South Africa

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Just completed an incredible month long trip to Asia - what a place! The sheer scale and scope of what is happening on that side of the globe is truly awe-inspiring. People, places, machinery, technology, focus, ambition, education, all very fitting adjectives for describing what I saw and literally felt while I made my way from meeting to meeting. Although I have made numerous trips there before, this time made a much greater impression on me for some reason. I guess when you are in SA there is a tendency to get a bit sucked in by what is happening around you and lose a bit of perspective of the bigger picture.

I see the usual suspects are still very much in play – the ANCYL calling people Lucifer (are we in the 16th Century?), Jay-Z was found not guilty and sung his Machine Gun song (the man is obsessed with phallic symbols) and of course the Prez. meditated over it all with his “Native Club” (sign me up!).

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t join the Native Club”

PS : the "Proudly South African" post was a work in progress from awhile back that slipped through the publishing software, will rework it and get it back up soon.

So I see the good times are still rolling in Cape Town. If you’re guessing by good times I mean chairs are being thrown around and knives are being drawn on the Mayor – you’re definitely on top of your game! Democracy (SA style of course) is truly on the march in Western Cape where democratic principles like Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association are ably protected and defended by the ruling party :

Max Ozinsky, deputy secretary for the ANC in the Western Cape, said Zille had visited the area without telling the ANC councillor, Elese Depoutch, or the party's leadership about it. "She has been working in the area for the past six or seven years, and she has always supported those who disrupted the ANC meetings," said Ozinsky

Come now Max, tell us what you were really thinking…

“That cow, Zille dared to venture into our bastion of ANC meritocracy, who the hell does she think she is? The most esteemed Comrade Manto??” (my mistake, that last sentence contained an oxymoron - Manto meeting any part of her constituency is like the Pres. admitting he made some mistake in policy.)

Speaking of the Prez, I see he decided to issue for the following royal edict statement

“Today, we need to ask ourselves whether we, cadres of our movement, are still upholding the unimpeachable track record of Ellen Khuzwayo and other past ANC cadres," he wrote in his weekly letter. We need to ask ourselves whether the seeds of self-sacrifice they planted into our organization have not begun to fall on thorny, barren soil of self-interest!"

Which of course in the lingua franca of Delmas can be roughly translated into “Did you say the taxpayer will pay – in that case Pimp my ride!” or if you have the more refined Pretorian way of speaking “Hell yeah! Send that Beemer over thissaway!”.

Public Service. It’s tough but someone’s gotta do it.

Just seen the very interesting "V for Vendetta". Was it a nice bit of agitprop cinema, hell yeah! Was it about the Bush administration, hell yeah! Can we take a bit of the message and apply it to our own country, hell yeah!

"People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."

A simple, catchy little movie slogan, but one that makes a lot of sense if you consider its implications. At its core democracy is all about action and reaction - you deliver poor, incompetent service to the electorate and you get booted out of office. You deliver fine, visionary leadership and you are rewarded with a continued control of the levers of power. This means a healthy level of fear needs to permeate the governing group - fear of failing in their mandate, fear of the electorate calling them to account, fear of being driven from office. I'm not talking about a paralysing terror of making a mistake, I am talking about a healthy fear that keeps the government on their toes and mindful that they are not South Africa, but merely represent South Africa. Those in power need to understand that they are transitory and remain in power only so long as we allow it, not the other way round.

Now think of our current government, be it at national, provincial or local level - do they have this healthy sense of fear of the electorate? Or do they act like arrogant, paternalistic clowns who seem to have more in common with medieval lords-of-the-manor rather than elected public officials. This attitude can be easily seen from the Eastern Cape where this idiot was allowed to poison the Province for SIX years, to the spend-taxpayers-money-like-a-drunken-pirate-so-we-can-get... at the Department of Justice. No Repercussions=No Fear=Governmental Arrogance=Faux Democracy.

The governing party knows it. The opposition knows it. The electorate doesn't know it. If the government decides to do something or follow a particular course of action, there is not a damn thing you or I can do about it. Nothing. Oh sure we can moan and maybe kick up a fuss in the Court's but inevitably the government will get what it wants...because it can and because it faces no prospect of punishment at the polls (at least in the near-midterm). There is no fear. This point was ably illustrated in the last government elections and in this post where it was noted that dissatisfaction with the government led to virtually no retribution by the electorate at the polls. Suckers. 

In any other sane democracy Manto's handling of the Aids crises would have brought down the government, the NIA scandal would have led to widespread concern among the populace, the various service delivery protests would have led to a major reevaluation of the direction government is taking in terms of delivery. Not in our faux-democracy. Here it is business as usual and these controversies are treated as speed-bumps on the way to national (ANC) glory rather than the national disgraces they should be.

So keep complaining, but don't hold your breath because: no-ones listening...because the don't have to.

Update : No fear and arrogance in action.

The coverage of last week’s little tussle between Helen Zille and the ANC over the new World Cup stadium seems to have given passing reference to why Zille took such drastic action. The DA may have won the Mayor ship and wrested control from the ANC, but I think their actions were driven by a growing reality over the massive challenge they face in running the city. The stadium battle is only the first problem the DA will face in a city that is in dire need of upgrades and service delivery.

To further this point and understand the long road ahead for the City lets look at a few highlights from an article written by Carol Paton in the Financial Mail :

Cape Town's electricity and sewerage infrastructure is crumbling and in urgent need of huge investment; the administration is weak, demoralised and distrustful of Zille; the housing crisis grows every year no matter if the province spends its entire budget; and the city faces a R3bn price tag to meet Fifa requirements for the soccer World Cup in 2010.

 

The elephant in the room is the housing shortage and the inability of previous City administrations to tackle the problem :

As with all city politicians that have gone before her, housing is the problem that is most on her mind. Cape Town, says Zille, gets about R350m/year for housing - which would allow almost 9 000 matchbox houses to be built annually, assuming that infrastructure for water and sewerage has been paid for out of the city's other budgets. 
"There are 250 000 households on the waiting list, which grows by 16 000/year. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that you are going backwards every year," she says. It's a numbers game that the city just can't win, and rather than continuing to promise everyone a house it would be far better to take an honest look at housing policy: either changing the national budget to ensure that there will be brick houses for all, or changing the policy to fit the budget by giving everyone services, like water and sewerage, but not all of them houses, she argues.

 
It might be a more realistic way of looking at the problem. But Zille is completely without influence to change national housing policy. And were she to try to do it alone, announcing to the poor of Cape Town that the DA did not plan to build houses, would be political suicide for her party.

Then there is the less visible but also important :

Six years ago, the Unicity Commission - a body set up to strategise the merging of Cape Town's six metropolitan substructures - put the sewerage infrastructure backlog at R1,4bn. Neighbourhood-based sewage pump stations built decades ago are no longer able to deal with the demands of a city of 3m people. But since the commission's warning, no investment in sewerage infrastructure has been made, except for an emergency R200m at one of the sewerage works. 

And of course who could forget :

The electricity crisis is more visible. Cape Town needs additional generating capacity urgently and the city will have to campaign hard with national authorities to make sure that it gets it sooner rather than later. Aside from the crisis in the supply, the distribution network - 6 000 substations that fall under the control of the city and now regional electricity distributor RED1 - are decrepit. With a maximum lifespan of 30 years, most are 33 years old and, says an official, "have been in crisis maintenance mode for five years". It is these substations that continually trip the network when Koeberg attempts to bring the power back up after an outage.

If the DA pulls this one off, they deserve to move on to bigger and better things…

 - (Big hat tip to Hex) -

...doesn't it? :

The words of Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States envoy to Iraq, were so chilling last week because they gave voice to a growing fear. He warned that “we have opened a Pandora’s box’’ that “would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child’s play’’. He was referring to the nightmare scenarios of civil war provoking wider regional conflict drawing in Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Afghanistan’s violence is on a smaller scale but still vicious. Last year 1 400 Afghans were killed. The choice of targets is particularly cruel -- teachers and schools have been attacked, along with administration officials. The introduction of suicide bombings indicates new outside support, which prompted the gloomy recent assessment to the US Congress by the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency that attacks are likely to increase.

The war on terror has failed -- it has been the most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented, it was redolent of an old-fashioned understanding of conflict and quaint faith in superior military technology.

It has had precisely the opposite impact from that allegedly intended, by significantly increasing the threat of terrorism while alienating Muslim opinion across the globe. Yet the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and uttering the same platitudes.

 

Does liddle-baby-Thabo need protection fwom da big bad man? Don't worry Mamma Mbete's here baby, she'll protect you from the bad man from the DA with his nasty, nasty questions :

National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete has rejected as "outrageous" claims by an opposition MP that she sought to protect President Thabo Mbeki at the expense of parliament's constitutional obligation to hold the executive to account. Mbete's political adviser, Lulamile Mapholoba, said that questions put to members of the executive, including the president, must comply with parliamentary rules and practices. If this did not occur, the question would be disallowed.

Mapholoba was reacting on Friday to a statement issued by DA MP Eddie Trent last week, criticising the Speaker for rejecting a question about whether Mbeki had met the head of Thales International, Jean-Paul Perrier, in May last year. Thales and its South African subsidiary, Thint, are facing trial later this year, along with former deputy president Jacob Zuma, for alleged corruption. Mapholoba confirmed that the question had been disallowed because some of the words used were "sarcastic and hence offensive", and the fact that it was not in order to suggest a member might have acted improperly.

 

Oh boo-friggin'-hoo, if the Prez. can't handle a bit of sarcasm in a question he should get out of politics now. I haven't watched Parliament Live recently but I do remember the boo's and cat-calls that emanated from the ANC back-benchers each time a member of the Opposition was making a speech.

Dry your eyes Baleka, I think that joyride official trip you took to Liberia has clouded your judgement.

When you're on fire you're on fire :

With the municipal elections safely out of the way, our political life is subsiding back to normal. An eternally grateful Mr Mbeki has been released from his disagreeable four weeks of country-arrest, and is back striding the world stage on our behalf. SABC news department loyalists no longer have to traipse around the lower end of the democratic compass recording their master’s every piety for reproduction in inspiring quarter-hour instalments each evening at seven. But for Eskom, these would have been electrifying as well.

Relieved of the exigencies of the municipal hustings, members of the central executive of the African National Congress are now able to get back to more crucial matters. And none more crucial than deciding who from among ANC ranks is going to be elected to lead the party’s new and imaginative campaign of moral degeneration.

This extraordinary volte-face has become necessary by force of circumstance. The mandarins of the ANC are acknowledging that, from among their ranks, only someone of Jacob Zuma’s singular qualities could ever have been charged with the regeneration and reinforcement of a nation’s moral texture. There was good reason for appointing him to flush out and purify the national soul. He was the only one among the ranks of the ruling party -- or their hangers-on -- of the requisite ethical fortitude. He was top of the heap, the very acme of probity and restraint. Together with his disciples in the ANC Youth League, Jacob Zuma jealously occupied South Africa’s moral uplands. Sadly, with his attentions now diverted by other and graver personal issues, he has left both his political brothers and a nation bereft. We now have only one way to go: back down into the sewers. If the ANC Youth League have their way we won’t even have a bitch to burn on the way....

 

Brilliant! Be sure to go read the rest for yourself...

Something needs to be said.

The latest revelations about just how dirty Brett Kebble was and how he had a number of senior ANC heavyweights under his little finger is indicative of a serious malaise affecting the ruling party. I remember a while back some ANC Youth League functionary declaring something to the effect that Kebble was "our white man". In other words the ANC Youth League believed that they were the ones calling the shots and Kebble was just some happy-go-lucky fat white guy who they (the league) could go to to get some cash when they needed it. 

But Kebble was the player, the puppet master who used these idiots ego's and lust for the latest Visa platinums to suck them into his world of chequebook politics. You wonder why Kebble managed to avoid paying tax for so long, or why he seemed to always be one step ahead in the PR war with the Scorpions? It's because he had all of these fools dancing to his tune as he changed his personae to suit whatever the situation - generous donor to the arts/africanist/patriot/BEE pathfinder - it's easy to do all this if you're using other people's money!

But of course the blowhards at the ANCYL didn't see this. No, instead they just focused on those "babe magnet" cars, designer suits and pampering their juvenile ego's. The same can be said for all those listed in Kebble's loan list - what the hell does crooked Tony Yengeni need R1.4m for? Doesn't he have enough cash from Thales already? It is really starting to seem that the political elite in the ANC are playing a one-upmanship game with each other to see who can buy the best silk-tie/exotic trip on government money/latest luxury vehicle, all the while the majority of the population lives in poverty.    

Here's an adage I think should be stapled onto the forehead of every Party crony who thinks he's hit the big time when a "friend" from big business wants to lend him some cash "no strings attached" -

                  "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts" - Virgil