One of a few ink drawings I made about speciation – creationism, gradualism, punctuated equilibrium and ‘specific mate recognition signals’ using the very ‘inkable’ Lanioturdus torquatus as the species

Obtained from the official attendance database, these delegates may or may not have attended the actual event (Covid?).

Mr.Hage Geingob, President

Mr. Penomwenyo Pohamba Shifeta, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr.Teofilus Mutangeni Nghitila

Mr. Petrus Ileni Muteyauli, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Timoteus Tunomwameni Ndahangetate Mufeti, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Aletha Frederick, Karas Governor

Mr. Martin Kaonzo Kaonzo, National Planning Commission

Mr. Nicodemus Ronchalze Matawa //Naobeb, Office of the President

Ms. Kafula Agnes Mpingana, Parliament

Mr. Thomas Kavaningilamo Alweendo, Ministry of Mines and Energy

Ms. Tulinasho Ejulia Amakali, Ministry of International Affairs

Ms. Nyeuvo Veronica Amukushu, Ministry of Mines and Energy

Ms. Toini Thomas Dhiginina Amutenya, Ministry of Youth

Ms. Margaret Angula, University of Namibia

Mr. Albertus Aochamub, Ambassador

Mr. Karl Mutani Aribeb, Environmental Investment Fund

Mr. Paulus Ashili, Ministry of Environment and Tourism

Ms. Sarafia Ndapandula Ashipala, Ministry of Agriculture

Mr. Uirab Benjamin, Office of the President

Ms. Louise Helen Brown

Mr. Bryn Canniffe, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Reagan Sibanga Chunga, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Panashe Daringo, Office of the President

Mr. Gondi Diaz, Office of the President

Mr. Neville Melvin Gertze, Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation

Ms. Susline Goreses, National Broadcasting Corporation

Ms. Margareth Celeste Gustavo, Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board

Ms. Baronice Raschida Hans, Bank Windhoek

Ms. Maxine Hashipala, Office of the President

Mr. Aune Ndamona Heita, Office of the President

Mr. Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari, Office of the President

Mr. Edison Hiwanaame, Nampower

Ms. Selma Nangombe IIpinge, Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism

Ms. Inge Zaamwani, Office of the President

Ms. Aina Maria Iteta, Environmental Investment Fund

Mr. Chapman James William, Bank Windhoek

Mr. Rudolf Jansen Van Vuuren, Office of the President

Mr. Halwoodi Josef, Ministry of Finance

Mr. Paulus Inekela Kainge, Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources

Ms. Monica Kalondo

Mr. Obeth Mbuipaha Kandjoze, National Planning Commission

Mr. Derek James Klazen, Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources

Mr. Abrahams Leevy Shivute Lee, Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources

Mr. IIpumbu Leonard Nangolo, Office of the President

Mr. More-Blessings Bendict Libanda

Mr. Cedric Mwanota Limbo, Ministry of Works, Transport and Communications

Mr. Simwanza Lucky Swaniso, Ministry of Works, Transport and Communications

Ms. Rosa Stella Mbulu, Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism

Mr. James Yusufu Mnyupe, Office of the President

Mr. Ndilipunye Tuhafeni Modesto, Office of the President

Mr. Johannes Srunda Munango, Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Frans Okuveri Mupurua

Mr. Albinus Imasiku Mutonga, Parliament

Ms. Liina Nuusiku Nantinda, Namibian Environmental Education Network

Mr. Henry Micheal Ndengejeho, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Johan Ndjaronguru

Ms. Gabriela !Kharibasen Okamaru

Ms. Anicia Nicola Peters, University of Namibia

Mr. Trianus Ndawedwa Pohamba, Office of the President

Mr. Scott Terence Richards, Office of the President

Ms. Linda Anne Scott, Namibia High Commission (UK)

Ms. Helvi Nangula Nalitje Shalongo, Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform

Mr. Alfeus Vatilifa Shekunyenge, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Deon Mandume Shekuza

Mr. Sion Ndemuuda Shifa

Mr. Absalom Shigwedha

Ms. Bernadette Namutenya Shivute, Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Erastus Shiweda, Office of the President

Mr. Manongwa Tonycent Sikanda, National Planning Commission

Mr. O’ Brien Simasiku Simasiku, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation

Mr. Kristine Mpingana Sindimba, Office of the President

Mr. Johannes Jaime Sirunda, Namibia Water Cooperation

Ms. Lupeso Erica Siyama, Office of the President

Mr. Amukwaya Thomas, National Broadcasting Corporation

Ms. Susan Tise, Ministry of Mines and Energy

Mr. John Johannes Titus, Ministry of Mines and Energy

Ms. Meriam Tjaimi, Ministry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

Mr. Unotjari Rolf Mcartney Tjiramba

Ms. Rauha Nangula Uaandja, Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board

Ms. Nomsa Uushona, Ministry of International Relations and Cooperations

Mr. Theofelus Uvanga, Development Bank of Namibia

Mr. Jan Johannes Van Wyk, Parliament

Ms. Mercia Roseline Windwaai, Office of the President

Ms. Carol Mwape Zulu,bMinistry of Environment Forestry and Tourism

This calm expression of refusal to conform is a poignant reminder of my Dutch roots; a fierce, civilly disobedient, determination to not be cowed into submission by systemic abuse of one’s rights to freedom. Freedom of choice, association, movement, speech and privacy. Freedoms being irresponsibly impaired by the economic greed of an elite few, mostly old, men. Beside the creepy (and costly) control of movement being enforced by global authorities to curb the spread of a virus threatening the (mostly) old-man demographic, we also have to deal with yet another 39,500 (!) registered, obsequious delegates copping out in Scotland; currying favour with the coal, gas and oil barons (mostly old, extremely wealthy men), thus making little more impact on the global environmental crisis than the hypocrisy of previous Cop-outs.

The Cop-out 26 delegate breakdown – a total of 39,509 participants registered for COP26.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTum00GS5Lm9BsCWYHQ7nvKMzT004BVSPdRrV6G9rnnJHuKehoEqLBb515lh3sGeNRgccrDRKqxtNV9/pubhtml?lsrp=1

Looking through this list of country delegations, I’m gobsmacked by the huge numbers of mostly male-skewed representatives of African countries. In particular, Namibia is supposed to have had 84 delegates (65% males) attending Copout26! WTF? South Africa, a vastly more populated and energy-critical country, had only 56 representatives.

These statistics really beg the questions of who these Namibian delegates are, in what capacities they went to Scotland, and who paid for this bunch to stand in Covid-risky queues trying to get into the hugely overcrowded Cop-out 26 venues.

It truly is a great shame that Billy Connolly won’t be spoofing this event.

Greta Thunberg has tweeted that COP26 is the most excluding of COPs and that it’s nothing more than a greenwashing festival for Northern countries.

Cop-out 26 will also likely turn out to be a Covid superspreader event.

The List of Namibian delegates to follow

What We Know About Educational Technology Effectiveness in Schools

By Mary Burns on November 10, 2021

Few innovations have generated such excitement and idealism—and such disappointment and cynicism—as information and communication technology in education. The noise around ‘educational technology’ is as cacophonous and contradictory as ever.

• Four decades after the introduction of computers in schools.
• Three decades after the first 1:1 computing programme was launched in Australia.
• Two decades after the appearance of virtual schools.
• Roughly a decade after the dawn of tablets.
• Now, as parts of the globe tentatively and anxiously emerge from the worst pandemic in over a century.

To wit: Computers are cast as an expensive boondoggle that do nothing to aid learning, yet tablets proliferate across schools in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Online learning promises equity of access to learning for all the world’s students, yet during COVID 19, online learning generally benefited the ‘easiest to reach‘—students from wealthy families and communities in wealthy countries—thus exacerbating educational inequities.

Educational technology can help students improve reading, math, and writing skills, yet it has failed to deliver consistent learning results. ‘Successful ‘technology interventions often fail to reproduce similar results in different—or even similar—contexts.

Educational Technology Research

The research base has traditionally done little to quiet this clamour. Evidence around the effectiveness of technology for improved learning can be described as falling into one of three categories: success (sometimes); failure (broadly), or no significant difference(generally) (Tamim et al., 2011; Spezia, 2010; McEwan, 2015; Kizilcec et al., 2020; Angrist and Lavy, 2002; Fuchs and Wößmann, 2005; Pedró, 2012; Burns, 2013a).

Competing narratives and inconsistent research findings on educational technology raise genuine concerns, but the picture they paint is incomplete. Amidst the noise around educational technology, the signal has grown stronger over the last few years, and our understanding of technology has begun to come into clearer focus.

This is due to multiple factors:

• The maturation and increased prevalence of educational technology, thus allowing for studies with adequate power and longitudinal data
• The accumulation of years of intensive experiences using a variety of technologies for a variety of educational purposes, thereby contributing to shared and applied knowledge about ‘best practices’
• Increasing demands for rigorous, evidence-based research by donors, governments, and educational organisations, culminating in the creation of entities such as the EdTech Hub and the open access Learning Technology Directory by the International Society of Technology in Education.

These developments should continue to paint a fuller picture of the kinds of accommodations and conditions that must be in place for technology’s promise and potential to be fulfilled. And they should help to further document technology’s diffuse educational benefits as well the many challenges associated with its effective implementation and integration for improved teaching and learning.

What Do We Know?

Here is what we do know about educational technology: We know that that in terms of learning, students are more likely to learn with technology than without it, particularly at-risk learners (Tamim et al., 2011; Bebell and Kay, 2010; Silvernail and MLTI Research and Evaluation Team, 2011; Major and Francis, 2020; Darling-Hammond, Zielezinski and Goldman, 2014).

We know that if students in the Global South cannot use technology as frequently and in similar ways as their peers in wealthy countries, they will be left behind in terms of educational and professional opportunities (MasterCard Foundation, 2020).

We know also that technology’s problems and successes are rarely due to technology alone—they are more often created by decisions and practices that are political, educational, financial, human, and institutional. Many educational systems attempt to use technology to overcome existing constraints in the education system (De Melo et al., 2014).

Yet we know that technology ipso facto cannot fix poor teaching and modernise outdated curricula that emphasise lower order thinking skills and the assessments that measure them.

Educational Technology Can Have Impact

However, technology can be an important component of educational improvement when it is part of a carefully designed and implemented programme of whole system reform (Culp, Honey and Mandinach, 2005). We do know that for many of the world’s teachers and students, the lack of access to a cellular network, an internet signal, or a digital device has been tantamount to a lack of access to education.

And we know that technology, because of its ability to scale, can make attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4)—‘ensur(ing) inclusive and equitable quality education and promot(ing) lifelong learning opportunities for all ‘(United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2021)—far more possible than it would be without technology.

As the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report Think Piece will repeatedly emphasise, educational technology is a highly complex intervention. As such, more than many interventions, it demands much from the education systems that seek to deploy it:

Given that technology is such a highly complex intervention, the research issues around technology are also complex. Education systems are noisy. As an example, even for educational interventions in the Global South that do not involve technology, effect sizes for changes in learning generally tend to be small to moderate (Evans and Yuan, 2020).

Despite this, and despite its ubiquity, complexity, utility, and heterogeneity, technology’s many concrete, non-measurable critical functions have been distilled to one indicator—student learning outcomes as measured on test scores.

Student Test Score Problems

This is problematic for several reasons. Technology has manifold direct and indirect educational and personal benefits that may not lend themselves to empirical measurements, but that makes them no less valuable. The research questions asked about technology may be formulated in ways that fail to consider the complexity and contingencies associated with education and thus may not be answerable (Pedró, 2012).

The diversity of technologies used in a particular setting may make it difficult to attribute specific outcomes to particular interventions, and there may be no normative expectations for improvement over time in student achievement as a result of technology use (Hill et al., 2008).

• It demands access to infrastructure, including sufficient electrical voltage; telecommunications infrastructure; secure spaces; and functioning, reliable equipment.
• It demands that government policymakers understand the affordances and challenges associated with educational technology and the array of inputs that must be in place, so they treat technology as a support, not as a saviour or as a silver bullet.
• It requires that policymakers and decisionmakers be as savvy as the educational technology companies pushing their digital ‘solutions‘ to educational problems, lest they waste limited financial resources that could otherwise be better invested in different interventions.
• It requires teachers who understand the conceptual underpinnings of a piece of software and know how to use, design for, and teach through and with a variety of technologies, as well as have the skills to change dominant instructional paradigms to capitalise on the benefits of technology for instruction and assessment.
• It calls for students who have the literacies, habits of mind, and behaviours to be successful participants in their own technology-based learning experiences.

However, the absence of evidence may not necessarily equal evidence of absence. Focusing on one data point—student test scores—is an insufficient measure of student learning in its fuller sense (E. Morris, personal interview, July, 2021; Spaull and Taylor, 2015). It may not give policymakers and planners the answers they need to make the decisions to drive investment and procurement.

The danger is ‘the baby and the bathwater’ syndrome—that donors and governments may jettison funding technology in schools, not because of issues with technology per se, but because of decades of ‘unproductive’ attempts to isolate the effects of technology as an independent variable.

Technology is often a Rorschach test for the understanding and misunderstanding, the biases and desires of governments, private enterprise, donor agencies, and the education system itself. Although technology can support instruction, it is not a pedagogy.

And while computer programmes and apps can teach students basic skills such as multiplication tables, they cannot cultivate empathy or kindness in students. No amount of technology in the world can fix curricula that emphasise rote learning.

No amount of technology can compensate for teachers who are poorly prepared, poorly paid, or poorly motivated. Technology cannot improve education on its own, but education cannot be improved without technology.

A lightly edited overview of the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report Think Pieceby Mary Burns, a senior technology and teacher professional development specialist based at Education Development Center

The post What We Know About Educational Technology Effectiveness in Schools appeared first on ICTworks.

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This is an ICTworks initiative – completely independent and separate from USAID.

Dear Stanley

my geographic location in Brakwater makes it very difficult to access conventional telecom services such as your wireless uncapped 4G / LTE internet solution. Fibre to the home would be very nice, but likely unaffordable given the distance to the nearest existing fibre infrastructure in the central Brakwater valley.

On a steep hill between my home and Telecom’s Eliseheim 4G infrastructure (6.94 km line of sight) I’ve been able to rig up a homemade solar-powered repeater which has a sim card configured for Telecom’s “30 day unlimited Data Bundle”. This kit has generally worked well – mostly 24/7 (except during a few attempted solar panel thefts) since May 2017.   It’s even managed to get 35 Mb/s download and upto 17 Mb/s upload speeds!

However, I do have a couple of issues –

1.   The “30 day unlimited Data Bundle”  has recently become a 30 day + “whatever number of hours & minutes” to when this bundle expires –  i.e., my current 30 day bundle expires at precisely 14h11:38 on 27 September.  Which means I can only renew this bundle for another “30 days” at 14h12onwards on the 27th!

2.  Because of this peculiar time-fixed arrangement, it is impossible to pay online (e.g., EFT) – which puts me at covid-risk standing in a queue at one of the teleshops.   This risky queuing is aggravated by the most bizarre requirement that the device, which has this pre-paid sim card, must be switched off!

This requires me to climb up the steep hill (carrying a ladder), to unlock a secured box and power down the router.   And wait for my angina to subside for the slide down the hill, and then drive 22 km into town to stand in a covid-risky queue!  And then repeat this exercise on my return home.  At which stage I ponder the raison-d’être of “connected” life in Brakwater, and resort to a large glass of whisky to overcome the wear-and-tear of my internet-dependency.

[I must likely be Telecom’s only client who goes to such lengths to have 4G internet access at home for family and staff;  indeed, my sons call me “woke”!]

Here’s the thing.   Late last year, and earlier this year, much to my delight, Telecom briefly provided a two-month, slightly discounted, pre-payment opportunity.  This saved me on queues, petrol money, my heart condition and my liver.  Much to my disappointment this service stopped abruptly in April, or thereabouts.

Ideally,  I would be happy to pay several months’ worth of “30 day unlimited Data Bundles”  in advance, online by EFT (hopefully with a pensioner’s discount!) so that I can avoid the monthly queues (and the ladder-carrying hillside scrambles).   At very least, I should like to be able to use the internet (before it and I expire!) to pay for the next 30-day bundle.

Given the scale of Telecom’s technical capabilities, are these issues really such difficult problems to solve?  Some well-considered solutions would certainly extend my life and my internet-dependency with yourselves!

Sincerely

tatejoris

[Joris Komen]

We were very lucky … fire jumped 20 metres over fire break and road to inside homestead camp where we were able to put fire out!

Some reckless feckwits on a plot NE of us (“golden oldies” suburb) started a bushfire just before lunchtime on Sunday 26 September in a howling near-gale force wind!

In just under one hour and twenty minutes our entire place was burned (400 odd hectares). The fire continued to burn through large sections of Brakwater south suburbs, and was finally extinguished after midnight.

While the fire brigade was criticized by Brakwater residents for their seemingly chaotic response to panicked home-owners (mostly without any substantial firebreaks), they helped where they could, and we, for one, would have had serious destruction of aviaries and other infrastructure if not for them being here at just the right moment with a sprayer vehicle. With the howling wind, our firebreaks – some of which are 20+ metres wide – proved ineffective.

There are some key issues to consider –

Brakwater residents persist in burning rubbish (illegally!) on their urban plots, instead of removing such rubbish to the skips at the municipal dump on our service road.

They pay scant attention to environment; firebreaks are rare, and tall dry moribund grass and leaf litter are left unattended.

They pay scant attention to weather conditions – at this time of year (september-november) the wind typically howls from the NE during the heat of the day, then swings to SW in the late afternoon early evening. The wind dies off during the night.

The frequent vandalism (by local residents) of fire hydrants on the Brakwater South road forced the City of Windhoek to shut these down. This makes for very slow filling of dowser-tanks on our private spray vehicles with 20mm hosepipe from a tap at home (at least 20 minutes to fill a 400 litre tank). With the right hose, a fire hydrant does the same job in under 7 minutes!!

And then the “gapers” who park their aircon SUVs in strategic roadways to watch others fight fires. Roadways which are meant to provide access to firefighters. Fuck you.

And likewise fuck all those neighbours who ignored pleas for help.

And fuck those truly stupid neighbours who started “backburns” to save their own plots at the expense of others.

They sound like a high-pitched rapidly fired telephone ‘ring’ and are generally hard to see in the foilage of tall trees from where they call; announcing their territories to several neighbours in the landscape around our homestead. Their incubation and fledging period are apparently unknown (Hockey et al. 2005).

We’ve had a pair breeding in our vegetable garden in a low gerenanium bush. The covered nest with a side opening, made of almost white grass fibres intertwined tightly with spider web, is well hidden. Dimensions of the nest, about 0.5 m above the ground, as recorded by Tarboton (2001). Three eggs (very faintly speckled light brown on whitish background (lighter than Tarboton’s (2001) figure 1, p. 110) laid in quick succession from 29-31 December 2020, with incubation started on 31 December. The first egg hatched on 14th January, with 2nd and 3rd eggs hatching through 24 hours of the 15th. So we can report an incubation period of 15-17 days. Egg shells were removed by parents, and there were no visible shell remnants below nest (likewise, there were no faecal material accumulations below the nest).

Newly hatched chick are naked, with light brown skin. Gape is yellow, with tongue and inner mouth black. Tip of tooth is pale yellow. Eyes open from at least 6 days, with dark brown dorsal feathers and primary feathers just out of sheath. One chick failed to survive during these first 10 days of the nestling period, with cause of death unknown. Two remaining chicks at 10 days old were well feathered dorsally. At 13 days fully feathered dorsally and wings, tail feathers out of sheath. First fledgling seen at 17 days old, scrambling and hopping in dense Acacia mellifera vegetation near nest site. Colour of eyes of fledged young dull-brown. Tail feathers of fledglings are incompletely moulted, so appear very short. Hockey et al. (2005) describe eye colour of adults as grey – this is incorrect. Adult eye-colour (plate 1) is reddish-brown.

The parents have a distinctive contact call made during the nestling and fledging period, far quieter than their strident territorial call. This call is used by the adults on approach to the nest, and notably when carrying food! Even when they’re perched within a meter of the nest! I A recording of this call has been uploaded to Xeno-canto.org; it is accessible as recording XC618064. Chicks in nest, and recently fledged young are silent. Fledgling contact call not recorded.

https://www.xeno-canto.org/618064

References

Hockey, P.A.R, Dean, W.R.J & Ryan, P.G., Eds. 2005. Roberts Birds of Southern Africa, 7thEdition. Trustees of the John Voelcker Bird Book Fund, Cape Town. 1,296 pp.

Tarboton, W. 2001. A guide to the nests and eggs of Southern African Birds. Struick, Cape Town. 432 pp.

Governments include municipal authorities and state owned enterprises which are directly responsible for public water consumption.

To wit.

With exception of those populations living alongside perennial rivers, urban Namibians rely almost exclusively on dams and boreholes for their potable water supply.  Sure, there’s also a bit of desalination happening at the coast.

The truth is that ‘engineering’ options are often seen as easier and less politically sensitive then actually managing water demand. Yet making water conservation a way of life, rather than just making it a practice during periods of high water stress, is key.

For example, residents of Melbourne, realizing the positive environmental impacts of water conservation, maintained habits implemented during a severe drought. Further, California Waterkeepers have actively been trying to make water conservation a way of life, fighting for “efficiency and conservation, not only in times of emergency, but also as a full-time strategy for a state challenged by increasingly extreme conditions as a result of climate change.”

So here’s the thang.

I don’t need bad hair days to bitch about the lack of pro-active response by Windhoek bulk water managers to millions of litres of potable water leaking from a main water supply pipe in Brakwater over several weeks – now seven weeks of frequent reporting and counting. There are several cracks/leaks along the length of this 1.5 km pipe installed just a few years ago. one of these leaks has been very obvious for several weeks to date with water pouring across the road. Until our recent good rains in the area, the other leaks were given away by the green flush of vegetation at these sites. No longer obvious, it will require communication by concerned city engineers with concerned local residents to locate these leaks. Let’s see if these civil servants have made water conservation a way of life…

Bait (such as white and black mussels, crab, redbait and (illegally) polychaete worms) is an integral part of coastal life, but is perceived as a low‐value resource as these fisheries are data‐limited, locally focussed and largely unregulated even though the ecological impacts of collection are considerable. This came to mind recently at “Blare”, a favourite recreational angling site on the beach some kilometers south of the Ugab River mouth.

Fishing on the day had been particularly quiet, with the odd ‘size’ kabeljou and barbels being caught on conventional baits – white mussel and pilchards. Two parties of anglers remained (ourselves (four persons) and an elderly couple from Hentiesbay) on the beach, braving a nasty wind and increasing side current on our last day angling on the coast.

Shortly after midday, a small saloon car (Windhoek registered) arrived and stopped some distance from the beach; four blokes emerged with fishing rods and ‘streepsakke’ and set themselves up on either side of the Henties’ couple. Casting out into the surf (not very far from shore) these blokes were catching galjoen, steenbras and kabeljou almost immediately. And repeatedly so. On approach by one of us with a gift of frozen pilchards (we were ready to leave anyway), the bloke (who claimed to be an artisinal fisherman from Windhoek (!)) was dismissive of our bait offering, showing his – a bundle of polychaete worms – wrapped in newspaper.

Predator populations are limited by the rate at which their prey reproduce. You can call this a universal law of nature – like gravity.

So while a social predator like the orca or dolphin will have developed several elaborate mechanisms to be more successful/efficient at catching their prey (mostly fish, but also birds and other mammals), the “food chain” is generally protected by numerical scale – in a natural world there will never be more predators than their prey species will “allow”. Hence the typical numerical predator-prey pyramid.

However, humans (as the top-(social) predator) have fucked this elegant model up completely, and while a few of them are trying to back-pedal against the onslaught of greedy profiteers, the prognosis is gloomy – humanity will soon resort to catching and eating toxic jellyfish in a cocktail of plastic and heavy metal soup.

I’ve been bitching about over-exploitation of marine resources for years – and while I still enjoy spending time on our beaches catching the breeze (and a few pan-size fish), circumstances have changed politically, and what used to be the abuse by seasonal fish-thieves from South Africa with their venter freezer-trailers, is now the abuse by growing numbers of ‘artisinal’ fishermen from Hentiesbay (and seemingly) further afield, using (illegal) polychaete worms to catch their prey. With total disregard for local laws and regulations.

My reports to the Ministry of Fish inspectorate remain ignored.

I have no objection to artisinal fisheries, but I do expect their respect for existing rules and regulations which are (mostly) designed to protect the limited marine resources accessible to recreational anglers and artisinal fishermen alike on the beaches between Walvis Bay and the Ugab river mouth.