Former Minister of Mines Mahmoud Thiam once famously said that “every crook on Earth” lands in Conakry. Read (a) Conakry : plaque-tournante de l’Escroquerie internationale (b) Guinea Mining. Exploiting a State on the Brink of Failure It turns out he was, himself, a big-time offender in the plundering of the country’s meager finances. Mahmoud belongs in the category of high level of corrupt…
I just read the New Yorker’s article titled “Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100.” The evocation of Shannon’s career took me back decades ago to the 20th century’s last quarter. It was the academic year 1967-1968. And I was an eighteen-year old freshman student at the Institut Polytechnique de Conakry (Guinea). I was in Propedeutics, which, then, designated the first of…