Friday, 31 March 2017

What is Zuma doing?



What is Zuma doing?

Jacob Zuma, by replacing Pravin Gordhan, the Finance Minister who rescued the South African economy from Zuma’s last attempt to capture control of the Treasury, and so open its doors to him and his co-conspirators, with Milusi Gigaba who has proven his loyalty to Zuma and his incompetence in almost every other field, has gained his dream team, at a cost to the South African people that will certainly be calculated at least in the billions. By this move, Zuma has proven conclusively to the world that he has only his own interests at heart.

The question that must be asked is why any elected President of a modern state, even if it has been brought down to a parlous level, would take this risk, or, better said, enter this new certainty. The answers should be clear to anyone who has even scanned the headlines over the time that Zuma has held the top job.

The first and most obvious reason is that Zuma’s term of office as President is limited to two terms. That means that, in terms of the Constitution, Zuma will be compelled to leave office by about the middle of 2019, when the next national elections are due.

Zuma faces numerous personal problems at present. The Court has ordered that the National Prosecuting Authority reinstate the 783 criminal charges against him that were withdrawn by his friends in that Authority in order to enable Zuma to take the office of President. Zuma managed to delay the investigation of the process by means of which the charges were withdrawn by failing to order the NPA to hand over the tapes of the conversations leading to the decision to withdraw the charges. That failure could, in the hands of an honest government, be construed as a criminal act. When the criminal charges are brought, there is a very high probability that Zuma will face very lengthy jail terms for corruption, fraud and racketeering, and he will be in need of a friendly face as President, either to stop the charges, to grant early parole (as he did for the only man tried and convicted on those charges – his opposite number in the offences) or to grant him or to arrange that he has immunity from prosecution. That will not happen if the national election results bear any resemblance to the local government result, with the election of an honest government. Even if the ANC were to pull off a major miracle and gain a winning vote, with Zuma’s replacement as President, it is unlikely that the new leader of the ANC, and so the State President, would want to be tainted with the reputation that Jacob Zuma has, and that will almost certainly imply that the new President will want to distance himself (or herself) from Zuma as much as possible.

In addition to the outstanding criminal charges, Zuma will, in the coming years, face further charges, such as the criminal act of breaching both the Constitution and his Oath of Office in the Nkandla affair – his ‘apology for the confusion suffered by the public as a result of his willingness to repay the money’ certainly does not meet the requirements of the Constitutional Court or exculpate him from the consequences of that act, the Public Prosecutor Finding that a judicial enquiry be held into the involvement of Zuma and others near to him, itself a damning requirement, showing clearly the distrust of the upright and brave Public Protector in the honesty or integrity of the President. Any such Enquiry, if conducted by an honest Judge, unlike the recent enquiry into the Arms Deal, which carefully ignored container loads of documentary evidence to come to a conclusion that whitewashed the ANC cadres, must come to a recommendation to Parliament that the involved parties be sent to the big house.

There are numerous other criminal acts, even ignoring the economic sabotage that Zuma and his ANC have wreaked on the country. In any civilized society, Zuma would have been thrown out of office years ago, but in the South Africa that exists today, the Constitution and the bodies established in terms of it is no more than a worthless piece of paper, one that slows the actions needed to be taken to rape the country of the last amount of funds.

The second reason why Zuma has made the moves he did is that he has become addicted to the power of his office and the benefits that flow from such power, not least among them the financial benefits. The Nkandla deal alone scored him in excess of R230 000 000, and the prospect of the Russian nuclear deal will add at least ten billion to that. And there are numerous other corrupt activities that will be added to those figures when the final accounting is done. He will not easily relinquish the glory of jetting in to New York, Addis Ababa and such other places to take his place amongst the world leaders, standing alongside such other notables as Robert Mugabe and Omar al Bashir, both of whom owe large favors dispensed by Zuma using South African tax money.

The conclusion is inescapable: Zuma, in his mind, has to stay in power, now and for the rest of his life. The actions Zuma has taken, not only recently, point to his determination to maintain his grip on power.

Jacob Zuma has a personal security force of 7 000, reporting solely to him. Where else in the world, apart from such idyllic places as Zimbabwe, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela, is a State President in need of such an army? Why in South Africa? He reinforces that army with a stranglehold over the Police (the previous Minister of Police admitted in the Constitutional Court that he lied to Parliament to protect Zuma, and he has been replaced now with another worthless person, previously the Minister of Sport and Recreation, who has shown clearly his racial prejudices, probably in order to prevent the previous Minister from the consequences of appointing a judicially-declared liar and untrustworthy person as the Head of the Directorate of Priority Investigations), and over the Defence Force (don’t forget that he illegally activated over 400 soldiers to protect him, and to make a show of force, at his latest State of the Nation Address to Parliament), over the Hawks, and the National Prosecuting authority. His control of virtually any State entity that manages large funds is clearly founded on the desire to avail himself of a significant portion of those funds, leaving only a 10% commission or finder’s fee to the ANC, while applying the levers of power over those bodies to ensure that his friends and associates gain the lion’s share of the pickings to be made from the contracts issued by those bodies. The fact that the Eskom customers are overpaying for their electricity by at least 30% does not seem to come to his attention, nor that a billion Rand tender has been handed to the step-daughter of the present General Manager, who claims that he did not know of it, although they live in the same house, that the passenger trains do not run because his cohorts have stolen between R14 billion and R23 billion from PRASA, that the poor suffer concern whether they will be paid their social grants because his favored Minister Dlamini insists, against a ruling by the Constitutional Court, on retaining the services of Cash Paymaster Services, a company in which a shareholding of 12,5% (a significant profit generator, in light of the R4 billion p.a. fee charged) remains unexplained, that the General Manager of the Petroleum Fund sold some R23 billion worth of strategic oil reserves at a price significantly lower than the lowest market value in the past 30 years, leaving the country without any fuel reserves, that education in the country ranks in the five lowest in the world, despite costing a greater part of the GDP than any other country, leaving nearly a million schoolchildren each year with a standard of education that is substantially lower than the minimum required in a world where technology is increasingly replacing manual labour.

There can be no doubt that Zuma is working to a game plan that will see him remain at the head of the country when the time comes for him to step down. He does not wish to view the world through steel bars. What will happen to prevent that?

The likeliest scenario sees Zuma precipitating a social crisis, and then using his military muscle to step in and declare a State of Emergency, discontinuing the power of Parliament and the Courts to allow him to manage the situation effectively. He has a good example of this in Robert Mugabe, who has ruled as dictator since he acceded to the Presidency. The timing of the Cabinet reshuffle, the night before Parliament goes into the Easter recess, speaks strongly to that move being made within the next weeks. Zuma cannot run the risk of his manouevres being foiled by Parliament, by attempts to bring a Motion of No Confidence in him, by Constitutional Court actions to force Parliament to impeach him or by moves by the strongly-disgruntled ANC National Executive Committee to ‘recall’ him as President.

When that happens, South Africa will enter a steep spiral of decline in every field, not least the economic. The Rand reacted quickly, dropping 5% in less than an hour.

The only way this disaster for South Africa, Africa and the world can be avoided is for all persons of goodwill to take strong and urgent steps to make their disquiet known to the ANC and to Jacob Zuma in unmistakable terms.

 

Friday, 17 March 2017

Why do I write this Blog? Nicole Stuart explains

I have two main roles in my life. I am a Management Consultant, working internationally to help companies and governments improve the way they do things. Generally, this work results in the client company earning more profit by reducing the wasted costs inherent in many activities, but often the real need is to interact with the world in a more effective and efficient way. Both companies and governments have a set of customers who want good service. This ranges from the sole doctor with a group of ten patients waiting in his waiting room to be seen, through the multinational automaker faced by a massive recall of defective vehicles, to a government body that requires ten months to issue a set of documents to which the public are entitled and which are essential, under law, to perform many of the normal functions of life. My philosophy in my work has always been to attempt to make things better for all involved, for the client, for the ‘customers’ and for the workers who might be displaced as a result of my recommendations. In this regard, I have been remarkably successful, with most displaced workers being offered new opportunities for employment, within their old employers or in new ventures created by my organization. The number of these new jobs presently stands in the tens of thousands, all of them sustainable because we have experts working with the owners constantly to refine their activities.

The second part of my work life is devoted to writing fiction. I have written over fifty books, all of them still selling well in most of the major markets around the world. I have always read widely, since my earliest years. Reading has given me a very large input of thoughts, ideas and ways of looking at the world. Reading has enabled me to visit other people, other places and other times, and to gain some understanding of what I am witnessing. That has worked very well in my consultancy activities, in which I am able to view the ways that numerous people in different places do the same sort of work, to understand that each way is relevant to those particular people, and to evaluate what is best and what less effective in achieving the objective. The consultancy activity has exposed me to many people and the ways they think, their personal viewpoints and experiences. I have found that everyone has something interesting to tell, some fascinating insight into the everyday and the unusual. This exposure has given me a vast pool of thoughts and ideas for my novels, a pool that is constantly bubbling over. Unfortunately, my exposure to other aspects of our world has made me uncomfortable with what we accept, which we do simply because it is so. I believe that we each have an obligation to understand our environment, not to accept what happens around us simply because it is so. We were given brains with amazing capabilities, and it is a denial of our Humanity not to use those capabilities.

Some of the more unsavory parts of the world that I have come to understand relate to politics and to justice. It is no coincidence that many politicians come from the fields of law and religion. Politicians, particularly the less scrupulous of them, are willing to use both law and religion to achieve their own selfish ends, in the knowledge that both fields of learning are substantially closed to the layman. Law is a complex field of study, and it has been manipulated by lawyers to ensure that the less knowledgeable among us are more or less forced to accept what is foisted on us ‘because we say so.’ Although the legal presumption is that every person in a society is presumed to know every law and regulation to which he or she is subject and to abide by them completely, that presumption is clearly a fiction. The number of laws passed each year in most countries is so great that it is impossible for even an expert lawyer to know the detail, so that the average Joe is forced to rely on common sense, an extremely unreliable form of understanding, or on rumor and bullet-point explanations of what the law says. That situation is exacerbated by the fact that each law often delegates the duty of making detailed regulations for the implementation and operation of the laws. Neither common sense nor rumor can protect the layman from transgressing some law or other, probably many times each year. The fact that we generally do not go broke paying the fines or spend years in prison is more luck than good sense.

The other aspect of concern relates to the use of religion by politicians, working on the innate respect each of us has for the pronouncements of men of the cloth. In this way, the President of South Africa declared before an election that his Party would stay in power until the second coming of Christ, yet no-one stood up to denounce this abuse of religion. The same President also informed the voters that, if they did not vote for his Party, they would be punished by their ancestors! Virtually every leader of a nation going to war claims that their cause has the backing of the Almighty, but who stands up to question that? Virtually every dictator claims to have the backing of the spirits for his cause, and almost every senior public representative swears an Oath of Office in the name of God, before proceeding to violate that oath at every turn. Has anyone ever been called to account for taking the name of the Deity in vain?

In all of my books, I attempt to describe some of the things I have learned in an entertaining and, hopefully, informative fashion. Although I want my books to be enjoyed by my readers, I would like them to sit back after reading and digest what they have read. I want their lives to be enriched by my books beyond mere entertainment. I want them to have some new thought or idea, some different set of experiences or exposure, to meditate on in the days and weeks to come.

In my blog, the purpose is more immediate and relevant to a particular situation. I live in South Africa, Germany, Britain and the United States, depending on where my most time-consuming projects are, and I work internationally, with fifteen countries hosting at least one major project. I love each of the countries and the people in them. If you open yourself to people, it is impossible not to like them. However, that does not blind me to the shortcomings I see in them. No single country is perfect, although several come as close to that state as may be possible in an imperfect world. In most cases, the politicians work hard at increasing the imperfections, usually against the real wishes of the citizens. The worst in this regard are the African countries, where the tradition of real democracy is not yet sufficiently deeply embedded for it to become an overriding consideration in the minds of the citizens, most of whom have some tribal tradition in the backs of their minds. Tribal rule is as far removed from true democracy as communism, and it is no surprise that Marxist governments tend to promote tribal contrasts as a means of entrenching their own ideas of a ‘democratic dictatorship’. Although few African countries do not escape this categorization, the one that comes first to mind is South Africa. It is a country that started, under difficult conditions, to establish a democracy, faltering at first under the racist thinking of Apartheid and then again under the dominant Marxist-Leninist policies of the present Neo-Apartheid government of the ANC. In both cases, the idea was to use the differences of the one group against the others as a lever to divide and conquer. I suppose that, initially, the purpose was to obtain and maintain political power, but, in both cases, that quickly degenerated to become an outright kleptocracy, in which political power was used for self-enrichment of those few in control. In both cases it was misguided at best, and almost certainly criminal, yet the rest of the world allowed the situation to develop to the point where the country was reduced to a shadow of what it could have been. The people of the world also pay the price for this, because your success indirectly is my success. The whole population of the world is enriched if at least one part of it succeeds.

And that is part of the message of many of my blog articles. If we work together to overcome criminality, prejudice and partisanship, we can make the world a better place, a much better place for all of us.

I hope that my books and my blog will play a part in that. I hope that, by giving you a view of the facts and of an alternative way of understanding them, I can encourage each of you to take a step in the direction of a better world for all of us.

I would love to hear from you. If you send an email to me at NicoleAStuart@gmail.com, I will send you a list of my books with a brief description of each, and notify you of new books and blog articles as they are published. I will never use your email address for any other purpose.

The Role of Government in the Creation of Poverty

South Africa has been following the precepts and rules of the Leninist-Marxist system of government since the ANC came to power, simply because the leaders of the ANC were indoctrinated in that system from an early age, and do not know any other system. The one exception to this was Nelson Mandela, who came to power as a dedicated communist, but had the good fortune to enjoy an in-depth discussion with the President of Vietnam, a country which had suffered under that system for many years, until an enlightened government came to power, and set about unwinding the evils that had been imposed on it by the unthinking rulers over man years. Mandela, an educated and thinking man, understood what he was being told, and attempted to revise the policies of his Party. Unfortunately, Mandela was an old man, and tired, and the lessons he tried to impart to his successors did not take root. That is not surprising if you understand Thabo Mbeki, a man who was capable of astonishing stupidity in the face of all the fact about HIV/AIDS (remember his famous speech that AIDS was a syndrome, and you cannot contract a disease from a syndrome? Mbeki was the man, the lauded ANC leader, who condemned hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens to a gruesome death because he was unable to understand some simple scientific facts). Mbeki was also hungry for power, as proven by his maneuvering to avoid answering to the South African Parliament about the extensive corruption in the Arms deal of the 1990s, and there is strong evidence that he benefited personally from that deal, although a Commission of Enquiry went out of its way to ensure that the evidence proving this was never presented. Mbeki set the lowest standard for governance in South Africa, and he was ably followed in this by Jacob Zuma and his cohorts.

The Minister of Finance, who is supposedly at war with Jacob Zuma, the President, stated flatly in his 2017 Budget speech to Parliament that the average growth in GDP achieved since the ANC came to power in 1994 has been only 1%. The population has grown at a rate closer to 3%, with the result that a once-thriving economy has been brought to its knees, yet the Government has been unable or unwilling to stop the slide. That they do not know enough economic theory to understand why this is so is evidenced by the repeated attempts to bring down ‘White Monopoly Capital’, which is supposedly bleeding the country dry, to expropriate without compensation all farms (presumably White-owned) which have changed hands since the arrival of the (White) colonists in 1652, with persistent rumors that the expropriation without compensation will be extended to banks, insurance companies, mines and other forms of entrepreneurial activity. The ANC has been unable to explain how this will achieve any improvement in the lives of the ‘poorest of the poor’, a mythical sub-class of (Black) ANC voters who do not have any adequate understanding to be able to distinguish a politician’s promises from reality. There have been numerous attempts to create a spark of life in the economy, all of them doomed to fail by the lack of even a glimmering of understanding of economic reality.

The only way to succeed is to focus on the winning attributes. That means business, industry, commercial agriculture and mining, with the minimum requirements being the provision of a high-quality education, removal of the dead hand of bureaucracy from the field, cutting back dramatically on every aspect of the government that does not contribute actively to the objectives of growth and wealth creation (not the variety generated by patronage!), and allowing the creators of wealth to decide on the allocation of it.

The result will certainly be more very wealthy people - Microsoft employs more than 10 000 millionaires - but also a much greater number of people making their own way into the middle and upper-middle classes.

South Africa is proud of the fact that it pays social welfare grants to 17 000 000 people! We should be ashamed of this. At least half of those people are capable of making their own way in the world, and would be delighted to escape the trap of being charity cases. What is holding them back is the hatred of 'monopoly capital', whether White or other. An economy needs capital to function, and it needs to leave the income that will grow into the wealth that becomes capital in the hands of the people who have proven that they know how to handle it - the entrepreneurs, the businessmen, the miners, the commercial farmers and the industrialists. Taking ten billion Rands per month (the amount of tax money that is channeled to the poor in the form of social grants) from the economically active results in thousands of billions of Rands of potential investment in job-creating activities being lost.

Unfortunately, the communist theory, liberally laced with patronage profits derived from supporting the ANC, militates against any of this real-life logic being incorporated into ANC policy.

Zuma explains. Crisis, what crisis?

The responses given by President Zuma to questions in Parliament regarding the crisis in the payment of social grants makes it clear why the ANC Government has consistently demonstrated a high level of incompetence in its functions. There are two main reasons.

The first is that President Zuma, and, by implication, the rest of his bloated Cabinet – numbering about one hundred incompetents, including Ministers and Deputy Ministers – simply do not understand one of the most basic and most important rules of management, the requirement to monitor potential threats and problems, and take preemptive action to prevent them materializing. Zuma declared that ‘this is a funny sort of democracy’, in which people are found guilty of a crime before they have committed the crime. It is clear that he does not understand the difference between what has happened and what he is describing. Any Managing Director of a company, large or small, who waits for the clearly forespelled result of a course of conduct to materialize before taking action to prevent that result would be thrown out of office, if the Board and the shareholders had the time to do so before the company became bankrupt. Such a method of management is clearly in breach of one of the most basic principles of management, and represents a level of managerial incompetence that one would be surprised to find in even the smallest and meanest of business.

The second reason is that Zuma has clearly demonstrated a desire, probably an imperative, to retain the goodwill of Bathabile Dlamini, a woman who has made clear on more than one occasion her disdain for the law, or her Oath of Office, and for her duty to the people of South Africa, as well as her support. The background to this seems to be partly her support for his chosen candidate as his successor as President, Nkosozana Dlamini Zuma (note the names!), who, he hopes, will protect him from the 783 criminal charges hanging over his head, as well as the several more that will be added as a result of his conduct during his Presidency. If Minister Dlamini goes, so will go his hopes of being able to avoid the need to take other action to fend off his loss of freedom as well as the loss of the ill-gotten gains he has accumulated during his Presidency. One wonders whether his inaction during the build up to the present crisis was not intended to permit, if not encourage, the riots and civil disorder that would inevitably ensue if the 17 000 000 social grants were not paid on time! The realization of that crisis would present a perfect reason for the declaration of a State of Emergency by Zuma, leading to a suspension of Parliament and rule by decree, a situation he is on record as desiring, and one which would relieve him of the anxiety attending any stepping down by him as President, even under the succession of his ex-wife to the Presidency. There can be no guarantee that she will protect him, or that she, and the ANC, will win the next election. Of course, the State of Emergency would allow Zuma to take from Robert Mugabe, a man he greatly admires, the crown as the worst African Dictator of recent years. Zuma has taken many steps to prepare for this event, including putting in his pocket the Minister of Police, the head of the National Prosecuting Authority, the Minister of State Security, building up of a seven thousand strong personal security body responsible only to him, with only a part of the Judiciary, including the Constitutional Court Judges, being excepted. Unfortunately, even the newly-appointed Public Protector, a woman following in the footsteps of her illustrious predecessor, appears to have failed the test of strong independence expected of her.

The picture of South Africa’s future remains gloomy, and has become darker than it was before, with the only bright spot in the future being the hope that the ANC will lose enough support in the next election to permit the election of a new Government which may, hopefully, have enough collective intelligence, managerial competence and understanding of democracy to turn the country away from its present course, which is solidly towards becoming another failed African State. That glimmer of hope is receding as Zuma and his support base in the ANC demonstrate ever more clearly their determination to hang onto power at any cost. All the signs are there, and the failure by most of the ANC politicians to stand up against what even the most obdurate Marxist must see as a developing disaster reinforces the view that they are determined to take the country into the abyss. The recent Budget proposed by Pravin Gordhan cannot be seen as an attempt to change course, and his admission during the Budget speech that the country, under ANC rule, has enjoyed a GDP growth of less than 1% per annum in the last twenty-three years must be seen as an admission of failure, yet there is no sign that any change is being targeted.

The pattern of conduct shown by Zuma in relation to the Social Grants Crisis (“What crisis?”, Zuma asks. “It has not happened yet!”) highlights the crises in Health, where the abject lack of management has resulted in 101 mental health patients dying after being removed from an established health care unit to unlicensed facilities, without any action being taken by Government to prevent the crisis developing despite Press coverage for more than three months, in the SABC, where a dictator was allowed free reign for more than two years during which the Press and MPs repeatedly raised the issue, in PRASA, where a Finding by the Public Protector regarding R14 billion of fraud and corruption has been allowed to fester without any action being taken by the Minister, in SAA, where the Treasury has been forced to contribute hundreds of millions of Rands to counter the disastrous and unconstitutional management by a Zuma favorite, in Eskom, where the country’s economy has been derailed by successive incompetent managements and the public has been bled dry to support corrupt dealings and inefficient and ineffective management actions, despite Press coverage over years, in the sale of the country’s fuel oil reserves at a price significantly below market while the Minister gives puerile excuses that not even a schoolchild could believe, with no action being taken despite extensive Press coverage, in Education, where the schoolchildren have been fed the third worst education in the world, with the Minister proclaiming yearly that the adjusted grades show that the standard is improving, in delivery of public services, where the man, whose house was burned down by a community incensed at his lack of performance, was then rewarded by Zuma in appointment as Minister of Finance! The successive Ministers of Finance, proudly lauded as custodians of the country’s finances, have brought the country to the brink of a ratings downgrade, with massive growth in deficits and concomitant increases in the proportion of the massively growing annual Budget being eaten up by interest payments, strongly declining business confidence resulting in sharply reducing new investment and foreign direct invest, and a flight of the best and brightest of our business community to more attractive economies. The mining industry has shown strong decline as a result of incompetent management of the sector by another Zuma favorite, a man who is on record as having lied to Parliament. South Africa, formerly the strongest economy on the continent, is now one of the weakest. The continent’s growth in GDP, if the calculation excludes South Africa, would be a full 4,7% higher than it is including South Africa.

It can truly be said that the only successful aspect of ANC rule has been its ability to convince the illiterate and unknowing mass of voters that the Party is the sole reason for the social grants being paid! Even the SACP, the ANC’s alliance partner, has stated that, if the average voter could read a newspaper, the ANC would no longer be in power.

What can be done to correct this situation?

It is clear that Zuma is beyond any hope of correction. The fear is growing that he will seize power in an Idi Amin-like coup, unless he can gain the assurance that he will be protected against retribution for his criminal conduct. (The word ‘criminal’ is used advisedly. Even though the 783 criminal charges have still to be adjudicated by a Court, Zuma has admitted before the Constitutional Court that he has knowingly breached the Constitution, as well as his Oath of Office. Both of such breaches constitute criminal conduct.) If South Africa can escape the treat of a State of Emergency, so well foreshadowed by Zuma’s illegal use of the South African National Defence Force during his State of the Nation Address, the threat of the ANC remains. Zuma could not have remained in office without the support of at least a significant number of the senior ANC office bearers, and the unanimous support for Zuma during Motions of No Confidence and attempts at Impeachment brought against him is a sure indication that the vast bulk of ANC members have irrevocably hitched their wagon to his star.

It seems that the only way to bring about change in the political domination of the ANC will be for foreign investors and Aid Agencies to recognize that, in providing funds to the ANC Government, they are supporting a Government that is at least as bad as the Apartheid National Party Government, and that investments made in the country are supporting something that will inevitably collapse. Only by starving the ANC Government of funds will it be possible to ensure that all 17 000 000 social grants recipients and the hundreds of thousands of ANC cadres holding sinecure government jobs that add nothing to the economy start to understand that their best interests lie in ensuring that an honest Government takes power.

An educated lower-middle class Black man, more than a year ago, stated that he and a number of his friends believed that Jacob Zuma was truly the Anti-Christ. He could not understand why any human could do what Jacob Zuma and his associates are doing to the people they were elected to represent. Discrete questioning seems to be indicative that the belief is gaining ground. One can only hope that the voters and the honest and good ANC members will act on that conviction before it becomes a fait accompli.

 

Postscript

Since writing this article, the public has been delighted to hear that the Constitutional Court has delivered judgment in the case brought against SASSA by the Black Sash. The Court had previously described the situation as a ‘crisis’, a description that is exactly opposite to what both the Minister and the President described it to be, and now ordered Bathabile Dlamini, the Minister, to provide an affidavit as to why she personally should not be ordered to pay the costs of the action. That will be a substantial sum, although not nearly enough to compensate the public for the lies, the obfuscations, the denials and the incompetence of the Minister. It is, most tellingly, a clear indicator of the hardening of the attitude of the Constitutional Court to the actions of the various Ministers in the Government, led by Jacob Zuma’s insult to the Court when, after a lengthy delay, he ‘apologized’ to the public for the confusion they had suffered in their misunderstanding of his honest intention to repay the funds he had stolen from the public to build his ‘mansion’ at Nkandla. One can only hope that the costs will be on a penalty scale, to drive home to the Minister and her partners in malfeasance that they are the servants of the people, appointed on their behalf and paid by them to do the job that is described. It is to be hoped that the numerous other cases brought by or against Ministers and the President will incur similar costs Orders, particularly the Review brought by Jacob Zuma against the Finding by the Public Protector in the matter of State Capture.