'Welcome to Haiti:Vol. 2'

Move over, Bono. Watch and learn, Richard Gere.

Hip-hop artiste Wyclef Jean has just taken the whole 'Rockstar-With-A-Cause' idea to the next level. The former Fugee has recently filed his nomination for the presidential candidacy of the devastated island state of Haiti.

After being nearly wiped out by an earthquake last year, Haiti's debt has spiraled out of control. The story behind how it accrued almost entirely matches the debt paradigm of the African continent. It starts, as usual, with owing your friendly neighborhood European colonizers for having rained on their plundering spree. In this case, Haiti were required to pay France to--get this--buy independence from their colonisers. The French demanded compensation for 'the loss of slaves', as a result of Haiti demanding sovereignty.

Now couple this with a regime of corrupt dictators (the Duvaliars, for Haiti) and you have a international debt that reportedly once reached $ 1.8 billion. In the aftermath of the quake, the IMF and the Venezuelan government have waived Haiti's debt. While this gives the country a partially clean slate, there is still the matter of the million people who have been rendered homeless.

So, what's different about Wyclef Jean making a foray into politics? The BBC did an article on 'Stars trading glitz for power', with extensive references to Reagan and Arnie Schwarzenegger.

Well, for starters, Jean won't even have a proper electoral office to file his nomination. The Provincial Electoral Office's headquarters were destroyed in the January 12 quake, the BBC reports. Furthermore, 'one-fifth of the officials charged with supervising elections were either killed or missing', according to those reports.

Clearly, Wyclef Jean's race is very different from that of the 'Leader of the Free World.'

Jean holds a Haitian passport, but has American residency. This could throw a spanner in the works, as the Haitian electoral law requires all candidates to live in the country for at least five years, prior to the elections.

But whether he lands the gig or not, his efforts are most certainly commendable. It takes some guts to move beyond simply playing token Live Aid gigs/ recording charity Christmas singles, and actually jump headlong into the solution. This gig is just too unrewarding to be another planned-to-perfection Hollywood PR stunt.

Kanye West, I hope you're taking notes.

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In other news, the last of the American combat forces left Iraq today. However, reports say that the American air force will continue manning the country's airspace (read: increasingly carry out unwarranted surgical strikes with impunity) till 2018.

Nothing changes, just re-arranges.

T.I.A?

Diamonds are a girl's best friend. Well, a certain Ms. Naomi Campbell begs to differ. The volatile supermodel was in the dock last week, on charges of accepting 'blood diamonds' from convicted Liberian president Charles Taylor in 1997.

Predictably, the mainstream media has focused all their attention on the celebrity factors surrounding the Sierra Leon trials. The BBC, with the rest of the western media, have been in sixes and sevens to get exclusive live feeds of Campbell and actress Mia Farrow's testimonies. One wonders if the trials would have got any major coverage at all, if it didn't involve high-profile western celebrities.

Global reporting continues in its one-dimensional trajectory. News from Africa continues to be mostly about 'dead, black babies', Ian Hargreaves, ex-boss of the BBC, once said. Furthermore, these stories are almost always relegated to the tiny, cobwebbed sections that get seldom noticed in a newspaper.

Take Somalia or Sudan, for instance. They've been torn by civil strife for a better part of the last two decades. Yet, the 1.5 million internally displaced Somalis get little or no mention in the Western media.

Sure, there's the whole proximity argument--why would someone in Little Rock, Arkansas want to read about gun battles in Mogadishu? One word: Globalisation. Shell. Co. and other Western oil giants have huge vested interests in Sudan. As they strike deals with the despotic Muhammad Al-Bashr, thousands are displaced from their homes, which in the oil-rich areas. One might even argue that the whole civil war has little to do with ethnic cleansing and is more about the distribution of resources across the country. This has got to sit rather uneasily with the conscience of the average Redneck, every time he takes his gas-guzzling Hummer for a spin. But somehow, it doesn't.

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In other news, President Hugo Chavez beat me to getting on Twitter. By a whole three months.