Hilary Clinton's Mugabefying orgasm and other things...

Greetings: My aging computer took a direct ‘loadshedding’ hit a few weeks ago and I’ve been offline for a month while repairs slowly took effect.. During this time I have caught up on outstanding tasks, performed the duties for which I am remunerated and pondered on various things that may or may not have anything to do with happiness.

Now I find myself puzzled by various things, and to cut a long blog short, they are: Hilary Clinton’s Mugabefying orgasm, inflation and the BBBEE contribution, the odd business of the vanishment of yet another in an endless string of coach decision failures, the sad business of Mr Bullard, the vanishment of money and one or two other odds n sods that maybe you can enlighten me on.

Did Barack Obama diss white males in Middle America for clinging to bibles and rifles? Did Mrs Clinton lie about her experiences “under sniper fire’ in Bosnia, or did she have a memory lapse. Each significant move is analysed and pored over with the deepest intent.

Seeing her full face on camera she looked to me for the entire world like a woman who just had the orgasm of a lifetime after winning Philadelphia: she worked for it and it was good and she was on a wild crest of joy . I got the sense of engorged fulfilment from her one-minute rant to the camera.

Was she therefore less than circumspect when she effectively demanded, that the super delegates give her the nomination at the convention later this year, notwithstanding that she is more than a hundred and fifty delegates behind in the popular vote.

I was immediately struck by the similarity in this demand to the behaviour of our wonderful national neighbour [if you live in SA]: Bob[the Roz] Mugabe, another person who is unwilling to face up to the ultimate power of the people… Expediency doth rule with Hilary it seems as it does with The Roz.

Like most people I am amazed and also puzzled by the almost unprecedented, Presidential “Vote-that-never-was”. A month after being voted out of power Bob is slowly convincing his peers that no election actually took place and that it is ok to have a re-run and is brutalising those who saw fit to vote him out. Is he slowly being jockeyed out of power? Are the generals preparing to grab power? Have they already grabbed power? Is Tsvangirai the best person to be a replacement president for the old madman? What if he does a deal with the generals to continue the terror where Mugabe left off? Possible? Not possible? Does anyone actually have any power? ‘Will he wont he will he wont he wont he join the dance??’

Considering how good Bob the Roz has been for Rumbabwe, and knowing too that he gave plenty of warning thirty years ago that he was going to wipe the place out, eventually, in pursuit of his racist revolution, should Americans be contemplating someone with such a naked lust for power. [Believing what I’d heard Mugabe say, I left the country with my dogs, my cats, my wife, my two children (at that time) and everything I could carry, in my ancient Volksie panel van, twelve days after Bob the Roz took office, and I am so glad I did; and worrying now that I have become too complacent and should already be out of here, SA.]. Would America be best served with a demonstratively duplicitous liar, who cannot even keep her naked ambition and overwhelming lust for power out of the camera’s eye, before she gets the nomination she so ardently covets? Could we later say, that after Philadelphia we caught on to the Mugabefication of Hilary Clinton.

Remember you read it here.

Talking of nominations I am puzzled at the non-existent process for coach selection in the soccer federation after the abrupt departure of the much-hyped Carlos Perreira, the National football team’s million and a half a month coach. Naturally with lying so fashionable: whether with the Clintons or the financial industry, where it is so endemic it has paralysed the entire system now since last August [see my blog Bureaucracy, August holidays: and the old Achilles heel.], I am sure none of us believe the “I missed my family” story put out with such plausible mien by scribes who obviously have nothing but contempt for ordinary people.

Given the well known fuss over the firing of the world cup winning rugby coach last year and the equally drawn-out palaver about choosing a previously disadvantaged person to be the new rugby coach why was there no equivalent process to find a suitable newly advantaged soccer coach, for what is a sport overwhelmingly run by and controlled by newly advantaged persons? Why is it that this sport is unable to structure a sequestered side that trains for the exclusive purpose of playing the opening game in the world cup, and leaves the club players out of the equation, since there is apparently so little glory in playing for their country, that field performances are reported to be universally abysmal: year after year.

Given that this is about the fifteenth coach who has come and gone over the past decade and a half isn’t it also time that the existing selection system was overhauled on the grounds that our soccer team performs poorly, has done for a long time now and shows no real sign of improvement, and that all these foreign coaches seem to share a common lack of any Midas touch. Why is there no demand from the State that a coach drawn from local structures be given the opportunity to star for a while.

I found this to be inconsistent and like Mrs Clinton’s grab for power curiously comment free.

Perhaps this is why all our country’s most fancied rugby teams languish at the bottom of the rugby super 14 leagues. Have the coaches decided that winning was a fast way to lose their jobs, better to lose. That way no one will want the job? Surely not?

Something else that is much more serious though than a football team, is our curious reluctance to ask whether the BBBEE fountain-of-wealth-creation scheme has any relevance to our inflation struggle. The routine list of tame economists who are paraded through our rainy days all chime to the same tune. Food inflation and petrol inflation imported from abroad are to blame for the unacceptably high inflation rate [now officially 11.8% and rising]. This imported inflation is exacerbated by the decline in our exchange rate, relative to our main trading partners, in the wake of the electricity fiasco.

The Financial Mail last week ran a leading article to follow its leading front-page screamer …


‘Has Tito Mboweni lost the plot?” shouted the cover. Inside a leader writer argued overwhelmingly in favour of the abandonment of the current interest rate policy struggle, on the grounds that all the inflation pressures are derived from imported food and imported petroleum products, which as we now know are on a stratospheric up curve: much of which has still to hit us. These are different times it argued and need a different solution: an argument reminiscent of the refrain earlier this decade that the new “tech” economies were more important than the old pre-tech economies, which proved unfounded.

Collectively these inflationary pressures can be likened to the leak in the Dutch style anti-flooding Dykes, popularised by the tale of the little boy who stuck his finger into a leak, and saved his country. Mr Mboweni is the official leak preventer whose fingers are now fist deep in holding back a firestorm of rampaging inflation… which, for the unitiated, reduces the value of a country’s assets inexorably. However to assume that the inflation is all imported, as the commentator in FM does, in common it must be admitted with the entire town’s most respected economists, is surely disingenuous or maybe naïve.

What the article writer does not mention, perhaps because he is a beneficiary and thus unable to see error, is that there is a gusher, pouring money through the low end of the dyke… just out of reach of Mr Mboweni’s left foot. This gusher is called “empowerment” and while empowerment can only be good for the country over the long term, is it not possible, that during this phase of the process, the level of productive output is not keeping pace with the value being unlocked, through the process?

Every day brings a new story of a new group of empowerment beneficiaries, an ongoing stream of “deals” that are, to the routine business page reader, now our daily grist. There are times when one wonders whether any of the fast flowing corporates that populate our pages have invented a new technology, or developed a new product for a newly discovered niche, it is just this that or the other company “doing a deal”. There have been times recently when it seemed to be the only business being reported. This gusher is only now ebbing: slowed marginally by Mr Mboweni’s strategy.

If Mr Mboweni were to take the advice of the leader writer for the Financial Mail then that would be equivalent to taking his fist out of its present plugging space in the Dyke, to reach the other outflow, wouldn’t it? Then is it not likely that the entire wall may breach across, putting us into triple digit inflation within eighteen months?

Over the past couple of months I have listened to a spate of knowledgeable economists whose opinions I generally respect. But like the Financial Mail not one of these economists seems to have factored into their public ruminations, the inflationary consequences of what must be the biggest asset stripping exercise in the country’s history, short of outright nationalisation. Is it not possible that a less than desirable productivity explosion is taking place, to match and enhance the value being unlocked in this redistribution, redress and equity exercise called BEE?

Obviously we don’t like to publicly refer to the so-called “empowerment’ exercise, heralded by the passage of the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, some years ago, as an asset stripping exercise: but it is nonetheless.

If we are going to take our lack of acknowledgement so seriously, that we recommend doing a Bernanke and changing our interest rate policy, regardless of the well gushing out of reach, then surely we will soon be as bankrupt as Zimbabwe?

The “problem” with BEE [and I fully appreciate and support the moral imperative that drove the decision to go the BEE route] is that these subtle ‘free perks’ have now become viewed as a market “value proposition”. The outcome is a stream of increased money supply that is beyond the Reserve Bank governor’s mandate to control. Add to this conundrum an apparent accelerated decline in productivity now made worse by the loadshedding regime, to which we are now subject; and which has not yet begun to be factored into the annual performance equation.

Inflation rate measurements are something like the Richter scale for earthquakes. Our main trading partners are whinging about a scale of 2 to 3 % inflation rates, and we are shaking at scale of nearly 12. That is like comparing your average suicide bomber with Hiroshima.

I would suggest that the unmentionable BEE is giving us a value squeezing headache, and that, notwithstanding his tactful silence on the matter, he knows full well how much it influences the rate, and is not locked into denial like some other public figure we could mention. So I for one, say Viva Tito…


Talking about people not seeming to understand the outcomes of the policy choices we, or even they, have made in the country… I heard a group of education wonks nattering about a so called ‘impending teacher’s crisis’ in the country on one of the new look after eight debates on SAFM last week. Apparently, the decision by a previous education minister to close all the teacher’s colleges a decade or so ago is now being questioned. It was regrettable that the only people on the panel were all those with a desperate need to justify the new existing status quo: which requires that the only “good” teacher in the new system is one who has undergone an academic training at a university.

For the unitiated the old, now despised, teacher’s colleges took anyone who couldn’t get a job doing anything else, and had no university prospects either; and whacked them through a practical three or four year course of study, usually at the State’s expense, and then shoved them, into random classrooms where the kids would learn things as a result of their activities.


Now in the new revised selection criteria plan [which is far more evolved than that for the much better paying national football coaches job] only those competent enough to qualify for university can train as teachers.

This means, apparently, that the mathematics of selection have turned sharply, against the teacher’s trade. Notwithstanding this the well-known head of education at Wits U spoke of the need to educate the educator in a professional manner, meaning a full academic programme at a university. This by the way is the same person who said publically on SAFM earlier this year that a non-university level of matric qualification, was not worth the paper it was printed on. So we know that she regards the practical trained post-matriculants as little better than morons? Perhaps. Now her position is an understandable one since presumably she acts to protect her status, which is much higher than that of the old rectors, of the old teacher’s colleges, who were simply civil servants.

Again what was not explored, was the fact that only around ten percent of matriculants qualify for university education, and there is a fair amount of competition for the best of these, who can expect to spend fruitful lives in high paying occupations. Teaching, by whatever name it is now called, is not one of those. In fact it is almost at the bottom of the league table and has always been so.

Rumour has it that the wheel has gone full circle. Presently about two thirds of the present teaching corps are reluctantly in the business because when they trained there were no options open to aspirant, previously disadvantaged persons, other than teaching. Now, in fact a black graduate in anything remotely useful like mathematics or mechanical engineering can, apparently, name his/her price, never mind the odd sob story to the contrary.

Why would anyone from the newly advantaged community want to choose what is arguably the worst paying, hardest job known to graduate humanity. Newly advantaged means just that… a world of possibilities. Now disproportionately new applicants are so called ‘white’ kids who are denied other opportunities in the new affirmatively empowered SA.

According to one of the speakers [on the radio debate] there are no black female applicants willing to work as teachers in the foundation phase for what was once called Primary school.

Like Duh! Thanks to the employment equity act and a measure of personal competence, a [so-called] black female graduate can write her own paycheck: … Why would she want to take on society’s most despised job: a world of one absolute certainty… long-term poverty.

Then when it was obvious to the speakers on the after eight debate that the gap in applicants was insoluble, the ever-vacuous Mr Hindle announced that imported teachers from foreign places would fill the gap. He was oblivious apparently, of the equally routinely debated situation, in which he frequently participates, that after ten years of intensive practice hardly any teacher in the existing corps fully understands how the new system works: the retraining has been so mismatched. So how are new teachers from foreign lands, where teachers are perhaps still teachers and not disguised bureaucrats, going to effectively plug our skills gap in this crucial area of development? This was not asked… maybe there is no answer.

As for Mr Bullard, I suspect he got what he wanted. I do wonder though whether he ever had any effective counselling, after being shot last year: for his writing became steadily more and more angry over these past months, and began to resemble many of the worst performing rantish blogs that one encounters in Blogospheria, the place where those who are still free of commercial ties still roam unnoticed. There were even occasions when I had to check the by-line to be sure I wasn’t actually reading a piece by Stephen Mulholland.

I do think though that he has a strong case for unfair dismissal on grounds that may even be seen as Constructive.

Ho hum… I shall conclude by referring back to the diminishing value of trust and the vanishment of money. It may be that the combined effects of mainstream media protecting vested interests, and official persons protecting sacred cows, conspires to fool most of the people most of the time, but markets never sleep and just as a school of fish seems to act as one, shifting direction almost in synchronised harmony; so too do markets rule. Another way to describe the phrase “Credit Crunch” which is paralysing the world of finance and thus starving the real economies of the world of money as well as food is to say that not only is the world apparently running out of food and oil, but, it has run out of money.

Is it then possible that the planet’s current plague of dishonesty, duplicity and overwhelming lack of ethics have conspired to pitch us into a dark place? Suddenly the phrase: “ trust no one” has become a universal watchword and we hover waiting for the next round.

Have fun and happy bloggin’

NiK is the Blogospherian


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