Global News Journal

Acronym soup swamps Malaysia reform drive

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak says he has embarked on a series of radical economic reforms. In reality it feels as if he has unleashed a barrage of incomprehensible acronyms on the unsuspecting public of this Southeast Asian nation.

The charge for economic reform is being led by the snappily named PEMANDU. As well as being the Malay word for “driver” it stands for the government’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit.

PEMANDU is in charge of formulating and implementing NKRAs (National Key Result Areas), MKRAs (Ministerial Key Result Areas) and getting “Big Results Fast”, according to its website, although it singularly failed to win political backing for a radical revamp of Malaysia’s costly subsidy regime.

It is also helping to formulate the 10th Malaysia Plan, 10MP for those in the know, a communist-era sounding 5-year plan that aims to help lift this middle income country to developed nation status by 2020.

PEMANDU is part of the GTP, the Government Transformation Programme, which also involves the SITF (Special Implementation Task Force). Throw in the NKEAs (National Key Economic Areas), another thinktank known as the EPU (Economic Planning Unit) and you haven’t reached the end of the alphabet spaghetti dreamed up by Malaysia’s civil servants…. There’s still the ETP. the NEP (sometimes good, sometimes bad) and the NEM (New Economic Model).  

To be fair to Malaysia, it is not the only country in the world that is wallowing in economic acronyms, the U.S. gave the world TARP, a $700 billion bank bailout programme, and the even more mind-numbing ABCP MMMFLF   (don’t ask), but it is fair to ask what Malaysians have got from all of this.

Does Sorb’s election win point to a more multicultural Germany?

Under Adolf Hitler, the Nazis tried to extinguish the culture and language of the Sorbs.

This week, a member of Germany’s indigenous Slavic minority won a state election for the first time. Stanislaw Tillich’s victory puts him firmly in control of Saxony, the most populous eastern state – and looks likely to catapult the 50-year-old to the front ranks of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU).

“It was a historic day for the Sorbs,” Alfons Wicaz-Lehmann, deputy editor-in-chief of Serbske Nowiny, the country’s only Sorbian language daily, said of Tillich’s win. “It also shows that members of a minority really can rise to such a high office in this democracy.”

Although they now number only 60,000 and have lived in eastern Germany for well over 1,000 years, Sorbs have retained a distinctive culture and language, despite efforts to suppress them under Prussian domination and then Nazi oppression. Partly because of this they have kept a relatively low profile in Germany, a country whose ageing population and low birth rates could leave it heavily dependent on immigration in the years ahead.

A father of two, Tillich knew only Sorbian until he was “about five” but alongside German, the former member of the European parliament today also speaks Czech, Polish, French and English. Though he inherited the post of state premier last year when his predecessor resigned, Tillich had never faced the Saxon electorate for the job before.

Despite being dogged by media reports linking him to communist East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, he was the only CDU premier to emerge from the three state elections on Sunday with his reputation enhanced. While the CDU’s share of the vote slumped in Thuringia and Saarland - prompting the resignation of Thuringia’s premier Dieter Althaus on Thursday – it held above 40 percent in Saxony as Tillich secured a five year mandate to rule.

“His victory was very important and helps to make the Sorbs better known – because very little is know about us in Germany,” said Wicaz-Lehmann.

Cattle Rustling, Pythons and Boogie Angola Style …. the best reads of May

Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.

Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks

Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.

Picking up the pieces from Afghanistan’s war

U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a  white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.

In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries

No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.

from Africa News blog:

Tale of an African whistleblower

A new book on corruption in Kenya is considered so explosive there that copies are only being sold under the counter in Nairobi by some book sellers too nervous to display them openly.

"Within these pages, we stand eyeball to eyeball with corruption. The book is an ironclad tell-all that mercilessly bares all to the light," said the local Sunday Nation newspaper in a review of Michela Wrong's book. "It feels dangerous to just read, let alone write."

Just published, "It's Our Turn to Eat" tells the story of Kenyan anti-corruption whistleblower John Githongo, who uncovered details of one of the country's biggest scandals, the $750 million Anglo Leasing affair involving inflated security contracts.

At the heart of the book is a portrayal of an ethnic clique intent on enriching itself and holding on to power - a picture familiar to many other African states.

We are told that, as Githongo's investigation deepens, the circle of suspects widens to include many senior officials, members of the Kikuyu tribe, Kenya's biggest, to which Githongo and President Mwai Kibaki belong. When he made his findings public in 2006, Githongo was vilified by critics for betraying his tribe in exposing "Africa's Watergate".

"The title of the book is an appeal Githongo's colleagues made to him: 'It's our turn to eat, John. Don't rock the boat'," said former British envoy, Edward Clay, who once equated the Kenyan government's tolerance of grand corruption to vomiting on the shoes of the donors who provide aid. "For the corrupters it is a sweat provoker," he said at the book's launch in London.

Wrong's book is being serialised in Kenya's biggest newspapers, The Nation and The Standard, at a time when the government is again tainted by scandal.