What South Africa needs now

 The past years have highlighted many failings in South Africa, failings that need to be addressed urgently if the country is to progress. These failings have smothered many of the elements that make up its potential to be a force for good in the world, but those elements still remain, although an observer might be excused for believing that they do not exist.

Even under the Apartheid regime, South Africa’s economy grew strongly, creating an economy that was on a par with most of the world’s great economies, one that could have accommodated the entire population, although the system of legalised separation of the races, and the concomitant hardship that, and other policies, generated for the Black population was a significant factor in holding the country back from the greatness it could have achieved. There was certainly a large element of corruption in the government, although it seems that the corruption was not a driving factor in many of the important economic decisions that were made in those years.

Unfortunately, along with the promise of freedom and democracy that came with the accession of Nelson Mandela to the Presidency, there came a cohort of parasites and profiteers, of people who had nothing to offer the country apart from their pollical connections. They quickly subverted the principles of the Constitution to enable them to use the nation to generate enormous wealth for themselves, often tying that wealth to their association with the governing Party, and always disguising their real motives under a plethora of quasi-righteous doublespeak.

Corruption did not start with Jacob Zuma. Corruption was already present in the early days, when first the plan to indulge in the enormously wasteful and economically worthless purchase of a mass of military equipment was floated. Even at that time, people connected with Zuma and his ANC were negotiating deals for the payment of large bribes in order for investors to gain favourable consideration by the government, at all levels, for the approval of contracts which required consent at that level. Already, by 1995, Provincial governments were suffering from the multi-level corruption of thousands of ghost workers, employees of government bodies who showed up only once per month to collect their illegitimate salaries. Already in 1996, the Premier of the Eastern Cape complained that more than 30 000 ‘workers’ fell into this category, although he did nothing to correct it, and there is no reason to believe that the same situation did not prevail in the other Provinces. At this stage, the corruption was relatively simple: a low-level manager would hire an unqualified person to do a ‘job’ (in reality to fill a position that had been approved, but which achieved no economic benefit for the country). He would negotiate a salary for the job, demanding a cut of that salary for himself. The ‘worker’ would agree to that cut, in order to keep the difference between the balance of the salary and the after-tax total as a reward for his or her complicity. The manager would agree with his superior to share the amount he received, in order to avoid awkward questions being asked, and this process would be repeated on the next level, until the man or woman at the top of the chain would be collecting a small amount from as many as thirty thousand crooked partners in corruption each month. If the final share were as little as R10 per ‘employee’ per month, a high-level manager could rake in as much as R300 000 per month! It can surely be no surprise that many, if not most, of the long-deprived cadres bought into the principle of corruption.

It was in this atmosphere of greed, self-enrichment and crooked thinking that the Arms Deal was borne, and it became easy to see how the main players in that grand corruption were able to subvert the oversight mechanisms of Parliament, an ease strongly supported by the proportional electoral system which deprives the voters, the innocent suckers, of the right to demand accountability from their representatives in Parliament. It was inevitable that the petty larceny would quickly escalate to fraud of the nation on a scale that would make the Mafia envious. This trend was built into the Constitution at an early stage, almost certainly by the negotiators of that critical document, who, no doubt, had their own interests and those of their Party at heart, ignoring the needs of the nation. As always, when politicians are involved in negotiating a law, the good of the voters remained very low on the list of priorities to be satisfied, and then only if it did not stand in the way of them achieving their goals.

The atmosphere of corruption that has pervaded the nation has grown since those early days, with the public simply accepting the crookedness, the dishonesty and the falsity of so much of what we hear from the people the political Parties have put in place to ‘represent’ the voters. The blithe acceptance of strong evidence of corruption and of deviation from what the average citizen would consider to be fair and right has increased steadily, to the point that the State President can deny in Parliament that he received a payment of R450 000 from Bosasa, stating that he would conduct his own son to prison if he found that he had done so, and then correct that some time later, when he declared that he did not know that such a sum had been paid to his election fund, managed by his son. Is it not remarkable that he was not aware that an amount of nearly half a million had been ‘donated’ to his election fund by an organisation that he must have known was under suspicion of having crooked dealings with the State? Is it possible that the State President did not realise that such a sizable ‘donation’ would be made in the expectation of some quid pro quo in the future? Is it not remarkable that the man aspiring to the highest office in the land did not make good his intention to take his son to prison himself, but rather continue to allow the status quo to develop to the point where that son is, once again, involved in a large deal with the State in circumstances that should have aroused some concern? Ramaphosa is far from alone in the race of their families to wealth on the coattails of a willing State.

Ramaphosa has stated on numerous occasions that he would ensure that corrupt persons would be hunted down and prosecuted, yet nothing has been done to bring his own ANC to trial to account for the contract for the supply of turbines for Medupe, that money-sink that continues to blight any possibility of economic recovery, in consideration for the granting of which contract the ANC gained a ‘finder’s fee’ and a shareholding in the South African subsidiary of the supplier, which it subsequently sold at a huge profit. Nothing has been done to punish the perpetrators of the Estina fraud, the Life Esidemi tragedy, even Judge Seriti, who whitewashed the Arms Deal Commission of Enquiry. The many Party members who have been involved in fraud on a grand scale, many of whom have been found guilty, either formally in Court or by judicial commentary are running free and continue to perpetrate bigger, better and more malign frauds against the public purse.

And the public stands back and waits for the second shoe to drop.

It will not, unless it is wrested by force from its place.

The Lebanese government has resigned, forced by the tragedy of the explosion to accept that it is accountable to the people for its lack of performance. Yet the ANC holds firm, although over 300 000 AIDS sufferers have died and South Africa has become the AIDs capital of the world, almost solely as a result of the inaction of Mbeki’s government to take timeous action. That is a multiple of the result of the inadequacy of the Lebanese government. The Arms Deal, which has been calculated to have cost at least R142 billion in present-day terms, and which has cost at least ten times as much in lost economic growth, continues to be denied by the ANC as a massive fraud, although one witness, at least, stated that he saw $20 million being paid into the private bank account of a senior politician. And yet the corrupt companies that undertook to make large (although easily affordable) offset investments in South Africa remain unpunished, although their promises have been largely ignored. One would be forgiven for believing that it is easier to pay R5 million to an over=zealous official than to make an investment of R2 billion. The Covid-19 disaster has thrown millions of citizens out of work, and set the economy back by at least ten years, yet the same incompetent who oversaw the Sarafina 2 fiasco continues to pontificate to the citizens on how they should behave, while presumably, playing a dominant role in the NCCC making ludicrous and almost certainly unjustified and irrational decisions that have continued to exacerbate the economic catastrophe over which the ANC is presiding, all without offering the ‘representatives’ of the people, worthless though they have shown themselves to be, any opportunity to evaluate the rationality of those decisions, all under the cloak of a State of Disaster. The multiple appointments of unqualified and incompetent Ministers of Finance, of Directors of the National Prosecuting Authority, of Commissioners of Police, of CEOs of numerous State Owned Entities such as SAA, SABC, Eskom and many others by Jacob Zuma and his chosen ones were some of the factors that have brought a once-strong economy to its knees, depriving millions of South Africans of their rights under the Constitution to health, to ownership of property, even to the ability to earn a living for themselves and their families, yet the only criminal charges brought against any of the perpetrators of these crimes are those against Jacob Zuma, for his almost petty participation in the Arms Deal corruption, and the chances are that the files will be lost, the Prosecutor will be of low grade and insufficiently prepared and the numerous objections and delays that have characterised the pursuit of justice against him will continue. The many fine words about correcting the dishonesty at all levels of government, the assertions that ‘we will eradicate corruption’, will continue to be uttered at the top level of government, as they have been since at least as long ago as 2012, when Jacob Zuma first put them into the boilerplate text of the State of the Nation address, and they will continue to be ignored for as long as the money flows, for as long as the citizens fail to realise that they are the ones who are entitled, not the politicians and the crooked businessmen.

That realisation may come in one of two possible ways. The one way, which the politicians should bear in mind as a distinct possible response to their continued treasonous conduct, is a public lynching when the people are finally gatvol, a realisation that seems, daily, to be more likely. People who have been made poor while their supposed protectors have continued to rob them, often have no mercy when that tipping point is reached. The other way, probably preferable, is that civil society get together to support a demand that a non-political Integrity Commission be established with the function of evaluating the fitness for public service of any person proposed for public office, from Deputy Director General to State President. The recommendations would be made after a careful evaluation of the background, the honesty, motivations, qualifications, as demonstrated by education and work history, and freedom from taint of the intended appointees. This is a requirement of law in the case of senior officials appointed to banks, insurance companies and financial service providers, and the requirement should not be less in the case of persons appointed to positions of trust in public service in the widest sense. The recommendations would not be politically motivated, as has been shown by the appointment of a Public Protector to be no more than a continuation of the ‘election’ of MPs by the dominant Party. The members of the Commission would be elected initially, and then each such Commissioner would be subject to a repeat evaluation at intervals of not more than two years, to prevent the possibility of such persons becoming tainted by the power they would exercise, and the recommendations relating to appointees, would be reviewed every two years for the same reason. The Commission would be entitled to conduct exhaustive lifestyle audits, and would be entitled to demand prosecution of those they find to have abused the position of trust implicit in public office. The Commission might choose to conduct an interim evaluation of its own accord, or at the instance of a complaint from the public. Most importantly. The Commission would have to be protected under Chapter 6 of the Constitution.

For those who might claim that such a Commission would be overkill, consider this: The much-vaunted Constitution of South Africa has been shown to be severely deficient in the protection of the citizens against the abuse of power by those in high office. Failure to correct that abuse may well result in the lynching of many of those suspected of such abuse. That happened in Italy, when the Italian people realised that their leaders, particularly il Duce, had gone astray. It has happened in other countries. Do you want to see it happen in South Africa? Really?

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.”

Let us Make America Stupid Again

Donald Trump has a wonderful platform to spread a message, no matter how uninformed, how incredible, how amazingly stupid it may be.

During his normally rambling and disconnected monologue to the Party faithful in Tulsa on June 20, he managed to pull off one of his most staggeringly stupid statements, apparently without any response from the audience. He stated, in unequivocal terms, without any possibility of a future claim that ‘he was joking’, that the coronavirus numbers continued to rise, a fact that he attributed to the increased testing of people. His recommendation, which he said he had given the people responsible for this unacceptable state of affairs, was to reduce the amount of testing!

This seems to be a statement of GOP policy, insane as that seems to be. This is borne out by the GOP Senators, who, during the impeachment proceedings, refused to hear evidence, positive or negative, on the conduct of their leader. By remaining ignorant in the face of well-publicized and well-proven facts, they can deny the truth.

Just as the continuation of the abjectly aberrant behavior of the current President places footprints in the history of the country, and of the Republican Party, in the way it has destroyed America’s status in the world and the cohesion of American society, his faulty and absent decisions have resulted in the needless deaths of over a hundred thousand innocent citizens. No amount of mindless ranting at the media for their ‘fake news’ or at the scientists and medical experts who have given advice tat has purposefully and maliciously been ignored by the President and, at his behest, by his administration, can take away the many graves of those who have died as a result of his stupidity, his incompetence and, as many around the world say, his insanity. Those graves will remain, written large in the history of a country that once enjoyed the respect and admiration of most of the world. They will remain as mute testimony to the ability of one man to corrupt the moral values of a venerable political Party, in much the same way as the graves of six million innocent people mark the history of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party. Neither of those men, nor their political supporters and mindless hangers-on will ever be able to deny their complicity in the deaths of many of their citizens or the destruction of their countries.

If one statement will go down in history as the defining description of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, it will be that they managed to MAKE ANERICA STUPID AGAIN.

It is Time to Go Back to Fundamentals

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for several years, with successive administrations chasing their unproven or disproven ideologies, conducting experiments designed to prove that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and structuring the State to facilitate fraud on a large scale. Even before the Coronavid-19 crisis struck, the country was in a parlous state, with unemployment at record levels and increasing steadily, school performance among the worst in the advanced world, the country’s ranking for economic performance among its peers in the developing world at record lows and declining, the finances of the country in the worst state for decades, and no reprieve in sight. The pandemic struck a country that was in the worst possible condition.

In a way, the pandemic, although hugely destructive in many ways, may present South Africa an opportunity to hit the Reset button, and grab at an opportunity to retake the place it held in the civilized world before lunatic policies and governing Party-institutionalised corruption dealt it such devastating blows. Tito Mboweni has recognised the need, stating that the Treasury should develop a Budget based on a zero-base process. He is fully aware that tweaking the existing Budget will not correct the many problems he, and the country, face. This would be an exercise in futility, a repositioning of the deck chairs on the ship of State as it sails at full power into the iceberg.

The first step in correcting any problem situation is to recognise what the real problems are, and where the country would like to be. A roadmap is useless until you know where you are on it, and where you want to go. This should be done in a dispassionate, non-accusatory way, so that the participants in the exercise are not compelled to defend their territory. The process of coming to a statement of where we are now must include theoretical and practical economists, businesspersons from large, medium and small businesses and people who are affected by the conditions, such as housewives, teachers, students and taxpayers, both active and retired. It is vitally important to have a balance of views. Nothing could be more destructive to the process than to have a preponderance of radical views, as is almost always the case when a committee of politicians and political advisors is convened. If you need to be convinced of the truth of this, look at the state of the South African economy! One cannot imagine that the ANC would be so delusional as to believe that it could benefit from the imposition of policies that would be certain to destroy the economy.

Once we know, realistically, where we are, we need to define where we want to go. At this point it will be almost impossible to avoid the political rhetoric and electioneering slogans, but a factual statement of the basics may help to define our desires. We could, for example, say that we desire to reach a state of 3% unemployment within ten years. The question then arises: employment in what? Let us say that we want the economy, in terms of GDP representation, to be 5% mining, 20% agriculture, 30% services and 45% industry. We can then break these desires down in terms of categories, and from these derive the growth needs to reach the targets. These, in turn, will generate the requirements, the absolute necessities, in terms of investment, education and training, infrastructure, labour conditions and so on. It will be a complex exercise, made more so by the need to avoid expressing the desires in terms of political aspirations and existing policies, but the exercise will be a valuable one, highlighting the actual needs, as opposed to what preconceived and often wish-list policies dictate.

When this work is complete, and not before, we can start formulating the wish-list, the configurations of the economy that we would like to have in the desired state, in accordance with the Constitution, and disregarding any other existing policy and legal imperatives and structures. We could, for example, desire an open economy, attractive to foreign investment, with equal opportunity to all its citizens and as much of the work as possible being done by private enterprise. It will be essential at this stage to ignore the past policies, because many people will see these as the only possible way, while others will view them as anathema. This wish-list will then be applied to the desired state and an assessment be made of how feasible it will be to achieve both the desired outcome and the desired form. Revisions and re-evaluations will ensue, until the majority accept that the statement is both comprehensive and realistic in terms of the South African scene and the world economy.

We will now be in a position to formulate plans to achieve the desired state. A combination of the desired shape of the GDP with the gap in number of qualified potential employees will result in an education outcome, and from that we can formulate the plans for a change in the education and training system. Similar changes will result in practically every area of economic activity. This must be done ruthlessly. Changes will bring pain to the participants in the existing structures, but this must be viewed as inevitable if we are to achieve the desired state. Some pain results from every change, but changes are essential if we are to move forward. The pain that we identify can be mitigated by plans to retrain and redeploy those affected. For example, it is clear that the civil service is overstaffed, underqualified and inefficient. When we know the necessary minimum configuration of the civil service, a performance evaluation can be performed to determine who is both capable of doing a meaningful job in their position and is actually doing it at an acceptable level. Those identified as being good in their present jobs will be retained or transferred to a similar job elsewhere, where a need is shown. Those who do not perform adequately can be put on a ‘B List’, while those who perform acceptably but whose jobs are no longer required, will be put on an ‘A List’. The A List can be offered a total retrenchment package, for example, of a value equal to their retrenchment packages plus, say, 12% plus benefits for a year, which can be drawn down as the interest on a loan to be advanced by the government plus a monthly salary, and they can be given leave of absence for three months to put together a business before the arrangement comes into effect. They will be supported in their efforts by a team of qualified experts in their chosen field and provided with retraining they may need. In this way, they will be given an opportunity to establish a business that, for example, is able to tender for the activities that they previously undertook as employees, or any other business. Of course, any attempt at illegally influencing the granting of tenders would disqualify them from the scheme. In this way, a large number of small businesses will be able to be established. Those on the B List will simply be retrenched on the normal terms, although they could be introduced to the business establishment support teams, or to retraining programs.

The restructure of the economy will require considerable changes to existing laws, probably including the BEE laws, the labour laws restricting the employment of workers, the generalization of Union settlements to non-participating employers and the setting of minimum wages, the laws entrenching tribal kings and chiefs in a position of almost unfettered power over their ‘subjects’ at high cost to the fiscus and the economy, the laws establishing numerous inefficient and economically non-productive bodies, and many others, as well as the passing of new laws to ensure that the civil service does its designated work honestly, efficiently and at lowest cost. Included in the latter could be laws that increase the penalties for dishonesty by 50% in the case of a person in a position of trust, such as a Mayor taking a bribe to allocate a contract illegally, or a bank director defrauding the depositors. This would underline the need for adherence to the doctrine of trust, particularly in elected officials. Other similar laws would penalise attorneys who persist in defending unfairly any person known to them to have committed the criminal act, on the basis that attorneys are officers of the Court, and should be expected to uphold the law, to the extent that they may act only to ensure that the client is given a fair trial. In this context, ‘fair’ should be applied to the client as well as to the prosecutor and the Court.

It is fair to say that a majority of thinking people are dissatisfied with the status quo. This is reflected in condemnation of an unfair, ineffective and unduly slow legal system, by citizens advising foreigners and foreign-based fellow citizens not to return to the country and not to invest in it, in racial bias between groups which previously strived to achieve the miracle that Nelson Mandela stood up for. It is shown by the near-insane call by the EFF to allow White businesses to die, echoed by the ANC Mayor of Ekhureleni, at a time when the country needs every job it can manage, and every cent of tax revenue. It is proven by a de facto real unemployment rate of 50%, when 5% would be considered by any thinking politician as a disaster, by the fact that South Africa has dropped in the ranks of economically-successful nations every year for the past decade, and has not achieved anything near its potential in the past 25 years. The need for a major overhaul of the economy is highlighted by the flight of major mining and industrial companies, such as Anglo American and Gencor, to foreign fields, by the continuing withdrawal of foreign investment capital from what should be the major developing economy in the world, as well as by the dismal financial reports regarding the performance of the economy. South Africa cannot afford to wait the months or years that seem to be normal in ‘urgent’ actions by the government, such as can be seen in the lengthy inactivity in combatting gender-based violence and the prosecution of those whose criminal actions have been extensively documented in reports by investigative journalists and the Zondo Commission.

The time for action is now, before the situation as deteriorated so much further that no rescue plan will achieve a result within less than twenty years. A naïve expectation that the ANC government will take the necessary steps in time to prevent the disaster becoming a catastrophe, an expectation that Cyril Ramaphosa would do that shortly after his accession to power, and then again shortly after his election more than a year ago, has been shown to be an illusion born of hope, not a realistic extrapolation of past conduct, and will inevitably lead to the collapse that seems, in any realistic view, to be imminent.