Summary: An analysis of banking interests in Africa, Gates’ role in them, and their impact on the population
IN a later post about GMO we are going to address one aspect on this sensitive subject, but in this post we are going to explore the impact of Gates Foundation investments in Goldman Sachs (going back to this report from August 16th, as well as others, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]). Taken into consideration there ought to be a plethora of factors which we shall summarise at a later stage.
Gates’ investment in Goldman Sachs is a subject we wrote about two weeks ago following literally thousands of links Techrights posted about Goldman Sachs over the years, e.g. about government influence. “Feeding the hungry” is the sort of sound bite everyone loves to hear and Gates sings it to the public many times. It’s valuable PR, but what exactly happens on the surface? Today we won’t be addressing the GMO agenda; however, we will be addressing the role of financial interests in food. By giving money to Goldman Sachs, for example, the Gates Foundation is actually feeding the bankers who starve the hungry. These are investments that achieve the very opposite of what’s publicly stated, as we last discussed in the previous post (conflicts abound).
For a little bit of background (we put about a dozen links about it all in all), read articles like “The great hunger lottery – How banking speculation causes food crises” (it’s not just Goldman Sachs, but it’s probably the largest culprit). Warren Buffett too is investing in this whole thing. From several days ago in the news:
Buying Goldman stock will put you in good company
[...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, bought 500,000 shares in Q2.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway famously bought $5-billion in Goldman preferred shares at the bottom of the 2008 financial meltdown, and acquired warrants for another $5-billion. Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice-chairman, commented that “we felt their merits outweighed their defects.”
The UN has called an urgent meeting on rising global food prices in an attempt to head off a repeat of the 2008 crisis that sparked riots around the world.
Seven people, including two children, were killed in Mozambique this week during three days of protests triggered by a rise in the cost of bread. There has also been anger over increasing prices in Egypt, Serbia and Pakistan, where floods destroyed a fifth of the country’s crops.
Read the article titled “Goldman Sachs makes $1 billion profit on food price speculation” and then take into account other banking connections, the World Bank for example. To suggest that solutions for third-world countries will come from banks is to assume that debt can resolve/substitute hunger and that putting people under the control of international banks is truly in their interest. Banks don’t produce food and often they create long-term liabilities.
The Grameen Technology Center, formed nine years ago by a former executive at Microsoft, has deployed applications in Uganda that send text-message reminders for neo-natal patients in Ghana to take medication and tests. Through a partnership with Google and the local telecom service provider, Grameen is able to collect data through smart phones on how farmers are dealing with crop disease and then serve up instructions from the cell phones on how farmers can keep their crops from getting infected.
They are essentially enabling some businesses in the West. Maybe it’s good, maybe that’s bad, maybe it’s a bit of both. It’s up for the local population to make informed choices rather than foreigners deciding for these nations what’s good for them.
China finds it rather offensive on the face of it. The financial press in the West shows how the world’s wealthiest are suddenly relabeled “do-gooders” (following the money and using PR in the Financial Times), but such expansionism is frowned upon by China. They won’t let Buffett and Gates play a role as “world’s parents” and to be fair, China too is increasingly taking control and colonising poor nations, including some in Africa. Feeding the hungry is not a priority, it’s a convenient excuse for getting in while having some consent from the exploited, occupied population (use of the local press for propaganda is crucial here too).
We are at risk of going off topic here, but one of the most fascinating things in Africa is the use of patents against it by the developed world (maybe about 10% of the world’s population, depending where the line gets drawn). This helps show how notions which are taken for granted in the West are actually extremely harmful to the large majority of the world’s people. Europe and the US each account only for about 5% of the world’s people and assuming democracy amongst all living humans, there is magnanimous, abject, unjust, powerful, and hostile relationship that needs to be accounted for. It’s a moral issue. █
Summary: Professor Simon Chapman explains why Gates does a disservice to the population along with Carlos Slim
IT IS A COMMONLY-KNOWN fact that the Gates Foundation has come under fire on numerous occasions for harming the very same people it purports to be helping. Basically, Gates tends to invest in the companies that cause harm to people whom he claims to care about. When the issue are raised, the foundation does nothing about it, it doesn’t even review its portfolio (for-profit but exempted from tax).
“When the issue are raised, the foundation does nothing about it, it doesn’t even review its portfolio (for-profit but exempted from tax).”A few month ago we gave one such example from Nigeria. Polio conflict exists there because Gates invests in companies which increase the chances of polio in Nigerian children. At the same time he invests in and promotes drugs or vaccinations that battle against polio (there was even an article about it some days ago). Why play for both sides?
Likewise, several months ago Gates got exposed for his support of Big Tobacco [1, 2] (all while pretending to work on tobacco prevention). It’s rather surreal, is it not? But that’s just what happened.
Following the tobacco scandal which the foundation escaped as soon it blew over, PR problems are happening again:
Another faux pas for the Gates Foundation on tobacco issues
This is the second faux pas for the Gates Foundation on tobacco issues this year. Are the programme officers on tobacco asleep at the wheel? Or is Tachi?
This is not gutter journalism. This comment was published in The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal.
Here is the full text (subscription required) and from the article we have:
Gates’ decision just 2 months later to partner with Slim is plainly inconsistent. He apparently did not know of McDougall’s appointment when he funded the IDRC. He might well not have known about Slim’s tobacco connections when he joined with him in the Latam project. He must know now.
For those without access to the journal, here are news articles about it:
An Australian academic and anti-tobacco campaigner has called out Bill Gates for his “plainly inconsistent” philanthropic partnership with another of the world’s richest men, who has links to a tobacco company.
Writing in the influential medical journal The Lancet, Professor Simon Chapman points to Mr Gates’ move in April to cancel a grant awarded to a Canada-based research group on discovery of its link to Imperial Tobacco Canada.
Prof Chapman said the Microsoft founder should similarly rethink his involvement in the “Latam health project”, a partnership announced in June in which Gates and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim will each provide $US50 million ($A56.8 million) for child health initiatives.
In the article that had been published in the medical journal, The Lancet, Professor Simon Chapman has stated that Gates’ plan upon partnering with one of the world’s wealthy men, who has strong links with a tobacco firm, was clearly contradictory.
He wrote that Bill Gates’ move in the month of April to call off a grant that had been awarded to a research group based in Canada, which was discovered by him that it had links with a tobacco firm, was incoherent with the announcement that he made in June to offer funds in cooperation, amounting $US50 million for vaccination project with Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helú.
An Australian academic and anti-tobacco campaigner has challenged US billionaire and philanthropist, Bill Gates’ commitment to his tobacco control projects.
In an article published in the medical journal, The Lancet, Professor Simon Chapman says Gates’ decision to partner with one of the world’s richest men, who has links to a tobacco company is “plainly inconsistent” with his stand on funding tobacco-control projects.
Professor Chapman is a Director of Research at the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.
This probably won’t be the last time we hear about this controversy. █
Isn’t it nerve-wracking that Microsoft has the nerve to lift FreeType (which it threatens) and use it in Microsoft Office?
There’s more of this “open” Microsoft PR busting in Slashdot (with discussion). The summary says: “Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software ‘clean room implementation’ of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs.”
“People ought to remember that Microsoft was created by parasites who took other people’s “free labour” (hard work) and used that to create copies, often illegally.”So here we have another lesson in what “Open Source” means to Microsoft. It means “free labour” to harvest, to exploit, and to then use for PR purposes (as in “we love open source”). Microsoft has a long history like that, dating back even to early versions of Windows which took a BSD-licensed TCP/IP stack.
People ought to remember that Microsoft was created by parasites who took other people’s “free labour” (hard work) and used that to create copies, often illegally. Bill Gates famously said: “I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
Bill Gates is still a parasite, but he has money to employ PR agents who spin it all as “charity”. Even while he makes money investing in Monsanto (which will earn money at the expense of impoverished African people) Gates pretends to help poor Africans. We are very pleased that Gates has received the blinding lights of truth shining into his eyes, revealing to the world his true agenda in Africa [1, 2] (along with Rockefeller). This PR disaster keeps spreading.
This is unfortunate. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has certainly been hard at work trying to improve healthcare around the world, but the latest news is that the Foundation has decided to invest in Monsanto, a company famous for widely abusing intellectual property laws to make people a lot less healthy, to increase the cost of some key foods important to feeding the hungry and to generally scare researchers from sharing important information with one another, for fear that it will be patented and locked up.
Glyn Moody’s response to this (“Gates Foundation Invests in Monsanto”) was: “intellectual monopolists made for each other”
It’s all about artificial scarcity (patents) and exploitation even when it’s called “philanthropy”. The latest Gates PR (Khan Academy) apparently comes from author of “The Silicon Boys”, a book that covers Bill Gates. Watch how the publicists try to spin Gates as a lover of sharing. Gates is just the queen of bees, laying all the eggs and enjoying the labour of “workers”. █
Summary: Bill Gates turns out to be hurting the African population in yet another way (while pretending to help), this time by advancing multinationals’ food monopolies over there
Both will profit at expense of small-scale African farmers
Farmers and civil society organizations around the world are outraged by the recent discovery of further connections between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and agribusiness titan Monsanto. Last week, a financial website published the Gates Foundation’s investment portfolio, including 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock with an estimated worth of $23.1 million purchased in the second quarter of 2010 (see the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission). This marks a substantial increase from its previous holdings, valued at just over $360,000 (see the Foundation’s 2008 990 Form).
“The Foundation’s direct investment in Monsanto is problematic on two primary levels,” said Dr. Phil Bereano, University of Washington Professor Emeritus and recognized expert on genetic engineering. “First, Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well-being of small farmers around the world, as well as an appalling environmental track record. The strong connections to Monsanto cast serious doubt on the Foundation’s heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa and purported goal of alleviating poverty and hunger among small-scale farmers. Second, this investment represents an enormous conflict of interests.”
Monsanto has already negatively impacted agriculture in African countries. For example, in South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. According to Mariam Mayet, environmental attorney and director of the Africa Centre for Biosafety in Johannesburg, some farmers suffered up to an 80% crop failure. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the faulty product, it gave nothing to the small-scale farmers to whom it had handed out free sachets of seeds. “When the economic power of Gates is coupled with the irresponsibility of Monsanto, the outlook for African smallholders is not very promising,” said Mayet. Monsanto’s aggressive patenting practices have also monopolized control over seed in ways that deny farmers control over their own harvest, going so far as to sue—and bankrupt—farmers for “patent infringement.”
[...]
As we noted last week, the Gates Foundation is harming Africans not just with Monsanto but also with banking institutions it works with (to increase debt like Elliott Associates does). “Gates Foundation [...] added the Goldman Sachs Group and Monsanto to its portfolio,” says IP Watch, repeating what we covered a week ago and adding:
According to civil society organisations, the addition of Monsanto into the Gates Foundation’s portfolio also brings concern about Monsanto’s patenting practices and monopoly over seeds. Civil society is worried that Gates’ interest in Monsanto will worsen the conditions of small farmers in developing countries, and might represent a conflict of interest, according to the Community Alliance for Global Justice.
The Gates Foundation is used to conflicts of interest. In many other areas of operation (e.g. polio [1, 2] and smoking/tobacco [1, 2]) there are conflicts of interest where Gates invests in the very same things he pretends to battle against. Now is a good opportunity to watch the following interview which explains this rather well. █
Summary: The role of the Gates Foundation in Africa is explored more properly by investigative journalists who explain why such intervention from the West is usually self serving
THIS is today’s last post about the Gates Foundation. It is also the longest.
Before we get started, everyone is encouraged to read the good new article from The Guardian:
Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
[...]
The way Gates and his elite staff have chosen to try to do so is by running their charity as a kind of business. Edwards calls this approach – increasingly popular at private foundations funded by business-people – philanthrocapitalism; others call it “venture philanthropy”. Steiner explains: “Sitting here in Seattle, we’re not going to solve Africa’s problems. Africans are going to solve Africa’s problems. We’ve got to find the Africans.” Often, this means the foundation mounting competitions for grant applications, and giving money to the winners, which usually means the most “pioneering” (Steiner’s word) and those that promise to fulfil a need not met by other charities.
Foundation staff describe this process, and indeed all their work, in business-school language: achieving “leverage”, building the foundation “brand”, serving “markets” and “customers”. Or they use the language of management consultancy and computing: “Bill is about numbers,” says Steiner. “He wants to see the data. He values data more than ideology.”
Gates’ influence in Africa is a subject we dissected in posts that include:
Gates Keeperscommends the author for what it names “best Gates Foundation coverage of the year”:
Who says long form journalism is dead? In this brilliant article that would never be published by an American newspaper, the British political journalist Andy Beckett takes on the Gates Foundation. This article is a frontrunner for Gates Keepers’ best Foundation coverage of the year award.
What’s more, the report from The Guardian has inspired others to comment in Ratio Magazine. To quote some portions from “Less Charity, Mr Microsoft”:
He is the ultimate geek done good: Bill Gates. Chairman of Microsoft, Master of the Universe, one of the richest men in the world, with a personal wealth of an estimated USD60bn.
[...]
And then, I guess, Bill got bored. Or maybe just wanted to try out world domination another way – by being nice. In 2006, he announced that he would only work part-time at Microsoft, and full time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. By 2007, he and his wife had given an estimated USD27bn to charity. Like his Microsoft success, Bill Gates’ charitable activities are XXXL, too. By the end of last year, the charity had an endowment of USD33.5bn, and Warren Buffet as a trustee together with Bill and Melinda Gates. The foundation’s status as a charitable organisation requires it to donate at least 5% of its assets every year, i.e. at least around USD1.5n. Just to put this in perspective: The USD800m that the foundation spends under its health programme are roughly equivalent to the entire budget of the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO).
So, given that there’s much poverty, surely bigger is better? The Guardian recently published an interesting analysis titled ‘Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ and this was one of the questions that the author pursued. The foundation has quickly become ubiquitous, thanks to both its generous finances and its star power: ‘’Every conference I go to, they’re there. Every study that comes out, they’re part of. They have the ear of any [national] leadership they want to speak to. Politicians attach themselves to Gates to get PR. Everyone loves to have a meeting with Gates. No institution would refuse,” the author cites a charity professional.
[...]
I was mulling this ‘venture philanthropy’ with the niggling feeling that I had overlooked something. Eventually, I realized what it was: That Bill Gates, a man clearly so talented in doing business, in earning money, decides that The Poor must be helped through charity.
[...]
If the Gates Foundation prides itself on doing things a different way, it still does not challenge the aid industry as such: it gives grants to intermediary foundation, many of whom represent the business-as-usual of the aid industry and the illusion of the fixability of single issues. And charity is limited, as the article points out: ‘For all the charity’s resources and connections, for all the attendant risks of over-confidence and over-mightiness, on the ground in Africa or Asia the foundation’s immense-sounding grants are a miniscule fraction of what is required to create a fairer world.’ In contrast, a successful business has no such limit. Microsoft is everywhere. It pays taxes for governments to fund their own healthcare system. Employs people so that they can buy their own mediation. Really now, Bill – I had expected more!
Here is another new example of public speaking from the Gates Foundation, this time at the Chamber. This whole foundation thing has grown into some kind of a movement.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private philanthropy fund, sold off almost all of its pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health-care investments in the quarter ended June 30, according to a regulatory filing published Friday.
The Seattle-based charity endowment, set up by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and his wife, sold its total holding of 2.5 million shares in health-care giant Johnson & Johnson in the quarter, according to the filing.
According to this piece, the Gates Foundation unloaded basically all of its pharma and biotech stock holdings during the second quarter. Merck/Schering-Plough, J&J, Lilly, through Vertex and all the way to InterMune, Allos, and Auxilium – they held millions of shares of these, and it’s all gone.
Was the public backlash playing a role here? That the Gates Foundation was investing (for profit) in the very same interests Gates was promoting through politicians? Let’s turn our attention to politics for a moment. We are well aware of financial-based political influence games that are played by Gates; the Boston press had this to publish last month: “On national standards, the Gates Foundation gets what it pays for”
Cue the surrogates. First, they got a memorandum from Mike Cohen actively supporting the national standards. Two problems with the source: (1) Gates gives Achieve millions of dollars, so anything Achieve says on the topic should come with a truckload of salt, and (2) Achieve’s Board now includes none other than Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
The Commish and the Secretary are also leaning on the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE). I like MBAE (and especially admire Linda Noonan, their executive director). In theory, if MBAE does a comparison of MA’s to the national standards on their own, that’s great. Welcome to the debate. But the MBAE analysis is directly funded by the Gates Foundation and the analysis is to be done by West Ed in San Francisco (and Woburn). Yup, Gates funds West Ed, too. An “objective,” “independent” analysis? Then the history of MBAE itself brings conflicts of interest. MBAE was co-founded by Secretary Reville; their former Board chair is Maura Banta, currently chair of the state’s Board of Ed (and someone who actively supported the inclusion of softer “how-to-skills” in our standards and assessments and now the adoption of weaker national standards). This is akin to being judge and jury in its own case.
I have no problem with Gates funding whatever they want. But the money merry-go-round gets dizzying (see here) when you think about the conflicts. No amount of salt is going to make this taste like cotton candy.
IBBLE VALLEY MP Nigel Evans and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons welcomed chairman of Microsoft Bill Gates.
It is dangerous when any individual is deciding for the world without ever being elected (and still with personal agendas and investments). The Taipei Times is another sceptic:
Last May, Gates, Soros, Warren Buffett and David Rockefeller Jr, Rockefeller’s great-grandson, held a long private meeting in New York, not far from the UN, along with an assortment of media potentates such as Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Bloomberg. It was reported that Gates had been involved in summoning them all together and that the “Good Club,” as it supposedly called itself, discussed the world’s economic, environmental and health problems, the dangers of over-population and how rich people could better help poor people.
The Sunday Times quoted an unnamed participant at the meeting, who said that without anything “as crude as a vote” the gathering had agreed that the world’s problems “need big-brain answers … independent of government.”
Gates is typically finding politicians to advance his goals. Nigeria's Jonathan is a good example from this year (there are still new articles coming out of there for PR purposes, seemingly placements with emotional, touching photos). We have already given people like Colin Powell as examples and quite recently — as recently as a month back — we gave Harper as another example (it is still in the news). Going further back there are many other famous/powerful public figures whom Gates uses to endorse his agenda. One of them is Clinton. Bill and Blll (Clinton) are still collaborating on a push originally initiated by Gates. There was a lot of coverage about it last month. When not focusing on the wedding of Chelsea Clinton, the press wrote extensively about this tag-team act [1, 2, 3, 4].
Bill Clinton and Bill Gates urged AIDS activists on Monday to squeeze value out of every cent of funds to fight HIV, saying they could not expect donors to give more in hard times unless it was carefully spent.
Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 (for contribution in discovering HIV), has a criticism of the Gates Foundation. Francoise Barré-Sinoussi said in last month’s interview:
Very often their programme is too much directed by the Gates foundation and they don’t consider enough the local situation.
Basically, whenever Gates wants something done, then he charms someone in politics too. Then he ensures that only his own venture gets to decide what routes to explore.
Not only do we have to listen to Bill Gates, of all people, give a speech at the start of the International AIDS Conference, but we have to put up with speech previews. Double coverage. The Gates Foundation PR people are milking this one for all it is worth.
So are the Gates Foundation grants in HIV prevention efficient? Don’t expect to hear from Bill on this one. There is almost nothing about prevention in this preview.
This takes the heat off Tachi.
There is nothing wrong with fighting AIDS, but the problem is that Gates monopolises research in this area and has investments in the companies which profit from AIDS. It’s no coincidence that even AIDS organisation managers are willing to go on the record criticising Gates, whose methods in fighting AIDS now include adult circumcision [1, 2], adding to criticisms over abortion, which is another controversial subject. █
“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”
Homeland Security Decides If It Just Keeps Interchanging Counterfeiting With Copyright Infringement, Perhaps No One Will Notice
We already wrote about the recent Congressional committee hearings on intellectual property enforcement, where IP Czar Victoria Espinel blamed China. However, there were other speakers there as well, and perhaps the most interesting was from John Morton, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) division — the group that recently started working for Disney and seized a bunch of domains using questionable legal theories. We’re still trying to figure out what the hell immigration and customs enforcement has to do with internet file sharing, and here was a chance to set the record straight.
Wikiedpedia defines “counterfeit” as “an imitation, usually one that is made with the intent of fraudulently passing it off as genuine.”
Every year, in May, we report on the latest release of the BSA’s totally bogus stats about “worldwide software piracy.” The stats are so laughable that even the firm that put them together for the BSA, IDC has claimed that the BSA is being misleading with the stats. In years past, we’ve done a detailed analysis of how the BSA’s stats are misleading, but one bit of news that came out last year that was even more interesting is that in the majority of countries listed in the report, IDC does no actual surveys. Instead, it just makes up the numbers.
Glyn Moody points us to an article looking at the report’s coverage of South Africa, and notes not only did IDC/BSA not survey anyone in South Africa, they’re using these totally made up numbers to push for new copyright laws. As for how ridiculous the numbers are, well, here’s the quick explanation:
How was the 35 percent rate arrived at? It’s a guess, or rather, a combination of guesses combined with some market data and presented as a final authoritative percentage.
IDC and BSA ought to be disgraced in more media outlets. They not only lie but they also know that they are lying. But they merely serve their clients in this case. Microsoft is one of those clients or sponsors. █
So, if that is the case, then how come the Companies and Intellectual Properties Registration Office (CIPRO) demands that visitors use Internet Explorer when visiting the site? The site has this warning (in red):
“Customers must use Internet Explorer for any CIPRO transaction. To download it, click here.”
Why exactly users need Internet Explorer is not entirely clear because the site appears to still work even if you’re using another browser. There may well be sections of the site that don’t work unless you use Internet Explorer but they’re not immediately obvious.
Sadly, in Korea this is the reality in many government Web sites, but they are said to be changing this at the moment. In Korea, only old people may remember an Internet that works all right without Internet Explorer. CIPRO too should fix this as soon as possible. It helps hinder South Africa’s migration to GNU/Linux and/or Free software (i.e. independence) — a migration that Microsoft still actively derails. South Africa is up against more than just a simple company here. █
Summary: Schools continue to be dominated by Windows not just because of Microsoft but also because of close partners of Microsoft
The Microsoft-funded Blackboard, which threatens competitors using software patents (just like Microsoft), implicitly/metaphorically says “No Linux for Online Education,” according to this new post.
In addition to being a Linux Advocate and working 40+ hours a week I am also a full time student. Due to schedule constraints I often take classes online at Governors State University. To manage their online classes GSU uses a system called Blackboard. If you’ve stopped by my blog here before you probably know that I run various forms of Linux on all of my personal computers. In addition to this I am almost always using a bleeding edge browser build. It was the bleeding edge part that made me assume when I saw this message:
That is just didn’t like the latest Firefox I had installed. For an entire trimester I just clicked past this Window (the website itself worked perfectly fine in my bleeding edge Firefox).
This hardly surprises us given what we saw in recent years. Right now Blackboard follows the Microsoft guidebook and pretends to be "open". The above proves it to be anything but open. Schools are often being locked in by Microsoft thanks to this juvenile programming from Blackboard. Coincidence, design choice, laziness, or malicious intent? Wikipedia has a “Controversy” section in the article on “Blackboard Learning System”, and for good reasons.
In 2007, a scandal broke in the world of technology about 11000 laptop computers that were meant to be supplied to Nigerian schools. The original deal was made with software company Mandriva. and their Mandriva Linux distribution was meant to run those computers. Somewhere along the line, the Mandriva CEO at the time alleged that Microsoft through its agent had bribed Nigerian government officials to install Windows on those computers rather than Mandriva Linux.
[...]
What irked me was what he told me. When the computers were brought back in 2007, the people who brought them just came, dumped them and they have not been seen since. This attitude actually makes TSC’s initial decision to dump Mandriva in favour of Windows the correct one, in a manner of speaking. The boys in Ogbia have been exposed to Windows, but not to Linux, and without some form of training, those computers were useless. Gift, the young man in question, has been thirsting to use his gadget for three years, and had no clue until I walked into his classroom in 2010!
This brings into question the use of the computers being brought by the Lagos state government for e-learning. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Linux is a superior platform to Windows in every way, and from the MOST important view point in our environment, cost, there is no better Operating System.
