President Dmitry Medvedev’s conference on the modern state and global security this week was an object lesson in efficiency and organisation. Four hours north east of Moscow in the ancient city of Yaroslavl, security was tight but not overbearing, hundreds of Moscow and Saint Petersburg students guided guests to their hotels and waited tables with exquisite fish, caviar, pastries, vegetables and fruit in a marquee beside the conference hall.

Russia was showing the face of a modern state with a global role.

Escaping the speeches for a view of Yaroslavl’s medieval Kremlin and onion-domed churches and monasteries, a few of us set off down the road from the conference centre in search of a taxi to drive us into town. The modern conference grounds quickly gave way to small wooden kiosks selling ‘products’, ‘vegetables’ - no brand names here.

No taxi either but there was a kiosk selling water melons, run by an Azeri eager to earn some extra cash.

His Lada stank of petrol and exhaust fumes belched inside the car every time it pulled away from every junction. He told us police sometimes stopped him because of his dark colouring - in this part of northern Russia blonde is the order of the day. And he complained that his invalid allowance - he had kidney problems - barely covered the cost of his medicine.

Bumping into the centre of Yaroslavl, the Volga stretched before us, we saw a harbour packed with millionaire’s boats. Out of the car and walking through the ancient gates of the Kremlin, we were greeted by an old woman sitting on a wooden chair.

Can the real Russia please step forward?

Abolish money. Punish the  looters. Eat the bankers.

Ageing 1960s hippies and their youthful anti-globalisation descendants joined in an angry  anti-capitalist protest at the Bank of England on Wednesday, waving placards and shouting slogans reflecting  a common fury at perceived corporate greed.

With worldwide recession destroying jobs by the week, protesters at the G20 protest in the City of London demanded an end to what they see as a global, predatory system that robs the poor to benefit the privileged.

"Welcome to Pig City: One war -- class war" was the placard held up by a masked man standing on the doorstep of the central bank.

As hooded protesters scrawled "Peace and Love" on the walls of the Bank, Drogo, an elderly man in flowing multi-coloured robes and carrying an orb on a wooden stick, pointed at staff peering out of the Bank of England's windows and said:

 "I am here to tell these fat bankers to get off their arses and save the planet.

"They have to do it because they are still in charge -- for now. But of course capitalism has to go down. We have had enough."

One man strolled along Threadneedle Street dressed as a white-faced corpse in top hat and tails with a placard round his neck that read: "Their greed is killing our planet."

Some windows were smashed. Protesters hurled paint bombs and empty bottles and occasionally threw punches at police, who responded with baton blows. 

Police said they had deployed one of Britain's biggest security operations to protect businesses, the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.

But the clashes were almost desultory, if briefly dramatic. There was no general looting.

This was not Seattle, 1999, when demonstrators successfully disrupted a World Trade Organisation meeting, or London's anti-Iraq war demonstration of 2003, when hundreds of thousands joined together in an impressively unified march for peace.

The G20 meeting was due to take place several miles away in the Docklands area of east London on Thursday.

On Wednesday, there were just 4,000 demonstrators, and the range of causes they espoused was  varied in the extreme, bringing together anti-capitalists, environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and conspiracy theorists of various stripes.

For much of the day the mood was carnival-like. The police managed to seal off the handful of streets around the Bank from the rest of the City, where workers went about their business normally.

A brass band played for several hours. And as the day wore on, protesters peeled away from the knots of angry young men taunting riot police to dance to a mobile disco set up on the steps of the Bank.

Above the disco, someone had fixed a large poster which read: "Hundreds of Architects and Engineers Demand a Real 9/11 Investigation."

The hard core of violence-prone protesters were a tiny minority. Some masked and hooded young men belied their mysterious appearance by being friendly and talkative.

One, 19-year-old student Francis, explained: "Bankers have made bad gambles and we are all paying for it. They must take responsibility for that."

There was even a good-natured counter-demonstration by pro-capitalists. One of them, Simon Richards, 50, from Gloucester, western England, said: "We have come to stage a counter-demonstration to show we are not intimidated by the terror tactics of these  protesters.

"We are in favour of free market rather than state control."

Protester Mia, 21, a student from Denmark, waving an anti-war banner, said the range of causes on offer was a  strength, not a weakness.

She said she wasn't just angry about international conflict.

"We're here to protest about all of it. All these crises are linked," she said.

"The U.S. has to borrow lots of money from China and other places to pay for all these wars, meaning they have less money for housing and other parts of their economy. It's vital to demonstrate about it, provided it's peaceful."

 Here are a selection of placards and graffiti seen at the demonstration.

 "Capitalism isn't working"

"Drop books, not bombs"

"Banks are evil"

"People will stop robbing banks when banks stop robbing people"

"Make love, not leverage"

"Resistance is fertile"

"Housing is a right, not a privilege"

"You can rent the house you used to own"

"Eat the bankers"

"Banker, rhymes with ?"

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.

Since Kibaki's disputed re-election set off tribal-based clashes that killed at least 1,300 people last year, a unity government bringing in leaders from other ethnic groups including the Luo and Kalenjin, as well as Kikuyu, has been accused of foul play over everything from the sale of a hotel to fuel and maize supplies.
   
Even for a nation used to hearing about corrupt practices, the scandal involving the mismanagement of maize reserves has stoked anger at a time 10 million Kenyans face starvation.

"People are really mad because politicians used a system devised to bring down maize flour prices to enrich themselves," said one Kenyan professional in Nairobi. "The flour is still expensive, inflation is up and drought is threatening lives. People are baying for blood."

For many kenyans, it seems Kibaki's promise to end graft, the pledge that first brought him to power in 2002, sounds as hollow as ever.

So, what can be done?

Wrong argues that the key to fighting graft in Africa does not lie in fresh legislation or new institutions.
   
In Kenya, as in many other countries, the anti-corruption body is "part of the grand corrupters' game, providing them with another bureaucratic wall behind which to shield, another scapegoat to blame for lack of progress," she says.

"Rather than dreaming up sexy-sounding short cuts, donors should be pouring their money into the boring old institutions African regimes have deliberately starved of cash over the
years: the police force, the judicial system and civil service".

Donors, she said, "would do better to target the Western companies, lawyers' chambers and banks which make it possible for crooked African leaders to spirit hundreds of millions of dollars out of the continent each year."

Do you think that would help? Do Githongo and other whistleblowers make a difference?

Lebanon, once a byword for violent anarchy, remains a country where the rule of law is patchy, to put it kindly. But Interior Minister Ziad Baroud, a youthful reform-minded lawyer who was appointed in July as part of a national unity government, is determined to change that, or at least to make a start. He has told the traffic police to do something about the cheerful but sometimes lethal chaos that pervades the roads. 

    Few Lebanese normally bother with seat belts or crash helmets. Speeding with a mobile phone glued to your ear or an infant in your lap comes naturally. Double or triple parking is the norm, lane discipline an alien concept and right of way determined by who gets there first or who drives a bigger vehicle. Scooters fizz everywhere, a law unto themselves. 

    Now Baroud is trying to impose order on all this wild individualism. As I discovered the hard way.

    Leaving home by car the other day, I found my normal route blocked by a truck delivering steel rods to a building site. I had a choice. Turn left, legally, and face a lengthy detour through jammed streets, or turn right for 20 metres the wrong way down a one-way street onto the main road.

    I was in a hurry and in Beirut one-way signs are just part of the urban decor, so for the first time in my two years here (honest), I took the short cut. Only to find myself collared by the long arm of the Lebanese constabulary lurking around the corner. The young traffic cop then swiftly flagged down a sleek black Mercedes which had followed my rash example. He proved impervious to our excuses about the truck obstruction.

    “I have to give you a ticket,” he told the protesting Lebanese driver, “otherwise this foreigner will get a bad impression.”

    “And I have to give you a ticket,” he gently explained to me, switching into competent English, ”because I’m booking the Mercedes.”

    I pleaded for a while, telling him how absurd it was that I’d been caught on my first offence. “Yes, it’s bad luck,” he sympathised, continuing to write out the ticket.

    Just then sirens wailed and a convoy of black SUVs carved a path through traffic, lights flashing. For a few moments, my policeman gestured furiously at drivers to make way. “That was our minister, Mr Baroud,” he said as the cavalcade tore on noisily towards the airport road.

    “Ah, he’s the reason you are giving me a ticket,” I suggested.

    “Exactly, I don’t want to lose my job, I’m so sorry,” he apologised with a smile, handing me a receipt for my driving licence, to be redeemed later that day after a long wait and payment of a $40 fine.

    Well, I had to admit it was a fair cop. And I can only applaud Baroud’s quixotic effort at enforcing the rules of the road  – the message on seat belts is already getting through. If he succeeds,  who knows, he might be able to crack down on the bribery, tax evasion and abuse of power which explain Lebanon’s lowly ranking of 102 on Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index — comparable to the likes of Tanzania, Bolivia and Mongolia. 

       But Baroud is a member of a government with a very short shelf-life. His main task is to prepare for parliamentary elections in May or June next year. And when it comes to tackling the unruly habits of the Lebanese, on or off the road, there are no short cuts.  

 A little while back, we asked who is and isn’t fighting corruption effectively in Africa. This week, a number of examples bring us back to the subject.

In Tanzania, two former ministers have been charged with flouting procurement rules over the award of a tender for auditing gold mining back in 2002. The pair, who deny wrongdoing, served in the government of President Jakaya Kikwete’s predecessor Benjamin Mkapa. One of them also served under Kikwete himself.

Tanzania’s pledge to fight corruption is under close donor scrutiny and given the level of aid that Tanzania gets - more than one tenth of GDP by 2005 figures - it has little choice but to show willing. There have been doubts in the past, however, about how serious the government really was about going after the most senior and the best connected.

“By hauling the long-serving politicians to court, the Government has dispelled the rumour that some influential personalities are being shielded,” commented The Citizen newspaper of the charges against the former ministers.

Is Tanzania’s anti-graft drive now fully on course or will these two turn out to be scapegoats while others are ignored?

 

In Nigeria, the troubles of the former head of the anti-corruption agency are back in the headlines.

Nuhu Ribadu was sacked by President Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration despite winning favour from many Nigerians, foreign investors and western donors as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. He had targeted some senior politicians and was widely credited with doing more than anyone had previously, although critics accused him of pursuing only those out of favour with former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Ribadu’s position has been getting ever rockier since he was sacked and demoted. At the weekend, he and his family were bundled out of a graduation ceremony from the government institute where he was sent after being fired from his top post – although the presidency later intervened to say he would get his certificate after all and ordered an inquiry into the incident.

“The entire Ribadu family must by now be wondering, as are millions of other Nigerians, if it’s a curse to serve this country with all one’s heart and whether it’s a country worth dying for,” wrote Thisday’s Funke Aboyade after the ceremony.

Ribadu may now face a police disciplinary panel next month. Meanwhile, a top official of the anti-corruption agency has resigned after failing to report suspicious payments, another setback for the troubled body.

The very different examples bring up the issue of how politics complicates the fight against corruption - something in no way exclusive to Africa. Is it possible to fight corruption without truly independent and trustworthy police and courts? And if not, how is it possible to put those in place when leaders promise to stamp out graft but fail to live up to their words?

As one Nigerian leader remarked not so long ago: “This administration will mobilise all resources at its disposal to fight the menace of corruption.”

President Yar’Adua? His predecessor President Obasanjo? No. That was General Sani Abacha, who died in suspicious circumstances a decade ago with billions of dollars thought to be stashed in foreign bank accounts (If you still get emails from people purporting to be his relatives, it’s probably best not to reply).

“Should I wait until she’s finished?” asks a soldier from an Italian Alpine regiment, in their distinctive feathered Tyrolean-style hat, to her police colleagues as they patrol an area of Turin notorious for addicts known as “Toxic Park” and see a woman shooting up.

Incidents like this one reported in Corriere della Sera newspaper seem to support Italian police unions’ doubts about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s initiative, which began this week, to put 3,000 soldiers on the streets of 10 cities for the next six months to help the police fight a supposed crime wave. Some police officers believe military personnel, even those hardened by peace missions abroad, do not have the training needed to fight crime.

But as the first few hundred soldiers took to the streets this week — wearing barrack-dress uniform with sidearms only for street patrols, but camouflage combat gear and rifles for guard duty on “sensitive” targets like embassies and railway stations — many city mayors hailed the exercise as a success. The military man in charge of the operation, Giuseppe Valotto, said the public reaction had been “incredibly positive” and helped improve citizens’ perception of their own safety. Soldiers even notched up a few “collars” in their first few days on joint patrol with the police, hauling in 12 African immigrants in Naples accused of faking fashion brands, chasing a thief through the streets of Bari and nabbing a man in Milan who had snatched the takings of a bar from the till.

Being style-conscious Italians, of course, the troops carried off their street duties with the requisite swagger and Rome’s right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, who has worried about them scaring off the tourists, appeared taken with the Grenadiers of Sardinia helping out with guard duties in Rome, saying: “They looked like they were out of a film, really perfect, they have a great image.”

But the political opposition, and the media, has asked if it is really necessary to draft in a token number of soldiers in a country that already has 230,000 police and carabinieri, and where the crime rate is not alarmingly high compared to the rest of Europe anyway. A new study by research centre Censis released this week shows, for example, that Italy has the lowest murder rate of the biggest European countries and one which is falling already. One union leader suggested the military should be drafted into Italian building sites instead to combat a growing cause of death among Italians — fatal accidents at work, where Italy ranks top in Europe, according to Censis.

The opposition also points out that Berlusconi has mobilised the military while simultaneously reducing funding for the police in the budget.

The foreign press appears sceptical too, with the Financial Times saying in a comment piece this week that Italy’s new conservative government might to well to focus instead on combatting corruption, where the country has the worst record in the European Union apart from Greece, according to Transparency International’s global corruption Index. Forbes magazine called the operation a “diversion tactic” by Berlusconi to shift the focus away from the country’s sagging economy, which it said has the lowest growth in the euro zone and is heading for recession.

But, as often seems to happen in Italy, Berlusconi comes in for fiercer criticism from the foreign press than from the domestic audience. While putting soldiers on the streets to combat a crime wave of dubious proportions might spark protest in some countries, so far it has been limited to a few banners and handbills in the capital saying “Free Rome”.

The streets of the Egyptian capital Cairo have been unusually quiet since the start of the month and cabbies say they now drive around in fear of the massive police presence, evident at all major intersections. The big junctions have a police “liwa” on duty — equivalent in rank to an army major-general — along with up to a dozen subordinates enforcing, or perhaps working out how to enforce, a draconian new traffic law.

The newspapers publish daily reports of the number of tickets they have given out the previous day — at least several thousand, for offences such as failing to wear seat belts or stopping beyond the white line at a junction.

On the first day some drivers were ticketed because they did not have the first aid kit which the new law requires them to carry, although the Interior Ministry had postponed that requirement for three months until pharmacies could stock up on them.

Egyptians assume that this unusual requirement is designed to benefit some businessman close to the government but no one has identified a suspect or produced any proof. With millions of vehicles on the road, many of them without working lights or brakes,let alone first aid kits, much money is at stake.

What has most put people on edge is the sudden shift away from tolerance of rock-bottom driving practices and vehicle maintenance standards. The trouble with the new system is its unpredictability.

One driver of a four-wheel-drive vehicle was stopped and had his licence seized because the vehicle had a metal crash bar attached to the front. When the driver argued that was how the cars rolled off the production line and came out of the showroom, his argument fell on deaf ears.

Drivers have warned me that I should have all the dents and scratches patched up on my car in case the police don’t like the look of it. But I’m happy to take my chances. After all, most cars are in worse shape and they can’t remove half the vehicles from the streets of Cairo without massive disruption.

Even since the new law came into effect, policemen have still been seen taking money from drivers, not a good omen for what the Interior Ministry billed as a fresh start. As long as those meant to enforce the law are taking bribes, there will be no law enforcement, as one taxi driver put it.