More on Johannesburg

I am on my way back after a long week in Johannesburg, writing this post from the business lounge in Nairobi airport, killing time on a 5-hour transit. The course on Public Financial Management was pretty good, with an entertaining and highly iconoclastic (anti World Bank) trainer. Quite difficult subject matter. I don't understand how colleagues can work on budgetary aid and institutional capacity building without specialized knowledge of PFM. We keep repeating the mantra of 'good governance' to our partner countries, but few of us know exactly what we're talking about. It's not only about democracy and anti-corruption.

A. did indeed arrive safely in Holland, but had her driver's license stolen on Schiphol airport, which meant no rental car. Her brother, as so often, helped us out by lending her his own car for two weeks. She told me she feels much better now that she's out of the oppressive heat of our host country.

Even though Jo'burg is said by some to be the most unpleasant place in South Africa, I was still quite impressed by it. Clearly there are massive social problems (unemployment, AIDS), resulting in horrendous crime and crime rates. But they have come a long way since apartheid. I enjoyed talking to black South Africans (taxi drivers for instance) who often are amazingly multilingual, as South Africa now has 11 official languages. Soweto was surprisingly middle class in some parts, apart from the misery of the squatter camps of course. Other parts, such as Sandton and others, are simply filthy rich and very beautiful. Definitely a country to come back to.

I just finished reading a book by an Australian woman Susan MacDonald, Holy Cow, about her adventures in the spiritual supermarket that is India. I liked it a lot. Bought some other books in Sandton as well, one of them Coetzee's 'Disgrace' & a history of South Africa. In the meantime we have started shipping books back to Holland. We don't want them to end up in looters' hands, something that happened to the belongings of several expats during troubles in 2002 and 2003.