A dream, i had

A dream I had last, yes Martin I did, a dream I had
In my dream I saw that we had entered the floor -crossing season when all the hacks from one party sneak off to join the government or create their own parties with themselves in charge at double the pay.
I had a dream that a whole load of people left their party and “came out of the closet” if I may again appropriate a cliché from another context.

In my dream all those members of the ruling party who are simultaneously a member of the South African Communist Party crossed the floor and launched their own parliamentary Communist Party behind Mrs Madlala–Routledge, the recently deposed deputy minister of health, who set herself up, [if such a thing is possible in the Communist Party] as the Parliamentary head of the party; with the objective of taking power at the next election, on a crest of indignation in the nation, about the rate of apparent looting: that is alleged to be happening in the country and in which the masses are prevented from participating.

The result was electric. Within weeks the weight of opprobrium had moved to a rancorous state of agitation as the right of the right moved right and the left of the left moved left and we, the citizens in the middle had been craftily and completely disenfranchised again in a way we had never anticipated… and it still two years to the next election where all the parties will have to strut their stuff…

It was such a dream as I had that I started to float…You know that kind of dream where you find yourself flying over country and through city and just hurtling along at a cracking pace and then gradually the freedom of flying is embraced in that sense of helpless ness as the position is fixed and the monsters of the deep are racing toward you and you cant avoid them… I am flying towards a disaster that I cannot avoid…

I have realised, somewhere in my subconscious REMish place, that Willie and Blade can’t agree between them on a rational explanation for what happened to a boot full of loot that was apparently given to Willie by an admirer of the Party and then disappeared after allegedly being given to Blade.

I realise that my dream is really a nightmare… If Blade and Willie cannot agree between themselves on how they will divvy up a mere half-a-mill what are their chances of getting out of their comfy seats to support their members in a walk across the floor… foolish dream … happy nightmare… that way lies madness wrapped up in integrity.

Far better: to stay with the big boys; and suck the hind tit, than head off into the wilderness: with only acrimony for a companion.

Keep on bloggin’
Blogroid Blogospherian

Manto's scores own goal

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Manto’s own goal

We keep dogs at the gate to warn off evil and to alert us to its presence. We do this irrespective of whether we believe them [dogs] to be an omnipotent talisman [talisperson?] against an irrational Fate; or whether we accept the flaws of these gentle creatures and work around them.

Dogs and their associated assistants, like the goose for instance, that lives across the road from me and that I hear from time to time indicating real alarm, are essential, and good; and we should always love them and often do. That is why, it seems that everyone, not just so-called” animal-rightists, was so enraged at the behaviour of a rural man who cut off a Siberian Husky puppy’s head with a chainsaw in a fit of rage. When the sawman died this week, soon after the event in some bizarre oxymoronic “karmic” “accident”, the country exploded in a frenzy of hate that I am certain violated constitutional safeguards against hate speech. [This was a catharsis I believe but it is not the subject of my blog.]

No I am concerned with Mrs Manto, and her rage and what she has achieved.

At the moment every ‘dog’ there is, is alerting us to the approach of those dark forces that have so frequently threatened and violated our past. We sit on the abyss of a cliché. “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” I have observed so often now I am sure I have I become a cliché too nonetheless, the fact that the cliché is a cliché does not cancel out the truth that the cliché once revealed, with stark renewed clarity at that time.

The cliché lies tucked inside is the current drift to authoritarian responses, not only here but elsewhere too; from Obama’s apparent threat that he’d nuke Pakistan, to Putin’s thuggish behaviour with his neighbours and his great attempted Land grab; to the home front with this strange business of Mrs Madlala-Routledge…the former acting and deputy Min: of Health.

In Marxian terms we are witness to a global phenomena: the classic reactionary response to any progressive movement. In addition we have also been witness this past few weeks to an hysteria generating global mini-market-meltdown that has freaked out the nouveax riche; and has boatyards in exclusive neighbourhoods suddenly looking like used boat lots in a fire sale. The razzmatazz surrounding this minor stock market reverse has papered over the nastiness of the whole affair, in much the same way that the razzmatazz of the recent national strike covered the passage of the new censorship laws.

However while we are distracted from the right hand by what is happening in the left, others noted the expulsion of a senior level party member from her post and from, presumably, whatever the so-called “Structures” were from which she emanated. I refer to the peremptory, almost arbitrary sacking of the former Deputy Minister of Health, and the battery of inconsistencies, evasions and accusations revealed from the act.

And the inconsistencies continue…Hard line stuff from Mrs Manto T…M…[The Minister of health]. Not only has she bullied a younger and some say more talented competitor from her side view; but she is now going to test this subtle drift towards a new authoritarianism by suing a newspaper that has published material that confirms the growing public perception that Mrs Manto T-M is a nasty person.

In fact the Minister has presented a wonderfully imperious battery of responses that are inherently feudal in construct. In addition, Mrs Manto behaves pretty well according to form… This is classic “madam power” behaviour run riot. Madam can do this because she has that kind of power.

A recent Australian survey apparently established empirically recently [according to radio reports] that which we have always known. Bullying behaviour is a routine route to the top [or near top] … Consider Dick Cheney… sorry he's a stereotypical male bully... we'll try someone else with balls of steel. Probably Mrs Thatcher could be a ‘damm demanding woman’. Hilary Clinton has a reputation for being a serious ‘psycho –bitch’, along the divaesque lines of a Madonna in full fury.

It doesn’t stop at the top either; like for instance there was a string of psycho boss women, more than i can remember and adoringly the crazy lady ho produced and directed my performance as Nietzsche back in 2000… [love you Ava’ rishus. We must do it again sometime.]
When i finished that i understood why Nietzsche went mad and how his sister hijacked his work.
So: why the danger? It is simple.

We do not want our leaders to behave this way.

I doesn’t matter who we are or what team we support. We don’t like it. Listening to the airwaves during the week it was hard to remember many callers who were really cool about either Mrs Manto or the late Mr Matthysen [sic] former late dog murderer.

That is why the bizarre outpouring of rage this week over Mr Matthysen is such a frantic “dogalarm”, and this strange public bitch-fight between two power seeking women was another. Neither was cool.

Now: logically the President was right to fire the ‘Routledge woman. She was out of line, doing her own thing. When you accept a job at any level you also accept its terms. The time for opposition to policy is when you are formulating it and negotiating it. When it is set, it is set until it is reformulated, in the light of changes that may have been unforeseen earlier, for whatever reason. If you don’t like it then don’t take the job.

With regard to HIV and Aids, which is the heart of the matter here, the ghost at the table quite literally, the core problem is that out President is reaching a critical stage in his responses to this pandemic and it is a stage none of us want to know about or accept.

It is not the President who is in denial it is those who believe that something can be done about HIV and Aids.

He has to admit, to himself at least, that his policy of downgrading support for Aids [which I suspect is a lot less downgraded than the furious relevant HIV lobbies would have us believe] is not founded on denial. This is a convenient crutch. It is founded on rational grounds in which an outcome is reached that is politically untenable.

People will die of this ‘HIV… event’ irrespective. The President knows that the more he attempts to solve the problem, the unavoidable probabilities suggest it will become more virulent, volatile and unmanageable… For whatever reason action equals petrol on burning flames.

This contested virus is currently incurable and it is increasingly obvious that little research is still going on at the Mega-Pharma-corporation level to defeat it…. simply because there is no money in it. The short term prognosis for finding a cure is not promising, the long view is even dimmer.

This means that the most likely solutions will prove to be expensive palliatives simply putting off the inevitable.

That’s harsh. How can a President tell us this… He can’t. The late Robert Kirby believed the President was too cold a person to feel remorse. He once compared our leader to Heimrich Himmler. I do not.

I do believe that he is so focused on his ideological purpose that a few million deaths are simply part of the cost: “collateral damage” as they say in the movies. This Aids thing was not in the plan. He doesn’t want to have to tell us that those AIDS people cannot be allowed to subtract effort from achieving the Revolution. No that would make him and his Party less popular, and his party needs to retain power because it is the Party of Ideology and the ideological sub-text is slowly peeping out and like all ideologies its intentions are not exclusively honourable.

Thus: as I discussed in my notorious “Manto 1 de Lille 0” blog last year the president has put a Pit Bull in place to deal with the problem of Aids. The second question arising therefore from this current hate-affair between two powerful ladies is “does the Pit Bull know it is a Pit Bull?".

In my blog [August 2006 Manto 1 de Lille 0] I supported the President’s position in that I can empathise with the Solomon style dilemma he faces. As a caring, moral and ethical man he knows he must care for those who are broken and hurting. As a rational manager with extremely limited resources [appearances notwithstanding]he has chosen to withhold resources from dying people in order to assist the living more.

This is the moral choice: does one take desperately needed resources from the many to deliver Pyrrhically to the few… the struggle against the Dispossession inherent in Apartheid was against that principle of the few feeding off the many. How does one rationalise that which you once railed against.

Our President’s dilemma is that both his “hounds” forgot their roles and forgot they were playing “good cop- bad cop” Mrs Manto Tshabala-Msimeng [sic] forgot she was bad cop and Mrs Madlala-Routledge forgot she was only supposed to play “good cop”. Both fell out of their roles.

And because she was the more senior guardian here Mrs Manto is the one who has kicked her ball into her own goal and now we have to face a stand off that could well bring us to the edge of that abyss which we would prefer not to explore.

In their enthusiastic support for the good cop many players are being mauled. The Sunday Times’ curious decision to publish random material purporting to demonstrate that Mrs Manto is a boozing bully was trumped by a declaration that another medical supporter of Good cop was a convicted criminal; and then court appearances follow in search of injunctions against the Sunday Times.

And suddenly we face a test. Do the new censorship amendments now prove to have their intended/unintended effect? Does Mrs Manto’s Constitutional right to dignity and privacy not trump The Media’s alleged freedom of expression in the public interest. This is soon to be tested.

I should say here that I am entirely on the side of the right to absolute freedom of speech bounded only by the famous caveat relating to shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and subject to normal accepted practices relevant to defamation and hate speech.

I am definitely of the opinion that because the track record of politicians and other public figures is so [regrettably] littered with public abuse, that we [the citizens] their employers [ in the case of elected officials] … the citizens in a democracy … have an absolute right to know what our employees are up to.

I would argue further that this right to know the facts, the evidence and whatever truths are being hidden, completely overrides any right to privacy on the part of an elected public figure. If it isn't already there then loss of privacy should be in the job description for a democratic state. Anything less is a route through secrecy to terror.

I would also suggest that the actual attempt to claim violation of privacy rights by an elected public figure reveals an authoritarian, feudal mindset that is one hundred percent the dark shape in the night against which our dogs clamour. It is democracy’s dark nemesis.

These few months in this time of our discontent is building to be the time when our democracy reveals a different face to the one presented for the past decade now. The problem with denial behaviour is that the truth will always out. It has for instance done so in a curious turn of events this past week when a denialstic silence of another sort was broken; and we discovered a hidden and shameful truth about the men who ran the country in the last bout of authoritarian bluster.

Three old, failed, shambled men stood in the dock this week and confessed to the most mundane of crimes: attempted murder. They pleaded guilty. They pleaded for mercy for foolish uncertainties and overwhelming rage so deep they could not bear it. In a strange act of contrition they were forgiven and somehow a fuse was expiated.

It is this more caring face that our democracy needs to heal the wounds that bind us. Bullying and thuggery are not what we voted for. Pit Bulls versus Corgis were not what the voter ordered. No: this was not what we ordered at all.

The President needs to come out of the closet… if I may misappropriate another cliché. He needs to come clean and admit that he does not want to use valuable resources on fighting an incurable disease.

Those who oppose his position, like the former Deputy Health Minister, and those worthy bit part players from the less commercially oriented components of the Tripartite alliance, need also to come out of the closet and take a stand for what they claim to believe. If necessary they must leave the party and found another and fight for what they believe. The alternative is a slow drift to Zanufication as all parties rely increasingly on lies to promote their intentions..[see my blog “the Zanufication of it all”]

A significant number of people did take a stand for what they believe this week and we all had a rare insight into the sub-texts at play in our evolving new Republic. This was a rare insight into the ideological place our leader has in mind. The much despised Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe played this week to an adoring crowd in Lusaka.

It is hard to decide whether the crowd who cheered the man and gave him a standing ovation were all focused on an ideological position so arcane, that its significance was lost on ordinary people, albeit shared by the entire leadership of Southern Africa.

Or was it that people just had to express their absolute admiration for a man who was so committed to revolution that he would go the whole Bakunin route of ripping out the roots of the old in a drive to impose the new order. Any man who will totally trash his own nest and wipe out the future of his people can either be a madman or a misunderstood hero… this week he was the hero. [ and thank goodness it was someone else’s place he had trashed they all breathed in relief afterwards].]

It was significant that no other leader got anything like that level of approval. You also have to admit that it is a weird week when a man who dies after murdering a puppy is sent screaming all the way to Hades pursued by a howling mob, while a man who has arguably abused an entire nation and turned his people’s dreams into nightmares received the Nuremburg salute… the 1936 version.

There is another strange story in the press currently in which a tribe of Papua New Guineans ask forgiveness for the actions of their ancestors. It seems they ate the ancestors of those from whom they sought forgiveness. This relic of human sacrifice reminds us that bullying and thuggish behaviour towards those whom one dislikes is not only common but long standing. This means that it is hardly a weird week when someone who seems to care is trashed and trumped by someone who doesn’t, and someone who doesn’t care at all is idolised.

But the essential needs of a democracy require that caring is, above all things, our most desirable attribute. The alternatives are a return to the known equation of suppression and terror in a blind denial of reality.

Keep on blogging.

NiK’s work can also be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

The Testimonies of an enumerator episode 4

Weblog: 11/08/07 Welcome to the 4th episode of the “Testimonies of an enumerator”, a weekly serial in 19 parts that acts as a prelude to part 3 of my collection called the Azanian Quartet. The first two parts of the Azanian Quartet: The Buffalo Hunters and the Ashanti Raider are both available in ebook form at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari. @ USD$1.50 each

In a preemptive, some say petulant move, this week our beloved President, Thabo the Great fired his Deputy Health Minister over an alleged act of insubordination[I gather]. It was such an event that catapulted an energetic Corinth Starr into the independent political arena where she gained a remarkable victory for her Gender in the coming Gender conflict associated with the Starr Revolution. Read on….

4 The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy under Starr the elder.
Period 2009 - 2019

The De Soto conditions

Previously: In episode 3 you read that Corinth Starr (the elder), leader of the Gender* Party made a keynote, life defining declaratory speech at the famous Constitutional Hill Indaba in which she presented the now-famous argument for Basic Pay, a change we all now think of about as often as we do the air we breathe, and which began to turn the tide against the chronic poverty of the previous age.

[* gender: the term used to denote two alternate species of humanity, locked, at that time, into a mutually demanding, reproductive process that aroused considerable competitive conflict. It was also a source of recreation, with the demands of the recreational dimension generally overriding those of reproduction.It was noted that there were humans who rejected the reproduction demands inherent in their design and chose to penetrate their own gender, so therefore not all those who were penetrated were of the penetratee* gender, although the effect in terms of dominance power relationships was similar.][**Penetratee: regular readers will remember that for convenience we have chosen to define the two gender variants that made up humanity on Urdos as penetratee and penetrator, as the terminology used in the documents on which these testimonies are based did not seem too clear on the roles.]

Continuing: The great issue of that time, from Starr’s perspective, was not only gaining acceptance of the idea of Basic Pay but also developing an irrefutable [if perhaps apparently facile] argument to justify her proposed course of action to the hard core economists and bankers of the world. It was her intention to liberate the world ultimately: starting with Southern Azania as the model, from the economic malaise into which a huge marginalised proportion of the planet’s citizenry had slid, early in the new century, and from which it was proving increasingly difficult to emerge, notwithstanding the brief stumbling emergence of the south Asian* economies.[Editors note: we do not know much about these entities. It seems that they may have disappeared during the great climate meltdown of the early part of this post-apocalypse era.]

According to popular legend, Starr the elder spotted opportunity.

Starr had originally sensed the opportunity during a television business chat show on CNBC Africa that she was idly attending to during a late night work session. It had featured a well-known, populist economic analyst from a poverty drenched region in South America.. He had written a widely acclaimed book evaluating why some places in the world, (mainly those from which the Koloniste or kinfolk of the Koloniste came), were able to become prosperous and comfort seeking, while much of the world languished in poverty, adrift in an ocean of corruption, bedevilled with fraud and abusive, unfulfilled promises.

It had been received wisdom for centuries that the reason some were rich (as it was called, i.e. well endowed with valuable assets) and the many were poor [i.e. had no possessions of value or means of obtaining any] was due to the thieving behaviour of those who were rich, stealing wealth (as collective richness was called) from the weak and the timid and the generally self effacing ‘peeple’, to benefit only themselves.

This belief had been the cause of immense conflict between the rich and the poor throughout the century preceding the 21st [51st]. Those places where the poor had won out had steadily become poorer, due to indescribable levels of corruption and mismanagement that had accompanied their attempts to run an incentiveless environment. As frequently collapse was inevitable as those who triggered the Revolutions of the age became themselves the new elites with only token regard for the poor and the dispossessed but without the collective experience and skills from ages past.

Those fewer places where the rich, or as they put it, where opportunity had won out, steadily became richer. Many believed that this was mostly due to luck since there was still plenty of corruption and mismanagement in those places. Nonetheless both sides plunged into an era of reconsideration in the aftermath of the inevitable implosion of all those poor regions. This occurred over the decades known as the ‘Millennium Changeover’ between the so-called 20th and the 21st centuries [Also, for different, but equally obscure reasons, known as the 50th and the 51st centuries: contributor’s note.] The implosions gradually contributed to declining economic activity on the plane, which at times ground to a virtual halt, relatively speaking by the late end of the opening decade of the 21st/51st century.

At that time peeple in the southern part of what was later to be called the Azanian Konfederacy had not yet realised how much their world had changed completely, following a revolution that had taken place in Southern Azania at the end of the 20th/50th century. There were those citizens (as peeple were also often called) who lived in an Azanian world where the Koloniste way still ruled and there were those who lived in a world where the new revolutionary order ruled. Then there were those in between; and those on the outside; and others in the place called nowhere, who had no influence at all on the way their world was ruled. All this notwithstanding all the wonderful masques and fol-de-rol *organised by whatever ruling clique-of-the-moment chose to represent as that moment’s received reality.[* Fol-de-rol: We do not know what this means and assume it to be a form of metaphor associated with misdirected activity: contributor’s note.]

Back at the great Constitution Hill Indaba* Corinth Starr stepped forward and lowered her arms…calmed the crowd soothed them with the rhythm of her arms falling to a beat they could all feel though no one said it out loud: it was a simple chemical reaction.
[* Indaba a word that seems to denote some type of formal assembly: Contributor note..]

“There are peeple out there who say that I am irresponsible for promoting the principle of basic pay and I say it is our due!”

The crowd roared their approval…she was right, who were these hypocrites to tell the world that there was a problem with basic pay for all when they had salaries, they were paid for doing whatever they did, whether they did it well or not. Many of those in the crowd suspected that the country was packed wall to wall with people who had non-jobs for which they were paid and in which they did more or less nothing of any value; so why should they, the peeple not also be paid too.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with an extremist, and Corinth Starr was certainly an extremist. According to legend an extremist of the penetratee gender was more ferocious than any other creature; and this was a person aroused to rage with an antipathy that was overwhelming. So intense was her rage that it had, until that time, created more revulsion than devotion amongst the voting public. The world had been there so many times, it seemed. Then she produced Basic Pay and suddenly when they all looked up they were bestrode by a giant: everything democrats warn against.

At some stage during her time in the sidelines she had a makeover of some major effect. The strident “I wannitdonenowhatthefuckareyoustillstandingaroundfor” scowling, foot tapping demands of the past had been converted to a low key intensity, that sucked in the audience rather than subliminally operating in the shrillness zone of the angry demanding parent: scaring us into submission and repelling, simultaneously. Those that admired her most had previously had distance forced upon them: now she wooed them with an intensity few could match.

“The propensity of all human beings to prevaricate is a core mechanism in us that acts to prevent us from achieving our true potential” She saw a few furrowed brows and smiled, with a perfectly crafted radiance, “This idea that we have an obsession with avoiding the truth is almost trite.” She bit the word off. “In fact it is almost a cliché and like the air we breathe; it washes us, and we never think to alter it.” She seemed for a moment to bow her head and her body slumped, as though as an act of obeisance to her allotted destiny. They waited, not knowing what she was talking about but knowing it had something to do with getting free money; and most definitely feeling the intensity of her presentation.

“How to work within that awareness is a main purpose of the task that awaits us.”

“For years now peeple have promoted the idea that every citizen should be paid a wage by the governing authority…They have called it BIG because it would be a basic income grant,” she twisted the last word as she said it, and the audience could feel the vomit in her bile as she ground at that word…“grant”… “And we say! … Grant us no favours…we our doing our job…our job is too consume!”

What an idea…the crowd loved it. The conservatives of the ruling party and those beyond, in the extended audience shuddered at the thought. The chat show cynics and all the lackey spokespersons of the servile chattering classes tittered at the naivety of it all, and railed against “irresponsible promises”: as if there weren’t already enough, they said.

For it was the received wisdom that for a range of perfectly respectable economic reasons the idea was considered impractical. The core objection was that “the country couldn’t afford it” and on the surface this appeared an insurmountable objection. Starr’s genius was that she saw the opportunity [perceived from that random television programme] to reconstruct the base on which that viewpoint rested and that, added to the desperate times, made all the difference…as they all said at the time.

“And since it is our job to consume we demand our pay by right, for, not to pay us would make us slaves and our constitution does not permit …slavery!” She did something weird there with her voice, dropped the breathe to the lowest point it would go, down below the navel and lifted the word on syllables of fire catching the mood of the crowd and lifting it to enraged indignation…. “Yes, yes, yes!” They roared in adulation.

“How are you proposing to finance this generally inflationary exercise in giving away free money?” her advisers had demanded when she had first shared her vision with them some months earlier. She had introduced them to her chat show hero, a man from a foreign land, a place much poorer than Southern Azania, who had written a famous book, about the true secret of Capitalism’s success, in that part of the world called …Developed.

He had talked to them for a while about the role of property in the accumulation of wealth. He explained how the poor actually, collectively owned great wealth but were unable to access it for use in financing small enterprises because the system failed them. In all places where there was great poverty, there were unclear guidelines to the registration of property rights and therefore huge delays, in some cases insurmountable in the lifetimes of single persons.

This meant that the country was dispossessing its poor by default, and that the failure of the poor to escape poverty was something for which the system itself was therefore accountable; and which must be rectified. He finished by suggesting that the poor should sue.

Starr added. “It is the intention of this party to make that access happen on a massive scale with the biggest recording exercise ever undertaken, what has been done so far is inadequate.” Starr the elder had fixed her advisors with her steely stare, and transfixed them, “Then we shall mortgage the future to finance present expenditure through the widespread use of the basic pay. This new electronic digital era gives us opportunities for wealth disbursement that have never before existed. The Tax authorities will claw the pay back from those who earn above the minimum and our purpose must be to make the entire exercise operate on an entirely electronic basis, with the minimum of costly administrative leakage...” As she spoke those last words she made a wringing motion with both fists held together …like wringing out a towel; like wringing out a bureaucrat with a personal agenda.

She told the assembled crowd all this that day, finishing with:

“Therefore we must redefine the way in which we calculate our national income to include not only all production and service activity, not only in the formal but also in the informal. We must cost in the labour of millions of household activities, all of which have already been financed for millennia by the greater society…indeed…have facilitated that greater society’s very existence.”

The crowd loved Starr’s theme, that in the time of formal slavery the society managed to facilitate the most basic requirements of slaves and the rich still managed to accumulate wealth. So why was it that now, with the world awash with goodies no one wanted, with interest rates at historic lows indefinitely, with deflation eating away at gross domestic product that suddenly the financing of society’s needs had become so impossible.

“It has been said for millennia that the poor have always been with us …well that is true and how have the poor been financed all these years if not through the greater society that has thus over time permitted huge unaccounted capital accumulation.

“It is time for us to realise that investment, for us to make that realisation practical through Basic Pay.”

The crowd loved the feel of Basic Pay and began the great chant: Basic Pay, Basic Pay; feet pounding to the rhythm of their chanting cadence, forearms thrusting forefingers forward in the style of popular rap music… Bee Peee, Bee Pee…..”

She raised her arms and they quietened for a moment. Then she noted, caustically, that delaying the evaluation of wealth existing among the poor occurred because the process was controlled for the most part by the Penetrators, and because the penetrative gender was not the one doing the most suffering; and therefore had no sense of urgency. It is for those of us who feel the pain of nature with its constant hunger, to get things done. Whooping from the crowd revealed a barb well sent

It was a subtle shift, almost a rider to a theorem, and the message got where it was intended.

The cynics in the ruling party, when pressured, said that Corinth Starr (Starr the elder) had merely arranged for the poor to finance their own development and that it was such an unfair idea that no one would buy it. Once a marginal, always a marginal: no one promoting these crackpot ideas had ever scored more than a point or two in an election, and if she looking threatening enough, put her down or buy her out. They were so sleek and comfortable, feeling their omnipotence: their necks wonderfully fattened for the kill. They made a few token gestures; promises of the old kind, that all wrongs would be rectified along with a few token “vivas*”. [editor’s note: we have no record of what is meant connotatively by the use of this word which itself apparently means “long live”]

They put out some election posters suggesting that the idea [of Basic Pay] would cause greater poverty and in their speeches, clever speechwriters argued that such schemers as Starr the elder, like the eternal pyramid scammers, would soon divest the poor of their miserable holdings and then they would truly understand the meaning of poverty and all of society would collapse, just like in the old eastern empires of poor disorder.

They miscalculated: and, again, that made all the difference….

To be continued.

see also:
http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

An ordinary day

It started out like any other day and largely continued that way. It was simply an ordinary day. To start with, Chev drove to her friend’s place to get a lift to varsity. It was incident free. When she first started learning it was as though every taxi, bus and general road hog in the city was targeting her. On this ordinary day we made the journey without incident and five minutes faster than before. I was grateful to have arrived intact.

All four petrol stations on the route were out of fuel, but I wasn’t too worried. I had half a tank, it was only a few kilometres both ways, and the news reports on the car radio said that the petrol strike was over and that supplies would soon be back to normal. Did I mention that it was freezing cold at 6.30 and there was mist over the top of Sylvia Pass, wreathing the new nursing home that was emerging on one of the few remaining pieces of open space on the top of Linksfield Ridge in an ethereal haze.

When I got back to the house the electricity was off, so we [me and madam] couldn’t have our customary eggs for brekky, and had to make do with jam on rye; a banana and a handful of nuts. Madam doesn’t like nuts so she had a banana. Did I mention that it was freezing cold? And of course the heaters weren’t working either. It was a good day to get back into bed.

However Madam said that we had to go to the southeast side of a place that is now called Ekhuruleni [don’t try] to pay her tax demand, and Tuesday was her allotted day. Why there? She didn’t know. She had paid the tax demand with a post office money order. It was something she had done routinely on those occasions when they had wanted money, over the past thirty or so years. This time however they had written to her and told her she couldn’t pay with a post office thing and we had to find some other means of payment, or come in and pay cash [or go directly to jail… you know the drill… people steal your money and then threaten you because you haven’t given them enough… it’s standard… happens daily on the streets and elsewhere: you know; death n taxes.]

So the letter, a polite letter incidentally, came from a place in south east Ekurhuleni and we must drive the thirty odd kilometres to the place to pay them, she said: which we duly did. Of course there were the usual quite ordinary, almost archetypal issues to contend with.

Firstly we had to find petrol After five or six misses we found a place near the highway, feeling smug that we had second guessed the industry and figured out which brands got their petrol fastest; and ran out least often… Engen in this case, and then headed for our date with destiny.

The SARS address shown on the letterhead wasn’t in our 2007 map book. [for offshore readers {O.R.} SARS = Southern Azanian Revenue Services… pronounced Sevasis]. Madam phoned the number on the letterhead of the polite letter telling us to pay, or else. It was a call centre number … you know your heart can’t help sinking when you know you’ve phoned a call centre and you get a call centre person. I know that I shouldn’t feel like this should I? It is more than likely to bring the result I most dread… I do practice optimism with call centres but I seem to always encounter those that respond to the most marginal twinge of doubt. True to form they had no idea where the SARS place was either. Maybe the call centre was in Mumbai, or Cape Town, or who knows, perhaps Margate or somewhere else off the beaten track. They had no record of south east Ekhuru… whatever, either.

We used the ‘phone and went online with wireless iburst, zooming through Facebook and other email and sms links and generally communicated with the universe on that journey; found out where it was and went there… and it was the wrong place. We discovered that South East Ekhuru…. whatever is so high on the SARS profile that they have three facilities there, even though the call centre person didn’t know that the place existed. But we chose the wrong one. It was the usual old game of Marabaraba again.

“We don’t take money here.,” said the SARS lady; politely oblivious of the oxymoronic irony. You must go to another place. She didn’t know where it was though, and called a supervisor who gave us a pre-printed piece of paper containing directions on getting to the correct SARS place, where they took money, she said. You could tell that she didn’t approve of money; money left no useable paper trail.

The piece of paper assumed you were coming from an entirely different place to that where it was handed out, and so we had to go to a few elsewhere’s first before the pristine logic of the instructions became obvious. The place turned out to be a car magnet place packed randomly with abandoned vehicles all presumably as loaded with cash as a lefty politician’s car boot. I got parking in the street, at the gate, as a blessing from the multiverse for all my labours; and read the newspaper while madam went inside, through the bedlam, with a heap of our hard earned money in a Checkers packet; to give it away to the miracle of our slovenly redistributionist charity arrangements. Yeah I know it sounds harsh and it isn’t as if we are such a service oriented society that you get great value for money from every other punter in the country… but you have to admit we get pretty piss poor value for our tax buck. Maybe it would be better if it was all more competitive.

So we got lucky twice, getting parking out front and, when she eventually found the right counter, she was first in line. By the time she left there were twenty people waiting behind her and you know how long that can take. Amazing. It was almost as if everyone followed us there… eerie… Pyrrhic luck of course.

Then it was back to the highway to get back inside the Dome*; being outside the Dome always made me nervous, anticipating disintegrated roads, and abandoned roadsides littered with giraffe salespersons. [* Dome: for O.R. Jozi, my home town, is surrounded by a circular highway ring road, like the lid of an overturned bowl. Those who live inside the ring road are living inside the Dome.It is not to be confused with a place called Northgate Dome which like Montecasino lies just outside the Dome.]

Just in time we heard a radio broadcast that yet another cash-in-transit heist had taken place on our return route since we had travelled on it earlier, and the traffic would be backed up for hours while the cops did their CSI forensic stuff. Nine guards transporting the cash had been shot by a gang of men operating a military style assault using three stolen, luxury, high powered vehicles. The so-called armoured cash-in-transit trucks were obviously more lightly armoured than a Bradley fighting vehicle, because all the guards had been wounded while sitting in their seats like ducks on a pond. They could also be pushed off the road easily, also indicative of underweight armouring. Madam affirmed that it was those “Rum raiders” again, collecting money, taxes, for Bob the Roz up north in his ravaged Eyrie, Rumbabwe.

Apparently, according to the radio news, a random bystander had opened fire on the gangsters as they were chopping open the back of the truck with a pickaxe aft6er they had shot all the guards. That must have been a crazy bystander. Who but a madman would deliberately draw fire from about fifteen guys armed with handguns and forty-sevens. Presumably the bystander left soon after the robbers left [without their loot: having been scared off apparently] because there were no further references on later broadcasts to armed citizens doing the citizen thing… most politically incorrect, and here we are attempting to disarm all good citizens.

The alternate route was littered with traffic lights that were out of order and we had to deal with el mucho backed up traffic, all moving forward in little timed jumps as each driver took a turn to cross the intersections. This tends to work best in the north east of the city, elsewhere, especially as you move into more downmarket neighbourhoods the routine become more ragged, as if people anticipate trouble at the lights if they hang about too long.

Then our own doubts about the material we wanted at the next place brought an unambiguous response. 'They' [the putative supplier] had run out of the stuff we needed to complete the job we were doing, and they were only going to get re-stocked “maybe in September… sorry.”

This meant having to renegotiate some alternate choice, which also turned out to be “out of stock”; as was the third option… the curse of “just in time” stock keeping practices in a minimal plan environment.

Eventually we left them and set out to find an alternative supplier. The highway was still jammed so we toddled through another load of inoperable traffic-light caused traffic backup and eventually got what we wanted on the third try. After that we had to find a useful computer repair shop because our trusty computer had finally succumbed to one electricity cutoff too many, and had refused to switch on again, presumably in protest at the continuous abrupt-shut-down function. Of course the computer repairman gave us the usual story about how it would be cheaper to buy another computer, which we told him was a lie because loading all the stuff that was currently on the old computer would cost an arm and twelve legs. He grunted and got on with the job, which turned out to be a burnt out switch.

It was all too much. We found a little Portuguese bakery in Queens Street: the Belem Bakery, and had a late brunch. The afternoon was going to be spent in a long boring routine client meeting at which my presence was required for protocol reasons and for purposes of “staying in the loop”. Most of it would take places in languages other than English and I would receive an occasional brief summary: it would therefore be tedious. It always amazed me that a forty-minute discussion could be translated, by my translators, into a paragraph long sentence. It did mean though that I would have at least four hours in which to get my admin up to date, since no one actually expected me to take any interest in the proceedings, my presence was a simple legal requirement.

While we were waiting for our order Madam had a call from a friend in a place that is now called Ethekwini somewhere outside the Dome. She was supposed to go there for the long weekend. Apparently friend’s car had been hijacked from the Bimbo’s outlet next to a 'Club 57', or something in that region. Friend’s daughters had taken the car to a club for a night out, and lost car, handbags and cellphones. We were grateful that they were unhurt.

Apparently the baddies had been brunching at Bimbos when the girls arrived to get their car, and had calmly stood up and produced guns and made demands. A security guard at Bimbos had recommended they park there because it was a better lit area. Perhaps he had tipped off the baddies, who were apparently waiting for them to come back, giggling and happy from a night’s partying and oblivious to the dangers that lurk constantly, waiting for just such a moment’s indiscretion. When asked later why the manager at Bimbo’s hadn’t pressed a panic button or taken any other action he allegedly said that what happened on the pavement outside his shop wasn’t his problem…which somehow explained why Bimbo’s was a diminishing brand, madam said.

The brunch when it arrived was superb: good service, plenty of food. I had a three egg omelette: deliciously fluffy and stuffed to the gunnels with mushrooms, ham and lashings of melted cheese. With it came an ample salad and a heap of deliciously crunchy fries. I shouldn’t eat fries and generally ignore them but these were un-ignorable and I guzzled them down watered intermittently with a most interesting tea distilled from the coca plant. Madam munched on a house Prego roll with salads, and glowered at me obviously failing to hide her disgust that I got the better meal. Best was that it all washed down with most reasonable prices. Then I dropped madam off at the Village, which is what our place is called, and set off on the rest of the day’s chores.

I was supposed to call in and do some work at a college, where I’m doing an upgrade accounting course, for purposes of taking advantage of an income opportunity that popped up during the national strike in June. The electricity was down in their neighbourhood when I got there. Ours had come back on again and it was Orange Grove’s turn to “loadshed”, so I had to pass on that idea, and go straight and early to the long drawn out meeting where the entire afternoon’s proceeding s could be summed up in less than a paragraph and basically nothing happened and no body died. I killed a pile of admin and figured out a plan for a task that had to be done, so I was grateful for the opportunity to concentrate for a few uninterrupted hours. {the rule of these meetings is that one must attend physically, emotional or intellectual attendance is not a requirement].

When the meeting finally ended madam phoned to say that her cousin, who had gone farming in Botswana because she thought Southern Azania too violent, had been attacked in her home. Her husband, Peet, was dead, and she’d been shot in the arm. The killers had then stolen her cellphone. Madam was upset even though we hadn’t seen the cousin in decades. Then she said she’d fetch our daughter from the University. After that they were going to a meeting to plan a trip to somewhere in Australia where the child and her club team were going to play water polo. It was the only way they would ever get to play foreigners, Madam said, because the national team couldn’t go anywhere because they didn’t have a requisite quota of disadvantaged players in the team. I could feel the anger about her cousin in that statement, so I asked her to drive with care and to outrun highwaymen on the night trail home.

So I was free to head off to the highway to return home to my part of the Dome. The radio person told me that there had been a second cash in transit heist for the day, this time on that section of highway I was about to use, and that traffic was snarled up for a kilometre or so. Obviously, I thought, mimicking madam, the aptly named “Mad Bob” had to pay extra for his recent journey to Malaysia; and since our president was averse to overt assistance he was being permitted to raise further tolls amongst the rich and famous. The regular cash heists were wonderfully planned and executed with the kind of precision one only develops under conditions of military style discipline, although the fact that they had apparently cut and run when the alleged bystander had allegedly fired at them was a troubling indicator of amateurism… so perhaps they were just local guys after all.

So once more I took a different, circuitous route, by-passing all the streets where the radio person said the traffic lights weren’t working and the traffic was backed up, and eventually retired to the Blue Naartjie, a place where they know my name and where they stock Castle Stout. They put one on the counter when I walked in through the door.

I guzzled a few and joined in some random barroom conversation about the latest anomalies in the contrasting worlds of rugby and soccer. If you remember we have this entertaining issue in our national psyche. Soccer fans and other vested interest parties are neurotic that the local stars, like Bennie Mc Carthy [sic] go offshore to earn big bucks and then refuse to come home and play for the national team, which for some odd reason we disparagingly refer to as “The Boys, squared”. On the other hand rugby stars [and swimmers for that matter I added] who go offshore to earn big buck are apparently to be banned from playing for the national team whether they want to or not. In reality one suspects that they would rather not come back and play since we are in the off-season for the North and they should be resting. Anyway, as Eddie observed, their going gave those who remained a chance to shine in the dark, and just look what a few years offshore had done for Percy… the fullback whose career came back from the dead.

I agreed with everyone that it seemed inconsistent, as inconsistent as firing the deputy minister of health for some minor infraction when half the parliament has entered plea bargains to get off stealing a few hundred million bucks… not to mention the cadres all over the country who were so busy stealing money the place was likely to run out of the stuff. Someone mentioned that the mayor of some place called Govan Mbeki had been arrested for murdering the deputy mayor, but since no one knew where the place called Govan Mbeki was we all agreed that nothing made any sense and that it probably didn’t matter anyway. After all if it didn’t matter if someone played for the country of not why should it matter where a place was that you had never been to… it would be as inconsistent as worrying about events in Ouagadougou or Tlemcen.

Shameer said that Govan Mbeki had been our president’s dad and that he had written a book and died. That got everyone nodding and agreeing that murdering one’s assistants was uncool anyway no matter where Mbeki was. I drank a silent Jogidar to Peet, madam’s cousin’s recently murdered husband; and hoped his journey into the multiverse would be filled with wonder. I had only ever met him once about thirty years ago. He was then a construction guy who ran teams of people building housing estates in the great seventies housing boom. He was the first person I ever met who built houses according to a production line formula building fifteen to twenty and even more houses all almost simultaneously using specialised teams. He was immensely successful and made enough money to retire rich before he was thirty-five. Then like the Boer from whom he was descended he’d taken his young family and gone farming in Botswana. I was grateful that I was drinking beer, getting shot is not cool.

Then it was time for us all to chill out on some cool acid rock that Eddie, one of the regulars, had plugged into the sound system. We gathered our thoughts; scrabbled together our clutch of gratitude’s for small victories, and watched the perfect view that gave the pub its name: the sun dropping like a flaming Naartjie against the darkening blue twilight sky, down, over the towers of Sandton, off the western horizon.

Keep on blogging
NiK
NiK can also be found on: http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

The Testimonies: episode three

The Manifesto of Corinth Starr: Starr the elder. Continued...

“We have almost as far to go as we have come.
And we have come a great distance.”The book of Shadrack: part the third

Editor’s note: These extracts which follow [and which have prefaced our herstory so far] are taken from the so-called “Testimonies of an enumerator”, which were discovered on an archaeological expedition to the “Abandomentei” zones of the ancient Azanian Konfederacy, about which much was published on Internet news casts when the discoveries were made.

Readers will remember that when the “Testimonies” were discovered the excitement triggered a wave of new investigations that have enabled us to gain a unique perspective, on a time and a place, which, previously, we had not known to exist.

According to the special investigation team assembled to evaluate and translate the documents, the evidence produced indicates that the Transformation period of ourstory started much earlier than we had previously believed, and certainly earlier than the time of the planet wide, “Flooding”. There are even indications that the Floods, with which we are now so familiar, were not the first. There is evidence to indicate that they have apparently occurred more than once during the physical era of proto-human history.

Leofric


The Manifesto: Part two.

“….This means that the way in which we calculate Gross National Product (our region’s income) is as flawed as the statistical data on which we base our conclusions. We may as well be Romans reading the entrails of goats.”

This was the opening full frontal thrust in Starr the elder’s assault on the ruling order.

Her party had come into existence early in the opening decade of that fateful century and she had languished for a time on the sidelines. Equally, during that time she moved fearlessly through the streets and shanty villages that were swarming into existence all over Zone One and beyond. She had travelled too, to the older liberated territories of Azania and encountered people who represented the best of a generation; and who were sliding deeper and deeper into destitution and mutual savagery, while the shining walls of the wealthy parts of the Zones seemed more elusive than ever imagined. Rage was steadily manifesting and that rage, deflected now from power, took the form of more and more violence, between the two species of humans that lived at that time in that place.

These two species, known as genders, (as we now know) existed to mate and produce more offspring, to mate and produce more, frequently identical, offspring in an endless cycle of incremental development, extending over an immense time* (See glossary notes to be published later, regarding abstract terminologies such as ‘time’. For convenience however time is taken as the space between the coming into existence of an average peeple, and their ceasing to exist. This space is then divided up by the number of times the planet turns upon itself, and /or turns about its sun. While it is in fact a mere flicker against the vastness of eternity at a nano level this flicker can seem to be an extensive period… Notes: Koz see ibid.).

This reproductive process involved the interpenetration of one by the other. The original terms for these genders do not make much sense so for convenience we have dubbed them the “Penetrators” and the “Penetratees”. It is also noted that these activities were not exclusively reproductive; in fact ultimately they were exclusively recreational after the reproductive function was modified and simplified. But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. As a further extension to the complexity of this interaction some penetrators could simultaneously be a penetratee, and some penetratees would make use of a prophylactic to consummate the act to mimic a penetrator.

For a variety of reasons, with which it is not our purpose to deal, these relationships had evolved, at the time of this, part one of the testimonies, into a ‘property’ dimension. Humans as we now know had an immense propensity to possess things exclusively. This was known as an Ownership right, and both of these genders believed that they had a ‘right’ to own the other.

For most of the period of advanced proto-human development the bigger, bulkier, penetratively designed gender (the penetrators), dominated the receiving, accepting, possessing gender (penetratees). This had something to do with the length of time needed during the post-gestation period to nurture the reproduced human product. The testimonies cover, in part, the time when that relationship altered.

To return to the words of Starr the elder.
“The true measure of wealth is no longer the production of goods, since we now have the capacity to produce infinitely expanding volumes of commoditising* goods at ever diminishing cost…”

“What we do not have is consumption of goods and services in sufficient volume to sustain all that production and whereas, in the past, excess of demand over supply led to the condition called inflation, with the present excess of supply over demand what we have is a debilitating deflation. Our world is stagnating into despair and violent confrontation between the genders”

… The crowd receives this in bemused silence.

“What happened?” She asked before answering her own question.

“The world has become a global marketplace.

A marketplace can only survive if there are reasonable numbers of buyers.”

The crowd were still puzzled but waited politely, drawn by the magnetic pull of the hyped up pre-publicity.

“The marketplace is awash with oversupply; the system of production is so efficient it’s imploding into stagnation and deflation. And this simply accelerates the plunge of the poor into greater, greater and greater, misery. Indeed,” she added, not quite as an afterthought, her voice rising imperiously through the word itself. “…Everything we have done since we liberated ourselves from the Koloniste and the time of our Dispossession has simply accelerated the vast numbers of poor into a greater condition of misery, made worse by this pestilential mating plague that has come to curse us.

The crowd had responded positively to the negative comments on the Koloniste. Such, ‘them are the peril’ related strategies always provided useful point scoring tactics. But it was the curse of the terrible wasting diseases that had plagued the closing years of the preceding century, turning into pandemics, killing millions by the time of the testimonies that really began to move the crowd. Years of seemingly neglectful measures to combat the scourge had reaped a bitter harvest, and many millions of grieving disaffected citizens; and citizens were also voters. Overwhelmingly the victims of the new age were those who were raped* and beaten by members of the ruling gender. Starr the elder tapped into that well of discontent and began to draw the waters of power to within drinking distance.

[Editor’s note: *This comment on “plagues” appears to be a reference to the so called ‘plague wars’ about which more shall be revealed when those parts of the Testimonies known as the Yonka Memorandum© that are to be published on the Internet Forum some time from now.
*The word ‘raped’ referred to a form of violent penetration assault on a penetratee, without the happy consent of the human being “raped”. As we shall see this rape issue, itself something of a pandemic apparently, played a significant role in precipitating the change that took place during the rule of Starr the elder.]

“There are certain truths that we must now accept,” Starr the elder was a large and formidable specimen of a penetratee gender (referred to as “her” or ‘she”). Her voice had been specially modulated by vocal experts to work on the dream mode of the human brain and was alternately soft and insinuating; rising to crescendo’s of suppressed rage, as she railed against the injustice of violence against her kind. However in this famous Constitution Hill manifesto she chose then to move to a different target.

For many of you however the reason you are all hear is to hear my party’s strategy with respect to Jobs, aren’t you?

And the crowd roared its approval even though they had been lied to for at least forever, it seemed, by ruling party politicians making promises about jobs. Secretly most of those present didn’t believe much would happen in the business iof job provision.

“The most important truth is that there are no more JOBS, and there never will be any ever again!”

She let that statement hang in the air until it gently rained down on her sobering audience. They weren’t too sure that they wanted their suspicions confirmed.

“You all know that for more than two decades now, the popular cry to call in the masses…You out there … at election time, is the ultimate promise of “more jobs”. We remember the “more jobs” party in the last election who gained six seats on the promise and defected to the ruling party on the first ‘window’* opportunity. They were the only ones who got jobs.”

Perhaps there were some in the mob out there who wondered if she wouldn’t just do the same. This right that politicians had to change parties in mid stream notwithstanding that they were not personally elected by the voter had effectively changed the basic compact denoting representative government; and the practice had become a thorn in the prickly hide of the system.

The effect had been to dilute the multiplicity of parties that had peppered the early years of the new Republic and had tended to favour the development of oligarchies; and had in turn ultimately mired down the pace of transformation in an eclectic wash of self-interest.

“It is my belief that those amongst our leaders who have made those promises were sincere in their belief that their actions would lead to more jobs. They have been doing and saying the same things, like some doctrinal mantras over and over again in the bland expectation that suddenly the outcome will alter.

However we keep ‘knowing’ that there are no jobs, that all our conferences have created no jobs other than for a lucky few. We know that jobs have not happened and we keep refusing to believe that they have become extinct. Jobs belong to an age that has gone forever. We have legislated jobs out of existence, haven’t we?”

She could see the first beginnings of movements, the first stirring of heads nodding in affirmation. She held her pause with infinite, studied, care. The crowd hovered in expectation, sensing that she was building to a momentous declaration.

“Most irrationally, we aggressively insist on believing that although we have passed thousands of laws that have made jobs extinct, these ridiculous “jobs” will keep coming back to life because of some curious ‘rules’ of ‘human nature’: whatever they are!”

At this point she paused; let the words sink in upon the now completely silent crowd. She had their total attention, not to mention that of the millions, around the world, who later saw the remarkable speech on television and through Internet podcasting on UTube and elsewhere..

“We must accept another truth, too.” she said eventually, her voice dropping, possibly by as much as an octave.

“It is this…the poor have always been supported by those who had plenty.” The crowd roared its approval. Someone had to pay and ‘they’ were always the favourite target. “They” who haditall: how dare they! Starr the elder raised her hand.

“In the far distant past this support would be in the form of voluntary bondage, later evolving into the hated institution of slavery!” The crowd roared its disapproval of the evil word, they were however concerned at the talk of voluntary bondage and the crowd had looked around at each other wondering about the strangeness of this statement. Fortunately that moment of question was immediately obliterated with the use of the S word. Slave was a word that obliterated reason..

“Therefore the wealth of society has always encompassed the needs of all, no matter how slight these needs are, have they not?”

“Yes, Yes, Yes.” The crowd roared its approval for after all, their needs were slight compared with those of the newly wealthy elites, who had come to dominate Southern Azania since the revolution and who, together with collaborationist remnants of the former Koloniste business class, now quaked at the thought of the new revolution; and would set out to limit it were they free to do so.

Starr the elder’s true genius lay in recognising where the lever was placed, which according to the ancient Archimedes, would “move the world”, and she had assiduously studied how to apply it. Brought up as a scion of a Party main person, she first exerted her influence in the rough and tumble world of construction and construction engineering, before moving into the political mainstream firstly as a hotshot party apparatchik, and then later, becoming disillusioned at the escalating dimensions of patronage, and its dulling effects on the tenacity with which the revolution was being pursued she had spoken out and been expelled from the party. She had taken it personally: others had been caught with their hands in the till and were not expelled!

She could have returned to her own corporation, which had, under her development become the most powerful company of its era, having gobbled up many of her long established competition in the meantime. It was a multi-billion-credit operation and she milked it now for her purpose as so she did what every ambitious person with the aim of ruling the world does. She started her own party and went off in pursuit of glory.

Then, starting softly in one corner of the crowded precinct that extends so spectacularly from the Constitutional Court of the Azanian Konfederasy, the now famous chant began, accompanied by the equally famous Toi Toi. Those who were there that day spoke of the hairs at the backs of their necks curling at the sound.

“Bee Pee, Bee Pee, Bee Pee…. Woza” and then again and again until the entire audience was worked up into a frenzy that even enveloped the gathered dignitaries- who seemed themselves undignified, primly, sitting, observing - until they too broke under peer pressure [to be seen later on television cavorting and toi toi ing with the best of the rest, as they say, and in some cases to their own, considerable, later embarrassment]

“In a world increasingly run by machines… large scale labour has become unnecessary! The exploitation of worker citizens by corporations has ended, but so has the work that humans did.”

The crowd had gone silent again with an aching anxiety. They didn’t really want to hear that jobs had become extinct.

With a nose for the correct instant Starr opened up for her climax.

“Human beings today have now got a new task, having been liberated from the task of toiling at the production lines it is the task of each and every citizen to go forth and consume goods and services, and soak up the excess capacity in our system!!”

She roared it out and the crowd picking up their earlier mood cheered lustily; all the while looking around in confusion, understanding only that there was a plan, embodied in the slogan B…P…, being chanted again and again: cascading around the precinct like a wild Mexican* wave. [Editor’s note: * we do not know what that word means.]
Corinth Starr stood almost bravely to attention throughout the tumult; catching it eventually on its crest. With a wave of her arms she lifted the sound and then gradually brought it down: rooting the energy, until the place was once again silent with expectancy.

“To enable this task of consumption to take place I decree… the payment of “Basic Pay”!
The crowd went delirious, as would any rational riotous mob hearing the most wonderful news ever to have been heard. They leapt up and down, hugged each other with anticipated pleasure and felt the glorious nub of hope burst effervescently through their normal mask of cowed cynicism.

“Yes you heard correctly, this is not some hearing defect you just got…a vote for the Gender Party means “Basic Pay for all”….
When elected, I shall, I decree now, that I shall legislate for the payment of a basic wage to each and every citizen of the land.

Each citizen shall receive one hundred credits each month paid directly into their own electronic account accessible only through their own unique individualised identity logo.

The news headlines that day were …BASIC PAY! WHO’S A GONNA PAY? …

Who indeed…


To be continued

Extracted from the Testimonies of an enumerator.