Fairness and Democracy are Unknown Concepts in South Africa

The so-called “Democracy” that is claimed to be the centrepiece of the New South Africa is very hard to discern.

The most glaring example of that is the National Covid Command Council, a grouping of the top (ANC) politicians which has taken on itself the control of the South African economy, issuing commands without providing any indication of the justification for them, if indeed there is a rational justification, and requiring strict adherence to even the most destructive and nonsensical parts of them, in the manner of any of the typical African dictatorships. This process of undemocratic governance is so clouded in secrecy and Party-controlled policies that even the nominal President has, at times, been blindsided in an embarrassing way. The actions of this Command Council are very clearly decided behind the scenes by the subversives in the Ramaphosa Cabinet and the suspect members of the ANC NEC. Nowhere is there any sign of a democratic process in making or evaluating these commands in a reasoned way by the elected representatives of the people, even those subject, as they are, to the discipline of the Party, another element of non-Democracy, and there is not even any apparent attempt to lead the electorate to believe that there is, in fact, any democratic process at work here.

Another example of the abject failure of democracy in South Africa is the rapid agreement by the government, in this time of financial and fiscal crisis, to hand over to the taxi industry R1,2 billion, to make up for their losses as a result of having to operate at less than their normal 120% of capacity. When the taxi bosses declared that they were not satisfied, wanting R5 billion, the government hastened to mollify them by agreeing that they could load 100% of capacity, provided they drive around in sub-zero temperatures with their windows open! Apart from the evidence that the government is operating on another planet, this move demonstrates two points very clearly. The first is that it has now been established beyond any shadow of doubt that it is possible to gain what you want by making threats, provided you simultaneously contribute generously towards the bank accounts of the favoured few, probably as well as the ANC. The few thousand lives that this will cost is, after all, no more than the usual death toll the taxi industry inflicts on the public as a result of the abject failure by the Police to do their duty in combatting dangerous driving and unroadworthy vehicles, and the failure of the government at all levels to provide safe and affordable public transport to its citizens.

Yet another example of the lack of fairness, usually a requirement of democracy. Is the fact that thousands of businesses were forced to bear the closure brought by Covid-19, coupled with the loss of wages and profits by millions of citizens, all of whom have the same debts, rent, and all other expenses and cashflow elements associated with being alive, while the government and SOE employees, most of them avid ANC supporters, continued to receive 100% of their grossly-inflated wages and salaries, without any need to perform any services to earn them. Of course, as they are ANC voters, one could not expect otherwise.

Of course, the ANC government is accustomed to unfairness. The BEE regulations are an enduring indictment of their commitment to unfairness in their striving to win votes. Under these regulations, Whites are unfairly prejudiced by not being able to build, own and manage their own businesses beyond a minuscule size, and, as a result, they unfairly prejudice tens of thousands of Black workers, who would have enjoyed an income from them, as well as an opportunity to gain the skills and experiences that, in any sane country, would have enabled them to work their way to the top, to start and operate their own businesses, and to contribute to the economy in a way that would have resulted in South Africa winning the race against unemployment and poverty. The regulations, by demanding that businesses have a prescribed minimum proportion of Black ownership, have also had the effect of driving away billions of dollars (not exaggerated, as is directly known by the writer) in direct foreign investment, money and expertise which would have gone a long way to allowing South Africa to win its place at the forefront of world economies, rather than slipping down the indices of leading countries in almost everything that counts for its citizens. What seems to have been ignored by the ANC louts is the fact that anyone who is willing to take financial risks, to apply effort and ingenuity, and huge effort, to build a small business into a large one, is not willing to hand over a significant proportion of that business to a parasitic shareholder, who will share in the profits and growth of that business without contributing anything in the way of skills, investment or risk.

The final example that we will list here, although the list could go on for pages, is the idea that Blacks have a need to own their own piece of farmland (conclusively disproved by several surveys and by the fact that most of those with access to such farmland do not make use of it to farm at a scale greater than subsistence level). This idea had produced the notion of Expropriation without Compensation, a principle that goes directly counter to the principles enshrined in the supposedly-democratic Constitution, and seems to be aimed directly at the Whites, who have been the driving force that took South Africa to the point of being a noted agricultural economy. Any Ramaphosa protestation to the contrary is shown to be no more than ANC disinformation by the fact that the President hastened to drop to his knee at the foot of the Zulu King, who did not like the idea of losing his control over the three million plus hectares of land held by him. The fact that the land became subject to his control by the despotic actions of his bloodthirsty ancestor, King Shaka, another markedly undemocratic person, seems to play no part in Ramaphosa’s unstinting promise to the Zulu King (another example of the failure of democracy under our Constitution) that the ANC would not apply to ‘his land’ the “fair” principle of return of the land taken from the early inhabitants of the country to their original owners. The thought that the Zulu King holds the land on behalf of his ‘subjects’ is belied by the corrupt actions of many other Black tribal Kings, who enrich themselves at the cost of their tribes, by the difficulties experienced by those subjects in gaining any long-term rights to the land in order to build an agricultural business, and by the facts that the Zulu King unilaterally imposed a ‘rent’ on his subjects, in respect of land which they apparently own.

It would certainly not be unfair to say that the illusion of democracy to which the citizens, all of them, signed off in 1994, when they handed the control of the country to a Party which has earned its name as the ‘Association for Nepotism and Corruption’, was a massive confidence trick.

President Ramaphosa and the Covid-19 Crisis

Not all that long ago, Cyril Ramaphosa was viewed as a reasonably competent manager, even if somewhat pedestrian in his decision-making and childish in his aspirations, as evidenced by his Wakanda new city plans, and his aspiration to teach every school pupil to code, where it is known that a high proportion of schoolchildren are not able to read with understanding and most children, not to mention teachers, are at a very low standard in mathematics.

Unfortunately, the continued experience gained by the public of Ramaphosa over the time he has been President have exposed many of his weaknesses. That has come into stark clarity during his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. As an experienced businessman, we would have expected Ramaphosa to understand that important decisions need to be made after careful consideration of expert advice. That has not happened. Just as Mbeki did during the early phases of the AIDS crisis, he seems to have locked in the advice of a group, perhaps only a few, ‘experts’, ignoring the views of others, particularly those of the public. This is clear in regard to the ban on cigarettes and liquor, where he has chosen not to permit the public access to the information or the reasoning process on which the decision was made.

The very name of the ‘Command Council’ gives a clue to the mindset: it is dictatorial, the action of a group of people who have no need to submit their deliberations to the scrutiny of an elected Parliament, no matter how feeble and emasculated that body may have become under ANC rule. This is certainly not the way one would expect an enlightened, confident and capable manager to act. The example of Angela Merkel provides an example of how he should have acted.

As an experienced manager and director of large companies, Ramaphosa should have the ability to understand when he can trust what he is being told, and what he should view as a sycophantic giving of information to please him. That is an important quality of any manager, and it is critically important in managing the response of a country to a pandemic, which has the potential to cost the lives of thousands of citizens, all of whom are entitled to rely on the capability of the elected President to make decisions that are well-considered and effective, in the light of facts.

Ramaphosa claimed at the outset of the lockdown that the purpose of it was to give the Health Service the opportunity to prepare for the crisis. That alone is a little naïve, given that the government knew, or should have known, early in January that the pandemic would be life-threatening. It should have started making the preparations at that time. It did not. The result of that failing has been that the hospital services, already at breaking point after 26 years of incompetent and corrupt cadre misrule, is now likely not to be able to handle the rush of patients. That level of incompetence seems to have prevailed until now. Two months ago, Ramaphosa visited the Eastern Cape ‘to check on the state of preparedness of the Province’. During that visit, he expressed his pleased satisfaction that the ‘Province was well-prepared’ for the encroaching crisis. That was patently incorrect, either as a result of his inability to investigate the matter correctly, or simply a political assurance, to avoid any political fallout. In either event, it amounts to criminal negligence on the part of a man whom that the public has a right to trust. The Province is not now prepared for the crisis, and was plainly never prepared. Ramphosa’s well-publicised endorsement of the performance of his Party in the Eastern Cape was wrong and misleading, and it came after 25 years of Press reports regarding the incompetence and corruption in that Province. Surely, that alone would have prompted any reasonable manager to interrogate the situation thoroughly. Ramaphosa failed to do so.

The prime requirement of a manager is that he manages. The antics of the members of the Cabinet, and more recently of the members of the ‘Command Council’, each going his or her own way, prove conclusively that Ramaphosa does not manage: he passes on the decisions made by the ANC NEC (a body that has no standing in the legislative or regulatory framework of the government under any law, but which is certainly the de facto government of the country). Ramaphosa’ s conduct in this regard is clearly in breach of his duties under the Constitution and his Oath of Office. His dereliction of his duties is clearly visible in the actions of Dlamini Zuma, in contradicting his statements on tobacco, and in the excesses of Cele and Mbalula. The fact that he would simply ignore the breaches of the law by the taxi industry in loading to 100% of capacity and crossing Provincial boundaries is clear evidence of that, as is his caving into the demands of the taxi bosses in forking out a subsidy of R!,2 billion, at a time when practically every industry is under existential threat as a result of his bungling of the Covid-19 crisis, without any form of support by the government.

Another vital capability of any manager is the ability to plan. Clearly Ramaphosa does not plan. The ‘Command Council’ has lurched from one self-made crisis to another, making ad hoc decisions and reversing them, and never bringing the public into its confidence. The rationale behind many of the incomprehensible decisions, if, in fact, there is a rationale, is conceived in dark rooms and edicts are issued.

Virtually every aspect of Ramphosa’s performance, or lack of it, since the coronavirus struck, casts doubt on his ability to be the President. The only comparison that is positive is that he has probably been better than Zuma would have been.

Surely South Africa deserves better.

Advice to the President of South Africa

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for two decades, with most of the indicators of a healthy economy falling, with the country losing its status as the most advanced and the largest economy on the continent, with a flight of experienced and effective management heading off to more congenial pastures, with the State Owned Entities heading ever more deeply into financial and operational collapse. The government has ignored this, as well it might. The ANC-led government has been responsible for the mismanagement of the economy since it has been in power, using its position to derive corrupt profits and simple corrupt diversion of funds from the State. It has constantly asserted that it plans to stop corruption, a statement in every State of the Nation Address by the President since 2010, but no action has been taken to put meaning to those fine words. The people, the businesspeople and the international investment community have taken note of the empty promises, and are no longer willing to give any credence to such empty words. They want action, and they want it NOW. The same disbelief applies to all of the multitudinous plans announced by the Presidents – all of them- and the government they represent. And the same demand for action NOW is present in the thinking of those businesspeople and investors when they consider what they can do to pull the country out of its multi-faceted crises, and, indeed, whether they wish to.

A small piece of advice has been offered in a book published early this year – “Multiverse” – which analyses the cause of the many problems discernible in the worked through the medium of quasi-science fiction. The book has been read by many leaders of business and politics around the world, and the advice might well be taken to heart by the President of South Africa.

“It is well known that your country has many plans, but that no-one ever does anything to implement them. Part of the reason for that is that the people who should be responsible for implementing them did not really commit themselves to drawing them up, and so have no real reason to do the hard work of implementing them, and the other part of the reason is that those plans were pie in the sky. They represent a wish list, but no fairy godmother has arrived with a magic wand to make them real. You need to call in the best experts in the country, no matter their political affiliation, to make a realistic evaluation of the state of the country, and then to formulate plans that will bring it to where it should be. There must be no reliance on the past as an excuse not to achieve the future. That past has happened, and you can’t manage it now. You have to accept what is and go on from there. There must equally be no reliance on reasons that you certainly know to be little more than political posturing, and equally no commitment to a set of policies and ideologies that no longer have a place in a real-world country. Nothing can be written in stone, and nothing can be off the table. You need to evaluate each element of your plan and take it to a logical conclusion, using only assumptions that can be shown to be valid now.”

I have told you this because I believe that there should be absolute clarity on our stance. Your government in the past has imposed laws and regulations on your people and the companies on the basis that they have the power to do so, without most people having the ability to avoid becoming subject to such unfair laws. I know that the Ministers have blamed the dire economic situation in the country on numerous factors, such as global warming, the China-American trade war, White Monopoly Capital, and other similar reasons. The real truth is simple. Investors avoid the country because they choose not to donate a half of their shareholding to people nominated by the ruling Party. They would rather go to another country where they can rely on the electrical utility not doubling the cost of energy every three years while they allow the lights to go out, simply because the political appointees are robbing the State-Owned Entities blind while they employ twice as many people as are needed. simply to keep the unions sweet. The businesspeople go to other countries and planets because they can, and because they have not received a fair deal here. If you want to create the millions of jobs that you need, you must offer the investors the sort of deal that they will get elsewhere, from any honest government. You, as voters, must insist that the people you elect, comply with the norms and standards that you would want for yourselves. You must punish the Members of Parliament who fail to hold the Executive to account, when it is clear to any thinking, fair person that what they are doing is not right. You must make them believe that they represent you [the voters] in every decision that they make. You have suffered long enough at the hands of evil, greedy men and women. You will have one opportunity, at the next election, to set the path for your country. If you make the right decisions, you will enjoy the full support of the Integra Corporation and many other similar companies throughout seventeen universes. Your country will boom as it never has before. If you make the wrong decisions. you will condemn South Africa to the group of failed States, the countries that are willing to accept the excuses that their politicians offer them, rather than demanding that they perform their duties to the high standard required by their salaries.”

In a discussion of the reasons for the state of the nation, an analysis of the President was made:

“We don’t think that he [the President] is an inherently bad man but sometimes the job is more than he can cope with. His response to such a situation is first to spend a lot of time hesitating and then, when we push him for action, to turn to the people he knows, the people in his Party, who are more than willing to give him the advice that best suits their desires, or simply to defer the matter, to delay making a decision or to pass the responsibility for it to a group of so-called ‘experts’, who are, more often than not, people who have sold him on their supposed capabilities and who are, almost by definition, people he has come to know as a result of their Party connections. Of course, they earn big fees for doing the work, and their interests are best served by inflating the problem far more than is really required. They produce a report at the end of weeks or months, with seven hundred pages of waffle and recommendations that are in line with Party thinking, when what he really needed was a one-page summary of the facts, and another page setting out three or four possible ways to go, each with a ‘why’ and a ‘why not’.”

The book contains many items of wisdom and insight, and should be made required reading by every politician and businessperson, possibly every High School student.

Where are They?

Fermi asked the question, referring to the lack of contact from other, inter-galactic civilizations. He asked “If there are intelligent people out there, where are they? Why have they not made contact with us?”

Of course, the question ignores numerous factors, such as the time it would require to travel to us, if that is what he expected them to do. A spacecraft, traveling at 20% of the speed of light, a speed well in excess of what we, as a supposedly advanced civilization, could hope to achieve with our present state of knowledge, would require more than six hundred years from a star system only 120 light years away, given the time required to accelerate to that speed and then to slow down on arrival. And that would imply that such a civilization would have a valid reason to visit us, a civilization that only managed to start using radio more than 450 years after they would have had to leave home!

Perhaps the answer lies in some simple calculations.

Assume that humans on Earth have been able to send and receive radio messages for about 120 years. That’s not long, considering our 2 000 000 year development as sentient beings, the Earth’s 3 600 000 000 year existence, and the 13 600 000 000 year life of the Universe. Assume that other civilizations have followed more or less the same path. That seems to be not unreasonable.

Now consider that radio waves travel at about the speed of light. That means that a radio message, a flashing light signal or other similar form of communication that was sent by a civilization somewhere in the Universe, let’s say 120 light years from Earth, on the day they first developed radio communication 120 years ago, would reach Earth today. To receive that message, we would have to aim a large radio antenna (large, in order to collect the faint signal sent by an early-stage technology) at exactly that point in the heavens that the transmitter would have occupied, adjusted for their movement and ours (because all celestial objects are in relative motion, at high speeds, so an antenna aimed at a star system we see in the sky today would miss the actual point it now is by many millions of miles if we were to reply immediately) in order to receive the signal. If our aim were even one degree off, there is a high probability that we would not receive the message. And, to top it all, we would have to be ready to receive the message at exactly the time it passed us. One minute too early or too late, and we would miss the signal, because it comes, not as a long beam, but as a single block.

If our radio antenna is able to scan an area of one degree by one degree at a distance of 120 light years, it would have to scan 42 253 such areas! If such a scan requires one day each, to be meaningful at the lowest level, about 365 blocks per year, the scan would require about 190 years! Alternatively, we would need about two hundred antennae continuously working for a full year to receive the signal from our celestial neighbors, to allow us to have a reasonable chance to receive the signal.

Of course, that neighbor might be further than 120 light years away, say 200 light years, in which case we would have to wait another eighty years to receive that message. They might have developed earlier, or more quickly, than we did. If so, two hundred years ago, they might have tried to make contact with us by radio, perhaps for fifty years, and then given up hope that there were other sentient beings out there, and reverted to other methods of communication, such as using the opportunities offered by quantum entanglement. The radio signals would have zipped on by us, leaving us ignorant of our neighbors. On the other hand, their development might have lagged ours, leaving us to wait another hundred years, or a thousand, to hear from them. A thousand years is an insignificant fraction of the period of existence of sentient life on Earth.

It is an enormous arrogance on our part to base our belief that there are no other sentient beings in the Universe entirely on our own example. We are, in effect, demanding that life on another planet developed in the same timescale as it did on ours! The factors that might influence when we receive a radio signal from another civilization are legion – their distance, the date of origin of the other civilizations, their rate of development to create radio signals, our ability and preparedness to receive a radio signal as it zips past our location at the speed of light, even the question of whether they use radio as a means of communication. While looking for such signals is a whole lot better than doing nothing, it is very far short of a valid test for the non-existence of sentient beings out in the Universe. Asking that another civilization should have developed both long-distance spaceflight capability, and then decided to look for intelligent life in our isolated nook of the Universe, at all and long enough ago to have reached us within the tiny portion of our existence when we would have the scientific development and religious permission to receive and understand such a visit is even more preposterous.

On any basis of science and logic, the answer to Fermi’s question, “Where are they?” is “Wait and see.”