Last month I spoke about David and my report on institutions and climate change at a Feasta conference entitled The New Emergency: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World, held in Dublin. Here’s the presentation…
Alex Evans – Global Framework for Climate Change from Feasta on Vimeo.
– Over at Politico, Ben Smith has more news about the Secretary of State’s big foreign policy speech, to be delivered today at the Council on Foreign Relations. Placing the last six months of US diplomacy into perspective, it will also offer Hillary the chance to begin putting her own distinctive stamp on policy. As Smith comments:
Clinton appears increasingly comfortable expressing her views. State Department officials have suggested that she’s been a hawkish internal voice, pushing Obama toward more confrontational stances toward adversaries from Iran to Cuba.
– The NYT has an interesting article highlighting the importance of water, as well as land, to Middle East peace. “[W]hen it comes to water”, Stanley Weiss suggests, “every nation is in the same boat”.
– Elsewhere, the FT’s Brussels blog identifies five priorities for the next European Commission – defending the single market; reforming financial regulation; clarifying climate change and energy security policy; unifying a foreign policy voice; and finally the small matter of appointing a new President. Deutsche Welle, meanwhile, has an interview with Hans-Gert Pöttering, the outgoing President of the European Parliament.
– Finally, a veritable slew of polls – well ok, two – on British defence spending. A PoliticsHome poll suggests 66% of voters feel defence should be protected from inevitable cuts in public spending (79% among Conservative supporters, 64% for Labour supporters, and 49% among Lib Dems). Details here. The Guardian, meanwhile has an interesting ICM poll (pdf) indicating that 54% of British voters now support nuclear disarmament, with only 42% in favour of replacing Trident.
Pakistan, the observant among you will have noticed, has been having a tough time the past few years. This graph sums it up for me (March 2009, Pakistan public opinion survey):
There’s one hopeful sign, though – a new generation that is beginning to get its act together to agitate (often online) for change. So what’s the government done? Yes, you’ve guessed it: announced a crackdown.
An official announcement by the interior ministry said that the government was launching a campaign against circulation of what it called ill-motivated and concocted stories through emails and text messages against civilian leadership and security forces.
The announcement does not elaborate what is meant by ill-motivated e-messages, but it is believed that the ‘civilian leadership’ meant President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and other politicians.
A senior official of the ministry said: ‘Sending indecent message is a crime under the Cyber Crime Act and liable to punishment.’
Isn’t that just fantastic? Pakistan’s government can’t get deliver universal primary education or reliable electricity to major cities. It’s fighting an insurgency against the Taliban with little clue how to win it. But yet it’s making it a priority to crack down on seditious text messaging.
And one other point – someone should ask where the monitoring equipment has come from. Specifically: was it supplied by the American or British government to help Pakistan fight the War on Terror?
Ban Ki-moon has given a long and enlightening interview to the Wall Street Journal (which duly responded by publishing a rather mean article about his time as Secretary-General). It contains quite a lot of interesting stuff on individual crises and his leadership style. But what dominates the conversation is his pessimism about the UN’s shrinking place in the world:
Mr. Ban: There should be a clear understanding what kind of a role do you expect, and what kind of a role the United Nations should play at this time, in the 21st century. Your philosophical views of the United Nations may be still like in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s at the latest. Your view of the United Nations is not 21st century. During the Cold War era, the United Nations might have been the only and most universal organization in the international community. But you are still looking at the early stage of that time of the United Nations. Now you have the European Union, African Union and League of Arab States and many regional and sub-regional and quite big organizations. There are many actors now. It used to be the United States and the Soviet Union until lately. Now you have all the European leaders, Germans, French, the European Commission. Many other European powers with quite high economic development. The European Union has now emerged as a political player, a global player.
It used to be only the United States. Now the United States is still the global power, but still one of the global powers. The United Nations has become one of the global players, it’s not the only one. Therefore you cannot expect all from the Secretary General. Those days are over.
At this point in the interview a “senior aide” steps into point out that the UN is very busy with peacekeeping, aid delivery, etc. – which was not exactly the SG’s theme. What’s striking about this passage is that Ban seems to have a pretty strong analysis of the way the world is going (i.e. away from the UN) combined with a nostalgia for a time that never existed. There was never a moment where the UN was a sole, unquestioned source of authority in world affairs. Yes, people talked like that in 1945 – and again, very briefly, in the early 1990s – but it was always rhetoric not reality. Every Secretary-General has had to struggle against global divisions. This is not new.
But Ban has not finished on the subject of his limited power:
Well, there are many areas where I can’t do, where even the Americans can not do. I’m not supposed to be responsible for anything happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan–all this political situation. But we are concentrating on how can we mobilize humanitarian assistance for all these affected people, displaced persons. We have no peacekeepers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole dynamics have changed.
[ . . . ]
You have seen North Korea, you have seen Iran, you have seen many countries who have not implemented Security Council resolutions, which are binding. There really isn’t any forceful enforcement capacity of the United Nations, legally speaking. That’s why President Bush took that action by creating multinational forces in Iraq because the Security Council was divided. So all this kind of blame and criticism comes to the Secretary General, that the U.N. is not able to address these issues. I want you to understand.
I can see what Ban is trying to do here, showing that he is a realist. But even if the Secretary-General has a limited conception of his role, he should still have a strategy to make use of what power he has. He needs to lay one out.
Despite being oil rich, Nigeria is desperately energy poor. Per capita electricity consumption is half that of nearby Ghana and even this limited supply is shockingly unreliable.
When the power shuts down – which it does all the time – people sit in the dark or, if they’re lucky, fire up generators that cost the country $140 billion to fuel (add a chunk more for capital and maintenance costs).
On Twitter, there’s an online demonstration going on at the moment against this crazy situation – with huge numbers of tweets using the #lightupnigeria hashtag. “I know a Doctor that once operated in moonlight because the generator refused to come on!” Olunfunmike writes, “Let’s make a change.”
Please join them – and spread the word. (Cool photo – courtesy plastiqq. Find me on Twitter.)
Update: There’s a newish Facebook group too.
Update II: NEPA – Nigeria’s National Electric Power Authority – needs $3.4bn investment over the next five years. At present, however, it’s operating at a huge loss, in part because it only manages to get customers to pay for 60% of the electricity they use (as one customer puts it, “NEPA doesn’t give me light, but at the end of the month a bill would arrive and they would expect me to pay? I don’t think so.”)
President Obsaanjo has pleaded with the company to at least warn customers of impending power cuts (load shedding) before they happen, but many Nigerians believe that’s all he’s doing – pleading for change.
Last year, a Parliamentary investigative panel claimed that $16bn has been spent on the power system, without delivering much increase in supply.
The House of Representatives investigation alleged that Mr Obasanjo’s government had paid millions of dollars to 34 “non-existent companies”. The committee visited the sites where power stations were meant to be built. It found no work had been done at some sites after several years.
Defending his record, Mr Obasanjo said his government had inherited 18 years of neglect in the power generation industry, and had done well to more than double power supply. Gas pipeline vandalism had hampered power generation. One damaged pipeline took two years to repair, he said. To “the uninitiated” it would seem like no work had been done on the power stations, but the reality was that millions of dollars had been “invested”, he said.
But he said the investigation into the power sector may actually hamper improvement, and jeopardise Nigeria’s development. Private partners were being chased away by the probe because they feared being “criminalised”.
Update III: There’s a logo now.
