weblog
Jozi
22 february 2009
Three mornings ago I was channel surfing in the small hours and I chanced upon the news that the American government has issued a travel advisory, warning its citizens to beware when visiting one of their favourite destinations. They were enjoined against rampant muggings at airports, rampant muggings in tourist venues and most disturbing the spiking of drinks in pubs and rape or other molestation in freelance taxi cabs. I thought they were referring to my hometown of Jozi [aka Johannesburg].
The problem must be bad when a travel advisory is issued.
And then gave a sharp cry of surprise. It must be most embarrassing when you know that the place concerned is London.
The programme was the BBC’s ‘Fast Track’ travel weekly for those who, like me, prefer to travel in virtual reality.
I was stunned.
I was even more stunned when the presenter went on to draw a comparison between my home city of Jozi [aka Johannesburg] explaining how we, the residents, have learned how to avoid being the primary subject of an anti-social citizen’s attentions. This means that there are only a few neighbourhoods where kids can ride their bikes without them being hijacked.[ ironically in those few places kids are at risk from mobile traffic that is unfamiliar with the fact that kids ride their bikes on city streets.]
It also means that it is only poor neighbourhoods where the homes are not heavily walled of from their neighbours and the passing parade, and are topped off with barbed wire and /or electric fencing. Many neighbourhoods are cordoned off into private suburbs accessible only to residents and approved visitors [naturally criminals do rent homes therein to gain the necessary access: but that would be a digression.]
I remembered living in London in the late 60’s. I stayed with a travel companion on a boat belonging to his brother who was away in Canada for a few months. The houseboat was moored off a place called Cheyne Walk near the famous Battersea Bridge. We would routinely walk up a few blocks to the Kings Road search out a pub that sold drinkable beer, and toddle off to the famous Carnaby Street, always so disappointing in its shabby media-hyped pretentiousness.
Sometimes when walking home late at night or early in the morning from some or other night of fun we would be routinely harassed by policemen in little motorcars who would pull up, and shout inarticulate questions at us in the native dialects of London, and which we could not understand. When asked if they could please speak English they would ask, suspiciously where we were from and we would tell them that we were tourists from Africa and we were going home to bed in our place on Cheyne Walk.
They would immediately become polite, and on the odd occasion would offer us a ride home, which occasionally we would accept. Coming as we did from a mean and savage police state where the police were invariably the enemy we found them and London itself polite, congenial and even convivial. It was a shock to know that it is so bad a criminal environment that advisories must be issued by friends..
From what I gathered now from the travel advisory chat to which I listened after recovering from my surprise, one surmises that perhaps we [SA] have been exporting our surplus criminals to London on the fake passports recently declared null without a visa by the British/ Pomeranian government.
This is of course feasible and understandably the Poms are unhappy. What the presenter left unsaid was that our crime rate is diminishing on a downward curve while that of the Poms is on a fast escalating curve. A friend who works in a large London hospital told me two Christmases ago that he felt at times that he was back in one of Jozi’s public hospitals back in the bad post- revolution days, he was having to deal with so many bullet wounds.
Since then we have had horror reports of knifings and stabbings and kids killed by the disturbing phenomenon of binge drinking female street gangs all happening in London, and in many other Pomeranian cities and urban wastelands in the United Kingdom generally. You know when a trend is well established, when such a scene of folk violence is represented on a programme such as ‘Skins’: the new entertainment series from BBC Entertainment. Truly the old axiom that when you outlaw guns only the outlaws will have them seems to apply to Pomerania today… another of Mr Blair’s legacy issues.– hopefully they [the outlaws] are only killing each other.
A city in which the common citizen has been disarmed is now awash with guns, crime, daggers and rapists… not on our scale of course but the trend is up. When I told my medical friend, who once lived in my neighbourhood and is now a migrant worker in a London hospital, that I only occasionally hear gunfire these days from my veranda … in fact less than once or twice a month… where once in the receding past it was continuous all day, he remarked that if I were nostalgic, I should visit the neighbourhood in London where he shares “digs” with other migrant workers from the Philippines, South Asia and West Africa. There the gunfire is routine, he said.
Now we know that what he shared that day two years ago is at last formally true…the spin days are over; The Americans have apparently issued a travel advisory warning their less sophisticated travellers that London is officially a bad place to visit for innocents abroad programmed to believe in the sanctity of life under a British star.
Much safer, I would suggest, to be visiting Jozi, a place in which you are programmed to be careful and we’ve learned to fuss over the safety of travellers.
Cheers
Blogroid
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
A moment's silence
A moment’s silence for the victims of the Victorian bushfires.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely an allegedly corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security, since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week, the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other alleged cronies, to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders, apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Perhaps the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do? Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type Received English presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly whilst driving around the city during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position, which seems difficult to achieve; then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it is all about our essential humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go. [I don't really understand it. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else],
Is Mr Malema however a “Naughty Boy”, as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite.
This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. Even some guys that shot me once said good morning first. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage.
Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip hop-dance. Given what we are led to believe about 'disadvantaged' schools the moves were mostly good, slick and surprisingly professional in both timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were inevitably, ultimately, same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I imagined squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely an allegedly corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security, since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week, the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other alleged cronies, to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders, apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Perhaps the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do? Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type Received English presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly whilst driving around the city during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position, which seems difficult to achieve; then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it is all about our essential humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go. [I don't really understand it. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else],
Is Mr Malema however a “Naughty Boy”, as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite.
This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. Even some guys that shot me once said good morning first. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage.
Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip hop-dance. Given what we are led to believe about 'disadvantaged' schools the moves were mostly good, slick and surprisingly professional in both timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were inevitably, ultimately, same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I imagined squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
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