ALMOST A QUARTER OF A MILLION NEW CRIMINALS

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”.[1]This apparently also applies to numbers particularly when governments need them to support a decision. Perhaps the most shocking example of this from the 63-day lockdown is 243 164. This is the number of arrests made by the police in that time for crimes (?) related to not adhering to the rules of the lockdown. This averages out at almost 4000 arrests per day, a rate which must be putting a severe strain on what we are told is an under resourced police force. Another puzzling statistic is the claim that the government had mobilised some 73 000 military forces to help the police in their duties. How this fits with the official total of just 64 000 uniformed members of the defence forces has not been explained. And then there are the daily Humpty Dumpty type numbers none of which appear to be flattening anything very much at all.

A common theme promoted by those calling for a complete and immediate end to all restrictions on civil liberties imposed in the last 9 weeks is that it is expected and inevitable that most people will in due course be infected. Sadly for a few this will have a fatal outcome  Waiting until the last known germ has been eliminated from what ever size area one chooses, is a fool’s errand  both because it’s probably impossible to know when this might happen and secondly because it just takes one outsider to pop in for a drink or even, heaven forbid, a smoke or a haircut to restart the threat of an infection chain. However, there are many people, including so-called influencers who can’t or won’t understand this inevitability feature of a viral infection, and who work and plan tirelessly but fruitlessly for a germ-free future. Unfortunately, there also are politicians eager to use this opportunity of a distracted nation to ram through their deluded and discredited plans for a communist utopia.

Like: rescuing SAA “for the people”, wresting control of the lucrative tobacco industry from the “clutches” of white monopoly capital,  exposing  the many alleged cases of “crass profiteering”, furthering the program of property expropriation, tightening the controls of freedom of expression and rewarding loyal but incompetent and corrupt cadres with positions of power. As if coping with a potentially lethal escapee virus from an experimental bio lab is not enough for us to cope with.

The many alumni of Pretoria Boys High include some who in friendlier times share a beer or two with your scribe. When next this happens, I shall be asking them about their fellow old boy who has saddled his infant daughter with the name “X Æ A-12”. Yes, just like that! Even the Californian authorities objected to the (almost) Roman numerals “Xii” in the original application and required that they be replaced with the more conventional 12! This poor child’s mother calls herself Grimes and daddy is Elon Musk. Money just cannot buy class.

A welcome addition to the now imminent reopening of bottle stores will happen when both professional and amateur sports restart and return to the TV screens. Understandably, players, officials and spectators will individually need to decide upon and manage their own risks about being infected. It perhaps won’t be an easy choice. But the cardboard cut-out fans and crowd noises played on public address systems to accompany the first matches, probably won’t survive for long. Whether the pay cheques will immediately return to pre virus levels will be almost as interesting as the games. Administrators have been busy in this dead period trying to reduce contact in contact sports. Also, they have been tinkering with other rules. Reportedly rugby referees have been asked to attend conjuring classes in order to learn how to store and produce on cue, the red, yellow and now an orange card. What happened to the white one?

James Greener

Friday 29^th May 2020. Day 63 of my government caring about me.

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[1] Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking Glass.

BORROW SOME MONEY. PLEASE

Mumblings on the internet suggest that Finance Minister Tito Mboweni is quite disgruntled with the way the governance of the country has slipped into a state of mystery with a powerful and probably unconstitutional structure apparently calling the shots and blatantly ignoring cabinet members including the President. It’s alarming that NDZ is now quite often referred to as our Prime Minister. A post last held by P W Botha. Remember him?

Tito alone seems to have the mathematical skills to subtract income from expenditure to obtain the measure of the depth of trouble the government finances are in. Which is deep. But no one seems to want to listen. The fact that the treasury is still (just) collecting some money is all that matters, as the looters jostle to get their sticky paws on it before it disappears to pay interest to the lenders and social grants to the ungrateful voters. While perhaps millions of South Africans have lost their income and jobs due to the lock down, not one civil servant has lost anything. Yet.

Meanwhile this week Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago cut the official interest rate by another half percent to its lowest level in living memory.  The motivation for this move is to encourage borrowers to take the cheap cash and spend it. This is not obviously happening though, as everyone is very wary of the unprecedented social and economic developments around the world and not just at home.  The flipside of course is that lenders have taken a cut of at least a third in their annual interest receipts and this will also impact tax collections as well.

The government has tabled their plans for the dreadfully messy and complicated task of reopening the schools after the lock down. As Tidemarks has discussed before, education is a topic in which everyone has an expert opinion, having themselves once upon a time been at a school. Advice, therefore, is not lacking, and gratifyingly neither yet is money. Private enterprise has come to the party in size with resources to help in the very first phase which is to clean and disinfect school premises. The next part, which is to get teachers and pupils to return to their posts is going to be much harder, as it contradicts the mantra of so-called social distancing that has become the keystone of our recent lives and we are also now experts in virology. To help with all the difficulties that might arise in Gauteng, the education department there has begun the task of selecting 7000 unemployed young (18 to 35 years old!) people to assist the school authorities and government offices with “screening, data capture and monitoring compliance”. and although they will be trained and paid a stipend they are not employed and will be “let go” when the crisis passes. Oh yes? Naming them the “Youth Brigade” is vaguely disquieting.

In February this year, an advertisement was published in the press by the Municipal Manager of the King Cetshwayo District Municipality. This was headed “Development of the District Development Agency” and appeared to be a consequence of a resolution made by the Municipal Council in June 2019 and simply told readers of the intention to develop a District Development Agency. The advertisement also set a quite short deadline for written submissions but neglected to say on what topic. The long delay between the council meeting and the appearance of this apparent request for help suggests that the officials also are unsure how to develop a Development Agency. Presumably, like the tens of thousands of other governmental schemes, it will simply channel public money to deserving entities that the Agency alone have the skills (and extended families) to identify. That is if there is any money left after the developers of the Development Agency have submitted their fee note.

SPORT SECTION. In a new twist to the ongoing saga involving the abaThembu nation in the Eastern Cape, a faction of the royal family wants all six of King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo’s children to undergo paternity tests. Presumably this is expected to whittle down the list of heirs and boot out the mountebanks. Entertaining maybe, but surely there are very few dynasties or royal families anywhere in the world that would willingly submit to that sort of investigation?

James Greener

Friday 22^nd May 2020

HAS PRESIDENT CYRIL EVER READ AN OPEN LETTER?

With few global exceptions, governments are scratching their heads about how to unlock the lockups into which they so keenly plunged their nations. It can now be seen that the lockup was the easy part both to launch and also to get people to grasp the issue and comply. One didn’t need a faculty of what-ever-ologists to do what mothers have been saying since germs were discovered. “You can’t go and play with your friend. He has a nasty cold.” But now that it turns out that most of us and our friends weren’t and aren’t infected by this terrible virus, we are eager to resume our lives. President Cyril could end the lockdown and all its levels immediately. Most of us will choose to practice social distancing until some unknown future time when we individually feel safer than we do now. But, aside from the opinions that an 8-week lockdown may be quite adequate for achieving medical objectives, there are two extremely important and urgent reasons for terminating the State of Disaster immediately and entirely.

The first is that the promulgated lifting of the restrictions in stages seems to hinge around the thesis that certain jobs are more essential than others. And the second is that politicians are thrilled with the docile compliance from their usually harshest critics and don’t want it to stop as they have a whole lot of other tests of central planning to run. Like for how long can the black market in legal commodities be milked for the benefit of the cadres?

The wilful denial of the hardship now being suffered by the poorest of our land in the absence of those jobs currently deemed to be inessential is breath-taking. To the owner of whatever menial or distasteful task they do to make a living, that task could not be more essential. Ministers say that they hear people’s complaints about hunger but just to wait while they get things organised and issue permits to charity soup kitchens on a daily basis. Humanity and compassion have disappeared in the race to get a share of the relief funds.

It is outrageous that we are not allowed to know who will use what data in order to adjust the level of lockdown. We are told how many people are and have been infected by the novel corona virus as well as the number who have recovered from COVID-19. There is also a count of how many have died. Reportedly, the number of deaths caused by this virus may be inflated because of so-called comorbidities (what a dreadful word). These data points probably form the basis of the secret calculation. Obviously, the quality and reliability of these totals range from modest to dubious on every geographic scale. Nevertheless, poor data is all in a day’s work for numerical epidemiologists  as they churn the numbers to produce a suite of results including the infamous R, the value of which indicates whether the virus is “winning” or “losing”. (Note that in polite company this R wears a subscript of zero, but computer printers are fussy about that sort of thing, so it is omitted here). Presumably at each value of R (or whatever it is) our government will grudgingly crack open the lockdown a bit more. Reversals are possible and have been mentioned for some regions which are “in the naughty corner” when it comes to their numbers.  Tut tut.

I am delighted to see that many respected voices are writing open letters to the Boss who did during his televised non-speech look very harried and tired. Their themes are identical.  We have done what you and your medical specialists asked for. We all learned a lot about infection control and will continue to exercise sense and caution Now give us our lives back please. And you go back to reclaiming all the money stolen by your colleagues and mates in the last decade so you can pay for the care that will be required by the few thousand people who won’t be able to avoid infection.

James Greener

Friday 15^th May 2020