Percentage games

The past few weeks with the National civil servants strike have been revealing in many ways. One of the most intriguing, curious and perhaps even disturbing revelations has been the confirmation [to this reader/listener/viewer] of our status as being among the worlds poorest exponents of mathematical fluency.

For our new offshore reader's base, we, the Southern Azanian/South African information consumers are routinely advised that our children and hence schooling system are consistently placed in the “dunce” category on global league tables regarding mathematical fluency.

Is there hope, of course there is hope. I who write this following observation and comment am no mathematical guru. I scored 11% for mathematics in my Matric Trials [1963] and only passed ultimately with an E after learning every geometry theorem off by heart over the few months before the finals. I have also avoided excessive involvement in Mathematics over these years since.... excepting the formulas i have to deal with daily.

Nonetheless I don’t think of this bizarre revelation this past few weeks as being representative of mathematics but rather of an old fashioned thing that may be popping up in a new guise as Maths Literacy, and in a more abbreviated form was called Arithmetic.

Okay. Enough. What was the revelation and why was it so problematic. Conspiracy proponents may tell us it's done on purpose. The effect of this core error in arithmetical thin-
king is disingenuous and it does help to mask one area of delusion in our magic mirror game called “the Global Economy”.

Okay; here’s a piece from Business Day [June 27, 2007: Page 14. Second/sub editorial:

'Mixed message".] Quote: referring to civil service workers: “And they want a pay increase of 8% -10%. So that’s just 2.5% more than the government started out with….”

What is so wrong with this statement that it even managed to reach the tiny percentage of understanding that I have of mathematics?

This was not the only example of this. On a range of occasions the filed interviewer reports on SAFM made the same observation. A young sounding female voice chirped brightly one morning this week about how she didn’t really see what the fuss was about: it was only two percent more she said, with all the charm of an ingénue.

More disturbingly one of the the negotiating team made a similar point in his summing up of the outcome at the stage where all bar the teachers were calling off the strike. Viva Teachers.

So when the government moves from 5.25% to 7.5% over a period of ten months or so from original offer to closing deal the negotiator talks of the government having only moved up just “more than two percent”.

Right now most people reading this blog are convinced that we just had a month long strike over 1 and a half percent! outrageous right.

Wrong. We just had a month long strike where the difference between the opening offer and the closing deal was 25%. Along the way the bites became less as each percentage point or cluster of basis points was negotiated. The difference between the offer and the demand [6% and 12%] was not 6% as many commentators suggested but actually ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

There is clearly a huge difference between 6% and 100%. Logically the difference can be described in two ways. Either the difference between offer and demand was SIX PERCENTAGE POINTS or it was ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

One is called POINTS or in smaller quantities than one whole number, BASIS POINTS; and the other is called PERCENTAGES. They are completely different in the way that the
measuring points on a tape measure are different to that which is being measured.

So the workers got a twenty five percent increase [above that which they were offered when the strike started] and before you get all agitated at how huge this settlement was, consider that when the CPIX [consumer inflation rate] went from 3%,only a few years ago to the currently stated 6.1% it didn’t go up by three point one percent, as is routinely [disingenuously?] suggested, but rather by more than one hundred percent. The workers are still worse off now than they were a few years back, eespecially when you cost in loss of pay for many for a month. In fact at our current rate of inflation we’ll be offering our visitors to the 2010 event a rather more expensive tour than they would have had when we planned the event originally, and that could be problematic.

An apocryphal tale, that may or may not have been told by John Kenneth Galbraith, holds it that the legendary JP Morgan pre-empted massive [personal] losses in what came to be called “The great crash”[1929] after overhearing a share market discussion between his driver and his housekeeper, while the former was ushering him into New York. He said something to the effect that when the chattering classes engage in economics it is time to sell.

When innumerate people are reporting on economic matters this little confusion between points and percents could be setting us up for a global credit meltdown.

A short while ago Japanese interest rates rose from low positions, [they were even negative for a while] by some fifty basis points to around three quarters of one percent. Talk on CNBC was how it affected the so-called carry trade: an activity whereby one borrows in
Japan [for instance] at a quarter percent and lends in another country, say SA at 7%.The profit is on the interest rate differentials and the difference is enormous.

 This Japanese rates increase occurred during the time that a private equity takeover of the country’s biggest Retail group was occurring, just before the final shareholder decision. Not one commentator nor participant in that takeover, not even the generally outspoken Public Investment Corporation seemed to consider that Japanese lending rates had not just risen by fifty basis points the holding cost of Japanese money had just raised by some one hundred and fifty percent. The impact on a flexible lower rate crashing up against a higher fixed rate was more than significant it was a potential deal breaker.

The Bain company who bought Edcon gave the impression that they were using borrowed money to finance the deal. Although never stated the deal could well have been financed via the so-called “carry trade” from Japan, which at the beginning of the deal was the cheapest place to borrow a few billion dollars. Edcon is currently touting bond issues of considerable margins just to pay back the cost of being bought [a curious idea isn’t it]. It does not take much prescience to foresee some serious woes in the Edcon camp over the next two years.

When Mr Mboweni pushes up the Repo rate again in the next month or two by fifty basis points he wont be pushing up the cost of borrowing by half a percent he’ll be pushing it up by the best part of ten percent [after having already pushed it up by about forty percent] and there will be a huge difference in the amount of cash you have on hand after paying ten percent more interest on everything you own on credit. Our low level arithmetical faculty may cost us dearly, or will it?

On a lighter note I met a man recently who had been at school with my brother, left the place at grade eleven, his father was killed by a hit and run driver, he was married at 19 with a baby on the way and no job prospects at all. He and his new bride began a business which they built up over time and today he is a mega-wealthy man with a home on every continent, still married to his bride. Asked about the secret of his success he said to me: “I bought stuff for four cents and sold it for twelve cents; and it’s amazing how all those eight percents added up.”

 The Blogospherian.

Viva bloggers.

A day downtown

The muggers may have been resting, it was Sunday after all when I went with a large party of about seventy people into downtown Jozi to watch a man walk diagonally across Commissioner Street while a motley, selected collection of traffic roared across the intersection of Commissioner and Joubert.And roared and roared, forwardsandbackwards on the commands of "ACTION!"  and "First positions"..

Forwards and backwards and the man doing the crossing was about ten stories up in the air on a piece of wire stretched across the diagonal; from the lower parapet of His Majesties Building [yes it’s still there] on the south east corner to the top of the old Johannesburg Building Society place on the north west corner. He walked with a certain caution: sliding each foot forward in a near shuffle. Nonetheless I wouldn’t do it.

And because the director was a man of principle who wanted to get as many permutations on his renta-crowded street scene as possible, he moved us, the visual décor, around and around from the cold side of the street in the early hours after dawn to the warm side at midday and back into the shadows when the sun drops over the roofs of the canyon buildings later in the day.

There will be a flash of me, a marginally featured extra… squinting into the sun unable to believe my eyes… a man walk across a road on a piece of wire fifty metres or so above the ground! Why?  There are obviously more comfortable ways to make money so he must have another purpose… mustn’t he?

But what if he just does it for the money.

We on the other hand were definitely doing it for the money.

Where else can you earn a reasonable day’s pay, receive a first class lunch and copious cups of tea, not to mention transport to and from the studio to simply  stand around and wait. Presumably we were doing it for a lot less than he was: even if you had to add all of us up together. At the same time it was a pleasant day. It was a day for hurry-up-and-wait-deluxe.

On some movie sets the Extras are on the move the whole time … that was us: the extras… once an extra always an extra, as they say… one becomes typecast. Sometimes you can be in the thick of battle; on other occasions you are simply hanging around in the background. This was a wonderfully convivial shoot, with time to swap stories over copious cups of tea and an excellent lunch: with a merry band of fellows in fantasyland..

The French film crew were amused. They had taken a reasonable budget and finessed it. Come to Jozi for a shoot. Shoot downtown on Commissioner Street. There are building there that represent early twentieth century “me too” architecture of a type cast aside in the great post-modernist revolution elsewhere. [could that have been a bizarre benefit of sanctions?] And of course it may yet be razed to the ground in a fit of post revolutionary building fervour as we demolish the past and all its tourist dollars..

In the meantime you can shoot a Gotham Time Ad in a Gotham type place with a ring of police to keep the muggers at bay. Eventually the police presence seemed to wander off. Maybe they melted into the sea of extras as unpaid confetti.  Someone did get through the inherently non-existent cordon to snatch a packet of sausages, I was told, from the hot dog stand that was so carefully arranged against the pavement, complete with hot dog man. He was allegedly chased to the corner. No one from our team fussed about it. We’d all known it would happen and weren’t surprised. Everyone hung onto their handbags and their spare kit was under guard. But the sausages were fair game, and were had. It passed almost without comment.

The big score for the foreigners who came to make the movie is the relatively large supply of experienced and skilled extras that exist in Jozi. You can cost a movie in Euros, come out to africa shoot the thing with  aprofessional skilled crew and cast; satisfy your Incustomer and pocket a bundle of windfallo profit.

In this this case they specifically needed the kind of Extra with whom their European targets could identify* and we were it. This was the new  rare occasion when the demand was for “Whiteys”. 

One suspects that we represented the largest body of “whiteys” to visit the corner of Joubert and Commissioner in a decade and we were as much a source of fascination for the assembled local citizenry as was the the tightrope walker.

A straw poll of responses from my fellows revealed that few had ever been downtown and for many of the younger team members this occasion was their first experience of downtown Jozi. I found that weird remembering the first time I went to His Majesty’s cinema to see Lawrence of Arabia in about 1958 or something. How can you have lived in Jozi and never been downtown? We dined in the underground parking garage below the newly named Ghandi Square and i recollected a glorious "prohibition" party celebrated in that same place thirty five years ago.

But downtown became no-town and in the great flight from the auld city to Edge City in the eighties and the nineties the place was left to rot, with all the buildings around us down there on the corner of Joubert, boarded up and all the entrances bricked over to preclude hijacked access.

*Identify: The point of being an extra is that you are simply background. Who ever notices the Extras, aside from the odd crazy person or pernickety film critic. Therefore because the target can identify with the background characters they are unnoticed and therefore do not steal inadvertently from the message being sold. To use black extras for viewing in a place that has relatively few black residents would cause the background to become obvious and defeat the point of the extras.

So isn’t that strange: here is a Gotham City in Africa complete with cut price White skinned extras [ there were of course also a handful of darkies demographically representative of a modern first world city which presumably we were simulating.] [Twenty years ago we remaining mass of whiteys were described disparagingly as the "poorest white people in the world" and what is working as an extra if not work for the poor.] I don't know if that is still true but nonetheless the irony was subtle and largely unnoticed.

Curiously most of the dark guys i spoke too seemed as unfamiliar with downtown Jozi as the rest of the crowd. Maybe they too were from elsewhere.

So there is a bizarre tweak to the business of business in SA. Our city in its present form is a tourist attraction in its own right; and a day parked off downtown gave me plenty of time to observe the completely retro-architectural feel of the place. Until Sunday I had never considered our city to be a place of beauty, so either I am going soft or I just missed it before.

One hopes that as the place gentrifies, in the wake of the various urban renewal programmes that are currently unfolding in our town, that some of this so-called Art-deco architecture that represents so much of the original splendour of the old Golden City can be recaptured.

It is more probable though, that we will treat the old city with the same contempt that the developers of the new Greenstone Shopping-experience Mall on the North-eastern corner of Greater Jozi have done, where arguably the finest view site in the Metropole was conveniently trashed with a blisterpack heap of concrete, stainless steel: and fake lawn.

As it stands right now though, downtown Jozi has a feel of Gotham City and the French Connection had lined up an eclectically Gothamesque collection of motor vehicles: aging Chevvies and Caddies and Comaros n all, lined up with some of more plebeian hue; plus those belonging to the most glittering present to parade a cavalcade again and again as we shot take after take after take after take after take….

And through all this not once, not twice, not even thrice across that deadly gap: he walked and walked and walked, and walked and... until he knew the way.

The Blogospherian.

"Failing democracy before democracy fails you"

Today is the first anniversary of the Jeppestown Massacre

A moment of news last year that otherwise is meaningless.

It represents an event. Four Police workers died. About three times that number of bad persons died, in a hours long shootout that following an abortive robbery be an incompetent heist gang.

I suppose one could argue that if three times the number of bad guys die for each good guy the world will eventually run out of bad guys: unless the ratio of bad guys to good guys is four to one or five to one or more likely nowadays about a hundred to one.

This is the core Achilles heel weakness of a democratic system modelled on the lines of the more open hearted so-called “liberal ethic.”  All political systems are flawed and ours is no exception so when I see a banner headline that says “Failing democracy before democracy fails you.” I have to comment on the issue of social cause given as the motivation for the headline. The writer of the M&G headline thasst fuelled this blog suggests that more social causes of crime should be explored. There are those who believe that what he calls tough measures are far too soft.

What are “social causes” and should they be given special attention as an excuse for excusing the otherwise inexcusable: “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help murdering that little baby. I had a hard life. I was abused and I needed the money because my dysfunctional past left me without any, nor the non-killing skills to acquire some. Oh boo hoo…. Save me.”

The argument against goes: “Well fuck you…!”

Treat em harsh but do it nicely.

 The problem for the first group … the so called “Bleeding heart liberals.” Is that unpleasant crime seems to be on the up and up. One home of this philosophy over the past six decades  sees a place like Britain reeling under social unrest amongst the working classes in the form of binge drinking and so called “Yob” behaviour. Decades of “niceness” has bred a society that is apparently,  in large part, dysfunctional. [What does this mean this “Dysfunctional?”]

If this policy of being “nice” to the poor and the indigent; and indulgent to the recalcitrant was going to work, in the sense of creating a more caring society, then it has plainly failed. This means that one either has to become more indulgent of those who transgress, on the grounds that it will take many generations to create ‘nicer’ people. Or, accept that people don’t change and giving them latitude merely feeds their sense of being right all along. The political climate seems to be moving away from that more indulgent route. It is possible that we are witness to the cracking. We begin to crack an ever ready whip.

However as usual the whip is being cracked against the good guys. Consider how the present regime is making it more and more difficult for a private citizen to legitimately own a handgun [while making it possible for the bad guy to own many].

In the same way the new censorship authority created under the new Publications Act is bullying the art movie-loving citizen.

Some new Puritan has decided that an award winning movie dealing with the scourge of child abuse and misogynistic behaviour, “The Bog of Beasts” by a Brazilian film production company which was due to be shown at an Arts Festival at a coastal city is evil, reveals scenes that could apparentlty promotye paedophilia and therefopre must be banned ffrom sight..

This is the first act in the new censorship regime that will gradually snuff out the voice of freedom, heralded by the event of 27 April 1994. [see my blog: the Zanufication of it all]. In the same way that freedom is not advanced by disarming the citizen, no society has ever became more liberated by censoring what citizens may read or think.

This Publications Act has been amended to drive sex and corruption out of consciousness: it is a move by the nannies who have come to haunt our later lives. Meanwhile out there child rape is an epidemic one is told and apparently all other forms of rape are pretty high on the hit parade of crime, along with murder and general brutality. All of this criminal activity was occurring on a considerable scale, apparently, in the bad days of the former evil regime when censorship rules made even this present modest move towards the abyss seem pedestrian so one can hardly blame the material for causing an upsurge in violence against women and children. [The new regime frequently uses the notion that criminal activity was widespread in the Dispossession era when all this porno stuff was banned and banned and banned. So this makes it hard to justify the notion that the presence of porn promotes rape and sodomy.]

We need to be vigilant to see whether stopping a handful of serious movie buffs from getting a fix in the Bog of Beasts actually results in a fourfold decrease in the aforementioned crimes.

Viva real bloggers

The Blogospherian.

Is the skills crisis an “urban legend?”

The tale of two studies/issues/stories/fantasies/illusions…  whatever. 

According to some fellow who spoke to a parliamentary grouping some weeks ago and was reported in the business press the so-called skills crisis that everyone mutters about is an illusion… specifically an illusion on the scale of “urban legend”.

According to that person [I’ve temporarily misfiled the clipping],who represents what seems to be a coherent school of thought, the “skills crisis” is a ‘catch’ phrase invented by the opponents of transformation in an attempt to have affirmative action activities curtailed.

It is white racists, in his opinion, who refuse to hire skilled, trained and eager black experts and, in fact, claim spuriously that they don’t exist.

 No job is so complicated it can’t be handled with ease by cadres of enthusiastic party apparatchiks who are, according to his interpretation of perceptions, waiting in their cloned hordes in the passages and in the foyers but not in the boardroom where they should be.

They are being deliberately deprived of the right to access comfortable paid employment because of the rotten attitude of incumbents: people who are afraid to lose their jobs.

WThis is not an unfamiliar refrain.

More routinely we know the other story”: the familiar one that says that we have serious skills shortages and they could well hamper things in the future, if not already. Curiously some wag of a sub-editor had craftily placed the Urban legend skills crisis diatribe alongside an impassioned plea to solve the skills crisis made by our beloved deputy president Ms M-N at a skills conference in a place called Ethekwini [sic] [wherever that is].

Each day brings its tale of skills shortages and each day brings denial. In all the argument that has raged about skills shortages for decades one thing is sure. If you’re under 25 and you’re not “connected” you are unemployable, irrespective of your education.

And if you are over thirty-five and not connected you are unemployable: in fact you are often unemployable because of your connections. Again it can be said with certainty that masses of education, experience and training count for little in our highly pragmatic dog-eat-dog business environment.  Whatever the facts and truths are that relate to these preceding statements they are unimportant alongside this overwhelming truth about our society.  Our philosophy has been founded on the idea that human are commodities… That is the essence of colonialism: and human commodities function best between twenty-five and thirty-five.

The mass-media press is filled routinely with letters; and radio with phone-ins from all walks of society that as routinely confirm that view. We have read them and listened to thyem for decades now: they are like weather reports. 

That particular age band[25-35]undoubtedly represents a large chunk of the working population… and perhaps there are almost as many ‘unskilled’ people in that age band as there are skilled persons, they simply don’t get noticed. It is doubtful though that the so-called “golden decade”  represents a majority of the skilled people potentially available out there. We don’t really know this because there is no national skills data base apparently.

At the same time the people who have jobs mostly seem to hate them and can’t wait to perform them badly. This week a young woman committed suicide because she had no ID book [the so-called “Book of Life”][Star Monday 18 June] and therefore couldn’t have a life. The ID book was found at a random Home Affairs branch,  a few days after her scandalous death had prompted some action. It was lying in an office somewhere … for eighteen months… no one cared enough about their jobs to wonder why it hadn’t been collected. This single instance, being a dramatic one is mentioned, it is part of a legion of stories that fulfill the media brief as comprehensively as do the skills crisis stories.

A routine complaint amongst commentators is the issue of demotivation at the workplace. It seems people seek jobs exclusively to satisfy material needs and mostly for no other reason.

The civil service has been on strike for three weeks and it is hard to say their presence has been missed… inconveniences for some no doubt but the countrthy has hardly blinked.There is a standard perception that theydo so little when they are working that even our reserve bank governor was reported quipping on the topic at a luncheon this week for the working  investoror class.

It has even been suggested that those without jobs have the skills and those with them do not… It  is a puzzling conundrum.

Perhaps the skills shortage is an urban legend.

Viva real bloggers

The Blogospherian

Lorries: the unseen enemies

lorries are emerging as the true enemies of the revolution: not the whinging mealie mouthed platitude generating prevaricators who litter our daily path and admonish us that we are on a wrong path to perdition... and fail to attend meetings to discuss their complaints... No it's the ubiquitous lorry.

Every morning as i listen to the radio road reports that enable me to pick my way carefully about our all neglected city the news is about lorries.

"A truck has broken down on the Mike 1 at the double decker section taking some lanes out of action.

A truck has broken down at Gilhooleys interchange blocking off ten kilometres of highway ...

A truck has overturned at yet another spot dumping a load of pigs/oil/chemicals/produce/timber/all over the associated traffic that is now piling up for the next twelve kilometres.

A truck has jacknifed into another truck on Van Reenen's pass. All traffic to the coast must now go through newcastle if you can remember where it is."

 Day after day it is the same news. You can generally predict that your journey to hell starts with a truck doing something unsheduled and blocking up the highway. Some days every route around and through the city is blocked and on really bad days every route around and through every city in the country is blocked, siphoned and remotely paralysed by disabled lorries. 

The cost annually of the congestion brought about by overloaded trucks flouting the law is calculted at billions in terms of road destruction. Now calculate the cost of millions and millions of person labour hours spent sitting in twisted gridlocks all over the country every day due to scumbag lorry operato9rs loading their trucks until the axles collapse and lo we lost a percent or two of GDP and who knows what else we lost as well.

 Can anyone rid us of this menace. The revolution is under siege. Never mind the pederasts and the lurking rinderpest...  the lamentable lorry is the recidivistic enemy of the people's revolution.

Viva lorry free driving.

Nik

A shortened cv

A shortened cv.  

Reduce your life to
less than a page double spaced

Do not place YOUR AGING PICTURES ON THE WEB PLACE THOSE THAT REVEAL YOU YOUNGER: BETTER,

Is this true? Yes.

There is no escape

We can rail against the creeping of the years

Deny them

Fight the onslaught through aging

More grace

Fully

But we cannot escape reality

We grow old and die
And we should celebrate growing old

Not many do even now in our better times

Mostly because it is too c

Ost

Ly.

Often because it was

Suf

Fer

ed

The wounds reveal their pain

still

all these

Years;

Those we gathered:

Those that gathered us.

We shall go on facebook; announce

That we would all be friends.

I take time

I take

Time:

I procrastinate on what is

Mine and

Should I

Break some mould that has grown old and shutters out

The oversold de
meanours.

When in time I can grow to revel

In

This idea : Keeping and finding

And ma
king friends. Against our better judgements that

Teach us to

Keep our friends tight and

Our enemies even tighter

Friends.

We have friends?

Face book would be morphed.

Friendships shall only last

For a time. Could that time occur that

facebook would contain a graveyard of late friends, not those who had merely

remmmooooved their subscriptions

not those enthusiastic flock  that gathers pages and times

and slips away in guilty pain when the world goes awry

but those who had genuinely died.

A cool idea says one acolyte

We should live that long

That we can build a graveyard with our ta
les of this

And that

And other idle chat.

And the wheel will turn

and we shall move forward with our

mercifully

shortened mem

ory

of what

was

last year’s fad?

Brittany, Paris, and people over here who come

And go, yea Thomas they talk not

Of Michaelangelo!

And should they perchance

Then it be hairs tyle

Mousseandgravitasloaded

Restaurants

So… launch yourself at

Amagama.com, launch again

and again and

again

And, and….  Machines that are inflexible to change

Change us and we shall follow the dots

Answer the questions, fill something into

The space

Where we will guess

That we should do this

Or that.

There’s a chill in the air beyond that which comes with June

Perhaps it will pass:

Soon.

.NiK[07]

Ideological oxymoron syndrome

Ironies abound in our wonderfully exciting country. My friend and colleague Carla calls it the “Ideological oxymoron syndrome”: a continuing series of them in fact.

The govt is weathering what seems to be almost a 'perfect storm': A national civil service strike that is moving to a violent phase. What started as a wage negotiation has moved to a form of confrontation that the workers will lose, simply because it is in their interests to lose. No good has yet come, regrettably to some, from any old style socialist takeovers of modern economies.

In the meantime we are all on the dance floor playing this increasingly deadly minuet of minimalist movement, as a government elected by “the people”: the party of liberation and freedom, has behaved with a rigidity of mindset that was at times close to Verwoerdian. There have been a few eerie déjà vu moments from government statements over the past few weeks. An ideological oxymoron is inevitably a contradiction inherent in the outcomes of ideological positions.

The ENatis traffic foul up is slowly being sorted out, slowly being the operative word, nonetheless it is being sorted [I ultimately got to the place when it was eventually open [see blog: "To the average Joe blogs aren't cutting it." ] and it took only 37 minutes from entrance to exit with licence disc.

My regular bloggees will recollect a blog some years back when I described a day in the city paying for the licence: and how it took around six minutes from in to out… an experience I subsequently discovered to be a norm. So technically, in my mind at least, a thirty-seven minute time passage getting my car registration disc was around seven times slower than my more common experience over the past few years… Then in the middle of the now almost tedious “Succession struggle” to decide the future leadership of the ruling party, interest rates went up by fifty points…. We’re all still digesting that... the outcome of this will be oxymoronic in the extreme one suspects. 

Milk is an short supply [and suddenly it’s a global shortage which seems weird given the amount of subsidies paid to European producers… anyway…] and the price of meat is rising as fast as the price of maize. Information from rural regions suggests that the price rises are resulting from an overall decline in commercial agricultural activity. In part this is the outcome of farm murders [apparently averaging one every thirty six hours], mass stock thieving: way beyond what I described in my 1996 novel The Buffalo Hunters. Undoubtedly some of it results from the yet to be successful land transfers that have been taking place as part of the land restitution programme. The final nail though seems to be commercial, resulting from oligopolies abounding in every sector of the country… The effect has been to strangle the productive capabilities of too many farmers. So an attempt to allow market forces to play [subject to intense social regulation] results in market concentration which suits a short-term socialist agenda at the expense of long term growth…another example of ideological oxymoron syndrome [IdOxSy] in action wreaking its unintended outcomes.

We won the rugby matches though, notwithstanding the unhappiness in disparate quarters with selection procedures. Luke Watson the pugnacious player from the big flat-mountain place down south did not quite bring it off and took a blow to the ribs that allowed his coach to dump him with a politically respectable excuse.

In a sense he shot his bolt. He’ll do better next time, which may be a while. If you are one of the new global readers browsing through this blog and none of this makes sense don’t feel bad. Once you mess with the free flow of any activity it becomes less and less predictable and convoluted. The whole game code[Professional Rugby in this case] is an ideological oxymoron in evolution. The dynamic tension here contained within the conundrum could win us the World Cup this year. The next four games will be the markers.

Back at the media front one sees that they [ the govt] have raised their offer to the strikers. 7 and a bit and the strikers are down to 10 with some unions starting to waver. The teachers in particular are wavering. They know that they are society's most despised citizens and they are cringing at the thought of being even more contemptuously treated than they are ... like a klapdog abused wife taking solace from her husbands momentary smile. The week has been punctuated with violent outburst of language from trades union leadership and unctious public pronouncem,ent in the form of paid advertising messages from the government exhorteing the workers to be reasonable.

To add fire to the fuel, yesterday a prominent and controversial educationist was murdered. It may have been a random event? Huge numbers, at least forty and sometimes fifty are murdered daily around the country at large, so, high profile murders are almost inevitable, and are frequent enough to wonder if there aren’t patterns: sub groups eking out agendas. But if it was random it came at a good time for the strikers and a bad time for the government.

One also remembers that last year’s National Security workers strike saw more than sixty murders of workers associated with the strike [or not]. To date this bloggist has no recollection that anyone has ever been arrested and charged for the murder of even one of those now forgotten workers. A school principal, especially one as controversial as the late Mr Karvelas was an excellent target; and the effect was that almost every school in the city was closed today: well according to anecdote anyway… The news mass media sources are playing gatekeepers with such information as this, and the masses become increasingly reliant on rumour and disturbance.

And so the pot bubbles merrily as two allies get their knickers in a knot in classic Marxian format. This entire spectacle is so gloriously; ideologically oxymoronic, that it is orgasmic.

The workers are angry. This strike is about more than just money. It is about rage. A great many people from the formerly disadvantaged part of our society are seeing fat rewards going to some comrades and thin rewards going to most.

What is the point of winning the revolution if you don’t get rich?

How quickly the new mother forgets the pain of childbirth in the quickening rush of a new life. The child though is no longer an infant. Like me, the bloggist here, chronologically sixty but due to the intervention of fate soon to be a teenager; the country is now in those tempestuous years we call the Teens… and the worst of all those years is this fourteenth year: this year of our perfect storm.

The workers have a case. The country’s inflation targeting exercise is a necessary but ultimately illusory instrument. Core inflation* is high. We pretend to have forgotten about core inflation and mumble about CPIX. The latter is simply a measure of how much Core inflation is rising. And Core inflation eats away at value inexorably.

[*For those who are confused Core inflation is a measure of the value that is constantly eroded in a society by all kids of price increases, especially for those that are not accompanied with increased productivity and output… so the Enatis catastrophe contributes to Core inflation through the 6% reported decline in vehicle sales during April May, this cost must be carried somewhere, usually bin the form of otherwise unjustified general price increases. Another example would be the cost of time wasted by tens of thousands of people queuing for no purpose, to renew licences and so on] Multiplied together with say costs of murders, heists, traffic jams, electricy burn outs like the one that has been affected about two million people east of me for two days now and so on and so on. The much-vaunted CPIX rate merely measures the rate of expansion and contraction of the Core Rate, which no one mentions.]

Core inflation takes in also the cost of errors made by newly emancipated affirmatively advanced persons many of whom have great knowledge and limited experience… The cost of gaining that experience, what Fred calls “School-fees” is in the core inflation figure.

Over time the workers wages have more than failed to keep up with inflation and many feel, justifiably, that they are worse off now, after years of work than they were years back. Their work, and keeping up with the market economy, has become a Sisyphean task: a treadmill on which we all run faster and faster to stay in the same place. And they [the workers] are enraged by these things they are not sophisticated enough to understand.

So as my final example of an ideological oxymoron I must ask you the reader to arbitrate on this speculation. It is possible that the moral imperative behind the BEE* campaign has run up against the economic reality of the market place so loved of market fundamentalists like myself. [*For offshore readers: BEE is a legal requirement in South African businesses, to employ people who were disadvantaged under the former evil apartheid system in preference to other, possibly even better qualified persons, whose ancestry was more privileged. In America {USA} it is called Affirmative Action.] Is it possible that the artificial shortages of top-level management at affordable incomes have been distorted by a shortage of affirmatively qualified and competent persons? [The question discounts for the moment the controversial counter-question of whether the national scarce skills problem is an urban myth or not] Could it be that instead of a pyramid of incomes growth with the worst paid at the bottom, and the best paid at the top there is an unnatural bulging of income about three quarters of the way up: fattening the point of the pyramid. Thus, giving the pay structure of the traditional organisation chart more of the appearance of a Pouter pigeon than a traditional pyramid.

The bulge results from over-compensation to obtain and retain the services of legally mandated persons who are in general short supply… so Market forces naturally work to force up their price. Less privileged peers on the same ladder see this and demand [and get] parity. Many of these latter are also in short demand in a global economy that is also short of scarce skills. This adds leverage to their pay, although by global standards we are badly paid. [I suppose we all stay for the sunshine.]

On the other hand the jobs at the bottom of the system are so commoditised that they have no value and since they can be performed more or less by an unlimited supply of anyone, pay scales are at historic lows in terms of so-called “fair” compensation and purchasing power. Again the market works its deadly way. More ideological oxymorons of a different hue.

Oddly though, those jobs that are relatively scarce at the lower end of the system do not attract a premium payment and this is an anomaly that can only be explained by the upper bulge that starves even the most skilled first level worker from gaining added value from their labour.

I find the contradiction inherent in this circumstance to be so monumental that it becomes inexplicable; and can only confirm that once the architects of an economic policy direction [ie a government acting on its policies] have intervened in the natural workings of a market on a sufficiently large scale, that all subsequent responses will become increasingly unpredictable. I have said before in my blogs that this BEE strategy will be a close run thing, this strike and the rising level of acrimony displayed therein, is an indicator of just how close run it may still turn out to be.

Viva bloggers.

Strike gets first victim?

According to a short news bulletin police in the Alberton area of what used to be known as the East Rand area of Zone One have denied that today's murder of high profile headmaster Nick Karvellas has any thing to do with the current national civil service strike.

 I am puzzled. The short newsflash said nothing about the alleged killers apprehension, interrogation and conviction. They don't even have a suspect under arrest as i understand it. So can can they be so certain that his murder had nothing to do with the strike.

The news report said that the shooting was associated with a burglary at his house. He had been called to his house by his housekeeper. Then he was executed. Smells like a hit to me assuming the story was correct... There has been no further reference to the alleged murder on any other station, nor on the one that i now think i heard it on... Perhaps he wasn't murdered after all. Perhaps like Bob Woolmer, who'se on'off suspicious death has now been pronounced normal... there are no people able to investigate the case effectively.

After all no one has been caught and tried for the murders of more than sixty security workers in last year's strike.

CNBC's new "hick Channel Africa"

Seldom in recent memory have I been so reduced to cringe mode as I was this morning watching the new CNBC channel Africa half hour broadcast at o6.00 hours. I had a sense of time warp.

CNBC is my channel of choice for business news and has been for many years. It is slick and as professional as one gets anywhere on daytime TV. This new SA local insert has to compete in my mind with the razor sharp interrogative style of Maria Bartiromo, for instance, and a hot shot collection of slick commentators from around the planet, and what I saw this morning was neither impressive nor convincing. I felt that I was watching a collection of nervous school kids delivering their first prom night presentations. Worse I had the sense they were all in short trousers with ‘Dagwood’ hairstyles. I understand that i have had some issues adjusting to the new blog format represented by amagama but i do this for fun... CNBC is supposed to be a professional operation. This production had all the rehearsed preparation of a charity amdram production at the SPCA.

One hopes that it improves as they all gain confidence, but the auguries are not good. Saturday’s launch of CNBC’s new Africa offering, with a collection of carefully scripted and staged questions to our beloved ‘Thabo the Great’ already reeked of feudal servility. "Sir here's a difficult question that we have prepared for you could you please give us some wisdom, and we'll make sure no one asks anything that isn't cleared beforehand." This morning’s collection of “suits” was not much better and had all the credibility of a collection of  Jules Street used car salesmen with bad haircuts, wearing the contemporary version of safari suits replete with long socks with combs stuck inside nogal. Our pair of giggling, stuttering presenters sounded as if they had no idea what a stock market index, for instance, represented, nor were they intending to find out. Naïve was never this embarrassing.

CNBC runs a series of these "local interest" inserts on a Saturday morning with diverse entries from Dubai, Turkey, Russia and China each in turn less intelligible than the one before. I submit myself to them from time to time when i missed some of the MclLachlan group at 06.00 and want to catch the re-run.  At the moment I would say this new Africa channel ranks on about a par with the Russian insert, which is also characterised by servile presentation and awkward questions... One always has the sense [with the Russian insert] that a hit man is waiting outside the studio ready to "take out" any excessively nosy interviewers...  

CNBC prides itself on asking the tough questions and demanding answers that serve the continually shifting needs of volatile investors. Are they unable to find any credible local economic analysts to handle the desk, or are we going to be witness to a collection of “chums” presenting ill thought out analysis which they are too over polite to interrogate. The entire production reeks of a level of parochialism that makes Sky look positively global.

How is that we can have such excellent economic analysis across a battery of radio stations and yet whether it is Summit on Sky, Summit on Summit or now this new CNBC Africa all we get is bad visuals and stuttering servile continuity in ongoing performances that have the ‘oiky’ staged credibility of a rural agricultural fair.

Channel chopping

Not only am I annoyed that I have woken up but I am mildly depressed. I nodded off reading a Carl Hiaasen novel [Native Tongue]. Those of you who know his work will remember that he writes funny novels that use the unspeakable corruption of Miami and the surrounding regions of Florida [
USA] as his sub-text. I like to think that if the USA can survive centuries of rampant corruption then why shouldn 't we.

So I went through to the kitchen to wipe the drowsiness out of my spirit with a cup of spiced tea and became aware of a new phrase: “Malicious compliance”. A man on the radio was tal
king about “malicious compliance” with the “Skills Act” legislation. What on earth did he
mean?

It seemed that he was the chief executive of a so-called SETA [a Sectoral Training Authority], which is one of those amorphous jobs-for-cronies organisations [prolifically created to avoid solving the Skills crisis in the country while pretending to do just the opposite]. I spent five minutes listening to the man presenting an incomprehensible stream of jargon-loaded prevaricating obfuscation or more politely… bullshit, while the kettle boiled. I eventually worked out that he was blaming his customers for failing to achieve any growth in their communication skills.

I thought of the education minister’s speech on Monday or recently in which she railed against the cult of mediocrity that is paralysing the country’s efforts to promote the revolution. At the time I thought perhaps she was simply “Pandoring” to the rising tide of discontent sweeping the country over the non-delivery of almost all the promises, after  listening to the SETA man I wasn’t so sure.

I felt that I was listening to a “shortbus” version of  Mrs Malaprop, alive and well and thriving in the SETA sector. He had the now standard patter albeit bereft of stuttter… a collection of “baffle with bullshit statistics”, an implausible array of data confirming that he, the appointed and anointed supplier of communication training skills was unable to achieve any results because the “People” had elected ‘those who could not be trained’ to be their representatives.

It was, it seemed, “their” entire fault. “They”…, I was uncertain whether he meant the "People", their elected representatives or the employer , were,  “maliciously compliant”, or was it now non-compliant while pretending to be compliant…  I have no idea… he was incomprehensible in a way that is becoming increasingly fashionable.

According to him “nearly 50%” of all all his customers were illiterate and another, [instantly evaluated random percentage] were close to illiterate and while it was the right, he said, of the employers to send him illiterate people for processing it was not really fair to expect him to take time off from playing golf and fucking beautiful women to attempt to educate those who were beyond learning.

It took serious deductive reasoning to get that message because every sentence contained a litany of ‘malicious’ grammar and bizarre malapropisms. He didn’t really say that he was too busy playing golf and fucking beautiful women but it was somehow implied.

And yet somehow he gained my sympathy… He was quite obviously one of those who hadn’t joined the “Struggle” to live a fuck-free life of poverty. His revenge on the evil former oppressors was to transform and de-colonise the English language and render it as incoherent to me [and presumably other listeners] as it must have been originally to his ancestors. His epiphany was to contribute to a new Struggle to bankrupt the entire system [for which his SETA was responsible] imposed by the colonial masters and facilitate a return to a previous ‘golden age’ pastoral order rooted in the  pre-defecane past.

Wow, I thought, struggling to liberate myself from post-colonial angst and return to the reality of the post-liberation 21^st century with its newly emancipated priorities. I thought of Carl Hiaasen’s glib, smooth thinking easy talking public relations saturated hero character. At least his fictional Floridian thieving cronies had the savvy to hire expert bullshitters to present their obfuscating crap… Here was a man, appointed to his job of running training in communication for one of the dozen or more of these SETA things, [ I never did work out which one he represented and I'm not sure that it matters they all seem pretty moribund] that was not only inarticulate but also incomprehensible; and was simultaneously so deliciously arrogant in his contempt for the listening public that he could barely contain his lack of erudition.

I realised that I could never compete with this reality: I can never write language the way this man, who pillow fights with words, uses it. My numb brain was struggling with “malicious compliance”: he loved the phrase; much of what else he said was even less intelligible…. And this man earns about a million bucks a year for presenting such crap… with such role models who really anticipates that the SETA s  can ever be other than bankrupt. I understood immediately how it came to be that one of them [the SETAs] had parted with about half a billion bucks to Mr Browns Fidentia scam… it was inevitable: the 'foxes were in charge of the henhouse' as they say and viva the days of our blessed relief.

I become depressed knowing that no fiction I ever write can approximately begin to grasp this surreal reality. Better I should retire and join the kleptocrat class, stealing whatever is available to be stolen before it is all gone. I realised sadly that notwithstanding my own alleged skill with words that I am no more than a semi-literate moron surrounded by thieves who have worked out that education is unimportant in a world where the subjunctive can be elevated to dynamic action and guilt can be finessed to bring wealth.

You can be the boss of a Sectoral Training authority without a shred of education… by the sounds of it. Perhaps, like fellow Struggle hero, Chippy Shaik, the man had a carefully plagiarised Doctorate in some arcane unintelligible field that qualified him to go on the radio and talk shit about nothing…. The scary thing is that no one is listening and nobody cares… how can they? We are all struggling to cope with the disintegrating society in which these plagiarisers are thriving.

Each day pompous men go on the radio on daily talk shows presenting themselves as experts to random radio presenters who pretend erudition, asking pre-scripted questions they are too incompetent, or is it too indifferent, to pretend that they are not reading from their carefully prepared page of notes… And no one takes a blind bit of notice.

We have all drifted into a state of apathy that holds such defective reasoning to pose as our intellectual superior; and to even refer to the man as a moron is somehow unfair and de
meaning of us. We must all grovel for the sins of our forefathers and defer to stupidity, prevarication and the covetous: because this is the right of the bold and the avaricious.

I realise suddenly that I am rambling: still numbed from my involuntary nap. No wonder the religious Right and the Righteous is convinced that we live in the “end of days”: that the sales of gas bott
les are on the rise: that a lawless disregard for the rules of the road is becoming de rigeur. They, Coetzee’s “barbarians”, are inside the walls. They are also inside our heads and make us doubt our own sanity.

What depressed me even more was the thought that this same collection of semi –literates are about to put legislation into place [the new Publications Act amendment] that will make it harder if not impossible to comment on such acquisitive stupidity and “malicious compliance”, or with the dictates of the rising kleptocracy. It is conceivable now that this blog could be declared undesirable and pronounced XX and banned, and that in years to come we will look back on this as a golden age.

I am even more depressed that I am becoming a simple minded grumpy old man, rueing my own lack of courage that I never had the chutzpah to bluff my way into a million rand a year job, talking shit to dull radio presenters: baffling a public that has lost all will to even listen to the pusillanimous incoherent chatter pouring from the airwaves… I realise at last that I welcome the electrical blackouts that cut me off from this ever-escalating wealth of inconsequential lies, chatter and irrelevancies pouring forth from a rising tide of pompous fools.

When I think of the lights going out every day all over town, traffic lights not working at ever more intersections, shopping centres closed on a Saturday morning due to electricy black outs, Enatis leaving us with deregistered vehicles, hospital trauma units closing down erratically, schoolgirls being mugged on busy streets in front of dispirited policemen, rioting citizenry etc, etc to a rising litany of discontent…  I realise that this glibly incomprehensible so-called educationists is a metaphor that Carl Hiaasen can only dream of in his deliciously evocative rhetoric.

So I change stations to the rancorously soothing sounds of UJFM the station that has reduced such interviews and other news reports to an incoherent art form with no pretence to information, where they are young enough they brag, to break whatever rules still persist, or perhaps more accurately, to practice the new rules where incoherence rulz.

I go outside with my spiced tea and lose myself in the timeless rituals of Tai Chi Chuan and meditate on the meaning of No… thing.

Viva bloggers

NiK aka Blogroid

In memoriam Diana Spencer [Lady]

I enjoyed Gareth Cliff on Monday last [28 May]and was going to post this blog [then] when I would have been saying that I enjoyed him today… only as we all know our blogspot vanished and has now been replaced with something
less vulnerable to the new publications act, presumably …

In fact I enjoy Gareth Cliff  every day and wish there were more of him, sharp, witty and irreverent. He reminded me then that it was ten years ago that we heard the terrible news of the death of a dilettante supreme… the awful end of the lovely Lady Diana Spencer, who, like Marilyn, had the good sense to die young and and while still loved by her admirers. 

He asked us [the listeners] to phone in with our thoughts on the event and it’s ever undiminished mystery… I couldn’t do that because I was driving across town and for a change was not stuck in a single traffic jam. But I remembered that day and for those who loved her this piece of poetry below is what I wrote then.

[If you didn't think much of her and considered her a silly dabbler then read no more. I always considered her a spunky 'wench' and had great regard for her courage in the face of some pretty brutal treatment.].

Blogmark was down en route to Amagama.com so this couldn’t be said at that moment and had to wait for now. 

It was not entirely mine, this "conversation with Diana" that you are about to read in poetic form. The class of young eighth grade ladies who wrote with me that morning would all now be circa twenty-four year old women, many married and with children of their own… So this is in memory of her and of them.  

Conversation with Diana. From a classroom exercise in deconstructive poetry with forty-seven grade eight girls on the morning that we all heard the news of the tragic death of ‘Lady Di’.



1

Were you making love

then

happy again;

indiscreet in the arms of a man you would meet in the fast flowing flood of eternity's beat.Were you rocking to the rhythm

of Freddie's

"Friends will be friends",

or was it Frankie's "Stranger's in the night"?

2





Your people now say

you were maligned; that

they didn't treat you right.

They say

they'll make amends,

call you: "... a

beacon of light".

3





Better to be

alive in the sea,

said the Indian guide

to the ingenue,

than a bloated dead dolphin

adrift

on the shore.

4



"We were always strangers

playing at the table;

then i was sent away

vaporised upon a cradle:

given far too many kisses

and no hugs

anymore.

5





Don't ask me what the 'sounds' were

when i went to stay.

It could never have been Queen,

i did it, my way".

.NiK(1997)

From the collection: “Random Notes” by .NiK [2000]