Hi Rooi Jan,
Thanks for the million swallows post. Excellent, I see that the theory of the “Criminal Army” is not that far wrong. 100,000 criminals in armed gangs alone on the Cape Flats?

Wow… maybe the ANC is getting close to that million man army of it?

Maybe the plan will be to swamp us with criminals when the time is right.

Cool!

Anthony Replied:-
Another member of the gatvol club vents his frustrations

One summer, a million swallows
By: Barry Sergeant
Posted: 18-AUG-06

One swallow doesn™t make a summer, but no one has ever explained just how many are needed. In South Africa, the first signs of spring are out there in the swelling buds, in the male weaverbirds donning their golden-yellow feathers, and the grass sprouting in the veldt where it has burned during a winter that delivered up some really bitter cold snaps. The ticks were roughed up, all right.

When summer arrives, there will be rain across the country, outside the Cape Peninsular which has a Mediterranean climate that supplies wet winters. Once again, the summer rains will be free and will happily fall on a country that is rapidly racing towards being fully dysfunctional. The swallows will arrive on cue from the northern hemisphere, while down on the ground, South Africans will each day bury (or cremate) around 1 000 HIV/Aids victims.

An average of 50 people will be murdered every day confirming South Africa™s status as the kill-capital of the world, outpacing Colombia and Nigeria. South Africa will retain and entrench its ranking as world number one rape capital, each day providing refuge for 150 rapists of adults and children. There will still be 350 armed robberies a day. There will be, as now, organised crime in every direction.

It™s estimated, as a sampling, that there are at least 130 criminal gangs on the Cape Flats, with a combined membership of about 100 000. In the Cape Flats and all around the country, it is often common knowledge amongst the community as to where the gang lords live, and what they do, when they do it, and how they do it. Crime has become institutionalised, with new generations knowing nothing else.

It is folly to even imagine that the South African Police Services (SAPS) gives a damn. On the contrary, the SAPS blows over R60m a year on private security firms in efforts to protect itself. And while South Africa currently ranks as a war zone (its kill-rate outpaced, for example, that seen in the recent Israel-Lebanon war), its soldiers have no interest in protecting their compatriots. They are up to no good. As a sampling, more than 1 000 South African peacekeepers involved in missions in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo have been charged with misconduct since 2002. Mosiuoa Gerard Patrick Lekota, the minister of defence, could handily explain to taxpayers each case of misconduct, which includes, but is not limited to, soldiers gone AWOL, disobeying lawful commands, and drunkenness.

Back home, as fast as South Africa™s government, provinces and municipalities conspire to wreck the country, so private sector initiatives increasingly fight back. In the past few weeks, as a sampling, the Parkmore Community Association, stung by violent crime in this suburb in northern Johannesburg, decided to œconsolidate by choosing one security company to retake their neighbourhood from violent criminals.

Residents want at least three patrol cars with armed guards patrolling œ24/7 in the Parkmore war zone. Real police are as rare as rocking horse shit, but rats are everywhere. Gauteng, the country™s economic heartland, is in the grip of a rat infestation, with rodents, as put in a Sunday Times report, œas big as size ten shoes, being spotted from Sandhurst to Springs. Rat plagues happen, like everything else, for a reason; uncollected refuse is only part of the explanation.

In years gone by, there would be a municipal rat-catcher who would work himself into a coma to rout the plague. Today, officials just don™t care and rats are becoming as common as dirty public accounts. A recent analysis showed that out of the 135 annual audits conducted by South Africa™s Auditor-General on the key 34 government departments and public entities, from 2001-2 to 2004-5, there were only seven œClean Reports.

The worst performing entities (unclean in four out of four years) were Home Affairs and Correctional Services, but the bottom line is that nearly 30% of the national budget, running into tens of billions of rands a year, is being mismanaged. Nobody is being held to account, never mind prosecuted.

Government continues to ignore the facts; on the contrary, it produces spin at an increasingly alarming rate. While the Public Finance Management Act, along with its punitive measures, is now treated as if it doesn™t exist, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel continues to berate private sector auditors. In a recent speech, he said that the œdisturbing feature of (private, of course) corporate failures, especially over the past five years, œis that auditors are said to have either aided or were complicit in some of the malfeasance that led to the collapses. Some of the practices that result in these collapses amount to downright fraud and corruption.

While the South African government™s management and accounting systems continue to descend into a bottomless pit of chaos, infrastructure increasingly disintegrates and rots. Nobody seems to give a damn. Jeffrey Thamsanqa Radebe, the minister of transport, has conceded that the country™s road network cannot accommodate the current rate of increase (now at 10% a year) in freight movement on the national roads. The minister of public enterprises, Alexander Erwin, has stated that South Africa’s rolling stock of rail assets has shrunk since 1994: electric locomotives numbers are down 12%; diesel locomotives are down 11%, and the coach fleet has contracted by 37%. Since 1994, South Africa™s rail route distance provision has remained stagnant at 22 000km. Chairman of the Portfolio Committee on Transport, Jeremy Cronin, has described the ANC-led government’s transport policy during the 1990s as “disastrous”. Does anyone care?

Some once-proud State agencies, such as Denel, have been wrecked beyond recognition. There are other State entities such as the Industrial Development Corporation that have morphed imperceptibly into something quite beyond their charters. The IDC, which founded the likes of Sasol and Sappi, now finances anything from motion pictures to magazines. Its CEO, Geoffrey Qhena, recently put it so: œAs a development finance institution, our key mandate is to support and develop small and medium enterprises, giving a whole new meaning to œindustrial.

But there are one or two heroes out there, reluctant as they may be. Two names, which deserve to be stamped positively on the national conscience, are Smunda Mokoena and Thembani Bukula, CEO and full-time executive, respectively, at The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa). These gentlemen this week signed off a report on the Western Cape power supply interruptions (November 2005 – February 2006). The finding was that Eskom, the national power monopoly, had been negligent; had failed in its maintenance obligations, and had breached its licence conditions. What a disgusting story.

Mokoena and Bukula are taking on Thulani Gcabashe, Eskom CEO, who in 2005 was paid R13m by Eskom œincluding payments on expiry of five year contracts. These were no doubt silly contracts, because Gcabashe continued in office and this year was paid R5m, including a horrifying R1m bonus. Bongani Nqwababa, Eskom™s CEO, who brandishes a chartered accountant (Zimbabwe) qualification, was also paid millions, along with a bonus. Eskom™s nine divisional MDs cost an obscene R57m in 2005, thanks to those contract expiry payments, but were dirt-cheap this year at R18m.

Everyone, with the possible exception of Eskom™s executives, has known that South Africa should have started building new power capacity about ten years ago. The beauty of the Western Cape power outages “ which costs businesses at least R1bn “ is that blackouts are absolutes. The other kinds of rot that are forcing South Africa into a fully dysfunctional State are less perceptible. How lucky are those swallows, however many are needed to make the forthcoming summer, to be able to stay aloft.

Source: Moneyweb
URL: http://www.moneyweb.co.za/economy/economic_tr…br>[Posted by: Rooi Jan]