Nigeria: Election Without Voting
The News Review:
- Nigeria: Election Without Voting
- the parakeets have waited nineteen years to be chirpy
- The Arts Column: Still waiting for a masterpiece
- Protection for home schooling
- Red tape ‘threatening renewable energy boom’
Nigeria: Election Without Voting
AllAfrica.com – Mar 12, 2008
Democracy, they had argued, differs from one country to another and Nigeria, given its peculiarity, was practicing home-grown democracy!Significantly, this variation of majority rule reached a head in April 1998, when all five political parties, one after the other, organized special conventions, amended their constitutions and adopted General Sani Abacha, a sitting Head of State, as their joint candidate. Ironically, two months later, Abacha died without accepting or rejecting the offer. Thereafter, the "home grown virus" became inert and in 1999, transparent primaries were held as well as general elections. Afterwards, things started changing in PDP, as Olusegun Obasanjo, brick-by-brick, dismantled party structures, stifled internal democracy and ran the party on his whims and caprices. From day one, he jetitioned party supremacy and ultimately, Obasanjo pocketed PDP as president. Chuba Okadigbo, the political philosopher, was PDP’s choice for the Senate presidency and 43 senators, in a shadow poll, endorsed him for the position but Obasanjo, in defiance to party position, supported Chief Evan Enwerem and mobilized ANPP and AD senators to defeat Okadigbo.
the parakeets have waited nineteen years to be chirpy
Sunday Herald – Mar 12, 2008
Despite Javier’s automotive munificence, Espanyol are not a wealthy club and they’ve built their side with guile and savvy more than cold, hard cash. Credit must go to Valverde and his sporting director, Paco Herrera, formerly Rafa Benitez’s number two at Anfield. The side is a blend of home-grown kids – there could be as many as five on Wednesday – and bargain buys who were written off elsewhere. Ivan De La Pena is, of course, the most extreme example. Ten years ago he was the brightest star in Barcelona’s young midfield, the heir apparent to Pep Guardiola, spraying balls all over the Nou Camp with supreme confidence. He moved to Lazio for £13m, in the summer of 1998 and, almost overnight, his career seemed to die. In the next four years he bounced around between Lazio, Marseille and Barcelona, making a total of 10 league starts… And yet, bit by bit, he lifted himself and his new club. Espanyol’s midfield is built in such a way as to insulate him and his most obvious weaknesses, the ones that prevented him from making the grade (lack of pace, personality and physical strength) earlier in his career. With a tough-tacking midfielder like the home-grown Moises at his side, De La Pena can still provide enough creativity on the attacking end without becoming a liability defensively. Out wide, Espanyol rely on other illustrious cast-offs, such as Francisco Rufete, who was shown the door after five years at Valencia, and Luis Garcia, a Real Madrid product who was let go before he had a chance to shine. The latter, who can also play as a centre-forward, has arguably been the side’s best player this season, along with the Cameroonian goalkeeper Carlos Kameni. But Espanyol supporters are perhaps most proud of the fact that the spine of their team is made up of home-grown players. With the central defensive pairing of Daniel Jarque and Marc Torrejon at the back, the aforementioned Moises in midfield and the inspirational Raul Tamudo up front Espanyol are a rarity in the modern game.
The Arts Column: Still waiting for a masterpiece
Telegraph.co.uk – Mar 12, 2008
Like two other equally sympathetic and approachable works of the time, Copland’s The Tender Land and Douglas Moore’s Ballad of Baby Doe, Susannah is modest in its aesthetic ambitions. It isn’t designed to be performed by a star-studded cast in great opera houses (although it was recently mounted for Renée Fleming at New York’s Met), and the score deliberately eschews modernist experimentalism in favour of an unsophisticated folksiness. However, only the hopelessly snobbish could fail to admire its theatricality and sincerity: short, sharp, unpretentious and emotionally involving, Susannah is dramatically lucid in a manner associated with Britten, and it contains some rapturously beautiful music for the soprano singing the title role – “Ain’t it a pretty night?” is a gorgeous Puccinian tear-jerker of an aria – as well as charmingly catchy Appalachian dances and choruses. It is, in sum, that rare thing, a modern opera that speaks immediately to an audience, and it is a little scandal that it has had to wait more than 50 years for its fully professional British première. But then American opera has never travelled well, and even with the considerable popularity of the genre in the US, it still awaits its defining masterpieces, let alone its Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Janácek or Britten. This isn’t altogether surprising, as its history is still so young: until the middle of the last century, opera in America was almost entirely a matter of foreign imports, bound up with a culture of dressy glamour and social climbing, in which anything home-grown would have seemed impossibly hick and naïve. The first American opera of any real and lasting significance is Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, first staged in 1935… It is, in sum, that rare thing, a modern opera that speaks immediately to an audience, and it is a little scandal that it has had to wait more than 50 years for its fully professional British première. But then American opera has never travelled well, and even with the considerable popularity of the genre in the US, it still awaits its defining masterpieces, let alone its Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Janácek or Britten. This isn’t altogether surprising, as its history is still so young: until the middle of the last century, opera in America was almost entirely a matter of foreign imports, bound up with a culture of dressy glamour and social climbing, in which anything home-grown would have seemed impossibly hick and naïve. The first American opera of any real and lasting significance is Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, first staged in 1935. What makes it important isn’t so much its African-American focus – which several other operas had already explored – as its creation of a mutation that one might call “the Broadway opera”, combining the razzmatazz and hit tunes of musical comedy with ambitious dramatic themes and passages of spoken dialogue (perhaps Bizet’s Carmen is the distant precursor). Weill’s Street Scene, Bernstein’s Candide and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd all fall into this genre, which sits as comfortably in a theatre as it does in an opera house. The second distinctive contribution that American opera has made to the repertory comes via the minimalist school.
Protection for home schooling
Christian Science Monitor – Mar 12, 2008
In many states, home-schoolers must ensure that lawmakers – under pressure from turf-protecting teacher unions – don’t put onerous rules on parents. This decision could provide fresh ammunition for harsh controls. Fortunately, such efforts have largely failed to roll back a movement that has grown with the rise of conservative Christians and others who prefer home schooling, and with the Internet’s ability to bring the best teaching tools into the home. Parents are now organized into virtual communities for mutual educational support. Still, as the California case makes clear, a right to home school remains vulnerable to political interpretation. Rules and enforcement are sometimes murky, with education officials uneven in their demands. At the least, home schooling should fulfill society’s interest in compulsory education up to a certain age, with students asked to provide a level of minimal educational competency.
Red tape ‘threatening renewable energy boom’
Sunday Herald – Mar 12, 2008
“There is no doubt that Scotland has a lot of expertise in this area. We have some of the most advanced research projects in Europe and our facilities sector is second to none. That’s why we should be able to complete the Orangutan project using only home-grown talent,” said Slee. “This is too big an undertaking to be left to the market however. The infrastructure, planning and logistical implications of alternative energy are enormous, and formulating an effective strategy can only work if it is driven at government level. ”
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