A couple of books I grabbed last days:
This is a classic I haven't read yet. The young girl hidden from the Nazis in an Amsterdam warehouse... I think she spent, with all her family, two years just to be captured and die in a concentration camp.
The diary of a youn girl
By Anne Frank
Published by Puffin
427 pages.
I read this book almost 20 years ago when at university. Now I am reading it again, in paperback. I remember being totally hooked and amazed with Hawking's prose plus the weird feeling about this titanic mind in such a fragile body. I think he is the Newton of 21st century... but maybe someone can say this is a too high title.
A brief History of Time
From the Big Bang to Black Holes
By Stephen Hawking
Introduction By Carl Sagan
Published by Bantam Books
220 pages
Thursday, May 31, 2007
An African Hero
Mo Ibrahim helped to bring mobile phones to Africa. Now he has bigger plans
IN 1998, as the telecoms boom was under way, Mo Ibrahim was amazed that big companies were rushing into the mobile-phone business around the world, yet not in Africa. There they saw only problems: poverty, unrest and corruption. Mr Ibrahim, a veteran of the telecoms industry in Britain and Sudan, was at the time running a consultancy he had founded in London. Amid the cigar smoke and snifters that followed its directors' dinners, an idea formed. Might it be possible to set up a pan-African mobile operator—and to do so without paying bribes?
This was the genesis of Celtel, which is now one of Africa's largest mobile operators, with some 20m subscribers in 15 countries.When Mr Ibrahim sold Celtel in 2005 to MTC, a Kuwaiti operator, for $3.4 billion, it demonstrated that the continent was open for business. Rather than charity, he insists, “the way forward for Africa is investment.”
Building businesses in Africa is important to Mr Ibrahim, who had to leave the continent as a young man in order to pursue his career. Born in Sudan and raised and educated in Egypt, he started off as an engineer at Sudan's national phone company. After further study in Britain he went on to become technical director at Cellnet, the wireless arm of BT, Britain's biggest telecoms operator. (Cellnet was subsequently sold, renamed O2 and is now owned by Telefónica of Spain.) He left in 1989 to set up an engineering consultancy that designed mobile networks, and sold the firm for just over $900m to Marconi in 2000.
These experiences paved the way for Celtel's emergence. The consultancy enabled Mr Ibrahim to peer into the business models of dozens of mobile operators, from which he concluded that an African operator would work. His time at BT was also informative: big companies, he says, teach a fellow everything he ought not to do in order to be successful. “Later on in life I was not worried about taking on the big guys, because you know they are not efficient,” he says. And Mr Ibrahim's previous success meant that the motivation behind Celtel's establishment was not solely commercial. He and his co-founders had already made their fortunes and regarded Celtel as a political and intellectual test. That is why they happily ventured into risky African markets and refused to pay bribes.
Now that mobile telephony is booming in Africa, Mr Ibrahim has other plans. Not for him the typical rush into private equity. Instead he set up a foundation last year with the novel (and, say critics, utopian) mission of promoting good governance in Africa. It plans to award an annual prize of $5m to retired African leaders who rule well and then stand down, rather than trying to cling to power. The foundation is working with Harvard University to establish a scoring system with which to assess potential candidates. The prize committee is chaired by Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. The first award will be presented in October, though the prize will be presented only in years when a worthy winner can be found. By that point Mr Ibrahim plans to have stepped down as the chairman of Celtel to avoid any possible conflict of interest.
Meanwhile Mr Ibrahim has also put up $150m to establish a fund to invest in African businesses. From its newly opened offices in London, the Africa Enterprise Fund will seek out promising companies in financial services, consumer goods, energy and agricultural processing. The aim is to focus on established businesses that need cash and experienced management to grow, and the average investment is expected to be around $20m. Only companies that can expand their operations regionally or throughout Africa will be considered. Mr Ibrahim has appointed Tsega Gebreyes, Celtel's former strategy chief, to help run the fund. This is because the fund's approach is to apply the Celtel formula in other fields: identify inefficiencies, consolidate fragmented operations, go pan-continental and develop a respected brand. The goal is scale. A large company that operates in several African markets can attract a higher calibre of managers than a gaggle of local ones, and can have more political clout when demands for bribes crop up.
Politics, philosophy and economics
Though there are no direct links between the foundation and the fund, the two are symbiotic. Business and investment in Africa can succeed only if there is good governance, which is what the foundation is intended to promote. And economic development is necessary in turn to give people a stake in improving the political process. The foundation's $5m prize is a pittance, it is true, when compared with the spoils that can be extracted by staying in power. But the initiative may not be totally futile: given the impotence of Africa's intergovernmental bodies it will do no harm at all to produce an annual public ranking of African governance. And the foundation will offer a carrot where other non-governmental organisations carry sticks.
The investment fund is also tiny when set against the magnitude of Africa's problems. But as Celtel shows, some businesses can have a powerful ripple effect, promoting economic activity and generating new investment. Celtel employs around 8,000 people directly, for example, but it and other mobile operators indirectly provide jobs to around 170,000 people in Africa who resell prepaid airtime. More broadly, mobile phones also promote entrepreneurship and economic activity by widening access to markets and making up for poor or non-existent transport infrastructure. Similar ripple effects ought to be possible in other fields such as financial services and energy.
Thirty years ago Mr Ibrahim had to leave Africa for Europe in search of education and professional success. He hopes that fostering indigenous African companies will help ensure that tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs can find their opportunities closer to home.
IN 1998, as the telecoms boom was under way, Mo Ibrahim was amazed that big companies were rushing into the mobile-phone business around the world, yet not in Africa. There they saw only problems: poverty, unrest and corruption. Mr Ibrahim, a veteran of the telecoms industry in Britain and Sudan, was at the time running a consultancy he had founded in London. Amid the cigar smoke and snifters that followed its directors' dinners, an idea formed. Might it be possible to set up a pan-African mobile operator—and to do so without paying bribes?
This was the genesis of Celtel, which is now one of Africa's largest mobile operators, with some 20m subscribers in 15 countries.When Mr Ibrahim sold Celtel in 2005 to MTC, a Kuwaiti operator, for $3.4 billion, it demonstrated that the continent was open for business. Rather than charity, he insists, “the way forward for Africa is investment.”
Building businesses in Africa is important to Mr Ibrahim, who had to leave the continent as a young man in order to pursue his career. Born in Sudan and raised and educated in Egypt, he started off as an engineer at Sudan's national phone company. After further study in Britain he went on to become technical director at Cellnet, the wireless arm of BT, Britain's biggest telecoms operator. (Cellnet was subsequently sold, renamed O2 and is now owned by Telefónica of Spain.) He left in 1989 to set up an engineering consultancy that designed mobile networks, and sold the firm for just over $900m to Marconi in 2000.
These experiences paved the way for Celtel's emergence. The consultancy enabled Mr Ibrahim to peer into the business models of dozens of mobile operators, from which he concluded that an African operator would work. His time at BT was also informative: big companies, he says, teach a fellow everything he ought not to do in order to be successful. “Later on in life I was not worried about taking on the big guys, because you know they are not efficient,” he says. And Mr Ibrahim's previous success meant that the motivation behind Celtel's establishment was not solely commercial. He and his co-founders had already made their fortunes and regarded Celtel as a political and intellectual test. That is why they happily ventured into risky African markets and refused to pay bribes.
Now that mobile telephony is booming in Africa, Mr Ibrahim has other plans. Not for him the typical rush into private equity. Instead he set up a foundation last year with the novel (and, say critics, utopian) mission of promoting good governance in Africa. It plans to award an annual prize of $5m to retired African leaders who rule well and then stand down, rather than trying to cling to power. The foundation is working with Harvard University to establish a scoring system with which to assess potential candidates. The prize committee is chaired by Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. The first award will be presented in October, though the prize will be presented only in years when a worthy winner can be found. By that point Mr Ibrahim plans to have stepped down as the chairman of Celtel to avoid any possible conflict of interest.
Meanwhile Mr Ibrahim has also put up $150m to establish a fund to invest in African businesses. From its newly opened offices in London, the Africa Enterprise Fund will seek out promising companies in financial services, consumer goods, energy and agricultural processing. The aim is to focus on established businesses that need cash and experienced management to grow, and the average investment is expected to be around $20m. Only companies that can expand their operations regionally or throughout Africa will be considered. Mr Ibrahim has appointed Tsega Gebreyes, Celtel's former strategy chief, to help run the fund. This is because the fund's approach is to apply the Celtel formula in other fields: identify inefficiencies, consolidate fragmented operations, go pan-continental and develop a respected brand. The goal is scale. A large company that operates in several African markets can attract a higher calibre of managers than a gaggle of local ones, and can have more political clout when demands for bribes crop up.
Politics, philosophy and economics
Though there are no direct links between the foundation and the fund, the two are symbiotic. Business and investment in Africa can succeed only if there is good governance, which is what the foundation is intended to promote. And economic development is necessary in turn to give people a stake in improving the political process. The foundation's $5m prize is a pittance, it is true, when compared with the spoils that can be extracted by staying in power. But the initiative may not be totally futile: given the impotence of Africa's intergovernmental bodies it will do no harm at all to produce an annual public ranking of African governance. And the foundation will offer a carrot where other non-governmental organisations carry sticks.
The investment fund is also tiny when set against the magnitude of Africa's problems. But as Celtel shows, some businesses can have a powerful ripple effect, promoting economic activity and generating new investment. Celtel employs around 8,000 people directly, for example, but it and other mobile operators indirectly provide jobs to around 170,000 people in Africa who resell prepaid airtime. More broadly, mobile phones also promote entrepreneurship and economic activity by widening access to markets and making up for poor or non-existent transport infrastructure. Similar ripple effects ought to be possible in other fields such as financial services and energy.
Thirty years ago Mr Ibrahim had to leave Africa for Europe in search of education and professional success. He hopes that fostering indigenous African companies will help ensure that tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs can find their opportunities closer to home.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
In Fact...
- ...there are more British troops in Ireland than in Iraq.
- ...rents in central Manchester are 40% higher than in central Manhattan.
- ...if all Lego in the world were divided up evenly, we would get 30 pieces each.
- ...Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.
- ...there are half a million semi-automatic machine guns in Swiss homes.
- ...Australia emits 30% more greenhouse gases per capita than the United States.
- ...the porcentage of Nigerians living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 32% in 1985 to 71% today.
- ...Mao Zedong had a hairdresser called Big Beard Wang.
- ...Israelis own 10% of the private land on the moon.
- ...of India's 1.1bn population, only 35m pay income tax.
- ...Europe's merchant ships emit around a third more carbon than aircraft do.
- ...when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, his army used more horses in total, and more per soldier, than did Napoleon's over 100 years earlier.
- ...rents in central Manchester are 40% higher than in central Manhattan.
- ...if all Lego in the world were divided up evenly, we would get 30 pieces each.
- ...Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.
- ...there are half a million semi-automatic machine guns in Swiss homes.
- ...Australia emits 30% more greenhouse gases per capita than the United States.
- ...the porcentage of Nigerians living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 32% in 1985 to 71% today.
- ...Mao Zedong had a hairdresser called Big Beard Wang.
- ...Israelis own 10% of the private land on the moon.
- ...of India's 1.1bn population, only 35m pay income tax.
- ...Europe's merchant ships emit around a third more carbon than aircraft do.
- ...when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, his army used more horses in total, and more per soldier, than did Napoleon's over 100 years earlier.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Hot, Cold, Warm
We have seen very different electoral outcomes in just a week. First was Scotland, the hot thing, with the Scottish National Party winning, at least in numbers of sits, the Scottish elections – and suddenly Number 10 has a Quebec in his own backyard. Will Alex Salmond’s SNP push for a self-determination referendum in this parliament? They really would like and maybe even try but is not likely. But the very fact that a pro-independence party is the single biggest party in part of the UK is more than interesting in political terms.
Scotland was on Thursday, then Sunday came and the conservative Sarkozy won the French elections, with a 53% of the share, against Royal’s 47% - she moved fast in recognizing her opponent’s victory. That was the “cold water” for any progressive soul in the Hexagon and in Europe in general. The son of emigrants who called “scum” to other son of emigrants is now the president of France.
And on Tuesday, came the hopeful picture that everyone was expecting: Ian Paysley senior (“Mr Never!”) and Martin McGuinness laughing together in the power-sharing Stormont government. If the darkest voice of Unionist supremacy and a former IRA commander can work together for a better future for the people of Ireland I don’t understand why in other European conflicts they can’t find the right formula with much less difficult parameters.
Scotland was on Thursday, then Sunday came and the conservative Sarkozy won the French elections, with a 53% of the share, against Royal’s 47% - she moved fast in recognizing her opponent’s victory. That was the “cold water” for any progressive soul in the Hexagon and in Europe in general. The son of emigrants who called “scum” to other son of emigrants is now the president of France.
And on Tuesday, came the hopeful picture that everyone was expecting: Ian Paysley senior (“Mr Never!”) and Martin McGuinness laughing together in the power-sharing Stormont government. If the darkest voice of Unionist supremacy and a former IRA commander can work together for a better future for the people of Ireland I don’t understand why in other European conflicts they can’t find the right formula with much less difficult parameters.
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