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 5th 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 24th July 2022
