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”.