The Renaming of Nations

Throughout history, the global map has been constantly redrawn, not just by shifting borders, but by nations choosing to redefine their own identities on the world stage.

In 2002, East Timor became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century and adopted the Portuguese name of Timor-Leste. 

Following this trend of official updates, Cape Verde changed its UN-recognized English name to Cabo Verde in 2013. 

The Kingdom of Swaziland rebranded as Eswatini in 2018. 

A year later, the Republic of Macedonia officially became North Macedonia. 

And more recently, Turkey registered its name change to Türkiye with the United Nations in 2022. 

Finally, on June 26, 2026, the Pacific island nation of Nauru reclaimed its traditional indigenous identity by officially becoming the Republic of Naoero. 

Malaysian women's doubles pair Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan are just one match away from winning their second World Tour title of the year after storming into the Taipei Open final on Saturday. 

The world No. 5 took 35 minutes to sweep aside American world No. 27 Francesca Corbett-Jennie Gai 21-15, 21-17 in the last four.

Germany Apologizes for Leopard Jibe

The German foreign ministry had wanted to poke fun at the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov (left) during his tour of Africa – South Africa, Eswatini, Angola and Eritrea – and they tweeted on January 24 that he wasn't there looking for leopards, but using the trip to try and justify Russia's "full-scale invasion" (actually, it's a Special Military Operation) of Ukraine. And to stress their point, they added a leopard emoji.

 

The tweet, and the 🐆 emoji played off Germany's decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to help the country fight off Russian forces. But the whole thing backfired when Africans were aggrieved. 

 

An upset African Union official said the continent was being portrayed as only about wild animals. 

 

Ebba Kalondo (right), the spokesperson for AU Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat, tweeted back two days later to the German government account questioning if Africa, its people and its wildlife was “just a joke to you”? 

 

And in a follow-up tweet on the same day, she wrote: “Foreign policy is not a joke nor should it be used to score cheap geopolitical points by illustrating an entire Continent with colonial tropes”. 

 

Of course, on January 26 itself, the Krauts apologized, saying that the tweet wasn't meant to offend. 

 

Germans are being laughably childish!

Omicron Shows Itself

In my post published November 01, I had highlighted a subvariant of Delta labelled AY.4.2 that has been detected in the UK and a few other countries. The good news is that despite its spread, it is not labelled a “variant of concern”. 

But now, another coronavirus variant has emerged.

It was first reported to the WHO from South Africa on November 24, and has already been identified in Botswana, Belgium, China Hong Kong and Israel. 

On Friday, the WHO declared the variant to be "of concern" and named it Omicron. They said the number of cases of this variant, initially named B.1.1.529, appeared to be increasing in almost all of South Africa's provinces. 

The first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection had been from a specimen collected on November 09 – and the WHO revealed it would take a couple of weeks to understand the impact of Omicron, as scientists worked to determine how transmissible it was. 

Not a few countries are already getting jittery. The European Union and other major destinations, including the United States and Canada, have moved to block flights from southern African countries – Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe – following the discovery of the said variant. 

Believe me, Covid is just a never-ending story.

I also read news that Merck’s experimental Covid pill has shown lower efficacy in an updated study. 

Following the release of a full analysis of trial results, the pharmaceutical company said on Friday the oral drug, molnupiravir, showed a 30 percent reduction in hospitalizations and deaths when compared with a placebo, based on data from more than 1,400 patients. 

Last month, the company said data from 775 patients had showed that reduction was “approximately” 50 percent. I had reported this in my post that was dated October 03, 2021. 

I don't believe Big Pharma. They are not exactly trustworthy. 

Remember how Pfizer brought out its Covid vaccine “at the speed of science”? Now a whistleblower has told the world that speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. 

As was reported, Brook Jackson, a regional director employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group had told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal Phase III trial. Not to mention that staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of problems they were finding. 

Pfizer's data fraud aside, Merck have speedily filed for a US authorization of the oral antiviral Covid treatment on October 11, following the interim data.

[Interestingly, Pfizer are already developing an oral antiviral drug Paxlovid for Covid-19, which requires patients to take three pills twice a day for five days]. 

Ever the follower, Malaysia has put in an order for molnupiravir that is said to force the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to mutate itself to death. 

I venture a guess that even with our “high” vaccination rates, it is not giving us the results we are anticipating. Our infections are stubbornly clinging on to four digits – yesterday, that number was 5,501 cases and 45 deaths.

Lim Kok Wing Proclaims Himself King of Africa

I don't know about you but Lim Kok Wing on a billboard is already an eyesore. And his latest attempt at self-promotion is sickening because it inflicts raw pain. 

I'm reminded of an insult I once came across and it describes him to a T. “You’re like the sun, not because you light up our world but because it hurts to look at you!"

Proclaiming himself King of Africa is an audacious act of impudent cockiness of the highest order. 

I cannot even begin to fathom where Lim (left)  is coming from, no matter how hard I tried – unless he is portraying himself as the “demi-god savior” of the continent because he offers young Africans tertiary education opportunities in his branch campuses in Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini and Sierra Leone?! If that is the case, he is guilty of preserving a “negative stereotype of Africans not having access to education. 

I can only conclude Lim’s ego is the boss. This clod earnestly wants us to believe he is larger than life. This cacafuego desperately hopes the public will put him on a pedestal and maybe, even worship and deify him. This coccydynia has sadly, lost his marbles.

Nobody minds if he keeps his derangement to himself – but to make public his self-delusion is distastefully despicable. Besides, nobody gives a shit. 

In fact, somebody correctly initiated a petition “LIM KOK WING UNIVERSITY'S CONDESCENDING BILLBOARD NEEDS TO BE TAKEN DOWN” on Change.org on June 07, 2020, saying that portraying Lim as a “saviour” is condescending and robs African students of their agency to pave their own way in the world. 

“The use of a jungle animal and reference to ‘king’ perpetuates ideas of Africa as one big jungle and adds to the (wrongful) animalistic characterisation of the students. This perpetuates the notion that black people need saving, taking away their power and psychologically placing them in an inferior role”, this person wrote on the petition page. 

Worse, I'm told the photo of Lim being surrounded by Limkokwing University students in Freetown, Sierra Leone had been edited to make the crowd appear larger and more packed than it actually was. 

What a joke! Nothing more than a wretched exaggeration for the mere sake of self-glorifying himself.

Enough said. Suffice to say, my senses are already benumbed.  

I find this whole self-aggrandizing thingy disagreeable, debasing and demeaning.  It not only insults me but worse, it disrespects Africans. God knows what they've done to deserve this! 

As far as I am concerned, the billboard spews a racist message – and we mustn't tolerate it. Not in Malaysia, not anywhere else.

It is sad that Lim consistently sets low expectations for himself and stll fails to achieve them.

The Cost of a Name Change

On April 19, 2018, one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchs announced that Swaziland will be officially known as the Kingdom of Eswatini. 

King Mswati III (left) had added – I’m not sure if it was an afterthought – that too often, Swaziland was confused with the similar-sounding Switzerland, when referred to abroad. 

I wasn’t concerned about the name change – after all, Bheki Makhubu, a journalist and editor of local magazine The Nation, said that the King’s pretty much doing what he likes with the country. 

The King already treats the state of Eswatini as his personal property – besides, people are already used to the king referring to his country as Eswatini anyway. 

I was concerned about the cost of the name change. 

According to South Africa-based intellectual property lawyer and blogger Darren Olivier: “There’s value in that, there’s intrinsic value in that identity and what it means for the people”. 

But at the same time, he also admitted there’s a cost to pay. Like many, Olivier had wondered exactly what the price tag for Eswatini will be. 

In his blog, he had estimated that it will cost the country $6 million to change its name. 

He calculated this based on the country’s taxable and non-taxable revenue at about $1 billion. For a large company the average marketing budget costs around 6% of its revenue, he surmised. That would be $60 million in this case – and rebranding budgets typically take up 10% of those marketing costs. This gives the $6 million that may ultimately have to be found by the eSwatini government. 

As Olivier had pointed out, for a small country that is largely agricultural – with about 70% of the population depending on subsistence farming, growing food to feed their families – that is “not insignificant”. 

He said his estimate was very “back of the envelope” and based mainly on assumptions about how rebranding works in corporate contexts such as when a company changes its name – but it was a potentially useful bit of guesswork given that no-one really knows what kind of bill King Mswati III’s people will be left with. 

Jeremy Sampson, executive director for Africa at marketing firm Brand Finance opined: “The paperwork, the website, signage on government properties, government agencies – there’s a huge, huge expenditure here and one’s got to ask right at the beginning is this really necessary”. 

For sure, everything has a price.

Anyway, a country's gotta do what it's gotta do!

Yesterday, in Group A, the World Cup match between Egypt and Saudi Arabia saw the former losing to the latter 1-2. The result didn’t matter because both countries had already been eliminated. In the other match, Uruguay easily whipped Russia 3-0 – in any case, the two countries have made it to the Round of 16. 

In Group B, Portugal drew 1-1 with Iran and the match between Spain and Morocco saw both teams scoring two goals each. Of course, Portugal and Spain progress to the Round of 16 too.