Zambian Withcraft · 1:09pm Feb 16th, 2021
Reading a book about how vulture funds work, there's this really brilliant bit about how third world debt is exploited using Zambia as a case study. Zambia has a $30 million debt to Romania, Romania sells the right to collect on that for $4 million to a former World Bank employee (who goes by Goldfinger), the World Bank employee gets the Zambian president to agree to it by giving him a $1 million dollar cut of it directly.
But then:
Zambia's finance minister could have put a halt to this game, but he had disappeared. Literally. The minister was employing witchcraft to make himself invisible. Minister Kalumba had good reason to vanish: $30 million was missing from government bank accounts. In the end, Kalumba was discovered hiding in a tree, believing himself invisible. However, the cops had outsmarted the minister: The Zambian police defeated his cloaking charm by removing their underpants.
One of the problems of studying non-fiction to inspire your fiction is how much stuff like this I just could not get away with.
Adjectives fail me.
Regardless: thanks for the blog post, it's fascinating!
If nothing else, news stories from Africa will never fail to astonish me at how ridiculous they can get.
...Uh. Huh. Well then! Certainly interesting, though; thanks for sharing the information.
This is the part that gets me, that there's a finance bro so unsubtle as to liken themselves to a Bond villain. At least they're admitting it now?
That's a depressing story right there.
"The universe is not only weirder than we suppose, it's weirder than we can suppose." -- J.B.S. Haldane
Yeah... magic and finance don't mix well:
i.ibb.co/5MWstnV/10tril.jpg
Just because the Chiremba rocks balance, doesn't mean your budget will. They should have tried the underpants trick.
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African newspapers had a load of fun writing headlines for their overseas news sections on Jan 7. They finally got to be the ones reporting too bizarre to be true news.
The big problem with fiction is that it has to make sense.
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For more in the world of African financial magic, Equatorial Guinea provides a rather horrifying example. Its dictator, Francisco Macías Nguema, was a practitioner of witchcraft and took hallucinogenic drugs regularly.
But more on topic, when the energy crisis of 1973 hit, he had a brilliant solution. He would make the power plants in the capital run using his "magic powers" and banned using industrial lubricants. The power plants exploded. The country's finances were a complete trainwreck from top to bottom, with no plans for development, and nor any kind of accounting for government funds. He had immigrant workers who demanded higher wages killed or expelled. This economic meltdown was not helped at all when he had the governor of the Central Bank killed and then moved what remained of the National treasury into his house.
It's completely insane.
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...and some people think history is boring!
Swaziland does not allow witches to fly higher than 150m on brooms, due to airspace law.
https://www.google.co.za/amp/s/www.timeslive.co.za/amp/news/africa/2013-05-13-broomstick-flying-witches-to-be-brought-down-in-swaziland/
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Well if you think those are fun you can always look for news starting with "Florida Man"...
Awesome.
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Those people were failed by the schooling system, which leaves out all the juicy bits for "think of the children" reasons. Same with the way schools teach Shakespeare; the Bard literally invented pandering to the lowest common denominator when he realized that there's a lot of room between being wealthy and having no money at all.
And if I get started on the Song of Songs I might have to be stopped with a shotgun.