Yesterday was ' World Missing Children's day' apparently and Sky News was broadcasting news all day about missing children. The numbers run into the thousands.
Central to the campaign to raise awareness of missing children is the circumstances surrounding the disappearance from her holiday bedroom on the Algarve of Madeleine Mc Call, a four year old child snatched from her bed while her parents dined some twenty metres away.
Madeleine has now been missing for some weeks and despite a massive almost unprecedented person hunt has failed to surface.
Ancillary to this is the disappearance of a BBC newsman from the Gaza Strip in Palestine who has now been missing for a few months and equally ancillary is the disappearance of American servicemen, snatched when a bomb explosion in Iraq toppled their armoured vehicle.
Then there are the missing Israeli servicemen snatched last year by Islamist fighters in an incident that precipitated Israel's abortive campaign against the Hiizbollah last year in Lebanon. They are still missing.
Sky interviewed a couple, who, less articulate than the McCall's who have almost thrived on the amazing wave of publicity surrounding their daughter's disappearance, spoke brokenly about the inexplicable disappearance of their university aged son on a holiday in Crete two years ago. He apparently left some sleazy bar to walk back to his hotel and has never been seen again: neither has his bank card been used.
What could all this mean?
Undoubtedly people are and have been snatched for a variety of purposes, often sexual, since forever. Ancient Gothic novels were written on the subject way back in the nineteenth century and it was a long established custom even then.
Nonetheless that there are sufficient cases currently to generate a world day devoted to missing persons, mainly children, is in itself indicative that the practice has become endemic.
First off , mysterious disappearances are taxing non-existant police forces in many arcane parts of the world. The Portugese police have not yet inspired confidence with their handling of the 'Maddy' Mc Call case and for that matter the Jamaican police have inspired even less over their handling of the mysterious death of the Pakistani cricket coach during the world cup a while back.
A South African Swimming protégé youngster who disappeared on his way to Dubai recently and later turned up dead in a plastic bag in Peshawar Pakistan elicited no more than indifferent confusion on the part of Pakistani police authorities in that region who allegedly are too afraid to enter the area where the boy's was found because of the general state of lawlessness in the area. The Cretan police had apparently been less than helpful in the disappearance of the English University student who's parents were interviewed on Sky yesterday.
It is a truism that police all over the world are overworked, underpaid and subject to corrupt practices and are invariably governed by political appointees and mediocre cronies of political appointees. According to press reports our own Chief of police has recently been investigated by the Scorpions on grounds not yet made public.
However incompetent police forces only facilitate comfortable circumstances for disappearances to take place- the question of how the disappearances occur is still open ended since police by their very nature are reactive forces.
Adult disappearances are relatively less problematic than child disappearances but both could fuel all kinds of hypothesis. My own is that in a violent and untamed world chaos rules and those whose appetites are insatiable can vent their lust with impunity knowing that the forces of 'good' are always going to stumble around in the dark while the forces of 'evil' make their getaway with their 'loot'.
Those who favour conspiracy theories would argue that we are indeed in the 'end of days', so long predicted by the book of Revelations in the Christian bible. Logic suggests that in the random chaos that has been created between the evil forces of religious fundamentalism sweeping the planet in the wake of the 9/11 incident, and the increasingly shadowy forces of 'law and order' who have imposed draconian curbs on civil and human rights around the planet [according to a recent Amnesty International report] a circumstance arises when the long predicted 666 condition will arise.[Revelations 13.]Such conspiracy theorist could even argue that missing children: being still pure and holy are the forerunners of the long awaited event known as "the Rapture".
My dogs can have microchips implanted in them to facilitate me finding them should they wander off and get 'lost'. I have seen various articles over the past eighteen months suggesting that panicky American parents are contemplating micro-chipping their children to facilitate their recovery should they disappear. Various cellphone-based methodologies are already in use. A cell phone search helped find the person who kidnapped and murdered the young woman Leigh Matthews three years ago. There are also frequent movies around, which embrace the theme of the universal human barcode. Many companies are increasingly making used of radio frequency identification discs [RFIDS] to track things like razor blades and other commoditised high volume high theft goods. I predict that some enterprising entrepreneurs will soon be advertising RFIDS for humans.
I would suggest that within this next decade it will become de rigeur for all citizens to be implanted with this 'mark of the beast' or as I prefer to call it a 'life activator', which will make it harder for people to disappear, easier to find those who are snatched by evil sexual predators [and political zealots]and naturally make it simple to track down those who kidnap journalists and soldiers for whatever purposes- well until the 'forces of evil' figure out how to counter the chips. Naturally the civil rights and privacy invasion lobby will object [reasonably] But the tone is being set up for the controlled society so long predicted by writers of science fiction.
International Missing Children's Day is a step towards our long anticipated destiny with a script [Revelations] laid down a few thousand years ago and predicted again by the late Mr Nostradamus: a script so embedded in our consciousness that we don't even realise that we are playing it.
Viva bloggers
Saturday, May 26, 2007
update on the new proposed Sardine run.
Just so's you notice i called it right... again and i was fiorst to do so ... see my blog: "Ruminations in a gridlock" last sunday when i called the Soweto monorail idea bullshit... Now even the Minister denies knowing anything about it... but then we all knew the Minister doesn't even know that we were supposed to have a new E NAtis... and that it wouldn't work. Check out the blog.. To move 1.5 million passengers daily the citizens of Soweto would have to take the Monorail Sardine run...
More cramped than their ancestors who went off to America in monorail sized sailing ships. They would have to be slotted in like the Japanese do with their overnight 'slot-in' hotel system.
Bullshit busted again.
Viva bloggs
More cramped than their ancestors who went off to America in monorail sized sailing ships. They would have to be slotted in like the Japanese do with their overnight 'slot-in' hotel system.
Bullshit busted again.
Viva bloggs
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Ruminations in a routine daily traffic gridlock
Some thoughts in a highway gridlock
Yet another overloaded truck has jacknifed, and overturned spilling its load all across the highway. Is this the tenth one this week or am I hallucinating? Has this daily Lemming rush to the city finally tempted my remaining sanity or is this no more than a pause in the melody? I think- I am a modern person- I have car radio, I have newspaper, I have fax to modem whatever laptop with wireless thingy, I park here amongst the multitude wrapped up in my canned world apart from those next to me and can conduct business here on the highway while nothing moves- I can catch a thought or thirty-
!
1. The long awaited report on our beloved leader's 'Peer review' mechanism is still long awaited. According to rumours the SA Gov't which dreamed up the idea of the African Peer Review mechanism in the first place is unhappy about their report card from the eminent crowd of 'untouchables' who came to South Azania [SA] from elsewhere on the continent to check us over for political credibility.
2. Allegedly they made some 300 unwanted recommendations and were critical among other thing of our unrelenting crime situation and our equally unrelenting Black Economic Empowerment [BEE] programme. We don't know why: our beloved leadership has rested on the report for months now - brooding- we are told..
3. Could it be possible that these alleged wise and eminent persons saw in us the seeds of what had led to their own destruction and are attempting some form of damage control? 'Don't do what you are doing you will burn the toast'- Surely not?
4. Is our gov't's reluctance to accept unwelcome advices prompted as much by lust as good sense. We all know don't we that the absolute worst time to think of putting on a condom is in those tumultuous moments in love making when both parties cannot wait another moment to experience full-on penetration- And we are in 'full fuck' mode in our wonderful traffic saturated place aren't we?
5. On another tack: Does the strange reluctance of the South African rugby selectors to use Luke Watson, son of 'Cheeky' Watson, a man who was 'blackballed' by the rugby fraternity for consorting with 'darkies' during the days of the Dispossession indicate a fatal flaw in the emotional makeup of the coach Jake White?
6. If it is bad for a politician to interfere in sport by threatening the SA rugby squad [for the impending world cup] that he will withdraw their passports if the team does not contain a significant quota of colour laden humans,[ the BEE thing] or by passing legislation that somehow 'interferes' with sport [in promotion of the BEE thing] then why is it 'good' for Australia's politicians to interfere in sport by banning the Oz tour to Rumbabwe?
7. Is it possible now that the government has proclaimed itself official boss and final arbiter of all sporting decisions over team selection that we will gradually get to have less sport and more braais? After all we are often told that obesity is a rising national problem and must be fed.
8. The civil service is going on a go-slow. How does one go slower than slow?
9. Some enthusiastic person has suggested 'Hugathons' as a route to re-establishing our common humanity with others- 'Hug someone today make them feel loved and wanted'- How would this idea square with the current ethic that to touch someone other than one's significant other is to invite a sexual harassment suit?
10. Question: Why do the new presenters on SAFM's morning live show [AM Live] constantly insert a gratuitous 'uh' sound in-between words, which are otherwise unpunctuated.
11. Answer 1: they can only read one word at a time off the script.
12. Answer 2: they can't remember more than half a word ahead on the script.
13. Answer3: the words they must speak are relayed to them via earphones from our beloved leaders and they can only hear one word at a time off the script.
14. In fact why is it that in our supposedly democratic society no one on the radio seems to ask the obvious questions anymore since Perlman left- come back Perlman all is forgiven, surely?
15. Given that 300,000 soccer frenzied young mainly male humans visit our country in 2010 to alternately watch the world cup, get drunk and get laid [and maybe, visit the Hector Peterson memorial]: then, against whom would said horny visiting World Cup tourists have recourse, should they decide after their visit here in 2010 to sue the organisers for not warning them that shagging SA's unlicensed, unregulated, non-health checked army of day to day prostitutes, would send them home with a death sentence dose of HIV [Henry the fourth]?
16. In other words do we intend to issue health warnings to unsuspecting foreigners that a significant proportion of the thousands of prostitutes [aka sex workers] who will flock to town to take advantage of the 2010 gold rush should be used at the tourist's own risk?
17. Isn't history deliciously ironic- In 1948 the white Afrikaners in our beloved country concluded their struggle to regain 'their' country just in time to be ambushed by the rising tide of Indigenous Black Nationalism. Today the victorious Black Nationalists have concluded their struggle to regain 'their' country just in time to be ambushed by Global Warming.
18. One notices that not much energy seems apparent in the sauntering journey through the vagaries of the new ENatis car registration and licensing system that has been dysfunctional for a month or two now. One notices too, the equal lack of apparent urgency over the Bedfordview three day power outage, the complete apparent absence of concerted action to solve the Khutsong rebellion, over the unwelcome transfer of those citizens from Gauteng to a lesser province. When one also adds to that the non-performance of Home Affairs where citizens have to resort to 'rolling mass action' just to get the correct forms to fill out, never mind not getting the correct documents in under a year or five. Toss in the weaselling over the electricity REDS and a ho hum list of underperformance generally. Would it therefore be fair to ask if all the movers and shakers in the Government are so busy being involved in the business of business and cutting deals to get rich quick before all the loot evaporates that government itself is on its way into long term recess?
19. I listen regularly to UJFM and have commented over time at how they play great music, how their continuity is at a level of the ingénue and their news reading is so bad it raises conspiracy theories- Recently they celebrated their 1st birthday and most of the presenters have now had a considerable amount of practice. So how come their performance hasn't improved- Is it possible that people do not improve their performance with practice: rather they perform badly with improved perfection?
20. If I extend this idea outwards to society at large: how come, in a place [SA] that is only growing rather slowly [by world standards] and in which opportunity is part of the new ethic, are so many people so completely unable to proactively lift their game, that we are faced with increasing frequencies of societal infrastructural breakdown?
21. I loved the story of the new Jozi to Soweto monorail in the press this week. I kept checking the date at the top of the page thinking that maybe I had overslept badly and that it was suddenly April again. But the story persisted even on Friday and so I had to accept that someone had come up with a most sensible idea, all correct bribes are apparently in place, and I wondered why we hadn't chosen to do such a sensible thing with the awfully disruptive, inherently problematic Gautrain.
22. I was particularly impressed with the idea that the 'Soweto Express' will move 1.5 million passengers a day. I think that it will be wonderful for the citizens of this mini city [Soweto]who have to leave town every day in search of revenue. I see [from the artist's impression in the paper on the seat next to me] that the 'train' is around about two taxis wide and about six long and will carry 107 passengers [Star Thursday 17/5/07]. According to my Sansui financial calculator, with which I am playing in the traffic, one train every three minutes carrying two hundred and fourteen passengers, plus some overload, running 24 hours a day would at most shift about two hundred thousand people both ways over a single day. Presumably though most people will still expect to go to work only in the daytime.
23. On the reasonable assumption that a massive proportion of the 1.5 million commuters need to be at their destinations within a simultaneous period of time: eg when whatever happens starts at the beginning of the day and again later when it's afternoon rush hour, [as we're all doing right now in this immobilised gridlock] then it seems that some 14,000 carriages will need to be moving almost simultaneously along the rail line, with commuters disembarking at particular stops and crowding onto escalators, which if they are anything like those at my local shopping mall will work only intermittently.
24. In other words the length of the train would fill the monorail nearly four times- wouldn't it. [14,000 coaches x10 metres long each without a gap: that is about 140 kms of train on a 43 kilometre track]. Every workday I experience Taxis moving along every road I travel. They are all around me now as I write this. They are often in lines forty deep and driving two and often three abreast as they race and struggle to meet their daily load. Undoubtedly the Soweto Express will move a number of people and it will cost that smaller number, more than ten rand a ticket. BUT moving 1,500,000 people a day - bullshit.
25. How can a single file pedestrian little two car monorail train move along a meandering 43 kilometre line with more than 30 stops, travelling at three minute intervals, hope to even remotely compete with the ubiquitously nimble taxi?
26. Look at it another way. The rush hour is called the rush hour because it's about an hour long and everyone is in a rush. If the train makes it to the main station every three minutes [according to the Star] with 214 citizens disembarking then that means twenty trains per hour with a full load: or 20 times 214 passengers per hour. In other words allowing for the usual over loading, about 5000 people an hour. Now while that is a useful contribution I hardly see it denting the alleged 1.5million commuters who apparently hurtle at the city daily from that particular source.[Or alternatively 750,000 each way home and away] {who counted them anyway?}
27. So I find I am puzzled by the fantastical figures being tossed out by what could perhaps be innumerate vendors, stakeholders, and politicians not to mention disingenuous journalists and spin merchants. Of course I could be misled by the artist's impression, which shows each 'train' set consisting of two coaches. Perhaps in reality the trains will be ten or twenty coaches long with about ten escalators per station, but I didn't get the impression this was intended. That would boost the infrastructure requirements and that was not indicated in the report. Perhaps the Malaysian promoters assume that our apartheid legacy turned us all into innumerate morons.
28. So I think that if I were a taxi operator with a hundred taxi fleet, like the fellow at the café the other day who proudly told me he grossed seven grand a day from his taxi chain, lived in a shack and spent his spare time boozing and fucking a succession of young chicks, I would not be losing sleep. And I do feel that the fact that the intended investor[Jeyakumar Varathan of Newcyc infra projects: Malaysia] is about to go bankrupt in Malaysia should not lead us to believe that their apparent innumeracy is at fault: or should I?
29. The present schedule of development projects looks impressive: a load of Stadia, and access roads, Gautrain and now The Soweto Express, bridges, highways all being pawed over by a happy handful of players with diminishing supplies of cement, steel and human skills. And all aimed generally at about 36 months from now as the completion target. In the meantime we hear daily of rioting, stoning and boycotting and general civil unrest by disaffected residents of poor communities over failures in service delivery. One can't help remembering that it was the Romans who devised the idea of a diversionary circus to take our minds of the immanent day when the payment must be made.
30. Can we manage all this I think in a place that takes about a year to issue a passport?
Aaagh- we move- the day returns to normal.
Yet another overloaded truck has jacknifed, and overturned spilling its load all across the highway. Is this the tenth one this week or am I hallucinating? Has this daily Lemming rush to the city finally tempted my remaining sanity or is this no more than a pause in the melody? I think- I am a modern person- I have car radio, I have newspaper, I have fax to modem whatever laptop with wireless thingy, I park here amongst the multitude wrapped up in my canned world apart from those next to me and can conduct business here on the highway while nothing moves- I can catch a thought or thirty-
!
1. The long awaited report on our beloved leader's 'Peer review' mechanism is still long awaited. According to rumours the SA Gov't which dreamed up the idea of the African Peer Review mechanism in the first place is unhappy about their report card from the eminent crowd of 'untouchables' who came to South Azania [SA] from elsewhere on the continent to check us over for political credibility.
2. Allegedly they made some 300 unwanted recommendations and were critical among other thing of our unrelenting crime situation and our equally unrelenting Black Economic Empowerment [BEE] programme. We don't know why: our beloved leadership has rested on the report for months now - brooding- we are told..
3. Could it be possible that these alleged wise and eminent persons saw in us the seeds of what had led to their own destruction and are attempting some form of damage control? 'Don't do what you are doing you will burn the toast'- Surely not?
4. Is our gov't's reluctance to accept unwelcome advices prompted as much by lust as good sense. We all know don't we that the absolute worst time to think of putting on a condom is in those tumultuous moments in love making when both parties cannot wait another moment to experience full-on penetration- And we are in 'full fuck' mode in our wonderful traffic saturated place aren't we?
5. On another tack: Does the strange reluctance of the South African rugby selectors to use Luke Watson, son of 'Cheeky' Watson, a man who was 'blackballed' by the rugby fraternity for consorting with 'darkies' during the days of the Dispossession indicate a fatal flaw in the emotional makeup of the coach Jake White?
6. If it is bad for a politician to interfere in sport by threatening the SA rugby squad [for the impending world cup] that he will withdraw their passports if the team does not contain a significant quota of colour laden humans,[ the BEE thing] or by passing legislation that somehow 'interferes' with sport [in promotion of the BEE thing] then why is it 'good' for Australia's politicians to interfere in sport by banning the Oz tour to Rumbabwe?
7. Is it possible now that the government has proclaimed itself official boss and final arbiter of all sporting decisions over team selection that we will gradually get to have less sport and more braais? After all we are often told that obesity is a rising national problem and must be fed.
8. The civil service is going on a go-slow. How does one go slower than slow?
9. Some enthusiastic person has suggested 'Hugathons' as a route to re-establishing our common humanity with others- 'Hug someone today make them feel loved and wanted'- How would this idea square with the current ethic that to touch someone other than one's significant other is to invite a sexual harassment suit?
10. Question: Why do the new presenters on SAFM's morning live show [AM Live] constantly insert a gratuitous 'uh' sound in-between words, which are otherwise unpunctuated.
11. Answer 1: they can only read one word at a time off the script.
12. Answer 2: they can't remember more than half a word ahead on the script.
13. Answer3: the words they must speak are relayed to them via earphones from our beloved leaders and they can only hear one word at a time off the script.
14. In fact why is it that in our supposedly democratic society no one on the radio seems to ask the obvious questions anymore since Perlman left- come back Perlman all is forgiven, surely?
15. Given that 300,000 soccer frenzied young mainly male humans visit our country in 2010 to alternately watch the world cup, get drunk and get laid [and maybe, visit the Hector Peterson memorial]: then, against whom would said horny visiting World Cup tourists have recourse, should they decide after their visit here in 2010 to sue the organisers for not warning them that shagging SA's unlicensed, unregulated, non-health checked army of day to day prostitutes, would send them home with a death sentence dose of HIV [Henry the fourth]?
16. In other words do we intend to issue health warnings to unsuspecting foreigners that a significant proportion of the thousands of prostitutes [aka sex workers] who will flock to town to take advantage of the 2010 gold rush should be used at the tourist's own risk?
17. Isn't history deliciously ironic- In 1948 the white Afrikaners in our beloved country concluded their struggle to regain 'their' country just in time to be ambushed by the rising tide of Indigenous Black Nationalism. Today the victorious Black Nationalists have concluded their struggle to regain 'their' country just in time to be ambushed by Global Warming.
18. One notices that not much energy seems apparent in the sauntering journey through the vagaries of the new ENatis car registration and licensing system that has been dysfunctional for a month or two now. One notices too, the equal lack of apparent urgency over the Bedfordview three day power outage, the complete apparent absence of concerted action to solve the Khutsong rebellion, over the unwelcome transfer of those citizens from Gauteng to a lesser province. When one also adds to that the non-performance of Home Affairs where citizens have to resort to 'rolling mass action' just to get the correct forms to fill out, never mind not getting the correct documents in under a year or five. Toss in the weaselling over the electricity REDS and a ho hum list of underperformance generally. Would it therefore be fair to ask if all the movers and shakers in the Government are so busy being involved in the business of business and cutting deals to get rich quick before all the loot evaporates that government itself is on its way into long term recess?
19. I listen regularly to UJFM and have commented over time at how they play great music, how their continuity is at a level of the ingénue and their news reading is so bad it raises conspiracy theories- Recently they celebrated their 1st birthday and most of the presenters have now had a considerable amount of practice. So how come their performance hasn't improved- Is it possible that people do not improve their performance with practice: rather they perform badly with improved perfection?
20. If I extend this idea outwards to society at large: how come, in a place [SA] that is only growing rather slowly [by world standards] and in which opportunity is part of the new ethic, are so many people so completely unable to proactively lift their game, that we are faced with increasing frequencies of societal infrastructural breakdown?
21. I loved the story of the new Jozi to Soweto monorail in the press this week. I kept checking the date at the top of the page thinking that maybe I had overslept badly and that it was suddenly April again. But the story persisted even on Friday and so I had to accept that someone had come up with a most sensible idea, all correct bribes are apparently in place, and I wondered why we hadn't chosen to do such a sensible thing with the awfully disruptive, inherently problematic Gautrain.
22. I was particularly impressed with the idea that the 'Soweto Express' will move 1.5 million passengers a day. I think that it will be wonderful for the citizens of this mini city [Soweto]who have to leave town every day in search of revenue. I see [from the artist's impression in the paper on the seat next to me] that the 'train' is around about two taxis wide and about six long and will carry 107 passengers [Star Thursday 17/5/07]. According to my Sansui financial calculator, with which I am playing in the traffic, one train every three minutes carrying two hundred and fourteen passengers, plus some overload, running 24 hours a day would at most shift about two hundred thousand people both ways over a single day. Presumably though most people will still expect to go to work only in the daytime.
23. On the reasonable assumption that a massive proportion of the 1.5 million commuters need to be at their destinations within a simultaneous period of time: eg when whatever happens starts at the beginning of the day and again later when it's afternoon rush hour, [as we're all doing right now in this immobilised gridlock] then it seems that some 14,000 carriages will need to be moving almost simultaneously along the rail line, with commuters disembarking at particular stops and crowding onto escalators, which if they are anything like those at my local shopping mall will work only intermittently.
24. In other words the length of the train would fill the monorail nearly four times- wouldn't it. [14,000 coaches x10 metres long each without a gap: that is about 140 kms of train on a 43 kilometre track]. Every workday I experience Taxis moving along every road I travel. They are all around me now as I write this. They are often in lines forty deep and driving two and often three abreast as they race and struggle to meet their daily load. Undoubtedly the Soweto Express will move a number of people and it will cost that smaller number, more than ten rand a ticket. BUT moving 1,500,000 people a day - bullshit.
25. How can a single file pedestrian little two car monorail train move along a meandering 43 kilometre line with more than 30 stops, travelling at three minute intervals, hope to even remotely compete with the ubiquitously nimble taxi?
26. Look at it another way. The rush hour is called the rush hour because it's about an hour long and everyone is in a rush. If the train makes it to the main station every three minutes [according to the Star] with 214 citizens disembarking then that means twenty trains per hour with a full load: or 20 times 214 passengers per hour. In other words allowing for the usual over loading, about 5000 people an hour. Now while that is a useful contribution I hardly see it denting the alleged 1.5million commuters who apparently hurtle at the city daily from that particular source.[Or alternatively 750,000 each way home and away] {who counted them anyway?}
27. So I find I am puzzled by the fantastical figures being tossed out by what could perhaps be innumerate vendors, stakeholders, and politicians not to mention disingenuous journalists and spin merchants. Of course I could be misled by the artist's impression, which shows each 'train' set consisting of two coaches. Perhaps in reality the trains will be ten or twenty coaches long with about ten escalators per station, but I didn't get the impression this was intended. That would boost the infrastructure requirements and that was not indicated in the report. Perhaps the Malaysian promoters assume that our apartheid legacy turned us all into innumerate morons.
28. So I think that if I were a taxi operator with a hundred taxi fleet, like the fellow at the café the other day who proudly told me he grossed seven grand a day from his taxi chain, lived in a shack and spent his spare time boozing and fucking a succession of young chicks, I would not be losing sleep. And I do feel that the fact that the intended investor[Jeyakumar Varathan of Newcyc infra projects: Malaysia] is about to go bankrupt in Malaysia should not lead us to believe that their apparent innumeracy is at fault: or should I?
29. The present schedule of development projects looks impressive: a load of Stadia, and access roads, Gautrain and now The Soweto Express, bridges, highways all being pawed over by a happy handful of players with diminishing supplies of cement, steel and human skills. And all aimed generally at about 36 months from now as the completion target. In the meantime we hear daily of rioting, stoning and boycotting and general civil unrest by disaffected residents of poor communities over failures in service delivery. One can't help remembering that it was the Romans who devised the idea of a diversionary circus to take our minds of the immanent day when the payment must be made.
30. Can we manage all this I think in a place that takes about a year to issue a passport?
Aaagh- we move- the day returns to normal.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Ruminations on the Zanufication of it all
Freedom Day long weekend: meaning no work for the wicked and may the car guard get his gratuity.
The problem with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one despised when alive and continues to despise after death is an apparently natural human tendency to treat the legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. When that uncle held one in thrall, never allowing one to participate in the complex process whereby that added value to our lives was made, and nurtured, then our own contempt will be our undoing and before we learn the truth we shall have impoverished ourselves and are left to wallow in regret and that sustained self-pity based on blame allocation, when the well runs dry.
!
I was talking with an old acquaintance a few days ago about his working in Malawi, a place I have visited on business occasionally over the past thirty years. It sounded like a distinctly double-edged experience. The country has the appearance of
being superficially beautiful and his life as an expat worker was blessed with good
living and great weekends, but up close and personal the warts proliferate. Poverty is
more than endemic, the plague is at its most pestilential and the fact that life expectancy rates are on a diminishing scale does not preclude a high rate of procreation coupled with a great many orphans [ironically, pronounced offens]
Having visited the country myself, as I have said, on various occasions over the past thirty years Malawi symbolises for me the real emerging tragedy of the Mugabe era in Zimbabwe. It is that time beyond encore, I said to him. He was sombre, and nodded. 'Malawi always reminds me of those sad people one encounters in Old Age facilities: ever declining faculties, on a slow road to oblivion; and thankfully blessed with a solid case of Altzheimers-. so whatever times you're managing to have are the good times.'
He also referred to the 'well fed ones': small coteries of Elites: sleek and well fed, and curiously, often dressed, whenever he or I had encountered them, in well-manicured leather. They were well hidden, he added, most of the time, behind bodyguards and high walls, tinted windows and well appointed offices set like wistful oases amongst the squalid circumstances of their surroundings.
This slowly disintegrating country [Malawi] represents a sad truth, which we all ignore, but which is nonetheless apparent. Malawi has never recovered from the long malign rule of its former dictator Hastings Banda. Although the notorious fly whisk carrying little man has long since departed the scene and although modern Malawi has all the inherent trappings of a democracy, with fairly routine changes of government; and anti-corruption trials nogal, not to mention charming and gracious citizens, the damage wrought by decades of corrupt one party rule are seemingly insurmountable. The legacy inherited by the Independent State from their despised uncle, after the dissolution of the failed Federation experiment, has been effectively squandered, and the family jewels have long since been pawned and forfeited.
Moving further south; when we read the routine demands in their various places in the media, that Mugabe should go, we neglect that truth. Mugabe's passing will not change things in Zimbabwe- it cannot.
Mugabe is merely the tip of the spear point of the corrupt missile plunged with hefted weight into the body politic of Zimbabwe. There is almost no corner of that squandered wasteland that is not pawed over for profit by some party functionary. There is also no rule of life that presupposes that a ruthless politician can automatically operate as a competitive business manager. Those who can make this transition simply demonstrate the adage that one or two exceptions do not disprove a rule. These well embedded parasites do not vanish with the wave of a wand- There will be no recovery in this or the next few generations. The precipitous plunge of this formerly, relatively, advantaged place will allow for no recovery. There is no chemo savage enough to placate such a cancer. One suspects that even Castro's reign in Cuba will turn out to have been less destructive than this illusion of democratic process masquerading as outright plunder that typifies the Mugabe era in Afrika.
We don't like to see this but that's what it is. If a place like New Orleans is unable to resuscitate itself after a minor catastrophe what chance a country hit by an apocalypse.
It took the massive Marshall Aid plan to resuscitate Europe after the demolition job waged on the continent by world war two and there was at least a considerable reservoir of skills and ability available to take advantage of the assistance. Africa has none of this- Zimbabwe has exported most of its talent and the system that facilitated such a large reservoir has been wrung dry. It is largely the parasites that remain. A parasite is by definition proactively destructive.
Although Zimbabwe can never recover, fortunately that Altzheimers syndrome about which my old acquaintance spoke will kick in, and slowly the people of that wrecked, wretched hole of a place will forget that they ever stood at the edges of greatness: and will lapse into the apathy that accompanies the knowledge that for them at least they had their turn missed their cue, and now the show is over and they will continue forever to enthuse over the odd casually tossed bowl of rice that comes their way..
Of course there will be plenty of hype about 'the growth to follow Mugabe's passing'; and anyone like me who speculates that there is no recovery after death will be denounced as a 'doomist'- but it is not I who am the doomist, I simply note the obvious: as they say- I am merely the messenger. Dead after all is- dead. The real doomists are those who sold out the future of the continent for a four-wheel drive and shopping at Harrods. It is they, who were once known as the 'Wabenzi' [people of the Mercedes Benz] who have ripped the soul out of so much of our continent's enthusiastic rush to take part in the modern world, and have left it skin deep in hope, feudalist in outlook; and possessed of a cancerous growth with so malignant a half life, that generations from now people will still curse the names, through song and parody, of all those thieving 'benefactors' who rendered them unto poverty.
There are many who say that Zimbabwe is entering the final phase now in its three part rise and fall drama. Malawi, even lowly Senegal, is proof that Zimbabwe has not even reached the halfway mark on the road to destruction and poverty. Two thousand percent inflation will soon become three thousand then four then five thousand while the meltdown moves from arithmetic to geometric progression as this apocalypse to which we are witness gathers critical mass. This is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.
Part of the problem facing both these places is associated with learning to stand on one's own feet. This is a problem we ourselves may yet encounter. The problem, as I have already mentioned, with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one intimately despises, is that we have treated that legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. This is what happened first with Banda, now with Mugabe and in fact almost everywhere else on our damaged continent. A class of citizen that brooked no competition somehow appropriated every functioning enterprise in those places to their own advantage, and the detriment of everyone else; and to the inevitable damnation of the enterprise, as the world moved inexorably into the Age of Commoditisation.
We have ourselves sown the seeds of our own dilemma with legislation that similarly favours appropriation of competitive competence to the long-term detriment of home grown competitive vigour. As the notorious so-called 'Bumiputri' [the class that benefits] in Malaysia have grown to become a barrier to the advancement of those non-connected Malaysians they were supposedly advancing, so are the common people in our own backyard again being cheated through a system that promises much but delivers only to the well-connected and well-appointed. Those achieving preferment in this era of the Acquisition will inevitably, and with all the inherent malignancy that typifies the corporate oligopoly, block those of their competitors, without connections, who seek preferment and competitive growth. These poor fools will find themselves excluded and punished for their presumption as we slowly strangle ourselves on our Alter of preferential preferment.
As a potentially entertaining example of this process consider the sudden elevation to emerging billionaire status of one Eltie Links, the head of the AfriSam consortium, which is buying 85% of minnow producer Holcim cement SA from its present owners for 13.9 Billion buckaroons. Part is purchased from its Swiss owners who are craftily, it seems disinvesting from our market place and the balance of 7.4 billion from Aveng Ltd, a local construction company.
The word buying in that last sentence is conditional, in much the same way that buying your house with one hundred percent of the money provided by a bank is in effect a conditional purchase, requiring that you stump up a routine schedule of payments over a longish period of time or lose the house. Rising interest rates will squeeze Mr Eltie's margins, impacting on his payment circumstances, as would a sudden glut of cement or even a decline in the demand therefore.
The former owners walk away with cash, the buyer gets the debt and the chance that the whole operation can finance the debt in the wake of much competition in a traditionally oligopolistic market place with pretensions to monopoly. In theory this should be possible, but as they say in the world of economics - 'on the other hand-'.
The question that has not been answered is: How did that particular person [Herr Links] get to be so blessed that his 'consortium' was the preferred one out of the hordes of aspirant wannabe millionaires/billionaires in the country ? Was it because he is well connected via his role as former Trade Commissioner and Ambassador to the European Union? There are those who once made Sherry, Port and Grappa who would argue that he didn't fare that well- Perhaps he is a natural captain of industry- now emerging chrysalis like in the wake of a possibly doomed political career? Or maybe he was simply a man in need of a favour; to be rewarded with what is perceived in a non-competitive mindset to be something of a sinecure, the way the plastic shopping bag scam became a sinecure for preferred party apparatchiks. One also wonders if his preferment had a 'facilitator', in the way one wonders who 'facilitated' the notoriously defective ENAtis new national electronic system for registering motor vehicles that has now not been working since blogs ago. Did the person who got that ENatis job get it because of competence or was it another 'Shabby Shaik' deal?
One suspects that the former owners [Aveng Ltd] who have disposed of their part of the operation for 7.4 billion smackeroons saw advantage in getting the cash to invest in somewhere that is growing, rather than leave the equity in a business that had reached the limits of its production capacity. According to various reports Holcim imports a considerable amount of cement from elsewhere, at a price less than what it would cost to produce it here. It was therefore unlikely, presumably, to generate the same potential return on capital employed as could be made skimming greater profits out of formal construction contracts especially as the panic buttons begin to go off over 2010 over the next period of time. And anyway if Holcim can import cement so can a n other.
One scenario for the future suggests that unnamed 'interest groups' have been stockpiling cement, and when the shortages pile up, as they will do given the national construction production timetable that is building momentum daily, then they will release such stocks onto the market, undercutting the process of supply and demand applying at that moment, and who knows perhaps putting Mr Links into a spot of bother paying back the interest on the total 13.9 billion that he has to borrow against an international climate of rising interest rates, while the price per bag is being undercut by crafty, wizened and brutally competent corporate bean counters. One hopes that Mr Links is enough of a competitive pragmatist to be building stockpiles of his own, if he can afford it: as a highly successful adman told me once decades ago: 'The customer is the battlefield the competition are the enemy that must be vanquished.'
The one saving grace of our own national-plunder-the-breadbasket campaign that may work to its comparative advantage is the vast amount of competition that is readily apparent between the members of the ruling party, which should before too long now [over the next twenty years ] begin to break itself up, a process that may be accelerated by an hour or two now that the so-called leader of the official opposition is going into retirement, and handing over the reigns of opposition to no one who will matter anymore. This removal of a long-standing roadblock could be the saving of our competitive State, or it may prove to be as irrelevant as the minority it represents.
The downside for the whole 'plunder at will' mindset, is that people who inherit businesses that they didn't build have a disconcerting tendency to fall over when markets change as they do so often nowadays. [see Malawi fell, see Zimbabwe fall- see- ] To compensate for this they [those who have plundered successfully] have to generate an anti-competitive environment to protect their self-interest. For instance in past times Mr Links would have simply arranged for import protection against any one with enough cash importing cement- you could only import cement if you had a cement factory locally for instance] In a competitive democracy in the liberalising climate of globalisation today this is not too easy anymore - in a non-competitive environment where the referee also gets to play the game then there is a slow insidious 'Zanufication' process that gets to work and eventually the referee becomes the only player, and the spectators no longer have anything to watch except the rise and rise of the inflation rate as more and more money chases less and less product. This is what took place in Malawi and is trending towards its apotheosis in Zimbabwe. There are a disconcerting and rising number of instances here [in Southern Azania: SA] too that the ruling party is playing both referee and participant in its own game, Mr Links' rise to glory being only one such example.
Alternatively the new owners of inherited Commoditised businesses may simply take their profits and walk away, as Mzi Khumalo did last year with his three quarter billion Group Five winnings, and as they are doing with the now late Edcon group- bought by offshore private equity in what may well turn out to be the corporate rape of the decade.
Enough already, for freedom day has passed and workers day will be celebrated without work and there are people out there making bucks while the hay passes by.
Are you getting your share of the spoils?
Keep on blogging
NiK
The problem with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one despised when alive and continues to despise after death is an apparently natural human tendency to treat the legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. When that uncle held one in thrall, never allowing one to participate in the complex process whereby that added value to our lives was made, and nurtured, then our own contempt will be our undoing and before we learn the truth we shall have impoverished ourselves and are left to wallow in regret and that sustained self-pity based on blame allocation, when the well runs dry.
!
I was talking with an old acquaintance a few days ago about his working in Malawi, a place I have visited on business occasionally over the past thirty years. It sounded like a distinctly double-edged experience. The country has the appearance of
being superficially beautiful and his life as an expat worker was blessed with good
living and great weekends, but up close and personal the warts proliferate. Poverty is
more than endemic, the plague is at its most pestilential and the fact that life expectancy rates are on a diminishing scale does not preclude a high rate of procreation coupled with a great many orphans [ironically, pronounced offens]
Having visited the country myself, as I have said, on various occasions over the past thirty years Malawi symbolises for me the real emerging tragedy of the Mugabe era in Zimbabwe. It is that time beyond encore, I said to him. He was sombre, and nodded. 'Malawi always reminds me of those sad people one encounters in Old Age facilities: ever declining faculties, on a slow road to oblivion; and thankfully blessed with a solid case of Altzheimers-. so whatever times you're managing to have are the good times.'
He also referred to the 'well fed ones': small coteries of Elites: sleek and well fed, and curiously, often dressed, whenever he or I had encountered them, in well-manicured leather. They were well hidden, he added, most of the time, behind bodyguards and high walls, tinted windows and well appointed offices set like wistful oases amongst the squalid circumstances of their surroundings.
This slowly disintegrating country [Malawi] represents a sad truth, which we all ignore, but which is nonetheless apparent. Malawi has never recovered from the long malign rule of its former dictator Hastings Banda. Although the notorious fly whisk carrying little man has long since departed the scene and although modern Malawi has all the inherent trappings of a democracy, with fairly routine changes of government; and anti-corruption trials nogal, not to mention charming and gracious citizens, the damage wrought by decades of corrupt one party rule are seemingly insurmountable. The legacy inherited by the Independent State from their despised uncle, after the dissolution of the failed Federation experiment, has been effectively squandered, and the family jewels have long since been pawned and forfeited.
Moving further south; when we read the routine demands in their various places in the media, that Mugabe should go, we neglect that truth. Mugabe's passing will not change things in Zimbabwe- it cannot.
Mugabe is merely the tip of the spear point of the corrupt missile plunged with hefted weight into the body politic of Zimbabwe. There is almost no corner of that squandered wasteland that is not pawed over for profit by some party functionary. There is also no rule of life that presupposes that a ruthless politician can automatically operate as a competitive business manager. Those who can make this transition simply demonstrate the adage that one or two exceptions do not disprove a rule. These well embedded parasites do not vanish with the wave of a wand- There will be no recovery in this or the next few generations. The precipitous plunge of this formerly, relatively, advantaged place will allow for no recovery. There is no chemo savage enough to placate such a cancer. One suspects that even Castro's reign in Cuba will turn out to have been less destructive than this illusion of democratic process masquerading as outright plunder that typifies the Mugabe era in Afrika.
We don't like to see this but that's what it is. If a place like New Orleans is unable to resuscitate itself after a minor catastrophe what chance a country hit by an apocalypse.
It took the massive Marshall Aid plan to resuscitate Europe after the demolition job waged on the continent by world war two and there was at least a considerable reservoir of skills and ability available to take advantage of the assistance. Africa has none of this- Zimbabwe has exported most of its talent and the system that facilitated such a large reservoir has been wrung dry. It is largely the parasites that remain. A parasite is by definition proactively destructive.
Although Zimbabwe can never recover, fortunately that Altzheimers syndrome about which my old acquaintance spoke will kick in, and slowly the people of that wrecked, wretched hole of a place will forget that they ever stood at the edges of greatness: and will lapse into the apathy that accompanies the knowledge that for them at least they had their turn missed their cue, and now the show is over and they will continue forever to enthuse over the odd casually tossed bowl of rice that comes their way..
Of course there will be plenty of hype about 'the growth to follow Mugabe's passing'; and anyone like me who speculates that there is no recovery after death will be denounced as a 'doomist'- but it is not I who am the doomist, I simply note the obvious: as they say- I am merely the messenger. Dead after all is- dead. The real doomists are those who sold out the future of the continent for a four-wheel drive and shopping at Harrods. It is they, who were once known as the 'Wabenzi' [people of the Mercedes Benz] who have ripped the soul out of so much of our continent's enthusiastic rush to take part in the modern world, and have left it skin deep in hope, feudalist in outlook; and possessed of a cancerous growth with so malignant a half life, that generations from now people will still curse the names, through song and parody, of all those thieving 'benefactors' who rendered them unto poverty.
There are many who say that Zimbabwe is entering the final phase now in its three part rise and fall drama. Malawi, even lowly Senegal, is proof that Zimbabwe has not even reached the halfway mark on the road to destruction and poverty. Two thousand percent inflation will soon become three thousand then four then five thousand while the meltdown moves from arithmetic to geometric progression as this apocalypse to which we are witness gathers critical mass. This is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.
Part of the problem facing both these places is associated with learning to stand on one's own feet. This is a problem we ourselves may yet encounter. The problem, as I have already mentioned, with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one intimately despises, is that we have treated that legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. This is what happened first with Banda, now with Mugabe and in fact almost everywhere else on our damaged continent. A class of citizen that brooked no competition somehow appropriated every functioning enterprise in those places to their own advantage, and the detriment of everyone else; and to the inevitable damnation of the enterprise, as the world moved inexorably into the Age of Commoditisation.
We have ourselves sown the seeds of our own dilemma with legislation that similarly favours appropriation of competitive competence to the long-term detriment of home grown competitive vigour. As the notorious so-called 'Bumiputri' [the class that benefits] in Malaysia have grown to become a barrier to the advancement of those non-connected Malaysians they were supposedly advancing, so are the common people in our own backyard again being cheated through a system that promises much but delivers only to the well-connected and well-appointed. Those achieving preferment in this era of the Acquisition will inevitably, and with all the inherent malignancy that typifies the corporate oligopoly, block those of their competitors, without connections, who seek preferment and competitive growth. These poor fools will find themselves excluded and punished for their presumption as we slowly strangle ourselves on our Alter of preferential preferment.
As a potentially entertaining example of this process consider the sudden elevation to emerging billionaire status of one Eltie Links, the head of the AfriSam consortium, which is buying 85% of minnow producer Holcim cement SA from its present owners for 13.9 Billion buckaroons. Part is purchased from its Swiss owners who are craftily, it seems disinvesting from our market place and the balance of 7.4 billion from Aveng Ltd, a local construction company.
The word buying in that last sentence is conditional, in much the same way that buying your house with one hundred percent of the money provided by a bank is in effect a conditional purchase, requiring that you stump up a routine schedule of payments over a longish period of time or lose the house. Rising interest rates will squeeze Mr Eltie's margins, impacting on his payment circumstances, as would a sudden glut of cement or even a decline in the demand therefore.
The former owners walk away with cash, the buyer gets the debt and the chance that the whole operation can finance the debt in the wake of much competition in a traditionally oligopolistic market place with pretensions to monopoly. In theory this should be possible, but as they say in the world of economics - 'on the other hand-'.
The question that has not been answered is: How did that particular person [Herr Links] get to be so blessed that his 'consortium' was the preferred one out of the hordes of aspirant wannabe millionaires/billionaires in the country ? Was it because he is well connected via his role as former Trade Commissioner and Ambassador to the European Union? There are those who once made Sherry, Port and Grappa who would argue that he didn't fare that well- Perhaps he is a natural captain of industry- now emerging chrysalis like in the wake of a possibly doomed political career? Or maybe he was simply a man in need of a favour; to be rewarded with what is perceived in a non-competitive mindset to be something of a sinecure, the way the plastic shopping bag scam became a sinecure for preferred party apparatchiks. One also wonders if his preferment had a 'facilitator', in the way one wonders who 'facilitated' the notoriously defective ENAtis new national electronic system for registering motor vehicles that has now not been working since blogs ago. Did the person who got that ENatis job get it because of competence or was it another 'Shabby Shaik' deal?
One suspects that the former owners [Aveng Ltd] who have disposed of their part of the operation for 7.4 billion smackeroons saw advantage in getting the cash to invest in somewhere that is growing, rather than leave the equity in a business that had reached the limits of its production capacity. According to various reports Holcim imports a considerable amount of cement from elsewhere, at a price less than what it would cost to produce it here. It was therefore unlikely, presumably, to generate the same potential return on capital employed as could be made skimming greater profits out of formal construction contracts especially as the panic buttons begin to go off over 2010 over the next period of time. And anyway if Holcim can import cement so can a n other.
One scenario for the future suggests that unnamed 'interest groups' have been stockpiling cement, and when the shortages pile up, as they will do given the national construction production timetable that is building momentum daily, then they will release such stocks onto the market, undercutting the process of supply and demand applying at that moment, and who knows perhaps putting Mr Links into a spot of bother paying back the interest on the total 13.9 billion that he has to borrow against an international climate of rising interest rates, while the price per bag is being undercut by crafty, wizened and brutally competent corporate bean counters. One hopes that Mr Links is enough of a competitive pragmatist to be building stockpiles of his own, if he can afford it: as a highly successful adman told me once decades ago: 'The customer is the battlefield the competition are the enemy that must be vanquished.'
The one saving grace of our own national-plunder-the-breadbasket campaign that may work to its comparative advantage is the vast amount of competition that is readily apparent between the members of the ruling party, which should before too long now [over the next twenty years ] begin to break itself up, a process that may be accelerated by an hour or two now that the so-called leader of the official opposition is going into retirement, and handing over the reigns of opposition to no one who will matter anymore. This removal of a long-standing roadblock could be the saving of our competitive State, or it may prove to be as irrelevant as the minority it represents.
The downside for the whole 'plunder at will' mindset, is that people who inherit businesses that they didn't build have a disconcerting tendency to fall over when markets change as they do so often nowadays. [see Malawi fell, see Zimbabwe fall- see- ] To compensate for this they [those who have plundered successfully] have to generate an anti-competitive environment to protect their self-interest. For instance in past times Mr Links would have simply arranged for import protection against any one with enough cash importing cement- you could only import cement if you had a cement factory locally for instance] In a competitive democracy in the liberalising climate of globalisation today this is not too easy anymore - in a non-competitive environment where the referee also gets to play the game then there is a slow insidious 'Zanufication' process that gets to work and eventually the referee becomes the only player, and the spectators no longer have anything to watch except the rise and rise of the inflation rate as more and more money chases less and less product. This is what took place in Malawi and is trending towards its apotheosis in Zimbabwe. There are a disconcerting and rising number of instances here [in Southern Azania: SA] too that the ruling party is playing both referee and participant in its own game, Mr Links' rise to glory being only one such example.
Alternatively the new owners of inherited Commoditised businesses may simply take their profits and walk away, as Mzi Khumalo did last year with his three quarter billion Group Five winnings, and as they are doing with the now late Edcon group- bought by offshore private equity in what may well turn out to be the corporate rape of the decade.
Enough already, for freedom day has passed and workers day will be celebrated without work and there are people out there making bucks while the hay passes by.
Are you getting your share of the spoils?
Keep on blogging
NiK
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