Back From St. Petersburg

Indeed I am back, back to the land of boiled cabbage and queues. In the White Night of St. Petersburg’s summer, blogging, surfing and generally keeping up with the world receded in importance. The hangovers did not help for that is a land where beer is considered a soft drink and seeing some dude taking delicious little sips of ‘Russian Standard’ vodka at … well at, breakfast. But for the first time I was living in an idea, a conceit that killed millions, a city built by the will of a single man. Russia, and particularly St. Petersburg, I found, is a place that has been cut, ploughed, planted and whipped by a ruling class that has been determined to turn national life into an expression of philosophical ideas. It has, as M. Epstein says, been treated as a tabula rosa on which foreign ideas can be writ with all the necessary violence. Being in St. Petersburg, taking in my favourite building, Kazansky Cathedral, I knew that its beauty – and indeed greatness – reflected the relentless succession of projects that has blighted the lives of millions and destroyed lives past count. Projects, national projects kill. When the determination of Peter the Great to Europeanise Russia is considered, then the soviet period is soon understood to have merely been a version of this project. Russia, for we of 5-year development plans and nationalist aspirations, serves as a warning beacon. I will come back to this in the coming weeks, once I have gotten my feet under me.

Putin and His African Cannibalism Take

Being in St Petersburg and only now learning that Putin said that Africans had a history of cannibalism made me laugh till the tears rolled. Not because what he said was really funny, but because of the knee jerk outrage that poured out of my own folks over the statement and not the promise of aid he made. Here is a guy who on one hand calls you a cannibal and on the other promises you money, and you accept! That is so hilarious because the only other thing it could be is tragic enough to make me cry for days. This is what Trevor Phillips, the UK’s government-appointed commisar of racial equality, had to say: “What a preposterous thing to say. He is at best insensitive and at worst a downright racist”. Insensitive? How hopeless. The brother is trying to spin some poltical correctness game in the midst of madness. Putin knows perfectly well that he doesn’t give a shit about Africans but needs to play ‘the game’ which over the years has come to include merciful gestures for the doomed Africans. For the last week, I have been staying in the city where he was born. It was here that almost a million people died so that I could take admiring photos of the city and in this country that Stalin killed at least 20 million Russians not to even mention the millions that Lenin and Trotsky murdered. There is no need for outrage from the usual coterie of African guilt mongers. Who the hell cares that Putin says Africans are cannibals when he comes from the cruelest place on earth? I think he was joking and actually really didn’t give a damn how it came out. Two minutes in St. Petersburg will show you that political correctness here is absurd.

The Vodka Haze and Related Matters in St Petersburg

Never ever try and blog as a Kenyan in St Petersburg, Russia. It is not possible; it is beyond the bounds of credulity and possibility. They have this clear, tasteless substance called Russian Standard Vodka and it really has been sad for this particular African. The toasts don’t stop, or the misplaced sense that you are in a familiar space when you are actually in the strangest city that was ever built. Throughout my life Russia has been a constant: its politics and, most importantly for me, its literature. After a week here, despite the haze, I have come to realise the self indulgence of my politics. Russians must be the toughest most stubborn people on earth because the cruelties leveled on them – by the Peters and Stalins – had to be a response to the size of their spirits. I want to live here and learn Russian and how to be a writer because this place speaks to so many things that I have never consciously articulated. I went to Kutuzov’s tomb yesterday. It is in Kazansky Cathedral and was my best moment in Russia. A country that prays while displaying the captured standards of Napoleon who brought death here and did not understand that Russians could endure more than he could wield. When I am reborn, I hope it is as a melancholic Russian writer who used to be a soldier.

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Graffiti outside the flat that Raskolnikov supposedly lived in. Raskolnikov is the most famous of Dostoevsky’s characters. The dude basically offs old ladies believing that he is beyond the bounds of good or evil, and of course this has made him madly popular among angst-hungry western intellectuals.

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This is a picture of an African scalp outside Kazansky Cathedral in St. Petersburg. I am living just up the street and have spent an inordinate amount of time seating in a small park next to the cathedral. It was, I am told, built at the beginning of the 19th century by Alexander I. It was during one of the Russian-Turkish wars thus the decision to build a large duplicate of St. Peter’s in Rome to prove that Russia was a serious superpower that Turkey shouldn’t mess with. It amazes me how notions spring up in a Czar’s head and they are brought to life at such horrific costs. One look at the huge looking mass with its dark stones is enough to let you know that folks done died putting it up. Anyway, word is that the project succeeded though I cannot really understand how. The Turks surrendered before the cathedral’s completion and therefore it was decided to not build a southern colonnade to match the northern one facing Nevsky (the main avenue where to be a woman not wearing high heels earns you an instant mob beating).

Now I quote and will put up more pictures the moment I am recovered from my lack of sleep:

In socialist times the cathedral housed the ideologically-slanted Museum of Religion and Atheism and had a graphic Spanish Inquisition exhibition in the basement, complete with a pair of legs jutting out of a cauldron. The current exhibition has a small section (in Russian only) on the history of Catholicism and a larger section on Orthodoxy which includes church art, historical paintings, and various religious knick-knacks.

Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, hero of the Napoleonic War, is buried in the cathedral and there are monuments to him and to General Mikhail Barclay de Tolli in Kazan Square, facing Nevsky. From a certain angle, General Barclay de Tolli seems to be doing something that he shouldn’t be doing in public; this is revenge on the randy general for sleeping with the sculptor’s wife.

An African in St. Petersburg: The Arrival

From today, I will try and keep a kind of diary of my two-week trip to St. Petersburg. Hopefully I will be able to find a computer that I can use to upload the pictures that I am taking.

The Arrival

I flew into St. Petersburg yesterday evening on a flight from Vienna. I have always wanted to put those cities in a sentence that involves me. As is the usual case for The African, immigration was a complex matter. It never ceases to amaze me how suddenly, when you are in an immigration queue, the crushing power of the State makes itself felt. While aloft, I was an international traveler, a privileged being that has taken flight. My troubles were behind and below me; ahead was possibility and optimism. When I landed, it was like being in a Toyland. The rows of planes, the terminal building and the little trucks zipping here and there all appeared a bit unreal, like a kind of children’s Lego set.

It is the immigration form that brought me to earth. It made no apologies for its demand of information: when was I born; where was I going; why was I going there; for how long; where did I come from; what was I carrying, weapons, acids, sharp objects, animals, plants…; citizenship; residence; date of birth; maiden name; address; passport number and date of issue and expiry; other? It is ‘other’ that gets my goat. What else could I tell? That I was carrying drugs or planning acts of terrorism? That I may have left behind heartbreak and that I hoped to one day win the lottery and that the expiry of my life, not just that of my passport, was a constant worry? Well, I filled the form. It is habit. I have been categorized, measured, weighed and credentialed so often that it now feels normal to squeeze my life into forms. And I also filled it because not doing so always has unpleasant consequences. 98.5% of all forms are a way of avoiding punishment, pleading and justifying. So I filled mine and got in line to speak to the most important individual in my life at that moment, the immigration officer.

By the time I inched up to the desk behind which sat, as always, a grim faced official my happy feelings of having been magically transported had dissipated. I was gripped by an inexplicable guilt, that I had committed some crime that the official would spot instantly. This is why I clutched my passport a little too tightly, and glanced repeatedly at the page with the visa to make sure that it was actually there and has the correct dates. Also in hand were my ticket, insurance form and the schedule of the writing conference that had brought me to Russia. I half expected that I would have to re-apply all over again for permission to enter. My overly active imagination started making up scenarios of the official ordering a search of my baggage and a joint of marijuana being found. I worried whether the friends I have lent my suitcase in the past could have left such damning evidence in it.

The Russians and Europeans ahead of me briskly stepped up to the official and were processed quickly and efficiently. She barely looked at their passports, seeming to be satisfied on the basis of the country that had issued them. The Austrian that I spent part of the flight conversing with kept up a lively chatter that I could not concentrate on. He had few worries; this for him was just a small irksome procedure. And that it is how it appears to Africans as well, after they have been successfully admitted. Before then, you can tell who they are by the silence that envelops them in the queue and their solemn expressions.

Finally it was my turn and as is my wont, I brightly said hullo taking special care to pronounce the ‘hi’ with a distinctly American accent. It was better, I calculated, to say ‘hi’ instead of hello or habari or niatia. Such greetings may mark me for some kind of rent seeking, asylum declaring African. The dirty little secret of the African in line is that he attempts to reduce his Africanness in every possible way. The passport from Kenya or Uganda and, heaven forbid, Nigeria, is trouble enough. Thus my chirpy ‘hi’ which evidently had been tried before since it was met with silence and a searching glance.

OK, have to run and meet the group for dinner. The Petersburg diary shall continue later.

The Lazy and Shadowy Blogger

The Lazy and Shadowy Blogger on the way to meet research supervisor, thus in a state of anxiety, insecurity and passive-aggressiveness. Since my newest chapter makes theoretical claims that in London read suspiciously like Frenchie hot air, the strategy was to dress in subdued tones meant to reassure my solidly anglo-pragmatic supervisor that my work was still on track. Long story short: it did not work. Tomorrow the Lazy One flies to St. Petersburg, Russia for two weeks with the vague hope of posting a photo journal of the trip on this blog. 

419 Scam: The Lawyer Prepares to Enter the Fray

This is a picture of Naomi Bangura, she of the $14 million Ivory Coast bank account. She sent it in response to my lonely roofer englishman character who it now turns out is in search of love having married a Croation mail-order bride who treated him badly. I had also created another character, Dick Ramahda II, who was going to be my lawyer meant to confirm that Naomi is for real but has instead decided to seduce her and get hold of her $14 million. I wanted the story to be filled with back stabbing, stupidity and loneliness.

dear naomi,
i am going through a lot with my employee accident and divorce. I maried a very bad woman naomi, she is from croatia and has treated me very badly. but you have been so nice to me even when we have never met, I wish you were here. I like your picture. do you think maybe when the money comes in we can go to brighton beach and maybe even become closer than close friends? I will make sure dick acts quickly for you. I thin you are nice.
with great love,
martin

I have blacked out her features since I am sure that this is not really Naomi. Notice the mansion in the background… 

See below for the continuation of ‘Can you find romance in a 419 scam?’ series. I post this with the usual sense of shame because if Naomi Bangura is a con artist, then I must be the idlest, nothing-to-do character alive to have engaged in this dialogue with her. This is just prior to the final series of emails when I introduce a lawyer called Dick Ramahda II who is meant to be representing me but actually wants to rip me off and take Naomi for himself. I wanted to see how the 419 crew would respond to such treachery…
To read the background to the series of exchanges below, please go to the following links:

Can a 419 Scam Letter Lead to Romance?
The 419 Scam Letter Romance Continues
419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Photo
419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Certificate of Deposit
The 419 Scam Letter Chapter 3

MMK,
Beloved Mr MMK am very glad to have a person like you on my way and i am sure is not a mistake because before i got your contact i prayed and fasted for 3 good days and this is divinely made by the power of Jesus christ.
And i will not stop praying for you and all the members of your family in Jesus name.
Please,sir i will you to contact me as soon as you contact the bank.
Have you received my picture and bank document?
God bless you is my prayer.
yours naomi.

MMK,
Sir,how are you today?am afraid because i have not been hearing from you for a long time,after sending my picture and bank document and contacts i want to ask you wheather you have received them or not;Have you contacted the bank?
Frankly,speaking i am worried for not hearing from you,remember you promised to help me,this money is all my hope and life you know there is political problem here in ivory coast for confirmation check this (WWW.ABIDJAN.NET).Being a young girl of my age i need your help and direction and if you cannot help me is better you let me know now so that i can look for another person that can help me.
I know that you might be busy of one thing or the other but you have to remember that am a young girl and human being and i see you as my father.
My greetings to your family and may GOD bless you
all amen.
Am waiting for your message.
Naomi.

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
MMK

Dear Mr MMK.

I thank you so much for your letter at last. And I am sorry for what heppened to your worker.

Please, I will want you to be serious about my case and help me.

Here is the website of the bank,where my father depoisted the money (www.boahq.com) you can contact them for the transfer of this fund,so that I will leave here now that the political problems has not gotten worse.

For the person that contacted you.I do not know him in person,But there are many people here who lost their parents in the cause of the war.If your spirit direct
you to help him as well, I will not stop you.

I am looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,

Miss Naomi Bangura.

MMK,
How are you sir?i see it neccesary to write you once again,i hope you are coping with the problem your company had in dead of your worker,i hope the situation is coming down.
I know the Lord is in control and i have been praying day and night to see that the lord see us through for this transaction,i still beleive that the lord brought you to be a help and it shall not be invain,you know am a young girl and don’t know much about business and i know with you everything shall go smoothly when i come to your country to work with you.Have you contacted the bank? i went to the bank to confirm if you have contacted them and i was told that you have not contacted them,pls sir don’t waist time remember you promised me,and they are still waiting for your lawyers to call them.
Sir, there is one thing i noticed from the bank director, he seems not to be much happy because i want to send this money abroad and he told me that he has a
friend in toronto canada who deals in diamond and he will contact him for me but i said no that i trust you and i cannot do business with anybody except you,tuesday last week i went to consult a lawyer concerning what the bank director told me,when two of us got to the bank my lawyer asked the bank director that as long as your name is in the bank file that he has no legal right to contact anybody who is not my
choice or desire,so my lawyer is with us here to ensure every thing go well and he is worried and he said you should do quick so that after the tranfer of this money i can come to meet you.
Please,sir call the bank director so that they can tell you what to do for the transfer of this money.
Thanks and GOD bless you and your family.
yours Naomi

dear naomi,

as always I am happy to hear from you. but worrid. i talked to my lawyer and he seemd a bit hesitant because he said my busines is very in debt. but then i told him that you seemed very nice and showed him the certificate of deposit. i hope that he makes a conection with the bank because he promised. how are you? tell me quickly when my lawyer contacts bank.
bye
MMK

Babylon System is the Vampire!

Why OGs and mababi, two generations of the African elite, are under attack

When I attended primary school in Pumwani in the early 1980s, babi was a teasing term for a softie: a spoiled kid who couldn’t hang. In the intervening decades, a babi has become a detested and shunned individual who cannot participate in most public spaces in Nairobi. His presence is experienced by most as an imposition, an invasion by a Babylon system that dirties all it touches with its contempt, sense of entitlement, foreign airs and corruption. To put it simply, a babi is a child of the OGs: the original gangsters who took over the reins of the colonial state in the 1960s and their hangers-on. While crime is widespread, to be identified as a babi marks you as a target for hyper-violent criminality; the failings of the political system that gave birth to him shall be visited on his flesh.

The Kibaki administration, the Official Opposition and the foreign-funded civil society are all mababi. While they are busy arguing about corruption, the constitution and speeches by Edward Clay, they have not noticed that they are speaking to themselves. People are hearing the political chatter, but listening is an act of faith that would be naïve given what has happened in the last two years not to mention the preceding forty. Many are realizing that the system has never worked for them. In fact, the problem is not that it has failed but that it was never designed to deliver. Those occupying the higher reaches of the state have not noticed that politics are moving out of the political arena. The people – that featureless mass perpetually invoked by the babi system as the recipient of its political efforts – have checked out of the building. But in many African countries, they have only been inside the national building for brief periods of postcolonial history.

Mababi cradle their drinks in expensive restaurants, often discussing, amid the sounds of tinkling glasses, mwa-mwa-mwa kisses and modulated Spanish music, politics. They tend to demand a return to a clean, green, criminal-free capital city – an Eden that only they, and the colonial settlers before them, ever occupied. Their concerns are reminiscent of colonial settlers who sipped sundowners during Empire’s high noon and complained that the city had gone to hell, that the Africans were becoming more criminal by the day. Can it not be asked whether the mababi are the colonialists of the 21st Century?

Their parents’, the OGs’, takeover of the colonial reins was a cosmetic change – the barest mention of words like revolution or struggle produces an uncomfortable shuffling of feet, clearing of throats – never meant to address the state’s toxic relationships to the many publics of the newly independent colony. The mode of OG governance was classically colonial: divide and rule, patronage, brutality and relentless speeches urging the ignorant rural folk to modernize and develop. They took over and whitewashed the colonisers civilizing mission: a confused, racist attempt to subjugate the ‘savages’ presumably in order to save us from ourselves.

Modernization and development in the OG dictionary have meant ‘come with me on a merry run-around where I pretend to do stuff for you while I pad my bank account with your taxes’.

It is true that the nationalists in their heyday captured the imagination of many people. Unfortunately many of them secretly aspired to be like the White dude they saw during a Speech Day in school. And so many of them became not the connecting voices of their different peoples, but the bridge between the village and the European metropolis, the commodity brokers who sold their people short. They turned their faces to London, Havana, Moscow or Washington; anywhere, provided it was not the smoky huts in which they were born. But they still sought to brandish those poor, church-attending relatives as a political base in order to get hold of the Governor’s Mansion or State House as it is now known.

The initial strategy was to shout down imperialism, flirt with socialism and declare that as panafricanists, they now represented all Africans. Simultaneously, switching from the language of revolution, they used their smooth talk to assure the colonial powers that it would be business as usual after independence. They were everything to everyone: fellow revolutionaries to Fidel Castro and Malcolm X; visionary leaders to many Africans; and business partners to colonialists.

The OGs in the next twenty years after independence engaged in an orgy of thievery. Its dire public cost was only relieved by infusions of Western aid, commodity exports and the fading memory of colonial administrative know-how. It is during these years that they gave birth to the mababi. Though OGs remain in control of the higher terraces of the state, their babi children are attempting the second inheritance. Where the former used nationalism and panafricanism to satisfy a hunger for power, the latter are using ideas from conferences held in Beijing, Davos and Monterrey. The cry is no longer yesteryear’s Viva La Revolución; it is now the Western liberalism of the UN’s Millennium goals, NEPAD, Feminism, Human Rights and Environmentalism. To mababi, the state is theirs to inherit. They are already working hard to create the impression that they are the representatives of – you guessed right – the people. They point an accusing finger at the OGs for bad governance – as if the opposite has ever been true in most of Africa – and conveniently forget that it is a sin to disrespect their parents. The citizen’s role in this plan: help the mababi clean up the OG system.

As the African publics endure insult heaped on injury, the numbers who still believe that forming legal parties, voting and raising kids to do well in exams can change the rules of the game shrinks. Increasingly, the view that it is not the rules of the game that are wrong but rather the entire class of people who dominate it is gaining a foothold. It is those who hold this conviction and have turned to crime that should concern everyone whose lifestyle seems babi-like even if they are not well connected members of this small tribe.

Adherents of the growing outlaw culture in Nairobi have a code that utilises violence above and beyond the call of criminal duty. When a babi is targeted, he commonly experience the whack of the pistol butt across the face, a humiliating undressing after a car jacking and unprovoked stabbings or shootings. The victim is held in such scorn that the assailants believe he deserve no humane consideration. Many innocents have been victimized and even the babi is often not personally guilty of any crime. But because so many have turned their back on the political process, and on the laws it is meant to create and enforce, they regard those on the wrong side of the babi divide as fair game.

To those who experience the quiet desperation of trying to survive in Africa – despite some personnel changes at State House – further talk of reform is a mockery. The only way out of this impasse is to ruthlessly limit the state’s functions and resources. Its reach should be shrunk to the point that there is little incentive for the OGs and mababi to control its coffers. The only institutions we need as people of initiative and industry are the judiciary, the legislature and law enforcement. Demands for privatization, decentralization, low taxes and the retreat of the state from the economy will not be bywords of a neo-liberal agenda set in Washington. Rather, they will be the start of a much needed and long-awaited process of decolonization. Africans do not want promises of better governance by the same old crowd or its anti-corruption rhetoric or seminars lecturing us about sustainable development. We want to be left alone by a vampire state and its little vampire children who never saw a con they didn’t like, a donor they could not kneel before and a poor person they couldn’t pity, hate or fear.

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Bob Geldof lets out the strange mix of profanity and plea making that has become his signature tune. Whenever I catch these so called Africa saviours on TV, the urgency of their appeals and the faux concern they exude always leaves me enraged. They use African poverty and suffering like a prop for already over-large egos. We are helpless beings who cannot survive without the concern of an Elton John (in the background) or a Geldof who has not written a hit song in a decade and yet can save Africa.  

Kenya Held Captive By Elders

Is it just me or is Kenya held captive by people who were born in the 16th Century? Whenever I see pictures such as this one, with an elderly politician or public servant standing in front of microphones, I always suspect that they are saying something vaguely ridiculous. I know it is a bit unfair since I did not have the privilege of listening to The Secretary-General of the Union of Kenya Civil Servants, Mr Alphayo Nyakundi, this time around. But surely a raise of 600% is a bit rich isn’t it? Not that I blame the civil servants for wanting to milk the Treasury what with the MPs going hog-wild with greed.
 

If Bob Geldof Cannot Even Write a Hit Song, How Can He Save Africa?

I was just about to comment on the upcoming G8 Summit and the hypocrisy of Bob Geldof who has been filling the air waves with his inane pleas for more aid to Africa. Then I came across the op-ed below, by Simon Jenkins, which says exactly what I had been hoping to express about the issue.

Aid sounds mighty nice, but it’s trade that feeds Africa
simon jenkins (In London’s Sunday Times)

To use the language of the “new” G8, I cannot get my head round next month’s summit at Gleneagles. Ostensibly it is running true to form. G8 summits have become a cynic’s byword for extravagance, platitude and glitz. But since Tony Blair unofficially signed up Bob Geldof as “G9”, the summit’s objective seems to have changed.

It is no longer to combat world poverty directly but to “raise awareness”. Since this can be defined in terms of airtime and column inches, a summit succeeds by doing what it anyway does best. The more it spends on itself, the more likely the target is met. The G8 is the New G8, with built-in cynicism deflection.

These gatherings are 30 years old this year. They were founded by the French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in 1975 as “library chats” between the heads of rich first-world governments. There would be no aides present and agendas would be ad hoc. By keeping meetings small and informal the exalted could commune “above the level of petty bureaucratic concerns”. Like Giscard’s doomed exercise in European constitution-building, things soon got out of hand. The group of five became eight. Canada was included but China, India and anyone black or brown were out.

Today the G8 outstrips Henry VIII’s Field of the Cloth of Gold in extravagance and posturing. Informality has vanished. Host nations spend lavishly on hospitality and call it “showcasing”. Officials are told to draft statements of stupefying emptiness. Favoured topics include free trade, energy conservation, climate change and, from some sense of shame, poverty. The last has predominated, as George W Bush curtly remarks, “as long as I have been president”.

Locations have been made ever more inaccessible to protect delegates from infuriated demonstrators. In 2000 the Japanese held a summit “to discuss world poverty” at a cost of £500m on Okinawa. The same theme was proposed for the most outrageous summit, Genoa in 2001, when Silvio Berlusconi regaled delegates with submarine protection, athletic masseurs, three tenors and £10m of security per head. The mob howled on the quayside and were beaten up by the carabinieri.

This so terrified the Canadians that in 2002 they decided to discuss world poverty deep in the Rocky Mountains. It was there that Blair felt the “hand of history” upon him. He had decided to “halve world poverty within a decade” and would start with Africa. When Blair talks about poverty today we should remember that this is his sixth successive bite at the cherry. The exploitation of global misery to justify a politico/celebrity extravaganza is global diplomacy at its most obscene.

Gleneagles is reportedly costing even more than Genoa, £12m a head in security. So paranoid are delegates that £50m is being spent on policing alone. Nine million pounds is going on moving, feeding and sleeping eight delegates “informally” for just three days. You need not be a rabid leftwinger to find these sums inexcusable.

This year’s gimmick is that the G8 will “incorporate its critics” by half-welcoming Bob Geldof’s music festival. Blair is now travelling the world on a pre-conference jaunt with celebrity endorsements from Madonna, Sting, Bono, Elton John, Ms Dynamite, Mariah Carey and a million wristbands. He has a backing track being rehearsed in London, Philadelphia, Berlin, Paris and Rome. Who says G8 is not reaching out? Nor does Geldof even mean to raise money, apart from the £1.6m he must give Prince Charles for evicting his charities from Hyde Park on July 2. He need only show airtime to meet his awareness target. Never say the British, led by the Irish, cannot do chutzpah.

The rich world has thus attained nirvana. The Good Samaritan need no longer cross the road. He need only be “aware” and cry, “Hey man, wow, right on!” The G8 and Geldof have accepted Margaret Thatcher’s exegesis: the real point of the biblical parable is that the Samaritan had to get rich first.

The meat in this beanfeast is supposedly supplied by Gordon Brown. His contribution is to repackage the familiar summit trio of aid, debt relief and trade preference. But which? The classic test of any discussion of world poverty is which takes centre stage.

Aid — Geldof’s “just give us the f****** money” — has become discredited, for reasons that run through Blair’s mostly admirable Commission for Africa report. The Americans have balked at offering more since they already give $7.5 billion and claim to prefer outcomes to inputs. I have some sympathy. The days are gone when the West sees any point in pouring money into Africa with no way of ensuring it is well spent. Blair’s pledge to “double aid in 10 years” is meaningless targetry. Nor have decades of bellyaching about corruption done any good. Why should an African leader promise elections in return for aid to his poor? Elections give someone else the Geneva bank account.

Debt relief is more complex. Brown’s idea of waiving it for tsunami states vanished when the states realised they might lose credit thereby. His pet international finance facility has been scaled down but remains debt by another name. Nor has anyone come up with a way of ensuring that relieving debt really helps Africa’s poor rather than its rich.

Debt certainly cripples the so-called Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, but Gleneagles is not needed to progress the existing British/American relief plan. The best way to help these states is not to press them into further debt, which is what Brown seems to propose. It is to help Africans repay their borrowing themselves.

Which brings us to trade. If the G8 really cares about world poverty, it will avoid Gleneagles and meet instead on a Glasgow dockside. There delegates will watch the unloading of a cargo of sugar, rice, fruit, cotton and coal from the Third World. Afterwards they will sail out into the Clyde and witness the ceremonial sinking of a ship crammed with their own surpluses, about to be dumped on African markets. That is not dumb awareness-raising. It is really tackling world poverty.

For the past six years the G8 has been preaching relief yet maintaining vicious trade sanctions against Africa and Asia. It has denied them markets for their produce and flooded them with surpluses. At this very moment, millions of tons of subsidised European and American sugar and cotton are being dumped on Africa, destroying local industries and impoverishing populations. This has nothing to do with corruption or lethargy or “ungovernable Africa”. It is economic warfare by the G8 against the poor.

The best thing Gleneagles could do is announce not another fancy aid package but a revival of Britain’s old imperial preference. This means more than debating the EU’s partnership agreements, promising to buy specific goods from specific poor countries and not dump on them in return. It means actually implementing such agreements. Yet I see from the spin that Britain is downplaying trade in favour of yet more aid and debt relief. The reason, I fear. is simple. Pledging taxpayers’ money costs politicians nothing. Since the pledge is seldom honoured, it also barely costs the taxpayer.

Trade is a different matter. It means confronting lobbies, upsetting producers, withdrawing subsidies. It means doing, not talking. Its benefits are seen not on western television but in the markets of Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. That is why trade reform has no purchase on the White House, Brussels or the Blair/Geldof agenda. Aid is sexy. It makes its recipients dependent and its donors feel good. There is a neo-imperialist streak in the Make Poverty History movement. Trade is mercantile and often “unfair”. It is always scrutinised for a boycott.

If Blair is serious about “tackling world poverty” he should devote his present junketing to one objective, to a crash programme of preferential, bilateral trade deals with poor countries. This is the only action that offers a robust and lasting cure to world poverty. If, as seems certain, Blair finds all ears deaf to this demand, he has one recourse. He should cancel Gleneagles as pointless. He should send the £100m it will cost straight to Oxfam and present a urgent trade preference bill to parliament. If he and Geldof really need to bask in each other’s glory, they can stage an annual rally in Trafalgar Square naming and shaming the countries that refused at Gleneagles to take poverty seriously. All else is flam.

Kenyan Blogger Party in London and Nairobi

I know that many bloggers like to be anonymous on account of their sick thoughts and libellous posts. Be that as it may, I am going to host a small party for Kenyan bloggers at one of my palatial homes in London during the course of July or early August. The point of this meeting shall be simple: to distract me from more important tasks, provide me an excuse to cook coconut milk yams, okra and honeyed roast lamb (hope there’s a cookbook for this) and allow me to generally revel in strangers. Then, if I have the energy, I shall propose a black and white talkies film fest in Nairobi when I get there in late summer. Knowing myself, I shall run out of enthusiasm for this idea in a few hours; but you must admit that it’s not too bad, aye? Of course I get the feeling that a lot of the power of blogging is the opportunity to stay ‘undercover’, so I will not be surprised if only the socially desperate and deranged take up this offer.