We seem at last to be emerging from a dreadful era when our leaders were panicked into whole heartedly embracing a previously untried notion about public health. This was that a complicated multi-level system of increasing discomfort and misery would control the rate of transmission of what was expected to be a very severe respiratory infection with global reach. Whether or not this succeeded will be the topic of furious debate for years to come. What is certain is that at our level 5, massive and long-lasting damage to economies took place. Thankfully this notion has now been mostly discarded, but now we are being subjected to another ranking system (this time geographical and not social) that is being used to ration the use of electrical power. This too is responsible for discomfort and misery. But what really hurts is that reportedly much of the shortage of power is being deliberately caused by disgruntled workers in Eskom, the electricity generation and distribution utility. Periods of level 6 load shedding (a misleading euphemism for power cuts) meaning 4 hours of continuous black-out are now being experienced. Surely even the most bullish party-line toeing analyst can no longer insist that economic growth and recovery is taking place.
Government’s response to this ever-tightening downward spiral to who knows what end point, is to continue inventing and implementing ever more onerous layers of regulation and red tape that consumes what few hours of productivity remain in the day of a private sector manager or employee. Further, the new laws don’t solve any ills or fill any needs that an educated and motivated citizenry will not themselves learn to handle and solve. Interference from a state pen pusher who has never actually earned their own income is unhelpful. And that includes our forex laundering so-called president.
One example of asinine and overkill nanny state legislation is surely the so-called POPIA nonsense. This Prevention of Personal Information Act now has its own Lord High Executioner who is required to hunt down anyone guilty of a new crime called “data breach” and send them off to a decade in prison or a R10 million fine! It’s a reasonable expectation that any third party holding confidential and privileged information that they collected with your knowledge should take care not to lose or abuse it. The nuclear missile launch codes and records of one’s bar bill come to mind as things one would want kept secret, But at a lower level it is also a complete pipe dream, especially now that even the bowling club membership list is stored on a spreadsheet in a computer that (probably unknowingly to Maud, the honorary secretary) is globally interconnected. Most organisations need to have records of their customers, contacts and competitors. The biggest and longest lists are held by government. Total privacy and confidentiality are impossible to secure. How much of the leakage is outright theft (“hacking” is the polite term) and how much is because of inadvertent activities by confused users is hard to tell. Just telling your laptop or phone to “reply all” spills millions of email addresses and mobile phone numbers into the ether every day! We have all done it. 10 years jail time? Please. Go and do something useful like filling potholes.
It has been proposed that anyone singled out as probably dodgy and corrupt in the just completed Zondo Commission should nevertheless receive blanket amnesty from prosecution. Presumably this would enable the affected cadres safely to retrieve their ill-gotten gains (i.e. money stolen from taxpayers) from under the bed and nip down to the Ferrari showroom to place their orders for the Prancing Horse’s impeccably timed first-ever SUV – the Purosangue.
This first weekend in July always has a huge smorgasbord of TV sport. In Durban, horses have their day although the rugby Test at Loftus against Wales must be among the most compelling. The squabble between the FIA and Sir Lewis about the advisability of someone who drives very fast cars for a living having a nose piercing also promises entertainment. Are the Wimbledon organisers considering a creche where the ever younger competitors can feed, nap and get a nappy change when not on court?
James Greener Friday 1st July 2022
