism in Somalia.
When it comes to America’s foreign policy, any concerns over shrinking democratic space or eye brow leaping election results are totally trumped by any help in “the war on terror”.
Mr Meles could be receiving a few phone calls from other African leaders searching for election tips.
The Ethiopian capital is famous for staging the hugely popular 10km race, the Great Addis Run, but now all talk is of ‘the Great Addis Turn Around’
Paul Kagame of Rwanda may not need the advice but his neighbour in Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, could do with a few hints on how to change the face of politics in the capital, Kampala, ahead of 2011 elections.
The Ethiopian capital is famous for staging the hugely popular 10km race, the Great Addis Run, but now all talk is of “the Great Addis Turn Around”.
Greatest enemies
In 2005, the opposition won all 23 parliamentary seats in Addis. In 2010 it kept just one. How?
The efficient well-oiled governing party machinery was a key factor – I lost count as to how many people told me that “the EPRDF only woke up in 2005”.
It was helped by the fact that the opposition was divided and fairly disorganised.
But many Ethiopia watchers suggest you have to look at what happened to the opposition over five years to get the whole picture.
If you try sending an e-mail from Ethiopia to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it miraculously bounces back
Almost 200 opposition supporters were shot dead when they demonstrated against what they saw as election theft in 2005; thousands were arrested, including opposition leaders who were sent to jail for close to years.
Birtukan Mideksa remains behind bars after being accused of breaking the terms of her pardon.
Press freedom has also been under attack. Journalists have fled the country since 2005 and if you try sending an e-mail from Ethiopia to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it miraculously bounces back.
Filming on the streets of Addis Ababa, it was hard to find people prepared to say on camera that they supported the opposition – many suggested that would be asking for trouble.
Addis Ababa has undergone great change in the last five years
The governing party dismisses all these allegations but analysts point out that the Ethiopian government is only willing to allow a certain degree of democracy and that will always be the root of friction with the donors – China excluded.
US-based Human Rights Watch said the government pressured, intimidated and threatened Ethiopian voters and said the most salient feature of the election was the months of repression preceding it.
One publication recently suggested that the Ethiopian government’s greatest enemies were Eritrea and the weather. Human Rights Watch could also be added to the list.
It clearly angered the government as it shone a light on allegations of repression that no election observer team would be able to find – partly because they were not allowed in the country early enough.
But the African leaders hoping for tips from Mr Meles should also realise that hard work is also useful ahead of an election – it wins votes.
The scale of the housing estates being built on the edge of Addis Ababa is nothing short of staggering.
Time will tell how good the quality of the construction is, but there are also impressive eight-lane roads leading to these suburbs.
The development is by no means restricted to the capital: access to healthcare has improved in the rural areas and in Lalibela, 700km (about 435 miles) away from Addis Ababa, new classrooms are springing up and roads built.
Kenyans, Ugandans and others may be freer than Ethiopians but their list of “What my government has achieved” would be miserably short in comparison.
Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/10205887.stm
Courtesy
BBC News
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