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Archive for the ‘South Africa’ Category

Jhb Toll Gates “A Done Deal” (Ndebele) … duh really?

19 Aug

This latest article regarding the toll gates (below) that have been built around Johannesburg once again shows the utter arrogance of the ANC. “It’s a done deal”, “The tolls are there”, “the decisions have been taken” …. does the Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele really think the tax payers of this country are STUPID? obviously he does. I have known for over 3 years since this process started that this was a DONE DEAL. From the very beginning it was a done deal and no opposition or public comment would ever change that. That’s the way the ANC does business, they want something and they make sure they get it regardless of what anyone else has to say. I can say one thing, this toll gate system is going to cripple the economy of Johannesburg and surrounding areas. Food prices are going to skyrocket and just about anything that travels by road is going to sky rocket in price.

Once again this ANC government has managed to introduce yet another tax to punish primarily white taxpayers, how lovely. The constitution of this country forbids racial profiling, it forbids discrimination, it says everyone is equal but we have yet to see any such a thing come out of ANC mouths. Add to this the recent statement from Desmond Tutu saying that rich whites should be taxed more, literally to keep punishing them for Apartheid and you certainly know who he’s speaking for. How UTTERLY SHAMEFUL for a supposed “man of the cloth” to utter such words, he is not an archbishop’s ass. So far our Constitution is nothing more than idle words on useless paper and its clear that from now till the end of time the ANC will keep conjuring new taxes to keep filling their own pockets, they certainly are not doing this to help their own people, the last 17 years has proven that the ANC only wish to line their own pockets.

Article reads (from Buanews):

Pretoria – Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele says the new toll gate system on major Gauteng roads is a done deal and that it is just a matter of time before it is implemented.

“It’s done. The tolls are there, the money has been spent and decisions have been taken,” Ndebele said at an Infrastructure Development Cluster media briefing in Cape Town on Thursday.

The tolls between Pretoria and Johannesburg are expected to be up and running in the next five months.

Last week, Cabinet approved the revised fee structure for the toll system, instructing Ndebele to effect the approval in terms of the SA National Roads Agency Limited and National Roads Act.

While the implementation of the system has sparked fierce criticism and opposition from motorists, Ndebele is adamant that the user pay principle, which he said was common in all major and emerging economies across the world, will be enforced.

“The debate about nationalising the department cannot be encouraged … You cannot expect someone in Lusikisiki (in the Eastern Cape) to pay for a road that is in Johannesburg. So the issue of nationalising the department is not in the picture at all,” he said in response to calls that the debt incurred as a result of provincial toll gates should be paid for from the taxpayers’ purse.

The South African National Roads Agency Limited had borrowed more than R20 billion to roll out the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project and has introduced the toll system to repay the loan.
Motorcycles would pay 24 cents a kilometre, light motor vehicles 40 cents, medium vehicles R1, and “longer” vehicles R2 a kilometre.

In addition to the 31% e-tag discount, other discounts applicable would be the time of day discount available to all vehicles, and a frequent user discount for motorcycles and light motor vehicles fitted with an e-tag.

Qualifying commuter taxis and buses would be exempted entirely, a decision Ndebele said was taken to avoid the costs being passed to commuters.

Meanwhile, the minister also announced that his department and the National Treasury were in talks to create a ‘rural transport grant’ as part of efforts to speed up improvements in the public transport system of the country’s rural areas. Such a grant would also serve as a long term commitment to the country’s public transport strategy as adopted by government.

“With regard to the improvement of strategic roads and implementation of the Road Infrastructure Strategic Framework of South Africa, National Treasury and the Transport Department  have rolled out the provincial road maintenance grant to the value of more than R22 billion,” he said.

More than R6 billion of the money, meant to eradicate potholes across the country, has already been allocated to provinces, with Ndebele saying individual premiers were expected to outline their spending on the projects in a meeting to take place in Cape Town next week.

“I am meeting with them and each premier will have to say where and how the money was spent to improve the condition of the roads and if people were employed, how many.”

The funding is on top of the R30 billion that government is spending over the next three years to upgrade the country’s ageing rail system.  – BuaNews

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

Joburg Metro Cops are USELESS and LAZY (Hendrik Potgieter Road)

04 Jul

Every so often I have the “pleasure” of taking a drive down Hendrik Potgieter Road which runs through Featherbrooke, Ruimsig, Strubens Valley and Hillfox and every drive is filled with frustrations at the lack of law abiding drivers who use this road on a daily basis. In 5 years of driving this road I have yet to ever see the Joburg Metro Cops actually prosecute someone for a moving violation.

In just one drive on Hendrik Potgieter Road a week ago I witnessed over 40 moving violations just going one way and another 50 or so going back home. In both directions I never encountered one JHB Metro cop anywhere … not one in sight.The only time I have ever seen Joburg Metro Cops on Hendrik Potgieter is when they rock up, seven vehicles at a time and conduct random pullovers checking vehicles and drivers for licensing. This is always done on a section of the road where the officers can hide in the comfortable shade of some trees but almost every day you can drive on Hendrik Potgieter and seldom will you ever see a Joburg Metro Cop prosecute someone for a moving violation.

The types of moving violations I witnessed in just one day are as follows:
- Vehicles using the left hand emergency lane for overtaking
- Vehicles using right hand turning lanes for going straight
- Vehicles regarding a red traffic light as permission to keep driving through
- Taxi’s using left hand turning lanes as places to stop and alight passengers
- Sand & Stone Supplier Trucks dropping sand and stone all over the road
- Emergency lane used to pass large queues of vehicles who are all abiding by the law

These kinds of violations happen every minute of the day on this road and it leads to a great deal of frustration for those who choose to abide by the law and follow traffic signals and road markings. The problem is that one driver sets a bad example and 10 follow him thinking they also have permission to transgress the law and because of the total lack of presence of any Joburg Metro Cops these problems are now starting to spiral out of control and violating traffic signals and road markings seems to be something that everyone thinks is OK to do.

Just spend 30 minutes at 5 in the afternoon at the point where Hendrik Potgieter crosses the N14 highway. Here you will see at least 5 vehicles at every change of the traffic light using the right hand turning lane as permission to cut into the long queue of traffic moving straight. You could spend 2 hours at this traffic light during peak hours and you will not see a Joburg Metro cop doing anything about it. You may see one pass this intersection on his way elsewhere but you will NOT see him stop and deal with these people who transgress the law and cause a great deal of frustration for other law abiding citizens.

As far as the trucks owned by construction companies or sand & stone suppliers who constantly drop sand and stone all over the roads, this not only leads to frustration but actual damage to people’s vehicles. I’ve personally had two windscreens smashed on Hendrik Potgieter Road from stones thrown up by other vehicles and I can bet there are thousands of people a month who go through the same thing. These companies are getting off scott free and instead the vehicle owner has to pay an excess to his insurance company to get a new windscreen in his vehicle. If Joburg Metro were pulling these trucks off all day every day and issuing the company with a fine that HURTS we’ll quickly see an end to this kind of blatant disregard for our roads.

Many articles criticizing Joburg Metro have been written in the last 15 years but it seems they continue to do as they please and instead of dealing with moving violations (part of their job) they continue to choose the easy work to do, like sitting around in large groups where they can chat with their friends and pull over cars to check for licensing and to collect bribes. But actually asking them to patrol this road 24 hours a day and to set an example by prosecuting those who clearly transgress the law and set a bad example is asking too much of our public safety workers.

 

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

Ma se Kar – Ma se MOER !!! (Learn to Park Dumbass)

16 May

While visiting a local mall the other day I was once again reminded just how many ARROGANT and IGNORANT people there are out there who just do not give a damn about how they happen to inconvenience other drivers. This was a perfect moment to take a photo of this car who simply could not park inside two white lines. This kind of person the world can do without.

masekar gp Ma se kar

Outstanding parking from MASEKAR GP

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

South Africa: Only a matter of time before the bomb explodes

08 Mar

by Moeletsi Mbeki: Author, political commentator and entrepreneur.

I can predict when SA’s “Tunisia Day” will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China estimates that its current minerals-intensive industrialisation phase will be concluded.

For SA, this will mean the African National Congress (ANC) government will have to cut back on social grants, which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China’s current industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of SA’s minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes.

The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkerings with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail. The ANC leaders are like a group of children playing with a hand grenade. One day one of them will figure out how to pull out the pin and everyone will be killed.

A famous African liberation movement, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, after tinkering for 30 years, pulled the grenade pin by cancelling an election in 1991 that was won by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front. In the civil war that ensued, 200000 people were killed.

The former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, once commented that whoever thought that the ANC could rule SA was living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Why was Thatcher right? In the 16 years of ANC rule, all the symptoms of a government out of its depth have grown worse.
Life expectancy has declined from 65 years to 53 years since the ANC came to power;
In 2007, SA became a net food importer for the first time in its history;
The elimination of agricultural subsidies by the government led to the loss of 600000 farm workers’ jobs and the eviction from the commercial farming sector of about 2,4-million people between 1997 and 2007; and
The ANC stopped controlling the borders, leading to a flood of poor people into SA, which has led to conflicts between SA’s poor and foreign African migrants.
What should the ANC have done, or be doing?

The answer is quite straightforward. When they took control of the government in 1994, ANC leaders should have: identified what SA’s strengths were; identified what SA’s weaknesses were; and decided how to use the strengths to minimise and/or rectify the weaknesses.

A wise government would have persuaded the skilled white and Indian population to devote some of their time — even an hour a week — to train the black and coloured population to raise their skill levels.

What the ANC did instead when it came to power was to identify what its leaders and supporters wanted. It then used SA’s strengths to satisfy the short-term consumption demands of its supporters. In essence, this is what is called black economic empowerment (BEE).

BEE promotes a number of extremely negative socioeconomic trends in our country. It promotes a class of politicians dependent on big business and therefore promotes big business’s interests in the upper echelons of government. Second, BEE promotes an anti-entrepreneurial culture among the black middle class by legitimising an environment of entitlement. Third, affirmative action, a subset of BEE, promotes incompetence and corruption in the public sector by using ruling party allegiance and connections as the criteria for entry and promotion in the public service, instead of having tough public service entry examinations.

Let’s see where BEE, as we know it today, actually comes from. I first came across the concept of BEE from a company, which no longer exists, called Sankor. Sankor was the industrial division of Sanlam and it invented the concept of BEE.

The first purpose of BEE was to create a buffer group among the black political class that would become an ally of big business in SA. This buffer group would use its newfound power as controllers of the government to protect the assets of big business.

The buffer group would also protect the modus operandi of big business and thereby maintain the status quo in which South African business operates. That was the design of the big conglomerates.

Sanlam was soon followed by Anglo American. Sanlam established BEE vehicle Nail; Anglo established Real Africa, Johnnic and so forth. The conglomerates took their marginal assets, and gave them to politically influential black people, with the purpose, in my view, not to transform the economy but to create a black political class that is in alliance with the conglomerates and therefore wants to maintain the status quo of our economy and the way in which it operates.

But what is wrong with protecting SA’s conglomerates?

Well, there are many things wrong with how conglomerates operate and how they have structured our economy.
The economy has a strong built-in dependence on cheap labour;
It has a strong built-in dependence on the exploitation of primary resources;
It is strongly unfavourable to the development of skills in our general population;
It has a strong bias towards importing technology and economic solutions; and
It promotes inequality between citizens by creating a large, marginalised underclass.
Conglomerates are a vehicle, not for creating development in SA but for exploiting natural resources without creating in-depth, inclusive social and economic development, which is what SA needs. That is what is wrong with protecting conglomerates.

The second problem with the formula of BEE is that it does not create entrepreneurs. You are taking political leaders and politically connected people and giving them assets which, in the first instance, they don’t know how to manage. So you are not adding value. You are faced with the threat of undermining value by taking assets from people who were managing them and giving them to people who cannot manage them. BEE thus creates a class of idle rich ANC politicos.

My quarrel with BEE is that what the conglomerates are doing is developing a new culture in SA — not a culture of entrepreneurship, but an entitlement culture, whereby black people who want to go into business think that they should acquire assets free, and that somebody is there to make them rich, rather than that they should build enterprises from the ground.

But we cannot build black companies if what black entrepreneurs look forward to is the distribution of already existing assets from the conglomerates in return for becoming lobbyists for the conglomerates.

The third worrying trend is that the ANC-controlled state has now internalised the BEE model. We are now seeing the state trying to implement the same model that the conglomerates developed.

What is the state distributing? It is distributing jobs to party faithful and social welfare to the poor. This is a recipe for incompetence and corruption, both of which are endemic in SA. This is what explains the service delivery upheavals that are becoming a normal part of our environment.

So what is the correct road SA should be travelling?

We all accept that a socialist model, along the lines of the Soviet Union, is not workable for SA today. The creation of a state-owned economy is not a formula that is an option for SA or for many parts of the world. Therefore, if we want to develop SA instead of shuffling pre-existing wealth, we have to create new entrepreneurs, and we need to support existing entrepreneurs to diversify into new economic sectors.

Mbeki is the author of Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing. This article forms part of a series on transformation supplied by the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

State of the Nation – How Zuma and the ANC intend to “create” jobs in South Africa

18 Feb

In Pres Zuma’s State of the Nation address given last week, Zuma and the ANC have once again promised to create many jobs in the coming financial year. There’s one good reason for this and for any political party, if you create jobs you’re the good guy and there’s a good chance you’ll get voted back into office.

But how easy is it creating jobs?

To be frank, not so easy. This often involves government taking on huge infrastructure improvement projects which do create jobs but for the most part these jobs are all temporary and when the contracts finish so do the jobs. We saw this with the building of soccer world cup stadia around South Africa which cost the taxpayers Billions of Rands and we’ve seen this with the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Toll Project too which has also cost the South African taxpayer Billions of Rands and will cost many more Billions to come in the form of toll road taxes. BUT all the jobs created by these projects are now almost over and we also sometimes end up with white elephants costing the taxpayer …. so just how does Pres Zuma and his ANC comrades promise to create jobs?

One way is to create them out of existing unregistered jobs, and the ANC already has one such plan in motion.

Instead of creating actual jobs, the ANC is sending officials to parts of South Africa, particularly outlying and rural areas, where employers are being approached to check if all their workers are registered on the Unemployment Insurance Fund UIF. In each town they visit, they uncover hundreds or thousands of workers who are not UIF registered. They then get the employer to register those employees as it is required by law and within an instant new jobs have been created for the ANC to look good.

In reality no new jobs are created but inside some computer buried in some dark ANC office it’s employment numbers grow by the day and the ANC will once again use this information to mislead its voters and the South African public that they have stood true to Zuma’s promises in his State of the Nation address.

There is one fact about the State of the Nation …. the Nation is in a State and will remain that way for many years to come. Until corruption and reverse Apartheid are stamped out, South Africa will remain in political turmoil.

All this fancy talk of job creation just amounts to political rallying and keeping themselves in office so they retain their cushy lifestyles while the people of South Africa continue to suffer.

I’m sure the ANC does have some “actual” job creation in line but the UIF registration approach is NOT creating jobs at all BUT it will show very nicely on their political resume’.

Shameful :(

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

iPad released in South Africa – Apple dumping 1st generation models on unsuspecting countries.

17 Feb

It’s been almost a year since Apple’s iPad was released to “first world” countries and South Africa is, according to the world, not a first world country. South African’s have been waiting in anticipation for this gadget to arrive but were told “they’re coming” … and South African’s waited and waited some more. Eventually about 3 weeks ago, Apple officially launched Ipad in South Africa and you can get one on literally every street corner with a seemingly endless supply of stocks available to SA.

And there’s very good reason for this. Apple is soon to be launching second generation models of the iPad to the “first world” countries and of course they have a lot of stock to get off hand. So in the usual manner of business that most tech companies follow, they now feel we are good enough to buy their product, but it’s really more of a matter of “where do we dump all this excess stock we got lying around” …. “Hmmm, just dump it into the South African Market”

We South African’s seem to be a great vehicle for clearing out warehouses of soon to outdated technology and it’s time that must stop. Apple is not cheap by any means, in fact their stuff is criminally overpriced considering what’s inside nowadays is no different than any other mobile device or pc out there.They also create monopolies on their products in most countries and South Africa is no different with only one official importer and distributor of products called CORE.

If South African’s must pay these exorbitant prices, surely Apple can release their products into our markets more timeously instead of using us as a dumping ground.

Hmmm, I smell a rotten Apple, excuse the pun :)

iPad, iPhone …. iBroke

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

South Africa – Land of the Striking Worker (Strikes)

03 Feb

I’ve never known any other country in the world whose workers are almost permanently on strike.

Sure every country has workers who strike but South Africa is just something else.

Most people are so caught up in their daily lives that they fail to notice what’s going on around them and they also forget yesterday’s news as quick as they heard it.

Last year, 2010, there was barely a week between strikes in this country. As one group got their way, so the next group jumped into strike mode. There was also numerous strikes co-ordinated to take place around the world cup, perhaps in the hopes of gaining sympathy from the rest of the world which did not seem to achieve the desired effect.

At the top of all of this sit a few very rich men who drive the trade union machine and they continually profit on getting better wage deals for their employees and seldom if ever get their hands dirty doing a days work.

They have the ability to bring a country to it’s knees and have on numerous occasions shown this ability. They almost always get their way and can make the biggest of corporations curtail to their demands.

It seems they’re onto a good business and they make sure that almost every working day of every year they’re in some wage negotiation or mass strike.

But as each wage battle is won, so the price of goods in that affected industry goes up. At the end of the day the economy takes strain and at the end of the line sits the poor worker who just got a pay rise and ends up getting less due to the knock on effect. Above this sits the South African taxpayer who has to foot the bill and that just seems to be increasing by the day.

Those running the trade unions seem to be the only one’s that profit and they do so preying on gullible workers.

2011 so far is off to a slow start with strike actions but it’s still early days.

 
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Posted in Life, South Africa

 

Another pithy slating of the proposed Protection of Information Bill and Media Tribunal, by Andre Brink

16 Sep

BACKGROUND: Here is a very nice, to the point, article by Andre Brink on the Protection of Information Bill, against which he stands firmly opposed. He invokes ‘Mandela’s vision’ and a different South Africa, as it existed in the 1990s. Mandela too, he contrasts to Mbeki and Zuma. There is much truth to this. They were two different worlds, and different people. The only problem with this kind of analysis is that it ignores or downplays that which is consistent: the ANC and its ideological foundation. Any leader can rise above that ideology but unless he or she actually changes it, the organisation will simply revert to type once they have moved on. Nationalism is concerned with control and hegemony and it has little time for criticism or dissent. In other words, if one had to reconcile the Protection of Information Bill with what the ANC actually stands for Mandela or no Mandela, well, it’s a match made in heaven. It always was. And the censorship creep that started under Mandela, only picked up pace and extended its reach under Mbeki and Zuma. Look at something like the Promotion of Access to Information Act, for example (the antithesis of the Protection of Information Act). The ANC government has never complied with it. Technically, there are occasions when an application is responded to with the requisite documents. But more often that not a request is ignored or one has to go to court to get what one is after. So when I say never, I mean it has never complied in spirit. The ANC is and always has been hostile to openness and transparency. Which leads to an interesting question, perhaps something we should do: what are the principles and values that underpin the Promotion of Access to Information Act and what are the principles that underpin the Protection of Information Bill and how do they sit next to one another? Are they compatible? How could both pieces of legislation be produced by the same government? (For those interested in quotable quotes, see bold below – a wonderful sentence I think.)

If you would like to be removed from this mailing list, please reply to this e-mail (to hudaak@da.org.za) with the words STOP.

New York Times

By: Andre Brink

11 September 2010

A Long Way From Mandela’s Kitchen

Twenty years ago the most famous prisoner in the world, Nelson Mandela, walked out of jail and began the process of leading his people to democracy. Today, that new South Africa faces its starkest challenge yet in the form of two pieces of anti-press legislation that would make even the most authoritarian government proud.

One, cynically named the Protection of Information bill, would give the government excessively broad powers to classify information in the “national interest”; the other, which would create a “media appeals tribunal” to regulate the printed and electronic press, is written in language chillingly reminiscent of that used by the apartheid regime to defend censorship in the ’70s.

This was not Mr. Mandela’s vision: the new South Africa was meant to be synonymous with freedom and openness on all levels.

I remember a story about a reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times who, soon after Mr. Mandela came to power, went to the presidential residence late one afternoon for an interview. When he arrived, he realized he had the appointment time wrong, and he was a few hours early.

It was a late summer day, and all the doors and windows were open. The journalist walked around the splendid old colonial building, knocking on some of the doors, but there was no answer. The place seemed deserted, an odd circumstance after half a century of the guards and dogs and iron railings that had protected all public buildings.

At last the journalist ventured inside through a back door and started wandering down the sprawling halls, still without being stopped by anybody. He was on the point of skulking away when a sound from the kitchen attracted his attention. There he found Mr. Mandela, preparing himself a cup of tea and a sandwich. Evidently pleased to find he had company, the president invited the journalist to share his meal with him.

This is not necessarily a state of affairs to be recommended, but it does say something about the mood in the country at the time. Everything was infused with this new sense of openness, of self-reflection and honesty. Looking back at the few years that followed Mr. Mandela’s walk to freedom after his release from prison, one is tempted to exclaim with Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

The euphoria surrounding Mr. Mandela and the new South Africa began to erode soon after he left office. Yet there is one achievement that has steadily become the last fallback position of hope in the country: the freedom of expression. In the face of corruption or the abuse of power, from the president’s office down to the lowliest official, the right of the press and the people to express themselves has been offered as a remedy.

But now even that is eroding. Our leaders since Mr. Mandela have been deeply resistant to criticism and truth-telling. This was true of Mr. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, and it is even more true of the current president, Jacob Zuma, whose government and party, the African National Congress, proposed the new censorship measures.

Though he took over with broad populist support, Mr. Zuma has ushered in a new kind of silence that is threatening to take the place of ordinary communication. His proposed legislation betrays a dangerous attitude toward the word, written or spoken. It has been said that the prime function of the word is to interrogate silence; but if silence becomes sequestered beyond the reach of words, of language, of the press, of literature, that space becomes inhabited by lies and distortions, pretenses and subterfuges and inadequacies of all kinds.

The proposals do more than just negate the legacy of Mr. Mandela’s era of transparency; they recall, particularly for writers like myself, the worst of the apartheid regime.

One of my novels had the dubious distinction of being the first book in Afrikaans to be banned under apartheid. As I learned, censorship involved much more than the removal of books from the shelves. When a book was prohibited, it was entered into The Government Gazette, the public record of government activities, and into the notorious Jacobsen’s Index, a record of banned literature that at one point included more than 20,000 titles. Once in the index, a book drew the attention of the brutal Security Police – particularly if it was banned for endangering the “security of the state.”

Such attention meant the author could expect a visit from the Special Branch, which policed internal security threats, to be interrogated and have his books and manuscripts and typewriters confiscated; if the author was black, he ran the risk of immediate arrest. He might be detained without official explanation. He might simply disappear.

Whites were always in a slightly less dangerous situation, but it was never easy. On one occasion I was removed from a plane bound for London and ordered to open my suitcase for inspection. The officers were unable to find anything incriminating. After I demanded to know the reason for the search, they finally explained that they had been tipped off that I would be trying to smuggle copies of my banned book to London. Considering that I was actually on my way to London for the book’s publication, I felt as if I was in a tale by John le Carré, if not Lewis Carroll.

President Zuma defends his proposed measures as a means of strengthening our young democracy and making human rights and the freedom of expression more vibrantly viable. But those of us who lived through the previous regime, which relied so heavily on censorship for survival, know it doesn’t work that way.

How a government that owes its very existence to its faith in the indivisibility of freedom can now so easily betray that faith is beyond belief. It is not just an act of foolishness, but of apocalyptic arrogance.

André Brink is the author of “A Dry White Season” and, most recently, the memoir “A Fork in the Road.”

 
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Posted in South Africa

 

Public Servants Strike South Africa – Cosatu are murderers and hooligans !!

25 Aug

The public servants strike currently affecting South Africa like a black plague is now really getting out of control. Cosatu has stooped to new lows in inciting their members to strike, disrupt, intimidate, damage, destroy and essentially to murder too. Murder you say? Yes I DO !!!

As a result of the public servants strike, hospital workers have allowed sick people and babies to die, that my friend is what we call MURDER because it has been done intentionally. Cosatu therefore are directly responsible and have blood on their hands. The leadership of Cosatu should be arrested, locked up and left to die. Oh I’m being harsh ??? Really ??? Is what they’ve done excusable? Is it acceptable ? Is murder okay when you’re trying to make a point? No No NO it’s not frikkin okay and it never will be either !!!!

Everyone thought when we had black leadership in this country that things would change, well nothing’s changed. The same scenes you are seeing on TV today are the same things we saw on TV 20 years ago. Then it was under white leadership, now it’s under black leadership but the picture is still the same. In fact I lie, the picture today is even worse because the ex-government would not have tolerated this kind of despicable behaviour yet the ANC are too timid to show they have any balls. 20 years ago we saw white policeman firing rubber bullets at hoards of hooligans, today we see black policeman doing the same thing, what has changed? Nothing !!!

Of course the ANC will always find a way to keep blaming this kind of behaviour on Apartheid but really that excuse is growing weak now, they’ve had control of the country for 16 years and not even they can control the holligans. They can take another 100 years and it will still be the same, and they’ll still be blaming Apartheid. The ANC will never own up to their own faults but they may eventually realise that there is just no controlling these barbaric masses that tick the vote boxes for them.

The fact that the military has been called in to assist hospitals etc, should be enough reason for the govt to declare war against the strikers, but as I said earlier, there’s a big lack of testicles.

What amazes me is that the Cosatu fat cats still earn their whopping salaries while the people they brainwash go unpaid, and they’re too thick to realise they are the puppets of a few greedy men. The effect this action will have on the economy and inflation will far outweigh any benefits the strikers are seeking, so even if they get their demands the knock on effect will see them worse off than before and of course, it’s the taxpayers that will fit the bill for all of this.

This country has no hope of a future as long as this barbarianism is allowed to thrive, we will end up like every other African nation. The “little” bit of good that came of the World Cup has been undone in less than a month …. WELL DONE COSATU ….. WELL DONE !!!

 
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Posted in Life, South Africa

 

South African Idol – Just how Fair is a voting system that does not work?

23 Aug

It seems that year after year we keep seeing just how poor our cell phone network operators are at handling mass volume SMS systems like the South African Idol’s voting system. Since last night’s Idol’s show sending votes through has been a tiresome task, every try results in a nasty “Network Out Of Order” message and this requires you the voter to keep retrying. Not only is the Idol’s voting system unable to accept the plethora of votes coming in but it has also dragged down the regular SMS system.

Last night the first vote I tried to send went through after 7 tries, the second vote went through after 15 tries and my third vote I only managed to send this morning as I just gave up last night. This morning however I again had to send the vote about 3 times to get it through and a regular SMS to my friend over the Vodacom network took me 5 retries. This just once again proves how our cellular operators charge us an arm and a leg for a service and are unable to spend the money increasing the size of their network to actually handle the load, a simple show like Idol’s drags a cellular network to it’s knees year after year and I doubt we’ll see much change when Idols 2011 comes along either. Why? Because the network operators quite simply will remain profteering without putting enough of that cash back to good use. I hope ICASA is listening.

Now the question? Just how fair is such a poorly managed voting system to the contestants? The voting lines are open until 10pm tonight to allow for people to vote (with all the network errors) BUT the onus is on you the voter to remember to vote. Most people now get busy on Monday morning and can easily get carried away with their regular work week and forget to vote but if they had had the chance to get their votes through last night while it was fresh in their minds they would be able to carry on with their week knowing it’s already done. So how many contestants lose valuable votes as a result of this and see themselves out next week just because their friends could not vote?

I think until South African mobile operators can offer world class service to such shows, the producers should look at alternative solutions for such shows. When we get our next SA Idol, think to yourself just how accurate of a reflection that is from the voting public. Boo to shoddy cellular network services.

 
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Posted in South Africa, Television and Movies

 
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