Robert plays wee gordon

Two guys are both invited to the same party.

One is an octogenarian and a survivor deluxe. He has faced down almost every leader on the planet over his lifetime. Presumably he is polite to the Chinese who keep him alive, he is barely civil to anyone else: he is Robert [Bob the Roz ] Mugabe of the ill fated ship R%umbabwe.


The other is shaggy whatsisname: that Brown fellow from outer Pomerania: Yes you know the chap, Gordon Brown, the canny wee Scotsman who has snuck in and hijacked Britain, hee, hee: except that he seems a tad knuckle fingered and lacking in style; and since he really got going he has slipped amazingly in the Pomish polls. Robert hasn’t. He has long since perfected the mad hatter’s knack of making polls believe whatever he wants them to believe.

They’ve both been invited to party in Portugal. It’s an Afro-European get together of the kind that knits the fabric of our duplicitous relationships and which is presumably jolly good fun for all the attendees. The Afro bloc has demanded that el Roberto should attend: he who is despised and reviled by the nice chaps, while curried with by those who seek advancement. They want to thumb their noses at the colonialists and make them writhe in guilty pain even though most members of the Euro bloc have recently been colonised themselves. They also want to make sure everyone knows how much they love Bob the Roz.

And big lumbering Gordon, who of humble passage hath regaled us with tales of ‘hardship and personal suffering’ growing up in a Scottish parsonage, has denounced Robert as an aging baddie: one who has strayed from the path. He has said he wont go. He has some support from the Dutch who have their own skeletons to deny in southern Africa.He says he wont go as though his views are important.

The Portuguese are the meat in this uncool sandwich: Gordon’s oldest allies on this planet. Excellent chaps the Portuguese; when they strike an agreement they stick with it… the alliance is some 600 years old. Surely Gordon is not going to be so crass as to spoil a party organised by his country’s oldest allies. Anyway this week his old Queenie [she who rules]has been tottering about in the company of another arch feudalist from Saudi Arabia… so why is meeting another human rights abuser going to cause Gordon any grief.

As for us out here in the bus. I certainly agree with the majority that a showdown is necessary and that Gordon should go and speak to Robert. I also agree that Robert should go to the circus.

Like any curious observer I have to ask how clean the empire’s hands really are, when it comes to the matters discussed at Lancaster House when expediency then, became something quite unintended now.

Maybe the real reason Gordon doesn’t want to go is the embarrassment he will feel when the rights abuser and erstwhile liberation hero Mugabe gets a standing ovation while he is merely applauded. How does a man who has nailed his plank to the wall of African development going to face down such a dis’. One also suspects that many will question Gordon's own democratic credentials. For those who missed it some wee scandal burst onto the scene this week allegedly involving some member of the feudal aristocracy in Pomerania and some extortion activity on the part of two men who appeared in court.

The reason you don't know this is because the "palace" issued a gagging order [in spin language the government lackeys of the palace issued a gagging order] sweeping away the right of the citizen to information affecting those who have such power. Ah silly... the Brits are not citizens they are subjects.

Basically Gordon and his leftward friends are faced with a heads you lose, tails I win circumstance where the dice are stacked against reason and reason is also down there somewhere flushed offstage for awhile. They have already lost anyway; how can someone who consorts with King Abdullah, and collaborates in violations of the open communication so essential to a modern state, in the interests of protecting some privileges his party came into existence to destroy, actually pretend to have any principles to be offended.

Gordon being essentially a hack politician will do what her majesty requires, even if that means taking orders from Mr Mugabe. He may not feel too enamoured though of those who orchestrate his discomfort, and maybe that will cause an unintended outcome for the Afro lobby who seem hell bent on their own path to hubris currently. He looks like a man who would hold a grudge for a long time... a regular stamp collector.

In today's paper the Portuguese say they are "soon" to send the invitations. Will they wont they... and if they do... then...

The big game for the next little while will be: Guess who’s gonna blink first.

Jake baby: apres moi, le deluge

Jake and that morning-after-pill

Quite aside from the sheer joy of being on the winning side for a change what was most enjoyable about our recent World Cup Rugby victory was the pure honesty of the final.

In old fashioned terms a couple of tons of meat crashing together leaves little room for evasions, vacillation, procrastination, duplicity or any of the other ailments that characterise life in the globalising fast lane, not to mention life in a sport form that is being compressed via a political agenda into recalcitrant transformation.

It is possible that there is huge resistance to transformation in the sport of professional rugby. It is equally possibly that impatience is driving the agenda faster than those to be transformed can keep up with. What is not in doubt is that two merit based teams crashed into each other last weekend at the Stade de France in St Dennis and we the wildly ecstatic audience watched, what a German colleague described as, a game of “barbaric beauty” in which no quarter was asked and none given.

And so to the celebrations and the joy and the national feel good factor that is already evaporating under the relentless pressure of rising interest rates scrum-crashing with the same brutal ferocity to which we were witness last Saturday against the immovable object of declining pay, and unwavering financial commitments.

Well done the Bokke.

For a brief moment we were able to leave this synthetic world to watch a sanitised version of all our histories. We could remind ourselves about where we had come from and what we had had to do to make our Darwinian entrance onto this makeshift stage. And it was eighty minutes of glory played against a host of agendas.

This was the game played by the children of those who built the greatest empire the world has yet seen and we watched it at its ultimate apotheosis.

And so now to the next…. And return to the bull terrier dragging its unwanted teeth against our trouser turn-up, dragging the fabric: forcing us to change our walk.

What will happen of course will be a gradual return to the agenda which has not gone away and wont do.

So… the next question: Does the venerable “Coach of the Year” walk away from it all as he has threatened to do. His contract is about to expire and his job was advertised last week and we love the idea of human sacrifice so why shouldn’t he go. On the other hand we can sacrifice him anyway, sooner or later his team will lose for whatever reason and then the fickleness of this moment will become evident. We can keep him on as a lackey slave and eviscerate him when he stumbles

Last week, before the final event, a woman at a school final assembly for school leavers, on the east side of Jozi, read out what she claimed to have been the Venerable Coach’s matriculation preliminary exam essay answer, circa 1981. Apparently she had been the coach’s educator then, back then, before when the coach was a learner: a simple Jeppe* schoolboy. Why she happened to still have his essay a quarter of a century later was not dealt with by her bedazzled audience.

In this essay, “My Dream”, he is alleged to have envisaged doing just what he did last Saturday night: watched ‘his’ team, that he coached, win the World cup. This week a letter to the citizen from Coach Jake White’s former Headmaster spoke of the same thing… this man’s dream.

So what happens when you wake up, knowing that this thing to which you have ridden for three decades or more has been achieved. This thing that has driven you since the earliest days, even before the competition became a reality; when the idea of a World Rugby Cup was still only a glimmer in the imagination of a rugby crazed school.

An old Koan referred to by the Zen masters of antiquity talks of the moment of one’s greatest triumph being simultaneously the instant of one’s greatest failure. For Coach Jake White that moment has now arrived and passed by and the real question [for him] is “What next”.

Logic suggests that he would now seek to be the first coach to get back to back victories in the World Cup. Set against that objective is the truth that the next four years will be unbearable for any national coach in the beloved country. His very success will stand as naught against the weight of ideological commitment to the racial folly that has been our undoing for so long, that it is the only thing we know how to do. The politics that have apparently almost torn rugby apart over the past decade are set to intensify now… once the hullabaloo has died down and the last ticker tape paper parade has been washed down a passing stormwater drain.

The ultimate logic is that we will now enter a weakened state with key players going away. The second team, which looked most ordinary against the Tongans and was soundly beaten by New Zealand and Australia during the offshore leg of the Tri-nations will struggle to find form… For White the game is over. It is now that “back to the drawing board” thing again, and painstaking reconstruction as a new vision is somehow cobbled together again.

Jeppe and Lord Milner.

Alfred: Lord Milner ran the four colonies of southern Africa that emerged from the war of 1899-1902 for eight years until Union. He was High Commisissioner and a hard taskmaster who left a legacy in the form of the so-called "Milner" schools and an education system based on the Milner ethic: service and dedication to one's country the empire and one's fellow person..

I spent a brief sojourn once at the school called Jeppe High School for Boys, as a relief teacher. I went initially for a month to relieve a man who had taken a team to the Far East, to swim in competitions there. I stayed on at their request for eight months while their business teacher, a lady fresh from the old pre-transformational lesser school system was on stress leave.

The school, almost the oldest in Jozi, was rooted in what was termed the “Milner” ethic. This was a colonialist concept founded in the ethic of ‘service. Milner's idea, and he had allegedly a whim of steel, was that the so-called Milner schools were tasked with producing incorruptible civil administrators, who would graduate to run this end of the Empire and maybe other parts as well. It was a powerful motif and stood this country well over the century between their founding and our new democracy. He, Milner, was himself described by those who knew him as the most incorruptible of men.

No matter how rough the kids that populated my classrooms during that nine month gestation that I experienced working at that school, there was always that latent message in the air, at assemblies and on the sports field, where rugby was the supreme concern surpassing even cricket, which is another obsession altogether. The message of duty, and service to one's fellows.

At Monday’s assembly a victory by the under thirteen’s against a traditional enemy like K.E.S. [another Milner school]would routinely take pride of place in the morning’s litany notwithstanding that some senior had won the national History prize in the annual Olympiade, or the rowing team had swept away all in another national competition. Rugby was the school's exclusive perspective, all others served that need.

And so it became for Coach Jake White and what he would do after the party is over.

Personally I think that the Jeppe ethic makes service to country more important than service to the sport or to oneself. As a result Coach Jake White's own training would call for him to persevere in his task and pace the process of transformation to a winning agenda. He could do this and we could win twice although no one team has successfully defended their title… keeping a winning team on the boil for four years has proved an insurmountable challenge to date. Nonetheless it is possible. He could do it. The odds are immense because the political climate in which he must make impossible decisions, will become more strident. Hobbes could easily have observed that the life of a world cup coach is "nasty brutal and short".

On the other hand the next World Cup hosts New Zealand are looking for a winning coach, and so are the former World champions whom we defeated last week. Ours, Jake baby, was to be scrapped by a xenophobic rugby management that was so intent on unseating him they advertised his job the day before the final. That is a bad omen for the future.

A recurring advertisement for the gambling industry ends with the phrase: "Winners know when to quit". [My own experiences as a student, working Wednesday’s and Saturday’s as an accountant for a well known bookie, the late Hans Stroobach [sic], at the old Loveday street Tattersalls in Jozi generally proved that winners seldom quit, but returned to the racecourse again and again and invariably went on to lose; and I would have to hassle them on the phone for their money].

Logic suggests he should take that job in New Zealand, and take his new friend Eddie and his vision coach and be the first coach to win back to back world cups … That would be consistent with his dream. Reading the media reports on the Internet this week from New Zealand one perceives them to be the same small-minded whiners as the Poms, and our own media for that matter, when we lose. He’d hate the weather and by the time he’d finished his family would have grown-up without him: Against that part of the Milner ethic is that family counts less than duty. On the other hand they [the Kiwis]seem to be a sort of colonial leftover place, quaintly rooted in a time warp where streets are clean and people walk on them without fear or favour: awfully post-Milner, even though he didn't waste much time with the place himself.

Back at the farm though the subjugated Boers of Milner’s day took to playing rugby and transformed the game, wresting it from the grip of the hated “Engelses”; putting us on the world stage. Now the game is under assault again, for a second time. We saw the undoubted fruits of this new transformation in the record equalling tries scored by a man who would never have been permitted to play in the bad Auld days. Plus we may never have made the final at all had it not been for that stunning overturned near-try in the game against the islanders: again by a man who would have been arrested for a pass offence back then for being on a rugby field at all.

In our moment of triumph we can see that the game is to be transformed again; and the iron hand of a man of principle is needed at this hour to steer us through this present storm of prevarication and obtuse duplicity, to achieve the seemingly impossible… Back to back national victory… In a world in which all things are possible… Why not… just do it.?

………………………………………..

And then the postscript after the party pill comes and we find ourselves tangled already in sheets of hubris…. Victory tours and angered fans and racial slights abounding and the buckle of routine response tightens once again on our defences.

Jake… Woody Allen put it best … “Take the money and run.”
Cheers
Blogroidnik Blogospherian.

No irretrievable breakdown possible Mrs Ginwala

Imagine you are appointed with great fanfare to the post of chief executive of a major corporation that is itself part of a larger corporation…. A common enough occurrence I’m sure you will agree.

One of your aims in executing your job would be to grow your business; and you can do that organically by growing the business, or by stifling or even taking over, the competition. I would hold that the natural inclination of all business activity is to create a comfortable grandchild rearing environment called monopoly. One of the purposes of the modern evolved social democracies of the modern era is to prevent these inclinations. In other words make monopolies more and more difficult to sustain: hence the prevalence of Competition boards. [We have oligopoly now instead which is marginally better than the stifling clammy grip of monopoly but still sees us as an emerging market economy rather than one that has been fully tempered.]

Now imagine this chief executive’s consternation when he discovers that the most impossible circumstance has taken place. The Chief executive of the operating division that “owns” his division effectively disowns him and his business. Not only this but declares to many [and thus inevitably all ] that She does not believe that her organisation should be in charge of such a business. She considers the idea that competition results in an enhanced lifestyle for many to be anathema. She sees perhaps that this division created by some now despised predecessor was an error.

As a shareholder you would demand an explanation, wouldn’t you?

And this is what we want on the issue of Vusi Pikoli.

We are told that his suspension is due to a terminal breakdown in the relationship between senior and junior chief executives.

I would suggest that such a relationship could never have existed because the job was, in the minds of an increasing number of unhappy seniors, a poisoned chalice. The relationship was iced over with the loathing that the senior executive had for the function for which the junior corporation was created. Perhaps it is too threatening and since power inevitably corrupts it may as well be corrupted as much as possible while the opportunity exists.

The issue of the Scorpions unit and the NPA [National prosecuting authority] is in general about the elimination of competition in the business of securing a crime free environment in the country.

While a crime free environment is to the benefit of the greater market served by the State, it is not necessarily of benefit to those who profit from the criminal society we have more overtly become. We could argue that we are a society in which criminal behaviour is the only "real" free market activity.

The decision to create a prosecuting arm to add “woema” to the task of rooting out particular classes of corporate criminal behaviour in our emerging democracy was bold one.

It is interesting that a more affluent senior generation should now be so keen to dismantle what is now seen to be an error compounded by triumphant democratic optimism. They certainly do not appear to be in any great rush to sort outr other errors, like the new education catastrophe-in-the-making for instance. Presumably we can expect an assault on the activities of the Independent Complaints Directorate after the NPA Scorpions sting has been excised from the body politic.

The United States has recently combined the activities of some thirty plus independent investigative branches of government into an unwieldy instrument called Homeland Security. There are many on both the left and the right who argue that the country has become both less competent and less free as a result.
I would offer the ghastly aftermath of Katrina as evidence of both.

There is a festering sore within the senior organisation in our country: one that is pitting teams against teams, within and while this may be no more than the unsightly actions within a directionless organisation, the absence of meaningful competition from outside means there is no Ardreyan "amity/enmity" construct to limit normal in-fighting. In the absence of viable competition for the marketplace internal competition becomes the norm.

It must be close to impossible to function in an organisation where the boss has decided, not specifically that they don’t like you, but that they simply don’t like the operation you are charged to run on their behalf… it does not suit management’s agenda any longer and must be eliminated.

Appointing a fellow manager to evaluate the policy directive is a sensible move, for people who are desperate to avoid scrutiny. There is a desperation about such a move. Why…. What was this subordinate chief executive doing that was so dangerous to the interests of management that he has had to be fired under dubious circumstances?

These are the questions that an emerging democracy needs to answer. Not to answer them, or to accede to the strange behaviour to which we are witness is to collaborate in the stillborn birth of a former emerging democracy.

This current obfuscating curtain of disinformation flooding out across the media waves must not deflect us from the central reality. It is not possible to have a disharmonious relationship with someone who did not want to be your boss in the first place.

Since we, the citizen are ultimately the shareholders of this vast corporation that we call the State, we must decide whether this collusive behaviour on the part of our anointed management is able to get to the nub of the matter in this carefully airbrushed sideshow.

Corporations are intended to outlive their human creators. They become entities in their own right in which today’s management giant is tomorrows epitaph.

Because of the overwhelming power wielded by the current ruling party in our country there has never been a more important moment than now to maintain competition in the Security field. Those who are blindly following their leader in this matter: those members of the Alliance, those Diamonds polished to glossy blackness through the beneficence of BEE, and all the other hanger’s on who have and are currently enjoying the edgy taste of freedom’s bounty, know this:

The hangover is worse when you forgot to take some corrective muti before you passed out drunk.

Will it all look different in January?

“Blogroidnik was here”.

Vu Si weh denials

Oh Vu si weh denial
Oh we’ll play a happy little game of denial oh ye
We deny we were bad; claim we were always good except for them who weren’t, and they claim the same only in reverse:
And now we have a pretty pickle.
[well maybe... who else is in sight?] Il violencia continua… continua.

Bob the Roz never had this problem … well in the beginning anyway.
He issued orders … the violence stopped,
Only to flare in a different order.
State violence in place of the free market form.

Our violence is the product of freedom and the need
To assert primacy over the new domain.
Crime is the only legitimate free market activity allowed in the country… all other
Economic games are monopolised, cartelised, controlled, regulated and now on top of it all officiated or is that now
mediated
through BEE to be...ee
Too hard to please,too.

It is our own ‘sweet anarchy’ and there is some desperation as the realisation dawns that there will be no free handouts to those who did not walk in freedom’s shoes but hovered on the sidelines waiting for the crumbs.

And the handouts and the takeouts and the stakeouts are paralysing our development
For as the winners take all those who can make it work are no where to be seen.
Money spent on arms it is said could have funded a national
education
bond
system so that the kids who go into tertiary ed
to learn how to run the prize captured by daddy and his buddys
could bond themselves
to a lifetime’s payback
Learn now pay over the life of your career.

But we didn’t do that: we bought the guns, planes, boats and bombs to shrivel Indonesia [well who else is in the firing line?] and giveaway
to our enemies in the form
Of fruitless expeditions
to foreign places which exclude Darfur and Myan Mar where
the people cry for liberation from alien enemies that we ignore and pretend not to see
for those aliens are our friends and we cannot see motes in the eyes of friens list the log rammed up- our bums becomes eternal..

Ho say
The legs are coming off the pot
And the pot
Will fall down into the fire.

The children from Khutsong, shipped sheepishly out to no place, went to drink
Vast swathes of local booze:
And shag the local ladies.
Response: a clichéd outburst from outraged
Displaced
Local lads
Who attacked and ravaged the traumatised Khutsongese
In their shivering beds.
There was no relativity here, no sense of carefully stage manged evasions.

Meanwhile our saga over Vusi persists… Why should simple things like firing someone you don’t like be so easy
For the President and so
Difficult for me?

Certainly apparent choices of who should be fired and who not, do seem to affirm the need to have rules making firing of anyone almost impossible
Even for Presidents

But the court agreed he could and we couldn’t.

Every wannabee instant megastar of the new ruling order will be watching with baited breath to see how wonderfully rich a few can become at the expense of the many when the dastardly owners of foreign held companies
Are deprived of their
Rights to the fruits of their
Labour by a thief in the night in the disintegrating failed State of Rumbabwe.

It is often said that to repeat the same action over and over in the forlorn expectation of a different outcome is an indicator of insanity
I prefer to think… oh unfashionable thought… oh naughty thought…. That such behaviour implied… shall we say… a dulled intellect: not to be confused with stupidity to which it is cousin... and which could never be said to apply to our people.
Albeit cupidity on the [part
Of those disingenuous con-persons
Who will benefit from the theft at the expense of those too dull-witted/indolent
satisfied/uninformed oh fuck it all just plain too damm old fashioned stupid
to
Realise
that there is no such thing as a free
lunch as
The cliché goes… someone somewhere always pays
Usually by leaving the table
While you are feasting… so your children stay
behind
to wash the dishes.

Is it denial to tacitly accept that the violence with which we live….
Comes in part from the national idea that having power means being able to do what you like because you can
And want to: and being left out of the party means
starting your own.
And because we are unfashionably unenlightened we cannot
understand that the
rhetoric with which
We handled the struggle for
Freedom
Was only
rhetoric?

Rubbish… Tell that bullshit theory to the Amagents who
Have become rich on the proceeds
Of daring deeds and derring do

And we shall break the mirror
To steal the image.

NiK

Free Burma.

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

Misdirecting Vusi

Sing a little jig about
Vusi
Shroud the reasons why you
Pushed him out
The door
With the strangest little song about a man who would go down
to the floor
If not rescued.


Quick shift with left to right to left again then hold on tight
For shadow sideshows that give us fright
And less than consciousness:
As first Shabby... so oh
conveniently
provides for
Righteous indignation
Affecting whoooh?
No redress save a lien
On his cash which with some dash may be
Dispensed...
to his bold markers.

A bigger hand
A bigger hand: they cry, with joy. Start the Toi… for the sneakiest
hand
Called blind man’s muff and we huff and huff about those who
stuff their pockets full of mis-
begotten rough bold cash: snatched from the dash
to ye olde [soccer] world cup

Fifty million in comm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How dare these men bomb!!!!!!!!!!! on the people this way????????????
Says the finister of migrants a fine old figature of probity and
Caution who speaks with straight comfortable morality,
inveighs against plurality
And neatly steals the show
away from Vusi
ands those woosy
men
And women in his prosecuting ministry

Now what was that story about a warrant... of arrest?... For who?
Nooo... 0
Never such a laughable
suggestion
surely
no one would think to...
Mention it was he
surely there would be
No such thing

And lest you forget again about the things that are real
That woman down there who killed a husband somewhere
Has been released to bury daddy struck down by wrath almighty so you see
if Vusi had something he had say then he may
have had such a hand wouldn’t he?

Wouldn't he?
NiK[07]