The Mail n Guardian's annual scorecard for performance by ruling cadre politicians shows a healthy average and there is a joyous sense of general hubris, glossing over the snorting at the feeding trough this year.
For most of us, it seemed obvious that Mr Manuel would be top dog, long may he continue to prevail over the gaping void that lurks below our bluff exterior.
Nonetheless the real winner should have been Ngconde Balfour.
Yes...Absolute top honours for saving the country from immediate financial ruin must be the Minister of Correctional services: a department that has, through some form of pleasantly misguided morality, been relegated to an under-performing position.
Now in fairness to everyone, I hadn't spotted this myself although I did have a hint a short while back. I was alerted to the truth at a dinner party over the hols with a group of businesspersons of comfortable means and immense anxiety. Talk ranged among other things over the M& G 'scorecard'.
We had started out discussing that great thing about Christmas: the 'Presents'.
We discovered that we had all taken Mr Manuel's [and Mr Mboweni's] advice and saved half the bonus, and bought fewer 'pressies': none on credit. We agreed that this had taken immense fortitude, mostly fighting the obsessive needs of our respective wives to spend as though there were no tomorrow [which there isn't].
Alone amongst my peers, I suspect deep down that there is not much point in saving any money at all, other than as a hedge against some immediate catastrophes. Generally after tax and inflation the interest isn't worth a damm [sorry Rhett]. Then of course there is a reasonable probability that whatever one saves will somehow be 'stolen' by some competent, thieving investment industry 'clever'.
Therefore our table voted: for second runner-up for the unsung-hero-of-the-year award, the fellow who beat the insurance/assurance industry into making some long overdue reparations-Vuyani Ngalwana. Good on yer Vu. [Mr Ngalwana was inappropriately voted #37 by M& G on its Dreamers, dazzlers and Doers page 15]
The financial industry has always worked at the sharp end of capitalist enterprise selling fantasy, dreams and ultimately an inevitable day of reckoning: they have sucked gloriously on the marrows of their market. They have it all. Many of us have long held deep suspicions about the veracity of the financial industry, and were equally dubious about the stooges who fill most of the so-called 'regulatory agencies', created more as sinecures for discarded cadres than for any useful purpose other than becoming yet another barrier to market entry. But that fellow Ngalwana actually performed and blew them into submission [and we all suspected that he would soon be 'redeployed'.]
However, it was suggested; helping him was the prospect of real Jail time and the probability of painful and deathly anal rape.
Consider further that there are a collection of aging [former]'execs' from the recently failed Saambou Bank who face the prospect of 'doing time' for palpable failure to perform their jobs according to the newly emerging rules of the market-that do not easily accept [inappropriate] performance apparently.
Plus: [further point] a small bonus-perhaps too late for the Press: a 'Boeremag' prisoner gets an 'Early release' under correctional supervision. The man becomes a 'hands-upper', a 'joiner'; who turned on his fellows, in return for ending jail time. ' [* Boeremag: For offshore readers: a largely irrelevant and marginalized collection of clapped-out alleged right-wing reactionary activists whose objectives are largely incoherent.]
So it could be that on some limited fronts 2005 was the year the People fought back. [Pity about all the other fronts: like plugging a dyke, attempting to keep up with all the good stuff while damping down the fires that rage in too many places.]
'Top of the class' went [officially] to Mr Manuel for a thoroughly well deserved A. Nonetheless I think there is an unsung hero in this package who was buried somewhere on the celebs page and would be my vote for runner up for unsung person of the year. Mr J. Steinberg [#69 on the M&G play list: P15] for an award winning and widely read book on the prison 'Numbers' gangs.He has driven home the reality of life 'inside'.
Why do I make this random and oblique choice of heroes? I don't. They make themselves. The common denominator running through all the above can be summed up in the following idea proposed at our table that evening.
'The ever-rising tide of revenue flowing to the till from formerly reluctant taxpayers may be due to Mr Manuel's trump card: the SA Penal system. Hence the Minister for correctional services [Mr Ngconde Balfour] emerges as the true hero of the revolution and should have received an A++ rather than a measly D.'
Consider: We did away with the death penalty and substituted the so-called 'slow puncture': anal gang rape by HIV AIDS infested fellow inmates is real and happens. Nice 'clevers', fellows who just wanted to keep more of their own money than the government hit men wanted them to keep, will now find themselves sentenced to a minimum period of jail time; and in the short period before they can organise their cash flow to provide for a comfortable stay, they will be raped repeatedly and face an almost inevitable slow and agonising death.
Well this is how urban legend now has it.
So we can see that the State now has a powerful [and formerly well hidden] incentive to maintain the present horror that is a prison system, as a deterrent to stiff collar 'thieving'.
Therefore we all declared first prize for this past year to be the Department of Correctional services [and #1 in the M&G Top Ten] for having presided over a monster of such horrific proportions that the very thought of going there makes grown accountants quail.
Thus the legitimised theft represented by taxation becomes more efficiently ground out of the truly productive in society, and sits in the budget surpluses idly waiting for the same medicine to be meted out to indolent and under performing cadres.
May all bloggers and other readers have a cool and prosperous 2006
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Monday, December 19, 2005
Playing the Rape card: a christmas tale
Weblog
Jozi
18 December 2005
The fun part of this end of the year shutdown time is the opportunity to meet old buddies who have moved offshore and who pay a passing visit to catch up with friends and family.
So on what was once called Dingaan's Day, and has now been deconstructed to some other unremembered reason to have a day off work, I shared a heap of ritually burned meat with an old friend. He is a guy who moved his factory offshore about five or six years ago, to avoid the BEE licensed property theft arrangement, that was blowing in at that time on the winds of change. He has since become rich working out of mainland China and exporting to many places.
He does still maintain a distribution office here now, and pops in and out about four times a year to check on sales, and shake hands with his favourite retailers for a few days. Talk soon turned to The Zuma Affair. 'When I was here a few months ago', he said, 'the news media communicated a definite sense of immanent revolution, I had to go somewhere to see a customer and the area was jammed with rallying supporters chanting weird things like 'down with Thabo'. It was dammed odd...what happened to 'kill the boer?'
'Aagh-a luta continua' I said, 'They are at least two thousand down, and many of the survivors are off to farm in Aussie.'
We then had some comment on the number of prominent personalities who had publicly backed Zuma and how they were all desperately scrambling around now to get their exposed arses back onto the correct seat in the great game of political musical chairs while the music's playing again.
'Now' he said eventually, 'It's like Zuma never existed. He has completely vanished. He's become- 'The man who never was'.' Then he paused and made his dramatic declaration- 'We've just seen the 'Rape Card' used for the first time.' He finished, 'The country's politics are evolving.'
'Oh-' I waited because I knew he wanted to say more, and living in China without speaking Chinese he doesn't get to talk often.
'No one was unhappy when he was accused of stealing, or whatever he was supposed to have done. It was normal and ok to most people, but the first whiff of rape and he's gone.'
And then of course since the man has become a born again racist over the past decade he had to have a theory-involving race, that he had disingenuously evolved from some anti-white tirade presented by our beloved leader last year.
'According to your Thabo the Great,' he said. He likes to lay on the 'your' bit, with that edge of sarcasm reserved especially for whitey's who associate too much with black people or are empathic with their issues.
"You remember that blogging thing he does on the Party's web page. I read it during a stopover in Hong Kong, 'All white people think all black men are natural rapists,'-remember that?'
I vaguely remembered, I said.
'So this is the new variation on the auld Race Card. Thabo's used the race card so successfully that people like me became politically impotent and left.'
'The race card?' I said, being disingenuous again: I thought we were talking about a rape card?' I like to stoke him up a bit.
'We are, but I want to illustrate my point. It's the same principle. The "race card" is used on whitey. You raise a reasonable objection to some outrageous policy direction that you know will have undesirable, unintended outcomes because its like... 'been there done that can't we try something different' and instantly you're silenced-
He manipulates the the old prejudice. Everyone 'knows'- 'All white men are racists' and of course we are. You can't escape it -So therefore you must be a racist to say what you said, and instantly everyone switches off you are equally instantly discredited. Now the same thing has just been done to Zuma-same rationale-same outcome- same cleansing of disagreeable opposition.'
And of course then there was the inevitable conspiracy theory, which i interrupted.
'Okay there are two issues here,' I said, cutting into the conspiracy and buying time with the old binary 'two issues' trick, while figuring out how this needed to be dealt with, or whether we should change subjects and deal with something more useful and tactful;, like generating better business. 'Firstly I disagree that this represents an evolution in our politics and secondly I don't think race is the issue here-for a change. Do you remember Excelsior?' I asked him, while we stirred the meat around on the Weber.
'Who doesn't?' His laughter was hearty: the past is such fun, and we digressed for a while into our shared past, to a time when a 'racist' was someone who despised Afrikaners for excluding us from the game. In similar braai conversations thirty five years ago the3 bullying ruling class of Afrikaners were regularly and contemptuously referred to as 'sandblasted blacks', and frankly Black people had been pushed so far off the agenda through the various litany of oppressive insulating mechanisms used by the white ruling class that most of us were so barely aware of their existence that it was generally convenient to employ the standard stereotype and dismiss them entirely.
Except for one thing, the Immorality Act. This piece of legislation made sexual contact between human beings of different skin pigmentation illegal, and any such 'discovered' contacts were the subject of regular salacious press report in such glorious tabloids as the late Sunday Express. The police vice squad had nothing to do except hang about Zoo Lake spying on courting couples [those were times when people could snog in their cars with no hindrance from itinerant peripatetic rapists and hijackers-one had only to be concerned that the occupants were complimentary in colour when the inevitable cops came checking with their flashlight that everyone was white-Others having been banished by night. We would sneer about policemen rubbing their willies in grand anticipation of what they found naked in motor cars.]
A considerable number of the people I have known over the years confess [now] that they had their first sexual encounter, with a home domestic worker, but such things were beyond secret [then], and were never shared until we were well over the times when such an act could put you behind bars. Men who had been caught especially prominent Afrikaner men, those who supported the law, regularly committed suicide in those bizarre times.
'Then we had Excelsior,' he shouted 'Yes, a whole mini-town wasn't it, suddenly acquiring a previously non-existent coloured population and rising rage amongst the Tannie Kollektive: the old mother grundies, those guardians of morality with their stern oversized hats, vast frocks and their mouths pulled down at the corners in permanent disapproval.' He was triumphant at the recollection. Excelsior was a landmark of note
"Okay but how did it all come out?" I asked
'No idea but I'm sure you are going to tell me aren't you?' He laughed.
'All the main dudes in the alleged town were at a dinner party, at an important person's house.' I was dredging up an imperfect recollection, reconstructing the lead Sunday Express story at the time, filtered through layers of booze.
'The important person was showing off and was abusive to a serving woman, who placed her hands on her hips and announced to him and the roomful of disapproving tannies - 'JA-Right now it's you stupid focken K-.r but later tonight when madam is sleeping, then it's 'my lovey', 'my little sugar', 'my little darling'-
The party ended in an uproar. Someone told the press and the town which was somewhere in the middle of fucksville, nowhere, became a cause celebré forever and the immorality act quietly died. That serving woman, whoever she was, struck a blow for freedom that night and I hope this male dominated new majority has honoured her for her stirring role. She also spawned an army of copycats, according to the urban legends of the time, and suddenly every prominent person was a potential target. "There is no evolving politics here-Black men aren't the only men who take a good fuck,' I finished my point.'
My old friend grudgingly relinquished a part of his theory, but added that guys like Tokyo Sexwale who was rumoured to be thinking of pitching for the 2009 nomination must be shitting themselves wondering who might come leaping out of the woodwork to denounce them, just as they start to develop a head of steam. 'The rape card is out of the bottle!' he declared -then remembering the second part of my objection to his hypothesis, demanded 'And what do you think it is, if it's not race?'
'It's a gender thing-for serious feminazis, all penetration equals rape.'
'Tell that to those horny chicks making the 'L word'' he tossed back.
'Whatever.' I wasn't going to be diverted by this standard sexist response. ' You know it's only power mad people who put up with all the shit you have to put up with to be in politics. And there is nothing much more power mad than women.' I said- He nodded, he knew-he's had four wives and still counting. 'The next President will be a woman.' I concluded. 'And I believe you are wrong too about this 'conspiracy' idea'. I tossed in for good measure.
'I'm sure I'm not.' He launched into a fanciful collection of conspiratorial conjectures that became progressively more intricate than a Hollywood epic, and were huge fun for a while. People so love their favourite conspiracies and there are so many, of such huge complexity. What always baffles me about these conspiracies though is their apparently seamless execution. In the real world in which we plod about, all around us, all we ever encounter in our day-to-day affairs are incompetent, lying morons who have no idea what they are doing. You know what I mean everyone you ever have to deal with seems to have been doing their job for about ten minutes or you got them on their first day. So -like how come we never encounter these amazingly competent conspirators in the real world?
'I don't think you can have it both ways' I said to him, passing him a stiff Gin and tonic. 'Surely, if your 'Thabo' argument, about a black man being prone to raping at a moment's notice, holds any validity, and I personally know of no study that conclusively demonstrates that, then no conspiracy was necessary, Zuma was an accident-in-waiting.'
Jozi
18 December 2005
The fun part of this end of the year shutdown time is the opportunity to meet old buddies who have moved offshore and who pay a passing visit to catch up with friends and family.
So on what was once called Dingaan's Day, and has now been deconstructed to some other unremembered reason to have a day off work, I shared a heap of ritually burned meat with an old friend. He is a guy who moved his factory offshore about five or six years ago, to avoid the BEE licensed property theft arrangement, that was blowing in at that time on the winds of change. He has since become rich working out of mainland China and exporting to many places.
He does still maintain a distribution office here now, and pops in and out about four times a year to check on sales, and shake hands with his favourite retailers for a few days. Talk soon turned to The Zuma Affair. 'When I was here a few months ago', he said, 'the news media communicated a definite sense of immanent revolution, I had to go somewhere to see a customer and the area was jammed with rallying supporters chanting weird things like 'down with Thabo'. It was dammed odd...what happened to 'kill the boer?'
'Aagh-a luta continua' I said, 'They are at least two thousand down, and many of the survivors are off to farm in Aussie.'
We then had some comment on the number of prominent personalities who had publicly backed Zuma and how they were all desperately scrambling around now to get their exposed arses back onto the correct seat in the great game of political musical chairs while the music's playing again.
'Now' he said eventually, 'It's like Zuma never existed. He has completely vanished. He's become- 'The man who never was'.' Then he paused and made his dramatic declaration- 'We've just seen the 'Rape Card' used for the first time.' He finished, 'The country's politics are evolving.'
'Oh-' I waited because I knew he wanted to say more, and living in China without speaking Chinese he doesn't get to talk often.
'No one was unhappy when he was accused of stealing, or whatever he was supposed to have done. It was normal and ok to most people, but the first whiff of rape and he's gone.'
And then of course since the man has become a born again racist over the past decade he had to have a theory-involving race, that he had disingenuously evolved from some anti-white tirade presented by our beloved leader last year.
'According to your Thabo the Great,' he said. He likes to lay on the 'your' bit, with that edge of sarcasm reserved especially for whitey's who associate too much with black people or are empathic with their issues.
"You remember that blogging thing he does on the Party's web page. I read it during a stopover in Hong Kong, 'All white people think all black men are natural rapists,'-remember that?'
I vaguely remembered, I said.
'So this is the new variation on the auld Race Card. Thabo's used the race card so successfully that people like me became politically impotent and left.'
'The race card?' I said, being disingenuous again: I thought we were talking about a rape card?' I like to stoke him up a bit.
'We are, but I want to illustrate my point. It's the same principle. The "race card" is used on whitey. You raise a reasonable objection to some outrageous policy direction that you know will have undesirable, unintended outcomes because its like... 'been there done that can't we try something different' and instantly you're silenced-
He manipulates the the old prejudice. Everyone 'knows'- 'All white men are racists' and of course we are. You can't escape it -So therefore you must be a racist to say what you said, and instantly everyone switches off you are equally instantly discredited. Now the same thing has just been done to Zuma-same rationale-same outcome- same cleansing of disagreeable opposition.'
And of course then there was the inevitable conspiracy theory, which i interrupted.
'Okay there are two issues here,' I said, cutting into the conspiracy and buying time with the old binary 'two issues' trick, while figuring out how this needed to be dealt with, or whether we should change subjects and deal with something more useful and tactful;, like generating better business. 'Firstly I disagree that this represents an evolution in our politics and secondly I don't think race is the issue here-for a change. Do you remember Excelsior?' I asked him, while we stirred the meat around on the Weber.
'Who doesn't?' His laughter was hearty: the past is such fun, and we digressed for a while into our shared past, to a time when a 'racist' was someone who despised Afrikaners for excluding us from the game. In similar braai conversations thirty five years ago the3 bullying ruling class of Afrikaners were regularly and contemptuously referred to as 'sandblasted blacks', and frankly Black people had been pushed so far off the agenda through the various litany of oppressive insulating mechanisms used by the white ruling class that most of us were so barely aware of their existence that it was generally convenient to employ the standard stereotype and dismiss them entirely.
Except for one thing, the Immorality Act. This piece of legislation made sexual contact between human beings of different skin pigmentation illegal, and any such 'discovered' contacts were the subject of regular salacious press report in such glorious tabloids as the late Sunday Express. The police vice squad had nothing to do except hang about Zoo Lake spying on courting couples [those were times when people could snog in their cars with no hindrance from itinerant peripatetic rapists and hijackers-one had only to be concerned that the occupants were complimentary in colour when the inevitable cops came checking with their flashlight that everyone was white-Others having been banished by night. We would sneer about policemen rubbing their willies in grand anticipation of what they found naked in motor cars.]
A considerable number of the people I have known over the years confess [now] that they had their first sexual encounter, with a home domestic worker, but such things were beyond secret [then], and were never shared until we were well over the times when such an act could put you behind bars. Men who had been caught especially prominent Afrikaner men, those who supported the law, regularly committed suicide in those bizarre times.
'Then we had Excelsior,' he shouted 'Yes, a whole mini-town wasn't it, suddenly acquiring a previously non-existent coloured population and rising rage amongst the Tannie Kollektive: the old mother grundies, those guardians of morality with their stern oversized hats, vast frocks and their mouths pulled down at the corners in permanent disapproval.' He was triumphant at the recollection. Excelsior was a landmark of note
"Okay but how did it all come out?" I asked
'No idea but I'm sure you are going to tell me aren't you?' He laughed.
'All the main dudes in the alleged town were at a dinner party, at an important person's house.' I was dredging up an imperfect recollection, reconstructing the lead Sunday Express story at the time, filtered through layers of booze.
'The important person was showing off and was abusive to a serving woman, who placed her hands on her hips and announced to him and the roomful of disapproving tannies - 'JA-Right now it's you stupid focken K-.r but later tonight when madam is sleeping, then it's 'my lovey', 'my little sugar', 'my little darling'-
The party ended in an uproar. Someone told the press and the town which was somewhere in the middle of fucksville, nowhere, became a cause celebré forever and the immorality act quietly died. That serving woman, whoever she was, struck a blow for freedom that night and I hope this male dominated new majority has honoured her for her stirring role. She also spawned an army of copycats, according to the urban legends of the time, and suddenly every prominent person was a potential target. "There is no evolving politics here-Black men aren't the only men who take a good fuck,' I finished my point.'
My old friend grudgingly relinquished a part of his theory, but added that guys like Tokyo Sexwale who was rumoured to be thinking of pitching for the 2009 nomination must be shitting themselves wondering who might come leaping out of the woodwork to denounce them, just as they start to develop a head of steam. 'The rape card is out of the bottle!' he declared -then remembering the second part of my objection to his hypothesis, demanded 'And what do you think it is, if it's not race?'
'It's a gender thing-for serious feminazis, all penetration equals rape.'
'Tell that to those horny chicks making the 'L word'' he tossed back.
'Whatever.' I wasn't going to be diverted by this standard sexist response. ' You know it's only power mad people who put up with all the shit you have to put up with to be in politics. And there is nothing much more power mad than women.' I said- He nodded, he knew-he's had four wives and still counting. 'The next President will be a woman.' I concluded. 'And I believe you are wrong too about this 'conspiracy' idea'. I tossed in for good measure.
'I'm sure I'm not.' He launched into a fanciful collection of conspiratorial conjectures that became progressively more intricate than a Hollywood epic, and were huge fun for a while. People so love their favourite conspiracies and there are so many, of such huge complexity. What always baffles me about these conspiracies though is their apparently seamless execution. In the real world in which we plod about, all around us, all we ever encounter in our day-to-day affairs are incompetent, lying morons who have no idea what they are doing. You know what I mean everyone you ever have to deal with seems to have been doing their job for about ten minutes or you got them on their first day. So -like how come we never encounter these amazingly competent conspirators in the real world?
'I don't think you can have it both ways' I said to him, passing him a stiff Gin and tonic. 'Surely, if your 'Thabo' argument, about a black man being prone to raping at a moment's notice, holds any validity, and I personally know of no study that conclusively demonstrates that, then no conspiracy was necessary, Zuma was an accident-in-waiting.'
Friday, December 9, 2005
Are we a work shy nation?
Are we a work shy nation?
Weblog 10 December 2005
Is it possible that the outcome of 300 years of struggling to overthrow the terrible overlords who dominated the Azanian sub-continent has so completely exhausted our newly liberated citizenry that a 'job' has become merely a place of refuge where the incumbents can rest from their labours?
This does seem to be the message we could draw from the recent bizarre hostage-taking incident at the Home Affairs Dept when an irate citizen finally flipped after waiting four years for an identity document. In the wake of the glorious rewards to 'some' brought about by the Revolution of '94 perhaps we are succumbing to the disturbing truth observed so succinctly by the scientist Steven Wright, that hard work pays off in the future while laziness pays off now.
Of course this single incident would not be valid enough evidence were it not for the overwhelming support for the hostage taker from the public and the media, indicating that the nation is 'Gatvol' with non-performance and that a great many more people would like to take the same steps: again, to borrow from Steven Wright, [a list of whose aphorisms pitched up on my email this week] 'A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking'.
So: We also know that we are almost overwhelmed daily with reports of disintegrating sewerage systems in bankrupt municipalities. Our city experiences electrical blackouts so regularly that you have to factor them into your budget calculations, and there are alarming reports about our long-term water safety needs.
Most pertinently this past fortnight we had a shutdown at a major airport down in the south end of the country when holes were discovered in the runway that had not been noticed in the previous SIX inspections. Amazingly no aircraft hit the things or we would we talking serious tragedy.
For most of us widespread indifferent performance in both the private and public sectors is a daily 'in your face' experience. Take for instance a member of my family who recently had to have a so-called 'medical procedure' [a piece of his body was sawn off, and a prosthetic replacement was hammered into the remaining bone tissue] at a hospital near us called the Morningside medi-clinic; a facility at the edge of Azania's so called 'Golden Square Mile'.
The procedure was a repeat in modern form of one he had thirty-five years ago. That job wore out and needed revision. He remarked that the medical proficiency relating to the 'operation' had improved exponentially over thirty years but that regrettably the 'after-care' had gone the other way and nearly killed him, requiring immediate and expensive interventions thus revealing the hidden cost of incompetence..
I went there once to visit him and was overwhelmed by the sheer filth of the wards in which sick people attempted to fight infection. The carpets looked as though they hadn't been cleaned in ages [should they even have carpets?], sack loads of discarded waste lay around in the hallway to his ward and I observed alleged orderlies who handled things like drips and dressings immediately after handling soiled bedpans, without washing hands in between-What a scary place [although in fairness I have seen worse in less salubrious neighbourhoods]. It is as though hospital assistants no longer need to consider hygiene in their day to day affairs -what would Florence have thought?
What brings this work-shy trend in our post- revolutionary society into sharp bas-relief is the contrasting sheer efficiency with which the current spate of 'heists' has been carried out this year [and a few others before].
[For offshore readers {O.R.}] who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon. One of the daily experiences of our 'neighbourhood' is the military style assaults-to-burgle on travelling armoured cash in transit vehicles, shopping malls, and casinos. It is not unusual for a squad of thirty men all armed with machine3 guns to be involved in such an 'event'.] The numbers of these heists runs into the hundreds for this year alone and they are a pretty long term phenomena that has accounted for a few billion bucks worth of 'takings' in 2005; not to mention that a few dozen innocent citizens have been gunned down in the frequent fire-fights that take place when these events occur.
The interesting thing is that there appear to have been so few arrests of these 'baddies' that one could say these heists are arrest proof, suggesting either incompetence on the part of the authorities or an iron tough discipline on the part of the [presumably] multiple gangs of 'heistees'.
Again, to draw on my Steven Wright [whoever he is?] email this week: "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to avoid work". Imagine a country where every legally empowered person has achieved their ambition and discovered the leisure inherent in 'work'.
Which brings me back to the baddies who reap their daily heist around our turf. In my view what distinguishes these outstanding exponents of a functional work ethic from the increasing dross of humanity that punctuate both corporate and public facilities, is embodied in that quaint word 'motivation'.
For most people it seems, work interrupts life. The main difference between a circus elephant and one that grew up in the wild is the length of the training. As the Jesuits were fond of observing, give me a child until its sixth birthday and it's ours for life.
People who have grown up in the prison that was pre-apartheid vile state would inevitably never have learned any other ambition other than to take over and 'gettital'- a completely reasonable ambition. As a result we became a society where everyone bought into the present-exclusively. Ripping off pays off now. I don't believe I am referring to any particular element in our society; notwithstanding that we are a diverse nation there are huge areas where we are all completely alike: laziness pays off now, corruption pays off now, a quick fuck pays off now; and the future is something one can put off indefinitely.
Success lies in determining what the future should be and then moulding one's energy towards its achievement-making the future real.
For an enormous number of people they have achieved beyond their fettered imaginations could have prescribed and it is for their children to continue and expand their own horizons. There is no longer a drum seductively beating-follow me-I'll take you there.
So what is it that makes the prolific heist so different to the run of the mill good guys-what is this 'motivation'?
At this point we have to resort to conjecture, which you will remember to be 'the formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence' [Collins].
Why have only a limited number of heistees been apprehended? No main organisers seem to have appeared in courts. Now and again a shootout occurs, resulting in the deaths of a clutch of criminals whose photos are then displayed in gory details in the omnivorous local media, always sharp to exploit a bit of bloodlust.
My own preference as a proponent of chaos theory is that the heistees represent the free market in crime: they are in many ways the last bastion of free enterprise in an over regulated State. Comfortable risks, short hours, and high rewards make heisting an attractive short-term career option. Plus you get to handle a machine gun and have power of life and death over the human Impalas who proliferate in our comfortable milieus. Bang, bang, people fall over: it's cool and fun and almost chic.
Others tell me that the heistees are the stooges of our famed 'Syndicates'[For O.R: the Chinese have Triads, the Italians the Mafia: we Southern Azanians have 'Syndicates']. There are some who argue that these 'Syndicates' are 'managed by Triads or prison 'Numbers' gangs, and who knows what other alien entities, all sucking off the natural intelligence of the masses.
Which raises a thought. [I warn you that this is a complicated thought, so follow carefully] What if a neighbouring crackpot dictator were seriously short of funds for meeting certain outstanding payments to the International Monetary Fund. He demands tribute from a feudal underling. What if his self-asserted feudal underling [later in history to be known as Thabo the Great] refused to make certain payments available from the public purse, of his fiefdom, to the crackpot dictator who, believing himself to be the last of an ancient ruling dynasty [aka Rozwi] has assumed some form of feudal obligation that exists only in the arcane depths of pre-colonial oral tradition.
Strange idea? Then imagine a man who is iron willwed enough to destroy the homes of the poor, [in bizarre echo of equally deluded 'devine rightist': Russian Tsars 'pogramising' the zones of the poor] to prevent them from expressing their political outrage, Such a man may well send forth squads of highly trained military chaps to take out the budget shortfall in heist takings. These men would be trained and experienced military fellows used to war and opposition. The crackpot dictator may be deluded but his military machine could be the slickest our money can buy.
If there has to be a well-organised syndicate orchestrating this entire Heist thing then I vote for 'Bob the Roz'. Notwithstanding this though my personal view is that we are witnessing the fruits of outcomes based education structured business studies classes, that have brilliantly inflamed the entrepreneurial hearts of an entire generation, and sent them forth to prosper in a way that makes perfect sense and gives bankrolling a completely new flavour. I vote for the young to be hiring out the old.
The irony is that this is not where the smart money has gone. Those motivated souls who are truly creaming it are doing it the smart way. According to regular press reports, clean collar criminals get away with around forty billion every year with minimal exposure, minimal gunfire, hardly ever a fatality and almost never a prosecution. It's regrettable to think that due to money laundering rules much of this loot will disappear from the national financial structure.
Either way it's a toss up between laziness-now-is-forever-extended and grabthemoneyandrun, as our collective failure to buy into the idea of the future places us precariously in a pillaging present.
Perhaps this is the subliminal reason for our Cabinet deciding against all reason and sensible accounting practices to 'Go For' the disputed Gautrain investment.
We are almost running this country at the moment on bullshit and hype. The future is a soccer match sometime in 2010 and a train to ferry the people.We constantly reiterate tired promises and cliches and progress is measured in micro gains. Ultimately to do this will be to say we are somebody in the world and can deliver on expectations.
We are a country in need of 'Purpose'. This idea of 'ongoing struggle' palls against the obvious overt lootage-As someone other than Steven Wright once observed 'You can fool all the people some times, most, most times but never all, all the time' [sic]. When you see your neighbour join the ruling party, take some form of office and suddenly acquire visible wealth it doesn't take the genius we hardly foster to recognise a rapidly 'berigged' deck.
Thus despair becomes the handmaiden of disillusionment; and underperformance becomes a right.
The absence of Purpose, or an overwhelming Reason for doing something, was the single most important factor discovered by the writer Victor Frankel for why so many of his fellow detainees in Auschwitz failed to survive the holocaust. The deadly efficiency of the heistees [whether Roz underlings or not] demonstrates the power of Purpose rooted into effective implementation. The indolence of the home affairs flunkeys who induced a citizen to break the law is a natural outcome of a purpose free life and demonstrates brilliantly why some people succeed and others don't. Purpose is a choice; work is an obligation that without Purpose becomes onerous and avoidable.
Only someone who buys into the idea that the future will one day arrive can be truly purposeful.
Love you all-NiK
Weblog 10 December 2005
Is it possible that the outcome of 300 years of struggling to overthrow the terrible overlords who dominated the Azanian sub-continent has so completely exhausted our newly liberated citizenry that a 'job' has become merely a place of refuge where the incumbents can rest from their labours?
This does seem to be the message we could draw from the recent bizarre hostage-taking incident at the Home Affairs Dept when an irate citizen finally flipped after waiting four years for an identity document. In the wake of the glorious rewards to 'some' brought about by the Revolution of '94 perhaps we are succumbing to the disturbing truth observed so succinctly by the scientist Steven Wright, that hard work pays off in the future while laziness pays off now.
Of course this single incident would not be valid enough evidence were it not for the overwhelming support for the hostage taker from the public and the media, indicating that the nation is 'Gatvol' with non-performance and that a great many more people would like to take the same steps: again, to borrow from Steven Wright, [a list of whose aphorisms pitched up on my email this week] 'A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking'.
So: We also know that we are almost overwhelmed daily with reports of disintegrating sewerage systems in bankrupt municipalities. Our city experiences electrical blackouts so regularly that you have to factor them into your budget calculations, and there are alarming reports about our long-term water safety needs.
Most pertinently this past fortnight we had a shutdown at a major airport down in the south end of the country when holes were discovered in the runway that had not been noticed in the previous SIX inspections. Amazingly no aircraft hit the things or we would we talking serious tragedy.
For most of us widespread indifferent performance in both the private and public sectors is a daily 'in your face' experience. Take for instance a member of my family who recently had to have a so-called 'medical procedure' [a piece of his body was sawn off, and a prosthetic replacement was hammered into the remaining bone tissue] at a hospital near us called the Morningside medi-clinic; a facility at the edge of Azania's so called 'Golden Square Mile'.
The procedure was a repeat in modern form of one he had thirty-five years ago. That job wore out and needed revision. He remarked that the medical proficiency relating to the 'operation' had improved exponentially over thirty years but that regrettably the 'after-care' had gone the other way and nearly killed him, requiring immediate and expensive interventions thus revealing the hidden cost of incompetence..
I went there once to visit him and was overwhelmed by the sheer filth of the wards in which sick people attempted to fight infection. The carpets looked as though they hadn't been cleaned in ages [should they even have carpets?], sack loads of discarded waste lay around in the hallway to his ward and I observed alleged orderlies who handled things like drips and dressings immediately after handling soiled bedpans, without washing hands in between-What a scary place [although in fairness I have seen worse in less salubrious neighbourhoods]. It is as though hospital assistants no longer need to consider hygiene in their day to day affairs -what would Florence have thought?
What brings this work-shy trend in our post- revolutionary society into sharp bas-relief is the contrasting sheer efficiency with which the current spate of 'heists' has been carried out this year [and a few others before].
[For offshore readers {O.R.}] who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon. One of the daily experiences of our 'neighbourhood' is the military style assaults-to-burgle on travelling armoured cash in transit vehicles, shopping malls, and casinos. It is not unusual for a squad of thirty men all armed with machine3 guns to be involved in such an 'event'.] The numbers of these heists runs into the hundreds for this year alone and they are a pretty long term phenomena that has accounted for a few billion bucks worth of 'takings' in 2005; not to mention that a few dozen innocent citizens have been gunned down in the frequent fire-fights that take place when these events occur.
The interesting thing is that there appear to have been so few arrests of these 'baddies' that one could say these heists are arrest proof, suggesting either incompetence on the part of the authorities or an iron tough discipline on the part of the [presumably] multiple gangs of 'heistees'.
Again, to draw on my Steven Wright [whoever he is?] email this week: "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to avoid work". Imagine a country where every legally empowered person has achieved their ambition and discovered the leisure inherent in 'work'.
Which brings me back to the baddies who reap their daily heist around our turf. In my view what distinguishes these outstanding exponents of a functional work ethic from the increasing dross of humanity that punctuate both corporate and public facilities, is embodied in that quaint word 'motivation'.
For most people it seems, work interrupts life. The main difference between a circus elephant and one that grew up in the wild is the length of the training. As the Jesuits were fond of observing, give me a child until its sixth birthday and it's ours for life.
People who have grown up in the prison that was pre-apartheid vile state would inevitably never have learned any other ambition other than to take over and 'gettital'- a completely reasonable ambition. As a result we became a society where everyone bought into the present-exclusively. Ripping off pays off now. I don't believe I am referring to any particular element in our society; notwithstanding that we are a diverse nation there are huge areas where we are all completely alike: laziness pays off now, corruption pays off now, a quick fuck pays off now; and the future is something one can put off indefinitely.
Success lies in determining what the future should be and then moulding one's energy towards its achievement-making the future real.
For an enormous number of people they have achieved beyond their fettered imaginations could have prescribed and it is for their children to continue and expand their own horizons. There is no longer a drum seductively beating-follow me-I'll take you there.
So what is it that makes the prolific heist so different to the run of the mill good guys-what is this 'motivation'?
At this point we have to resort to conjecture, which you will remember to be 'the formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence' [Collins].
Why have only a limited number of heistees been apprehended? No main organisers seem to have appeared in courts. Now and again a shootout occurs, resulting in the deaths of a clutch of criminals whose photos are then displayed in gory details in the omnivorous local media, always sharp to exploit a bit of bloodlust.
My own preference as a proponent of chaos theory is that the heistees represent the free market in crime: they are in many ways the last bastion of free enterprise in an over regulated State. Comfortable risks, short hours, and high rewards make heisting an attractive short-term career option. Plus you get to handle a machine gun and have power of life and death over the human Impalas who proliferate in our comfortable milieus. Bang, bang, people fall over: it's cool and fun and almost chic.
Others tell me that the heistees are the stooges of our famed 'Syndicates'[For O.R: the Chinese have Triads, the Italians the Mafia: we Southern Azanians have 'Syndicates']. There are some who argue that these 'Syndicates' are 'managed by Triads or prison 'Numbers' gangs, and who knows what other alien entities, all sucking off the natural intelligence of the masses.
Which raises a thought. [I warn you that this is a complicated thought, so follow carefully] What if a neighbouring crackpot dictator were seriously short of funds for meeting certain outstanding payments to the International Monetary Fund. He demands tribute from a feudal underling. What if his self-asserted feudal underling [later in history to be known as Thabo the Great] refused to make certain payments available from the public purse, of his fiefdom, to the crackpot dictator who, believing himself to be the last of an ancient ruling dynasty [aka Rozwi] has assumed some form of feudal obligation that exists only in the arcane depths of pre-colonial oral tradition.
Strange idea? Then imagine a man who is iron willwed enough to destroy the homes of the poor, [in bizarre echo of equally deluded 'devine rightist': Russian Tsars 'pogramising' the zones of the poor] to prevent them from expressing their political outrage, Such a man may well send forth squads of highly trained military chaps to take out the budget shortfall in heist takings. These men would be trained and experienced military fellows used to war and opposition. The crackpot dictator may be deluded but his military machine could be the slickest our money can buy.
If there has to be a well-organised syndicate orchestrating this entire Heist thing then I vote for 'Bob the Roz'. Notwithstanding this though my personal view is that we are witnessing the fruits of outcomes based education structured business studies classes, that have brilliantly inflamed the entrepreneurial hearts of an entire generation, and sent them forth to prosper in a way that makes perfect sense and gives bankrolling a completely new flavour. I vote for the young to be hiring out the old.
The irony is that this is not where the smart money has gone. Those motivated souls who are truly creaming it are doing it the smart way. According to regular press reports, clean collar criminals get away with around forty billion every year with minimal exposure, minimal gunfire, hardly ever a fatality and almost never a prosecution. It's regrettable to think that due to money laundering rules much of this loot will disappear from the national financial structure.
Either way it's a toss up between laziness-now-is-forever-extended and grabthemoneyandrun, as our collective failure to buy into the idea of the future places us precariously in a pillaging present.
Perhaps this is the subliminal reason for our Cabinet deciding against all reason and sensible accounting practices to 'Go For' the disputed Gautrain investment.
We are almost running this country at the moment on bullshit and hype. The future is a soccer match sometime in 2010 and a train to ferry the people.We constantly reiterate tired promises and cliches and progress is measured in micro gains. Ultimately to do this will be to say we are somebody in the world and can deliver on expectations.
We are a country in need of 'Purpose'. This idea of 'ongoing struggle' palls against the obvious overt lootage-As someone other than Steven Wright once observed 'You can fool all the people some times, most, most times but never all, all the time' [sic]. When you see your neighbour join the ruling party, take some form of office and suddenly acquire visible wealth it doesn't take the genius we hardly foster to recognise a rapidly 'berigged' deck.
Thus despair becomes the handmaiden of disillusionment; and underperformance becomes a right.
The absence of Purpose, or an overwhelming Reason for doing something, was the single most important factor discovered by the writer Victor Frankel for why so many of his fellow detainees in Auschwitz failed to survive the holocaust. The deadly efficiency of the heistees [whether Roz underlings or not] demonstrates the power of Purpose rooted into effective implementation. The indolence of the home affairs flunkeys who induced a citizen to break the law is a natural outcome of a purpose free life and demonstrates brilliantly why some people succeed and others don't. Purpose is a choice; work is an obligation that without Purpose becomes onerous and avoidable.
Only someone who buys into the idea that the future will one day arrive can be truly purposeful.
Love you all-NiK
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