Steel balls, please

No balls game

Lawn tennis as we used to know it to differentiate it from the original racquet sport of Real tennis that Henry VIII played or the ping-pong game of Table tennis and now commonly referred to as Tennis is a game of balls and quite a few balls have been tested the past few months. I prefer racquet of French provenance and etymology to racket by the corruption of spelling and language used in North America.

Anyway, the issue here is Novak Djokovic, the number 1 ranked male tennis in the world who was granted a medical exemption by Tennis Australia to play in the Australia Open and defend his title. It was a case of no balls for that organisation to have done this when the rules required that all players at the tournament be vaccinated. [The Guardian: Appalling message’: outrage over Novak Djokovic’s medical exemption to play Australian Open]

Big balls boy

Now, Mr Djokovic to the eye is a strapping healthy 34-year-old at the peak of health and his sporting prowess, the burden of proof definitely had to be on him to show why for purely medical reasons he had to be allowed entry to Australia to compete. It appears that is the test that Mr Djokovic failed to convince the Australia Border Force of. [The Guardian: Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open hopes dashed after visa cancelled at airport]

For too long, issues with this Coronavirus pandemic have been politicised and usurped by libertarians pursuing freedom and liberty for the individual at the expense of community, the consequence of which is evident with us, the pandemic is still headline news as we enter the third year of its hold.

Just the balls

Indeed, Mr Djokovic has every right to privacy regarding his medical history, even his vaccination status should be protected for purposes of sheer confidentiality, and all that, he can exercise completely at fully at home. However, the moment you leave home and board a plane to travel abroad, there are limits to your exercise of individual rights within the scope of responsibility to others.

Imagine a scenario where the Australian Open had to be cancelled midway because of the outbreak of COVID-19 amongst any of the participants, players, officials, or teams and it was the unvaccinated or one whose vaccination status is unknown. There is form because the Adria Tour 2020 organised by Novak Djokovic was shutdown because COVID-19 protocols were not followed on the court and amongst spectators with some players and coaches testing positive for COVID-19. This was the risk Tennis Australia was ready to take.

Steel balls, please

Obviously, Novak Djokovic’s team would appeal the decision to cancel his visa and there is a diplomatic fallout about to result between Australia and Serbia, but common sense should prevail and that requires balls, steel balls at that. I believe the Australian Border Force have felt a handful of the balls of Novak Djokovic to traipse into Australia on a medical exemption called it out, we do not need Hawk-Eye to confirm that it was out as out can be.

That decision should stay, and Mr Djokovic can watch from Serbia his title go to a new champion that follows the rules and is deserving of the honour. For too long, people have used the privilege of wealth, power, or status to claim exemption from the rules and civic responsibility. We need examples to help us put this pandemic behind us, the good examples should be lauded, and the bad examples should never be rewarded. Put that diva on a plane and send him home.

Change that call from ‘New balls, please’ to ‘Steel balls, please’.

Britannia riles the diplomatic waves

A junior player we are

This need not be a long blog, yet an interesting point to note. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom entered an alliance and pact that left a submarine contract arrangement between Australia and France dead in the water. [BBC News: Aukus: France recalls envoys amid security pact row]

France recalled their ambassadors to the United States and France but did not consider it necessary to recall their ambassador to the Court of St James’s. The reason given with obvious disdain as good as a typical English putdown, “France considers the UK a junior player in the new pact, seeking a new world role post-Brexit, and riding along on Uncle Sam's coat-tails.”

Making waves no longer

It is normally attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte that he considered England a nation of shopkeepers, that same nation that once was an empire on which the sun never set, Great Britain has been on a steady decline for over a century and is now after Brexit being dismissed as a junior player by our neighbours across the channel, that respectful consideration is a waste of diplomatic nous, the contempt has been delivered with inaction.

The Britannia that once did rule the waves no more makes any waves to bother anyone on the international stage. How indeed are the mighty failed and fallen by those who led that Brexit march, we are treading the path of reduction with gusto, bluster, bombast, and insignificance. Alas!

Nigeria: The relative cost of our democracy is unsustainable

This is too dear

I have written many times about the exorbitant and probably prohibitively unsustainable cost of the democratic experiment in Nigeria and there are many reasons to be concerned for how much we pay our lawmakers on average. [Nigeria: Our Exorbitant Government]

The graph below published by the Economist is more than just an eye-opener but it is also revelatory about how political office is a parasitic drain on the national resources since politicians cannot be considered part of the economic engine of a country.

What makes this graph worthy of the most righteous indignation begging for public insurrection is not so much about what the politicians earn, but the gap in earning capacity between the citizen and the representative lawmaker.

The comparisons

Australian lawmakers earn the most at $201,200 followed by Nigeria at $189,500 and then Italy with $182,000 and the United States at $174,000 all compared to the people they represent, we find that Australian and American lawmakers earn less than 4 times the average economic activity of their countries divided by their populations (GDP per capita), Italians just about double that and Nigerian lawmakers earn 116 times that.

The World Bank, the IMF, the CIA and the University of Pennsylvania all put the GDP per capita of Nigeria at between $2,661 ranking 137^th in the world out of 180 countries, $2,720 ranking 143/187, $2,800 ranking 148/194 and $1,716 ranking 152/185 respectively.

By comparison Australia is in the top 10 thrice, Italy in the top 30 twice and then the top 35 and the United States of America 4 times in the top 10, it goes without saying that Nigeria has no business paying its legislators in what is purportedly a representative democracy these atrocious amounts of cash that bilk and milk the country without contributing anything to its economic growth.

The consequences of expensive democracies

Worse still, it creates a competition for political office where the rewards far outweigh the commensurate perspiration leading to many situations where power-grabs by every means possible warps every notion of free and fair elections, talk less of representative democracy – it is utterly bad for Nigeria apart from the fact that it is unsustainable.

Looking at the chart again, you also wonder why Sub-Saharan African nations that hog the bottom third of GDP per capita tables are the ones that take the lead by far in the discrepancies between elected and elector besides the fact that only Ghana has consistently rewarded its electorate with the will of its people, Kenya did not in the penultimate election which has the current leadership indicted for crimes against humanity and Nigeria is a travesty in everything but name.

Nigeria is awash with oil money in the wrong hands which is used in acquisitive, ostentatious, hedonistic and wanton display of power, wealth, influence and mischief, it exacerbates a pressure cooker of ethno-religious and regional tensions, none of which the leadership have had the wherewithal to grapple with or understand that the consequences as it holds together with threadbare allegiances of snouts in trough might well be dire for the 2015 election year.

Enough is just enough

In my humble opinion, this democracy is neither representative nor working if the people we choose to represent us are so far removed from the reality of the citizenry that they literally live in a parallel universe, there ought to be no reason for Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana to be democratic outliers compared to the economic activity within their regions in comparison to their people, it calls for reform and this must be urgent, radical, far-reaching and deeply examining of the culture of corruption and influence-peddling we have allowed to become the raison d'être of political life.

This is the one time when the chorus from the village to the city and from the homes to the marketplaces of the country should ring loud – Enough is just enough.

Other reading

Nigeria: Our politically immature systems

Nigeria: Percentage Allowance Legislators

Editorial: Lifting the burqa on identity and ignorance

Where the burqa belongs

The matter of the burqa though religiously sensitive needs to objectively thought about in its proper contexts. A number of European and Western countries have promulgated laws or are in the process of creating legal situations where the burqa is banned in public places.

In Islamic countries where the chastity and dignity of the woman is presumably preserved by the total cover-up with slits for the eyes, a see-through net or grille it is traditional and customary for women to be invisible as recognized individuals and personalities.

In more conservative settings, the women would have to be chaperoned by male members of their families to be seen in public and their identity is derived from who accompanies them.

Western societies have no such customs and this type of extreme modesty is rather alien to the concept of individual identity and the representation of personalities.

Where the burqa does not belong

The face is the first object of identification, communication requires eye contact and people, especially adults have the responsibility for acting as free moral agents with verifiable particulars of identification to access all sorts of services especially those to do with security, law enforcement and business transactions.

It means such open societies just do not have the means or the latitude to accommodate these alien customs because it abridges human-rights in terms of having a clear identity in the public space as it disrupts the sense of security people have by facial recognition of those within their space.

The civil liberties advocacy for the right to wear the burqa in open societies that require facial identification as a verification of identity simply holds no water wear no alternative system of identification exists to verify a covered face belongs to a particular person, it burdens such societies with impossible hurdles and impacts on the sense of equality we all have.

Whilst the preservation of right to religious observation is apparently sacrosanct, that of customs that go against the grain of easy identification cannot be so. The burqa just does not belong in free societies.

Unhealthy burqas of ministers of health

Health ministers would be expected to have the medical health of their fellow citizens as paramount with the aim to facilitate access to good, affordable and accessible healthcare to all.

For all their erudition, expertise and organizational ability, we expect that whatever they do will attract the greatest commendation of respect and praise of their service and one can dare to hope that they would avoid being embroiled in controversy.

It was bad enough that a health minister in Nigeria did not see the medical emergency of fake drugs and substandard drugs being dispensed in Nigeria’s University Teaching Hospitals suggesting only his predecessor was directly addressed and informed of the matter.

However, when somewhat progressive countries end up with health ministers in that kind of mould, a greater disservice is done to the people who deserve better than that kind of cack-handedness.

In South Africa it was the health minister in Thabo Mbeki’s presidential tenure who advocated the use of beetroot garlic and herbs for the management of HIV and AIDS that she earned the embarrassing world-stage moniker of Dr Beetroot as the medical situation in South Africa was allowed to grow into an epic emergency.

She has passed but the baton seems to have been handed to the health minister of the world’s second most populated counted and the largest democracy.

Donning the burqa of crass ignorance

Whilst health ministers are entitled to their moralities and values, they are not put in their positions to preach to the adherence of some moral code and alienate others on grounds that have no professional or medical basis.

It therefore comes as a shock beyond words when the Indian Health Minister at a HIV/AIDS conference he was attending said that “homosexuality is a disease which has come from other countries.”

It is hard enough listening to people propose that an element of human nature has a particular racial or regional progeny in their quest for a sense of cultural purity but to hear such stuff from a health minister is really beyond the pale.

There is every reason to expect this person to walk the plank before their pronouncements validate and promote the persecution of others on all grounds predicated from a false and illiterate medical perspective, one can only be filled with trepidation at what might result from this statement in a country where the matter of rights are not as sure and in others where India is supposed to serve as an example.

We need to lift the burqa on this kind of intellectual arrogance which is portends to have moral underpinnings but is stark ignorance expressed by one who should really know a lot better.

Acknowledgements

The BBC news website writes about giving powers to the New South Wales police concerning criminalising burqas by reason of the fact that it hampers the identification process in crime investigation and law enforcement. After a BBC documentary five years ago, I wrote a blog about the Unhealthy directors of Nigerian Health and yesterday, the Indian Health Minister took on the mantle of Dr Beetroot of India.

Silly Dingo hooked by Nubian money boobs

A tale so funny

This must be the subtext for a saga – Gullible from Oz – as we read earlier this week of an Internet bride scam.

A sheep farmer, Des Gregor, 56 from Australia had been involved in some Internet dating that blossomed into a virtual love affair with Natacha (picture downloaded from the millions on the Internet) – a twenty-something Liberian refugee who was in Mali. They somehow came to an arrangement where he was to visit Mali to get married to her, pocket a dowry of $86,000 and take her home.

Now this is as incredible as it gets as the press makes issue of the Internet fraud element of the story which led to him being kidnapped by the fraudsters, maltreated and imprisoned for 12 days as the culprits reversed the dowry sum into a ransom for his freedom.

It took some smart thinking on the part of the Australians to convince the kidnappers that Mr. Gregor would pick up the ransom from the Canadian embassy in Bamako which brought his freedom and living to tell the tale.

The gruesome picture of a hacked-to-bits sheep farmer who is already hacked-off by the scam does not bear scrutiny.

Ring the ding for dingo

However, let us examine the whole plot and see how many bells (Ding!) we can ring for each scam alert.

This was a twenty-something Liberian refugee living in Mali – Ding! – Considering the situation in Liberia, a refugee in Mali would probably not have ways and means or would be in a desperate situation to get out of Mali on any pretence.

He was going to get married to a lady whose name was only Natacha – Ding! – What is her family name? She might not have anyone giving her away, but she definitely would have an identity more than plain Natacha which does not look English or French, probably Russian – Ding! – The Australian authorities would have required a maiden name even though she would have been addressed as Mrs. Natacha Gregor.

Usually men pay the dowry – Ding! – If a woman or her family had such a lump sum to give away, it would not be for a lifetime of shearing sheep.

The dowry was in the sum of $86,000 – Ding! – How does a twenty-something refugee from Liberia get her hands on a sum like that to give to a man she has never met who is planning on being her husband?

You get to the airport at Bamako and your true love and beau is not there to meet you – Double Ding!! Ding Dong bell. – And he probably does not have a return ticket.

Ruled by his ding

There were enough Dings in that analysis for anyone with more brains than a sheep farmer to realise that this was looking like a humongous scam of a silly wally that would get the full ridicule treatment from yours truly.

In the end, one cannot say if it was the excitement of getting under the sack with a Nubian beauty's svelte body as his manhood exhausted itself on half-price erectile dysfunction medication or the thought of getting a new sheep shearing machine with the largesse of the dowry that compelled him to fall for this scam – my countrymen would call that a Double Whammy.

I have always attributed greed to people who fall for scams like this, now; I have to add lust to the equation.

Oh! For a title to call this blog – something Australian with a twist of black beauty zest – I’ll try – Silly Dingo hooked by Nubian money boobs. I should be working for a tabloid, this is crass, but I like it. For once, Nigerians do not seem to be involved in this deception and that is good.

Obama is one quick wit - Howard trumped

Barrack of hope delivered

I am not writing much about Barack Hussein Obama who declared that he is in the race for the Presidency of the United States yesterday. He gave a speech that would inspire anyone to hope and promise.

Whilst I am still of the opinion that he is in this race too early, I am beginning to think Hillary Clinton would have a dilemma on her hands if she takes the Democratic nomination and needs a running mate.

Methinks John Edwards might not be as fortunate to play the second fiddle on this occasion having not really done much to augment the ticket of the John Kerry partnership of 2004.

However, Mr. Obama who is stridently against the war in Iraq has suggested that all troops be withdrawn by March 2008, however, whilst another man is busy trying to secure his legacy on the sacrifice of more American lives, this might not gain traction.

Nosey parker gets bloody nose

The more amusing development comes from Down Under where Prime Minister John Howard fulminated about the troop withdrawal idea saying it would completely destablise and destroy Iraq, create chaos and a victory for the terrorists – I would not explore that further, we all know how terrorists ended up in Iraq and they wee not there when Saddam Hussein ruled with tyranny.

So, a last question is thrown at Obama about this blast from the antipodean and he calmly acknowledges the recognition from afar with as much as saying he is flattered – then went for the jugular with pin-point accuracy.

I believe we have 140 thousand troops in Iraq, Australia has 1,400 troops, he is so keen on the war, he should send 20,000 more Australians to Iraq. Touché! He is not even asking that he square the numbers.

I am beginning to like this man and well, the moral of the tale is never meddle with a smart arse young and articulate ascendant politician, you might find out that you are too old a dog to learn new political tricks – John Howard has been Prime Minister of Australia for 10 years, surely, he must have seen this coming or he is losing his touch.

Doing England badly with a cricket whitewash

A whitewash and stumped

After the first test, we could have said the final rites and concluded with ashes to ashes.

It looked evident that England was going to give up The Ashes, but to have given them up by the end of the 3^rd test out of 5 and then not found the resolve to make something to save face from the last 2 is sorry indeed.

Having won the ashes in 2005 after a good undefeated 2004 in Test matches, it is surprising that England performed so badly. Ho hum!

As winners of the Rugby World Cup in 2003, we are to defend that trophy in 2007 in Paris, and from all recent performances; we might just receive a serious drubbing.

However, the cricket should attract a post-mortem about selection, preparedness, team spirit, the management of cricket and the possibility of losing Test cricket status – in sport, we cannot continue to rollover and think of England, this went seriously wrong, it is unbearable.

For rugby, this just would not do – Come on, England – “England expects that everyman will do his duty”. That is our rallying cry; retain the trophy or face the music.

Come October, we should have another moment of glory; hopefully, this is not a pie in the sky.