The Independent is today edited by Bono. On hearing the news I groaned, but having read it on the web, he’s got to get marks for producing a considerably more sober and serious newspaper than usual – even with a Damien Hirst front page.

The outstanding article to my mind is the piece about Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister, who is making a serious, and successful effort to tackle corruption.

Last year Nigeria was named as one of the 21 most improved countries in 2005. “Some very, very powerful people including the inspector general of police [Nigeria’s top cop] have been brought to book. He has been tried, and is now in jail on several counts,” the minister says with a grim smile. “Two judges have been suspended, two sacked outright, three ministers sacked, two rear-admirals, a state governor, top customs officials. Did we get all the people? Not yet – but we’ve got enough to send a powerful signal and [generate] a powerful fear. People in power now know they can’t act with impunity.” The tentacles of her anti-fraud operation have reached down to lower levels too. More than 500 people behind internet “advance fees” scams have been jailed for frauds estimated to have milked more than $100m a year out of gullible Americans alone.

This is the first I’ve read of this story, and it of course reminded me of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, recently elected president of Liberia, which has just been named by the UN as one of the UN’s list of forgotten stories. Not quite sure that’s the case with that story – although the publicity was due to the fact a famous footballer was her opponent, and have read precious little since about Liberia’s progress.

There are many parallels between the two women – both formerly high-level UN bureaucrats. I’ve never met either of them, but in my UN days I met many high-powered UN women from Africa who were desperate to try to deal with these issues of corruption and underdevelopment.

Could they, as a class, be the saviours of Africa, given the chance to do so? It might be one of the continent’s best chances overall.

Dear Knowledgeable Reader,

Having got a new computer that will OCR a page without giving me time to make a cup of tea while it is doing it, I now of course want more …

So, does anyone know of an OCR or related programme that will scan text from a succession of pages into the one file, rather than creating one page per file that then needs to be pasted together?

After decades of killing far too many trees with photocopying, I’m now trying to go for genuinely paperless note-taking, which is now just about possible. (Well except in the British Library, which still bans scanners and cameras.) And with Google Desktop it has enormous possibilities for information access.

Cycling down Oxford Street yesterday lunchtime I was depressed, as I always am, by the swarms of people collecting stuff – bags and bags of stuff, that in many cases they can’t possibly need or really want. A beautiful, sunny Saturday and this was the best thing they could think to do with it.

Well not everybody, of course; I’d earlier had a lovely, madly busy session doing handling in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum – barely stopped talking for 2.5 hours.

I particularly enjoy the “gifted kids” – an immediately identifiably category. They are usually with clearly working class parents with limited education, and the parents look with fond bemusement (and a touch of embarrassment) at the child they have produced – one who is interested in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, who talks extremely fluently for their age (usually around 10 or so) on such things.

It is partly because it brings back memories. Mum and I probably looked a bit like that when I dragged her around the Chinese exhibition in Sydney at age 11 or so.

As for the shoppers, well it seems there is nothing new about that. A Liverpool gallery has just opened an exhibition about an early 20th-century shopaholic, an intelligent woman given no professional or even social outlet:

The puzzle about the clothes is that not only were many of them unworn, but they were clothes she had little or no occasion to wear. As the wife of a local GP, she had few opportunities to dress up. The Tinnes do not seem to have had a particularly active social life; her husband held surgeries every evening, and they seldom went to parties.

Perhaps, like many middle-class families before the war, the couple dressed for dinner, but their daughter has no recollection of this. ‘I remember my mother in rather uninteresting black things,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t very stylish, and I just can’t imagine her wearing some of those dresses. Her family would have been shocked.’

This is understandable enough in its time and place; but why is it so many are still behaving in similar ways?

Can’t help feeling today’s Independent splash falls into the “local man survives ship disaster” Titanic trap: Why global warming is to blame for Britain’s hay fever epidemic.

The pollen from trees and grasses that produces allergic reactions in millions of people is steadily increasing with rising temperatures, according to the UK’s leading pollen specialist. Pollen seasons are lengthening, and the pollen itself is provoking a morepowerful reaction.

Next: high sea-level rises will flatten the break at your favourite surf beach.

And, in the “it was bound to happen some time” category, the BBC goes live to the minicab driver for his views on the Apple court case.

I know they’re unlikely to be cheap, but there’s a PCWorld 200m from my house, so last night, as I was trying to set up a new computer, and I found at 7.45pm that I needed a serial cable not supplied, I thought that I’d just nip out and get it there. Whizzed into the doors just before they closed, found a staff member hiding amidst the racks, thought “great”. Until I saw the pirce-tag: £20 (or of course £19.99). For a bit of wire and two plugs that was, I decided, just a little too ridiculous, so I came home without the cable.

Then I looked it up on Amazon; £3 for a longer one, with four plugs, not two.

The task has left me musing: “Whatever happened to ‘Plug ‘n’play”. Several years ago it was what everyone was advertising, but it must have provoked so many angry phonecalls, and maybe suits for false advertising, that computer companies dropped it. Why should it still be so complicated trying to transfer a few files from one computer to another? Why doesn’t the cable (which would only cost the manufacturers a few pence) come with the computer?!

If you hear a rhythmic soft squelching sound today that will be me beating my head against the wall.

Note for burglars: new computer is a Morgan cheapie; definitely not worth the effort….