What I have to deal with every day, Take a minute to read.
Sad but true…
An article on South Africa in leading Australian newspaper
Very interesting reading indeed.
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Wounded Nation
AFTER bathing in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South
Africans today are deeply demoralised people. The lights are going
out in homes, mines, factories and shopping malls as the national
power authority, Eskom - suffering from mismanagement, lack of
foresight, a failure to maintain power stations and a flight of
skilled engineers to other countries - implements rolling power cuts
that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos.
Major industrial projects are on hold. The only healthy enterprise
now worth being involved in is the sale of small diesel generators
to powerless households but even this business has run out of
supplies and spare parts from China.
The currency, the rand, has entered freefall. Crime, much of it
gratuitously violent, is rampant, and the national police chief
faces trial for corruption and defeating the ends of justice as a
result of his alleged deals with a local mafia kingpin and dealer in
hard drugs.
Newly elected African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma, the
state president-in-waiting , narrowly escaped being jailed for raping
an HIV-positive woman last year, and faces trial later this year for
soliciting and accepting bribes in connection with South Africa's
shady multi-billion-pound arms deal with British, German and French
weapons manufacturers.
One local newspaper columnist suggests that Zuma has done for South
Africa's international image what Borat has done for Kazakhstan. ANC
leaders in 2008 still speak in the spiritually dead jargon they
learned in exile in pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin and Sofia while
promiscuously embracing capitalist icons - Mercedes 4x4s, Hugo Boss
suits, Bruno Magli shoes and Louis Vuitton bags which they swing,
packed with money passed to them under countless tables - as they
wing their way to their houses in the south of France.
It all adds up to a hydra-headed crisis of huge proportions - a
perfect storm as the Rainbow Nation slides off the end of the
rainbow and descends in the direction of the massed ranks of failed
African states. Eskom has warned foreign investors with millions to
sink into big industrial and mining projects: we don't want you here
until at least 2013, when new power stations will be built.
In the first month of this year, the rand fell 12% against the
world's major currencies and foreign investors sold off more than
£600 million worth of South African stocks, the biggest sell-off for
more than seven years.
"There will be further outflows this month, because there won't be
any news that will convince investors the local growth picture is
going to change for the better," said Rudi van de Merwe, a fund
manager at South Africa's Standard Bank.
Commenting on the massive power cuts, Trevor Gaunt, professor of
electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, who warned
the government eight years ago of the impending crisis, said: "The
damage is huge, and now South Africa looks just like the rest of
Africa. Maybe it will take 20 years to recover."
The power cuts have hit the country's platinum, gold, manganese and
high-quality export coal mines particularly hard, with no production
on some days and only 40% to 60% on others.
"The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary,
unprecedented event," said Anton Eberhard, a leading energy expert
and professor of business studies at the University of Cape Town.
"That's a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa's
reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines."
To examine how the country, widely hailed as Africa's last best
chance, arrived at this parlous state, the particular troubles
engulfing the Scorpions (the popular name of the National
Prosecuting Authority) offers a useful starting point.
The elite unit, modelled on America's FBI and operating in close
co-operation with Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO), is one of
the big successes of post-apartheid South Africa. An independent
institution, separate from the slipshod South African Police
Service, the Scorpions enjoy massive public support.
The unit's edict is to focus on people "who commit and profit from
organised crime", and it has been hugely successful in carrying out
its mandate. It has pursued and pinned down thousands of
high-profile and complex networks of national and international
corporate and public fraudsters.
Drug kingpins, smugglers and racketeers have felt the Scorpions'
sting. A major gang that smuggle platinum, South Africa's biggest
foreign exchange earner, to a corrupt English smelting plant has
been bust as the result of a huge joint operation between the SFO
and the Scorpions. But the Scorpions, whose top men were trained by
Scotland Yard, have been too successful for their own good.
The ANC government never anticipated the crack crime busters would
take their constitutional independence seriously and investigate the
top ranks of the former liberation movement itself.
The Scorpions have probed into, and successfully prosecuted, ANC MPs
who falsified their parliamentary expenses. They secured a jail
sentence for the ANC's chief whip, who took bribes from the German
weapons manufacturer that sold frigates and submarines to the South
African Defence Force. They sent to jail for 15 years a businessman
who paid hundreds of bribes to then state vice-president Jacob Zuma
in connection with the arms deal. Zuma was found by the judge to
have a corrupt relationship with the businessman, and now the
Scorpions have charged Zuma himself with fraud, corruption, tax
evasion, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice. His trial
will begin in August.
The Scorpions last month charged Jackie Selebi, the national police
chief, a close friend of state president Thabo Mbeki, with
corruption and defeating the ends of justice. Commissioner Selebi,
who infamously called a white police sergeant a "f***ing chimpanzee"
when she failed to recognise him during an unannounced visit to her
Pretoria station, has stepped down pending his trial.
But now both wings of the venomously divided ANC - ANC-Mbeki and
ANC-Zuma - want the Scorpions crushed, ideally by June this year.
The message this will send to the outside world is that South
Africa's rulers want only certain categories of crime investigated,
while leaving government ministers and other politicians free to
stuff their already heavily lined pockets.
No good reason for emasculating the Scorpions has been put forward.
"That's because there isn't one," said Peter Bruce, editor of the
influential Business Day, South Africa's equivalent of, and
part-owned by, The Financial Times, in his weekly column.
"The Scorpions are being killed off because they investigate too
much corruption that involves ANC leaders. It is as simple and ugly
as that," he added.
The demise of the Scorpions can only exacerbate South Africa's
out-of-control crime situation, ranked for its scale and violence
only behind Colombia. Everyone has friends and acquaintances who
have had guns held to their heads by gangsters, who also blow up ATM
machines and hijack security trucks, sawing off their roofs to get
at the cash.
In the past few days my next-door neighbour, John Matshikiza, a
distinguished actor who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and
is the son of the composer of the South African musical King Kong,
had been violently attacked, and friends visiting from Zimbabwe had
their car stolen outside my front window in broad daylight.
My friends flew home to Zimbabwe without their car and the tinned
food supplies they had bought to help withstand their country's dire
political and food crisis and 27,000% inflation. Matshikiza, a
former member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre company, was held up
by three gunmen as he drove his car into his garage late at night.
He gave them his car keys, wallet, cellphone and luxury watch and
begged them not to harm his partner, who was inside the house.
As one gunman drove the car away, the other two beat Matshikiza
unconscious with broken bottles, and now his head is so
comprehensively stitched that it looks like a map of the London
Underground.
These assaults were personal, but mild compared with much
commonplace crime.
Last week, for example, 18-year-old Razelle Botha, who passed all
her A-levels with marks of more than 90% and was about to train as a
doctor, returned home with her father, Professor Willem Botha,
founder of the geophysics department at the University of Pretoria,
from buying pizzas for the family. Inside the house, armed gunmen
confronted them. They shot Professor Botha in the leg and pumped
bullets into Razelle.
One severed her spine. Now she is
Playing (Music): Anti Falg
Current mood: aggravated
Added on: 06/03/2008 23:01:47
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