BAD HAIR DAY

Tidemarks has a thesis that the absence of even the most basic skills in arithmetic, like counting and multiplication and division is increasingly responsible for the nation’s poor choices. Amongst the leaders and opinion-formers the concept of “per capita” is not widely grasped. For example, the popular political policy of confiscating the wealth of the presumed rich of this country and distributing it among the rest is all but pointless because the number of beneficiaries is so large. This simplest of sums is not meaningful for a dangerously large number of people.

This week, the worse than expected GDP figures for the second quarter of 2020 were published. The headline result was that our economy slumped at an annualised rate slightly worse than 50%pa. It is  not really much fun to dissect this horror limb by limb, as hopefully, this will never happen again in anyone’s lifetime. The sole thing that deserves to be emphasised, however, is that the government sector suffered not a scrap in this period and it was from this place of comfort that the politicians and bureaucrats told the rest of us how to survive. Also this week, the State of Disaster was renewed for another month. There is probably no supporting evidence for such a decision beyond NDZ’s explicitly expressed threat to find a reason to reimpose the bans on our pleasures. The interesting Covid research emerging these days are “sotto voce” admissions by the medics that perhaps their worst fears were a tad overly pessimistic and that their counting was a bit wrong. Once again if maths understanding were more widespread the nation should be able to enjoy a huge sense of relief and prepare to defenestrate those who think that hundred of thousands of arrests for breaching lockdown regulations is a satisfactory sign of great policing and wise infection control measures.

But the big news of the moment, which is impossible to explain to friends overseas, is that some of the biggest corporates on the block bought off a handful of mostly male, stupid and nasty troublemakers with a truckload of tampons. An advertisement commissioned by the Clicks pharmaceutical chain store for a hair shampoo targeted at young women was angrily identified by the EFF political party as racist. These incensed guardians of the country’s hair-care choices picketed, and, in some cases, trashed Clicks stores. The revelation that the advertising campaign was the work of a black executive team intent only on growing sales amused everyone, except for those who suffered from the violence. This included an elderly woman who on being manhandled produced a handgun from her bosom and was immediately hailed as a heroine. The donation of female hygiene items to disadvantaged communities was a very clever idea. Provided of course that the thugs don’t nick the shipments and try to sell therm.

My spirits sank when I read the news that Cricket South Africa has appointed someone to the post of “Acting Head of Pathways (Development)”. This is part of a press release about many other posts with fancy names and including something called a “high-performance team” who “will work with the Proteas men’s and women’s coaching staff in ensuring (that) a steady flow of talent reaches the national team(s) when needed”. A few of the names whose shiny suited bottoms will soon fill the plush chairs at the CSA offices, are surprisingly familiar, despite last week’s racist policy dictat. But just the idea that CSA employs someone to write that sort of guff, is depressing. The raw materials for selecting teams of any sport at any level is  a pool of gifted and self-motivated individual athletes who have been willing, and more importantly, able to train and practice for many long hours both alone and if they are lucky, under the guidance of an experienced and dedicated mentor. The nature of sport is that talented people appear without much warning or heed for needs that are neatly typed out on a meeting agenda. The very name “selector” reveals that filling a team sheet is more about who to leave out. Socialist theories about equal opportunity don’t win games.

James Greener

2020 anniversary of  9/11

 

I CAN’T REMEMBER

Buyers of financial sector shares on the JSE have for many months now been swamped by those who are keen to get out of their exposure to companies that increasingly seem to appear in the cross hairs of a government rapidly running short of money. National Treasury’s website is full of notices about meetings they have held with The Banking Association and other outfits about “measures to support the economy”.  New taxes are inevitable, especially those aimed at the balance sheets of the wealthy. Alarmingly, for the first time in memory, Treasury have not issued their monthly Statement of the National Revenue, Expenditure and Borrowing.  Why?  On the good side, however, the resources sector indices are clawing back into a measure of respectability. Anything that might benefit from  another plunge in the currency caused by gross maladministration of SA is probably a buy.

The talking heads who suffer from the smallest shred of optimism, are sure that President Cyril is on the verge of cleansing the ANC of the rot that infests it. They are excited by the small dribbles of truth and culpability that have been extracted from those who sat in the “chair of forgetfulness” at the various very lengthy and costly “truth seeking” exercises. But now it requires a ruthless, fearless, and efficient National Prosecuting Authority to get the miscreants behind bars. And how long will that take?  And by then, even more memories will have dimmed. What we have learned in the past few years is that our leaders are not concerned with banal everyday matters like wedding anniversaries, who paid for the car or the price of a security system. Our previous president couldn’t tell a fire pool from a swimming one and was hazy about the children’s birthdays. Money matters were hard even for his financial adviser, who took to playing golf after being convicted for fraud. What about the cabinet minister who was unaware why his wife made so many lucrative overseas trips? What do these people chat about over the poached egg of a morning? Oh I know! Luxury car and watch catalogues. They are all quite sure that Ramaphosa will never manage to get them into handcuffs.

Giving an airport a different name from the city it serves, is not the smartest idea, especially when there is a desperate need to get tourism going again. It appears that one of the few functioning departments in the particularly impoverished Eastern Cape provincial bureaucracy is the one tasked with renaming stuff. Even Wikipedia is a tad confused about who exactly King Phalo was, but he may have been a Xhosa chief in the eighteenth century. Not a compelling personage to rename the airport in East London after. Especially not when that city may soon be known as KuGompo.

In these times when every little saving helps, President Cyril really must immediately close the Ministry of Sport, Arts and Culture and ask the civil servants to offer their talents to the private sector. Hopefully, the trickle-down effect from such a move would squeeze from office those administrators and even some athletes and artists who are using these activities to pursue purely political agendas. Anyone who believes that the apartheid era of this troubled nation ended in the 1990s is wrong. It is sadly still very much alive. Only now mostly reversed, with majority groups discriminating against minorities. The group photo of the current Board of Cricket SA is very short of anyone with Test Match experience. The “diversity” aspect is well covered though, which should terrify our opponents on the field no end.

A team not terrifying anyone except its drivers, is the Ferrari F1 outfit. These cars now allegedly shorn of an engine feature which used to make them the fastest on the 2019 circuits now battle to go anywhere in a hurry. Which begs the question: what was the feature capable of delivering so much boost that without it they severely underperform their usual rivals? And talking about underperformance, even the French have been pressured into abandoning their Ooh La La factor at the Tour de France. One of the usual pair of gorgeous young ladies showcasing Parisienne designs on the winner’s podium each day, has been replaced by a man. A very poor idea.

James Greener

Friday 4^th September 2020

FROZEN OUT

In the UK, shoppers are required to wear a surgical mask. But the assistants behind the counters are not. That apparent utter failure of logic points up the fact that no one really understands very much about this virus that has so changed all our lives in 2020. Every day the internet carries new claims by, for the most part, smart and well-meaning researchers about what they think their data has revealed. The topics range from the fiendishly intricate micro-biology of the bad bugs, to conclusions drawn from the tsunami of statistical counts of everything from deaths to the phone numbers of shoppers and guests in the pub. A moment’s thought about even this last simple record-keeping makes one wonder how the originators think it will work. The man at the Wimpy tells me that he has been told to file these precious records for a year.

But despite the mistakes and miscounts, the indications are that the worrying statistics like infection rate and morbidity counts are in decline, so perhaps this virus thingy is in retreat. It cannot be because we are developing the so-called herd immunity condition. This can be declared only when a huge proportion, probably greater than 70%, of a population is immune to infection. The textbooks suggest that this generally happens only when an effective vaccination is in use and despite the worldwide jingoistic claims, no such thing is yet available.

The huge danger is that governments are going to claim that their lockdown protocols have caused this slowdown in infection rates and therefore are going to insist on retaining their powers to control freedoms. Hard core conspiracy theorists are sure that the local regulation requiring everyone to wear a mask has been a hugely successful attempt to get people to wear a “badge of compliance”. The claimed efficacy of both the lockdown and the masks is unproven and likely false.

How banks actually work, and in particular how the SA Reserve Bank works (hint: not at all like the others) is a mystery to those of us brought up on cartoons of the wild west where the chief plot line was robbing a bank of sacks of cash. Hopefully, MP and EFF office bearer Floyd Shivambu’s imminent doctoral thesis on “South Africa’s transformation policies, legislation and practices as well as ownership and control of JSE-listed companies” will devote a chapter to this topic. Then we can see why he wants to nationalise the Reserve Bank, -- a topic he returned to this week. Has he perhaps earmarked the Governor’s job for himself once he can tag PhD to his name?

Despite having an investigation, the Pretoria Municipality (Tshwane to the cognoscenti) still cannot decide whether there are 1400 or 7000 so-called ghost “employees” to whom it pays a salary each month. Whatever the number is, the wise suggestion that they should not be fired has been made. Firstly, because they are about as productive as the living employees and secondly, they won’t be stealing anything. Just start by firing the ones who pitch up for work and work down that list until the townspeople begin to complain that things are not working. Oh, wait!

Each January the good, the great and the probably dodgy of world economics gather in the snowy enclave of Davos in Switzerland. There, in cosy luxury paid for by taxpayers and shareholders, they warm the cockles of each other’s hearts with theories and stories of how brilliant their models and decisions are. Only, in 2021, the folk who plan this thing have taken advice that the threat of the virus will even then be too large to let the world’s elite meet in one place. What does that say about our own meagre level 2 and 1 scenarios that far out?

The nation that holds the Rugby World Cup has still not managed to arrange a provincial tournament. Another oddity was a “friendly” soccer match between two topflight European clubs where a “lucky” 300 or so fans were permitted entry and crammed into adjacent seats and rows in a stadium capable of taking tens of thousands. And not a single mask.

James Greener

Friday 28^th August 2020