The Gandhi Nobody Knows

Gandhi vs Norman Borlaug

by Richard Greiner

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of 'Gandhi' with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.

At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, “But still. . . .” I would prefer to explicate things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.

An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one second that these awards were made independently of the film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.

California’s Potemkin Environmentalism

A celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs.
by Max Schulz

In January 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood before the California legislature in Sacramento and delivered his fourth State of the State address since his improbable 2003 election. It was a rhetorical tour de force that would win him widespread acclaim. “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” said Schwarzenegger. “Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there.”
Schwarzenegger especially celebrated California for its leadership on energy and the environment. Just three months earlier, he had signed the Global Warming Solutions Act, committing California to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels—roughly 25 percent below today’s—by 2020, and all but eliminating them by 2050. The Governator then lambasted the Bush administration for failing to tackle global warming: “It would not act, so California did. California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial to action.” Such performances have helped establish Schwarzenegger as a national figure, even a statesman, on the environment. In April 2007, he posed for the cover of Newsweek, spinning a globe on his finger under the bannerleadership & the environment, and in September, he even addressed the United Nations on climate change.
Schwarzenegger’s reputation as an environmental trailblazer is in keeping with California’s recent history and self-perception. California’s political leaders, business titans, academics, and environmental activists proudly point to the fact that the state has infused its public policy over the last four decades with an environmental consciousness unmatched in the United States, while also maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion. The widely shared assumption is that forward-looking Athenian wisdom has nourished awesome Spartan power.
In truth, however, the Golden State’s energy leadership is a mirage. California’s environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated some of the highest, business-crippling energy costs in the country; and left it vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies, which would be disastrous if extended to the rest of the country.

Amazing. 'Authorities do not yet have a motive'

Suspect in flight disturbance had Calif. ID

Published May 09, 2011 | Associated Press

The passengers sat stunned as they watched a man walk quickly toward the front of American Airlines Flight 1561 as it was descending toward San Francisco. He was screaming and then began pounding on the cockpit door.

"I kept saying to myself: 'What's he doing? Does he have a bomb? Is he armed?'" passenger Angelina Marty said.

Within moments Sunday, a flight attendant tackled Rageh Almurisi. Authorities do not yet have a motive.

While authorities said that Almurisi, 28, of Vallejo, Calif., has no clear or known ties to terrorism, the incident underscored fears that extremists may try to mount attacks to retaliate for the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden last week.

Federal agents are investigating Almurisi's background. He was carrying a Yemeni passport and a California identification card, authorities said.

Yemen, a nation at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, has been a focus of U.S. officials because one of the most active branches of al-Qaida operates in the remote part of the country.

Almurisi went toward the cockpit door 30 minutes before the flight from Chicago was supposed to land on Sunday night, San Francisco airport police Sgt. Michael Rodriguez said. Almurisi was yelling unintelligibly as he brushed past a flight attendant.

Marty, 35, recalled that she and other passengers on the plane were stunned when they saw Almurisi walking down the aisle. She said a woman in a row across from her who speaks Arabic translated that Almurisi said "God is Great!" in Arabic.

Andrew Wai, another passenger, told KGO-TV on Monday that the wife of one of the men who took Almurisi down later said Almurisi was yelling "Allahu Akbar."

"There was no question in everybody's mind that he was going to do something," Marty said.

A male flight attendant tackled Almurisi, and other crew members and passengers, including a retired Secret Service agent and a retired San Mateo police officer, helped subdue him as he banged on the door, police said. The flight attendant put plastic handcuffs on him.

"Everybody was fixated on him," Marty said. "You never think that something like that would happen in your life."

Wai also said Almurisi appeared "fidgety" in his seat when he saw him on the way to the bathroom earlier in the flight.

The Boeing 737 carrying 162 people landed safely at 9:10 p.m. Almurisi was placed into police custody, as some passengers cried.

"Flight attendants were trying to soothe different passengers," Wai said. "We were all looking at our lives flash before our eyes."

Federal authorities took Almurisi into custody Monday morning after he spent the night at the San Mateo County jail, said San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti. Almurisi was being held on suspicion of interfering with a flight crew, a federal offense, according to authorities.

No one else was hurt and the airport continued operating normally with security levels unchanged, the officer said.

There were two other mid-air disturbances on Sunday.

A 34-year-old man from Illinois tried to open a plane door on a Continental Airlines flight from Houston to Chicago. Investigators questioned him, but did not file charges.

There was a security scare aboard a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to San Diego, prompting it to land in Albuquerque, N.M. Authorities did not release any more details, except to say that "no suspicious devices" were found. No one was arrested.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/09/suspect-flight-disturbance-calif-id/#ixzz1M4qHtEG4

If you are drowning in Debt this is a good investment

Lifeguarding in OC is totally lucrative; some make over $200k

High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.

When thinking about career options with high salaries, lifeguarding is probably not one of the first jobs to come to mind. But it apparently should. In one of Orange County’s most desirable beach destinations, Newport Beach, lifeguards are compensated all too well; especially compared with the county annual median household income of $71,735.

It might be time for a career change.

According to a city report on lifeguard pay for the calendar year 2010, of the 14 full-time lifeguards, 13 collected more than $120,000 in total compensation; one lifeguard collected $98,160.65. More than half the lifeguards collected more than $150,000 for 2010 with the two highest-paid collecting $211,451 and $203,481 in total compensation respectively. Even excluding benefits like health care and pension, more than half the lifeguards receive a total salary, including overtime pay, exceeding $100,000. And they also receive an annual allowance of $400 for “Sun Protection.” Many work four days a week, 10 hours a day.

Lifeguarding in Newport Beach is a pretty good gig, if you can get it.

There is no denying that lifeguards protect swimmers and play a vital safety role in protecting numerous beachgoers every year. In 2010, the total number of rescues by Newport Beach lifeguards was 2,190. Even so, these salaries seem too generous, and the compensation levels don’t appear fiscally sane.

Currently, Newport Beach has 13 full-time active lifeguards and hires about 210 seasonal and part-time “tower” guards, Newport Beach City Manager David Kiff told us. Lifeguards are organized as part of the fire department. The Lifeguard Management Association represents the 13 full-time, salaried employees in collective bargaining with the city whereas the Association of Newport Beach Ocean Lifeguards represents the part-time, seasonal lifeguards.

In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.”  And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents.

Repudiating the National Debt

"We" (the burdened taxpayers) owe it to "ourselves" (our betters living off the proceeds of taxation).

By Murray N. Rothbard - 22 Feb 1981

In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to vote for an increase in the statutory limit on the federal public debt, which was then scraping the legal ceiling of one trillion dollars. They cried because all of their lives they had voted against an increase in public debt, and now they were being asked, by their own party and their own movement, to violate their lifelong principles. The White House and its leadership assured them that this breach in principle would be their last: that it was necessary for one last increase in the debt limit to give President Reagan a chance to bring about a balanced budget and to begin to reduce the debt. Many of these Republicans tearfully announced that they were taking this fateful step because they deeply trusted their President, who would not let them down.

Famous last words. In a sense, the Reagan handlers were right: there were no more tears, no more complaints, because the principles themselves were quickly forgotten, swept into the dustbin of history. Deficits and the public debt have piled up mountainously since then, and few people care, least of all conservative Republicans. Every few years, the legal limit is raised automatically. By the end of the Reagan reign the federal debt was $2.6 trillion; now it is $3.5 trillion and rising rapidly [ed. Note: $13,365 trillion, by May 2011]. And this is the rosy side of the picture, because if you add in "off-budget" loan guarantees and contingencies, the grand total federal debt is $20 trillion ($120 by May 2011) .

A must read for PIIGS.

'Enslaved humans usually produce for their masters about half the amount of finished goods that freed slaves produce for themselves'

by Andy Duncan

If you believe in a Creator, then you must acknowledge that He (or She) possesses an incredible sense of humor. Without this, how do you explain Iceland?

Fortunately for us, and particularly perhaps for the Irish, the Greeks, and the Portuguese, this deific challenge is detailed gloriously in the new book, Deep Freeze: Iceland's Economic Collapse, written by Professors Philipp Bagus and David Howden, which is freely downloadable for your Kindle or iBook pleasure via the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

In much the same way that East Germany and West Germany formed the perfect means of comparing complete socialism and partial socialism, the isolated case of Iceland forms an almost perfect storm of a standalone test tube to examine the money-crank experiment of fiat paper currency — a diabolical pathway to fiscal hell followed by all of the world's short-sighted and feeble-minded governments (and all of the personally selfish, corrupt individuals within them) since 1971, when Richard Nixon took the Bretton-Woods US dollar off the final tattered shred of a voluntarily accepted commodity money standard. This thereby allowed an almost infinite abuse of power amongst government officials around the entire world, predicated upon the oil-based momentum and former preeminence of the dollar as the pyramidal fulcrum of the exploded Bretton-Woods global currency system.

With the final link to gold cut and the pyramid finally floating free, it was merely a question of how long it would take for reality to catch up with the almost-infinite paper-currency bubble that the world's central planners were about to blow up, to test these new, unknown limits of financial-paper gravity.

As with all my favorite books, Bagus and Howden come at the problem from an unorthodox angle. To be cunning, however, they begin straightforwardly enough for an Austrian-based book:

The real reasons for Iceland's collapse lie in intrusions by the state into the workings of the economy, coupled with the interventionist institutions of the national and international monetary systems.

So far, so predictable. But then, immediately following this bland opening, there's this:

Iceland's crisis is the result of two banking practices that, in combination, proved to be explosive: excessive maturity mismatching and currency mismatching.

Say what? I awoke at once from my cortical slumber.

What on earth were Bagus and Howden talking about?

Would they be gentle with me? Would they explain the Icelandic situation in ways a man could understand even when he was drinking a beer and stoking up a barbecue, even when he had (temporarily, you understand) forgotten everything he is supposed to know professionally during a working week, while he wears a suit?

Luckily for me, they could.

Iceland has something in common with other developed economies that the recent economic crisis has affected: its banking system was heavily engaged in maturity mismatching. In other words, Icelandic banks issued short-term liabilities in order to invest in long-term assets.

Best Econ lesson on Foreign Aid

A generous offer by the crew turns ugly, quick.

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

(Watch from 8 min. to end)

Tony feeds the locals

A Travel Channel episode of No Reservations, a cooking-focused show narrated by Anthony Bourdain, took viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I had heard that the show offered unique insight into the country and its troubles. I couldn't imagine how. But it turns out to be true. Through the lens of food, we can gain an insight into culture, and from culture to economy, and from economy to politics and finally to what's wrong in this country and what can be done about it.

Through this micro lens, we gain more insight than we would have if the program were entirely focused on economic issues. Such an episode on economics would have featured dull interviews with treasury officials and IMF experts and lots of talk about trade balances and other macroeconomic aggregates that miss the point entirely.

Instead, with the focus on food and cooking, we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes. And what we find is surprising in so many ways.

In a scene early in the show set in this giant city after the earthquake, Bourdain and his crew stop to eat some local food from a vendor. He discusses its ingredients and samples some items. Crowds of hungry people begin to gather. They are doing more than gawking at the camera crews. They are waiting in the hope of getting something to eat.

Bourdain thinks of a way to do something nice for everyone. Realizing that in this one sitting, he is eating a quantity of food that would last most Haitians three days, he buys out the remaining food from the vendor and gives it away to locals.

Nice gesture! Except that something goes wrong. Once the word spreads about the free food — word-of-mouth in Haiti is faster than Facebook chat — people start pouring in. Lines form and get long. Disorder ensues. Some people step forward to keep order. They bring belts and start hitting. The entire scene becomes very unpleasant for everyone — and the viewer gets the sense that it is worse than we are shown.

Bourdain correctly draws the lesson that the solutions to the problem of poverty here are more complex than it would appear at first glance. Good intentions go awry. They were thinking with their hearts instead of their heads, and ended up causing more pain than was originally there in the first place. From this event forward, he begins to approach the problems of this country with a bit more sophistication.

The rest of the show takes us through shanty towns, markets, art shows, festivals, and parades — and interviews all kinds of people who know the lay of the land. This is not a show designed to tug at your heart strings in the conventional sort of way. Yes, there is obvious human suffering, but the overall impression I got was not that. Instead, I came away with a sense that Haiti is a very normal place not unlike all places we know from experience, but with one major difference: it is very poor.

"Many people rail against the term capitalism because it implies that freedom is all about privileging the owners of capital. But there is a sense in which capitalism is the perfect term for a developed economy…"

By the time the show was made, the glamour of the post-earthquake onslaught of American visitors seeking to help had vanished. One who remains is actor Sean Penn. Although he's known as a Hollywood lefty, he's actually living there, chugging up and down the hills of a shanty town, unshaven and disheveled, being what he calls a "functionary" and getting stuff for people who need it. He had no easy answers, and he had sharp words for American donors who think that dumping money into new projects is going to help anyone.

The people of Haiti in the documentary conform to what every visitor says about them. They are wonderfully friendly, talented, enterprising, happy, and full of hope. Like most people, they hate their government. Actually, they hate their government more than most Americans hate theirs. Truly, this is a precondition of liberty. There is a real sense of us-versus-them alive in Haiti, so much so that when the presidential palace collapsed in the recent earthquake, crowds gathered outside to cheer and cheer! It was the one saving grace of an otherwise terrible storm.

Rebound

by Mark Perry

The chart above helps tell the story of manufacturing's comeback this year.  Compared to the overall real growth rate of the U.S. economy during the first quarter of 2011 at 1.8%, the manufacturing sector is growing at 9%, or five times faster than the overall economy (based on the annual growth rate of Industrial Production: Manufacturing series from the Federal Reserve). 

NEW GEOGRAPHY -- "This year’s survey of the best cities for jobscontains one particularly promising piece of news: the revival of the country’s long distressed industrial sector and those regions most dependent on it. Manufacturing has grown consistently over the past 21 months, and now, for the first time in years, according to data mined by Pepperdine University’s Michael Shires, manufacturing regions are beginning to move up on our list of best cities for jobs.

The fastest-growing industrial areas include four long-suffering Rust Belt cities Anderson, Ind. (No. 4), Youngstown, Ohio (No. 5), Lansing, Mich. (No. 9) and Elkhart-Goshen, Ind. (No. 10). The growth in these and other industrial areas influenced, often dramatically, their overall job rankings. Elkhart, for example, rose 137 places, on our best cities for jobs list; and Lansing moved up 155. Other industrial areas showing huge gains include Niles-Benton Harbor, Mich., up 242 places, Holland-Grand Haven, Mich., (up 172), Grand Rapids, Mich., (up 167)   Kokomo Ind., (up 177) ; and Sandusky, Ohio, (up 128).

One big driver of industrial growth has come from the source of so much pain in the past: the auto industry. Although production remains 25% below its 2007 peak, the industry, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the nation’s industrial output, is on the rebound.  Ford Motor is achieving its best profits in over a decade, and both Chrysler and General Motors are officially in the black.

Long-depressed industry center Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., topped our list of manufacturing job-creators, with an impressive 8.2% increase. Second place went to the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn area, which experienced 3.5% growth."

We are doomed. Really.

Our betters now what is best for us

Making It Cool to Use Less Stuff

by Van Helsing 

Not even Hollyweird could produce a more preposterous eco-hypocrite that the dribbling cretin we know as Prince Chucklehead:

Late Spring

Letter from Tunisia

by Gregory Mann

Have we already forgotten that the ‘Arab Spring’ began in the winter?

Ben Ali and co. took flight in January, before the whole word learned that the Arabic word for ‘liberation’ is ‘Tahrir,’ as in ‘Tahrir Square.’ But Tunisia’s revolution is not yet ancient history—it’s still underway. Here in Tunis, the dust hasn’t settled, and the end is unclear. Next door in Libya, not to mention Syria and Yemen, it’s hard to know what’s beginning, or whether one swallow can make a spring.

In the seaside town of Hammamet, a local businessman boasts that one of his neighbors slit the throat of a pet tiger that one of Ben Ali’s in-laws kept there. The beachfront villa Ben Ali gave this amateur zoo-keeper stands gutted and hollowed out, everything in it having long been reduced to ashes and pebbles. Next door, the villa of one of Ben Ali’s children from his first marriage was untouched. That wife was respected, say local residents, and they had no quarrel with her children. Meanwhile, in town the last of the burnt out buildings—mostly banks and government offices—are being re-plastered and painted. Tourism has collapsed. Builders are doing well, though, and the price of bricks has shot up dramatically. They’re not needed for re-building, but for new construction. Landowners are trying to build as fast as they can while the building codes go unenforced. When a new government comes in this summer, everyone thinks that window of opportunity will close.

In this long moment of waiting, Tunis is a strangely quiet town. The country is in a long pause between Ben Ali’s flight and July’s elections. Will the pause be long enough for the new political parties to mount a respectable opposition to the better-established, moderate, and business-minded Ennahdha party, with its Islamist orientation? Many doubt it. In the meantime, no one is sure what is happening. Prison breaks are frequent, and strikes flicker across the country. Security forces fired shots on Friday to disperse some of the Islamists’ partisans, prompting more than one wag to ask how they could claim to be excluded from a political progress that has hardly begun. Nonetheless, the machine guns on top of the armored personnel carriers all have covers drawn over them, as if they were slumbering while stationed at traffic circles, in front of ministries and banks, or near some of the embassies. They often have water cannons mounted on big blue trucks to keep them company, just as the policemen and the soldiers lighten the burden of their boredom by sharing it. But the Libyan embassy is buckled down, squat and non-descript behind a heavy wreath of concertina. It makes you wonder what the border itself looks like: the Libyan army crossed it over the weekend, bombarding a frontier town and killing Tunisians. Meanwhile, Tunisians are proud to recount that their countrymen are sheltering Libyans who’ve taken refuge here. Here and there across the capital, collection points have sprung up to gather goods that will be channeled to the refugees. There may be a re-emergent fraternity between Libyans and Tunisians, whose governments long sought to keep them apart. After the supposed death of one of the Colonel’s sons, Qadaffi’s people sacked European embassies in Tripoli, but the soldiers in Tunis look to have nothing more serious than time on their hands.

The chimera

Osama Unbound: A moment in the war on terror

Journeying through the Muslim world during the height of the so-called “war on terror” was to experience a region mired in a powerful dream world. No pronouncement from the West or, for that matter, from local leaders, was met with anything other than a labyrinthine counter-narrative. But the mother of all conspiracy theories was saved for the events of September 11, 2001. What does Osama bin Laden’s death mean when millions believe he wasn’t responsible for the crimes for which he died? By RICHARD POPLAK.

It’s a sweltering day in the city of Peshawar, when finally I snap. Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been on the frontline of global terror for almost as long as there has been global terror. Many on the “Most Wanted” list have lived there, in dusty compounds with rhododendrons, shaded porches and the ghostly whiff of Pims and lemonade.
I have just spent my day in the old city’s canton, among vestiges of a barely remembered Raj, interviewing the usual array of Taliban or Talibanish folk who really rule the roost. The grand and terrible joke defining the war on terror, at least for those of us who have limned it, was indeed Peshawar and its environs. So porous is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for so long has it been the de facto home of Islamic radicalism, that one enters a shadow world where the news coverage and political newsspeak seem to come from another realm. This was the heart of the war. Why, then, wasn’t it a theatre?
The symbol presiding over all this was Osama bin Laden, or the horrific Boy’s Own caper he engineered on September 11, 2001. I bring up Boy’s Own, because Peshawar featured once or twice in stories in the old paper, which hitched the mores of Protestant colonialism to tales of valour, over the Khyber Pass and beyond. It always seemed to me that 9/11 originated in a barely formed adolescent mind, a Boy’s Own mentality where McGyvering and Jerry-rigging and derring-do, all in the service of some amorphous greater good, were the reigning morality. The attack always felt hormonal, petulant, the sort of thing a boy who salts snails or fries ants under a magnifying glass would do, while assuring us there was some larger ideological merit to his actions. Never has a Little Lord Fauntleroy, a child of such munificent privilege, spent his daddy’s money in such an awful way.
Such thoughts are on my mind as I hitch a ride back to my hotel with a young man who hopes to be my fixer. We rattle through the gloaming in an auto-rickshaw and fall into conversation. As so often happens in these parts, our chat morphs into a disquisition on the evils of the West, which doubles as a parsing of the nature of truth. I am informed that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founding father, was a Jew—how else could he champion rigid secularism over the glories of Islam? I learn that Yasser Arafat was poisoned by Mossad. I am told that Bush is not the President of the United States, but the puppet of a powerful cabal who want to rule the world. (Which was true, I suppose, but in a far more prosaic way than my new friend imagined.) Then this—the old shibboleth, the dread canard I suffered through countless times to leach a story from a source: 9/11 was an inside job; there were no Jews in the Towers on that fateful day; it is impossible for an airplane to bring down a building etc. etc.

Failure of Development Aid, as planned

African Universities: Creating True Researchers or “Native Informers” to NGOs?

By Laura Freschi 

In a recent speech addressing the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani described the state of academic research and higher education in Africa as dominated by a “corrosive culture of consultancy.”

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates…

What’s the difference between academic research and consultancy-driven research? Mamdani, who spent decades teaching at universities in South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda before moving to Columbia University, defines research for a consultant as seeking answers to problems posed and defined by a client. But university research, properly understood, requires formulating the problem itself.

His example of how this works in practice is an interesting one. In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shifted global health spending priorities towards their research question: How to eradicate malaria? But if malaria can’t be eradicated, as a team of scientists from France and Gabon now believe, then researchers have spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars answering the wrong question.

The cumulative effect of this model is to “devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa.”

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.

In my view, the proliferation of “short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers.

Mamdani, who is now director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in addition to his professorship at Columbia, seeks to counter the spread of consultancy culture “through an intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture.”

“To my knowledge,” he said, “there is no model for this on the African continent today. It is something we will have to create.”