Our new secular Hell

Yesterday I experienced a secular vision of hell.

I had to make a quick journey out from Auckland Park, where I have a small nesting place, to North Riding down the Malibongwe Road, and then I had to take the Witkoppen Road to another place after which I was to return to the home nest, in the North east of the city. The ‘mal’ in Malibongwe means madness in one of the region’s languages; and on Thursday 24th Jan it lived up to that implication.

This, usually brief encounter, a round trip of some thirty five kilometres that would normally take around forty five minutes, eventually took four hours.

I once, in my foolhardy youth, drove from our city Jozi, to the coastal city of Ethekewini [sic], which I presume is where Durban once was, in four hours and a few minutes, but that of course was back in the sixties when such madness was a rite of passage..

Now it takes that long to get around roughly a quarter of the city! What a pass!

Power failures abounded. Chaos, is mile upon mile of sleek, shiny cars, big, smoke belching trucks and articulated vehicles, buses, broken down clunkers: all heaving fumes into the universe as each vehicle methodically, and with staggering self-discipline for the most part, approaches yet another intersection; and inches through, car by alternate car, in a grinding minuet of endless four way stops,four way stops, four way stops, four way stops... ad infinitem.

I decided various things during that long ride

Firstly at 62 you don’t get that many new experiences, and sitting in the biggest gridlock in national history [to date… watch this space] was a new experience.

Secondly. I shall no longer refer to the euphemism “load shedding” that has been coined by our electricity utility. “Load shedding” communicates the idea of an orderly transfer of scarce resources from one region to another, the phonics of the word make it sound similar to “sharing” and so we are expected to derive comfort from the use of this word to imply “fairness”... No more.

What I and about half a million other metal armoured bodies experienced last Thursday was a vision of orchestrated chaos such as Ayn Rand in her wildest and most fervent imagination could not have truly envisaged: a city paralyzed.

When Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged [1958] I read it as fiction and found it delightfully entertaining: in retrospect almost a Mills and Boon experience... with a message of warning… Her thesis was simply that a world run by those filled with Resentiment was a world on its way to secular hell.

Lately I have remote viewed the meltdown in our neighbouring country as: ‘Ayn Rand: “Atlas Shrugged” on steroids’, and with consequent rising concern. But this experience yesterday made the entire idea, that she described, of a society in chaos, as a result of the people who knew how things worked being replaced by the people that didn’t, that my skin crawled at the horror of it all. Thank goodness there wasn’t a tsunami or other natural disaster on its way, we would have all drowned at the wheel.

For this strategic error, on the part of our leadership, has struck at the most vulnerable part of our economic plan with an almost perfect symmetry, ironic really given that our former President was jailed for 27 years for [among other things] setting out to sabotage the power system.

For our leaders to somehow ‘misplace’ the development of new power capacity, perhaps in the interests of, or distracted by, short-term aggrandisement, amounts to an un-natural catastrophe.

Their current prevarication, obfuscation and general squirming about and whining collection of Clintonesque Mea Culpa's, cannot distract from that overwhelming error. This dereliction of duty will confound all the good works of the new ruling class, and could well permanently stain Thabo Mbeki’s legacy. To mangle Shakespeare’s Marc Anthony … The cock-ups men make live after them…the good shall often be interred with their bones: think Bill Clinton think Monica Lewinsky… Don’t think… longest period of sustained and sustainable economic growth in American history. Ditto Thabo.

That was my third thought, and carried me eventually to the junction of Malibongwe and Witkoppen, haunted by Herbert’s observation regarding the “Want of a nail” [see my previous blog]. It did not give me any pleasure to realise that this crisis in our power supply system is the first real post-revolutionary problem that cannot be blamed on Apartheid: an inheritance has been put at risk.

I now proceeded to inch my way parsimoniously east along the fifteen kilometres of Witkoppen en route to the Old Pretoria road at the north east junction of the city. We were heading inexorably towards a heavily pregnant wall of deep dark cloud from which long extended tendrils of water could be seen drenching forth on at least a tenth consecutive day of persistent rain. By this time it was after four o clock, my journey up Malibongwe had taken nearly two hours and the madness had yet to fully manifest

Ultimately the dams of decorum burst and I [and probably others] watched in disbelief as increasingly desperate taxi drivers, well behind on their daily schedule of human delivery units, took increasingly insane measures to beat the clock. They obviously had to make their quotas in the face of a power failure so total we were faced with an almost limitless ocean of crawling metal. … Poesa* Thursday be dammed! We sat dry mouthed and watched the so-called new recapitalised, 16 seater Quantums slipping, slithering and sliding about on mud soaked sloping roadside verges, dancing while a torrential downpour was sent to add more misery to further misery.

I saw at least six such taxis come so close to overturning, teetering at times on one side side of wheels only, that heart was alternately in my mouth and jogging about with mirth. One Quantum slithered past me and I caught the rolling whites of their eyes from many a full load of passengers as their transport keeled yacht like to the left, and desperate contents hiked brutally to the right to keep the things on their wheels. At one time I had to remind myself to use tji kung breathing to avert what felt like an immanent heart attack so tangible was their stress..

And through this entire journey I saw no form of authority in evidence other than the random police vehicle trapped in the same gridlock.

There were a cluster of Metro cops standing at the slipway joining the Rivonia Road with Grayston Drive; but that was one of the few places where there traffic lights were actually working and traffic was moving relatively freely…. or as freely as possible through a police gauntlet: talk about shuffling the deckchairs about on the Titanic.

As for the other thirty odd kilometres of chaos… not a copper in sight. Head of metro police, Mr Wayne Minaar’s words rang hollow. He said on radio a few days ago that he and his team had a plan. Well we saw it. At least two hundred thousand vehicles were abandoned to their fate as the Metro cops simply buckled. The voice on the radio said that the cable thieving syndicates were taking the opportunity to steal as much cable as possible during the power cut reasonably secure that they could work without interruption from the pesky electricity. Maybe the Metro cops were hoping they would make their getaway using the slipway to Grayston.

This was a picture of meltdown. When I eventually saw the Metro guys virtually barricading the only part of town that was moving, my umpteenth and spleen filled thought was about Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

I don’t live in the crowded outer North west of the city and seldom go there. The last time was three months ago and i faced a similar gridlock albeit a shorter journey and only two hours to do what used to take twenty minutes. That which happens once may be an exception ... that which happens twice... becomes a trend.

I felt that if I were a person who lived in the North West: in that ‘cookie cutter’ housing territory that looks like a low rise Hillbrow spreading virus like un-aesthetically towards many horizons. And if I realised that this was to be my lot for the rest of my probable career or at least the next ten years, which basically means forever because the world moves so fast that if you fall behind you can never catch up... then I would begin implementing immediate migration plans at once, before the value of housing in the region goes into property meltdown.

Alternatively I would shoot myself.

Appropriations.

Appropriations.
[21 January 2008]

“Welcome to Mbeki’s banana republic.”
Thus reads the headline in the Sowetan this morning.

'We are rapidly joining the ranks of Nigeria, and Zimbabwe”. It
Continued.


It could as easily have read: “An inheritance ruined!”
They could have said.

The milk is spilled: the omelette awaits ruin;
For want of a light
The darkness will return...
For want of a light.

******************

No one will remember, that,
When it was being done:
The arrogant takeover; the
Cursory word of contempt,

As the newbies reached for the symbols
When the phrase was ‘who do you know?’
and also what do you know?
When the newly appointed toadies [who owed everything to their
Revolutionary masters
Held schtum when the outrageous was apparent.]
And the emperor’s non-existent rags began to wither on
A malformed leg. All now say
'We didn’t know...'
We experience attention deficit.

We didn’t know it was so important;
That there would not be a place where we could appropriate
the stock
and take it over
For our own delicious ends.

******************

And how dare the people demand!
We gave them everything they have
So they must now pay
With their aspirations and their leavened joy.

Spend wisely said the trustees
Who were impolitely ignored
There were guns and bombs and loot
to be adored.

And all the best horses and all the new men
Could not put light where no facility
Began.

***********************

The citizens who were enraged
Burned the trains
And are now caged
Into their neighbourhoods
Where there are no jobs and
fewer goods
and Work is scarce, and money more so.
The Kenyans use bullets and
We use space
The pain is the same
and there is little grace.
We can’t stop the game
‘Atlas has shrugged’ The world is shaken: are we teleported?

The “mirror cracked
From side to side’ and we saw
Ourselves
Distorted.

All that we did
All that we courted
dispersed so soon: revealing our all
too waning
moon

‘For want of a nail.’
The end. So soon?

NiK [08]

The Zumanian option

It seems the “new” ANC is faced with a quandary [For Offshore readers {O.R.}.].ANC: African National Congress: the governing party in the Republic of South Africa/ S.Azania:

The decision of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] to charge the newly elected anti-establishment, populist, ultra left supported President of the Party with a range of serious Financial offenses that could see him doing at least fifteen years, should he be convicted, is one that can seriously derail the worthy agenda of the ‘usurpers’ if they are not careful.

This agenda was vaguely spelled out last month in the five year re election process for the Party when the Ultra left leaning coalition of forces took over the Conference and saw to it that their entire faction swept the board. It is doubtful that the new ANC was as magnanimous in victory towards the so-called Mbeki faction as the latter was to the old vanquished pre-transformation tribes that held sway then.

Arguably the country lost some impetus last year with the ferocious struggle for power at the top. Countries are often able to comfortably survive bouts of serious neglect by those who play the power game at the top. They tend to ru7n on critical mass and we’ are doing well on critical mass. Of course once a decline in performance sets in then critical mass can slowly bury you. The country is entering a period of negative stagflation, which means that costs are rising and incomes are falling and we’re all getting slowly poorer even those people who are assuming they grow richer.

This means we don’t really have time to indulge ourselves with eight months of fighting before the trial. The idea that a trial of this magnitude should by scheduled for start only in the late part of the year effectively kills the year before it gets going. Those more radical than I are suggesting that this decision represents of form of economic sabotage.

Unrest is growing and the Kenya option demonstrates just how uncool things can become when the people feel they are being cheated… flagrantly and rudely and with disrespect. This strange bizarre notion that politicians “rule” in a democracy is a strange notion left over from our feudal past and we must resist its intrusion into our daily thought process lest it become a self-fulfilling meme.

In a democracy the people rule and last month that was brought home to us.

Secondly: This trial will run right into the next election and will pollute it one year before the world cup pressure piles on for all its worth. It would be illogical and not in the long term public interest to allow that to happen.

There fore there is only one logical answer to the problem.

Bring the election forward into April 2008.

How?

The ANC [or any other party in our constitutional system] appoints the members of parliament to their jobs to represent the party interest.

The party should with immediate effect recall those cadres delegated to Parliament, specifically those known supporters of the previous party president. They must then re appoint new loyalist members in sufficient quantity to outvote the entire parliamentary complement [ Meaning that for simplicity they should simply replace the entire existing parliamentary party cadre.]

They would then propose the motion of no confidence in the government [or respond favourably to the traditional opposition vote] bring down the government and hold a new election which they would comfortably win.

Jacob Zuma then becomes President of the country and the question of his guilt or not become more of a political decision than a legal one.

This option carries some downside risk. At issue is whether a quick downside risk is better than a slow drawn out downside risk, on which the emerging downside is bleak indeed.

A less dramatic alternative would be for JZ to stand down in the interest of the revolution and let the sideshow play in the shadows while they push their agenda. One benefit of this strategy [albeit not for Mr Zuma] would be to focus the attention of many nervous incumbents on optimising performance and we could se an outpouring of achievement between now and April 2009 by when the next general election must be held that could well sweep the party into power on a mandate greater than any seen before. There is nothing like the threat of losing a job to focus one’s attention on its performance… This was the famous Jack Welch formula at GE, the world’s largest corporation and it worked.

So the new incumbents face two options Keep JZ and go for an early election.

Or Dump JZ now he has spear pointed the ultra left into victory. In the long term hios obvious need for huge amounts of cash flow[ apparently he has at least four wives some contemporaneously some consecutive and some 18 children to support] means that he would easily be a target for the subversive capitalists who will happily bribe him into a comfortable moulded lifestyle that he may well find as difficult to resist as I would.

I understand that this seems a rude and ungrateful option and would personally NOT recommend it. I far prefer the first option as being soundly in our country’s best interest. Nonetheless is present it because these are the only two positive options for dealing with our current circumstance: all else will be prevarication and misery.

Alternatively of course the State could accellerate the trial date to circumvent this strategy... If they don't it could well be a case "you snooze you lose".

Cheers… Have a great double oh eight.