[At my work I have been coming across more and more side effects of the move towards employing ever more blacks.

I mentioned yesterday the inept black receptionist at the casualties department of a clinic near where I live. He forced me to pay R4617 ($700) which he said I owed the clinic from a year ago. I had to pay it otherwise he would not admit my mother into casualties. But the next day, a white woman in the accounting dept told me they had had problems with him before. And that indeed I did not owe the money, and they would refund it to me. I will still take this up with whoever runs the clinic.

But in the course of my work, I’ve come across more and more instances of problems due to the hiring of inept blacks. We have a very large computer system which is the backbone of the company I work for. The company employs 1,500 people and finances homeloans. We have a very complex system which processes the homeloans applications as fast as possible. The process is highly complex. The system has been in existence for several years now. This system feeds data into other systems. People working on these other systems have complained about truly horrifically stupid errors which are coming into the data. Some of the data capture errors are completely ridiculous and nonsensical. The property might be in Johannesburg, but some of the information selected might apply to say, Cape Town.

Recently, people on one system complained about daily problems. Between business users and programmers who investigated the problems from every possible aspect, we all ended up concluding that these errors were not system related but related to bad data capture – truly bad data capture.

There is one Afrikaans woman who is about 2 years away from retirement age. She is a specialist user on this large system of ours. She trains and helps the data capture clerks. Her job these days is to run around investigating errors. She keeps reaching the conclusion that the problems are not systems orientated – but almost ALL are human errors. She is at wits end. Her nerves are shattered. She walks around cursing and swearing in our staid banking environment. Sometimes she works until late at night. One day I asked her, jokingly, if she had killed anyone today yet. She said to me, “I swear like a common street WHORE!” (She’s right – she does!). But wait until she starts talking about the problems she is running into! She describes one problem after another caused by nothing other than sheer laziness and complete stupidity. Simple things which are common sense… are stuffed up by our ever lower quality black data capture clerks.

Today I was having coffee with a woman I have worked with on many projects in the past. She then recounted a high level meeting she attended earlier today. At that meeting, one of the highest ranking white women in our management structure made some interesting statements. She openly stated in this meeting that the quality of the people being employed by the company is getting lower and lower. She said that this cannot be avoided and that everyone MUST ACCEPT that new employees will be EVEN WORSE than the ones we have! She said we must be careful, because these new employees will have difficulty understand the requests from our customers and they won’t have the ability to properly interpret all customer requests. If the customer words something slightly wrongly, the new employees will do the wrong thing. She said that the company has no choice but to employ these people due to Government regulations. It is just a fact of life. She said that it is hard to tell which of the new employees can actually do the jobs they claim they can, and that it often happens that they can’t make the grade. The thrust of her observations are that the company must accept this as a fact of life and we must just do our best to keep our business processes and systems functioning despite this and we must take this into account in our planning and systems designs!

I have warned in the past that the ANC’s fantasies will cost companies money – BIG MONEY and that the companies worst affected will be the big corporations which control most of S.Africa’s business. I have even posted thoughts from other people to the effect that these big corporations may become unprofitable and that smaller, leaner companies may take them on. It might even open up niches for small, lean, mean white-owned, white-run companies to grab profitable business niches abandoned by larger inefficient companies. All these inefficiences and errors are going to have an impact on company profitability and yet at the same time, the Government has laws forcing these blacks to be given extra training which white employees don’t need. All these rules, laws and taxes suck money out of previously profitable corporations. It impacts the bottom line…

We have one specialised system in our company which deals with “geographic data”. This data is assembled with a lot of trouble and cost. It contains important financial data on a geographic basis. Due to some internal company problems, the database was not updated and got very out of date. Last year, my boss gave this system to a black guy with a university degree. He was instructed to investigate the problem and to do whatever was necessary for that data to be updated again. The black guy sat with that system for a year – yes, almost a whole YEAR – and did nothing with it during that time. So earlier this year, my boss asked me to investigate it. It took me about 2 months to look into the problem and to make the appropriate fixes.

Time and again, we whites walk around fixing problems the blacks cannot fix – even though the blacks have higher ranks and get paid more money than we do!

I have watched blacks being promoted beyond their level of competance – to quote Professor Parkinson.

There is no doubt in my mind that all across S.Africa, the employment of these badly skilled blacks on a vast scale is costing companies deeply in profitability. President Mbeki was very angry when some businesses admitted that Government laws represented a RISK FACTOR to investors. But its true. It is stupid to try to cover this up. Of course, Government claims there is a lack of skilled people – but what they don’t say is how many whites lost their jobs – whites who used to be efficient.

Instead of allowing businesses TO BE PROFITABLE and to expand – the ANC came and loaded a whole lot of “humanist” and socialist laws on them. Now these companies battle to make a profit, and they can’t expand. Instead, they are finding new ways to pass these extra costs on to their customers in order to survive.

Keep watching S.African BANKS… wait… as the years go by you will see the extra costs they will sneak in to pay for all the tremendous extra costs they are burdened with. I mentioned a year ago a really CRAZY, INSANE Law that is coming… The NATIONAL CREDIT BILL. The National Credit Bill is going to drive up banking costs here. All financial institutions are building systems, costing them millions of rands and putting complex processes into place for this hideous piece of legislation which will drive BAD DEBT up!! Honest customers will end up paying for the bad debts created by masses of defaulting blacks. Wait for it!

Bad Debt… wait… this monster is coming… and big companies will be defrauded of large amounts of money because it is ILLEGAL for them to refuse loans to people who have been blacklisted in the past. So the very people who are most likely to default on loans, will default again. Plus, with rising interest rates, I think you will see an explosion of bad debt in S.Africa the likes of which we have never seen in our history. It is still a few years away… but the process HAS ALREADY BEGUN. I have heard managers talking – who monitor these things.

It is also my personal view, that the rise in interest rates and inflation which we are seeing will only get worse. S.Africa’s economy is going to start sliding downwards. Even Govt is now talking about lower growth rates than their mythical 6% (which itself was sleight of hand).

We are still going to look back on these times as good times. I think serious trouble is coming economically. The housing boom has come to an end. That was driven by cheap credit on a vast scale never before seen. But all that has come to an end. These prices are topping out. House prices were the only part of the economy which boomed. A friend who is knowlegeable in these trends told me that traditionally, house prices in S.Africa follow a 5 year boom and bust cycle. We’ve had our boom. Prices have been flattening out over the last year. Richard Branson is investing in a big way, into a market which is already well on its way to topping out. I believe a BIG CREDIT CRUNCH is coming. The credit expansion under ANC rule is the greatest in this country’s history, and people have gone totally crazy, buying everything on credit like mad – especially the blacks. But I think the biggest bad debt and credit crunch in S.African history will be upon us within the next several years. The mythical boom will lead to a very real crunch. Jan]