In an unusually dull State of the Nation address, Jacob Zuma did mention that he wanted to spend some very large amount of money on a broadband implementation plan. Given the government’s record in telecommunications, this struck me as a stupid idea. Don’t ministers need cars or something? Read Throwing good money after bad on ITWeb.

Considering specific corruption cases in isolation may provoke outrage, but it’s a cop-out. It’s a defence mechanism against despair. Because a full litany of the depth of the crisis in South Africa makes depressing reading. Alec Hogg, the editor in chief of Moneyweb, writes such a litany in his open letter to ANC president Jacob Zuma, prompted by the finding in a recent survey that nine of every ten South Africans consider corruption to be a way of life.

The letter is worth reading in its entirety, if only to be reminded of the weight of evidence against individuals involved in public and private corruption in recent years — some of whom remain unmolested by public reproof or legal censure.

I’m doubtful whether it will have much impact. The fact that Hogg feels the need to resort to transparent flattery, and to gloss over Zuma’s own proximity to, tolerance for, or involvement in corruption, suggests that he knows the letter will not find a sympathetic ear. Nonetheless, it is a letter that had to be written, and should be read. Widely. Well done, Alec.

I haven’t weighed in on the noise about the Forum for Black Journalists, whose racist admission policy was recently declared unconstitutional by the Human Rights Commission. Since the story broke days after my rant about white racists exploded into a raging inferno, I had been toying with the idea of using the FBJ issue to make a similar argument against black racists. But I admit, I was weak. I felt swamped by — and tired of — the subject of racism. Another reason I desisted is expressed well in this excellent editorial on the reaction to the ruling, by political analyst Prince Mashele.

What both whites and blacks in our country seem incapable of, however, is to subject racial questions to rational thought. And unfortunately, this failure leads to an automatic expectation of racially solidaristic approaches to issues of race. As a result, simplistic formulas take the place of dispassionate analysis — so commentary on racial questions becomes predictable and a platform to parade racial correctness.

Whenever race issues arise, one can easily tell whether it is a white or black person commenting, not on the basis of accent or style of writing, but based on their unconcealed preference for racial solidarity over sound argument.

It’s this kind of approach that has made blacks who dared to raise critical questions about the FBJ’s racial policy to be quickly labelled “coconuts”. In the same vein, a white person expressing sympathy with black people is generally interpreted as a buyer of favour. Is there nothing like a race-neutral mind?

This question makes me sorry I didn’t post my position on the FBJ. In my view, as a white journalist, it has every right to exist, and every right to exclude whites. Why should I care? I feel the same about white racist groups. If they want to congregate and burn crosses and do what white supremacists do, that’s their problem. In their case, I’d only object when they start committing crimes. When it becomes harrassment, assault or murder, we have a problem, but that problem does not affect the right to freedom of association or freedom of expression.

Similarly with the FBJ. If they feel the need to have a racially-exclusive club because they prefer to think in terms of race and solve problems based on racial analysis, that’s their loss, not mine. I think it’s rich of people who support such organisations to claim racism in others, but that’s also their loss, not mine.

Here’s my objection to the FBJ, though. I have a serious problem that a senior political figure agreed to meet with them in a closed, off-the-record session. If you’re going to have discussions with exclusive groups, by all means do so. The FBJ wouldn’t be the first group of limited membership and special interests to meet with the government or the ANC. But then disclose what was discussed.

You see, there’s an important feature of the constitution that is often overlooked. The function of a constitution is to bind government, and protect citizens. The constitution explicitly says so, making only specific provisions, “where applicable”, binding on other persons. For binding citizens, we have the statute books — regular law — which serves essentially the opposite function.

So while the FBJ has a clear right, in my view, to associate however it wishes, that Jacob Zuma meets behind closed doors with an explicitly racist body strikes me as unconsitutional discrimination on the part of Zuma. Especially since, at the time, he was refusing to grant interviews to most other journalists. His argument might be that he was acting in his capacity as ANC president, not as an agent of goverment, but that seems like a weak defence.

Zuma’s meeting with them, not their existence or constitution, is my main problem with the Forum for Black Journalists. And I disagree with the Human Rights Commission’s ruling.

Is that point racially neutral enough?

In a previous post I used a throwaway line about shooting a fleeing suspect in the back, as proxy for lazy, unprocedural, untrained, unconstitutional and in the end unacceptable behaviour by the police. I thought it would be obvious, but now it seems I was wrong about such behaviour being unacceptable, if I am to believe a foaming-at-the-mouth deputy minister of safety and security, Susan Shabangu.

The Pretoria News reports that she spent a good while whipping up a crowd in Pretoria West, with phrases like these:

You [police] must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect…

I won’t tolerate any pathetic excuses for you not being able to deal with crime. You have been given guns, now use them.

I want no warning shots. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot. If you miss, the criminals will go for the kill. They don’t miss. We can’t take this chance.

Criminals are hell-bent on undermining the law and they must now be dealt with. If criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, they must be killed. End of story. There are to be no negotiations with criminals.

The constitution says criminals must be kept safe, but I say No!

Well, okay then. Right. That was exciting. It reminds a friend of mine of Sylvester Stallone: “I am the law”. It reminds me of the more expressive Al Pacino: “Hoo hah!”

First, we have corruption. Then, we have incompetence. Shabangu is right in pointing out that police are often slow to respond, reluctant to investigate and generally lackadaisical in the face of high rates of violent crime.

But is it really a good idea for a senior member of the government to stand before an angry crowd and blatantly undermine our law and constitution? Wasn’t it a serious scandal, and a major claim of human rights abuses, when apartheid-era police forces were suspected of shooting to kill first, and firing warning shots only afterwards? Doesn’t this sort of fiery rhetoric make vigilantes, kangaroo courts and lynchmobs look like the reasonable actions of concerned citizens?

She appears to labour under the misconception that the executive — the ministry in which she is the deputy — is the ultimate source of law. It would serve police officers well to grasp that this is not the case, before they take her advice and find, inexplicably, that “her responsibility” is of little use when a court decides to “worry about the regulations”.

I’ve written before about suggestions for improving policing in South Africa, noting in particular a piece by Jim Harris of the Free Market Foundation that argues despite high crime numbers, actual numbers of criminals are comparatively low, so well-motivated, well-trained forces, private if necessary, should be able to find and squash them.

Given the hamfisted and abusive record of the police, however, I’m not entirely convinced that Shabangu’s incitement is a good idea. The crowd she addressed, however, gave her a standing ovation. So now we have Keystone Kops with a licence to kill and orders to shoot on sight, with a baying, bloodthirsty crowd at their backs.

Would someone please fire the dangerously irresponsible deputy minister, before she gets someone innocent killed? With that speech alone, I suspect she’s broken so many laws, surely even the Keystone Kops can make charges of incitement or conspiracy stick.

Hoo hah, indeed.

Updated at 12:50 on 12 April 2008: It is deeply disturbing that Jacob Zuma, the president of the ruling ANC and presumptive next president of South Africa, agrees with Shabangu: “If you have a deputy minister saying the kind of things that the deputy minister was saying, this is what we need to happen.”

No wonder he’s all put out about corruption investigations, when that’s his view of the authority of the executive and the origin of law. It is true that politics is among the few careers for which no formal qualification is required (journalism being another). It is true that, “owing to his deprived childhood, Jacob Zuma did not receive any formal schooling.” I’d suggest, however, that an introductory basic course in Political Science might be in order for senior politicians. Nothing fancy, you understand. Just to get an idea of who does what in a constitutional democracy. Perhaps a special extra session on basic budgeting might be added in Zuma’s case. It may come as a surprise to our unschooled lord and master, for example, that neither his nor the deputy minister’s word is law. If she wants to change the law, she’s welcome to table a bill in the legislature, where it can be debated, examined by the Law Commission, and voted upon. In supporting her advice to the police to simply disregard laws and regulations, Zuma is gravely undermining the rule of law in this country. Not that he’s shown much regard for such quaint concepts in the first place, I guess. Now at least we know how literally he takes his campaign song: “Bring me my machine gun”.

I’ve been wondering what the point is of blackouts during off-peak times. Nevermind that it isn’t the slot I was told to expect, but why would my power need go out between 9pm and 11pm on Monday? Surely demand can’t be that high so late at night? Why get outages between 10am and 3pm? Peak times are mornings and evenings, not so?

So to answer the question, I’ve watched the power usage charts over at Power Alert for a few days. Here’s what I see:

This represents national power usage. Brown indicates critical levels. What can one conclude from this? One shouldn’t presume that the chart is drawn to scale. But it does show that power usage is constantly at critical levels, not only during peak usage times, but all day from 7am to 11pm.

And what does that tell us? That this problem isn’t new and sudden. That it’s been brewing for a considerable time. Eskom may claim unscheduled service outages at power stations, but that’s because, by Eskom’s own admission, they’re running them as hard as possible.

And from that, we can conclude that when Thabo Mbeki told us in May 2006 that “there is no crisis”, noting that supply (37GW plus 2GW peak capacity) exceeded projected demand (35GW), he was lying. Don’t tell me he didn’t read the reports. He has apologised, yes, but for what? For being wrong? Sure, the government was wrong, but as Andrew Kenny writes at Fin24, it had no excuse for being wrong. He knew what economic growth was. He knew what Eskom’s supply and demand projections were. Anyone with grade 4 arithmetic could figure out we were headed for a crisis, even then. The idea that private sector companies would build generation plants without being able to price their product for a reasonable return on investment was self-delusion, and to sell the idea, he and his ministers simply lied to us. (Aside: Kenny makes a good point about Alec Erwin. He may believe a hammer and sickle are the tools of the economist’s trade, but he wasn’t in charge of public enterprises in the 1990s when this half-baked plan was cooked up.)

“Whatever needs to be done to make sure that the economy grows and new investors come into the economy is being done on the energy and other sides,” he said at the time. Lies.

“The Honourable Member is proceeding from the wrong assumption that our government has failed to meet South Africa’s electricity capacity needs,” he told an opposition parliamentarian. Lies.

Erwin and President Thabo Mbeki have played down the impact of the blackouts (reported Fin24 in August 2006), saying the outages would not affect
investment and would not derail efforts to lift economic growth to 6% from below 5% now. Lies.

In May 2006, after the first blackouts hit Cape Town, Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu told Donovan Jackson, writing for Mining and Manufacturing Systems Magazine: “Your assertion that planning did not anticipate the demand is not correct. … The recent events in the Cape is not (and should not be seen as) an indication that South Africa has run out of capacity and therefore cannot meet the demand.” He added that the problem was impossible to foresee. Lies.

“I don’t think we are facing a crisis, we firmly believe the long term plans make it very comfortable for us to meet our needs,” said the deputy director-general in the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs, Nelisiwe Magubane, in February 2006. Lies.

In January 2007, the office of Public Enterprises minister Alec Erwin told Reuters in a statement that he was “confident that South Africa as a whole will not be plunged into darkness”. Lies.

“You don’t have permission to access /energy_in_africa/975198.htm on this server.” Lies.

“We don’t believe there is a crisis in the energy sector in South Africa. There are challenges that don’t amount to a crisis,” said Sandile Nogxina, director general of the Department of Minerals and Energy in June 2007. Lies.

So what about the other promises? Health care? As a surgeon in Nelspruit pointed out in a blog post to which he linked in a comment on this site, that’s lies too.

Gautrain? Well, we’ll see about that. The tunnel boring machines hired at huge expense don’t work too well without power either.

Without any shame, without any loyalty to the people that elected them, the ANC government, from Thabo Mbeki on down, simply lied to us to cover up their own failures.

So where is the truth in all this? Well, Thabo Mbeki did tell an election rally (reports Reuters) that providing these basic services was “central” to maintaining freedom. And that much is true.

But isn’t that anti-campaigning? “Failure is not an option. We failed. Vote for us.” Huh?

Why on earth would anyone still believe that the ANC can deliver basic services? Why would they think, as Richard Catto apparently does, that merely electing a more populist leader for the same party of central planning, national socialism and crony-capitalism will make all the difference? At best that leader, Jacob Zuma, has shown a singular inability to manage just his personal affairs. What would make him any better at planning government service delivery?

Has anyone been held responsible? Has anyone been fired for incompetence, for lying, for failure to deliver? Is that really what happened to Thabo Mbeki in Polokwane last month? I don’t think so. Do you think anyone will be fired? I don’t think so. Will the ANC, which is the source, as ruling party, for the policies the president implements, take responsibility? I don’t think so. And even if they say they do, can we believe them? I don’t think so.

Isn’t it time to fire the liars, for a start, and then revisit the notion that government is capable of delivering services? Isn’t it time we rely on the energy, innovation and hard work of ordinary South Africans to make a better life for themselves? Ordinary South Africans earned their own liberation. They got together, across party lines, to overthrow Apartheid. Isn’t it time to look beyond struggle credentials and loyalty to the ANC, and look to a future in which South Africans can reasonably expect to prosper? We may already have missed a window of opportunity, in terms of global economic health. Now we can’t even afford the economic growth we need, lest we run out of energy to fuel it. Isn’t it time we, ordinary South Africans, do something about the government that, since liberation, not only failed us, but lied about it to our faces?

The ANC’s slogan of “a better life for all” is clearly an empty promise. What is a democracy to do other than turf the useless liars out?

Updated: Added Gautrain paragraph after first publication.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up. — Hosea 8:7

It felt strangely like a wake, watching the inevitability of Jacob Zuma’s election as the new head of the ANC, and proposing a wry toast. Unless he is convicted on corruption charges, which is far from certain, South Africa’s list-based proportional representation system makes him a near-certainty to become the next South African president in 2009.

That’s what you get for half-hearted commitment to market reforms and economic freedom.

Although many praise the ANC for having steered a sensible economic course, I’m far from enamoured with its record. Instead of freeing the economy, it has largely pursued a brand of national socialism not unlike that followed by the racist National Party during the Apartheid years. That the intended beneficiaries of government’s policy were infinitely more fair doesn’t change the fact that government tried — and failed — to deliver services that are beyond the ability of a government to deliver. If national socialism didn’t even work for a tiny fraction of South Africa’s population, what chance would it have of providing for the entire population?

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