tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62413583403977775492024-03-13T23:19:16.950+02:00Tony Leon BlogUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger205125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-64140370635884949172015-02-24T23:01:00.000+02:002015-03-03T23:06:17.846+02:00Mbeki got away with skipping question time and ministers routinely evaded censure<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">24
Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original
Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">YOU
couldn‘t make it up. Peering at the world through chic European spectacles,
shod in Italian shoes, chauffeured in a German car and the beneficiary of
R25-million from a US-listed mining house, National Assembly Speaker Baleka
Mbete assailed Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema — and for even
worse than being a “cockroach”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">According
to a report of her speech in North West last weekend, Mbete — the person
mandated by the constitution to ensure his parliamentary rights — said proud
anti-imperialist Malema was actually “working with some Western countries in
their quest to take over South Africa”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Malema,
who sports an überexpensive Swiss Breitling watch and is hoofed in Gucci
loafers, repaid this rhetoric in similarly debased currency in parliament on
Tuesday. He accused President Jacob Zuma of referring a bill back to parliament
because of pressure from Western companies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mbete‘s
subsequent and welcome apology for her attack on Malema simply underpins the
incompatibility of being, simultaneously, a top gun in the ANC leadership and
the presumed protector of members‘ interests, including those in the
opposition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6B0qsQ4u86I/VPYhmJpVjpI/AAAAAAAAArw/oC8DPRpzpt4/s1600/Mbeki.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6B0qsQ4u86I/VPYhmJpVjpI/AAAAAAAAArw/oC8DPRpzpt4/s1600/Mbeki.png" height="166" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thabo Mbeki</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
in the midst of this inflammation of hypocrisy and rhetoric, spare a thought
for the institution that these two polarising figures — and one-time allies —
represent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Before
interrogating their roles in debasing parliament, we should in fact thank
Malema and Mbete for highlighting two fundamental trends.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Malema,
more than any individual in the past dozen or more years, has reinvented
parliament as the centre of the national discourse and attention. Mbete, in
turn, has made blatant that which, before last Thursday‘s night of national
shame, was done through back-door manoeuvring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Certain
signposts on parliament‘s downward road are illuminating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">First,
under Thabo Mbeki the national legislature became, as I once described it, a
“forum for non-debates and non-accountability”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mbeki
got away with skipping question time and ministers routinely evaded censure for
not answering questions because the executive amassed power outside of
parliament and the opposition regarded itself as bound by the rules of the
institution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Respect
for the office of the president was then absolute, and even I, the leader of
the opposition to his administration, would stand up before and after Mbeki‘s
speeches. He was the fortunate beneficiary of the mantle of his sainted
predecessor, Nelson Mandela.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Also,
despite his prickly personality, evasion of accountability, inflicting ruinous
HIV/Aids policies on his people and green-lighting stolen elections in
Zimbabwe, there was no stain on his personal conduct in matters of state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mbeki
also helped to create, and presided over, a growing economy. Critical elements
of civil society, from the press to the business community, therefore simply
averted their gaze from the predations under way in parliament.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
it was during these post-Mandela years that parliament‘s rot began. Perhaps the
greatest white-anting of the institution was hobbling parliament‘s quest to
investigate the arms deal. In late 2001, the executive rewrote the damaging
conclusions of the joint investigative task team into the affair, in the hand
of the president‘s parliamentary enforcer, Essop Pahad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
lessened its damning conclusions and protected the cabinet. But it damaged
parliament. The infamous arms deal — the hard case that settled into bad
parliamentary and political precedent — first detonated most of the
institutional damage made plain in more recent times.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
first person who was convicted of corruption in this saga was Schabir Shaik,
whose acts of corruption deeply implicated Mbeki‘s successor, Zuma. Zuma‘s
escape from the coils of his own corruption charges, which haunt his
presidency, hobbled parliament long before he assumed the highest office.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
2001 strong-arming of parliamentary processes to protect the executive
occurred, ironically, under the speakership of Dr Frene Ginwala. She otherwise
provided a form of independence from the encroachment of the ruling party on
the rights of opposition members and had, in the main, some regard for the
rights and privileges of the institution over which she presided.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
even her impartiality and independence — rickety though they proved at that
defining moment — were too much for the rampant presidency. After Mbeki‘s
emphatic re-election in 2004, she was fired as speaker. Her replacement was
Mbete, in her first of two terms as speaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">By
this time, the ANC no longer countenanced robust contestation by the opposition
or even the occasional free-wheeling of its own members. During the Mandela
era, frontline cabinet minister Joe Slovo had been able to question the
necessity of the arms acquisition, and free-spirited ANC backbencher and singer
Jennifer Ferguson could abstain on the abortion vote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now
Mbete was joined in a quest for total control by the deeply militaristic Tony
Yengeni, who was installed as the ANC‘s chief whip.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
this combination lay further seeds of decay. Question time was curtailed,
follow-ups were limited and the speaker was accorded the right to “vet”
questions to the president.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
speaker then defiled her office in 2006 by being at the front of the queue to
wave Yengeni off to jail. He was the second political figure to be named, then
convicted and imprisoned, for accepting an arms deal bribe. But the real stain
on Mbete‘s office was that Yengeni had in fact been convicted of defrauding
parliament, the very institution the speaker was entrusted to protect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
next milepost on this slippery slope was “Travelgate”. In 2007, five years
after the whistle was blown (and the whistle-blower victimised) 32 MPs received
criminal convictions and sentences for cheating parliament, but the speaker
allowed them to hold on to their parliamentary seats. The institution was now
truly discredited.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Little
surprise, then, that in 2007, when I vacated my parliamentary and political
leadership, my successor, Helen Zille, declined to lead the main opposition
party from parliament, choosing to do so from the City of Cape Town and later
from the provincial legislature. Her decision both underlined and assisted the
sidelining of the national legislature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Enter
Malema and the EFF, stage left, after last year‘s elections. Alongside 399
other MPs, Malema swore to uphold the rules embedded in the functioning of the
legislature — but had, from day one, no intention of being bound by them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">No
longer dealing with a rule-bound opposition force, the ANC realised that the
old approach of back-door manoeuvring and the emollient and inclusive approach
of Mbete‘s successor as speaker, Max Sisulu, would not suffice. Time to recall
Mbete, now also ANC chairwoman, to fly the party flag and enforce its diktat
from the speaker‘s throne.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Then
the Nkandla bomb exploded. It was the gift that kept on giving to what was now,
on this issue at least, a united opposition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">From
his minor perch of just over 20 seats, Malema, aided by a report of the public
protector, seized the moment. With just four words — “pay back the money” — he
branded Zuma as an unaccountable and self-enriching politician. Untroubled by
the mayhem he unleashed, Malema had captured the national spotlight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Last
Thursday night, before the state of the nation chaos unfolded before a now
enthralled, possibly horrified, nation, an opposition MP asked a cabinet minister
what he expected to happen. This was in the light of Malema‘s threat to demand
the missing answers to the question he had attempted to ask of an unresponsive
and, later, absent president.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Whatever
else, the speech will go ahead,” was the reply given.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">And
so it did. But in the process the naked use of force, the illegal jamming of
cellphone signals and the sight of a president suffering an acute form of
political autism were made plain. The security state made its unattractive
reappearance 25 years after the enforced departure of securocrat-in-chief PW
Botha.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
this time the pushback was different, more diverse and much stronger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">No
longer could the executive trample constitutional rights underfoot. Two court
applications immediately ensued and are ongoing. The press gallery, in an
unprecedented display of revulsion, rose in protest. The leader of the official
opposition, Mmusi Maimane, found his true voice, perhaps for the first time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">His “a broken man presiding over a broken
society” mantra was aimed at Zuma. But it probably resonates way beyond the
opposition constituency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
speaker remains in office but, even post-apology, is bereft of authority and
legitimacy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
a constitutional democracy, might does not equate with right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Authority
has to be coupled with principled persuasion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
the debate this week, it seemed that all parties had pulled back from the
brink. The presiding officers were at pains to make even-handed rulings, and
Malema read out a speech of thudding dullness, but left his wrecking ball at
home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">And,
for the first time in many years, both the nation and the state were entirely
focused on parliament. In the wreckage of recent events lie, hopefully, the
seeds of renewal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">*
Leon was a member of parliament from 1989 to 2009 and leader of the official
opposition from 1999 to 2007 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
article first appeared in the Sunday Times<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-63910133466500559302015-02-19T22:36:00.000+02:002015-03-03T23:16:56.161+02:00Zuma should take this oath: 'Above all, do no harm'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Amid
the chaos of last week's state of the address, President Zuma rehashed old
ideas that will do more harm than good to SA<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">19 Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rand Daily Mail</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Look
beyond, if you can, the violent distractions on display in Parliament last
week. Ignore even the curious head-dress borrowed, it seems, from Hiawatha's
cupboard, of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Even the laugh, or rictus, of our
president will fade over time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Drill
down into the content of President Jacob Zuma's speech and you get a glimpse of
the future, even though much of its language and imagery came from the past.
There are parts of it which create much foreboding and which should cause as
much concern about our economic prospects going forward as the din and clamour
inside and outside Parliament last Thursday suggested about the failing health
of our democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Speaker
Baleka Mbete should know that "cockroaches" are well-nigh
indestructible, having been recorded as even surviving nuclear fallout. Zuma
must equally know that even when regents thought they had divine gifts, King
Canute could not turn back the tide. In modern economies in the tough,
take-no-prisoners world in which we operate, and where real jobs are created
and currencies pummelled, there is no room for wishful thinking or untested or,
worse, disproved policies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yet
buried in the text and the laundry list of measures outlined by Zuma last week
we had plenty of what Gabriel García Márquez called "magical realism"
on display.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strangely,
Zuma got bashed by the estimable Financial Mail when, in his charm offensive in
Pretoria with journalists days before his speech, he was heard to complain that
"technology was costing jobs". Never mind the fact that this is part
of the parcel of blaming external conditions for the local state of our
affairs; there is a profound truth in what Zuma articulated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">We
live today in an "Uber on-demand economy". Harvard’s Prof Yochai
Benkler described the changing world of work as follows: "They are the
people formerly known as employees. In a broad range of service industries, workers
who once drew a steady salary are cutting out the employer and plying their
services direct to people who used to pay companies, rather than people, to
meet their needs."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Or
to use a well-cited example: a few years ago when Facebook (which did not exist
a decade ago) bought photo-sharing site Instagram, it paid a whopping
$1-billion for a company that employed only 13 people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
the same year, Kodak, which at its height employed 145 000 people, went
bankrupt. As The Economist notes, "the new economy is remarkably light on
workers".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">That's
the scary world we live in and to which South Africa, a small economy,
dependent on and buffeted by these forces, needs to accommodate itself, and not
imagine Canute-like that it can reverse these tides.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
there was no following echo, or even recognition of this reality in the state
of the nation speech. Indeed, the very script which Zuma and the South African
delegation read with some apparent success to the World Economic Forum seems to
have been discarded. In the Swiss Alps we proclaimed to investors that
"South Africa was open for business", and cited the
investor-certainty in the National Development Plan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Back
home, in the Sona speech, we seem to have slammed the door shut and reheated
yesterday's announcement with the day-before-yesterday's ideas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">At
the Mining Indaba, leading foreign investors indicated that mining companies
were "sitting on their wallets" when it came to investing in our
bedrock industry. Mineral Resources Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi confessed that
he had been ambushed by ministerial colleagues into reneging on a closely
fought agreement with the local Chamber of Mines on the vexed issue of
"gate prices" for local strategic minerals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Instead,
we are to enter the brave and state-imposed world of "development
pricing". In effect it is an asset-grab, which even roused the normally
shy Chamber of Mines to declare this will "break the back of the South
African mining industry".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Zuma
said not a word on this controversy. He spoke of mining as the "backbone
of the economy" but simply ignored the fire lit by his own government to
immolate it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
he did offer further legislation to "promote worker rights" and to
"regulate" the practices of "private employment agencies".
All this is intended to "prevent the abuse of unsuspecting
workseekers".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">It
will simply further remove our country from the reality of the world we are in,
rather than the socialist utopia the ANC dreams to inhabit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
speech also gave a half-nod against the madness of the tourist visa regime
which threatens to choke the one growth industry which could supplant ageing
and uncompetitive mining as a job-creator and nation-saver. It will be recalled
that the new visa regulations were announced last year without a single study
or pilot project.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now
Zuma tells us "we will prioritise a review" of them. I suppose
putting the cart after the horse is better than disposing of the animal
completely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
just before this announcement, he proclaimed — without any evidence to motivate
— that the government would ban foreign land ownership entirely and limit farm
owners to 12 000ha. Why not 5 000 or 50 000 is not explained; nor is the likely
benefit even alluded to at all. I can think of multiple harm in terms of
crushing foreign investment and promoting food insecurity; these too are left
unaddressed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Presidents
today, no less than divine-right kings of old can, despite their pomp, powers
and privileges, in truth not do much to change the economic forces of life.
But, as every good doctor knows, they should be bound by the equivalent of the
Hippocratic Oath: "Above all, do no harm."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
article was first published by The Times<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Follow Tony Leon
on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><i><span style="color: blue;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></i></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-25408701119907934742015-02-16T22:24:00.000+02:002015-03-03T22:25:05.826+02:00Not our darkest moment but an ominous forewarning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">16 Feb 2015
| Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication: </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Business Day<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Julius Malema has chosen to participate in
Parliament, yet regards himself unbound by its rules and precedents, writes
Tony Leon<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">THURSDAY night’s debacle in Parliament reminded me of a spectacularly
bad football match. Instead of focusing on the man with the ball, the
spectators’ attention pivots to the activities away from the centrepiece — the
offside players, the deliberate fouls, the baying crowd and the biased referee.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Indeed, even before play commenced for the state of the nation address,
the police water-cannoning of opposition supporters outside Parliament and
arrest of an opposition MP salted the clues for what was to follow. Never mind
the fist in the velvet glove, the country and the world would soon see just the
unfurled fist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Stripped of subtlety, South African Communist Party boss and Higher
Education Minister Blade Nzimande announced after the melee of storming
policemen and injured MPs, his fist apparently hitting his palm: "We had
to show them who is in charge." And so you did, Blade, so you did.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ctSLk4jSyc/VPYYN6qN2PI/AAAAAAAAArU/d8r_FSU6w_g/s1600/Julius%2BMalema%2B%2BJanuary%2B21%2B2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ctSLk4jSyc/VPYYN6qN2PI/AAAAAAAAArU/d8r_FSU6w_g/s1600/Julius%2BMalema%2B%2BJanuary%2B21%2B2015.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema. Picture: PETER MOGAKI </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Indeed, the government’s enchantment, or the enthusiastic security
cohort within it, for all things Chinese was also on display. "The great
firewall of China" — historian Niall Ferguson’s slogan for the communist
government’s blocking of unwanted social media — also descended briefly on
Parliament.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Persons unknown — but one can hazard a guess — jammed cellphone signals
out of the National Assembly. In one of the few clear goals scored by the
opposition on Thursday night, and not on offer in China, Democratic Alliance
chief whip John Steenhuizen invoked the constitution to persuade the speaker to
restore it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">A decade or so ago, the opposition which I then led and the government
of Zuma’s predecessor actually had a debate of sorts, without assistance from
the police. I used the reversible raincoat rhetoric which seemed apt for such
sonorous events as the state of the nation debate. "There’s nothing wrong
with the nation," I declaimed. "It’s the state that’s the
problem." Both before, and especially after, last Thursday both seem to be
in crisis. But how deep is the crisis and what does it tell us, to borrow Will
Hutton’s title of a book of his, "the state that we’re in"?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The day after the address I received a call from former newspaper editor
Tim du Plessis, a thoughtful veteran of our tumultuous past 30 years of
history-in-the-making. After agreeing that the last rites being read by some
for our fledgling democracy were a mite premature, he reminded me of a brutal
page from our recent past. It was in that most fateful of years, 1993, between
the assassination of Chris Hani in April and the finalisation of the interim
constitution in November. One June morning at the World Trade Centre in Kempton
Park, the buffoonish but sinister Eugene Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) right-wing forces invaded the talks venue with an
armoured car and men on horseback. The latter-day burghers succeeded in
smashing part of the glazed façade of the conference centre, and, for a while,
took charge as delegates scurried to safety.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Du Plessis noted that, on that afternoon, everything seemed far more at
risk than it did after last Thursday night. I then remembered that my late
predecessor, Zach de Beer, told our delegates’ group that he doubted
"whether even the Archangel Gabriel, were he to descend among us, could
reason and restore peace between the government and its right-wing foes".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In far more earthly and recent form than the archangel, the country
noted the failure of Pastor Ray McCauley to repair relations between the
African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose
tactics bear more than a passing resemblance to the fascists of the AWB.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Of course, history now records that, as with other right-wing ruses of
that time, the sound and fury and the real fear invoked by them did little to
retard the momentum of the process they tried in vain to stop.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But there are other big differences between then and now, which offer a
less reassuring prospect for the future. First, there is the biggest disrupter
of all, Julius Malema and his EFF. Business thought leader Clayton Christensen
of Harvard Business School has written an entire book, The Innovator’s Dilemma,
on the power of disruption. Or, how bad and cheap products can usurp
long-settled brands and market leaders. One example he cites is how in the
1950s, the cheap and tinny and initially bad-quality Japanese transistor radio
in short time overwhelmed the established radiograms of my grandmother’s era,
which would soon disappear entirely from the shelves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In some ways, the EFF is a classic disrupter. But unlike the AWB, Malema
has chosen to participate in Parliament, yet appears to regard himself unbound
by its rules, conventions and precedents. Strip away, for a moment, Zuma’s
ducking and diving on the Nkandla questions and the shield offered to him by
speaker Baleka Mbete and the way she puts the opposition to the sword. How
should Malema’s disruptions be dealt with in a parliamentary democracy, where
the rules of robust engagement are not a licence to pillage parliamentary
privilege and bring down the House?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Presumably, and perhaps fatefully, the speaker and her party colleagues
decided to confuse means and ends. Parliament and the people who elect it are
indeed entitled to demand proper debate and not the one-trick-pony antics of
serial disrupters. But when armed heavies, signal jamming and the full
apparatus of the PW Botha iron fist are unleashed, then it may be said that
they "destroy better than they know".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Or perhaps they — the current rulers — know only too well and simply do
not care, which brings us to the second fork in the road set out at Kempton
Park in 1993. Although the parliamentary building, even the Tuynhuys
presidential office next door, were designed to the architectural
specifications of PW Botha, the democratic furniture of our new order was cut
from new and radically different cloth. We were meant, among other things, to
replace the culture of authority with that of persuasion; democracy in place of
brute force. Yet what was unveiled on Thursday night was far too reminiscent of
the old era and seemed to bury the new.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But one group of people who have powers in the new era they never
possessed in the old is the judiciary. Conspicuously, as armed police entered
the chamber, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng exited it. One of the judges
president present was also reported as shouting at a policeman: "If you’re
armed you had better get out of here." The chastened policeman duly left.
In such small events we can derive some comfort.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Perhaps even more extraordinary was the very public demand of Malema
that he be treated as a liberal. He demanded of the speaker that she judge his
MPs and their behaviour as "individuals and not as a collective".
Hugo Chavez, his late inspiration, must be spinning in his grave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Finally, what of the player at the centre of it all? When Zuma finally
rose to speak, he faced an open goal, after so many on his side had netted own
goals. Doctors are confronted with a trick question during training: "What
treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?" The correct answer is,
"words of comfort".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Zuma’s nation had watched the spectacle before he spoke, dismayed and
appalled. He would have scored big had he even alluded to it and, as the man at
the apex of our now damaged democracy, offered words of comfort, reassurance
and repaired the breach. But he laughed and said not a word about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-26674423106465058542015-02-04T13:40:00.001+02:002015-02-04T13:40:22.267+02:00Why F W de Klerk should be honoured<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">What might have happened had PW Botha
not succumbed to a stroke and handed power to his successor?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #333333;">4
Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily
Mail</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-flZBTvJ7dFs/VNIFFPtl72I/AAAAAAAAAqA/3mLFeENHxOI/s1600/Tony%2B-%2BRDM%2BPicture.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-flZBTvJ7dFs/VNIFFPtl72I/AAAAAAAAAqA/3mLFeENHxOI/s1600/Tony%2B-%2BRDM%2BPicture.png" /></a><span style="color: #444444;">CHAOS,
in local politics anyway, apparently spirals downward. Channelling their
"inner EFF", ANC Cape Town city councillors last week decided to
mimic their national foes by imitating the disruptive tactics of Julius
Malema's opposition fighters and applying them in one of the few places where
the party finds itself in opposition.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">DA
mayor Patricia de Lille, with a leaf from the book of parliamentary Speaker
Baleka Mbete, obliged them by calling in the police to lock them out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">The
clichés "when the shoe is on the other foot" and "imitation is
the sincerest form of flattery" hardly seem to do justice to this latest
act in the theatre of the absurd, which seems to substitute for real debate in
our national melodrama.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">One
of the items on the council agenda that inspired the EEF-like tactics of the
local ANC was the decision to rename a portion of Table Bay Boulevard in honour
of former president FW de Klerk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Strangely
enough, for a party that believes the majority is always right, it opposed a
decision that obtained more than 75% public support and had been endorsed by
local luminaries such as Desmond Tutu.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Elsewhere
in South Africa, street renaming has some ANC provenance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Since
Table Bay Boulevard is a motorway rather than a residential road, it should
also be less inconvenient than matters doubtless were for, let us say,
residents of Cowey Road in Durban.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">They
woke up one day a few years ago in the city of my birth to discover, courtesy
of the local ANC council, that they now resided in "Problem Mkhize Road''.
Mkhize was a big figure in the local MK structures but not perhaps a person of
world renown. And, just maybe, reselling your home in a street beginning with
the name "Problem'' might be, well, problematic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">No
matter. The objection to De Klerk was not that he did not make history, with
his epoch-changing speech in Parliament 25 years ago this week but that, for
the national majority, or at least their leaders, he was on the wrong side of
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Of
course, for the majority of residents in Cape Town, De Klerk was their
political leader of choice in the two elections he contested at the helm of his
party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">In
the first democratic poll in 1994 and the local government election which
followed it in 1996, they voted in large numbers for him. So if street names,
in part, should reflect the preferences of local residents, this small matter
should be both uncontroversial and democratically appropriate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">But
the big controversy around this was captured by ANC council leader Tony
Ehrenreich, who also moonlights as Cosatu's Western Cape secretary, or perhaps
the other way around. He said De Klerk was "an architect of apartheid and
responsible for implementing a system that brutally oppressed the
majority".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Actually,
it would be more accurate to say that De Klerk's party and even his family (his
uncle was the hard-line prime minister JG Strijdom) were the architects. But I
quibble. The crux of the Ehrenreich objection appears in the next line:
"[De Klerk] was an accident of history who just happened to be the leader
of the National Party and was forced to negotiate with the ANC."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">As
British journalist Andrew Rawnsley wrote in another context: "That's
post-hoc analysis from Professor Harry Hindsight at the Faculty of Wise After
the Fact."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">While
South Africa seems to have many graduates from Professor Hindsight's faculty
these days, it is perhaps worth reframing the question and the day on which De
Klerk turned his back on 350 years of history and started a process that would
see him ejected from supreme power in just four years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Of
all the "what if?" questions, let us entertain the Ehrenreich theory
at its root.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">What
might have been or might not have happened had PW Botha not succumbed to a
severe stroke the year before and reluctantly handed the reins of power to his
successor, or had them forced from his hand to be perfectly accurate?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Strangely
enough, one person far more significant than the latter-day re-writers of
history who believed it made little difference was none other than the mighty
Nelson Mandela. He once told me, to my surprise, that he "far preferred
dealing with Botha than with De Klerk".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Last
week, I discovered I was hardly alone in being startled by this observation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Former
British Ambassador to South Africa Robin Renwick has produced his own account
of the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy entitled <em>Mission to
South Africa — Diary of a Revolution</em>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">In
some ways the book is a mixed bag. The prose is lumpy and it doesn't drop names
so much as carpet-bomb the reader with them. It also covers a lot of already
very well-trodden turf.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">But
Renwick was certainly a star in the diplomatic firmament and, as a top-ranking
ambassador, a very accurate recorder of intimate encounters with the good and
the great.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">He
recounts, after his retirement from his post here and Mandela's election as
president, that he went to visit the icon in Pretoria to discuss the trashing
of De Klerk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">He
writes: "Whatever [Mandela's and De Klerk's] disagreements, I reminded him
he should please bear in mind that, but for De Klerk, he would not have been
elected president and might still be in jail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">"Mandela
characteristically informed his assistant that the 'ambassador is right'
(though I had ceased to be one), adding that De Klerk had richly deserved his
Nobel Peace Prize, 'for he had made peace possible'."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<span style="color: #444444;">Case
closed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-20632114488690566672015-02-04T11:14:00.001+02:002015-02-04T11:14:19.818+02:00What Mandela and Mbeki can teach Zuma<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Can the president use the tricks of his predecessors
to tame opposition?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">2 Feb 2015 | Mpumelelo Mkhabela | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rand Daily Mail<u1:p></u1:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<u2:p></u2:p>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
It is abundantly clear that
President Jacob Zuma faces a tough time in parliament for the remainder of his
term in office.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Opposition parties, especially
the red irritants, as some governing party MPs disparagingly describe the EFF,
are there to make sure he giggles as little as possible.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
It is not clear though what
Zuma’s strategy will be in response to the increasingly sharper arguments,
finger-wagging and general rowdiness directed at him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Zuma’s predecessors had their
own strategies and personalities to contain a vocal opposition. Nelson Mandela
used his aura, or what the political scientist John Kane calls “moral capital”
to command respect across political parties.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Tony Leon, the ambitious leader
of a tiny Democratic Party at the time, had the unpopular task of challenging
Mandela on a range of policy matters. But whatever the challenge from opposition
benches, Mandela had one important defence that no politician could master ...
just being Mandela.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
So respectful of him, MPs
volunteered to reduce the number of question time sessions on account of his
frailty.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
The manner in which parliament
interacted with him also gave the institution a huge quantum of what
businessman Reuel Khoza calls the “moral quotient”.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
However, even with the high
moral ground on which he walked, Mandela could still feel the blows coming from
the likes of Leon.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
To counter this he employed
appeasement and wooing tactics.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
He offered Leon a cabinet post
on the basis that opposition views would best be articulated within government
where they stood a chance of being translated to policy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Although the offer was packaged
as a typical Mandela reconciliation move, it was carefully designed to weaken
the opposition.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
The IFP, the largest black
opposition at the time and which had its leader enjoying the perks in
government, would later learn the difficulty of singing with two voices.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Mandela’s strategy was an
attempt to rid the opposition of its sharp teeth. Leon rejected the offer and
went on to gain more votes for his party using all manner of divisive campaign
tricks in subsequent elections.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
But Mandela however succeeded in
crafting a culture of mutual respect between the executive and opposition
during the early years of democratic state building. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Enter Thabo Mbeki. Except for
those he co-opted into his cabinet Mbeki had a generally frosty relationship
with the opposition, made worse by his views on HIV-Aids and his policy on
Zimbabwe.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
But it was hardly personal. Only
once was an opposition member sanctioned for violating Mbeki’s privacy after
Douglas Gibson visited Mbeki’s retirement home and questioned how it was
funded.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Mbeki’s agenda rhetorically and
in practice was to fast-track state institution building and transformation
initiated under Mandela. He was attacked mainly for his policy choices and
decisions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
He had a defence different from
Mandela’s. His main strategy was to intellectually bludgeon the opposition.
They would complain that he was very cold. They missed Mandela’s warmth. But
they couldn’t take away Mbeki’s bravery and his intellect.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Quite often he would turn the
sharper edge of the knife against Leon and the rest of the highly critical
opposition MPs. If Mandela’s strength was his moral standing, Mbeki’s was his
intellectual and scholarly approach.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Who will forget the exchange
between Leon and Mbeki on the global economy? In one of the last sessions
before his infamous recall, it was Mbeki who came to Speaker Baleka Mbete’s
defence and not the other way around when Leon demanded answers from the
president during a question session.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Leon had asked a question about
the development round of trade negotiations and the implications for South
Africa. It was a very technical question and Mbete felt the president would
need more time to prepare to answer.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
After a brief exchange between
Mbete and Leon, Mbeki eventually offered to “try to answer” the question. The
“try” turned out to be a long lecture on the global political economy for which
he got a standing ovation. It must have been a humbling moment for Leon, who
must have felt he had cornered the president.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Also in Mbeki’s arsenal of
defence were MPs who ate of out of his palm. It is no secret that during
Mbeki’s tenure Exclusive Books had more clients from among the parliamentary
benches of the governing party.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<o:p> </o:p>Despite the unbearable
sycophancy Mbeki’s presidency bred — the mimicking and empty questions from ANC
benches — parliament was largely in sound standing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
It was demeaning of ANC MPs to
ask: “Honourable president can you reiterate what you said...” Or some question
like that. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Zuma is neither Mandela nor
Mbeki. His elevation was fractious from the start when opposition MPs tried to
block his election.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
He was the first to draw on his
party’s strength to defend him against a motion of no confidence and when he
had to deal with the Nkandla scandal.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
He was the first to be heckled by
junior opposition MPs. How he plans to deals with these is ongoing highly
personalised, though not entirely devoid of principle, attacks on him will
contribute a lot to his legacy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<o:p> </o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
So far he has continued to open
more avenues for opposition MPs to unleash punches on him. Can he use the
tricks he deploys on state organs to tame the opposition?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-71002587912911413912015-01-27T11:07:00.000+02:002015-02-04T11:08:19.757+02:00What AB and Hash teach South Africa about hope<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">27
Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original
Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail<u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla are great examples of the rainbow dream that South Africans have been letting go of recent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-coqCJ9f9TXY/VNHhTybdk1I/AAAAAAAAApo/T9rGCTC5Bcc/s1600/Tony%2B-%2BRDM%2BPicture.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-coqCJ9f9TXY/VNHhTybdk1I/AAAAAAAAApo/T9rGCTC5Bcc/s1600/Tony%2B-%2BRDM%2BPicture.png" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I won't
offer an opinion on whether President Jacob Zuma or Zelda la Grange is right on
whether South Africa's troubles began with the arrival on these shores of Jan
van Riebeeck.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I also
don't know the exact genealogy of the Pretoria-based De Villiers family. But I
suppose that if it weren't for that consequential landing in the Cape on April
6 1652, South Africa might never have laid claim to the cricketing genius and
force of nature Wanderers and the world saw last Sunday when AB de Villiers
smashed his way into the history books.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">There
are, for once, too few superlatives to describe such an instinctively brilliant
player, in any sporting realm. Dr Ali Bacher, no slouch at the crease himself
and someone who knows a thing or two about high-pressure test captaincies, is
not normally given to exaggeration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">His take
on De Villiers scoring the fastest one-day international century hardly seems
over the top, given that De Villiers scored 104 off just 31 balls, including 10
sixes. "In my opinion, AB is the most brilliant, innovative batsman the
world has ever seen," Bacher enthused after watching De Villiers's
demolition of the West Indian bowling at the Bullring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">With so
few, if any, political role models to inspire South Africa these days, perhaps
focusing on sporting heroes will lift the national spirit and light the
load-shedding darkness soon to be thrust upon us, courtesy of either Eskom or
apartheid, but probably not to be blamed on Van Riebeeck. He was a candles-only
man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Our great
cricketing rivals, Australia, spend far more time and money incubating
prodigies like De Villiers by fast-tracking them to state-funded academies and
training camps at an early age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Perhaps
in the case of AB de Villiers it's just as well he was not spotted for one
sport early on, because then he might never have taken up international
cricket. His embarrassment of sporting riches includes junior records and
national selection in practically everything else: rugby, tennis, swimming,
athletics and badminton.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But the
Aussies also have the order of things in life right - they revere sports stars
and disparage their politicians. I witnessed this phenomenon at a Bledisloe Cup
rugby test against New Zealand on a starry night in Sydney in September 2001.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">One of
the most successful captains of Australian rugby, John Eales, was to lead his
team onto the field against New Zealand for the last time. The capacity crowd
cheered him to the rafters when the stadium announcer reeled off his superb
achievements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The same
disembodied voice then announced the arrival of "the prime minister of
Australia, Mr John Howard". And the same capacity crowd lustily booed the
man they had voted into office three times and would do so twice more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">De
Villiers, of course, didn't write his name in the history books because someone
appointed him to the position or because he fitted some or other sociological
or demographic profile. He did it on sheer merit and the "10000 hour
rule," which, journalist and researcher Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, is
the backbreaking effort and temperament needed to supplement even outsized
talent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">This
point was underlined last year by none other than Sports Minister Fikile
Mbalula. At the costly 2014 SA Sports Awards he proclaimed: "I have never
made an excuse for mediocrity. I will never shy away from pulling an
extravaganza to celebrate the winning spirit of South Africa."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Alas, any
of his ministerial colleagues, while not shy of extravaganzas, would have a
problem with Mbalula's denunciation of mediocrity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">For a
range of reasons, despite their celebrity status, few sports stars - no matter
where in the world - do well in politics. Temperament and money might provide
some clues here. But even when they take the plunge, few succeed unreservedly.
Another sporting great named De Villiers, Springbok captain Dawie, managed to
lose his marginal parliamentary seat in 1981. He found another one, but his
winning aura was dented. The same thing happened to British Olympic hero
Sebastian Coe. His global fame was no protection against the Tony Blair
electoral tide which swept him out of the once-safe Tory seat of Falmouth and
Camborne in 1997.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In
Pakistan, cricketing legend-turned-politician Imran Khan has tried in vain
since 1996 to translate his popularity into presidential power.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">One MP
here who has some sporting form from way back is the president of the almost
lifeless COPE, Mosiuoa Lekota. It is from his soccer-playing days that he
derived his nickname, "Terror".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Whatever
his failures of political leadership, he is a certifiably non-racial player and
a man of unusual eloquence and thoughtful insights.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In a letter
to The Times this week he borrowed the powerful imagery of the Wanderers
partnership of De Villiers and his other record-breaking teammate, Hashim Amla,
to revive the all-but-buried nation-building of Nelson Mandela.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">"Let's
set aside victimhood and build bridges," Lekota wrote. "Like Hashim
Amla, we can look to compile our societal gains incrementally, or like AB de
Villiers we can seek to get over the confines of racism in a hurry by hitting
it out of the ground so it disappears forever."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">There's
another point of light which the Amla-De Villiers partnership offers to a world
dimmed by the fundamentalist violence witnessed in Paris and Nigeria just days
before the match.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Amla is a
devout Muslim and De Villiers a practising Christian. Their partnership
inspires and builds hope. Which seems a better vision to celebrate than
debating Van Riebeeck.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-50273968439534518072015-01-20T12:41:00.000+02:002015-01-23T12:41:59.686+02:00Why does Africa not incur our wrath?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Something is far from kosher in Equatorial Guinea, but
the ‘moralists’ are turning a blind eye to it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
20 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail<u1:p></u1:p></span><o:p></o:p><br />
<u2:p></u2:p>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
There’s a question, coupled with
a riddle, designed to shake off the back-to-work blues: Which is the richest
country, per head of population, in Africa? Theoretically at least, each
citizen there should be more than three times richer than the average South
African.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Clue: If you have not paid much
attention to it before Monday this week, you should now know the country, as
its city of Mongomo, home town of its president, was the site of Bafana's
defeat by Algeria in the African Cup of Nations.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
<o:p> </o:p>Answer: Equatorial Guinea, the
continent's third-largest producer of oil after Nigeria and Angola. Its
population of just 650 000 people in this tiny country should enjoy a standard
of living approximating that of the average citizen of Portugal, which it
closely matched in terms of GDP per capita, at more than $20 000 (R232 000).
South Africa's GDP per capita is just over $6 600.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
The riddle: Why does 80% of
Equatorial Guinea's population live in abject poverty? According to the UN,
fewer than half its population has access to clean drinking water. About 15% of
Equatorial Guinea's children die before reaching the age of five.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
According to a recent article in
the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal, it is "one of the deadliest
places on the planet to be young".<o:p></o:p></div>
<o:p> </o:p><br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
The simple reason for the wealth
gap was explained in the same article.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
"Energy revenues, derived
from pumping around 346 000 barrels per day, have flowed into the pockets of
the country's elite, but virtually none has trickled down to the poor
majority."<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Of course, given the collapsing
price of crude oil, the country's ruling elite might be soon be less rich than
they are currently. But they've done pretty well since Teodoro Obiang Nguema
Mbasogo seized power in 1979 in a bloody coup against his uncle.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Today he enjoys, along with his
great riches, the awkward title of being "Africa's longest-serving
dictator”.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
That award, conferred on him
last year by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, jostles along with others
awarded to the great man and his regime.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
"Worst of the worst"
was Freedom House's description of the state of the country's political and
civil rights. Reporters Without Borders, which monitors the state of media
freedom in the world, described Obiang as a "predator of press freedom'',
and Transparency International places Equatorial Guinea in the top 12 of its
list of the "most corrupt states in the world".<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
But if you think the father is
bad, the son is apparently even worse.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Teodoro Jr, recently installed
by his dad as the country's vice-president, is also a prodigious collector of
real estate across the world. This includes a home, recently condemned as
rat-infested, in Cape Town's Clifton Beach. But this pales in comparison to his
Paris mansion, estimated to be worth more than R1.35-billion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
The headline-catcher for
"Junior" was his pile in Malibu Beach, California. It was seized,
along with a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson memorabilia and eight Ferraris by
US Justice Department officials. In court papers, the prosecution averred that
his riches were a consequence of corruption and were "inconsistent with
his state salary of less than $100 000 per year". Last year, to settle the
criminal indictment, Obiang forfeited some $34-million of these assets to the
US government.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Needless to say, back here in
the more modest (even Nkandla seems a shack by comparison) South Africa, there
is no "boycott, disinvest and sanction" campaign against Equatorial
Guinea and its ruling family. Standard Bank, the sole African sponsor of the
CAF — which is highlighting this benighted country — is not having any of its
branches picketed or boycotted.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
No, we reserve our ire and concern
for human rights for one country, and just one chain store that stocks its
products: Israel and Woolworths.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Strangely enough, Obiang and his
dictatorship was once described by George W Bush's Secretary of State,
Condoleezza Rice as "our good friend". Hardly surprising since,
pre-fracking at least, most of that country's oil exports went to the US. But
Bush had a more arresting phrase as the educational-reforming governor of
Texas, before he became president. He said that accepting poor results in black
and Latino schools was the consequence of "the soft bigotry of low
expectations".<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
With all the current swirl and
tweeting around racism, real and imagined here, one can only assume that
holding Israel, for example, to the highest standard of human rights behaviour
and expecting nothing of the sort in, say, Equatorial Guinea is the current and
local equivalent of the soft, or loud, bigotry of low expectations. The local
BDS crowd expect every human rights box to be ticked by Israel, and hold no
mirror up at all to a slew of states far closer to us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
On the Woolworths issue, matters
become even more interesting. It was with a sense of macabre fascination that
last year we watched Cosas, going one better than the usual suspects in the
anti-Israel brigades, deposit pigs' heads in the Sea Point branch of
Woolworths. The basis for this act was to discomfort local Jewish shoppers
using the kosher section of the store. The stand-out problem here was that
there is no specific kosher section in the shop.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
Yet just across the road, a
gleaming new Checkers store has an aisle of kosher and Israeli products. But
Checkers has been untouched by the boycott or any pigs' heads.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; line-height: 15.6pt;">
That's another riddle in a maze
of inconsistencies in this selective targeting. Is Israel the only country
worthy of protest action? And is it the fact that the chairman of Woolworths is
Jewish, or is it that it is seen to be the place where the elite shop that
makes it alone the target? As they say in the classics: "I think we should
be told."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-82656251435159627192015-01-13T12:25:00.000+02:002015-01-23T12:28:41.842+02:00Cape Town takes centre stage in the national conversation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">13 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">| Original
Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BDlive</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The City of Cape Town seems to
have taken centre stage in the national conversation since early this month,
writes Tony Leon<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">IN THE shadow of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter in Paris, where crazed and
violent fundamentalism reminds us of the fragility of the freedoms we too often
take for granted, it seems trite to turn attention to more local matters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S5ke94oQUm8/VMIiCYop8JI/AAAAAAAAAow/m2UDdUPZVjE/s1600/Cape%2BTown%2Baerial%2Bview%2BXXX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S5ke94oQUm8/VMIiCYop8JI/AAAAAAAAAow/m2UDdUPZVjE/s1600/Cape%2BTown%2Baerial%2Bview%2BXXX.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But, in counting new year blessings and reminding ourselves of so many
points that divide the often fissiparous South African society, it is pertinent
perhaps that, despite the occasional pig’s head tossed into Woolworths, most
religious communities in this country actually coexist in conditions of amity.
If you look across the Middle East and now into the heart of Europe, and even
at the cultural wars often revved up at election time in the US, this
achievement is bigger than it often seems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">And we don’t coexist in conditions of religious freedom and acceptance
simply because someone at Kempton Park more than 20 years ago decided it was a
nice-to-have in the constitution, but because degrees of tolerance not confined
just to religious coexistence are more hard-wired into our communal DNA than
often appears in the daily discourse that seethes with apparent dissent and
mutual recrimination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Now on to matters of more immediate concern: the late, great Harry
Oppenheimer once commented that "the difference between our two major
cities is that in Johannesburg there is nothing to see, and in Cape Town there
is no one to talk to".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Of course, matters have changed in more recent times as Cape Town seemed
to take centre stage in the national conversation since early this month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">On the opposition side of the fence, in the only province controlled by
it, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille
shocked her party by sacking her deputy provincial leader, Theuns Botha, from
his powerful post as health MEC. In truth only the portfolios of health and
education, alongside finance, amount to any budgetary and political
significance in our nugatory provincial setup.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Exiling Botha, the previous Western Cape leader, to the wasteland of
sport and recreation is pregnant with meaning, yet to be explained.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Predictably, the African National Congress (ANC) found much to moan
about when it arrived in the Mother City to reaffirm its revolutionary
credentials, alongside serving champagne and Chivas Regal in its hospitality
suites.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The outpourings of ruling party bile and vitriol against the DA in Cape
Town perhaps obscured the fact that, objectively viewed, and with thousands
voting every year with their feet, the poor and the marginalised have a better
chance of being better off in the Western Cape than in the neighbouring Eastern
Cape. There many of the services are in an advanced state of collapse and
atrophy. Ironically, it is the department of health here, the very portfolio
from which Botha was ejected on new year ’s eve, that only three months ago won
the award for the best performing in the Western Cape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">As for President Jacob Zuma’s claim that the DA cares only about
"the whites" and the province is "governed by the wrong
people", this is a decidedly odd statement for the president of the whole
country and someone who constantly bangs on, as recently as in his New Year
statement, that SA’s democratic credentials are unassailable. The province is
governed by the "wrong people" precisely because the majority of them
chose the "wrong" provincial government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">And when the "wrong people" in the form of the many ratepayers
eye their monthly rates and services bills from the city council, they note
with some consternation the very steep charges in the municipal accounts. And
this is not to pour the proceeds into the leafy suburbs where the DA vote can
be weighed rather than counted. But it is the result of perhaps, outside the
city of Durban, the most aggressively redistributionist administration in the
country. Despite the city channelling most of its funds into the townships, the
ruling DA receives very few votes from its black residents in return.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Ironically, the party does much better in the townships of Johannesburg,
where it has no power or patronage to parcel out. Perhaps it’s a case of what
Karl Marx called "false consciousness". But then again, looking for
consistency in local politics strains the imagination, if not the memory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">For example, giving equal voice to the grievance lobby in the run-up to
the ANC’s 103rd anniversary bash in Cape Town was its dial-a-quote
secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe. He added to the new year festive cheer by
reclaiming the Freedom Charter for the ANC, in the 60th year since the document
was published. Mantashe expressed his displeasure that "every Jack and
Jill" (doubtless code for "Helen") and "hooligans"
(not a stretch to transpose the Economic Freedom Fighters here) had wrenched
the document from its rightful owners.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Back in 1995, the golden age of our Parliament as some describe it, an
almighty fuss arose when the opposition challenged the fact that state funds
were to be spent on the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown.
Democratic Party chief whip Douglas Gibson was roasted by ANC luminaries, the
voluble Kader Asmal at the fore, for daring to suggest that the Freedom Charter
was a "party pamphlet".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Admittedly, the riot police were not called in to still this debate. But
Asmal and other ruling party heavies were incandescent with anger at the
suggestion that the document was anything other than a revered statement of
national aspiration, way beyond the confines of petty party politics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Twenty years on, and facing pressures on several fronts, and
disappointment and open dissent in its ranks, present needs suggest that Gibson
was more right than he ever imagined back then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But conversations aplenty were also to be had in the quieter corners of
Cape Town during the festive season.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The arrival back on these shores, temporarily at least, of so many
successful South Africans, some of whom have become masters of the financial
universe and corporate boardrooms across the globe, certainly improved the
dialogue in ways of which Oppenheimer would certainly approve.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I was seated across the table from one such eminence, a senior executive
at Eskom before democracy arrived, who then went out into the world and capped
his corporate success by launching a hugely successful resource enterprise. Now
he heads a significant fund overseas. Like many other temporary returnees, he
remains passionately committed to this country’s success.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">He kept the dinner riveted by not only crisply diagnosing the travails
of our once mighty electricity provider but also suggesting a highly
imaginative and cost-effective solution for this crippled giant. And it’s not
just dinners by candlelight and shopping centres plunged into darkness that
Eskom’s power outages forces upon us. As Brian Kantor of Investec described it
a few weeks ago: "Eskom is the Grinch that stole Christmas." Because
the one competitive advantage that could cause a surge in much-needed growth is
the collapsing price of crude oil. But without sufficient and reliable energy
supply, we cannot export our way out of economic difficulty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">After listening to the explanation about putting Eskom to rights, I
asked the dinner guest whether he would, if asked by the government, return to
do his national service by taking the helm at Eskom. "I absolutely
would," he said. Perhaps if Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, now charged
with rescuing this key state enterprise, wants an interesting and rewarding
conversation, he might give him a call.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-55018799596147253342015-01-07T11:15:00.000+02:002015-01-23T11:20:56.561+02:00New brooms needed to sweep SA politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There should be an age limit on
staying in the political arena <o:p></o:p></div>
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7 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail<u1:p></u1:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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CAPE Town in early January
heaves with local and foreign tourists. In euros and dollars, at least, it
ranks as perhaps the best and cheapest long-haul destination in the world.
Hence the throngs of foreigners and temporarily returning expats now in the
Mother City.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the weekend, with matters
other than the beaches and vineyards on its members’ their minds, the ANC
gathers in Cape Town for its annual show of force. The ruling party
— in-between bad-tempered jostling with the opposition-controlled city
council — is marking its 103rd anniversary, a reminder of both its longevity
and its power, which extends everywhere except in the city in which it will be
celebrating.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Without boring readers with my
recent social calendar, I was quite struck by the fact that, in four encounters
last week, I broke bread with members of the British House of Lords holidaying
in this city. They were a politically diverse bunch, Labour, Conservative and
independent. They were united by the fact that they enjoy the Cape sun at the height
of the British winter and have a huge regard for South Africa as a place to
visit and as a beacon of both hope and unfulfilled promise.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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The last of this quartet I met
served in Tony Blair’s cabinet. I asked her about the article in The Economist,
in its Christmas double issue, about her former boss, the only
Labour politician to have won win three consecutive British general elections.
He is therefore objectively the most successful member of his and her
political tribe in terms of power, if not accomplishment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The article in question was
headlined “The loneliness of Tony Blair”, perhaps an odd citation for such a
successful politician and someone who in his political afterlife commands
megamillions of rands to speak (as he will do here at February’s mining
indaba). He also appears to do useful work in the Middle East and Africa,
and in sport, in what is called “foundational do-gooding”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The reason for the magazine’s
description is that the former PM is “celebrated abroad and reviled at home”.
And the reason for the latter can be summed up in one word: Iraq. Or in longer
form, for having uncritically signed up his country to the regime-changing
agenda of his close friend, if political opposite, US president George W
Bush. And doing so on a false prospectus concerning (non-existent) weapons of
mass destruction in the horrible hands, allegedly, of Saddam Hussein.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The guest offered a different
explanation for the Blair’s lack of appreciation of Blair in his home country:
“He came to office so young [he he was 43 when he became prime minister] and
was still relatively young when he left 10 years later. Constructing your
afterlife at such an age is quite a challenge.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The opposite impulse seems to
attach to local political leaders. For all that the ANC obsesses with making
national demographics the be-all and end-all of public office and appointments,
the one demographic it never measures is age.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Consider this, and apply it
across the political spectrum: South Africa is a remarkably young country with
a rather aged leadership. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Overwhelmingly, South Africans
are less than 54 years old. About 20.2% of the country is younger than 24 and
the biggest age cohort (38.7% of the population) is between 25 and 54. Fewer
than one in 10 South Africans is on the wrong side of 55 (this columnist
among them, but I gave up political leadership at 50).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now look at our leaders:
President Jacob Zuma is 72, DA leader Helen Zille is 63 and, at the far end of
the age spectrum, IFP president-forever Mangosuthu Buthelezi is 86.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The only exception is Economic
Freedom Fighters “commander-in-chief” Julius Malema, a comparative baby at only
33. But, as I once observed, his policies are so antique that he is almost old
by association.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Not that youth is the entire
answer, but sclerotic policies are often the result of ancient ideas, the
unwillingness to consider fresh ideas or the inability to open to outside
voices.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The old cliche “old habits die
hard” has some unfortunate application in a world of ageing leaders.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Zimbabwe is an even more extreme
example of this mismatch between the ages of a population and of its
leadership. Robert Mugabe quite incredibly holds the reins of power in his 91st
year while his young country suffers from decades of his misrule.<o:p></o:p></div>
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South Africa sensibly limits
presidents’ terms but does nothing to suggest that there is a retirement age
for other political office bearers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The perfect counterpoint to the
obsolete older leader was perhaps provided in Blair’s home country when,
in its hour of need and crisis, of the world, 1940, Winston Churchill took
over, just in time, at the age of 65. But he did not operate in the era of
24/7 news, social media and the relentless demands of today’s information
cycles and culture of openness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I found an explanation for
politicians exceeding their expiry dates in 2006, the year before Blair
was shoe-horned out of his position by his impatient rival Gordon Brown. It was
written of Blair by the thrusting Conservative journalist and now mayor of
London Boris Johnson (today aged 50).<o:p></o:p></div>
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“It is a necessary fact of
political biology that we never know when our time is up,” he wrote.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Long after it is obvious that
we are goners we continue to believe it is ‘our duty’ to hang on, with
cuticle-wrenching intensity, to the privileges of our post. We kid ourselves
that there is a ‘job to be finished’. In reality, we are just terrified of the
come-down. There is no day that politicians find easier to postpone than the
day of their own resignation.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Does this warning voice from
abroad ring any bells locally?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-50268424003407335742014-12-17T17:30:00.000+02:002014-12-18T07:58:55.636+02:00Memories of my first load-shedding<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">17 Dec 2014 | Tony Leon | </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail<u1:p></u1:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><strong>It was long ago and far away, but it has eerie lessons
for the present<o:p></o:p></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">WHEN and where did you endure your first
“load-shedding”? Strangely enough, my first such encounter with a mass
electricity outage happened long ago and faraway. It was in a city (and
country) which is today the top-performing and arguably most modern economy in
Europe and the financial centre of the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">For a middle-class South African boy brought up in the
stifling strait-jacket of Calvinist South Africa, London back in 1973 appeared
alluringly cosmopolitan and free. David Bowie and the “drugs, sex and rock ‘n‘
roll” siren calls had even breached the walls of my Natal provincial boarding
school. And for television-deprived South Africa, the idea of several channels
of evening TV to select from seemed impossibly exotic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Despite strong parental warnings to the contrary, but
with the determination of a wilful 17 years, I cashed in the savings from
birthdays and bought an air ticket, found a cheap hotel, and departed these
shores in December 1973.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Talk about bad timing. My arrival in London coincided,
almost to the day, with the introduction of the infamous “three-day week”. The
UK at the time was hit by the double whammy of depleted energy supplies after
the 1973 Middle East War and the Opec oil crisis (some things don‘t change)
that drove up the price of coal, and a national strike as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The mighty National Union of Mineworkers demanded a
huge pay increase. Hapless Conservative prime minister Ted Heath was unwilling
to breach the wage freeze to meet the demand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The UK economy, then called “the sick man of Europe”,
was battling a run on its currency and high inflation. It all has a rather
familiar ring about it, looking at our own current gloomy economic prospects
and power constraints.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">What was also far different was the severity of the UK
equivalent of load-shedding of 40 years ago. Instead of celebrating New Year‘s
Eve bathed in the lights of Piccadilly Circus and channel-surfing the TV, the
lights were literally switched off and the evening TV screens went dark for
four days at a time, or for long periods during the days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">However, the singular advantage of being a young
visitor to Britain then was the strength of the rand, which at two to the pound
went further than it does today. But for Britons it was misery. Hundreds of
thousands of workers were laid off and the country plunged into national
despair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">It also finished off the prime minister. Heath called
an election two months later and lost power to Labour‘s Harold Wilson.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">But Labour, which temporised with, rather than
confronted, the trade unions, settled the strike but on terms that saw their
five years in power end on an even worse note than the Conservatives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Five Decembers later, in 1978, Wilson‘s successor, Jim
Callaghan, presided over an even more dire economic crisis, the “Winter of
Discontent”. This entered into grainy infamy with piles of unburied bodies in
Liverpool and mountains of uncollected rubbish in central London. Strikes were
now the rule, not the exception, and the economy was saved from collapse only
by a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Having witnessed the three-day week, I watched a
documentary on the second crisis the other night, Andrew Marr‘s History of
Modern Britain. It is worth the viewing to witness how a country can come back
from the edge of economic collapse and restore itself to the top table of
economic performers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a very telling point in the middle of this
BBC documentary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Marr describes how, in the middle of the winter of
discontent, Callaghan confided: “If I were a young person today, I would
emigrate from Britain.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Many young South Africans are considering Callaghan‘s
advice in their own situation. Many young Brits did indeed leave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Callaghan called an election a few months later and
lost power to Margaret Thatcher.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">She had decidedly different views, and untried policies
from taming union power to mass privatisations of state-owned industries. She
destroyed the post-war consensus and divided her country, but arguably saved
the British economy. Tough, but essential medicine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Goldman Sachs, the global super-bank, was one of the
chief beneficiaries of Thatcher‘s reform agenda when her “big bang” of
financial sector reforms transformed British banking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The South African managing director of Goldman Sachs,
Colin Coleman, could hardly be called a “Thatcherite”, despite the position he
holds. He has a far more radical and activist past than most other bankers
around. He is also very bullish about the country‘s long-term future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Last November, in the company of leading cabinet
ministers, he published the Goldman Sachs report Two Decades of Freedom. Its
upbeat note was premised. among other metrics, on his bank‘s forecast of 3.4%
GDP growth for the year ahead. Ruling party apparatchiks were quick to proclaim
it as proof positive of the “good news” achieved on their watch. Now, a year
later, in a recent speech based on the reality of a growth rate a third of the
forecast (1.4%), Coleman struck a more sombre note.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">He drew attention to the “self-inflicted wounds” South
Africa has imposed on itself. Key among these are in the arenas of labour
conflicts, energy supply disruptions and what he terms “public sector
institutional weakening, inefficient and poor governance and management”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">This is much tougher stuff than the report of a year
ago, but in a deteriorating environment it is necessary to highlight. Among his
proposed solutions is a call for a “team South Africa” approach so the huge
economic inputs on offer from the private sector and elsewhere can be used to
help put the country, not just a narrow ideology, first.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed by the
cabinet last week to rescue the three most-failed state enterprises — Eskom,
SAA and the Post Office. Let‘s see if he goes wide or narrow in crafting
solutions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
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<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-2417215604669030732014-12-10T14:30:00.000+02:002014-12-18T07:50:23.903+02:00Government indifference to business elite puts us in peril<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">10 Dec 2014 | Tony Leon | Business Day<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">While Jooste and Bekker are
fairly quiet about their political opinions, Rupert and Wiese are less so,
writes Tony Leon<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">IN 1936, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, American Nobel literary laureate
Ernest Hemingway mocked F Scott Fitzgerald’s apparent obsession with the
super-rich. Fitzgerald had mused: "The very rich … are very different from
you and me." Hemingway’s withering literary retort was: "Yes, they
have more money."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Nearly 80 years later, over the past weekend, the Sunday Times published
its own list of SA’s wealthiest billionaires. No doubt the names on it inspire
similar sentiments among readers — from admiration to envy or, in the case of
the revenue service facing diminishing returns, an itch to extract even more of
their income for the needy fiscus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I couldn’t help but muse that nearly 40 years ago, during military
conscription, I shared a billet in Pretoria with the top name on the list, Ivan
Glasenberg. But, alas, none of his later revealed business acumen rubbed off on
his fellow conscripts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The paucity of women and infrequency of black names on the list inspired
a lot of necessary comment. But I rather thought that the response of one
reader captured the essence of the issue: "What SA really needs is more
billionaires", of whatever stripe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The listing is inexact, but it does provide a snapshot of many of the
local super rich and the companies they have built or in which they have huge
holdings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">My second musing was about the town of Stellenbosch and its university.
Doubtless there is a thesis waiting to be written about what it is about the
waters there which incubated so many of the post-1994 business leadership
success stories of this country. It was hardly written in the stars, that a
quartet of Afrikaans-speaking men — Johann Rupert, Christo Wiese, Koos Bekker
and Markus Jooste — would achieve such global, never mind South African,
prominence within two decades. And each of them has some provenance with this
small town.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Of course generalisations of this sort are also inexact. Other business
achievers of recent note such as Stephen Saad, Patrice Motsepe and Adrian Gore,
got their business smarts elsewhere. And of course, simply the fact that this
foursome are Afrikaans-speaking residents of the Western Cape can be as
misleading as bracketing together Jacob Zuma and Lindiwe Mazibuko on the basis
that both are isiZulu-speaking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But while Jooste and Bekker are fairly quiet about their political
opinions, Rupert and Wiese are less so. In an interview in Rapport Wiese made a
revealing disclosure. Recounting a conversation with Motsepe who expressed his
dismay at the absence of most of "the rich list" at this year’s
presidential inauguration, Wiese countered with the unanswerable: "Well, I
wasn’t invited."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Since the past weekend also marked the first anniversary of the death of
Nelson Mandela, Wiese’s omission from the current president’s guest list was
striking given the enormous attention which Mandela lavished on the then
business elite of SA, from invitations to everything, to constant rounds of
telephone diplomacy with its leading members.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Perhaps 20 years later the government no longer feels the needs for such
interaction, or does not enjoy the "noises off" comment some might
offer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Perhaps the wise dictum of former US secretary of state Colin Powell
that "no leader’s office should be an echo chamber" where the only
conversation amounts to a chorus of approval, has been discarded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Rupert underlined this point, and made a lot of the recent political
weather. At the annual meeting of his Remgro Group, he opined: "The
leadership of the country, quite frankly, is becoming very hard to defend
abroad. The biggest insult is that they don’t seem to care what we think."
And in a bow to populism he added that this dialogue of the deaf was not just
confined to business but extended to "people in the townships".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The headline-treatment for Rupert was not that his comment was
extraordinary; it was the rarity of such public expression by a certifiable
leader of the corporate elite.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">It is a matter of record rather than conjecture that on reading such a
comment, Mandela would have been on the phone to Rupert within a hour or two.
Different times then and now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Perhaps the lack of response from the governing elite to the challenge
of leading members of the business elite is at one level to be welcomed. It is
a matter of more recent record just how easily stung our rulers and masters are
when criticised. Far less harsh criticism than Rupert’s jeremiad led to a
stream of invective from African National Congress secretary-general Gwede
Mantashe in January last year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The rather anodyne First National Bank advertising campaign "You
Can Help" was pulled when the voluble Mantashe described the bank and
various mining companies as, variously, "unpatriotic",
"self-hating" and "treating the country like visitors".
More darkly, business as a whole was accused of bidding to "control the
state". Given the current electricity blackouts and a host of other
ailments affecting the delivery of basic services, many might only wish that
the latter was the case.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">If, in fact, either Wiese or Rupert controlled Eskom, past form suggests
they would hardly have lavished bonuses and salaries of R60m on its top
executives for this year’s performance. They would have been shown the door.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But the absence of official comment on the Rupert speech did not prevent
the "troll brigade" from commenting. One particularly bone-headed
response in the comment section of BDlive was instructive, and perhaps widely
held. Khayazonke opined: "The man’s amnesia is amazing, perhaps he has
forgotten that his empire was built by the evil apartheid corruption."
Indeed Rupert is the scion of one of the most prominent families of the past
era. But famously his father began his empire in the back of a garage with £10.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">They were doubtless assisted by proximity to the past regime, but the
Ruperts were hardly its praise singers. Indeed, on the death of Anton Rupert back
in 2006, then president Thabo Mbeki, also famously over-sensitive to any
criticism from big business, struck an unusual pose in his encomium for Rupert
the elder. He eulogised him as being "inspired by the spirit of
righteousness and justice". He also noted approvingly that during the
darkest night of apartheid, in 1985, Rupert had warned: "Do not embalm the
corpse of apartheid, bury it."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In Wiese’s case, the facts also point to an early opposition-mindedness,
long before it became fashionable. In 1977 he stood (and duly lost) as a
candidate for the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Anyway, the more recent corporate success stories of Rupert and Wiese
have had a global dimension in the far tougher stream of international waters
than the smaller, more protected shoals of the local economy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Neither these nor other "inconvenient truths" will prevent the
crude stereotyping and stigma-labelling which so characterises and debases the
current discourse. But a little basic research might help it along.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">There are many reasons why the mighty engine of the US economy has
roared back to life, the recent extent of which has surprised even the closest
market watchers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But one of a host of differentiating facts between Americans and South
Africans other than the striking similarity that we both live in countries with
dysfunctional politics, is noteworthy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">It is the splendid disregard which American business has for political
leaders it dislikes or whom they think harm their corporate, or even their
cultural, interests.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">• Follow Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA</span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-84197362475182713532014-12-03T13:30:00.000+02:002014-12-18T07:45:35.652+02:00What Julius Malema and Nigel Farage have in common<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Tony Leon | 03 December 2014 | Original
Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rand Daily Mail<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">They
have mastered the shock tactics that keep them in the limelight<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">AT
FIRST blush these two politicians have absolutely nothing in common.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
one is a sleek, silk-suited former city banker who quaffs a pint and proclaims
the virtues of “little England”. Many of his supporters are fuelled by an
anti-immigration anger which resonates with fed-up white voters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
other is rotund, wears red overalls, has had no career outside of politics and
wants “our mines back”. He is supported by marginalised poor black voters, many
of whom would be delighted to see the back of the whites who “stole our land”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">But
at second glance, both Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, and
Julius Malema, boss of the Economic Freedom Fighters, have far more in common
than either might admit, even though they have never met each other. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Welcome
to the world of populist “anti-politics” which has taken centre stage in
Britain, across Europe and is now firmly planted on our own shores as well.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">It
provides the rocket fuel for seething electoral discontent both here and abroad
and makes the prediction of future election outcomes a mug’s game. Both parties
have also shaken the very foundations of the political establishment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">They
have forced the traditional parties to switch tactics and strategies, and
sometimes junk entire policies to meet this new challenge to the political
order.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">I
arrived for a recent visit to London the day after Farage’s candidate<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>had won the second by-election in a row for
the surging insurgent party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
was after Prime Minister David Cameron had boasted that his Conservative Party,
from which Reckless had defected, would “kick his fat arse out of Westminster”.
Well, he certainly didn’t do that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
Conservatives were saved from complete ignominy only by the Twitter activity of
Labour MP Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general. She had<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tweeted a photo, without any adverse comment,
of a house in the constituency on by-election day, draped in St George’s flags
and with a white panel van in the drive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
an uncomfortable echo of the Twitter storm here caused by Steve Hofmeyr’s silly
comment and the Helen Zille “refugee” tweet, the Labour lady was denounced as a
“snob”.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">She
was all the proof needed that the Labour Party was “out of touch with patriotic
working class voters”, and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that the
one-time champions of the proletariat were led by a “metropolitan elite”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Just
to ensure that this narrative remained dominant,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who
resembles a dithering geek and goes from one stumble to another like Mr Bean on
a bad day, fired her from her post. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
UK Independence Party<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has the ability
now, with Scottish Nationalists and even the limping Liberal Democrats (who
managed their worst performance yet in the same by-election, netting less than
1% of the vote) and the Greens<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to
prevent either main party from winning and to require a three- or even
four-party coalition to govern after next year’s election.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Back
home, the EFF has mastered the tactics of parliamentary shock to such an extent
that it has left the ANC flat-footed and caused the DA to change its normal
parliamentary procedures to appear<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more
aggressive and nasty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">We
have yet to see what impact the EFF’s media dominance has had on electoral
outcomes, but the 2016 local government elections will provide some clues and
some big dilemmas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">DA
leader Zille noted<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that based on the
results of this year’s national election, the ANC is already below 50% in Port
Elizabeth and Tshwane and hovers just over that in Johannesburg.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Having
already lost heavily in Cape Town, Durban is the only major metropole that
remains firmly within the ruling party’s grasp.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Given
lower voter turnouts in local elections, it is quite conceivable<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the ANC could lose out in four of the five
largest cities. At least, that’s the theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Like
in Britain, the moment you chose a coalition partner, the real problems start.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
the UK, the Liberal Democrats were once the party of the protest vote, but also
a party of the centre left.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when
they formed a coalition with the centre-right Conservatives in 2010, they lost
the bulk of their voters, hence their terrible result in Rochester and Strood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">So
with whom does the DA form a collation?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
all the hotly contested metros here, the EFF will hold the balance of power
between the ANC and DA. Yet how could the party of middle-class propertied
interests (the DA) form a local government with a party which has declared war
on both this class and its interests (EFF)? For the ANC, the dilemma is just as
great. With whom to govern: EFF or DA? And this for the ruling party is, in the
phrase of international diplomacy, the “land of lousy options and outcomes”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Meanwhile,
for the insurgents in both the United Kingdom<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and South Africa, the power of disruption forces opponents onto terrain
that is both uncomfortable and unfamiliar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Welcome
to the world of “anti politics”. Its arrival has meant that for the next
while,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>certain outcomes and “politics as
usual” are a thing of the past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-3336510115124040842014-12-01T16:00:00.000+02:002014-12-02T10:02:56.464+02:00Helen Zille is 'fighting back'? I thought the DA banned that phrase<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">1 December
2014 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>| Tony Leon </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">|
Original Publication: Rand Daily Mail<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em><span style="color: black;">As the tide of woeful news grows, predictions of a dire future are
gaining strength with some notable exceptions<o:p></o:p></span></em></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit. It's
really quite amazing how the very same set of facts lead to radically different
conclusions about what they mean. Take the travails afflicting South Africa at
the moment. They make a long and depressing list and you're spoilt for choice
on which to highlight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Our ever-weakening currency - or the country's share price, as
it is sometimes termed - has fallen more than 70% against the surging greenback
in just over four years. The public service wage bill now gobbles up 42.2% of
all government (read taxpayer-funded) expenditure and three million civil
servants make the government the biggest single employer in South Africa by
far.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Yet, across a swathe of functions, the state is barely
functioning, from supplying electricity anywhere to safe drinking water in
Gauteng.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">The flagship national airline is the scene of boardroom battles
even as it battles to stay aloft. The South African Post Office cannot deliver
letters and even the much-admired South African Revenue Service is mired in
allegations that one of its units ran a brothel.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Property rights, one of the key compromises in the constitution,
are under threat, and not just from the land grabs by the Economic Freedom
Fighters in Pretoria. A flurry of laws are excavating under the foundations so
carefully constructed at Kempton Park in the early 1990s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Our growth rate has dropped from the 5% achieved a decade ago,
and the once-mighty tripartite alliance has been rent asunder.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">The day after Nelson Mandela died, in December last year, the
parliamentary speaker of his time, Dr Frene Ginwala, noted that in place of his
normal batik-style shirts, South Africa's first democratically elected
president "always wore a suit to parliament as a sign of his respect for
the institution". And it wasn't just his sartorial choices that mattered
both there and in the courts of law. He arrived, did his duty and even took the
occasional judicial and political bullet that went against him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">The scenes of chaos in parliament two weeks ago - especially the
fateful decision to send the police into its inner sanctum - show how far we
have fallen since then, not least in our own estimation and in the eyes of the
world, which has long since moved beyond the "miracle rising" narrative
we once gave to a globe in need of heroes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">But is it a tipping point into failed-state status or simply a
fork in the road to more competitive politics? Despite its enormous numbers at
the moment, is the ANC staring long-term decline square in the face?<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Of course, the governing party will reel off a host of
statistics, from three-million houses delivered to 16million social grants
deposited every month, to justify its claim that life is better today than it
ever was.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">But even for those sitting far away from government,
commentators reading the tea leaves predict different futures. Just last week,
two of these scenarios were on offer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Financial analyst Magnus Heystek read the last rites for the
rainbow nation on the back of what he called "jackbooted thugs in the most
hallowed halls of democracy". I never thought of my former place of work
in such sacrosanct terms. His conclusion set the Twitterati ablaze. Forecasting
the demise of offshore investments, Heystek prognosticated that within five
years the effects of weakening economic growth and further currency decline
will see the "jackbooted bankers" from the Reserve Bank -
"overnight and without warning" - switch off the offshore investment
tap.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">So, if you think your rand-hedged investments are a safe haven,
think again, he suggests. He ends his cheery note with this zinger: "There
are only two types of ex-Rhodesians in the world. Those who took all their
money out of the country and those who wished they had."<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">DA leader Helen Zille is made of sterner stuff than this
"apocalypse just now" scenario. Strangely, she describes herself as
"exhilarated" by the recent events inside and outside parliament. She
reads into the "deep crisis" in party and state the seeds of a
campaign of "fighting back" (long after I thought the phrase was
banned by the party) by civil society and through the accumulation of actions
and pushback, "a prefect storm for fundamental change".<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Her reference point is the Leipzig Moment in East Germany 25
years ago, when the people's demands for reform and freedom became unstoppable
and eventually toppled the government and the Berlin Wall.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Of course, a major factor beyond "people power" in
that revolution was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to use force
to prop up his satellites. Locally, Marikana suggests that a different scenario
could unfold here.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">But what certainly links the collapsing Soviet empire with our
state, apart from ideological nostalgia, is that when the money runs out, all
settled futures become unknowable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">As US scenario consultant Ian Wilson said: "However good
our futures research may be, we shall never be able to escape from the ultimate
dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are
about the future."<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Perhaps before either packing your bags or at least sending your
assets offshore while you can, the more earthy remark of former editor Steve
Mulholland might chime with both history and expectation. He said: "Ever
since I was five years old, I was always told that South Africa had five years
to go before it exploded. Well, I'm 78 and we're both still here."<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">•</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"> <i><span lang="EN-US">Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on
Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><i><span style="color: blue;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-41094570703440648652014-11-19T11:55:00.000+02:002014-11-26T11:57:36.919+02:00Dear President Zuma, it's not too late to restore Parliament to its former <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Tony Leon | 19 November 2014 | Original
Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> Rand Daily Mail<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><em>When police stifle opinion in Parliament, the light
of our hard-won freedom flickers</em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><em></em></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">DEAR President Jacob Zuma, last Thursday night,
riot police entered the National Assembly to eject a member of Parliament who
had called you “the greatest thief in the world”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">At the time, you were on the other side of the
world in Brisbane, Australia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Doubtless this grave insult to your office and
dignity was deeply offensive. But your absence from these shores was because
you were attending the G20 summit, the gathering of the leaders of the world’s
most significant economic countries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">We are the only African member of this global club
of the good and the great. Nigeria now has double our GDP, so we are no longer
the continent’s biggest economy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But we are, certainly, the only African country
that is both of economic significance and a full-blown democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4kQNHxc2QZI/VHWj4hH_OqI/AAAAAAAAAnI/V2ySWuM0KE8/s1600/Zuma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4kQNHxc2QZI/VHWj4hH_OqI/AAAAAAAAAnI/V2ySWuM0KE8/s1600/Zuma.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacob Zuma</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">This is not a matter of opinion. While our country
has fallen, sometimes precipitously, down the global benchmarks that matter,
from perceptions of corruption to the measurement of our economic
competitiveness, we have maintained our democratic credentials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In January this year, Freedom House, the democracy
rating agency which measures “Freedom in the World”, rated our country as
“fully free”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">If you measure that against the 10 other emerging
market economies who sat around the table last week with you, you will see what
an achievement that is. Only Argentina, Brazil and India are in our company.
Your colleagues leading China, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and
Turkey head countries which Freedom House rates as either “not free” or “partly
free.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But now that police enter the hallowed portals of
Parliament to eject errant members and interfere with their rights, all bets
are off, as they say in racing. It will be interesting, perhaps sobering, to
see where Freedom House places us next year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Your opposite number from Great Britain, David
Cameron, might offer a sobering historical perspective. We derive many of our
parliamentary conventions, not least the position and status of The Speaker,
from Westminster, rightly called “The Mother of Parliaments”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Scroll back around 370 years to January 1642 when
the king of England, Charles 1, forced his way into parliament accompanied by
400 soldiers. They were attempting to arrest five members of the House on
charges of treason. That invasion of the inner sanctum was resisted by the
speaker of the day, William Lenthall. When the troops marched into parliament,
and the king demanded to know where the famous five were, the speaker faced him
down. He said to the all-powerful monarch: “May it please your majesty, I have
neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is
pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">What speaker Lenthall was saying was simple and
brave: he was a servant and protector of parliament and he would take on the
mightiest force in the land to defend the institution. Of course, the events of
that day led to two civil wars in England and, seven years later, Charles was
beheaded as a public enemy by the triumphalist forces of parliament.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The speaker of our Parliament does not see herself
as a defender of its interests, to put matters at their mildest. She could
hardly do so, given the massive conflict of interest that goes to the heart of
the matter: She is both speaker of Parliament and the chairman of the ruling
party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Mr President, you and I began democratic life in
1994 in different places. We were both members of minority parties. You were
the leader of the ANC in KwaZulu- Natal, and while a member of its cabinet,
your presence and participation in legislative proceedings was adjudicated by a
party member from your then mortal enemy, speaker Inkosi Bonga Mdletshe of the
Inkatha Freedom Party. But he gave you all the democratic space you needed back
then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I had fierce differences at the time with your
party in the National Assembly, but my rights were protected by an ANC speaker
of commendable independence, Dr Frene Ginwala. She allowed me freedom to speak
and act and to contest matters, even though I led a party with just seven
members.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">You do not need to be a Steve Hofmeyr to know that
our history did not begin in 1994. In fact, in your 2010 state of the nation
speech, you specifically drew attention to the role played by one MP during the
apartheid years. You said: “Let me acknowledge the role played by the late Mrs
Helen Suzman. She was for a long time a lone voice in Parliament, calling for
change.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Yet by her acknowledgement, her voice would never
have been heard were it not for the protection she was given by her political
polar opposite, National Party speaker Henning Klopper. She recorded with
gratitude: “Without his help I could not have functioned.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">It says a great deal about where we are now that
far from protecting the interests of minorities, speaker Baleka Mbete is seen
as their persecutor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Mr President, you have enormous power. It was
suggested at the weekend that events in Parliament last week were triggered by
your demand that ANC MPs “Use their numbers to crush opposition”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I sincerely hope this is not the case. But either way,
may I sincerely suggest that you pause, think about history, think about our
place in the world and pull back from the brink.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Yours sincerely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></span> </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-61234462208410485022014-11-10T13:11:00.001+02:002014-11-10T13:14:22.494+02:003 Minutes of Inspiration - Tony Leon TEDx Johannesburg: Part 1 - Lessons learnt after 20 Years of...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-19311199386272224212014-11-06T13:09:00.000+02:002014-11-10T13:09:51.613+02:00The Big Read: If we rise up, then walls fall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">06 Nov 2014 | Tony Leon | The Times<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">This Sunday, 25 years ago on
November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. There can be few modern events - perhaps
other than Nelson Mandela's walk into freedom some three months later, and
there is a direct link between both of them - which so symbolically, and on
prime time television, defined the turning of the page of history.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">"Things are always
clearer through the rear-view mirror than the windscreen" <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7S94C_5TpmQ/VGCcaoexIrI/AAAAAAAAAmc/mNPEWvJgw5o/s1600/1158580_963204%5B2%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7S94C_5TpmQ/VGCcaoexIrI/AAAAAAAAAmc/mNPEWvJgw5o/s1600/1158580_963204%5B2%5D.jpg" height="320" width="218" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">STOP, IT'S HAMMER TIME: A 1989 picture of the demolition of the Berlin Wall while East Berlin border guards watch from above the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Scholar Francis Fukuyama called it the "end of history", which
it was for around 12 years until 9/11 in 2001, when the twin towers of the
World Trade Centre were also reduced to smoking rubble and we were reminded,
anew, that history mocks those who prematurely declare the endgame.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Still, the breaching of the 156km "iron curtain" erected by
the Soviet-backed East German regime in 1961 to prevent its citizens from
fleeing the claims of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the material
pleasures, democratic choices and better life chances on offer in West Berlin
stands out in the memory for many reasons, some of which still resonate today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Some two years before thousands of East Berliners poured across the wall
without being shot by border guards, unlike the 136 victims of such atrocities
before them, the nemesis of the Soviet system he so opposed, US President
Ronald Reagan, made a famous address at the Brandenburg Gate, very close to the
wall of Berlin's division.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">He was not the first US president to use divided Berlin as a backdrop
for the claims of freedom against the tyranny next door: John F Kennedy had
proclaimed "ich bin ein Berliner" just after the wall was
constructed. Reagan used his speech - literally against the wall - to challenge
the new, reforming Soviet boss, the general secretary of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, and guarantor of its East German satellite: "Mr
[Mikhail] Gorbachev, tear down this wall."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In fact when the wall fell, it was not because the Soviet leader tore it
down, but rather because the "power of the powerless" - as
anti-Soviet, pro-democracy leader, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia - described
the people's revolution that swept away the 45-year imposition of communism
across Eastern Europe. But Gorbachev was simply not prepared to use force to
maintain the system.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">His Chinese counterpart, Deng Xiaoping, in Beijing was not as fussy. He
sent in tanks and soldiers to Tiananmen Square in June that year. An unknown
number of pro-democracy demonstrators died.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">When Gorbachev confided a few years later to Reagan's successor, George
HW Bush, that the wall fell - and with it the aspirations of seven decades of
Marxist Leninism - because "ordinary people made it happen", he was
only half right. It also depended on whether the powers-that-were would defend
it by force.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">And, of course, the hinge of history always swings on events unknown to
even the most careful and well-informed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Although history makes the path it follows seem inevitable, "the
view'', as Warren Buffett famously remarked, "is always clearer through
the rear-view mirror than it is through the windscreen".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis recounts that at the beginning of
1989, the year of such shape-shifting change in Europe, China and South Africa,
there were - just like the French Revolution that overthrew the divine right of
kings two centuries before that - few signs of the upheavals in store.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">As he noted: "What no one understood, at the beginning of 1989, was
that the Soviet Union, its empire, its ideology and therefore the Cold War
itself, was a sand pile ready to slide. All it took to make that happen were a
few more grains of sand."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The people, in their masses and discontent with the slide in the price
of Soviet commodities and the US outspending the Soviets in arms, all
contributed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But as I saw for myself, even just a few weeks before, it did not seem
as though these events would conspire to tumble walls, empires and ideology. I
was a guest of the [West] German government in Berlin just weeks before the
wall came down. On a Saturday morning my local host, a Christian Democrat MP,
took me on a tour, via the U-bahn, or underground, from West to East. Even with
a South African passport back then, provided you paid hard currency, the East
German border guards would give you a day visa to visit the "showcase
capital of the showcase country of the Eastern Bloc", as he sarcastically
described the grim city of East Berlin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Though it was in effect the same city, with the same people, it was a
world apart. The consumer bustle and anarchic freedom of the West gave way to
goose-stepping soldiers, hideous artifacts of monumentalist architecture and
very few goods in downmarket stores. A few hours there convinced me that, with
its many challenges and imperfections, life on the western side was
immeasurably better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The fall of the wall a few weeks later also led to changes here when FW
de Klerk, who read the writing on his own wall of apartheid, reckoned the fall
of communism removed an immense obstacle in the path forward for South Africa.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">So, November 9 1989 is one of those anniversaries that, literally and
figuratively, changed the country and the world in which we live today.</span></div>
<o:p><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="en-ZA" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">• </span><span lang="en-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">Follow
Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span><span lang="en-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><span lang="en-ZA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></a><span lang="en-ZA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-2541542168429155752014-10-30T10:49:00.001+02:002014-10-30T10:49:25.396+02:00Lessons I learned serving opposite Mandela | Tony Leon | TEDxJohannesburg<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vYx6EfQY47U" width="480"></iframe><br />
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<br />
26 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon | Sunday Times<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
THERE were no laughs in <span class="aqj"><span data-term="goog_322602943" tabindex="0">Wednesday’s</span></span>
sombre medium-term budget speech by Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene. But, given
its grim context and the pain inflicted on South Africa by the markets, it
evoked the gallows humour of Samuel Johnson: “When a man knows he is to be
hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
The “fiscal
space” in which government vanity projects can be indulged and hard choices can
be ducked has disappeared. Nene donned the hair shirt — even if he dared not
whisper the word “austerity” — although some of his more ideologically inclined
colleagues seem committed to their bling ways.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Like
a faded suntan, the sunny tales of the “development state”, 5% annual growth,
“countercyclical spending” and “a good story to tell” have been replaced by the
more frigid world of tax hikes and spending cuts.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<o:p> </o:p><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After
<span data-term="goog_322602944" tabindex="0"><span class="aqj">Wednesday’s</span></span>
speech, I thought the following snapshot might be an accurate summary of the
state we’re in, with a post office which can’t deliver letters but whose
directors award themselves 25% pay rises; a dozen turnarounds at South African
Airways which cannot fund its way and other delights of a failing state:</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“These
things are the result of rotten government. To this very day, the government is
pouring money down rat holes, and the people know it. The police are underpaid,
the hospitals understaffed, the roads are disintegrating, the people left to
build shacks for themselves on stolen land; yet there is no end to the minister
of finance’s demand for more money.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Actually,
this paragraph of vivid vitriol was penned on January 26 1992 by the then
editor of this newspaper, Ken Owen, on the ills of the dying National Party
government.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">His
words are a reminder today that it has never been the fate or luck of South
Africa to enjoy sustained periods of good governance, whether the
administration is National or African National.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A
week ago, President Jacob Zuma underlined this point when he compared his
“persecution” over Nkandla with the lack of criticism for the PW Botha airport
in George, although one suspects the public benefit of the latter will outlive
that of the former.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
Zuma’s
point of comparison is striking: when you set the bar at ankle height, even my
dachshund can leap over it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">An
antidote to our rather depressing economic situation was provided on the same
day as Nene’s speech by the insightful, down-to-earth Investec boss Stephen
Koseff. He reminded a Cape Town audience that the National Treasury and revenue
service have immeasurably improved in the past 20 years, both in terms of performance
and transparency.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He
also provided a clue as to why taxes are so better collected, even though there
is a R15-billion hole in revenues — a reflection on low growth and not a
failure of collection: “When Pravin Gordhan was in charge he hired a bunch of
old whitey CAs to help with the collection.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">So
for our efficient and communist tax collector, now minister of local government
and traditional affairs, pragmatism, not ideology, prevailed.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I
was struck by this point about why the collection of taxes seems to be an
ideology-free zone of admirable efficiency and not the dumping ground for the
friends of the famous and the centre for semi-unemployable cadres that seem to
be the hiring principles on the boards of so many failing state enterprises.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I
found the answer buried in the pages of a remarkable book written in 2007 by
Paul Collier, then director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at
Oxford University. In a library of tomes about bad governance in poor countries
and some useful solutions, The Bottom Billion stands out.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On
the puzzle of good revenue collection in a sea of state dysfunctionality, he
offers this insight: the function of raising tax revenue was taken out of the
traditional civil service because there was no realistic prospect of making the
traditional system work. But as to why so many governments in the developing
world, along with South Africa, went for the radical option on revenue but not
on service delivery, he says the answer is “depressingly obvious”.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“Governments
benefit from the revenue, whereas ordinary people benefit from basic services.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“Governments
were not prepared to let the traditional civil service continue to sabotage tax
revenues, because governments themselves were the victims.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“They
were prepared to leave basic service delivery unreformed because the governing
elite got its services elsewhere.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The
FW de Klerk administration did not reform the revenue service, the ANC did. But
De Klerk certainly reformed the political space back in 1990 because he alone,
in comparison with his five NP predecessors, could both read the writing on the
wall and not assume it was addressed to someone else.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">His
government had essentially run out of money and its ideology could no longer be
sustained, let alone funded.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="border: currentColor; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Now,
24, years later, the successor government is also running out of money. Here’s
hoping this tight space leads to another “wonderful concentration of the mind”.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
<o:p> </o:p><span style="color: black;">•</span><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> <i><span lang="EN-US">Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on
Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><i><span style="color: blue;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-10906293790034255692014-10-23T15:30:00.000+02:002014-10-29T23:25:32.733+02:00The Big Reads: JZ's 'Groot Krokodil' tears<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">23 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon | The Times<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Never mind those pesky
"clever blacks" who so irritate His Excellency the President. We have
our share of "clever whites" as well, both local and exported.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">"</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Apparently
in the land of the rising sun Zuma means 'running horse'</span><span class="end"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">"</span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Kevin Pietersen, the supremely
talented batsman lost to these shores and from 2005 the key man in the English
cricket team, has recently switched from on-field fame to retirement notoriety
by dishing the changeroom dirt on his enemies in his team with his apparently
explosive memoir, KP: The Autobiography.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">But whatever his prowess in front
of the wicket, he is apparently less nimble in a media interview. At the
weekend he bagged the premier interview column in the Financial Times, whose
"lunch with" series is the gold-standard platform for celebrities.
Our Kev chose the restaurant for his interrogation with journalist Matthew
Engel. Quite unselfconsciously he selected Zuma, which the sharp-elbowed Engel
described as "contemporary Japanese almost opposite Harrods, but without
anyone Japanese in sight. The waiters are English; the clients wealthy
wanderers."<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Apparently KP is not as quick
with repartee as he is with the bat. The interviewer records: "
'Zuma'," I muse. "'So it's a KwaZulu-Natal restaurant?'<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">"It takes him time to
remember South Africa's president.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">" 'Oh, Jacob!' " Then
he decides that's funny. He is not very hot on politics, including the politics
of everyday life," Engel notes.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">But we can be grateful for KP's
restaurant selection as it led me straight to Google translate since, until
then, I had no idea that Zuma had a Japanese provenance. Apparently in the land
of the rising sun it means "running horse". This seemed very apt and
localised since weekend reports suggest that our homegrown Zuma is running away
from parliamentary questions, although he must have been relieved - in a
universe of bad headlines - that the C word chosen by the Sunday Times was only
"coward".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">But both evasion of parliamentary
interrogations (which, to be perfectly fair, the presidency describes as
"grossly misleading") and unfair enrichment lead us back again to
that once obscure KwaZulu-Natal village, now a byword for state-sponsored
profligacy, Nkandla.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Since parliament has never had a
proper presidential explanation for the R246-million expenditure there - either
because of the tactics of disruption of the enfantes terribles of the Economic
Freedom Fighters or some other undisclosed reason - we have to read the tea
leaves elsewhere (perhaps this is appropriate since this president's tipple is
nothing stronger than Rooibos tea).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Apparently the most powerful man
in the land feels "persecuted" by the media over the expenses. On
Sunday, he advised that "there was no outcry over an airport built in
former president PW Botha's home town".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">His reference to the airport at
George is both accurate and instructive. Indeed, during the long tenure of the
former strongman of apartheid and MP for George, a modern airport was built in
his constituency. Doubtless, the identity of the local parliamentarian and
consideration of the ease of his travel counted for a lot in green-lighting its
construction. But 25 years after Botha's forced exit from public life and
office, the airport still serves as a huge and necessary gateway for tourism
into the southern Cape region, which long after the reign of Botha still
attracts thousands of visitors. More than 600000 arrive there every year.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Any tourists visiting the former
home of the "Groot Krokodil" in Wilderness might also be surprised by
its modest scale, not the palace of splendour one might expect.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">But this is really beside the
point. Things have reached a pretty point when a post-apartheid democratic
president uses as his standard of justification the excesses and outrages, or
lack of them in this case, of the brutal and undemocratic system he and his
party vowed to replace and improve upon.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">The old struggle phrase
"never again" seems to have been replaced by one that says
"well, sometimes when in a corner, we will dust it off".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">The PW Botha defence at least has
some form, as they say in cricket. Less helpful to Zuma's cause was his
invocation of geography the other day. He apparently shrugged off the mushroom
clouds engulfing his administration when he suggested that corruption is a
crime only in a "Western paradigm".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">He might want to have a word at
the next Brics summit with his opposite number in China, Xi Jinping. He doesn't
have the inconvenience of being heckled by opposition MPs but, in the eastern
corner of the world, he has unleashed a campaign against corruption described
recently by The Economist "as the most sweeping for decades".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Since we apparently bow to China
in matters of foreign policy, we might want to borrow domestically from this
campaign, although in China the drive is apparently led by "party
investigators and the feuding factions they serve".<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">We have no shortage of feuding
ruling party factions in South Africa. But we are blessed with an independent
public protector, one of the real gains of the post- Botha years. A pity we
don't celebrate her work and not curse her existence, as some in the seats of
power do.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span lang="en-ZA">•</span><span lang="en-US"> </span><span lang="en-US" style="font-style: italic;">Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela
(Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span><span lang="en-US"> </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><span lang="en-ZA" style="font-style: italic;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-90078046997999335162014-10-13T15:00:00.000+02:002014-10-14T22:41:55.618+02:00We need leadership willing to make tough calls<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: black;">Patrick
Cairns | 13 October 2014</span> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">| Original Publication:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moneyweb<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">South Africa can't just drift along. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">CAPE TOWN – Of all the criticisms
levelled against President Jacob Zuma's handling of the economy, perhaps the
worst indictment is that he has failed to provide South Africa with decisive
leadership. He has been unable to inspire the country towards a cohesive vision
of where we need to go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">There are many reasons for this, not
least of government's inability to produce and stick to a clear economic plan
in the first place. But the president ultimately has to bear the responsibility
of not being able to provide the guidance that the country has needed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">At a recent panel discussion hosted
by Sanlam Private Wealth, political commentators Justice Malala and Tony Leon
pointed to exactly this fact. They highlighted how although there has been some
outstanding leadership in South Africa's economic spheres of government, its
reputation is at risk of being undermined by the incompetence elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“In South Africa you have the Revenue
Service, Treasury, and the Reserve Bank, which are three fantastic institutions
that seem to work pretty well, and then you have the rest of government,”
Malala said. “You have this bipolar world and unfortunately, if the world of
sloth overwhelms the world of efficiency, then we have a problem.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">For Leon, where South Africa's
leadership needs to come to the fore is in tackling the country's current
account and budget deficits. The present situation means that South Africa
remains vulnerable and another credit downgrade will have serious
repercussions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“There are a number of money managers
who, given another credit downgrade, will pull the plug on us,” he said. “Then
our current account and budget deficits will become unaffordable and we're in a
deep crisis. So whatever the leadership does or doesn't do, there are a whole
lot of external factors barrelling down the highway that are inescapable.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Leon said that while the Minister of
Finance, Nhlanhla Nene, has a very informed appreciation of how little is in
the cupboard, he doesn't believe that the rest of government necessarily shares
the same understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“The head of the government
prevaricates between the national development plan, which is a good thing, and
the national democratic revolution, throwing out concessions to unions and
everyone else,” Leon said. “But leadership is about making tough choices. When
you have good leadership the tough choices are made and you move forward. If
you don't, then you drift along. But you can't just drift along when you are so
dependent on external financing.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Leon noted that his three years as
the ambassador to Argentina gave him a solid understanding of how a country is
able to destroy itself both economically and politically. The case of nearby
Venezuala, which is one of the richest oil producers in the world yet still has
to import food, is another example.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">However, other Latin American
countries like Peru, Colombia and Chile have managed to avoid such disaster.
And their policies are worth taking note of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“Each used the crisis years to repair
their balance sheets, improve their governments, and create more
business-friendly environments,” Leon said. “And today they are among the
high-performing emerging market economies. So it’s no secret. Either we take
those examples and apply them, or we don't.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Malala expressed that one of the
vital parts to achieving this is forming a new understanding between
government, business and labour. And that also means that each of the three
entities has to provide better leadership than it is currently doing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“In a country where we have a 25%
unemployment rate by the narrow definition, you cannot say we're okay growing
at 1.9%,” Malala said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">He said that while political
leadership has been most prominently lacking, business and labour have equally
failed to offer direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Malala believes that there has to be
a push towards a conversation where these three critical role players in the
economy can talk without being afraid to voice any opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 140%; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Most of all though, what is needed is
implementation. Those at the top need to make firm decisions about what has to
be done and then there must be a cohesive drive to do it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 140%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“At one stage we were an emerging
market darling and now we are a laggard. Emerging markets themselves are less
than the flavour of the month,” Leon said. “When we had credit coming into this
country, we didn't use those good times to take advantage and now, in more
challenging circumstances, we are going to have a hard landing. I just hope we
will have the leadership to make the tough calls that are necessary.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-90198649244042670242014-10-09T16:30:00.000+02:002014-10-14T22:28:24.571+02:00The Big Read: Only government to blame for Nobel fallout<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">09 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon | Times Live<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">As a detribalised attorney, I
am pleased that, thanks to the Oscar Pistorius trial, so many lay people are
now on nodding terms with such esoterica from the realm of criminal law as mens
rea and dolus eventualis.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 4;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">“Folk in Hong Kong protesting
for democracy? Ukraine wanting Russia to leave it alone? Not on our agenda”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But it is from our civil law that we can take a concept that goes some
way towards finding the truth in the accusations and counter-accusations flying
between the mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond
Tutu and former president FW de Klerk (an interesting alliance) on the one
side, and the presidency on the other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The most recent verbal mortars were fired after the announcement last
week that the 14th World Summit of Nobel Laureates had been canned in Cape Town
and would relocate offshore. This unprecedented sanction, at least in our
post-apartheid brave democratic age, which was meant to end isolation, has been
imposed on us by some of the most admired people in the world. They have done
this because of the government's refusal to grant the Dalai Lama a visa to
attend the summit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The Roman Dutch mouthful eceptio doli generalis simply means that a defendant
can raise the defence that the plaintiff has not acted in good faith, or that
he cannot set up his own bad conduct, such as intimidation, to prosecute a
claim against someone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">For technical reasons back in 1988, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled
that it did not apply in South African law. But it is a handy term to divine
the truth around the Dalai Lama saga, perhaps the final nail in our claims to
be a country that acts as an independent sovereign, not as a client of China.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">It might also answer the question: do we still practise, not breach, the
famous Nelson Mandela 1993 formula that pinned our foreign policy to the mast
of "human rights"? On all current evidence, we do not, but let's see
who is telling the truth on this issue, not just relying on prior bad conduct
to assert a claim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In the Dalai Lama case, the president's spin doctor (by now he must be a
specialist surgeon in the dark arts of communications), Mac Maharaj, was
furiously unequivocal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">He slammed the mayor's statement (and by implication De Klerk's as well)
as "inaccurate and misleading" and stated that the government had
been informed by the Dalai Lama's office that he would not be attending the
summit. This meant the holy man was "thus effectively cancelling his visa
application", Maharaj triumphantly proclaimed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Well, as they say in the classics "you can't bulls**t a
bulls****er".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Entering the row next was Dave Steward, who knows a thing or two about
government communications, having headed the "Bureau for Information"
when PW Botha imposed his states of emergency in the 1980s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">From his current perch as head of the FW de Klerk Foundation, Steward
said Maharaj was guilty of a "terminological inexactitude" and
pointed out a simple fact: On September 4, the Dalai Lama's representative had
been contacted by an official at the Department of International Relations and
Cooperation [by telephone no doubt, and thus no danger of a paper trail] who
"had informed her that the Dalai Lama would not be granted a visa".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Only after this unwelcome news did he withdraw his visa application.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Talk about the exceptio doli, or relying on bad conduct to perfect your
claim, and there you have it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The letter that 14 Nobel laureates sent to President Jacob Zuma asking
that the visa be granted received no response, and certainly not the
"terminological inexactitude" cooked up later by Maharaj.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Case closed. Except of course, we do apply a human rights, rather than a
realpolitik, standard elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The ANC and the toy-town revolutionaries of its youth league are in full
cry sanctioning, boycotting and disinvesting from any organisation that dares
to stock chopped herring, or whatever, sourced from the gardens of
"apartheid" Israel. And if, as its ally Cosatu maintains, this should
include sanctioning the most cost-effective and medically reliable Israeli
circumcision device (after all, which country has practised this longer?) then
so be it, even at the cost of saving our own lives. Ideology comes first. Folk
in Hong Kong protesting for democracy? Ukraine wanting Russia to leave it
alone? Not on our agenda - wrong places, wrong opponents, wrong ideology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But thinking back on the high place in the world we occupied under
Mandela, this simply proves, as Christopher Hitchens noted, that when you fall
from a great height, the descent can be very swift.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span lang="en-ZA">•</span><span lang="en-US"> </span><span lang="en-US" style="font-style: italic;">Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela
(Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span><span lang="en-US"> </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><span lang="en-ZA" style="font-style: italic;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-86965485550156929552014-10-03T13:30:00.000+02:002014-10-07T08:28:08.240+02:00Nene cannot rely on parallel universe to balance books<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">03 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon |<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Business Day<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Many of the new finance
minister’s ministerial and party colleagues seem to derive their assumptions
from realm of science fiction, writes Tony Leon<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">WHEN former finance minister Trevor Manuel presented his medium-term
budget policy statements in Parliament, he used to adorn his speeches with
literary bells and whistles, quoting the likes of Ben Okri, before presenting
his numbers and forecasts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">New Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene is a decent and conscientious man but
far plainer spoken than Manuel. Financially, he also has a far worse set of
books to contend with. If so inclined, he could draw from a rich seam of
quotes, from Shakespeare to the Bible and even the unmentionable (for African
National Congress ears at least, in the post-Mbeki era) Margaret Thatcher to
spice up his prose when he presents his medium-term budget policy statement in
Parliament this month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s-a_Kx68Cak/VDOHwGaqrNI/AAAAAAAAAlU/6QVasw00vX8/s1600/NEne.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s-a_Kx68Cak/VDOHwGaqrNI/AAAAAAAAAlU/6QVasw00vX8/s1600/NEne.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nhlanhla Nene. Picture: TREVOR SAMSON</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Claudius’s lament in Hamlet that "when sorrows come, they come not
single spies but in battalions" is as good as any starting point for a
description of the bleak economic canvas on which Nene has to paint his
projection for the next three years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Our terms of trade have deteriorated sharply, and much worse than
expected, with the August trade deficit widening to R163bn (double the market
expectation), explicable by a sharp drop in exports of R77bn against a surge in
imports of about R93bn. SA is caught in the classic "double whammy", in
which currency weakness — the rand has been on the slide since 2009 — has not
led to export growth. As we import inflation, and financing the current account
deficit has become crucially dependent on foreign flows, the interest rate
needs to be competitive to compensate on both fronts, hence the rise in rates
in a year of very low growth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Wage rises not tethered to productivity increases hardly help, nor does
the surge in public sector jobs, which do nothing to allow us to export our way
out of difficulties. They simply increase Nene’s difficulties in balancing the
books with an unhealthy 5.4% current account deficit. This places us second
only to Turkey of the 45 countries whose economic and financial indicators are
published by The Economist. Further spending will just pile on the misery, and
tax increases are hardly an option, when economist Dawie Roodt recently
forecast a revenue shortfall of R15bn-R30bn, measured against the projections
in this year’s budget estimates.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Actually, the higher figure in Roodt’s estimate coincides almost exactly
with the figure the auditor-general identified as lost to unauthorised or
wasteful or irregular spending by government departments, which suggests state
failure of a vast magnitude, the rectification of which would go a long way to
assisting Nene in his balancing act.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In the unvarnished warning of Investec chief economist Annabel Bishop,
the once beneficent global economic environment has turned sharply against us,
especially the Chinese economy, that traditional anchor of our resource
exports: "As economic growth in China has moderated, commodity prices have
eased…. Should China experience further slowdown, the rand will likely weaken
further as commodity prices ease once again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">"Quite aside from tear-gassing pro-democracy protesters in Hong
Kong and ensuring that its client states like ours keep the Dalai Lama out, the
Chinese are involved in a massive attempt to reorientate their economic model
away from manufacturing and saving, towards consumption and services, causing a
very hard landing for economies such as our own. Especially when, as the
Financial Times advised recently, the most vulnerable emerging markets, in the
wake of the removal of quantitative easing (QE) and anticipated uptick in US
interest rates in the US … are those ill-prepared for the change in the
economic weather."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Here’s where the Bible comes in handy, although quoting Hebrew prophet
Joseph might be career-limiting for a minister given the anti-Israel rhetoric
of the ruling party. Still, back in the land of the pharaoh, Joseph famously
could interpret his master’s dream of seven lean cows devouring seven healthy
ones to mean that seven years of famine would follow seven years of abundance.
His prudent suggestion to fill the granaries in the boom times to compensate
for the lean period to follow not only made him the second-most powerful man in
ancient Egypt but also provided a clue for today’s policy makers. SA went in
the opposite direction, trying to spend its way out of its difficulties, not
saving for the proverbial lean years that are now upon us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">The smart money, so to speak, is now following emerging market economies
such as Mexico, Peru and Colombia, which were recently cited as having used the
resource boom and the QE years, which coincide with the biblical seven, to
increase their savings and reduce public debt. Our savings rate (about 13.5% of
gross domestic product) and public debt (more than 40% of GDP) mean we are not
in their company.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Enter Thatcher. She once famously said: "The problem with socialism
is that you eventually run out of other people’s money to spend." Here,
Nene is spoilt for choice. South African Airways has guzzled at the taxpayers’
feeding trough and now cannot publish its results unless it gets further state
aid. This is despite, perhaps because of, its addiction to bail-outs. In the
estimates of opposition MP Natasha Michael, the airline has received, over the
past two decades, "R16bn in bail-outs and has been subject to nine
turnaround strategies in 13 years". Further state assistance, she
suggests, would be tantamount to "madness". Perhaps professional
aviation and commercial management would be the ticket, but, like Thatcher, any
suggestion of reviewing or cancelling the ruinous cadre deployment strategy is
off limits. There was something rather touching, were the track record not so
disastrous, in the proffered solution of Public Enterprises Minister Lynne
Brown to the almost across-the-board rot and ruin at state enterprises.
"An interministerial task team has been meeting for months," she
said. Well, that should help.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I went this week to visit Nene in his Pretoria office. I was reminded
that he is down to earth, has a realistic appreciation of the enormous
challenges, surrounds himself with smart advisers and actually goes around the
country, from boardrooms to the factory floor, to get a proper appreciation of
the real economy and its ailments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But if Nene is admirably grounded, many of his ministerial and party
colleagues seem to derive their assumptions from the realm of science fiction.
In the movie Star Trek, the laws of nature are different, and its citizens
inhabit a parallel universe where the laws of motion and gravity do not apply.
Our local inhabitants of this charmed planet are to be found everywhere. ANC
policy head Jeff Radebe has decreed that the most important issue facing SA is
the "power of monopoly capital". Given that the Post Office has not
delivered letters for the past month and Gauteng residents are crippled by
water and power cuts, evidence here on planet Earth suggests he could look
closer to home, and inside his government, for the real challenges.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Another star of the parallel universe is ANC secretary-general Gwede
Mantashe, who advises that the lack of investment by the private sector is
evidence of a "lack of patriotism". Back in the real world, it
relates to a lack of confidence and the failure of the government to provide
investor certainty. The least vulnerable emerging market countries are those
that used the fat years to improve poor business climates. We have gone in the
opposite direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Nene’s speech will perhaps reveal that, contrary to sci-fi movies, the
laws of gravity do apply, and you can’t defy them forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">• Follow Leon on Twitter: </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="https://twitter.com/tonyleonsa" target="_blank"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: blue; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">@TonyLeonSA</span></i></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-10823547145705950712014-09-28T16:30:00.000+02:002014-10-01T23:47:18.962+02:00Populism is the wrong solution, but it might rattle the right cages<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">28 Sep 2014 |
Tony Leon | Sunday Times<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wMYAuHUWPQg/VCx115mdliI/AAAAAAAAAlA/76gnnfyFX0w/s1600/AJL%2Bpic.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wMYAuHUWPQg/VCx115mdliI/AAAAAAAAAlA/76gnnfyFX0w/s1600/AJL%2Bpic.JPG" /></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Most Ninety-one
year olds would probably consider it an achievement to get up in the morning,
have a cup of tea and watch television. But Dr Henry Kissenger, former US
Secretary of State, decided it was a good age to produce a new book, in this
case a 432- page door stopper entitled,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History.
</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Actually, as
Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, noted in his review of Dr
Kissenger’s tone it could more accurately be entitled” World in Disorder”. Mad
jihadists of the Islamic State beheading western journalists, a very reluctant
(‘ambivalent’ is Kissenger’s phrase) US hyper-power re-engaging in a war in the
Middle East in response; Russia throwing out the post -cold war settlement by invading
neighbouring Ukraine, Israelis and Palestinians fighting an endless conflict, China
upsetting its neighbours, Japan militarising, Iran nuclearizing, and anarchic
permafrost settling upon the once hopeful Arab Spring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In West Africa the once contained and rare
Ebola virus has leapfrogged borders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
has mutated from an epidemic<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to a
life-shattering endemic disease which, according to this week’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>forecast of the US Centre for Disease Control
and Infection could get far worse by orders of magnitude killing hundreds of
thousands of people and ‘embedding itself in the human population for years to
come’.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Difficult
indeed, in these hard times, to be optimistic about the world and human
conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But according to the
well-credentialed contrarian Matt Ridley, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Rational Optimist</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>there’s
actually more realistic hope about than at any other time in human<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>history.”The world might have gone to hell”
he writes, “but it is getting much better”: the average person (meaning someone
somewhere in the poor world ) lives about a third longer than he or she did
fifty years ago and buries two thirds fewer of his or her children and the
amount of food available per continent has risen dramatically,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>so that famine, once a semi-permanent
condition in the third world is in fact today rare ‘despite a doubling of the
population since the early 1960’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But even if,
objectively, the human condition has improved, the body politic appears
diseased. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The institutions designed to
improve the global order seem stuck in the past and unfitted for the present,
never mind the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The United
Nations is paralysed to act on the new threats to the planet such as climate change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The World trade Organisation meant to
harmonise global trade abandoned the Doha round after a decade of wrangling .
The International Monetary Fund’s inability to reflect the economic realities
of 2014 rather than 1945, has seen the rising powers of the South establish its
own vehicle for development in the form of the BRICS Bank. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And when it
comes to national politics, we see the rise of populism practically everywhere:
nearly half of Scotland last week surrendered to its siren call, the
once-fascist National Front in France is on the up and up, and even that bell
weather of humane social democracy Sweden has seen the rise of nativist racist
parties. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as Philip Collins<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wrote in The Times what we are witnessing in
the world is ‘’the bacterium of anti-politics”. When you give up on traditional
parties bringing real change to your life or the national condition you embrace
the virus of anti-establishment organisations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This rather dark
global lens was given local resonance in a recent talk at the Cape Town Press
Club by author –journalist Ray Harltey. He was speaking in the wake of the
charm offensive launched in its rather traditional confines the week before by
uber-populist Julius Malema. Far from infantalising politics as he is accused
of doing, Juju had played his audience<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and fine -tuned his message with the assurance of a political
Stradivarius. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The far quieter
but equally assured Harltey reminded us of the vast numbers of South Africans
who have succumbed to the virus of anti-politics by opting out of the system
entirely: of the 36m South Africans who could have registered and voted in the
last election only 18m actually did so and of that total, the ruling ANC
received only 11m votes, a far more modest haul than its apparent supremacy
suggests. This led former parliamentarian, Dr Denis Worall to conclude, that
while the “lords of Luthuli House” (to borrow the phrase of the DA Chief Whip)
fixate on how to fix Malema, good and proper, we should actually thank Malema
for ‘’making Parliament more relevant.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">After all when
did you last hear the ANC Secretary General fussing about ‘’the dignity of
parliament” as Gwede Mantahse recently did? When in fact did the ruling party
last worry about parliament at all? Populism and its nasty noise and tactics
can do much damage, but perhaps in the corroded corridors of power in South
Africa, it might also be rejuvenating. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-56477975843529495532014-09-25T18:30:00.000+02:002014-09-30T18:31:15.476+02:00The Big Read: The centre cannot hold<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">25 Sep 2014 | Tony Leon | Times Live<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">I saw Alex Salmond, the
"loser" of last week's exciting Scottish independence referendum, in
action when I went to Britain in May 1997 to observe the country's
shape-shifting general election campaign, which resulted in the Labour Party
sweeping out 18 years of Conservative Party rule.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">"It was as though David
Cameron's gift box had been wrapped by Pandora herself" <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Tony Blair would do nothing in that election to alarm "Middle
England" and provided carefully scripted sound bites of thudding dullness
as he marched to power. But it was during a campaign stop that Salmond -
leading the then obscure Scottish National Party, with only three seats in
Westminster - aptly captured, in his "cheeky chappy" way, the
haplessness of the incompetent administration of Prime Minister John Major.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">He declared that attacking the Tories was "as difficult as shooting
fish in a barrel", before reeling off a list of their perceived sins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">His party's number of seats doubled in that election, although he could
only have dreamed then that 10 years later he would be installed as first
minister of Scotland, a post equivalent to our provincial premiers but with
powers that make the local equivalents drool with envy. The Scottish
parliament, under the very generous terms of Britain's devolution arrangements
enacted in 1998, controls its own policies and practices on law and order,
health and social services, the environment and education and, under the
Scotland Act of 2012, controls 10% of its income tax revenue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Though not even the "prophet" TB Joshua could have divined the
10% margin by which Scottish voters would reject Salmond's proposal for
Scotland to go it alone as an independent state, a few weeks ago a poll
suggested that he would, in fact, win and that the 307-year-old United Kingdom
would split apart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Prime Minister David Cameron, alarmed by this poll, then did what his
stockbroker father's profession knows best to do when the market starts to
slide: when it's time to panic, make sure that you panic first.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Two weeks before the first vote was cast, and backed by the leaders of
the two main opposition parties, Cameron offered further concessions to keep
Scotland in the union. With an unspecified package called devo max, he
basically made it clear that, other than reserving foreign affairs and defence
for Westminster, Scotland could pretty much do its own thing if it stayed in
the UK.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">But as though his gift box had been wrapped by Pandora herself, he would
win on Thursday only to find that he had unwound the basis of Britain's
constitution. On the basis of the sauce for the Scottish goose is sauce for the
English and Welsh gander (never mind Northern Ireland), it became apparent that
similar powers would be demanded by the rest of the kingdom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">So while Salmond, in an act rarely seen in these parts, took personal
responsibility for the failure of his campaign by announcing that in November
he would quit his government and leadership posts, in fact he won much of the
argument and more of the power, even as he lost the poll.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Coincidentally, Friday's high-drama announcements in Edinburgh happened
on the day on which the South African Police Service announced its annual crime
statistics.</span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">For Western Cape, it was mostly an unremittingly grim, gruesome picture,
with murders up 12.8%, aggravated robbery increasing 16.7% and rises in car
thefts and drug-related crimes.</span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Strangely enough, in terms of his extremely limited powers if not his
title, the province has a cabinet-ranked MEC for safety and security, the aptly
named Dan Plato. But in comparison with his opposite number in Scotland (or any
province in Canada, for example), in constitutional terms, he lives on another
planet, able to do little more than issue statements of concern.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Despite the opposition controlling this province there is little it can
do in terms of innovative policing to change anything. Power is exercised from
Pretoria.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Once upon a time in South Africa, the ANC had a compelling slogan,
"The people shall govern". After 20 years of its highly centralised
rule, one could today add the caveat "except where the ANC does not".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">And so any ideas of localism or devolution are not entertained.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Even the lowly matter of the province commissioning an inquiry into the
multiple policing failures of crime-infested Khayelitsha (one of the province's
hot spots) was wrung from the national authorities only on pain of an adverse
court order. And, of course, Pretoria is free to ignore its recommendations.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">In this age of personal devolution obtained from the click of a computer
mouse or an app of a smartphone the world, and not just Scotland, is moving
inexorably in the direction of "local is lekker". The idea that
"one size fits all" will soon go the way of the woolly mammoth.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Is Pretoria listening?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">More pertinently, does it care?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">•</span><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> <i><span lang="EN-US">Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on
Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook:</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/TonyLeonSA"><i><span style="color: blue;">facebook.com/TonyLeonSA</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6241358340397777549.post-77871356226357746722014-09-09T09:10:00.001+02:002014-09-09T09:10:41.173+02:00Tony Leon shares Mandela moments<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VaGJl8DVxiI" width="480"></iframe><br />
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