Yet another reason to get angry with Bill...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 16 March 2006 16:50, Jan Claeys wrote:
> Op do, 16-03-2006 te 13:23 +0200, schreef Alan McKinnon:
> > He's also clueless about how places like Africa work. There is no
> > connectivity, there is no support infrastructure, and there is no
> > money for software.
>
> Your description of "Africa" is a bit of an over-generalization... 
>  ;-)

Not at all. I live in a nice middle class suburb in Cape Town where I 
can have ADSL any time I want and there are more cell phone towers 
than I can shake a stick at. My son lives 40km away and to get there 
I drive past a *huge* town where the majority live in abject poverty. 
It's called Mitchell's Plain. Ever tried to get ADSL in Soweto? You 
can't. And Telskum^W Telkom have no plans to introduce it for the 
foreseeable future.

I represent maybe 8% of the population of this, the leading 
industrialized nation on the continent, closely followed by Egypt and 
Nigeria. But still, we have 30+% unemployment. My mother works in a 
plastics blow-moulding factory employing 50 people. 40 of them cannot 
afford to provide their children with any form of tertiary education 
whatsoever, a sizeable chunk of them cannot really afford school 
books for high school. A sizeable number of Western Cape teachers 
have not received any salary at all this year. A significant problem 
with high school education in this country is that there is a huge 
shortage of maths teachers - I've heard figures of the supply is 50% 
of the demand. And let's rather not talk about Zimbabwe, The DRC, or 
the Great Lakes region.

I think my statement does hold true for the majority of Africans.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five