The Eye in Brighton

Forever young: Nigerian football’s age-old problem

Nwankwo Kanu’s official age is 33 but his real age is 42. Obafemi Martins is not 25 but 32. Jay-Jay Okocha was 10 years older than his “official” age throughout his career. And Taribo West, whose playing career ended only two years ago, is in his late fifties. Who says so? A stream of bloggers on some of Nigeria’s most popular websites, in response to comments made after the country’s timid effort in last month’s Africa Cup of Nations.

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Suspicions about true ages of some Nigerian footballers date back 20 years. Fifa banned Nigeria from all international fixtures for two years after finding that the birth dates of three of their players in the 1988 Olympics were different from ones used by the same players in previous tournaments.

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Nigeria have a rich tradition of seemingly promising youngsters who mysteriously fail to fulfil their potential. Phillip Osondu was the best player at the 1987 Under-17 World Cup, after which he was snapped up by Anderlecht, only to drift out of the game and into janitorial work after questions were raised about his real age.

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A trawl through the blogosphere makes for intriguing reading. “A friend of mine who once played in the Nigerian league told me his real age was 34 but his football age was 21,” wrote Onmonya. “You can walk into any immigration office in Nigeria today, forge documents at the nearby business centre, change your name, place of birth, date of birth, pay 7,000-10,000 naira instead of the official price of about 5,500 for an international passport and within hours you have completed the whole process.” A new passport, a new person – and if you are a footballer, a younger one.

A former employee of the British embassy in Nigeria told Observer Sport that when visa applicants complained to him about having their applications rejected, he would reply: “Well don’t talk to me about it, I’m dead.” He would respond to their looks of puzzlement by pointing to the wall behind him, on which hung his death certificate, purchased for a small fee from a Lagos supplier. Fifa reckon they have finally come up with a foolproof way of determining real age. Ahead of last year’s Under-17 World Cup in, as it happened, Nigeria, the governing body announced that players would be subjected to wrist scans using magnetic resonance imaging, and this would determine their true age.

That led some countries to undertake precautionary scans beforehand. The results were never announced, but Nigeria suddenly discarded 15 squad members, while Gambia omitted 11 of the 18 who had helped them to victory in the African Under-17 championship a few months earlier. Reports claim that retrospective analyses of the previous three Under-17 World Cups showed more than a third of all players were too old.

[Emphasis added]

Nap ‘boosts’ brain learning power

A nap during the day doesn’t just beat tiredness, but actually improves the brain’s ability to absorb new information, claim US scientists.

Volunteers who slept for 90 minutes during the day did better at cognitive tests than those who were kept awake.

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The latest study, from the University of California at Berkeley, suggests that the brain may need sleep to process short-term memories, creating “space” for new facts to be learned.

In their experiment, 39 healthy adults were given a hard learning task in the morning - with broadly similar results, before half of them were sent for their siesta.

When the tests were repeated, the nappers outperformed those who had carried on without sleep.

Checks on brain electrical activity suggested that this process might be happening in a sleep phase between deep sleep, and dreaming sleep, called stage 2 non-rapid eye movement sleep, when fact-based memories are moved from “temporary storage” in the brain’s hippocampus to another area called the pre-frontal cortex.

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However, Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, the director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre, said that there was no clear evidence that daytime napping offered a distinct advantage over sleeping just once over 24 hours.

“The sleep-wake cycle is not as rigid as we might think - we have the capability to sleep in different ways.”

He said that while the brain effect reported in the study might be spotted in a laboratory setting, the picture became more clouded in the “real world”.

“The size of these effects are much more difficult to assess - if I have to learn something, for example, it’s easier to do this when I’m feeling awake and alert than when I’m sleepy.”

The Hitchens brothers: Anatomy of a row

On a book tour in Los Angeles, Christopher [Hitchens] agrees to read the review [of his work written by his brother] by email and then flatly rejects the idea that he is, as he put it, a “repressed seeker”. Prefacing his response to his brother’s review with faint praise - “a quite stirring and eloquent piece” - Christopher says: “The sickly idea that this interest is a disguised cry for help… only demonstrates the insecurity and the bad faith of the godly.” The elder brother then adds: “Though I slightly dislike to say this, [Peter] offers himself as yet another example of how the religious mentality forces honest and reasonable people to say dishonest and irrational things.”

This exchange is merely the most recent of a long line of clashes between two brothers who make up a unique phenomenon in the world of journalism. Normally, they tend to pass each other by, partly because they operate on different sides of the Atlantic, with Christopher based in Washington. ” Quite a lot of people who read Christopher don’t know that I exist; and quite a lot of people who read me don’t know he exists,” Peter says. “We live in different worlds.”

Once, however, they were something close to brothers in arms. They grew up in boarding schools around England and Scotland, constantly on the move thanks to their father’s postings as an officer in the Navy. In their early teens Christopher led Peter into an interest in radical politics, and both spent their university years (Christopher at Oxford, Peter at York) fighting for the International Socialists, something of a minority within a minority: a Trotskyist faction.

As well as fellow Trots, they both became journalists (and later polemicists), with Christopher doing a stint at the New Statesman with friend Martin Amis, and Peter joining the Daily Express as what he describes as “the world’s worst general reporter”. At one point, Christopher went to write leaders for the Express, where the brothers were occasionally mistaken for one another.

But Christopher soon moved to America to cultivate his status as the quintessential Englishman abroad, writing prolifically for a wide range of publications including left wing journal The Nation, and gradually beginning a side-career of controversial television appearances. As an opponent of the previous Gulf War, he shocked viewers by challenging right-wing actor Charlton Heston to name the countries surrounding Iraq (Heston could not) before telling him to “keep your toupee on”.

Mike Marqusee: Why I became British

It’s been a curious exercise. I’ve spent a good deal of my nearly 40 years here as a leftwing activist. Though never allowed to vote, I’ve taken part in numerous election campaigns. First and last I’m an internationalist. I wrote a book called Anyone But England (its title was my answer to the question, “Who do you support in test cricket?”) So becoming British was for me a process laden with irony and the odd embarrassment.

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The [“Life in the UK”] test was introduced at the end of 2005 as part of New Labour’s drive to cement “social cohesion” and promote national identity. In reality, like other elements in the citizenship process, it functions primarily as a deterrent, a winnowing-out device: one in three fail. It measures nothing more than the ability to study a text and answer questions on it. Certainly not familiarity with British daily life. There are no questions about sport, music, TV, shopping or food. Nor should there be. In the end the government is trying to test something that can’t be tested.

Having passed, I was confronted with the 14-page application form, with a number of questions pertaining to my “good character”. Applicants are asked politely to “tell us if you have ever had any involvement in terrorism” with the additional warning: “If you do not regard something as an act of terrorism but others do or might, you must mention it when making your application.” Which others? The FBI? The Israel lobby? Fox News?

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Once I had organised my tax documents and filled in the form, I paid a visit to Hackney council’s Nationality Checking Service, where for a £50 fee a diligent young woman double-checked my calculations, certified my documents, ensured my handwriting was legible and dealt with a gnawing concern: I couldn’t remember exactly when I’d been granted indefinite leave to remain. She phoned a Home Office official on a direct line and got a quick, plain, reassuring answer. God knows how long it would have taken me to do the same. An efficient service cheerfully delivered – though they do have to collect the Home Office’s exorbitant £720 application fee.

In due course I received a letter from the Border Agency informing me that my application had been approved and inviting me to attend the mandatory ceremony at my local town hall. As I read the letter I felt a warm wave of relief. I hadn’t been turned away at the gates of my own home. Relief, though, was followed by mounting anxiety about the ceremony.

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The ceremony is another New Labour innovation intended to strengthen national identity. But in seeking to inject some ideological content into the legal proceedings, the government enters murky waters. At the ceremony each new citizen is required individually to swear or affirm to “bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law”. My dread at this prospect wasn’t much allayed by the fact that after the royalist pledge the new citizens as a group declare their commitment to respect Britain’s “rights and freedoms” and “uphold its democratic values”.

My problem was that these rights, freedoms and democratic values stand in stark contradiction to the preceding royalist pledge. I’ve always been a committed republican. Some of that stems from my American background, but much from the rich tradition of republicanism in Britain: Milton and Rainsborough, Paine, Blake and Shelley, John Maclean and Hugh MacDiarmid, Sylvia Pankhurst and John Lennon. These are my British heroes, and all would have found the royalist pledge unsayable.

As an atheist I am allowed to affirm, without having to swear by a god I don’t believe in. As a republican I should be allowed to demonstrate my commitment to this country without having to pledge loyalty to a monarchy I don’t believe in.

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In the course of becoming British, I’ve been asked to prove things and say things that those born here are never asked to prove or say. I’ve been forced to define myself in ways that I was not comfortable with. I don’t and won’t ever feel like an “Englishman”, though I am certainly a Londoner. In this case, the local identity is more capacious, diverse and intimate – something that a citizenship process tied to an official national identity can never provide.

Still I felt a surprisingly warm glow as I ventured out of the town hall into the gloomy mesh of people, cars and buses. A personal reality had been given official and public recognition. I felt embraced and protected. What remains now is to register to vote, at last, in a general election (the 10th since I’ve been here) and get my new passport. At least when we’re next in an airport, my partner and I will be able to queue together.

Unequal Britain:
richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest

A detailed and startling analysis of how unequal Britain has become offers a snapshot of an increasingly divided nation where the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society.

Gordon Brown described the paper, published today, as “sobering”, saying: “The report illustrates starkly that despite a levelling-off of inequality in the last decade we still have much further to go.”

The report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, scrutinises the degree to which the country has become more unequal over the past 30 years. Much of it will make uncomfortable reading for the Labour government, although the paper indicates that considerable responsibility lies with the Tories, who presided over the dramatic divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Researchers analyse inequality according to a number of measures; one indicates that by 2007-8 Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality since soon after the second world war.

The new findings show that the household wealth of the top 10% of the population stands at £853,000 and more – over 100 times higher than the wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below (a sum including cars and other possessions).

When the highest-paid workers, such as bankers and chief executives, are put into the equation, the division in wealth is even more stark, with individuals in the top 1% of the population each possessing total household wealth of £2.6m or more.

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The Hills report…found that:

• Divisions between social groups are no longer as significant as the inequalities between individuals from the same social group; inequality growth of the last 40 years is mostly attributable to gaps within groups rather than between them.

• White British pupils with GCSE results around or below the national median are less likely to go on to higher education than those from minority ethnic groups. Pakistani, Black African and Black Caribbean boys have results at the age of 16 well below the median in England.

• Compared with a white British Christian man with similar qualifications, age and occupation, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim men and Black African Christian men have an income that is 13-21% lower. Nearly half of Bangladeshi and Pakistani households are in poverty.

• Girls have better educational outcomes than boys at school and are more likely to enter higher education and achieve good degrees, but women’s median hourly pay is 21% less than men’s.

The significance of where you live is another theme. The panel says the government is a “very long way” from fulfilling its vision, set out in 2001, that “within 10 to 20 years no one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live”. The paper notes “profound and startling differences” between areas. Median hourly wages in the most deprived 10th of areas are 40% lower than in the least deprived.

Cameron’s freebie to apartheid South Africa

David Cameron accepted an all-expenses paid trip to apartheid South Africa while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, an updated biography of the Tory leader reveals today.

The trip by Mr Cameron in 1989, when he was a rising star of the Conservative Research Department, was a chance for him to “see for himself” and was funded by a firm that lobbied against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime.

Critics described it as a “sanctions-busting jolly” that raised questions about the character of the man who, after a week when the Government’s credibility on the economy hit a new low, is now on course to be prime minister in a little more than a year’s time.

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He met union leaders and black opposition politicians, including the head of the left-wing Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) during the trip, a spokesman said. The trip was organised and funded by Strategy Network International (SNI), created in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on South Africa.

Yet when asked by the authors if Mr Cameron wrote a memo or had to report back to the office about his trip, Alistair Cooke – in 1989 his boss at Central Office – said it was “simply a jolly”, adding: “It was all terribly relaxed, just a little treat, a perk of the job. The Botha regime was attempting to make itself look less horrible, but I don’t regard it as having been of the faintest political consequence.”

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A spokeswoman for Mr Cameron said: “Yes, he did go to South Africa. He met with anti-apartheid campaigners, he met opposition politicians when he was out there, including Zeth Mothopeng, the head of the PAC.

“It was a fact-finding mission that happened 20 years ago. He met union leaders and was shown around mines. The position of the Conservative Party at that time was against sanctions.”

The trip was offered to the Conservative Research Department by Derek Laud, who was employed by SNI and was later a Big Brother contestant.

China ‘overtakes’ Germany to become largest exporter

The growing economic might of China was laid bare yesterday by reports that it overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter last year. The strong export data for December follows the news on Friday that China had leap-frogged the US as the world’s largest automotive market.

China is also forecast to outgun Japan to become the world’s second largest economy in 2010, and it is inevitable it will take top spot from the US, given that Chinese GDP is forecast to grow by more than 10 per cent a year for most of the next decade.

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China’s exports were…surpassed by storming imports, which rose by more than expected at 55.9 per cent a year to $112.3bn. This squeezed the world’s most populous country’s trade surplus down to $18.4bn, compared with $19.1bn in November.

Lin Songli, an economist with Guosen Securities in Beijing, told Reuters: “If exports and imports were as strong as that, then other economic indicators like industrial output would have been surprisingly strong as well.”

He added: “It’s hard to say the government will take action on one month of data, but if the situation stays the same for the first quarter, Beijing is likely to let the yuan rise again at the end of March.”

But Guosen Securities forecasts that the yuan will appreciate by a modest 3 per cent in 2010, as the Government is keen for exports to continue growing. The US has led the criticism of China that it has unfairly made its goods cheaper by maintaining a weak yuan. But the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, has hit back, saying the country will “not yield” to its competitors’ demands to revalue the currency.

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In October, China’s official news agency forecast that the country will overtake Japan this year to become the world’s second-biggest economy. The Chinese economy grew by 9.6 per cent in 2008, and is estimated to have expanded by more than 8 per cent last year — far outstripping its neighbour. But Japan emerged out of recession in the third quarter of 2009.

Brown has missed the chance for real electoral reform

So, 13 years after Labour first promised a referendum on electoral reform, Gordon Brown has finally guaranteed to hold one. Reform is now on offer, but of the most limited kind possible.

Brown’s first mistake was to reject the bold option, favoured by Alan Johnson and others, of holding a referendum before or on the day of the general election — with the result that a referendum is now unlikely to take place.

His second mistake was to adopt the Alternative Vote (AV) as his system of choice. AV has the benefit of eliminating the need for tactical voting by allowing electors to rank candidates by preference but it is not a proportional system.

Indeed, it can produce even more distorted outcomes than first-past-the-post (FPTP). The Jenkins Commission found that, had the 1997 election been held under AV, Labour’s majority would have ballooned from 179 to 245.

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Had Brown come out in favour of proportional representation (PR), he could have begun a realignment of the left and ended the stranglehold of a handful of marginal voters on British politics. Instead, he has left Labour open to charges of cowardice from reformers and of opportunism from opponents.

Brown’s Damascene conversion to electoral reform is transparently motivated by a desire to win over the Lib Dems in a hung parliament, but it is unlikely to achieve even this. Many Lib Dem MPs fear that a referendum on AV could settle the issue for a generation, ruling out any lingering possibility of PR.

Brown’s political fudge has ended up pleasing almost no one.