Talking heads


Heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) meet next week in the Zambian capital, Lusaka. SADC is a group of countries whose leaders meet every so often to discuss what went wrong since the last time they met.

A lot has gone wrong in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean economy is in tatters, held together by Band-Aid and Scotch Tape. Pump readings at fuel stations are unable to keep up with inflation. While the SADC meeting may offer a sympathetic ear to President Robert Mugabe, attempting to fix his economy is akin to picking nickels in front of a steam roller.

That said, the economic fortunes of the other members of the group have been good. Economic growth is at its best in years with GDP averaging 5% over the last five years. Triple digit inflation no longer haunts governments. Commodity prices have soared, with copper taking the lead. Interest rates are down along with the cost of borrowing. Despite the drought in South Africa, corn (a regional staple) is in abundant supply.

Their Excellencies have good reason to be pleased with their excellent performance. Except Mr Mugabe. He may be keen to discuss what went wrong since the last time they met.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Whose Shilling?

Image
Zimbabwe is Africa's Lazarus. The economy is in tatters, the citizenry of this great nation are despondent but Robert Gabriel Mugabe remains firmly in charge. For the time being. Many believe that only South Africa is in a position to determine the destiny of Zimbabwe. Yet President Thabo Mbeki, save for his quiet diplomacy, appears disinterested in employing enough downward pressure for Mr. Mugabe to repent his sins and thereby rid the Zimbabweans of their current economic woes. What exactly does Mr Mugabe have on Mbeki? In exile Mbeki lived, at different times, in the United Kingdom, Botswana and Zambia. He hardly was guest of the Mugabe's. On that score alone, Mbeki does not owe Robert a good turn. Of the two neighbours, Zimbabwe is most reliant on the other. Zimbabwe relies on South Africa's ports for her exports and imports. She draws electricity and routes her telecommunication traffic through her southern neighbour. South Africa is one of Zimbabwe's m
Read more

Free mobile-to-mobile calls

A mobile phone is a miniature telephone exchange. It accepts incoming calls, initiates outgoing calls and can act as a repeater by forwarding calls or as a switch through teleconferencing. These are the basic features of a telephone exchange. TerraNet , a Swedish firm, has exploited these features to facilitate free mobile-to-mobile calls. Using peer-to-peer technology, a cluster of mobile phones can communicate without the need to go through a base station (switch) provided they are within 1,000m of each other. This technology, being trialled in Ecuador and Tanzania, is perfect for developing countries where infrastructure is as limited as disposable income. Because mobile phones can forward calls, the effective communication distance can be extended from a 1 kilometer radius to about 20 kilometers. That is sufficient to cover most rural communities and, for example, university campuses. Like Skype , this is a subvertive, effective and disruptive technology. While manufacturers
Read more

Want to test midlets on real phones?

Most mobile phone manufacturers offer emulators to help developers with software tests. Java and C++ programming environments usually provide plug-in facilities for emulators . Products such as Pulsar go a step further to integrate and maintain the entire development space. Although emulators catch a fair amount of design and runtime errors, software behaviour on real phones is unpredictable. For most developers it is not financially feasible to test the behaviour of their mobile applications on all target platforms. To get around this obstacle some companies offer on-line services that allow for application testing on real devices. These services are often expensive. In software provided by phone manufacturers multiple instances of the emulator are invoked to simulate the behaviour of federated handsets. One solution is to run an instance of the application on a PC and set up a local communication channel with a real phone. A neat, inexpensive and elegant solution is availab
Read more