Debate at Kaya . . .

Like most "firsts", the anticipation fuelled excitement promptly fizzles out at the reality of the actual happening of the "first" - for want of a better description. This was unfortunately no different with the debate conducted by his royal Phatness on his Kaya FM morning show. Take nothing away from the audacity of it all and even less from the gusto with which the participants went at each other - including sometimes off the point of the debate and into the realm of the private and the personal.

Whichever way you look at it, this was a good thing and we can only hope for more of such sparring of the minds or views. About the Phat one - you will remember that he won the adoration of many a media fundi when he came onto our little screens with that interview show of his, with Leo as his side-kick. Some of those episodes were memorable, so no surprises that he would pull something like the Dandala-Tsedu bout. Then there was the skit about the young politician with gout problem who claimed he did not know. Well done to Kaya FM. Enough with the sucking up . . .

I was somewhat disappointed by how the two gentlemen conducted themselves during the debate; I am of the pompous opinion that they really could have done better. Well, it may be the case that if one would like to influence the policies of the ANC, one should join the nearest ANC branch and make one's voice to be heard - as Mr Tsedu argued - but it is a different story when the ANC is vying for one's affections or vote. Similarly, it does not matter Mr Dandala - at least it does not matter to me - the HIV status of a woman the prospective president of SA chooses to sleep with. What does sit uncomfortably with my petit bourgeois morality is that he was married at the time and not to the woman who my reactionary views deems her too young for him. I only have one wife so take that whence it comes.

It became clear during the debate that COPE will have to do a lot if it hopes to make inroads into the mind of the South African voter. At this stage they just come accross a collection of disgruntled sore losers. As they say in the classics, if you take a shot at the king, do not - I repeat - do not miss. Kings do not take too kindly to attempts on their royal lives. The ANC too will need to come down a notch or two. Organisations are made and indeed broken by individuals. Despite the motives of those leaving the ANC - it shows the intricacies of relations and cliques within this broad church and how those are becoming less and less tolerant of each other. The little I watched of the Polokwane happenings, it was fairly clear that the utterings were a little more than robust - it looked like a quarrel of enemies and not of brothers - and sisters.

The good thing that this Kaya debate was is that we can and should continue to ask for more and better of our political leadership. It doesn't matter whether I am or am not a member of the ANC, if they want me to vote for them, well they better appeal to my wannabe middle class-reactionary leanings, failing which they have one vote less - under the current climate my pompous ass would like to believe that each vote counts - even a reactionary one. The same goes for COPE - I am not interested to hear how bad the ANC is, I want to hear how good COPE is. Let us see the emergence of real politics.

Kaya and the Phat one have done well here - now let's see if it can be sustainable. By the way it means that the next debate will or must not end unceremoniously leaving me and my beloved whether we should wait for the questioins from the audience as we were promised or just head off to our breakfast wondering what happened; did Hlomla really go and punch that guy for raising all those personal issues or did that guy declare the crowd too hostile and refused to come back on . . .

Whatever the case may be, the debate must go on and I look forward to the next instalment.

Not in my name . . . no more

“Nobody wants to kill the springbok” blah, blah, blah fish-paste, says the honourable Stofile, the minister of Sport and Recreation, etc. This he says in his capacity as a public official apparently on behalf of us dumb and sometimes deaf voters. Well, dearest honourable Stofile, I hereby recall all previous authority I may have granted you to speak on my behalf.

In case you think I have something against the honourable minister, I do and he is not the only one. In fact I take my axe-grinding right back to Nelson Mandela, Africa’s most loved statesman, prisoner, liberator, etc. Thanks to him this springbok nonsense still lingers, not to mention the fact that I now have to sing die stem right in the middle of my national anthem! I am not going to waste time and bandwidth on the good things Nelson Mandela did, that was the absolute minimum expected of him. It is what he cost black South Africans that matters to me.

Anyway, back to the minister of sport and the antelope.

When the honourable minister met with the rugby boss whose name I’m never sure of but think I know, he did so presumably in my name. Before we get into the meeting let me disclose my leanings to the reader where Oregon Hoskin (the rugby boss) is concerned. I don’t like the guy. No, I don’t hate him, I just don’t like the guy – big difference. My dislike of this gentleman is based on one news-clip. Just one clip, no context, no nothing. In this clip he shouts menacingly threatening at an elderly gentleman who seemed to be questioning one or other decision of the rugby leadership. He came across as a bully and I don’t like bullies. But that is not the point.

When the minister met with the bully, he smilingly told us that throughout the world national sports teams wear the national emblem on the left side of the shirt (of course I paraphrase). It had been previously suggested that the antelope was going to stay but will be moved away from the clutter on the left side of the jersey, to the right side. Remember this we are told by our elected official (yes I voted ANC) that this is an appropriate resolution to the matter. This according to him is what is done everywhere else in the world. I still don’t know why on earth the government of Nelson Mandela decided to cut a deal with rugby on the issue of what is the national emblem. It was probably done for the same reason the national anthem is what it is – compromise.

You can therefore imagine my absolute surprise to discover that the soccer team aka Bafana-Bafana, wears the national emblem on the right hand-side of the jersey. In case there is any doubt:

I know that the picture is small and it is not clear but you do get the point of my shock. I do not wish to give the honourable minister another opportunity to smilingly tell me what the rest of the world does when it comes to football.

I wish to ask the government to cease all negotiations and deal-making on my behalf until further notice. Until such time as there is a decision on what our national colours and emblem are, I would prefer it if the government was to just leave all sporting codes alone to put what they like on the jersey. Until there is an interest in sport as a means of nation building and as a means of getting our people to participate in sport equally and fairly, I propose we let each sporting code to do whatever takes their fancy. All this pretext of transformation and strong words and subsequent apologies just turns my stomach.

No more deals or pontifications in my name, please. Thanks.

Teachers and the question of the surplus value . . .

One of the privileges of being a member or an official of a trade union is the annual (or different frequency) wage offers and counter-offers aka wage negotiations. This is one of those fascinating phenomena of the modern economy, at least as experienced in SA. Grown men and women attend expensively arranged, even more expensively conducted meetings at which they have a contest of demands and denials. This carries on for a few days, while the business that supposed to fund the whole thing and the eventually agreed upon increase on wages and other benefits of employment, chugs along on the same basis and same rate of output as 5 years previously.

The management stick to their guns, the union escalates their demands and rhetoric and sometime in the future they all agree, shake hands and go back home or back to the head office. This unworkable and archaic method of interaction between the worker and the employer will be employed again in the next round of negotiations and for the forseeable future. In the meantime the workers will remain pretty much where they are at the moment - between the rock (the job) and the hard place (the trade union). There is of course the believe that the power and strength of the workers is the trade union. I believe the opposite - it is the workers that lend strength, power and legitimacy to the trade union. I can never understand how people who do not work the same, do not have the same dedication, do not have the same loyalty - should be rewarded the same. What do I know, I am just a middle class neo-liberal counter-revolutionary whose mind is shorter than his BEE shoes - the kind that arrive at the door before their owner, as Dr Nzimande eloquently describes them.

That the employers the world over exploit workers and treat them slightly better than the tools and machinery operated by the very workers is without doubt. Similarly, there is so much more to a working man or woman's life than wages. Yet wages remain the mainstay of any of these annual or however frequent meetings of demands. Trade unions in my view have the same effect on true worker power that the church has on true faith - but let us not unzip that pair of pants as yet.

This brings me to the point of this post, pretentious as that may sound, I do have a point to make and it is about teachers. Teaching is a proffession I love, contrary to popular believe. When I was still studying I had a few friends who were teachers. I remember having what I thought was a friendly chat with one of them about whether teachers should be organised or organise themselves like workers; whether teachers should form and belong to trade unions as they are known through-out our capitalist SA? This chat was inspired by my love for the profession in the face of what I believed to be an assault on the noble profession. He did not believe that I could be serious, he in his words thought I was making a joke - of course teachers are workers - just like my father who at the time was working for a rugby head-honcho who made kunsmis (scientific shit) and money as a hobby. My friend, who started work at 8am and finished at 3pm (I know I'm being generous but for the sake of this post I will equate being at work with working), pretty much determined his work routine and outcomes - believed that he is no different to my father. That fateful afternoon was the end our relationship as we both had known it. We disagreed and parted ways having said things we both lived to regret.

I tried to impress upon my friend (thanks to liberal arts under-grad education) that the whole fight between the bosses and the workers (pronounced "whackers") is the surplus value and that it is this surplus value that the bosses seek to increase and the workers wish to eat into. Having spend considerable amount of time fielding all manner of questions about Marx and his comrades and what I thought was a straight-forward determination of surplus value in any profit-driven enterprise, all I managed to do was to really anger my friend (as he then was).

If the teachers are workers just like those who produce scientific shit, then they will need bosses. The bosses in the teachers case shall be the government represented by the minister of education and of public service. Workers are paid out of the funds of the company that employs them or out of the overdraft of that company (the latter more so lately). Workers' salaries and benefits are part of the cost of production - the idea is generally speaking that the workers should meet the cost of production and then leave the cream of the income otherwise known as profits for the bosses to enjoy. I am not sure what the production is where teachers are concerned and how the cost of that production is to be measured. If teaching be the enterprise, what is the income side that is meant to mirror and balance the expense side? Ok, maybe school-fees, taxes, fund-raising and maybe even donations. It is not like parents pay more for teachers who do their job well and produce good results. This is another debate because fundamentally the good results are produced by the learners/pupils with the guidance of the teachers. Just in case the reader got lost, I am not talking about private schools here - in any event those schools are never affected by such noble causes as teacher trade unions and chalk-downs.

The era of teacher-trade unions have reduced what used to be a noble profession to a toyi-toying mass of shame-less lemmings. I had the benefit of a township education back in the day when teachers were professionals and commanded respect and/or fear. The fear inducing type commanded less respect and are remembered accordingly - nevertheless, they were teachers and occupied a special place in society. They also appear to have been rewarded accordingly - that seems to have changed somewhat dramatically over the years and maybe that is the reason there is a belief that trade unions is the way to go. A poor solution coming from those we trust to train the minds of our young ones.

There is of course a great benefit to our goverment, specifically the ANC and the tri-partite alliance that teachers, police and nurses form and belong to trade unions. With a constituency that large, one can't go wrong in national elections - that too is another story for another post.

Regardless of the incoherent pontifications of Mr Nxesi and the other comrade-educators, they are members of the professional class where labour is unrelated to production and surplus value is not part of the equation. The existence of the teaching and other administrative strata is to support and to created aspiration for capital. Comrade-educator does not focus the minds of the learners on the assembly line or underground drilling and excavation type of work. The target, we are led to believe is scientist, philosophers and other such like great callings.

There is also the interesting position of the old-school type teacher who does not want to belong to the trade union, to put his chalk down or to toyi-toyi. The sad stories of these teachers are too sad to repeat. All of this is made even worse by the fact that as the teachers chant Marx (whom they hardly ever read) their own children are happily chanting a sonet in the comfort of a school and under the supervision of a teacher that does not belong to or support a trade union. In the meantime, the child of the Cosatu comrade is loitering and passing time until he is old enough to replace his or her parent as another worker.

It is I believe Marx who said something uncanny about how each class reproduce itself.

Integrating Prof Jansen's theory

It does not get more dangerous than when a failed engineer takes on a professor of education on the professor's views about education. A few disclaimers are called for at this stage. I am fond of the good professor, not of him really because I don't know the man like that, but of his writing and views on education and other social issues. This post, I hope, will reflect the respect and fondness I have for the prof, his writing, his views. As in maths I hope to integrate the good prof's views where the limit of his view tends to zero (that is at least my recollection of the integration formula) - something like lim x=0. Where x is the prof's views.

The good prof recently wrote in The Times newspaper that we ought to be cautious when we integrate children from different races and culture into one school - a school that in typical South African style, was previously white. He argues that children coming from different backgrounds respond differently to education and to discipline, etc. This far I do not take issue with Prof. Jansen's views. Strangely, this being his conclusion, I may be mistaken to be agreeing with the whole article, which I don't. It is how the good prof builds his argument that his conclusion belies his thoughts.

According to Prof. Jansen, the schools that stand to suffer the most from ill-considered integration, are the poor Afrikaners' schools. These schools he opines, although poor, are functional and produce the goods - presumably through discipline and hard work. There is something in the sub-text that suggested to me that the discipline and good performance of these school is almost genetic as much as it is in the nature of the Afrikaner. This of course concerned me somewhat. There are of course well-run poor, primarily Afrikaner schools, I am sure of that. This to me is more a testimony to the management of the school and the parents maybe but definitely not the nature of the children. Children I have learned are just that - and their conduct is in the majority of instances the explanation why certain species eat their young.

Prof. Jansen then continues to say that integrating black children from poor black township schools into these Afrikaner schools is a bad idea. This, after he stated that by default, the poor Afrikaner schools attract children from these very poor black schools (rich blacks are already in posh schools and the almost rich don't go to the poor Afrikaner schools). He then says that children from the dysfunctional poor black schools do not respond well or positively to discipline that is imposed by the Afrikaner school that they are now being integrated into. Fights break out on the playground, in the toilets; knives appear at school; drugs and other ills, which appear to come to the hitherto well-run Afrikaner school concealed in the backpacks of the black children. In the end the school suffers the most. This is so because at the first sight of the knives or the throw of the first punch, the Afrikaner parents yank their children out this previously well-run school and the previously white school soon becomes a poor black and dysfunctional school. This is so notwhithstanding that the teachers do not follow the white children in exodus. Apparently not only do the children not respond to discipline, the teaching staff cannot bring this lot to heel.

As indicated at the beginning of this post, I may well have misread the good prof but I doubt it. With respect Prof. I believe that you overstated the goodness of the poor Afrikaner kids and the badness of the black children from dysfunctional school. The casualness with which his article is written (quite uncharacteristic of him I must say) condemns the black children and not the poorly-run schools that they come from. This is not about the children, it is about those with authority over them. It is in my view an unfair and glib assertion that the poor children bring all manner of ills to their new school.

There are enough reports Prof. that suggest at least to me that the children, white and black, are thrust into racially charged environment, which the adults do nothing to defuse but infact make it worse. You will remember the Huhudi (Vryburg Prof) incident. The parents, teachers and unemployed officious bystanders all behaved poorly - they made what was already a difficult situation worse. They were all of them, worse than the poor kids at that poor school.

The difficulties the prof raise in his article are real and need to be addressed. They are however not problems of integrating unruly black children from dysfunctional schools into the poor well-run Afrikaner schools. They are about those who are in charge of our children's education taking their jobs seriously and jealously protecting our children's right to learn.

In this instance Prof. I'm afraid there are no problem children, just problem adults.

SADC Leaders . . . what leaders?

Which part of "Mugabe lost the elections" do these guys not get. I am hard-pressed not to refer to them as anything more disrespectful than "guys". Here are the gentlemen (I am not aware of any ladies among that lot) who go by the title "SADC leaders" or "cowards" according to another gentleman who would like to become a SADC leader - having a meeting apparently to resolve the problems of Zimbabwe, but unfortunately missing this rather fundamental point. Talk about the elephant in the room!

The MDC, having won the presidential and parliamentary elections is apparently expected by the leaders of our region to now share power with uncle Robert - he of murderous fame. It seems to be the new African way of governing - sharing power with the party that lost the elections but that can cause the death of many of the citizens. Kenya, Zimbabwe, who will be next I wonder. There is no point making peace with a war-monger, war is about the only thing Mugabe has to offer for his (sic) people. How does one even begin to engage Mugabe? I would have thought that the legislation was very clear on what should happen should the run-off elections not take place within the specified time limit. That of course is another story for another camp-fire.

There is no community, no development and definitely no leadership. A lot more can of course be said about the very people that the leadership of Zimbabwe ought to serve. It has been said that fundamentally, it is the people of Zimbabwe who can rid themselves of the tyranny of Mugabe. Notwithstanding the damage he has done to country and people, Mugabe still has the support and loyalty of the state functionaries. Well, this may well be evidence of what Mr Justice Malala flambouyantly refers to as "dipolotiki tsa mpa" (tough one to translate but it is something along the lines of selfish interests of the functionaries - looking after their often large tummies).

What is to be done when there is suffering at such a large scale. I have a friend who has just returned form Zimbabwe - "it is really sad to see old people dying of hunger", he said. Life does go on in Zimbabwe though and for some, lucratively so. There is always some interests served by large scale mayhem and suffering. This reminds me of the tall gentleman with the shining military boots waving a stick as he strolls through the blood-drenched jungles of the DRC. Those that having the best of this tragic situation do not care about the extend of the suffering their actions or inactions causes. Whatever happened to that great weapon of public international law - the doctrine of recognition. Is it that difficult for the SADC leaders to simply declare that they do not recognise the government of Mr Mugabe. Surely no-one would hold it against them. I would personally applaud anyone who refuses to recognise a government that kills people.

What is it that SADC spent the time discussing with Mugabe? What is his bargaining position? Does he threaten to go home and kill more Zimbabweans if he does not get his way. What about fresh SADC sponsored and monitored elections then? The money spent on meetings so far could have run an election! What are the constitutional, legal or other constraints that prevents these leaders to do the right thing? I am not advocating breach of sovereignity or other such like Bush diplomacy. I am not asking for invasion of Zimbabwe or the deposition of Mugabe (although the thought has crossed my mind).

I am asking for the leaders to live up to their title. I am asking for courage and integrity. I am asking for compassion for the suffering masses of Zimbabwe. Of course the British did a number on the people of Zimbabwe and were quite happy to ditch the country after paralysing it. Of course the land issue was never properly resolved. Of course white Zimbabweans continued to live as if nothing had changed. Come to think of it, kinda like the situation in South Africa - rugby like before, farms like before, control of the economy like before, white schools like before, white areas like before, etc. But I digress . . .

None of the evil perpetrated by the colonial powers is excusable, far from it. I would like to see dignity restored to the people of Zimbabwe, by the man they supported for over 2 decades. I would like to see his human side. This is the only basis one keeps the conversation going - on the basis that there is a human being on the other side, listening - engaging, empathising. I believe the time for the conversation has pretty much come to an end. Some would argue that if the dialogue stops people will die. I struggle with that too. The sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe, the food that is not getting to the people - all this, is killing the people of Zimbabwe and has no effect on Mugabe. I infact would argue that all this, is strengthening his hand. He remains the only source of food for those who support his murderous cause.

In Africa it seems whenever there is a choice between saving lives and power - power wins all the time. I am not sure what it is that makes us Africans so tolerant of tyranny and oppression, especially when perpetrated by our own on our own. Do not get me wrong, these are complex issues with even more complex vested interests. The tyrants and the war-mongers get food, amunition and all other creature-comforts - they sell their souls for it but they get them. I would love to know who is providing the arms to that Laurent fella (another one). Complex as these things may be, they cannot be too complex for SADC to say "let us go out there and save lives!"

Now, would the real SADC leaders please stand up . . .and please don't all rush at the same time.

And then came Obama . . .

"Things like this do not happen but for the Grace of God" my wife says this morning as we sat watching the celebrations accross the US, following Barack Obama's speech. I hesitate to refer to that speech as a victory speech.

It is not long ago that he was described as a 1 term senator with no experience. Apparently, so the competition asserted, all he had was a speech. He was not ready, he would not know what on earth to do when that 3am telephone call came.

During what was probably the most protracted election campaign the US has ever seen, this man has been as audacious as he was hopeful and as courageous as he was clear in his vision. He faced attacks on many fronts and an assortment of reasons were put forward in support of why he was not right for the job of the president of the United States of America. He in his own words described how he was said to be a little different from all those other presidents on the dollar bills.

This is not a backward-looking rant about the opponents that Obama has had to face in this nothing but legendary election campaign. The adversaries were worthy opponents in their own right - but this was not their time but his. Each of them with the history and the pedigree - he with audacity and a speech.

The post election analysis has gone to some length to caution Africa that she should not expect to be prioritised by the Obama presidency. He said in Berlin that it is time to bring down the walls of rich nations and poor nations; he also said that we should give some meaning to the phrase "never again" for the people of Darfur. These are not Africa's expectations but words of the 44th President of the United States.

Africa may well not benefit from Americas 44th president, at least in the way that the intelligent people on TV may have thought. Africa has already benefitted from the validation bestowed on her by this man and his mantra "yes we can". The young African-American men now can surely do other things - it does not have to be athleticism, performing arts or gang-banging.

All this through, because and from a man without pedigree or history.

Granted, no former president of the Harvard Law Review would ever need to be affirmed or to be given a hand up. Membership to that exclusive club is reserved only for the finest of us, with even finer minds. This much each one of us know is true from the last 21 months or so that we spent in the company of this fine human being.

The time for an idea of the US being governed by a black man had come and we all know how powerful such an idea tends to be. America had pretty much fallen from grace. We carried on watching CNN and drinking Coke pretty much from habit and addiction than choice. Invariably we drink water and watch Aljazeera. The 43rd president is generally accepted as an under-achiever and a war-monger with no sense diplomacy or intellectual appreciation of the gravity of his office. The US was rapidly becoming irrelevant and even more broke. It became less attractive to be associated with the US and Canadians became more insistent when distinguishing themselves from the Americans. As if the problems (mostly self-inflicted) were not enough - what with the 2 wars and shrinking economy - the sub-prime crisis, like an explosion, came onto the scene and shouted: "Surprise!" And my, was Mr Bush surprised.

Among all the despair and the trying times the US kept hurtling towards disaster with wild abandon. There was the 700 billion dollar bail-out, the collapse of the once great Lehmann Bros and the credit freeze.

And then of course came Obama and he made a speech, and as has come to be the case everytime he speaks, not only the US but the world, listened.

Bad guys don't make us Good . . .

Good is a character discernable in its own right. Being human, we have the ability (apparently) to tell good when we see it. For completeness' sake, we apparently can also tell bad. The presence of one does not however indicate the absence of the other.

I am reminded of a poster I read some years ago: "there is so much good in the worst of us and so much evil in the best of us . . ." Good has unfortunately become somewhat bad. Allow me to develop this. Over time the demands placed on one to be a good person have gradually become less honerous. By way of an example, being a child in the township I grew up in, meant that you greeted older people as a matter of course; and whenever you got up to no-good, you did it in hiding. When you were in high school, you were not old enough to be seen drinking or smoking - not that there was no smoking and drinking among that age group, it just wasn't in your face. Even then it was limited enough to make the headlines if discovered.

Today, a child that greets is celebrated as a saint. The measure of goodness has become watered down.This measure became watered down when we started being good by comparison. When we became good husbands because we at least don't beat our wives in public; or because we at least pay for our children's school; or we at least have only one affair and not a string of affairs.It is this relative goodness that our political leadership seems to be engaging in lately. "This leader is good because he is not as bad as the other guy." The South African electorate surely deserves (and must demand) much better than this. What good is a leadership that cannot argue its case for goodness' sake?

The ANC is a voluntary organisation governed by a constitution which I believe gives the body of its membership certain rights and impose on them certain obligations. Each member of the ANC has a right to vote, to stand for election, to debate matters openly without fear or favour and most importantly, has a right to be protected by the very constitution against intimidation and oppression. At least that is how most democratic organisations function. How then will this leadership argue my case against the big bad world that is South Africa (if the free press is to be believed)? Whatever faction it is that Mr Lekota and Mr Shilowa previously represented or aligned themselves with within the ANC, was outwitted and out-strategised. They went into an election that they could not win because the candidate they put forward was wrong for what the organisation needed at the time. These two gentlemen could not be silenced by the brutal apartheid state at the threat of being maimed or killed. They now claim to have been harrassed and intimidated into silence and submission by the bad guys in the ANC; the bad guys who would not let them speak and who would not let them adhere to the Freedom Charter. So they quit.

All this is of course speculation on my part as I am neither a member of the ANC nor was I present at the now legendary Polokwane conference. What I have seen and heard from the new organisation is how bad the other side is; and this supposedly makes the new guys good. A word of advice to these two fine gentlemen - these are the politics of defeat. Ask Tony Leon, seriously, ask him. He should in all honesty tell you that you need your own identity, strategy, policy and views. Those are the things that will define your failure or success. Forget about how terrible Mr Malema performed in matric or how other people intimidate others. Tell us that you will encourage good matric results, that you will not intimidate anyone, etc. Put differently, be good in your own right.There is a substantive portion of the South African voters who are not impressed by or attracted to the fighting talk that characterises our politics. Whether it is Helen Zille, Mr Vavi or any other of our politicians.

The good that the new party can and should bring to our political landscape is something akin to what the Arch once said "if you know what you are saying, you would hardly find a reason to shout". On paper, there is exciting potential for the South African politics to mature - who knows, we may even end up with a South African political party.
Will it be good?