BIG BROTHER LIVES IN YOUR PHONE AND IS GETTING NOSIER

For a bit longer than a year, our weary rand has been reasonably steady when measured against the behemoths of the currency world. In that period, it has been no more than about 15% weaker or stronger than it is now. That may seem to be painfully volatile especially if you managed a double whammy and carried out your transactions at exactly the wrong moments. But historically that’s impressively stable! It would seem that on average the world is content with what the fellows at the helm in Pretoria have been up to. And that would include their handling of the alleged pandemic, pressing on with the Zondo Commission investigating state capture, coaxing Dubai to round up and send the Guptas “home” and finally letting some of the dinosaurs like SAA go extinct. Those of us much closer to the action are the outliers in this “average” classification and when pressed can of course produce events and developments which are very unsatisfactory.

Rebecca Davis in the Daily Maverick has scrounged what should be deeply embarrassing numbers about how much we taxpayers pay various pen pushers in the corridors of power.  Our 9 provincial premiers each bank about R2.3m a year while President Cyril must struggle to fund his hobby of collecting costly cows on a mere R3m a year. Meanwhile traffic accidents, the nation’s greatest killer (and that’s neither an easy or praiseworthy target), or rather the prevention of them, has its own head honcho in the form of Makhosini Msibi. Taking home more than 3 times what the President is paid, this man is the CEO of the Road Traffic Management Corporation. Right there is this nation’s greatest per capita waste of money. And I’ll bet he gets performance bonuses too. It is infuriating and unsettling that the bloke tasked with controlling our road traffic – and failing so spectacularly – is the highest paid civil servant on the books. 

However, everyone must be delighted and celebrating this week’s scrapping of the sillier anti-covid measures. Already the memes about repurposing those blue ear-tugging face masks have appeared. Dropping the attendance limitation at public gatherings came just a few days too late to enable even more gloating Stormers fans to attend the URC final. Those who were making a living from performing the covid tests for travellers must be flipping through their virology textbooks searching for how to detect monkey pox. The first case of this disease in South Africa has supposedly been identified and the enormously lucrative industry of infection control is anxiously looking for a new revenue generator.

Please brace yourselves for ‘remote biometric onboarding’. Apparently, this describes the action of loading your so-called “biometric parameters” onto the SIM card that lies inside your mobile phone. That this is even being talked about reveals that enough of us – despite dreadfully high unemployment and rampant poverty -- use smart phones which will make this idea effective. Your mobile phone will become your Identity Document and can enable a ghoulish concept of acting as a “liveness detector” by holding your phone next to your face. Technocrats and bureaucrats are squirming with excitement at the prospect of knowing where you are (your phone has a geolocation device built into it) and what you are doing at all times. Like buying underpants at Woolies or Castle Lite at Tops. At first this Cell Phone technology was so cool and useful but now it has grown up to be a monster. Our President Cyril knows all this which is why he stowed his money in his mattress.

The Proteas might just have dodged a bullet when the 5^th and final T20 match versus India was washed out. But next up is England who are always tricky and have a point to prove that they invented the game after all. Hopefully the committee that have come up with a 60 balls per innings version of cricket will shuffle off in embarrassment.  Thanks to the reader who pointed me towards the excellent cricket correspondent Jonathan Liew writing in The Guardian, who alerted me to this development.

James Greener

Friday 24^th July 2022

WHO’S RUNNING THIS PLANET?

 Yesterday the Federal Reserve (in effect the USA Reserve Bank) increased the price of money by 75 basis points (three quarters of a percent). In the context of usual US monetary policy and action this is huge. Grave even. Presumably it’s a response to the uncomfortably high inflation in that country. In turn that was likely exacerbated by President Joe Biden dishing out truckloads of cash to almost every mendicant who stopped by the White House. Like most governments indulging in such a feel-good spree the money was either borrowed or printed. With the largest economy on the planet indulging in this behaviour, the consequent unfolding events are massive. And not foreseen by even the most expensive talking heads on the TV news channels. Please ensure you are sitting comfortably. And then there is the side show that is our own President Frogboiler having cosy chats with Russia’s President Putin. Right now, that’s not a good choice of chum but you can see Cyril’s point. Putin supposedly controls a lot of stuff like food and fuel and maybe while they are chatting about those things Cyril can flog him a rare cow or two. Just don’t expect folding US dollar notes in payment sir. Vlad is happier with Roubles

It is astonishing the way the pundits are now blithely talking about petrol at R30/l. While all commodity prices are set by supply and demand (or should be) there is something really weird going on here. Petro chemicals are now considered to be the planet’s greatest enemy -- a month ago it was a virus that interestingly, no one has actually yet isolated – and our leaders have boarded the band wagon created and steered by the doom merchants. So, while there is probably now more proven reserves of coal and oil than at any other time in our history, regulation, sentiment and dubious science has caused the current price spike.

The high hopes that the internet would raise and improve education and knowledge levels and stimulate rational and intelligent discourse on the future of man have not been fulfilled. Instead, the lunatic fringe (a mild and generous description) has been very successful in harnessing the unimaginably powerful world wide web to scream at the rest of us that we are deluded deniers of what is happening and where we are going. Taking temperatures must be one of the earliest scientific measurements mankind has developed and even so we still argue about it!

President Frogboiler has been jabbing at the keys of his laptop again. This time he was updating the entries in the spread sheet he uses to calculate if he can afford to give his employees a nice pay increase. Apparently, the computer said “Yes”. Remember the civile servants are one of the few groups who never missed a payday throughout the pandemic. The spreadsheet obviously did not take into account the anger this move might cause among those who were not so fortunate. Cyril and the cabinet are utterly tone deaf to the woes and hardships being suffered by everyone else.

Tomorrow’s kick-off time for the URC final to be played unexpectedly in Cape Town, is quite late. Presumably this is because the TV broadcasts slots were booked when no organiser imagined an all-South African game! Mind you we will already be sitting up for the US Open transmission which appears to be on one of the fiercest golf courses ever. There’s both Formula 1 and MotoGP races and a particularly crucial T20 cricket match versus India who got shocked terribly by the Proteas in the first two. So the couch cushions are going to need some attention before that all begins. In the meantime, news comes that the F1 circus might pitch up at Kyalami as early as next year and there is speculation about what tickets might cost.  One Warren Scheckter, the race promoter has confirmed that it "will be well within reach of your average F1 fan.”. It will be interesting to see what this means. And there’s a single-handed yacht race underway where the course goes round the top of Iceland. Why?

James Greener

Friday 17^th June 2022

THE CASE FOR CASHLESS COMMERCE

Tidemarks missed the fact that the extradition agreement between SA and the United Arab Emirates was signed about a year ago. But it has taken since then for the cops in Dubai to pop round to the Gupta compound and arrest several members of the notorious Gupta family. While this arrest is a wonderful move, it is puzzling that legal opinion is that the delay before actually shipping them back to SA is likely to be even longer. Why? Just the action of arresting them shows that the Arab fellows have already made up their minds and that putting them on a flight to ORT (not Sun City) should be simple.  Rajesh and Atul have presumably insisted they have done nothing wrong so let’s have them back here and stick them in a cell with Jacob Zuma. In a day or two the friendship may have cooled, and the shouting and finger pointing will break out.

Despite Google’s assurance that the €500 note is becoming the unit of choice among your common-or-garden money launderers, Cyril seems to prefer Uncle Sam’s $100 bill when it comes to currency for his (ahem) confidential transactions. But this means that the rather piffling amount of USD 1 million does require the counting and carrying of ten thousand physical notes. This is not a trivial number or task. Reportedly our President Frogboiler shoehorned about 5 times this amount into his palliasse at the farm which sort of raises the old story of the Princess and the pea. It also suggests that his suspicion of Uncle Sam does not extend to his money.

One of South African top wildlife sightings is a cabinet minister excitedly quoting the bleeding obvious as if it’s an Earth-shattering revelation. One genre of this habit is when the declaration includes a list of items which have been “identified” by a committee. Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula is an aficionado of this practice. This week he announced that a road policy is being developed with four critical chapters, namely: Road Safety, Road Financing, Non-Motorised, and Road infrastructure delivery models.  Can you picture the hours of committee work that went into identifying and labelling these topics? The real tragedy is that not much is likely to be done even as the latest horror accident claims two dozen lives. The first item on Fikile’s sorely cries out for effective and immediate official action. But like the Americans and gun control no one in charge (if they even exist) wants to tackle this problem, and it’s hard to understand why. Is it a toxic topic for voter support? Reportedly there is a country in Europe where the police confiscate and then totally crush any uninsured car they find on the roads. That’s pretty final!

Repairs and recovery from the two deadly rain bombs that hit Durban in the last 6 weeks are not obviously receiving much attention from the local authority. It turns out that little of the promised National Treasury rescue fund money has yet arrived in the province because no one has filed the correct applications! A feature of the rebuilding is the number of privately funded and organised initiatives taking over the official public functions. Are the state employees still working from home? It really is time to defuse this way too overblown health scare and get everyone working properly.

URC semi-finals happen this weekend with two SA based sides playing, but with a few SA stars playing for the Irish sides.  Prices at the bookies show little support for the possibility that both will win and meet each other at the final. Are the organisers of this tournament now sorry they invited SA to join?

The TV sports networks have discovered an eager audience for women’s championship level golf where the players are almost all what has been crudely described as “eye-candy”. Interspersing scenes of birdie hunting by these lithe and attractive young ladies with commercials for power tools, cars and beer is apparently proving a winner. This week there was even a tournament format using what used to be called a “gruesome foursome”. i.e. mixed pairs.  

James Greener

Friday 10^th June 2022

ROYAL HOME TRUTHS

In the absence of actual honest reliable data about the future, and the past for that matter, financial markets happily resort to rhyming couplets like “Sell in May and Go Away”. Well, that didn’t work this year. Only the people who dabble in the mysterious crypto currencies and other members of this family of chimera instruments would have benefitted from taking that advice.

Those of a masochistic bent might enjoy reading the interview granted by André de Ruyter, the CEO of Eskom, to David Ansara of the Centre for Risk Analysis. The Eskom boss has a refreshing but alarming way of telling it exactly as he sees it and sacred cows are harmed in the process. De Ruyter is not happy with the government requirement that “interposing non-value-adding intermediaries in the process of procurement (because this) inflates cost, … introduces additional risk in terms of potential corrupt practices, and …also slows down our supply chains”. What a lovely euphemism for the phrase - cadre deployment.

In the meantime, the nation’s interposer-in-chief, Ms Mmamoloko Kubayi, who chairs the ANC's economic transformation committee, a government agency in charge of implementing the current version of apartheid, has been speaking. After helpfully revealing that load shedding (aka power failures) were crippling the country's economy, she offered the party's policy conference in July as an opportunity “to help Eskom improve financially and operationally”. What great timing. Financially it would help Eskom a great deal if Ms Kubayi’s committee could get municipalities to settle their massive debts to the utility. And operationally? Well, why not tell South Africans that acts of sabotage in the power stations must stop?

Many years ago, the respected market analyst named Richard Russel, wrote a wonderful piece about the service to investors that would have resulted from someone telling the Wright Brothers that there was no future in flying machines. Russel’s thesis was that because of Wilbur and Orville, airlines came into being, and these businesses have consistently and spectacularly destroyed investor wealth. The Comair stable of the local arm of British Airways and Kulula are merely the latest in a long line of disappointments. There probably are exceptions but business school archives must be stuffed with analyses about why investing in moving passengers by air is normally a bad business. Nevertheless, there seems always to be a queue of bright eyed hopefuls ready to take on the task of managing what inevitably appears to be a lethal mixture of a very wide range of staff skills, an inventory of very costly and complex machinery, an ever present and vigilant regulatory bureaucracy, and a consumables bill exposed to one of the most price volatile items on the planet. And then there are the passengers, some still filled with expectations about the excitement and romance of air travel. Richard was very prescient.

The rather unfortunate outcome of the UCR quarter final line up this weekend is that only two of the three SA teams that reached this stage have any chance of becoming semi-finalists. Obviously the pairing of the Bulls and the Sharks, in the early match tomorrow, means only one will move through. A background irritation to this tournament for local fans is that our government is still of the view that having more than half the spectator seats filled at a sports event poses a health risk. A very popular sport this weekend in London is “Spot the Duke” The occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has caused a gathering of the Royal Family. Because of various choices and indiscretions in the recent past some members are now dubbed “non-working” and not on display. But as every celebrity comes to learn there is no limit to the power of today’s camera lenses and some of these miscreants have been snapped deep inside the palaces where the celebrants are gathering. Sadly the Queen herself is not well but nevertheless seems to be enjoying the party in her honour.

James Greener

Friday 3^rd June, 2022.