Goals have little to do with soccer

Before this week’s blood-curdling threats issued against me by the Justice for Hlophe Alliance force me into the obscurity of a witness-protection programme, I thought that, like the nation, now in thrall to the Confederations Cup, I’d switch attention from politics to soccer.

But I’ve discovered that there is more than a stitch or two that threads together two of our nation’s, and the world’s, favourite pastimes.
And I’ve also learnt another of the perils confronting the apprentice weekly columnist: the tyranny of the deadline. This prevents me from knowing whether yesterday’s clash between Bafana Bafana and Spain reclaimed our national honour or not.

But last Sunday’s opening between our boys and Iraq resulted in what that country’s latter-day conqueror, George W Bush, would have called an “underwhelming” performance.
We stuttered to a goalless draw, and our team ignored the advice of the Sunday Times’s soccer maven, Carlos Amato, who had warned them that nothing short of “Zen concentration” would achieve a win.
Presumably, the reason for South Africa not attaining the single-minded concentration demanded by 12th-century Japanese Buddhists was that their attention was elsewhere.

It brought to mind a withering put-down I once heard of the talented, but underperforming Pakistani cricket team: “They are more preoccupied with issues in the change room than with the state of play on the field.”
One of the change room issues apparently occupying the minds of our players was a demand for R34-million from Safa, should they win the eight-team tournament. This led sports writer Mninawa Ntloko to harrumph in Business Day that “Bafana’s shameless greed and blatant opportunism” could prove to be “the team’s undoing.”
Whether their backdown from this “ransom attempt”, or opening-night nerves, or some other malady explained our disappointing loss of mojo is not known.
But, whatever perils await the Iraqi team back home, the advantage of post-Saddam Iraq is that their soccer team does not have to reckon with Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic elder son, Uday.

Apparently, a performance not to his liking could result in torture sessions, which included “ritual head-shavings”, “punching and slapping”, “sessions of kicking a concrete ball”, and “fitness work-outs that lasted 12 hours”.
But the international spotlight now shining on South Africa for the Confederations Cup has encouraged other sectors to ventilate their demands, and use the tournament as leverage to enforce them.

This week, the beleaguered and leaderless SABC was threatened by its unions with a blackout of Confed match coverage unless pay demands in excess of 12% were met.
Quite how the national broadcaster — R800-million in the red and seeking a taxpayer-funded bailout of R2-billion — intends to even pay its proffered 8.5% increase is an accounting mystery, a little like the creative book-keeping of our newly enthroned Ponzi king, Barry Tannenbaum.
A union official put the blackmail in straightforward terms: “No agreement, no Confederations Cup. .. a complete blackout.”
Doubtless, the cash will be stumped up, and the tournament will be televised.
Another no-show at the tournament was the much-anticipated Rea Vaya, the first phase of the bus rapid transport system.
The plug was pulled due to an election promise of President Jacob Zuma. Undoubtedly, its on-time introduction during the cup would have unleashed taxi mayhem on the streets.

Whatever the merits of the so-called Bafana “mercenaries” and other bandwagon climbers, the world of soccer is actually dominated by stupendous amounts of money. Three days before the Confed kickoff, Real Madrid set a world record when it paid £80-million for Manchester United’s Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo — making Bafana’s pay claim look like peanuts.
And this signing came just days after the club had paid £58-million to acquire Kaka, now on display here for Brazil, from AC Milan.
Those two transfers approximate half of the R4-billion national sports budget of South Africa.

Interestingly, Real Madrid was described by soccer writer Simon Kuper as “a populist democracy”. Its recently returned president, Florentino Perez, was elected by the club’s 70000 members.

The club, rather like a country, has no shareholders, only members. As Kuper explained, “he bought Ronaldo to please them”.
As I was totting up the revenue figures of Real and the other nine richest soccer clubs, all European (I arrived at the total of € 2.5 -billion), I came across a report stating that the world’s leading hunger fighter, the United Nations World Food Programme, had less than € 1.1-billion in its budget, and was obliged to slash its programmes and, among other cuts, suspend food distribution to 600000 seriously hungry people in northern Uganda.
As the old banking advert used to say, “It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

*Published Sunday Times 21 June 2009

Lesson for SA textiles sector in the fate of an American icon*

TWO features of power and affluence stand out from my Durban boyhood. The one was textile mogul Philip Frame, and the other was the swanky American car, the Pontiac.
Frame’s Waverley brand literally blanketed the country — protected from competition by the high tariff walls and the policy of import substitution, which was the apartheid state’s quid for Frame’s quo of locating his factories in border areas designed to keep black labour far from the white heartland. In those times, there was little talk of trade liberalisation.
The Pontiac, a far more exotic sighting than a Frame blanket, fed schoolboy fantasies of American excess . The reality of SA was more accurately located in the satanic mills of the Frame Textile group, where in 1973 ultra-exploited black workers defied the law and organised a strike. Frame was unmoved. But the protest galvanised the formation, and ultimate legalisation, of modern trade unions in SA.
There are no end of ironies in the fact that today the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (Sactwu) has, via its investment arm (nogal) a significant stake in Frame parent company Seardel , and thus in Frametex, as the fast-fading textile empire is today called. Philip Frame had access to the National Party government via his long-standing membership of the prime minister’s economic advisory council. Sactwu’s influence with today’s government is even more direct. Its outgoing secretary-general, Ebrahim Patel, is now the minister for economic development.
He and Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies appear eager to use Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) funds to bail out Frame, which is bleeding R30m a month, and will be closed unless it receives government life-support.
This is where the Pontiac comes in. This uncompetitive icon will cease to exist. It’s part of the price the US government has extracted for its infinitely larger (perhaps ultimately R500bn) bail-out of the US car industries. At General Motors, CE Rick Wagoner was replaced; 13 factories will close by next year ; 21000 jobs will be lost, and the powerful United Auto Workers Union has had to accept restrictions on employee entitlements. This stringent package was described by Michigan governor Jennifer Grenholm as “tough love”.
Actually, “tough love” was the exact formula Trevor Manuel prescribed for the South African textile industry in 2004. He later told Parliament “the country cannot protect uncompetitive industries from destruction through global exposure”. Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni was even more hawkish. He opposed the three-year quota on cheap Chinese imports when it commenced in 2006. He told MPs there was not “a dog’s chance” that the industry would become more competitive in the period, having failed to modernise or globalise in the preceding 12 years. Protection through quotas would simply raise consumer prices and fuel inflation.
Well, despite our government obliging the Chinese on the Dalai Lama, their government was decidedly disobliging last December when it declined to renew the quota restrictions on textile imports. The jobs massacre that followed and Frame’s proposed closure proved the point made in a study on, of all things, a 3- pack of women’s panties. The Chinese version retails in SA for 10 times less than the South African equivalent. But now Davies, a softer touch than Manuel, says there is “a strategic importance” in preventing local clothing manufacturers from being dependent on imports.
He did not elaborate on this curious proposition, and fed the impression of a policy being made on the hoof, in response to insider pressure. Leaving aside the glaring conflict of interest between Patel and Sactwu, the government is sitting with the Harvard report. It warns against an industrial policy which seeks to pick and predetermine “ winners”. But if the government bails out Frame, despite the IDC finding no “economic merit” for doing so, it will be backing a loser. Of course, there are 1700 jobs to be considered and the retention of plant and capacity. But, as industry experts point out, there are 600 companies in the sector — all exhibiting the stress fractures and ailments consequent to the recession and the cheap imports. There has been a 46,7% rise in all corporate bankruptcies in the first quarter of this year, compared with last year. How will Davies and Patel determine which is “of strategic importance”, which are “too big to fail” and when does the government apply the laws of moral hazard? What about the most vexed issue of a bail-out: “privatising profit (for the company) and socialising losses (for the taxpayer)?”
A bail-out policy requires transparency, thought, and fairness. It needs to account for, and answer to, the whole of society — from workers, to consumers, to competitors and to our global commitments. It’s a tall and difficult order. And some Pontiacs will get ditched in the process.

* Column in Business Day, Friday 29 May 2009

Letter from Washington - First Week Here as a Visiting Fellow, Cato Institute

Five days is a lifetime in Washington DC, a city that is as much a metaphor as it is the capital of the world’s only, but fast declining, hyper-power.

I had barely shaken the jetlag out of my eyes last Thursday night, when I forced myself to stay awake for the much-hyped debate between the nation’s two Vice Presidential candidates. The expectations were both huge and diminished: would Republican Governor Sarah Palin manage to stutter out a few comprehensible sentences? Would she fall off the stage? In the event, the nation’s now most famous “hockey mom” managed a performance, which exceeded the expectations of this Samuel Johnson sort (“She does it exceedingly badly, but the wonder is that she does it at all”).

Palin’s shtick was a bazooka assault on the city which is to be my home for the next three months. She vowed throughout the debate insistently to “change”, “clean up”, “fix”, “reform” and “shake everything up” in Washington.

The following evening I attended a swanky party in the toniest DC neighbourhood. Our hostess, Katharine Weymouth, is both the granddaughter of Washington grandee, the late Katharine Graham, and currently publisher of the Washington Post – which happens to be the family newspaper and one of the very elite symbols that Palin so disparages.

My interest in the event is both political and anthropological: the party is the launch event of a searing book on the dark but hugely consequential vice presidency of Dick Cheney (“The Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency” by Barton Gellman). Having had a dozen or more book launches of my own recently in South Africa, I can only commend Mrs. Graham-Weymouth’s event: the Chardonnay was superior and the canapés spectacular – no doubt confirming every prejudice of Governor Palin and her constituency. Although I couldn’t sight a single Republican at the party, most of the marquee democrats were strangely subdued despite the extraordinary news just in that Senator John McCain had pulled out of campaigning in the State of Michigan which he had previously described as a “must-win”. The cause of the sombre tones was Congress’s decision to eventually nod through the $700 billion rescue plan. Few thought that despite its size it would soothe the global financial system and provide the “stick of dynamite” which Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson claimed would unfreeze the stuck credit markets. As it happened, the sceptics were proved right by Monday morning: the credit contagion continued to rage like wild fire and on Wall Street the Dow dropped a frightening 800 points, while stock prices collapsed around the world.

Sometime Democratic Presidential candidate (back in 1992) and Bill Clinton’s Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbit advised me that the only thing which could save McCain at this late stage was “a Hail Mary pass”. I could not confess to this suave Washington fixture that I was utterly ignorant of American football argot, but on subsequent inquiry I discovered that the term relates to a forward pass made in utter desperation, with only a small chance of success, at the end of a game.

The very next day Sarah Palin threw such a long shot at Barack Obama by reminding a fired-up audience in Florida of his links to William “Bill” Ayers, a founder of the 1960’s radical terrorist group “The Weatherman Underground”. In Palin’s folksy vitriol this amounted to the Democratic frontrunner “palling around with terrorists”.

But this is one “Hail Mary” that doesn’t seem to connect. Because while the Republicans are desperate to change the subject from the economy (which the voting public holds them, and especially the toxic presidency of George W. Bush responsible for) most American voters cite the collapse of Wall Street, and the collateral damage to main street America as the seminal issue. Indeed, this is arguably the biggest economic event in world history for the past eighty years. Just put this crisis in perspective: Americans (who largely acquire stocks and shares for the purpose of retirement) have lost a combined $1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks. More than one million people have lost their homes in the last two years and one million more are expected to lose their homes in the next year or so. All this makes it a hard, if not impossible, sale for the Republican belief in deregulation, unfettered free markets and its associations with some of the “villains” of Wall Street.

So is the race for the American presidency over? Based on the polls it would appear as though McCain’s candidacy is “as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill” to quote democrat strategist Howard Wolfson. And while McCain’s campaign has come back from the dead more than once before in this electoral season, his appearance in Tuesday night Presidential debate with Barack Obama was certainly no game changer. Sadly, he almost looked half-dead: waxen and wooden, desperately trying to churn out some lines stuffed into his head by his campaign operatives including the, extraordinary suggestion (from a Republican, at least) that his administration would buy up all the bad home loans in America and renegotiate mortgage repayments.
Ronald Reagan must have spun in his grave.

In fact, some of McCain’s solutions were more substantive than Obama’s light fare. But the Democrat projected a fluency and ease which cast him, ironically, as the more seasoned and reliable hand on the tiller. Given the perfect economic storm now raging, such reassuring poise is probably the game winner.