One indicator
that is frantically waving at us from the wings is a commodity index which shows
that the dollar prices of stuff like minerals, food and energy products are
mostly quite a lot higher than they were a year ago. This is not bad news for
the producers and sellers of these items (like we ought to be) but perhaps is
the reason for forecasts that the economic boom elsewhere is coming to an end.
In fact on a coarse scale the price of gold has, over the past two years, outpaced
the average price of shares both in Johannesburg and New York . It would not be
hard to work up an argument for explaining why hard assets might be more
attractive than ones whose possible values rely on reports prepared by the currently
rather embarrassingly error-prone tribes of accountants, auditors, executives
and board members.
President CR
has come home from the Commonwealth meeting early, presumably to put out the
actual and figurative fires that have broken out around the nation. Some of the
most severe conflagrations are the result of dire local and provincial
leadership. Instead of renaming airports, government needs seriously to curtail
provincial and “traditional” power structures. These are costly anachronisms
unsuited to a modern state, providing cover for incompetent paper shufflers and
disguise for large scale larceny. Halving the public service wage bill will trigger
social upheavals registering at least 10 on the Richter Scale. But it will
allow for massive reductions in tax rates, which in turn will encourage entrepreneurship
and self-help capacity.
And on the
subject of renaming, the king of Swaziland is so sick of his country being
mistaken for Switzerland, that henceforth our neighbour is to be known as eSwatini.
It’s hard to see where the confusion arises though.
In yet another
but just the latest revelation of corruption involving government officials taking
sweeteners from suppliers, it has emerged that our police force has a Technology
Management Service headed by a Lieutenant-General. That’s a pretty senior rank
for a computer geek. People like that rarely reach such giddy heights and are
normally kept out of sight ferreting around in the cables and boxes under the
desk. Of course, the emerging story of who was giving and who was receiving
gets long and complicated with an especial horror being that one of the
freebies consisted of tickets to a Manchester United home game. Hopefully when the
conviction and sentencing of both sides of this dirty dealing takes place, the
judge will take into account the time served at Old Trafford and reduce jail
time by a day or so.
About a week
after the Easter long weekend finished, transport minister Blade Nzimande held
a press conference to announce that his department’s preliminary statistics
showed that 510 people (61 more than in 2017) had died on South African
roads during that period. There are many responses to this bleak formal
announcement not least of which is what is he going to do about it? Presumably the
claim that 18 900 law-enforcement officers were deployed countrywide over
that long weekend was expected to be seen as a start. But this number suggests
that absent comfort breaks, at peak periods there should have been around 3
cops per km on the main roads connecting the country’s bigger cities. Really? Where
were they? The 5-yearly driving licence renewal program with the risible and easily
circumvented eye-test is clearly having no effect on reducing accidents. And plenty
of drivers are unlicensed anyway. Unroadworthy and grievously overloaded public
transport operators also seem to have found a way around the law. Keeping true
to all the zero-tolerance waffle is long overdue. Reportedly, in some nations, non-compliant
drivers stopped at a roadblock are invited to witness the crushing of their
vehicle there and then. In the interests of humanity though they may get out of
the car first.
One has great
sympathy for the sports journalists who earn a living trying to write about the
state of rugby in this nation. The thesaurus function on their laptops must be
weary of looking up words like bad, shocking, terrible and disappointing. And
since I don’t have to, I won’t.
James
Greener
4/20
cannabis culture day
