Hello and welcome to Hard Copy, coming to you from our studios in Abuja, Amman O'Gun Yusuf. This week, Channel's television in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme began a series of conversations called the Development Dialogue Series. The main addition focused on the subject of corruption and how it affects development. The conversation boasted a panel of experts, one of whom is Professor Mushtaq Khan. Khan is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies that saw us at the University of London and Executive Director of the DFID-funded Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Consortium. He is our guest in the programme tonight and we're honoured to have him in our studios. Professor Khan, welcome to Hard Copy. Thank you. It is very interesting that just about a few hours ago, should I say 24 hours ago, Transparence International just released a new report for World Rankings. And I want to take a look at some of the findings. They're saying that a majority of countries are showing little to no improvement in tackling corruption. That corruption is more pervasive in countries where big money can flow freely into electoral campaigns where governments listen only to the wealthy or well-connected individuals. It also shows that anti-corruption efforts are stagnating in the G7 countries. I find that very interesting. And I want a number of questions immediately pop up. One, are governments getting weary of fighting corruption? I think they are getting weary of fighting corruption because they're fighting it the wrong way. And I think the research we are doing and the work we are doing, including in Nigeria, is saying that the way in which we have fought corruption and Nigeria has been at the forefront of fighting corruption has been about trying to enforce rules on very powerful people who are breaking the laws without asking if there is any real support from anyone for enforcing these rules apart from the people in general who are generally not very powerful. So I think the assumption behind a lot of the anti-corruption work has been that these countries and not just Nigeria across the developing world have a rule of law that almost everybody follows the rules, a few people are wickedly breaking the rules, and if we can identify them with transparency and force them to be accountable and take them to prison, then we will go back to a better outcome. The problem is that is totally misconceived. These are very informally operating economies. 70 to 80 percent of the economy is informal. So to begin with, you have a large chunk of people in these societies who aren't following rules not because they're corrupt or they want to break the rules. They simply don't have the capability of following a raft of rules that we have constructed with respect to tax, property rights, registration of companies, etc. At the top we have another bunch of people who don't follow rules because actually it's not in their interest to follow the rules. Now here is a very big difference with more developed countries where powerful organizations need to follow rules in their own interest because without contracting and a rule of law their business goes bust. So when a company in an advanced country is caught breaking the rules and everyone wants to break rules to freeride, they immediately apologize, they fire the people who are breaking the rules and they improve their systems. There's a higher incentive for them to do what is right. There's no way that they cannot follow rules and operate in business, whereas what happens in developing countries is that the powerful don't need a rule of law. They know I am corrupt and you are corrupt, but I can do business with you because there are small number of people who are powerful and they have informal ways of enforcing rules on each other. So if I'm buying cement from you and you don't deliver the cement, I have an informal way of sending someone to collect my cement. I don't have to use my contract and go to court. There are informal ways of enforcing for the top people and the bottom is largely informal anyway. On top of that politics and the Transparency International Report says that is largely about using lots of sources of money which can't come from official sources because official sources are very thin. So politics in these countries engages in a lot of clientlism and patronage. Now once we understand that whole situation, we have to design our anti-corruption very carefully because otherwise we will spend a lot of time trying to do things which cannot be done and then we get depressed and say actually we haven't made much progress. So our work is actually identifying feasible anti-corruption and by that what we mean is anti-corruption that we can do which will have the support of some of the people who are engaged in that activity because they actually benefit from it, who have the power to do something about it and which will improve outcomes for society. Now those? That's not an interruption because we're still going to come to some of the theories and we're going to explore how they have worked in terms of, in practical terms so to speak. I want to quickly still focus a little more on some of the findings of Transparency International. You've answered the question as to whether or not governments are getting where you say they're getting where because of how they're fighting it and there's also the link between democracy and corruption which is getting more and more interesting. Some analysts say that you know for some people and observers they say that since the advent of democracy in developing countries it was seen that the problem of corruption has gotten worse instead of getting better. What exactly is the link between corruption and democracy especially in developing countries? So I think there's a lot of confusion about this issue. If you define corruption as a misuse of power, if you have a very authoritarian regime, an authoritarian regime doesn't have to break laws, it can just pass laws which are in its interest and follow them. So if an authoritarian regime wants to take your land, they don't have to engage in corruption in the courts to do that. They just take it and they pass a law saying it's ours. But that will still be corruption. So if you define corruption as a misuse of power, that is corruption. But if you define corruption as is there a bribery going on, you might not see that. So in the same way you have the old Soviet type regimes or feudalism in the past didn't have corruption in the modern sense because you didn't have to bribe to get. But because the powerful had the capacity to actually pass rules in their own interest, they could misuse power without some forms of corruption. But in my book, that is also a form of corruption. So I think this analogy or this comparison is mistaken. The real question is why is it that some types of corruption are much more damaging than other types of corruption? And one of the problems of a lot of developing countries is not only that the powerful are violating rules, but they're also violating rules in very socially damaging ways. Now you can violate rules in ways that actually create new industries or create new employment. So it's a kind of corruption that we used to see in China or South Korea earlier and people associate that with authoritarianism. But the issue is not authoritarianism versus democracy. The issue is whether when the powerful violate rules, they have compulsions on them to use the assets or the resources productively to create jobs. And what is happening now in developing countries is that the elites, the powerful, don't believe in the future. They don't believe in investing in their country. They don't believe in creating jobs. They believe in taking the money and keeping it stashed away in safe places all over the world. Why is that an incentive for them? I mean, why don't they see the good in at least trying to do good for their people? So if you steal the money but put it back, maybe people will not make so much noise. So I think that's what used to happen in countries like South Korea and Taiwan and Japan and earlier in other countries. All countries went through stages of high levels of corruption when they were developing, when the rule of law is weak. The rule of law only becomes stronger when you have a broad distribution of power in society and lots of checks and balances, which takes time to happen. But what has happened now is that the elites have lost confidence or ownership of their own countries. And I think that's a separate problem from just corruption. So I think we shouldn't look at everything from the lens of corruption. We should also try to ask why the powerful don't believe in their countries anymore, don't have a long term. And perhaps it's because, paradoxically, the popular perception that they're breaking rules means that they're not secured that if the government changes, they will be able to remain. So they take their money out. Now, I'm not making too much of that. The alternative approach is we take this context as given because we can't change the behavior of really powerful people by just exhorting them to behave differently or messaging them to behave differently. They will behave in terms of their own interests. What we can do as social activists, as academics, researchers, as media, is try to identify areas where it is hugely against the interests of the powerful that certain things are happening. And by the powerful, I don't necessarily mean people at the very top. The powerful might be at different levels of society where those people are the ones who are making the decisions. Now, when the decision makers themselves are not benefiting from how things are working out, if we can find an alternative set of rules that works for them, that allows them to make money without breaking the rules, then you have the option of actually an effective anti-corruption strategy. And the point is that we can't do it for the whole of these societies at one fell swoop. We have to do it in areas where there are opportunities, in reforming how, for example, why is there doctor absenteeism in hospitals? If we look at the process in great detail, we might find lots of reasons, and most doctors might actually want to be in the hospital. But for all sorts of reasons, it's not viable for them to do that. Why are hospitals engaging in corruption and procurements of medicines? It might be that the rules are set up in such a way that the capacity of the people involved is such that corruption happens. But we can fix that. There aren't mega interests who are going to stop it from the top if we fix up these systems at the bottom. If they are, then that's not a feasible space for anti-corruption. But our proposition is that there are lots of areas like that. For example, can we help SME clusters get access to electricity without engaging in lots of corruption? And I think there is, because in Nigeria there are laws which allow local grids to be set up. Now, why aren't we focusing attention on how to solve the corruption problem by coming up with feasible solutions which allow some groups of people who might create jobs, these SMEs create jobs, they have the capacity to reinvest in society, but they're forced into being corrupt because the system doesn't allow them to buy power from the grid, doesn't allow them or there's no system for setting up cheap forms of local power. And so what do these people do? They go into diesel smuggling and because of the corruption in the big network, there's now corruption in the smaller lower down as people solve the power problem by now having smuggled diesel coming in and generating electricity. Is those sorts of problems which researchers aren't giving attention to? And I think they're not the big ticket ones which will make transparency international rankings change immediately, but it's those step-by-step processes which build up a society where there are millions of pockets where people are following the rules and once people start following the rules, you will get a lot of pressure, real pressure from powerful people on other powerful people who are breaking the rules. But right now everybody who has anything going on in these kinds of societies is breaking some rule. So when you try and prosecute someone who is breaking the rules, even the guys who are breaking the rules for very selfish reasons, other people are breaking the rules not for selfish reasons but because they have to survive, they don't want to go and give evidence against those people because those people tell them, look, if you come and give evidence we will point out all the rules you are breaking. Now, so that is why the standard anti-corruption doesn't work. Standard anti-corruption of enforcement and so on will only work if 70, 80, 90 percent of your society is following rules. We are not there yet so we have to build that up step by step and that is the ace approach, the service ace approach, the research we are doing. Professor, I would like you to quickly take a look at some of the methods that Nigeria has employed to fight corruption and why they seem not to be working. I will have some quotes from UNODC later as to how even the importance of corruption for Nigerians seem to be dropping. It is dropping in terms of the importance of the things that the government should be handling. But at the beginning of this administration, President Mohamed Abu-Hairi's administration, a number of policies were brought up to at least try and maybe get the buying of the powerful people, some really powerful people at the top. There was a tax amnesty program which they came up with perhaps for people to be able to get more of their money into the formal economy, declare them, pay taxes on them. And I don't know, put them in the formal economy, so to speak. That's one, then there was also the program, the whistleblowing policy, which now they're complaining doesn't seem to be working. Why does it seem that some of these policies, even though the whistleblowing policy, you are supposed to get, I think, a percentage of whatever it is that you declare, not from the person who was found to be corrupt, but the person who told on the other person was supposed to be able to get a percentage. Why do you think that some of these policies have not proven as effective as people thought they would when they were proposed? So it comes back to what I was saying earlier. People follow rules when they have to follow the rules. When there is real compulsion on them because others, their peers, will not tolerate them breaking the rules. This is extremely important to remember. When a society becomes rule following, it's not because there is some external agency watching them and they're scared that if I break the rules, I'll be caught and punished. 90% of the time, if you go to advanced countries, people follow the rules, not because they're scared someone is watching them, but because the rules are in their interest. And if they break the rules and if their peers find out, not the state, not the Anti-Corruption Commission, their peers, the people they're dealing with, their peers will stop dealing with them. So a company in the United Kingdom or in any advanced country is paying taxes, not because they're scared of the tax man, is because if their competitors find out that they're not, or if their businesses they're buying and selling find out, they will stop dealing with them because they don't want to deal with someone who breaks the rules because that destroys their reputation in the market. There is no such compulsion yet in countries like Nigeria, as I said earlier. A company can violate rules and other companies will deal with it because they enforce things on each other informally. So giving them a tax holiday doesn't mean they will start following rules again. You have to ask, can we make a system where it is in their interest to follow the rules that if they don't follow the rules, something terrible will happen to them, regardless of the enforcement. That's the 10% of free riders that are occasionally caught. That's why I think we need to focus at an intermediate level of activity. We can't focus on the big companies right away, and it's not much point looking at the violation by really poor people. It's at the intermediate level, and the examples I gave you. Why do doctors not go to hospitals? Why is procurement happening in the wrong way? Why are skills training programs not working? Why are schools not, you know, here you have ways of redefining incentives where the people themselves who are players will find that now the rules are actually in my, aligned with my interest. If I follow them, I can make money. Of course, if I break them, I can make even more money. But then others, my peers are observing me, and they're saying, look, we are following the rules. We're making, why do you want to make extra money? That's when anti-corruption becomes effective. You have to split the rule violation into those who want to follow the rules and can feasibly follow the rules and others who will observe them. Now, the mistake we keep making is that we don't look at this critically important part of enforcement. That 90% of enforcement happens when the people you are engaging with are enforcing the rules on you. We just think that the EFCC or the ICPC or some anti-corruption agency or Transparency International, they will come and blow the whistle and people will stop. They won't stop. They will only stop when it is not feasible for them to behave in this way in an everyday sense when no one is observing except the people they're interacting with. That's when the rules become enforced. And that's why we focus on this manageable, feasible level of activities which are critically important for development. Have you seen instances where this solution which you propose could work or have worked? Loads of them. So our research is finding lots of such opportunities in the countries we study. Let me give you a fantastic example from Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, we found that skills training programs who are paid to incentivize them to train properly, they're paid when they show that the people they have trained in skills actually have a job. Then we found that a lot of these skills trainers do fraud. Their trainees don't have jobs, but they report they have jobs so they can get paid. Now this is wasting massive amounts of public money in the skills training programs because the trainers are training and the jobs aren't being created. Then we asked why are these skills trainers doing this fraud? And we looked at a whole bunch of a dozen trainers and we found that some of them are doing no fraud and some of them are doing a lot of fraud. So why the difference in the same country? And we found something that we didn't expect that the problem was on the demand side, that the companies who are getting the trainees, their capabilities vary hugely. Now if a trainer is in a cluster of companies which is very capable, those companies want skilled workers because their production lines are moving very fast. If they take an unskilled worker, they immediately see the problem. Whereas if the cluster is low capability companies, their production line is moving very slowly. The skilled worker doesn't add much because they can't do much because the line is moving slowly. They prefer to hire from the street at a lower wage.  Whereas those whose trainees are getting jobs don't do fraud. Now this is a problem of we haven't thought through can the rules be followed? The rules cannot be followed, so the rules are wrong. So what we suggested in our work in Bangladesh is that skills training should be joined up with investments in raising the capabilities of companies. So if the companies become more capable, we already see that in Bangladesh that when you have capable companies, the training providers do know fraud. And there is a massive improvement in productivity when you supply skilled workers to capable companies, but no improvement in productivity when you supply skilled workers to low-capable companies. I am sure the same problem exists in Nigeria. So this kind of research shows how you can redesign incentives and rules so that the training providers themselves will say, okay, if I train hard, I get paid. Now why should I do fraud? There is nothing genetic in us that we do fraud. We have a whole bunch of rules which force people to engage in rule violation because the people who made the rules didn't think through the consequences at that level of detail. So by thinking through in detail why the rules are being broken at huge development costs because hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted in Bangladesh in skills training programs which actually don't add to productivity, actually don't add to employment because we haven't connected the dots. We haven't connected the capability of the employer with the skill of the worker. So that's the kind of thing we're doing and we're doing similar things in Nigeria, in the power sector helping SMEs, understanding why SMEs are buying smuggled diesel instead of buying power from the grid. Those are solutions which take large chunks of society out of avoidable corruption. We have to take our people out of avoidable corruption, the corruption they actually don't want to engage in and show a development outcome. And when you have wins, the problem with our anti-corruption strategies is we can't show any wins. People don't see any wins. Wondering, do you think at any point corruption efforts could peak? Because if you're also looking at the findings of Transparency International, finding that it was seen that there is a stagnation in the fight against corruption in the G7 countries, you think that we could be at a point where what could be responsible for that stagnation? Just wondering, maybe they've peaked. So I think there's a lot of evidence that the billions of dollars spent globally on anti-corruption has not delivered any sustainable results. Anti-corruption commissions, rule of law reforms, police reforms, ombudsmen, the evidence is very clear. They don't work. They don't work for the reasons that we have been discussing. They don't work because they assume that the society has a set of rules that most people are following and can follow and a few people are breaking the rules. This is the fundamental assumption that is wrong. Almost nobody in our society is following all the rules. So, yes. That's in developing economies. In developing economies, right? But the anti-corruption effort of the G7 is targeting largely developing economies. So they're spending their taxpayers' money trying to help us improve our development outcomes. But because of the misunderstanding of the nature of corruption, a lot of this money is wasted. So there is still time. We need to get back to more viable forms of anti-corruption. The anti-corruption, which actually takes real people out of rule violations, improves outcomes for people, improves jobs, and that is both developmental and step by step moving us in the direction of viable, diversified societies where lots of people are following rules. And at that point, the really problematic, powerful people who are breaking rules can be taken on and defeated. But we can't defeat them in step one. We can defeat them in step six or seven. But if you don't take the first five or six steps, you don't get there. And we have been jumping to steps seven without going through steps one to six. And that is what we are trying to change. Okay. Professor Ken, we have to thank you for coming on hard copy. That's what we draw the curtains tonight. Patricia Marira, managing director at Transparence International said, corruption chips away at democracy to produce a vicious cycle where corruption undermines democratic institutions and in turn, weak institutions are less able to control corruption. So if you wish for our fledging democracy to survive, we mustn't give up on the war against corruption, but maybe we have to come up with new ways to fight them. We look forward to your feedback. Do use the handles on your screen. Thank you for watching. I'm Maupe Ogre Yosef. Good night.


English sunshine, how's training gone so far? We're hearing a camp here in Cheshire giving the chance for the lads to get some time together. Yeah it's been great weather's been perfect, great facilities and everyone's back raring to go so it's been an enjoyable first couple of days and just enjoying the hard work at the moment. We were looking up to see some of the training that we've had so far in this camp. Everyone looks certainly fit and raring to go come back you know chomping at the bit from a summer break. Yeah exactly all the boys have kept themselves in good shape over the summer and we've really come back with the bit between our teeth you know no one was sort of happy with the way we finished the season last year and new coaching set up so a few new players in and everyone's trying to impress and put a marker down and you know try and get in that starting 11 for the first game of the season. And I know you'll be used to this beautifully warm weather but all jokes aside does it make you harder the training sessions obviously it's really cranking up the heat. Yeah it does a little bit you know some of the boys aren't really used to the sun let alone the heat so yeah it does make it harder but at the same time it's enjoyable to get away and you know be together for a few days and get to know everyone and yeah you know us footballers are sometimes a little bit we enjoy getting away even if it's just a different pitch that we get to train on so being in a totally different part of the country I guess and using the different facilities has been good for us to get away and yeah we're all enjoying it. Several of the summer signings with the group this week I guess as a camp like this give you the chance to get to know one quite quickly ahead of the new season. Yeah it's you know it's a lot easier to get to know them obviously even just eating together you know we eat three times obviously breakfast lunch and dinner and walking down roommates it's just been good just to get to know them you know off the field and more importantly know them on the field and what they're good at what they might need help on and what we can help them with as players. Obviously we have our new coaching team head coach Michael Collins and assistant Martin Dury here as well taking taking the team house training going under those. Everyone's been very impressed you know training has been spot on it's got a meaning to it everyone knows exactly what they're doing and you know for the next couple of weeks it will be the coaching staff trying to get their point across and it's up to us as players to grasp that as quickly as we can and and if you can do that then you'll be involved in their plans but you know the first three or four days have been very impressive been great training and all the boys are really enjoying it. Yeah you said that obviously early days I guess into preseason but can you kind of feel that positivity around the camp when you're talking about the training and the standards at the moment? Yeah exactly you know these the new coaching setups brought in you know a great vibe they're young they're exciting they put on good sessions they want us to play a certain way and I think the whole group's responded to that exactly how you should do and yeah it's been three or four days but already you know tempo and training has been a lot higher than it was last season and yeah everyone's really excited about the season coming up. We're talking about the weather officer we spoke off camera about you could have flown four or five hours away to get this sort of weather so it's kind of we've got everything we need really and we're only an hour or two away from Brownfield. Yeah it's been beautiful even the setup you know it's a great golf course that hopefully maybe get to have a swing at one afternoon but yeah training pitch a couple hundred meters away from from the rooms and you know that's probably the best thing about being away is that you know we're not having to travel an hour on the bus to a training ground everything's here that we need and yeah the weather has been turned on it's been great and all the boys are really looking forward to it. And a personal note I guess you must be raring to go this season obviously the obvious injury frustrations towards the back end of last season? Yeah it's part and part of football really getting injured and just unfortunate that it was quite a bad injury to my knee but you know touch wood it's all fixed and all better and yeah full training full steam ahead for the season. And the injury came unfortunately fairly early into rapid cramming it's your third game after joining the club does it almost feel this summer this pre-season kind of like a new start for you as a referee player?  And your hopes I guess for the rest of this pre-season I guess it's just to be make sure you're fit and firing come August the 4th? Yeah that's you know that's the key for everyone really is you know some boys come back well some boys are naturally fitter than others so it's just to try and get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible get the messages that the coaching staff want to put on us and make sure that everyone understands that so that you know there's no real excuses come the 4th of August of you know boys not knowing what they're doing and so far that's been really impressive by the coaching staff is you know that they put their point across in every training session every drill that we do there's a meaning to it and it's up to the boys to to pick up on that as fast as we can and and to sort of understand what they want and if I think if you can do that and do that to their standards then you'll be in the team so it's yeah pre-seasons looking good and shaping up nicely and everyone can't wait for the 4th of August.


Excellency, Acting Governor-General, please allow me before I start to express my sincere condolence for the death of Queen Elizabeth II. For generations of Swiss citizens, Queen Elizabeth has been the constant figure representing Great Britain and the Commonwealth. She will be remembered for her threatened fulfillment, her duty, up until her death with unwavering dedication. It's an honour for me to request your Excellency to accept, together with the letter of recall, of my predecessor the letters by which the Swiss Federal Council accredits me as Ambassador of Switzerland to St Lucia. I am strongly committed to fulfil my duty the best I can and allow me to express the hope that in doing so I shall be able to rely on the valuable support and confidence of your Excellency and of the authorities of St Lucia. My government follows with great interest the developments in your country and I have been charged to further enhance the excellent relations between our two governments and people. In another testimony of my government's interest and commitment to the region I am also accredited to CARICOM as the Swiss representative to the Caribbean community, another important responsibility that I am fulfilling to the best of my abilities. My country works relentlessly to develop friendly, respectful and mutually beneficial relations with other countries all over the world. In addition to the relations with our neighbours and partners in Europe, Switzerland's foreign policy priority focus on the alleviation of need and poverty in the world. The respect for human rights and democracy, the promotion of the peaceful coexistence of peoples as well as the conservation of natural resources. My country stands up for peace and security and is promoting a viable and just international order with the aim of achieving a world free of poverty and a global environment conducive to prosperity. We will continue working for peace, humanity, innovation, sustainable development and multilateralism. Indeed, the current global challenges show once again how important cooperation at the international level is. In that sense, I can assure you that Switzerland intends to remain a close and reliable partner to St. Lucia, both on the level of our bilateral relations as well as in the undertakings of multilateral collaboration. It is a most pleasant duty for me to convey to your excellency the highest esteem of the Swiss Federal Council for the People and Government of St. Lucia as well as its wishes for their happiness and well-being. I also will wail myself of this opportunity to convey to your excellency the assurance of my profound respect and expression of my best wishes for your personal happiness. Your Excellency, let me first and foremost thank you for the very kind sentence you have offered to go on the passing of Her Majesty the Queen. This talk will be passed on to His Majesty. Let me start your Excellency by assuring you that it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to St. Lucia and to accept the letters of credence by which your President, Ignacio Cassis, accredits you as Ambassador Designate to the Swiss Confederation to St. Lucia. These will be laid in due course before His Majesty the King. Your Excellency, since establishing diplomatic relations with your country in 2005, Switzerland has proved to be a most reliable partner in those areas where we share our small nation has had strong interests. A world without poverty for sustainable development is a shared vision between our people and one that we consider achievable where there is cooperation among like-minded members of the international community. However suffering from the malaise of size, it is difficult to achieve the critical mass that allows us to compete in an arena where GDP per capita has become the tool to ostracize small states like us from the low-cost development funding thus retarding our progress towards a comfortable degree of sustainability. Your visit today provides a launching pad allowing us an opportunity for discussions aimed at improving international interactions between our two countries. Your Excellency, there are several areas where my country can benefit from the wealth of knowledge Switzerland has acquired over the years starting with food security. We note the huge strides your country has made in the use of technology to increase agricultural yields even where soil quality is below standard. And we wish to explore the possibility of tapping into this area of expertise to aid in combating existing issues that we experience with production and yields in local agricultural sector. As the world appears to be approaching irreversible curve in the ability of the more developed to save the planet from the scourge of climate change more than ever, we are calling on countries like yours to support us in the call for lowering carbon emissions to tolerable levels so at least small island states like St. Lucia can survive. We note your country's commitment and progress in reducing its emissions with an overall emphasis on environmental protection. And perhaps in the spirit of goodwill we may seek your further support in meeting our national determined contribution guided by your expertise, technical solutions and final resources dedicated to such initiatives. Directly leading from this is the need to build expertise in disaster mitigation and management techniques domestically given our vulnerability to hurricanes, earthquakes. Instead of waiting for friends to come to our assistance, it is always comforting to be prepared. Your Excellency, we wish to commend your government for continuing to make available the Swiss government excellence scholarship for foreign scholars and artists. And in this vein we would like to explore opportunities to benefit from your country's scientific advances in areas such as forensic training including attachments at institutions and laboratories and scholarships to pursue academic technical programs in other disciplines a priority to us. Ever mindful of the advancement your country has made in health, any support you may give in this important sector would be highly cherished given our high rate of noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer and hypertension. Your Excellency, tourism has for many years superseded agriculture as the mainstay of our economy, putting us always on the lookout for new markets if we are to remain competitive within this jurisdiction. Therefore it would be timely for us to pursue plans with your government to create an enabling environment to allow the Swiss tourists to visit St. Lucia as an easily accessible destination. Given the visa-free access between our two countries, we can seek to capitalize on such an opportunity through increased marketing efforts along with buy-in by the international airline companies. Your Excellency, this has been a long list. Which we advance in the spirit of cooperation between our two nations. Knowing that my country will reciprocate in kind whenever and wherever possible. As the world now titters on the brink of war, let us lend our voices like we have done in the past, along with other like-minded nations in pursuit of everlasting peace. Not only for our time, but for all times. Finally Your Excellency, I wish you a rewarding tour of duty. Please convey to your President and the Government of your Confederation my very best wishes for continued harmony and prosperity. These wishes, I assure you, also come from the Government and people of St. Lucia.


Meanwhile, the chief spokesman of the APC presidential campaign cancelled Mr. Festus Guillermo and Director Media & Publicity, Mr. Bayo Ononuga, have reacted to the alleged plan of the Atiku Co-Presidential campaign to seek a quarter disqualification of the APC presidential candidate, Boletinobu, over alleged links with drug dealings. Not reacting to the PDP's counter moves, Guillermo in a chat with the media said the main opposition party lacks originality. He also challenged Atiku to address issues of whether we sublime by Michael Chimago, who swore to an oath and whether Atiku made a scandalous conversation on how he and the former president of Obeso and Joss set up SPVs such as Marine Float to steal public money. And a Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed the four appeals that emanated from the Ogun State People's Democratic Party governorship legal battle. The appeal instituted by one of the governorship aspirants, Otuba Jibela Wal, and some war delegates were dismissed on the grounds that the appellants have no curse of action. Justice Kodorat Kikiria Konliden, a panel of five justices, dismissed the appeal following their withdrawals by the respective lawyers. The apex court also held that the law is clear and only an aspirant in a primary election are conducted for the purpose of nominating candidates for election. Can lawfully challenge the outcome and not any other member of the party. The wife of the presidential candidate of the People's Democratic Party, Alaji Atiku Abubaka, Titia Abubaka, has heologized the efforts of women in electioneering and order Southwest women to support her husband to become the nation's president. Titia Atiku stated this in a bid on at a Southwest female town hall meeting, which was held in Ibada Oyostata capital. The wife of Nigeria's former vice president, Agia Minna-Titi Abubaka described her husband as the most qualified, who according to her possessors, the acuity to turn around the fortunes of Nigeria for good. Of the PDP said, the essence of the town hall meeting was to showcase the leadership potentials of women. The party is solidly united behind Alaji Atiku Abubaka. The state chairman was there. All the ex-colleagues were there. All the three candidates for the Senate were there. Fourteen House of Rep candidates were there. The entire PDP was there. I agree. Injineshi Imakiri was not there. But you know what it means is one person and he gave his assent for the party to unite behind the presidential candidate. And everywhere that he goes on campaign, he says that the people should please vote PDP from top to bottom. So yes, there's still some issues probably to be ironed out at the highest level. But the party is already united behind all the PDP candidates. And don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Mediation ja moderation models are very common in social sciences, and they are often combined, and there is a large body of current literature that discusses the combination or whether you use mediation or moderation. The idea of mediation was that when you have x and y, then the effect of x and y goes to a third variable called the mediator. The idea of moderation was that when you have a relationship between x and y, then the strength of that relationship varies as a function of a third variable, which here is the z. So these two effects are sometimes confused, so it may be difficult to make the choice of whether your effect is actually a moderation effect or a mediation effect. The Baron Kehney 1986 article was written to address these concerns that research are confusing these two models, so which one is appropriate for the data. It is less common nowadays, but one thing that you should know is that if you are choosing between mediation model and a moderation model, you don't have to because you can do also moderating mediation. So you can combine these variables together, these models together, so you can have a mediation model and then you can have a moderation effect for all of these three paths. You could also have a m here moderating this direct effect for example, so you could have a m moderating itself in which case you would have a u shape effect for this relationship. So it really gives you lots of options for variables, how you model them. And then you have to make a choice based on your theory, what is the best representation of your theoretical ideas, so what's the best model for your particle study. There is yet another concern that you need to take into account. The concern is that the mediation model is just identified. If you just look at correlations, then the mediation model will always explain those correlations perfectly. So it can be tested empirically just with three variables. Another concern is that just by running a regression of x and m and y, you can run the same mediation model in six different ways just reversing some of the regression paths. So this is the same model with just the positions of x, m and y reversed or altered. So you can't really say which one of those is correct empirically because they all produce the exact same model implied correlation matrix. This is from Klein's paper, The Mediation Myth. And his main argument or one of the main arguments is that if you do mediation, you can really only say that there's a mediation effect if you have long internal data sets. So you can't from a cross-sectional model data to say that this model is the correct one and not that one, because these both fit the same data equally well. Similarly, it is possible that instead of this model, you have this model with a bidirectional effect. So this is called a simultaneity in econometrics. We don't address that now. And it's also possible that x is just a common cause of m and y, and m and y are correlated for some other reason, but there is no direct effect between m and y. So empirically, all of these models are equally good. So you have 18 models, all of them are plausible. So which one is the best for you? That's where your theory comes to play. So you have to theoretically argue unless you have long internal data. You have to theoretically argue that your model is one of these or one of these or one of these and not the other one. And that can be difficult to do. Mediation testing is an active topic. A mediation model estimation is an active topic. So every year there are more new papers and more techniques coming. And the practices in mediation and moderation testing are changing. So one good way for mediation is to go to David Kenny's website. And that maintains a list of up-to-date sources for some of the reason discussions in mediation. So should you use Baron and Kenny, should you use bootstrapping or should you use the Sobel test? Different perspectives on these problems exist. And David Kenny's website contains a good list of references for some of the most central articles. Here are some and also if you do a mediation model, I recommend that you search organizational research methods for the term mediation and see what is the current practice in organizational research. There are at least one or two articles that come out each year that address mediation because this is such an important topic.


Anyway, I wanted to give a short talk or actually a buff, which I'm not sure how it will work. So to basically explain what my Google Sum of Code project is, what I was doing there, and some other ideas for dark I had. And well, to basically discuss what other people would like to see in dark, which doesn't work that well, I guess, today. Well, no, it doesn't like me, but it was working before there. So there's basically four parts. The first part is, well, a summary of my current Sum of Code work, which is to introduce multi-archive support in dark. The other topics are the Debian maintainer permissions. People might know that I wrote a mail to the list about this. Then there's an idea for a remote control interface for dark, which basically was already introduced in the Debian maintainer changes I suggested, and how we would like, what else we could do with this. And well, then the part that probably won't work that well today is basically I wanted to know what other people would find useful to see in dark. So this is about the multi-archive support, and yeah, inside dark we have several places we install packages to, which are suits, policy cues, and build cues. Suits are basically what people see, that is unstable, experimental, stable testing, also like stable proposed updates. Policy cues are the new cue, or moderation cues that the release team uses before packages are accepted into proposed updates. So it's proposed updates new. And build cues, this is basically incoming Debian org. So it's used to give packages to the build demons before the next mirror sync, so that they can already use them, and don't have to wait six hours. So currently, or well, in the current dark code, basically there's extra code to handle each of these. Each of these implementations has their own bugs, so it's a bit annoying to have three of them. So for example, the main archive doesn't use up to FTP archive anymore, but it's still used for the build cues. And also by the decision which files to keep, it's basically re-implemented three times. So it would be nice if we had a single implementation that could handle all of this. Then there, we would like to merge basically backports Debian org, which would reduce the administrative overhead. So because we have one less stack installation we need to maintain. And then there was the idea of introducing developer repositories, which is something PPA like, but not entirely the same. So for example, one use case for these would be staging transitions before uploading them to unstable. We have experimented for this somehow, but it doesn't work that well because if it involves several packages and you would like users to test them, then they would need to change pinning for all of them. So yeah, some teams already have their own repositories. For example, I know that the KDE team has. So maybe we could integrate that into the official archive. Also maybe things like Mozilla, Debian, that also. Yes, the plan was basically to add support for multiple archives. So instead of just having what you see as FTP Debian org, that would also implement additional archives, which looks similar, but are either not public or exported to a different URL. So like backports Debian org. And a private archive, which looks basically the same, but is not exported to public place, should be used to replace the build and policy queues. Actually, there are now three of these private archives. One is for new and by hand, which is a bit special for various reasons. Then there's an archive for the build queues and another archive for the remaining policy queues. Yeah, and if you want to merge backports Debian org and keep it on a separate mirror network, then it could just become an extra archive in the setup. Yes, the current progress is basically, I have a working version, but it is not merged yet. So in the process of writing this, I have actually rewritten a fairly large part of dark itself. So basically anything that handles uploads. This is process upload, then to move packages from the policy queues into the archive, there's process policy, which is also rewritten now because basically there are no special policy queues anymore. And processing new queue also had large changes. But for the build queues, there's also managed build queue, which was also changed a bit. It's now rather simple because most of the logic is now we don't, well, it doesn't need any special logic anymore. Well, then you might wonder why I've rewritten these parts actually. It would have been possible to basically hack it into the existing code, but I was getting annoyed by it because basically the main problem with the existing code, especially process upload, was that if you change some parts, it would not unexpectedly throw an exception at a later place. And it doesn't really handle these exceptions. So it might have already installed some files, done some database changes, and if there's an exception anywhere later, then it wouldn't revert these changes, which is not very robust. And it would be nice to have the archive and the file system and database always in a consistent state. So I decided to simply rewrite these parts. Yes, it basically works. I have done a lot of testing during DevConf and DevCamp and fixed a lot of errors in the new implementation. Sadly, there's no test suite for dark itself. It's quite annoying to find them. And I'm now preparing to merge the remaining parts that are currently not merged. So some parts are already in the official repository, but basically the entire rewrite is not there yet. And there's still some minor features that are missing. I don't think they are important to have right now. So it's basically like things we would like we like, but it's not essential to have them. And there are some security Debian org specific parts, so the security archive cannot be updated right now. For details, you can always see my post on the mailing list. It also has all the comments. There are also the where else to access repository with my current work in progress. Yes. This is how it now looks like. So basically, you can see that an upload to new now also appears in the output from dark LS because it's just another suit at this point. And in the second list, you can see that a new package that was just accepted from the new queue is now an unstable in the build queue for unstable and in what is used to generate incoming Debian org. Yes, maybe we can look if there are any questions on IRC so far and we could. Okay, so basically there's an entire repository at FTP Debian org. It has multiple suits like unstable, experimental and so on. This is this and the pool directory with all the binary and source packages itself. This is an archive and multi-archive support means that a single installation of that can handle multiple such sets. So currently we have in Debian three of them, which is the official archive at FTP Debian org, then backpots Debian org and security Debian org. Security Debian org is a bit special. But we would like to merge at least the first two of them. Oh, somebody volunteered to write a test suit. Or was volunteered. Okay, so apparently there are no questions so far. Then we can go on to the Debian maintainer permissions. This is nothing new. It's basically what I said on the mailing list. So currently to allow Debian maintainers to upload packages, we use the Debian maintainer upload allowed field in the source package. We take its value in either unstable or experimental and check that the Debian maintainers also listed in the uploaders or maintainer field of the last package. And in addition we also check that he's also the mentioned in the change by field of the current upload. So we cannot sponsor other people updating packages. So there are various reasons that this should not be in the source package. The main reason is that it's not related to the source package as such. And it also makes no sense for example for derivative distributions because, well, this is a Debian specific field. So yes. It also applies to, well the current field would allow all people listed in the uploaders and maintainer field to upload the package. But we feel that it should be a setting for to only allow, well specific Debian maintainers to upload a package, which is only a time change. Basically I have the impression that the original GR does not, well, really take de-maintenance into respect. So I have the impression that was not sort of at that time. Yes, also we would like to basically get away from matching user IDs. That's a bit annoying because the archive only knows about a single user ID and sometimes this is not the same user ID people would like to use. Which basically means you have to ask the FTP masters to change the user ID dark expects. It's not so nice. So instead we would like to just use a key fingerprint which is always correct. Also, should we introduce developer repositories? It might not make sense to basically tie the upload permission to unstable or experimental because say the KDE team stages a new KDE release in their own repository they might already want to allow Debian maintainers to upload the packages even though they are not yet an unstable or experimental. So instead we would like to introduce an interface in dark to control the DM permissions that is not tied to the suspect itself and entirely drop anything related to user IDs. So basically the current idea is to introduce some sort of command file similar to the command files decad users which would basically contain several stanzas what should be done. So the first section is basically a bit boring. It says which archive this control message is for to where should anyone else run dark that the message could not be relayed there. Then an address where any response should go to. So you can choose which mail address you use. And then basically there's a command field. So which action to take this would be this would mean that it should handle Debian maintainer permissions. Then you would give the fingerprint of the Debian maintainer key. And then you can basically say which packages to allow upload for and which packages to revoke the upload permission for again. Then there's a reason field which I think is more useful for denying upload permissions again. So basically other people have an idea why this was changed. I'm not sure if it should be mandatory or not. But we can see that later. Yeah. So now we have a nice remote control interface for dark. Just using it for Debian maintainer permissions would be a bit boring, right? So once we have this, we can implement some other things that people have asked for, which is basically the first point here. That is to move packages from experimental to unstable without requiring an upload. So this is useful again for things like KDE where they first upload everything to experimental, see that everything is built and then currently do a new upload to unstable which doesn't change anything but requires all binary packages to be rebuilt. Yes? Sorry, don't you need to do an unstable rebuild to be sure you've got the right set of libraries because the set in experimental isn't necessarily up to date? So you really should do a new upload built against the current libraries. Well, when you build in experimental, it usually takes only packages from unstable anyway, except for those that specifically require a newer version. So people would have to take care of this. It would be a bit easier if you have your, like if you have the custom developer repository, then you can ensure that there are no unrelated packages involved. Yeah, that's the second point that we would then also like to allow moving packages from developer response to unstable. And well, as developer repositories are managed by the people who operate them, we could also allow removing packages from there without having to file a bug against FTP, Devian org. So basically that's what. And well, I have no other idea what we can do with this, but maybe other people have. So we can look if anything has happened on ISE. Transition Stunning Experimental, people are happy for no shadow. Did I understand correctly that they are rebuilt? If it is moved, they are not rebuilt. So I'm not sure what we do want to do there, but we could basically allow on also source on, only movement between suits, but then you would have the building network would somehow need to know that it needs to change the binary version. So because otherwise if you upload a dash one to experimental, then move only the source package to unstable and then the buildings would upload, build the binaries for that. They would have the same version at the binaries in experimental, but be different. So the archive would reject that. So... It's for the building things, for the migration. We can just specify the sort of set of rules we use for can things migrate to testing. You check whether it's built against up-to-date libraries or not. If it isn't, then it can't migrate. And you do need to do a new upload. Well, currently we don't really care about dependencies in dark. So that's only handled by Brittany for testing migration. So there would be an entirely new feature. Okay, Pixelpabs suggested that, well, after a source only movement, it could be handled like an automatic binary non-maintain upload that could probably be done. But, well, that would be something for the building people to implement. And until they have decided if that is reasonable or not, we could probably only, well, start with allowing source and binary movements. Okay, this is already basically everything I would like to say. So I was wondering how many people have actually used either dark or project B, the database behind that itself. But there aren't that many people here to ask. But who of you has already used dark or project B? Okay. Yeah, I've used that. One of the things that I'd really like to see, and maybe you guys have already started down that path, and I've heard some noise that maybe you have, is making it much easier to install and set up DAC on a specific instance. I mean, currently I ripped things out of Git and then spent some time massaging the PostgreSQL files and learning to ignore some of the things that are in the configuration files in the Git repository that don't actually do anything. And so it would be really, really useful, I mean, to me anyway, to have either just a DAC package that you can install that did the right thing, even if it was behind a bit, what Debian was using itself, or at least extremely good instructions on what to do to get a running DAC instance. I mean, I assume you guys do some sort of testing or something and so some sort of system that would set it up, run the DAC for a bit and then do that. When did you last try to set up DAC? I set it up in March. So have you seen Max read me how to set up DAC in the set up directory? I looked at one of them, but I haven't looked at it recently. So I probably need to go back and check that out and see if it's up to date. You wrote that sometime last year and basically explains how to set up DAC. Also includes all the necessary steps to generate a minimal configuration file and basically just blindly following it should work to get a DAC setup that has an unstable suit with two architectures. Yeah, I think I looked at that and started working with that, but like I needed some of the other things, like I needed a testing and I needed a stable. So yeah, I think that helped me. I think I do remember this document. I do remember reading it and it helped me get started a lot because I wouldn't be able to, I mean, I basically would have been harassing people on IRC all day long, but it would still be nice to have the configuration file more completely documented. So you have some sort of idea of what you're actually doing and when it breaks, whether it's because you don't understand what the configuration file does or if it's a buck, something like that would be. Sure. One other thing I was considering, basically one of the problems with the test suite is that there are some unit tests, but most of the functionality of DAC relies on the database. So my idea was that for testing these, we would basically need to set up a clean database for every test to ensure that they don't influence each other, so we would need to somehow automate setting up DAC for this. And I think this would certainly also have other people that want to try it out or an eventual Debian package. So I've always used Repri Pro whenever I need to do this kind of stuff and I haven't really understood why I'd ever need DAC rather than Repri Pro for doing the equivalent, right? Well, I'm not sure it has all the features we have, for example. Probably not. And I'm not sure how well it handles very large repositories. So the problem, for example, with FTP Archive, was that it didn't scale that well. That is crap, yeah. But I've been very impressed with Repri Pro, it does a pretty good job of stopping you doing stupid things which shouldn't be allowed and it's relatively easy to configure and arrange pools between different things and updates between different things and processing incoming for different things. So yeah, I don't know. It does the job for me, so I've never really looked at this because I didn't need to. And it's quite well documented as well, which is also useful. Yes, that's one of the problems. The other things that, well, we basically need our integration into the bug tracking system and such things and I don't think Repri Pro has these. Actually, it has quite primitive interface to build these stuff. It does have one, it's not very smart. But again, for a lot of people, I think if you need to set up a repository for a purpose, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Those tools work quite well. I don't know, and I guess it will be nice if we didn't have to maintain two different repository management systems, one of which is really complicated and nobody understands, and another one which is not quite capable of doing the real job and everybody else uses. Yes, but one of the other things you have to keep in mind that are different between these systems is that Repri Pro, I think, has not many external dependencies. While for dark, you need quite a lot of other things like PostgreSQL with the depth version data type for PostgreSQL and lots of other things. Yeah, I mean, in my case, I'm running DAC because I have one a build running for two different architectures building on three different suites for all of CRAN, which is our archive network. So I have probably 5,000 packages for each suite, so it's a little bit beyond what I thought Repri Pro could do. Yeah, exactly of scale. So it will be interesting to know whether that would, in fact, work or if there are important parts missing. And so what people want to know is at what point is this tool not suitable? And I should look at the other tool. What are the limits? I don't know. I've never hit the limits of a Repri Pro archive, but then I guess my biggest one is the Mdebian stuff, which is 3,000 packages. I'm not sure either. I personally use Repri Pro as well for some small. I've been impressed with the responsiveness when I complain about stuff as well, which is always nice in a package. Stuff that actually gets fixed. So I don't want to say that this is not useful, but I just try to understand the range of application of these various tools when I'm not sure many people know. I am not sure either. But well, you could try out with the official Debian archive with all architectures and suites. I'm not sure how well Repri Pro would cope with that. OK, then there was a question about source-only uploads, which you're already was not so happy about. Yeah, he says, sort them. So basically, we don't want that as a policy decision. From a technical side, it's basically the problem is building the architecture independent packages, because these are currently always taken from the maintain uploads. Are there any further questions or comments? So one thing we're looking at doing because of the cross-compiler work is having dependencies between architectures, which is something we've never had before. The dependency set was closed within an architecture. That was for the cross-built toolchains, right? Yeah, because toolchains depend on the libc from another archive, or they could be made to. And I guess, actually, maybe that's a Brittany thing, isn't it? It's not actually something that has to worry about. Yes, that's mostly for Brittany, so testing migration. Dart doesn't really care about dependencies, besides that it checks that Python app can parse these fields. So they have to be syntactically valid. Everything else we don't care about. So, well, and the others, it's, of course, a policy decision if you want cross-architecture dependencies. Yeah, I was just, I wanted to check that we didn't need to change anything here to make that work. And as you say, it just needs to be syntactically valid, which is already done. So that's in Weezy, in fact, even though we're not planning to use this yet, but we've made it possible to do this in Weezy so we can try. Yeah, personally, I think it would be OK, but I'm only a FTP assistant, so you can rely on that. And, well, of course, first, Brittany needs to be addressed. There was a question about any plans to get something towards security, Debbie and Ork having other upstream tower balls than FTP, Debbie and Ork. Well, Jörg said, merging the archives, but I'm not sure when we will be able to merge security, Debbie and Ork, because of the obscurity factor there. Basically, for embargoed packages, we don't want people to know that there is an embargoed package, but there's the read-only version of Project B on Rease, which every Devin developer can access. And it has a changelog entry and lots of other interesting things, so that is a problem for this. So Jörg says, in a decade, the other thing we could do is maybe in some way teach security, Debbie and Ork, about which upstream tower balls exist in the official archive, and only ensure that if an upload goes to security, Debbie and Ork, it matches the hashes. Are there any other questions? So I missed the beginning of this. Is this now packaged so you can just get installed back, but the problem is that you have to set the database up and we haven't got to make it. But there's no package yet. There isn't, right? Are you planning to? Maybe. OK, because I think one of the things we've done badly over the years is, although all our infrastructure uses free software, it's been very hard to replicate. All the distros do this, and it shouldn't be really hard to set up an archive with a build D, and everybody who makes a derivative distro or is using it in a commercial project, they all have exactly the same problem, which is that they usually want to have their own repo control, which means they need to set it up and all that infrastructure. And we've made it far too hard. It's getting better with this work. But I think packaging stuff and being able to initialize stuff is a really important thing. I think it would be nice also to get other people to use Stark, because, well, if more people use it, maybe we get new contributors. But I think before we can strip a package, it should at least be easier to set up. Basically, that the package maintainer scripts handle the largest part of the setup, at least for common installations. You're quite right. And the same problem with build D is that there isn't a method for initializing a new database from nothing, because we always have one. And then it was done once 10 years ago. In the current version of Dark, at least, ships the database schema. Ola versions didn't have that, apparently. So you basically needed a running deck setup to be able to even set up another installation. Exactly. That sort of problem we've dealt with very badly and makes everybody's lives difficult. I guess, in fact, the side effect of that is that one of the things I'm actually prepared to work on is making it easy. So I have slowly been working on making it easier to set up a build D, basically. Now, at the moment, I'm doing that with ReprePro and RebuildD because they're simple. But it will be better if I'm waiting for the S build DB stuff to be finished, because I think that's a lot more tractable than want to build, but should ultimately have the same functionality. That's the plan. So it will be nice when all that kind of comes together and it gets to be really easy to just make a new repo that builds stuff. Sure. Let's see if there's anything new on ISE. Some comments about the security DB and org and the initial setup. But I think we covered all of that already. So I think that's it, I don't know. So well, it was nice that at least some people are on ISE and that a few more people here appeared as well. OK. Thanks to everyone as well.