The images, stories and eventualities coming out of Ukraine are almost too horrific to contemplate. Rocket strikes against non-military targets, indiscriminate bombings across business and residential districts of major cities, and the creation of almost half a million refugees in just one week make the picture clear. This is a nation in the midst of […]
Russia and Ukraine: Back To The USSR Read More »
Turkey is now officially known as ‘Turkiye’, in an extensive rebranding operation that will see the new name used in diplomacy, commerce and (ultimately) everyday life. From one side, this can be seen as the nation further embracing its cultural heritage and refusing to be constrained by Western naming conventions. From the other, it is
A Tale of Two Turkeys Read More »
France is to withdraw its troops from Mali, in the enforced culmination of a nine-year mission to help preserve security in the porous and febrile West African nation. Parallels can perhaps be drawn with last year’s international retreat from Afghanistan, in terms of a sudden and unexpected change in authority that hastened the departure and
Mali: The Imbalance of Power Read More »
The UK government is to scrap the ‘golden visa’ scheme, which permits foreign investors to make a substantial financial donation in return for access to a paperwork fast lane, in response to concerns that Russians are exploiting this. This is presumably ahead of announcing a new coat of arms, which will consist of a stable
When is a crime not a crime? When it’s a fraud. That at least appears to be the view taken by the UK government, whose Business Minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, made the claim last week in an interview claiming that crime levels had dropped by 14%… because fraud was excluded from those figures. Quite apart from
The Faultlines of Fraud Read More »
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But it is difficult to think of a moment in recent times when this company of players has been more divided, or when the stage has been so febrile an environment. Is this purely a question of our leading performers – strutting
“This Strange Eventful History…” Read More »
There can be few countries for whom the phrase ‘new start’ is more applicable, than for Tanzania. As the Covid-19 pandemic ripped around the world in early 2020, her President, John Magufuli, adopted a position of deeply religious opposition: claiming that prayer could drive the virus away, mocking masks and medical intervention as unnecessary in
Tanzania: A Diagram For Success In 2022 Read More »
The delicate peace and settlement that followed the last major “boots on the ground” conflict in Europe, the Bosnian War, has begun to unravel. Since the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the hostilities and created Bosnia and Herzegovina, composed of two distinct power-sharing entities, the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska and the predominantly Croat-Bosniak Federation of Bosnia and
Bosnia: Old Enemies, New Threats Read More »
What connects 30,000 civil servants in Mozambique, 25,000 in Cameroon, 16,000 in Tanzania and 12,000 in Kenya? Just one thing: they did not exist. Over the last five years, all such groupings were identified as fraudulently sitting on the assorted government payrolls and accounting for millions of dollars in deliberate or mistaken lost revenue. These
The legacy of Boris Johnson will not be found in the getting done of Brexit (for such a thing is impossible), nor will it ultimately be in the ‘world-beating’ track and trace system and VIP contract lane. It will not even be in the litany of crude insults, inadequacies and irregularities that have become the
This Is My Truth & Don’t Tell Me Yours Read More »