Over the next period of time I shall be using my blogspot not only for the random blogging that has been my practice for some five or so years now. I also intend to present to you a cyberserial that I first published on my own website five years ago. I believe it needs to be read again by the millions who never got a chance to read it the first time.

I say this because all the topics covered in my serial are pertinent to today’s world, [2007] in a way that they weren’t when I first wrote this in 2002 and saw it in a series of … nightmares, perhaps; long before Mr Gore had made his opportunistic movie. Five years ago we hadn’t discovered China or Global Warming, among other things. All these have somehow moved to centre stage now while a frantic market dance takes place on the front apron distracting us from trends long evident. There is a rapidly evolving sense of global crisis, observable to those who watch such things with care.

For all the background to this pending cybersoapie, why i’m writing it etc you may consult my blog ‘Prophecy and testimony’ [July 2nd 2007] [scroll down a way] although you don’t need to do that now, do it afterwards.

Right now it is time to read the introduction and first [short] episode to:
‘The testimonies of an enumerator’

The testimonies of an enumerator©Featuring

• The Azanian Konfederacy© The preludes.
• The Yonka Memorandum©.

By

Nicholas Jakari

Part three: The Azanian Quartet.
Parts 1 and 2: being the Buffalo Hunters and The Ashanti Raider
Available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
@ USD&1.50 each

The Testimonies of an enumerator encompasses the Preludes to the Yonka Memorandum© and the Yonka Memorandum© itself. And consists of 19 serialised episodes.

Copyright© to these works vests with author and poet Nicholas Jakari aka Nicholas Williamson aka . NiK@… Leofric.House@Gmail.com
NiK is the Blogospherian¨ http://www.NiK.amagama.com

http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

Published by Leofric House Publishing
PO Box 891224
Lyndhurst
2106
Zone One
Southern Azania [aka for legal purposes: Gauteng in South Africa.]

Through accessing this ebook you obtain a right to read, only.
All other rights are reserved: The author asserts his moral right to the work identified by the contents of the cyber soapie© referred to by the above title and subtitles: namely: The Testimonies of an enumerator©, the evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy©, the manifesto of Corinth Starr©, The Yonka Memorandum©, which shall be evolving on the Internet over the next period of time from the time of first publication on the weblog forum in May 2003.

This proclamation of rights shall be deemed to apply to all Jakari derived material appearing on the author’s weblog forum

No part of this work may be used in any way or in any form for purposes of financial gain and/or profit, without the express permission of the author.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication, which follows in serialised epidodes may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system for purposes of duplication, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and/ or the publisher of this work.

Neither may it be used in any other way than that intended, which is to be read, enjoyed and possibly discussed.

ISBN # 0-620-23287-0 Azanian Quartet series
ISBN # 0-620-23291-9 Yonka Memorandum

…….
Editors note:

The poet and author Nicholas Jakari/! NiK [00], created the world of the Azanian Konfederacy to enable him to further his objective of writing in a completely different contextual style to almost any other fictional writing emerging from South Afrika in the post- Apartheid era, post-Revolution era.

Almost any other because when he chose to write the Buffalo Hunters in 1995 he was heavily influenced by the works of Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco and JM Coetzee. This has made him difficult to access, apparently, for readers who are accustomed to the almost mandatory racial sub-text of most South African writing.

So some guidelines to his work and vision are presented here. In other words, for starters: no person in these coming stories will ever be referred to by so-called “race” and in some cases not by gender either. These qualities of a human have no bearing on the story and therefore as Chekhov observed so long ago… they have no place in the text.

Jakari [a pseudonym] is himself both a pre-and post ‘September the eleventh’ person. In his case Sunday, September the eleventh, 1994 at 7.30 in the morning. On that date and time the poet Jakari was attacked and seriously wounded in a gunfight with armed gangsters. It seems they were seeking vengeance for the murder of the anti-Apartheid hero Steve Biko by the former Apartheid regime, albeit no real express ‘motive’ for the attack was ever presented, either before the assault or subsequently. Steve Biko’s observation that there is only one race, the human race, forms the core of Jakari’s chosen deconstructive writing style.

For the poet Jakari the experience was ironic [once he recovered his sense of humour…. Eh I knew this was a Sunday, I didn’t think it was going to be this holey]. His earliest recollection from his pram was of his, so-called “white” mother being verbally and physically harassed by thugs of the former Apartheid regime, when he was a near toddler where the forties became the 1950’s.

His second major recollection was of himself and a so-called “black” nursemaid being set upon by Apartheid thugs while the woman was walking him home from nursery school. When he tried to help her he was beaten, kicked and hurled into a ditch. The woman was dragged away screaming and the four-year-old Jakari was left to walk home alone, shocked, traumatised and damaged. The woman, known to him only as Jane, was never seen again, and to this day he has no idea what happened to her.

Harassment, further harassment, discrimination and assault characterised his life growing up in a small town place controlled by the evil agents of the former, now disgraced, regime. He rationalised that he was not being singled out for any reason other than a tendency to outspokenness, and that he belonged to the wrong tribe. It was normal for any, even marginal, critics of the evil regime to be harassed. Many sensible people left the country and went to live out their lives in less confrontational places.

So after that personal 9/11, while the poet Jakari was recovering from the wounds inflicted by those who were now liberated, he had a vision. He knew that he had now to become also the writer Jakari. Specifically, the writer of an extended set of tales stretching out from the present time [mid-nineties of the late twentieth century, then] to a point sometime in the future approximately one hundred and fifty years hence although there is no certainty about that time. He saw all this in what may have been a morphine induced series of major gunshot trauma, post-operative hallucinations … Alternatively he knows now that he had two, so-called, “out of body” experiences on that horrendous day, and it is possible that the idea for the Azanian Quartet was born in some no-place of a travelling soul.

Either way the idea for the Azanian Quartet was born: a set of four works spanning that period from the time of the successful culmination of the South African Revolution to approximately 2130. In order they are:

• The Buffalo Hunters©. Exorcism : First published in 1996.
• The Ashanti Raider© Redemption: first published 2001.
Both of these are available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari @ USD$3.50. each
• The extreme future work: The Jonker Memorandum© aka the Yonka Memorandum: Prophecy was part published in serial form on the former, now discontinued website: http://www.williamsonreport starting late 2003. The Testimonies are part of this work and represent the “Preludes” and were first serialised during 2002-2003
• The intermediate work The Juno Konspiracy©: Reconciliation, is set in the period between the first Apocalypse of December 23rd 2012 and the Great Apocalypse of January 10th 2017. This story will commence serialisation when it commences..

The extended irony of finding himself brutalised and abused by representatives of both contending parties, in the ongoing competition for control of the vast resources of Southern Africa during the twentieth century, made him truly the ‘marginalised man’, and became the title of his acclaimed collection of poetry: “Random notes” also to be found in the editred.com bookstore @USD$3.50

“The easiest thing to do in South Africa,” he said, “is to whip up racial hatred. We avoid dealing with our all too human flaws by designating them to be the properties of “the other”. The true challenge [for Jakari] is to demonstrate the common humanity that persists between all humans, defying classification by race, creed or gender.”

The Azanian Konfederacy sets out to provide just such a demonstration. Sensitive readers are warned that the first two books in the Azanian Quartet are not pleasant reading. They depict a place of extreme brutality; one that it is hoped will evolve into a place of normal brutality like everywhere else.

Much of the material in both novels would now fall foul of the new amended Publications control Act in South Africa, and be classified XX: representing a march from freedom in the new democracy, as we strive to hide ourselves from our own truths… The two works however will provide an understanding of the context for Corinth Starr’s amazing extension to the SA Revolution, catching it as it falls, in the manner of ZANU PF into disarray, and rescuing it in an unimaginable way.

************

Thus the Azanian Konfederacy is a place where stereotypical physical differences between people have been eliminated and only the raw humanity prevails in all its varied forms between kindness and cruelty.

The foundations for the Azanian Konfederacy are rooted in the sophisticated Constitution of the ‘new’ South Africa that emerged from the ruins of three hundred years of kolonialist oppression in Southern Africa of so-called black people by so-called white people.

All laws in the Konfederacy are predicated on that Constitution and are moderated by the laws that prevailed in each of the formerly independent components of the Konfederacy.

The Konfederacy itself is conceptually modelled on the Swiss Cantonal system and is presented in counterpoint to the proposals of the emerging African Union in Africa, which, like its European Union counterpart, is modelled as an American style federal state.

This was done because it [Konfederacy] worked more effectively in practice than the Federal notion has shown itself to operate, at the time of writing. The Federal form was found to be problematic by citizens who were still raw from centuries of oppression and distrustful of more; and while they could see the benefits of cross continental collaboration were resistant to the idea of being controlled, by “others”, in the form of the centralised kontrol that accompanies Federalism.

Therefore rules and procedures, which are revealed in the stories that follow are derived from a context of Konfederal respect for a central constitution. This Constitution derived from that of Southern Azania [SA] was called the world’s most liberated Constitution when it was written.

For the uninitiated: a Konfederation is a loosely associated group of nations who agree to cooperate in their external affairs preparatory to forming a more formal and centralised Federal state, if ever. As a general rule Konfederal government legislation has no effect inside any of the member states unless specifically ratified by plebiscite [on each occasion legislation is passed] and much was not ratified. The Swiss Confederacy has never evolved to a federal state whereas the United States, Canada, Nigeria, the German Bundesrepubliek and Australia did.

All Jakari’s stories take place in the “Zones” (as he calls them) of the Southern part of the Azanian Konfederacy. In other words the stories are set in that part which may also, in another quantum dimension, be called South Africa. Specifically, within that dimension they could be in, mostly, that segment of South Africa called Greater Johannesburg, in the province of Gauteng (South Africa), which in the alternate geography of the Azanian Konfederacy are called Jozi or ‘South Central’ in “Zone One”. This information may be of use to some, if not it doesn’t matter; it’s just a place where people live, eat, shit, sleep, love, hate, work, work, work, procreate and murder each other, like anywhere else.

This does not mean that the other zones in Azania are called Zone’s two or three etc, as that caused far too much controversy and unhappiness. Zone One was called Zone One because it reflected an unassailable truth: that the tiny urbanised and landlocked state/administrative region was responsible for an overwhelming proportion of the Konfederacy’s gross domestic product, relative to its geographic area and population; and was home not only to the world’s greatest person produced forest, one of the great wonders of human creation in living form, but also the biggest container port on the continent.

The names of these other zones will be revealed, as this serial unfolds. Similarly more detail will appear regarding the incidental historical events of the era. This era is taken as the one hundred and fifty years following the Revolution in Southern Azania. The great determining events of that period are known variously as: “The Great Apocalypse”, “The Wars of the Acquisition”, “The Time of the Dispossession” [the era of Kolonisation by the Koloniste class, which no longer exists as an identifiable entity in the future world of the Yonka Memorandum], and, most importantly: “The Water Wars”, two of which have already taken place at the time of writing these testimonies [or are taking place, depending on your perspective].

These places and events are referred to in the later works [Jonker/Yonka Memorandum and the Juno Konspiracy] and will form the basis for some of Jakari’s post-Quartet stories like, for instance the quirky ‘confessions of a debt collector’ novel, “7 Ways to get your money….” [Available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari @ USD$3.50]

Insofar as any references to other places occur, they are non-distinctive and the places they represent are not germane to the stories.

The issue of the “testimonies” themselves shall be referred to later in the series. Suffice it that they appear to have been written some one hundred and fifty years from the time of the Southern Azanian Revolution. The author is unknown and it is assumed, from the various contexts of the testimonies, that the writer would seem to be a well-informed citizen, rather than an academic scholar or other person of expert knowledge. As to why the Testimonies were written we have no information.

According to Jakari, learning to be in charge of oneself means that the journey from a slave to a freeperson is often violent. The first two parts of the Quartet reflect that violence. Part three on the other hand has seen the end of that catharsis and the world of the Jonker is a normal free society for the time in the future in which it is set. Part four will seek to reflect the move to resolving the violent with the civil. Specifically the world of the Jonker Memorandum [aka Yonka] is one where a woman could walk unmolested, naked, the length ogf the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head.

Well in theory anyway…

Leofric

Episode 1 The Prologue: Tales of Auld Azania

The Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika came into existence on the 15th July 2001 AD just prior to the infamous events of 9/11 that profoundly changed the world in which all people had lived for the preceding half-century.

It was formed out of all the countries of Sub-Saharan Afrika that fell into the central and southern regions of the continent known as Afrika. It is unclear what became of the countries of west Afrika or of the Semitic northern end of the continent.

In the process of its development over the period between that date (2001) and that time of the Great Apocalypse, between 2012 and 2017, the idea of a Konfederacy took hold, although progress was at first much slower than most peeple had hoped.

Later, after the Apocalypse and the freezing of the Northern regions of the planet Urdos, accompanied by the new Krusades and the great migrations of the second decade of what was then known as the 21st century AD; [but which later became known as the Post-Apocalypse Era [PAE] and also the 51st century], the Konfederacy went through a moribund period, gradually fusing around the problems of coping with the mass movements of populations around the planet, until at the time of the Yonka Memorandum it had become a place joined by common adherence to the Konfederate Constitution.

To be continued…


Welcome to the world of the Azanian Konfederacy.

While the editorial team understands that the world of the Azanian Konfederacy is a fictional one these views do not always square with those of the poet and author Nicholas Jakari, who frequently confuses the real South Afrika in which he lives with the Southern Azania in which he also lives.

If you wish you can also sign up to be a citizen of the Azanian Konfederacy, which is open to all residents of Afrika. Offshore residents may also become citizens if they have a connection, spiritual or real, to the re-emerging spirit of Afrika and are committed to the vision of an Afrika sharing a common destiny with the rest of humanity.

Yes… I would like to be a free citizen of the Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika and understand that at a time when all the 19 episodes of the testimonies have been published that all the names of those who desire citizenship shall be entered along with their comments and other contributions; also including the comments and contributions of those who may not choose citizenship, and that all of this information shall be published in ebook through editred.com or any other such facility as time goes on. It may even, who knows, come to be published in the increasingly sclerotic Print form.

See also: http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

“Last week the Prime Minister, Mr Robert Mugabe, hit out at people in leadership positions who were amassing wealth and described them as ‘Socialist deviants who are traitors to the revolution.’ … he went on to say: – ‘It is downright selfish and utterly immoral that we leaders should take advantage of our positions to acquire wealth we would never have been able to acquire had we not held leadership positions.’

“Selfish and immoral it may be”, the article continues, from which I took this statement attributed by the Star’s Robin Drew to Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe up north in Rumbabwe. It was written and published on the 17th of August 1987. Yes 20 years ago when Bob had only been in power for 7 years and already the same article quotes “The hard pressed taxpayer has once again had to face the reality that his money is being squandered by crooks….”

I take huge heart from this. This Mugabe chap and his kleptocratic cohorts have plundered the second Changamire State to a condition of hyper-bankruptcy: and still they are unmovable. If they can keep this hustle going for 27 years and counting then the glorious exponential republic of enlightened SA will stay afloat for eons.

Now that I am satisfied that the country is in reasonably good hands… certainly as good as they’ve ever been, I must ask myself the question that we are all asking at the moment… where will we be twenty years from now in 2027… and all I can imagine is that the world will be as different then compared to now as now is compared to when Mr Mugabe made his most relevant and true speech.

So I could stop there and say this is interesting and leave it at that…. But no…

I have to make a point.

To digress for a moment: In 1994, on the 11th September, the anniversary weekend of Steve Bantu Biko’s, murder my wife and I were attacked by a gang of armed men who fired seventeen bullets at me personally, of which four tore holes in my body in places that still cause grief On the other hand i, being, fortunately, given the tenor of the times, and for other reasons that are too complex to deal with here, armed with a small Czechoslovakian pistol [now it would be either Chech or Slovak depending on where Brno is now] fired thirteen back at them and hit them nine times… I am still disturbed about the four missing bullets. Offically I won although the truth is that in such a circumstance no one wins: it isall so point
less.

However having survived the gunfight I then had to survive the aftermath and that was a tale in its own right.

I had a sense during that gunfight that I was not alone… in a poem I wrote after the event: Satori, I wrote: – “I saw a gathering of angels….” [in echo of Hamlet]

I knew that something one could call miraculous had taken place. After all I was no gunfighter. Like many citizens living through a violent and terrible period of our history the weapon existed to be certain that I existed and my work took me to many places where safety was minimal.

Where did that awesome strength come from? I had assumed for a time that it was adrenaline shock… but what if it wasn’t…?

What I do know is that it wasn’t some outlandish weirdo… According to evidence led at the hearing, where I had to show justifiable homicide to a court to account for those who died in that struggle; those people saw a man [me] become two people. Now maybe they were drunk, court records show that their blood alcohol level was high for a Sunday morning. On the other hand what if they weren’t “what did they see? They saw me in two places, which is what I saw: and in my denial frame called it a gathering of angels.

So what is the point here?

Simply that I went somewhere over those next few days or seconds or while whatever happened. I went somewhere. I don’t know where. For all I know [and have preferred to think of as drug induced hallucinations derived from whatever hospitals feed one on while full of bullet holes that have to be opened up cleaned out and fixed before being stitched up again… they do immense damage as they blast their way through the body like some giant electric shockwave] for all i know they were no more than hallucinations…. then again. What if they weren’t?

Along the way I had a vision of catastrophe and redemption.

I wrote notes on what happened while stoned out in intensive care and wrote many more over the intervening 13 years since that event. I have also noted the synergy with the great 9/11 event. I have compiled that vision into a collection of work, which is only partially, complete [on paper]. I call the collection of work the Azanian Quartet.

At this stage two parts of the Azanian Quartet exist: The Buffalo Hunters, and The Ashanti Raider. The first is set against the year of the Revolution at a time much more violent than now when the gain was no longer political. The second, also a crime story adventure ta
kes place against the philosophic background of the Truth Hearings.

The third part is more complex and is set at some “Other” time which may or may not be in our future. It may equally be in a parallel universe or in the minds of the players or only in your mind.

That world of the third, which is called the Jonker Memorandum, is a world where a women [also known as the Penetratee Gendor] could walk naked and unmolested through the Azanian Konfederacy with a purse of gold on her head. According to legend this has only ever occurred during the short rule of Genghis Khan, so It’s a big deal in the future.

The problem was how to prepare you, my reader, for that journey into that story set against that social code. In addition I had to deal with the vision that is central to the story.

In my story The testimonies of an enumerator part one [that I first published on my now discontinued personal website in 2003] my vision involved deluges of water, a tsunami from hell. My hope is that the great tsunami of 2005 that wiped out Banda Acre in
Indonesia represented the fulfilment of that vision.

My world that I created to account for the destruction I witnessed during that time that I was recovering from multiple bullet wounds in the Linksfield Park Clinic is set against the decade 2009 – 2019.

The great disaster I saw in my state of hallucinatory recovery, when according to various confirmations I was travelling in some other dimensions of our alleged reality involved huge flooding that devastated the planet sufficiently to render the world static for a time. I have made it to occur on 23rd December 22012 in confirmation of an ancient Mayan prophecy. I do hope that it happened already, as I said, in the east where although the human loss was real, the destruction of vital global infrastructure was minimal.

Many things happened during that period and I have attempted to reconstruct the vision. At a contrary end I also had to deconstruct the vision and its symbolisms from the times in which we live so that we would not confuse the place in my story with the place in which we live.

I published therefore a linking piece to bond the first two parts of the Azanian Quartet with the two parts that are to follow: one in that time and the other in another.

This linking piece is called the Testimonies of an enumerator.

The testimonies fall into two parts.

Part One is the concerned with the presidency of the first woman to take charge of the country called Southern Azanian, in the emerging Azanian Konfederacy in
Azania. Any comparisons with places like South Africa, The African Union and
Africa are relatively coincidental although without either rancour nor favour.

She [Corinth Starr]takes charge during the period 2009-2019 [AD] and takes the idea of transformation to a place you never dreamt of, or if you did it was never this complex.

I do not promise you an easy read. I do anticipate that it will be a provocative read. As the author who published this story four years ago I am amazed myself at how much of what I was saying then is in play at this stage.

Specifically the idea of a United States of Africa, which I wholeheartedly endorse with the usual caveats to the rights of the citizen.

Secondly the idea of people being “on line” with some form of body tagging. Not that this is a new idea, simply that it is part of the vision that I had of Armageddon and the Apocalypse as presented in the book of revelations in the Christian bible.

Before you think I’m about to launch into a re bornm mode the question passed by my vision was:

“What world do those who are left afterwards… after the closing Amen to the chapter…

What I understood so clearly from that strange journey that I took to who knows where was that those who were left continued with their lives… what else was there to do, and the story that I fell into takes place at a time when they have forgotten all but the raw fact… There were terrible floods then and many peole died and then life went on.

As a voice in my story said at that time what could you say about the Anglo Boer War apart from its having happened, should you know that?

There will come testing times.

Since I have had this experience of being attacked and shot to pieces and experienced the consequent trauma of recovery, not to mention the small matter of dealing with the fact that I had to execute a man to survive, and that is itself an entire story with its own surprisingly revelations … to put the barrel of a gun into the back of a man’s head and pull the trigger…not cool even if its about me or him…

So I warn you that the Testimonies will not be an easy read but that’s why we have feedback mechanisms. Bear in mind that some of your questions may be answered in subsequent text and none of the ideological positions I have taken in the story are fleshed out in huge detail… I am simply not competent enough to do that at this time… this was what happened in my story and came to me while I was flying around a hospital ward loaded with bullet holes and the shit they pump into you to take away the pain: which I can assure is considerable.

So later this week I shall launch the first of twenty episodes of the ‘Testimonies of an enumerator’.

At the end of each chapter I shall include a hyperlink to a site that I shall set up this week with editred.com in their ebookstore, pointing you to the following:

By the end of the week you should be able to download copies of The Buffalo Hunters and The Ashanti Raider from the ebookstore for a nominal fee. I still have to sort out details with Pay Pal but basically whatever they charge plus a dollar each.

Both these books have been read by people all over the world and have been highly rated on sites like Blosm.com for their powerful evocation of a time in our lives. Both would now be banned in terms of new legislation on the grounds of the brutal treatment of women, graphic sexual detail that is almost over the top and taste
less except that it was real.

And it is true: women are brutally treated, mainly in the Buffalo Hunters, but ultimately in both. That is because we live in a society in which women are brutally treated. On the other hand, women are the heroines in both books, and they are pretty mean.

But what would happen if the tables were somehow turned; and to harm a woman became more than simply uncool? What would happen if rape were to be declared a genocidal crime and the rules of procedure were altered; to make an accusation binding on the accused who has to prove innocence rather than the prosecution to prove guilt?

Find out what happens when Corinth Starr the elder becomes president of
Southern Azania in a landslide shock election result in the 2009 election. Corinth Starr campaigned for the Gender Party on a ticket against rape and in favour of Basic Pay.

What happens when she wins?

This is the purpose of the preludes to the Jonker in the form of the testimonies that I shall start publishing [again] this week. [You are unlikely to find the original because I have recently shut down my former website for a complex range of reasons that are not part of this story.]

Later this month [July]the testimonies will appear on the ebookshelf at editred together with two collections of poetry: the Marginalised man and Rehearsing Nietzsche. In addition to that you’ll find a book I recently put out in ‘real book’ form and which has been selling more frequently off my online advertising than in local bookstores where it has informal censorship encounter issues with ‘rules n things’.

This book is called ‘7 ways to get your money’ and it is a book for those shit stirring wannabee paid people who proliferate. Officially it’s a handbook for debt collecting but that is only a subterfuge for a book dedicated to the art of getting your own way in things. How to go from being gentle and polite to a fiend from hell determined to get what you want … without violence or using legal aid..

So stand by for the forthcoming attraction that I have hinted about in many previous blogs over the past two years … The day of thePrivatised
State is coming. A time when no putative Prime Minister would have cause to suggest that he is able to enrich himself so hedged in is s/he with rules of procedure and pinned down by the Life Activator… the ultimate lie detector. We do not need the power of prophecy to know where that former Prime Minister’s bold words have taken his country: –

a luta continua…

The testimonies of an enumerator part one cometh….

The Blogosspherian.

How do we describe denialism? – If a litany of evidence arose that consistently indicates that someone is not being entirely truthful would it be sensible to continue to implicitly believe what they say as if the evidence did not exist?

Should we then in the interests of self-interest pretend that all such damming evidence must await an ultimate disaster that may overthrow our enterprise?

During this week I [and you perhaps] have been presented with two instances of evidence being piled up and being absorbed by an ocean of indifferent denial. We have also had [or missed] our opportunities to act according to what we wanted.

The first of these involves a media blitz [in my home turf] regarding the chief of police. Evidence seems to exist that indicates that the chief may have been less than generous with the truth in his earlier observations relating to an ongoing murder investigation, and his involvement with elements incongruous with his status: in other words that he was [allegedly] hanging out with bad guys.

The mainstream media are screaming for the police chief’s suspension pending further investigation. The authorities are suggesting that the rules of evidence [innocence ’till proven- ] require that he continue to investigate the crime in which he is alleged to be complicit until he proves himself guilty [or innocent, as the case may transpire-]. The idea that the wolf could well be in the henhouse seems to have been ignored. In being ignored it will only fuel the manifest tensions implicit in our increasingly riven society. On the other hand does anyone really care? Denialism is ‘not-caring’ in action

The same thought about denialism came to me when I saw Al Gore’s movie this week at the cinema nouveaux [sic]. For those readers who missed it, Al Gore, the self-styled former, almost-President, of the USA, whose ancestors, I believe, once owned the land on which Washington was built, presumably after having ‘removed’ any previous inhabitants somehow, and who has some form of familial relationship to both the writer Gore Vidal and Mrs Jackie Onassis; this same Al Gore has produced a ‘wunderkind’ movie called ‘an inconvenient truth’ which makes a most plausible case for an impending global catastrophe of the likes unheard of since I wrote my [far less heralded] 21 episode piece called the Azanian Konfederacy some years ago.

I went to see the movie loaded with scepticism-In mind I had the recollection of my distaste at the so-thoroughly propagandistic [sic] piece of filmmaking -Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by that fellow Moore- I appreciated his basic movie- its style intent and argument, but found the absence of balance irritating. Ultimately. I was left less than convinced by the fellow’s virulently partisan argument. In a sense he went so far over the top that his case simply imploded, and his vested interest was exposed for all too see.

By contrast Gore’s message is all too real-The power being in the visuals…certainly one of the more impressive PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen over the years, and much of it validated [to me] by my own research over the past fifteen years leading up to my ‘Azanian Konfederacy’ Web presentations, January 2004.

With the Azanian Konfederacy I was setting out to construct a world that would be the context for the serialising cybersoapie [as I call it] the Yonka Memorandum, which is a giant ‘work-in-progress’ thing that I shall now return to: having finally signed off on the definitive Alpha edition of my book ‘ 7 Ways to get your money’-a handbook for debt collecting, which is proving as popular and entertaining as I had hoped and intended.

In order to write that story -the Yonka, – which I have been fooling around with now for more than twenty years [time flies while you’re having fun raising families and garnering wealth while words plod unexceptionally along] – I had to answer the question how did the world of my futuristic story [the Yonka Memorandum] come to be. Was it a dystopian world -it certainly is not utopian- but is it perhaps just a normal world like the one we know now but different because the values of that time [in the future] were different?

What I wanted for part three of my series: the Azanian Quartet, [the Yonka is part three], was/is a world in which a woman could [if she chose] walk naked the length and breadth of the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head and not be molested.

There is an alleged precedent for this. Apparently the short-lived Mongol Empire was such a place. But there the basis was terror. The awful fate that befell anyone who molested a traveller combined with the awful fate of all that person’s relatives and extending associates who were all put to death in a most uncongenial way [not that I’m implying that there is a ‘congenial’ way to put anyone to death] so completely terrorise the local [wherever that was] citizenry that years went by without a traveller being molested, thereby giving rise the myth about the naked wanderer and the purse of gold

A simple requirement you may think. Just write about that world. My purpose was to write an adventure story set in a time when violence generally was exceptional not normal [by contrast to parts one and two where violence was standard] and how did one create such a world given that when I was writing all this I was living in one of the world’s most dangerous cities; a place in which I had had my own brushes with death, on many occasions?

My solution was to generate a catastrophe of such proportions that the world would be changed utterly by its outcome-It would in fact be the much heralded Armageddon-except that it came in the form of Tsunamis, earthquakes and all the horrors predicted by Nostradamus, Siener, the Mayans and of course Revelations, followed of course by all sorts of nasty genocidal activcities on the part of the survivors…escaping the drowning Indonesian archipeligoes and the freezing northern hemisphere.

Over a lifetime of shacking up in ‘one night stand’ hotels across the continent I have found myself reading Revelations on many occasions, in the wee hours, when unfamiliar surroundings drive out sleep; and, having read the local rag, I would toss and turn with the Gibbons standby bibles that proliferate, in hotel bedrooms, just about everywhere I’ve ever been.

I am an inherently secular person but nonetheless found myself asking the question-could such things be plausible? I thought this, back then in the early eighties when I first contrived this plot, that has not yet been written to completion-Then I was too early, like the fax machines I used to sell then-now it seems, according to Gore, that I may be too late, like those fax machines that are now obsolete.

Everything I have researched over the past two decades is reinforced by Gore’s conclusions. The world is in peril and the most important part of the problem [Gore seems to imply ] is the fact that there are more and more people pouring onto the planet and demanding shit.

Which brings us back to denialism.

When I drive about the city, which I do daily, I see no signs of the impending chaos predicted equally daily by the mainstream media. Over the past month for instance three, formerly inconvenient and time consuming intersections along my route have been quietly and efficiently upgraded, to facilitate effective traffic movement. The pavement outside my house [and the rest of the street] was recently demolished by the city council; to lay new electrical piping. They also ripped up my brick [paved] driveway and promised they would ‘fix it later’. Well it was later-later came-
they said about five weeks and about five weeks later people came and fixed the driveway- and now the trench that marred its beauty it is almost unnoticeable.

The streetlights go out and are fixed. Most weeks the garbage collectors collect the garbage -sometimes it takes all day for them to arrive and occasionally they are travelling the suburb at 21.oo but it is usually collected-I also heard only two gunshots in the night this week and it has been some months since I heard the last, compared to fifteen years ago when the gunfire was continuous.

Nonetheless Mr Gore assures us that we have about ten years to make important changes to the world or face catastrophe and we all know that we [the human race] can barely cope with the effects of living now, never mind living in a never land of the future, which may, or may not occur. And there are many who dispute with considerable substance that the problem described by Mr Gore is either real or inevitable. Others argue with disturbing conviction that the real issue is that there as a proliferation of poor people and that no programmes can cope and that perhaps the real programme requires unpleasant action..

My novel, the Yonka Memorandum is set in a future age well after the events that caused so many catastrophes; when the participants in the story have only the sketchiest knowledge or understanding of what happened, except that it was the time the world changed. In effect I was contemplating what happens when we reach the end of the script- in this case the script represented by ‘Revelations’ the arch- document of the gloom and doomists-

Imagine if you would, interviewing ten citizens at random: about an event today, and you would perhaps get some solid committed answers. Ask about an event ten years ago, say, the assassination of the person I call Konstant Mann, an event that almost caused our emerging democracy to come unstuck, and most of the ten would be a tad hasty although they may recollect the event. Ask about the Bambata Rebellion or the battle of Isandlwana, the so-called Third Frontier War, or even the war of 1899-1902 and their eyes will glaze over; and they will either puzzle or remain blank

This is the condition of the characters in my novel-The world picked itself up after the disaster and continued as it may well have done in the dim and distant past–[or if you prefer to be more real…as we all did after the great tsunami a few years back…

We have no real knowledge of our extreme past-10,000 years back but we do have a planet full of unexplained and inexplicable architectural artefacts; and as many inexplicable folk tales. People just get on with their lives irrespective of the chaos apparently reigning all about: the way those road workers put up those useful traffic circles last month and the other worker fellows who eventually, working their plod, plod way, along behind the diggers, reached my house and fixed the driveway. The idea that the sky is falling down and everything is about to end is too ridiculous for words: superstitious nonsense really…isn’t it?

In my preparations for the world-to-come in my novel I explored the role of the so called Atlantic Conveyer system, and found, as Mr Gore now proclaims, that it has been under threat for so long now the damage is probably irreversible and Europe stares a Newfoundland style climate in the face within Mr Gore’s decade without being able to do anything about it.

In my story I created a catastrophe that decimates the East coast of the United States and another that implodes the U S West coast, reducing the United States to a non-player in planetary affairs. The extended catastrophe decimates Japan and sets China back a decade during which time all the pent up rage stored as Yang energy by the infinitely suffering Chinese citizen, explodes in rage; and the forty million men deprived of access to a woman through the outcome of the one child policies of the present regime in China, rampage and consume all.

In our own world [here in the place i call Zone One ]we come face to face with the water supply crisis that is Zone One’s Achilles heel [Zone one is my fiction name for the “hard-to-pronounce” term Gauteng] and my heroine, taking her cue from similar projects in Spain and Australia undertakes to build the five, one kilometre high, Towers, that come to dominate the North Western corner of the tiny province and which supplement the water supplies to the city through evaporation and also provide for massive scale horticulture.

What freaked me out watching an ‘inconvenient truth’ was not that the subject may be pure propaganda for the eco-fascist movement. [This movement apparently tacitly concedes that for the world to survive the coming eco-meltdown predicted with such glee by so many for so long now, it will be necessary to reduce the global population by about four fifths. They assume this will occur through natural selection and perhaps much of it will.] Gore makes no such suggestions. He simply presents an accumulation of facts that have been piling up, according to my own delving, for decades now, and demonstrates the visual imagery that makes his case so profoundly real.

For instance he reveals footage of buildings sinking into the melting permafrost of Siberia. I scene I found to be almost incredible. I had read recently that Siberia was melting and saw some footage on a recent BBC programme but the visuals of what is happening were profound. The poignancy for me was also astounding:

During 1978 I gave a lecture at the now University of Zimbabwe. I spoke to a hostile audience, generally sourced from the various departments of the social sciences. The subject of my presentation related to the inevitable and impending collapse of the [now] former Soviet Union. As we now know the place collapsed eleven years later.

I have never considered the likelihood of a communist style repressive State surviving and prospering to be anything but inherently implausible, and so part of my argument in my speech related to rumours [now known to be well founded] that the Russian drive to exploit the oil reserves of Siberia were being thwarted by their inability to develop home grown drilling technology to facilitate access to the oil through 600 feet of rock solid permafrost.

This revelation proved too disingenuous for my audience who accused me of being a “Smith stooge” and a “capitalist lackey”, a “fascist” and other uncool stuff and I had to be escorted off the campus by the campus security for my own safety. In fact I was lucky to get off the stage undamaged by flying chairs and other missiles. It was good practice for the many bullets dodged on another occasion later.

Now here we are, not thirty years gone past and that solid, multi millenia old, permafrost that arguably proved the undoing of the Soviet Union is melting- why? – What happened? Gore suggests that centuries of climate affecting carbon emissions have finally reached a tipping point and the effect of warming is on an accelerating curve.

In my fictional world I suggested that the tipping point was accelerated by an event that precipitated what I called: ‘The Ringing’. Gore doesn’t mention this, perhaps because the two country’s concerned are now American allies and Mr Gore’s presentation is an inherently bi-partisan one [in an American sense]. Perhaps he doesn’t mention it because he gives it no credence, or perhaps none of his advisers, being scientific fellows, have given it credence.

As we know [and I have mentioned before] in 1998 India and Pakistan exploded a flurry of underground nuclear devices over a period of six months in a tit for tat episode in their serialised half-century conflict. Now, notwithstanding the arguments presented by numerous scientific types that the planet is too big to be affected by six nuclear explosions, even allowing for the cumulative shock wave effect, and that the idea that the earth’s axial rotation process was disrupted by the patterning of the explosions, I will persist in my hypothesis that what is affected is the resonance’s of the planet.

Mr Gore spends some of his movie referring to the many expert opinions that global warming was an illusion, and how they have been debunked; and my contention is that our knowledge of how the planet works is so inherently rudimentary that the idea that the planet ‘biorhythms’ if you like could have been abruptly disrupted by the compounding impact of nuclear energy patterns can not be simply ignored out of hand-So in the classic tradition of the ‘dime store novel’ I asked ‘what if’ – the planet’s biorhythms were fatally [from our limited perspective] wounded by the combined effect of a triple nuclear double-tap [see my piece ‘The triple nuclear double-tap’] and the vibration patterns became disruptive in some way. [In the same way that your car’s wheel’s ‘bounce’ and the steering wheel shudders at particular speeds when your tyres are not properly balanced.]

Reviewing Mr Gore’s presentation the idea that long standing trends are now accelerating to and beyond [perhaps] a tipping point seems more plausible than my dramatic Nuclear Ringing option-Either way the eight years since those explosions have been wracked with global disasters on an unprecedented scale many of them, almost disproportionately in the tectonic plate regions served by India and Pakistan.

In my fictional world the clouded memories of my characters have only a blurred recollection of the horror that came one night, generations earlier, on the 23rd of December 2012. My deadline is earlier than Mr Gore’s and it could be a race as to whether my fiction or his fact turns out to be the Planet’s truth. What is certain is that we may know the real story behind the present wave of denials about the actions [or inactions] of our police chief, long before we know whether Mr Gore or I, proved right or wrong.

In the meantime I have hedged my bets. I own property high above the projected new sea levels on a large piece of ground in Zone One. In my fictional world I wiped out Cape Town and the entire coastline of the country [following a secondary disaster actually hinted at but not explored by Mr Gore], which raised the global sea level by twenty metres. When I contrived this concept back in the nineties, I was being expansive -common wisdom prevailing only half a decade ago put sea level rising at about a metre over a century. Mr Gore now suggests far more than my generous twenty metres, and by twenty twenty nogal.

I also wiped out Mozambique, much of which is below 200 metres [above sea level] and had a tsunami scoop a giant land bridge between Africa and Madagascar. Indonesians invade Africa across the land bridge from Madagascar, to which millions of Indonesians fled after the great flooding, claiming ancient kinship ties of language as the basis of their claim to rights over Madagascar. [Ironically internally in South Africa [Southern Azania] the North West province secedes from the Republic and joins their blood brothers in Botswana in culmination of an ancient claim by that country on the territory .. I never referred in my text to the recent Swazi claim on the province of Mpumalanga, but based on the Mugabe precedent affirmed by the South African government, which as we know upholds the reasonable right to reclaim land arbitrarily confiscated by earlier regimes. Such claims were regarded by the International court to have credence.

[In other words if Robert Mugabe can seriously and legitimately claim back the confiscated farmlands of his despised former colonialist citizens on the grounds that the lands were originally misappropriated by ancestors of said colonialists, who is to gainsay the veracity of Swaziland’s claims that the same circumstances apply to the loss of their South African holdings in the nineteenth centuries, and that the Mugabe precedent, in fact the Israeli precedent as well, opens the door to retrospective claimants..]

Okay- I think that I have made my point- If Mr Gore is right [and the jury is still in deliberation] the rules of denial so manifest in the official response to the news about the police chief will make it a certainty that the impending catastrophe he is predicting for us shall come to pass and that as biblical types would have it, we are truly, living in ‘the end of days,’ and that it is therefore time to Party, Party, Party-

-.

Cheers.

What is a week in the world if not a time of constant change. My favourite constant change moment came On Thursday morning last week. The world that morning was awakened with a dramatic story about a homeless man who liked to peek into motor cars and watch amorous couples and who claimed about a year after the event to have witnessed the late ‘fat man,’ ‘sing’. For those whose memories are as random as the soon to be late unknown anonymous so-called ‘homeless’ man-A well known mining man and general raconteur, playboy and allegedly corrupt human was found shot to death in his luxury car in an upmarket Jozi suburb last November. The case has been stalled since the beginning.

As I rode across town in my rusty steed I heard the inimitable Gareth Cliffe [sic] confirm that the ‘police were on their way to the SABC premises to interview the alleged so-called ‘homeless man’ [from the Ethel and Frank Grey Park where the murder occurred.]

That was at eight o clock and then I went into a meeting for a couple of hours. Later, at ten thirty I was again driving but north this time and the voice on the radio, Classic that time I think, told me that the police had been and met with the man and then arrested him on charges of alleged housebreaking in the central city of Mangwane (again sic)in the more remote central rural hinterlands of the fair South. He had already set off in transport for that city. The radio then played a recording of the anonymous homeless man advising that he feared for his life now having been arrested.

By evening he was being denounced by a branch of the ruling Party structures implicated by the alleged homeless man [now alleged housebreaker and thief ] in the ‘bumping off of ‘the Fat Man’. The homeless man was now insane as well as a thief and alleged housebreaker and there the matter rested. Maybe I missed the bulletin that said he was alive and well and appeared in court this morning or on Friday morning and was duly arraigned with as much respect to the man’s ‘due process’ rights as befitted the almost blinding speed with which the Police acted in some two and a half hours-a time, it is frequently reported, that it more often takes the police to respond to a call in many parts of the country, never mind investigate, arrest, process, and dispatch a general miscreant of to a holding cell somewhere in the hinterland..

We know that the police are capable of acting with superb speed and were impressed at how much they could achieve in two and a half hours. Will the homeless and ultimately nameless man [does one lose one’s name when one loses one’s home?] ever be heard of again? Will we, one month from now, remember that a surprisingly well spoken, alleged homeless man, claimed for reasons of his own to have witnessed a murder deluxe… and for whatever reasons had decided to come forwards about nine months later -was he committing suicide? Did we imagine it?

Had you not been overly alert to the nuances of our daily spin and drivel outpourings on mundane inconsequential matters dear to the hearts of the chattering classes then you heard no broadcast and saw no articles and therefore as with the koan about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it does it make a noise-did he ever exist or was it a piece of performance theatre.

If the homeless man has no name and has been removed to a place far away who is say say who he is and will he pop up later? Is he in protective custody or is he to be on trial for housebreaking, something for which he could get bail: and then vanish forever into the mists of history?

We shall see -we hope this is not another circumstance like that strange matter of Mr Rashid. Two is a trend.

Is it better to have meaningless toil or should we be paid for living? That is the question, as Hamlet could have said. The big debate on Perlman’s after eight debate this last week concerns a low-key campaign to amend the constitution to include ‘the right to work’ in the Bill of Rights.

On the surface this ‘right to work’ seems to be a sensible suggestion. In a land where millions will never enjoy the experience of being exploited for their labour value the idea of a right to work seems so apple pie essential that its almost de rigeur. It also seems to be a pretty dumb solution to a serious problem.

So one listened to some staggeringly asinine argument put forward in defence of the proposal, some by proponents who were allegedly university professors. Listening to someone make a series of pronouncements; a collection of statements; pronounced, nay declaimed, with dramatic effect to justify an impossible demand. Each statement, was a statement of perception, and a valid statement: for instance: ‘Huge numbers of people are unemployed. Other people have jobs. Huge numbers of people live on five hundred bucks a month. I met a person [from the same previous underclass] who was drinking whiskey that costs a thousand bucks a bottle.’ All these were individually reasonable statements of fact. Then suddenly :’This is wrong!’ [ why it was wrong was unclear] Conclusion: ‘ there must be something wrong with a system that lets some people have vast wealth and others nothing at all.’

Perlman did make a valiant attempt to propose an alternative argument although one was never certain that his heart is in the matter. Nonetheless he chose the popular [and rational] defence that we are a capitalist society and that the whiskey drinker takes huge risks and makes a relatively huge reward. And to a democratic mass intent on pursuing the logic of defining the fruits of anyone else’s energy as ‘ill gotten gains’ available to be snatched as Evo Morales has just done with the Bolivian Oil fields this argument of unfairness is naturally seductive.

And of course all joined together they made a remarkably illogical but nonetheless emotionally rendering plea. How can one possibly deny this plea?

However during this entire presentation not one person, not even Perlman, and we hear it often enough on his programme, ever acknowledged the obvious truth. THAT THE ERA OF JOBS HAS COME AND GONE-the new wealth of the planet seems to emerge from no labour at all or at best from armies of machines overseen by immensely talented and avaricious hordes of dealers, traders and general wheeler dealers functioning in a mysterious world of derivatives, hedge funds, warrants, index linked commodities funds and general arbitrage. In fact the truth is that we live in a ‘real’ world of tertiary sectors services driven added value and that the mystery of the ‘virtual’ money that drives our planet with such fierce determination, is so arcane it simply could not [or perhaps would not] be grasped by the proponents of ‘the right to work’.

It was one of Perlman’s more surreal presidings. It is almost quaint that there are people who believe that there will ever again be work enough to keep all who would be exploited for their labour value in a blessed state of exploitation. So the presentations on behalf of the motion seemed therefore self-serving. The sound of those who beat a drum for the support it garners and the ready source of cash from supporters. In the case of the academic promoter of the campaign it seemed a hack attempt to bolster a sagging career.We were told of country’s that have the “right to work” enshrined in their constiutions but interestingly none of the proponents told us who they were. I gathered subsequently that one of them is Germany and i was told that twenty years ago this right was declared to be unenforcible in that country where the “unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Europe.

This then is the argument that should have been presented in response to the demand to amend the constitution [again for the fifteenth time]. I can assure you that this argument will be as difficult to sell, as the ‘right to work’ argument is impractical. This argument, that all citizens should receicve “BAsic PAY”, will arguably affect the supply of willing labour and will gradually, through the market mechanism improve the condition of those who work while materially impacting on the lifestyles of those who are desperate for support. So if we are going to agitate for a right then the right we should be agitating for should be ‘the right to Basic Pay. Because of the argument’s impact on the labour supply it will be opposed by the Right.

Because the long-term implications of the proposal require that solving the problem of the unemployed and therefore incomeless citizenry leads inexorably to the logic of The Privatised State the Left will oppose it. [The world has already spectacularly failed to solve the problem of ‘work for all’ through the horrors of the late Soviet style nationalised State throughout the equally late 20th century-Thus the left’s darling hypothesis has already been proven a failure and any attempt to reinstitute a failed exp-eriment would be a violation of human rights.]

It is a modern cliché that the world is experiencing so-called ‘jobless growth’-. [Although the great mushroom growth surge of the mid decade period over the past few years has wiped out the losses of the preceding post Y2K [remember Y2K] /9/11 meltdown of the global economy and no one wants to lose more again.] Thus the entire thrust of the past five decades has continued: -downsize downscale; use technology to replace humans, and develop technology that eliminates even those who create technology-[assuming that to be possible.]

In effect the outcome of a century of social engineering is that the worker is being liberated from the requirement to sell labour as the machines take over [again]. -Even the knowledge worker is being released from the purgatory of daily toil: there is a reason why the IT world has become a less desirable area of employment in our new age for assertively ambitious humans. Gradually we are moving to a world which may well leave only those who can juggle and entertain, like soccer players and popstars to earn the big bucks while ordinary folk must learn to subsist on basic pay.

Logically this upsurge in the growth of our planet has created opportunities for employment in our ‘knowledge/services’ economy but it is a truism that these jobs, in IT, tourism, call centres or fast food outlets are numerically fewer and curiously poorly paid relative to say working in a car assembly plant. The commodities and manufacturing environments that underpin and drive this new services economy are also being pruned. A less destructible robot that together with fellow robots controls the entire vehicle manufacturing process has superseded that labourer who a century ago would be crippled for life because a crankcase fell on his foot while he was moving it around. Robots don’t agitate for the right to work in a job that gives them no satisfaction but simply provides access to the ‘bucks’ we all need to survive the day.

The question obviously arises. Why do these proponents of ‘the right to work’ seek to enforce a right that they despise? Their philosophy is founded on the premise all ‘work’ is exploitation because it is subject to the law of supply and demand. Therefore they have successfully agitated for the right to drive up the price of their labour by cornering the market for their labour somehow. The outcome of this game is that labour is less in demand. The problems of labour today are the outcome of the truth that-the market rules.

As an example of how the market rules I offer you -The outcome for instance of this long drawn out security workers strike which has seen more than fifty people murdered in defence of the ‘right to have more money for the same amount of labour’. This outcome will be fewer [albeit ‘smarter’ and better paid] people working in the security industry than there are now

A certain number of so-called marginal ‘security’ businesses will be driven out of business because they cannot squeeze more income from a competitive market to cover the additional costs resulting from the strike. Those workers will become unemployed and will have to start practising for real the trade learned so effectively over the past months of tossing people from trains.

Additionally the public has been horrified that, apparently, murderers are guarding their homes. Cameras will replace workers in strategic environments and fewer people will watch more video screens. This is as inevitable as the sun rising each day. The sheer joy of walking around in camera saturated downtown Jozi today is testimony to the effectiveness of this changed approach to securing a living environment.

The truth is obvious: there are no more jobs. The present government came to power on a claim to ‘create’ a million or more jobs and they are discovering that it is impossible.

What would be more sensible though would be instead to agitate for ‘BASIC PAY’.

Basic Pay-I hear you say
What is ‘Basic PAY’-Aagh that’s the rub-

What indeed is basic pay- ?

To be continued-.

Gravity

If an Avalanche is
Crashing
Down a mountainside
Shall we believe
That the atomised snowflakes are engaged in
A tacit
Conspiracy to crash
Through
Their destination
Or would
It be rational to conclude
The destination to be
Inevitable: a result of
Critical mass.

.NiK(00)
from the collection: Random Notes…

I decided some years ago to rename Gauteng, the so-called “Golden Province” in which i live, as Zone One. I intended it as a literary device wherein my Zone One could be many things that I choose it to be, without it necessarily being what it was when I was not choosing.

Some of the rationale for this had to do with the difficulty offshore citizens had with pronouncing the name [where is this place called Gouting? For instance] and I am sure that if people can’t remember or pronounce your name they will tend to avoid using it. So I unashamedly appropriated the name from another part of the continent. Like other places this one defines its regions by Zones rather than by pretty names. In my view the name ‘Zone’ reflects a continental reality emphasized by our beloved leader’s supreme masterstroke of turning our Zone One into the ‘Washington’s of Africa/Azania’. There are Zones where people can make loads of money and live well and there are Zones where they can only eke out a decidedly miserable existence. I am pleased that I live in one of those where people can live well without having to be politically connected.

Now I see that a new so called ‘factional’ novel is about to be launched onto the market and the setting for this book-Zone One. Is the name use spreading or is the new factoid novel one written by Moi? Is this the stuff of conspiracy?

Why would a place in Africa simply reduce regional segmentation to the abstraction of Zones 1- Whatever-. Does the numbering itself reflect the State’s priorities? Or perhaps –

No one thought about it at all. There was no careful conspiracy. Or perhaps someone somewhere among the initiators thought it out: some genius of pre-modern communication theory. Don’t you find that to be the most fun about conspiracy theories. In our general day to day lives we encounter nothing but broad ranging incompetence, foul-ups, plans shot down due to misinformation, disinformation or just plain thoughtlessness-and yet in conspiracies all is perfection-I’m always most curious about the seemingly supernatural powers of the unsung participants in the conspiracies that are the basis of conspiracy theories, aren’t you?

The Zones are places that have been geographically segmented. All over the continent there are zones where no nothing lives, something lives, some people live and many people live. The places where many people live are always the most free: citizens are free to merge their shadow with darkness and slip unknown through their scurrying lives.

Zone one is the primary liberated Zone. It is vast, one of the world’s mega states in a globalising world. It could be argued that Zone one is vulnerable to implosion. It could equally be argued that the issues arising that indicate potential implosion are soluble with money, effort and enthusiasm. Broadly speaking Zone one is the fastest growing region amongst a toddling but nonetheless growing region.

A while back people who obsessed about conspiracies placed the big corporate monster identified in the book S A [Inc] published some dozen or so years ago as the prime mover and shaker in the transition. They were allegedly the architects of change. The Liberal SA writer Jill Wentzel added to that fire of speculation with her evaluations of policy adaptations of SA [Inc} over the decades of the dispossession era in a groundbreaking book on the Liberal perspective around the time the country was liberated.I don’t have it to hand and the local library has misplaced their copy-possibly someone wanted it and took it before someone else did?

According to the venerable Robin Mc Gregor, SA[Inc} owned some 90 odd percent of the SA stock market listings in the late 80’s. Now they don’t I’m sure, and the press is increasingly muttering on about the stark reality that SA Inc has ducked out of the country altogether and is divesting itself of its SA holding with almost unseemly haste. Now that would have been a strange outcome for a conspiracy wouldn’t it-unless there wasn’t a conspiracy and all the various players were doing was ‘adapting their skills to the situation’ as the lead character in the above mentioned soon to be published factional novel set in Zone One, is frequently apt to point out.

Notwithstanding this, the rump of the old SA [Inc] that remains will no doubt continue to exercise formidable resources with the possibly over cautious dexterity that we never saw, experienced or cared about with the late large murdered mining man [about whom I alluded in my blog story called ‘the Apprentice Hit Man’ in an earlier blog. This overweight life connoisseur undeniably, to my mind, holds sway as the most flamboyant, over-the-top criminal we have ever experienced, and being a country rich in diverse resources we have experienced many. There was theft on the grandest scale ever conceived and it just went on and on-Significant commentators have pointed out huge discrepancies in the man’s dealings for over a decade -and the party as we all know went on-My personal favourite in all of that scam was the fake Arts awards thing where the artists got zip and the marketers won the prizes.

When you can have crime on that scale, taking place with impunity, then who needs more secret conspiracies if indeed there are such things. And was it a conspiracy or was the BIG BAD MINING MAN simply someone seeking attention on a vast scale.

I have mentioned before I’m sure my favourite conspiracy. Growing up in a small now forgotten mining town on the eastern edges of the eastern quarter of Zone One, east of Jozi-my journey to school was one undertaken daily through hostile territory. There were warring factions and tribes that hated each other and one tribe in particular; a newly ascendant one was violent in the extreme. I grew up believing that the members of that ascendant tribe were the most hateful of people and was later most surprised to discover that to be reasonably untrue.

Decades later, in my mid-forties I befriended an old Septegenarian who told me- in confidence over a few too many dops of Klippies and iced water – that the fathers of his generation would pay their sons two and six [refers to currency prevailing in 1950’s -had a purchasing power parity index value of about R150.00 in 2006 currency-using the ‘how-many-times-could-you-go-to-the-movies’ index -five times for two and six.]. If that is not a pretty solid incentive to beat the shit out of your neighbour than what else would be.

I suggested this to him. ‘Did the orders go out?’ I asked. He shook his head for awhile, thinking back over a confused life of ups and downs. No-he said eventually. ‘It wasn’t as though he had ever been told he should do it;’ he said. It was just that he didn’t want people to think he was a ‘joiner’, as he called it.

So a wave of terror-certainly on me-was unleashed for two and six. A tacit conspiracy whereby we all agree without formalising our position.

I would suggest that the recent decision of a labour court to rule in favour of a Black man of the now ascendant ruling class dominant ethnic source, over a Black man of mixed blood/original colour origins reflects a tacit conspiracy in favour of the wrong recipient.[see Escom appointment saga recent press reports]

There is wide agreement that the dominant black part of the population are themselves usurpers. The so called ‘coloured’ man derives [frequently] from the ancient remnants of the Koi and San tribes who were engulfed by the southward migration of pioneering agricultural settlers and were effectively dispossessed centuries before the pioneering [so-called black] settlers were themselves displaced and dispossessed by an even later invasion of differently hued [so-called white] settlers.

In this new more materialistic post revolutionary age who was the more sinned against is slowly becoming a divisive issue as I predicted in a piece published in the Mail in Guardian back in ’99.

Conschmiracy

I couldn’t find the things I wanted today, they’re in
The computer somewhere,
Probably neatly filed in place
Under a name I’ve given it
And a category I deemed appropriate at the time.

When I read of hackers entering the domain
And looting the contents
Of one’s hard drive and thus
Becoming privy to these thoughts
I wonder if they find the things I can’t.

Were I a conspiracy theorist I should believe that ‘they’
Had taken
My thoughts away
And that is why I can’t find them.

Then perhaps there is a more prosaic side to
This belief that groups meet in huddled rooms
And plan the enslavement of the world [and perhaps they do?]
Do herrings shoal from tacit conspiracy?
Or is it simply
Sensible
To pursue the pulse.

.NiK[2002]
from the collection: Rehearsing Nietzsche.

Some years ago I constructed my favourite personal hypotheses, in support of a science fiction novel I have been working on for decades. The hypothesis concerns what I called ‘the Ringing’, and a sudden and confounding pattern of weather change that occurs at the beginning of the 21st Century, and was intended as fiction. I am starting to wonder if this hypothesis could have validity.

I published this fictional hypothesis some years ago in a different Bloggosphere, under a general series of chapters regarding what I called ‘the Azanian Konfederacy’. Since it hasn’t been read by huge numbers of people [compared to the many billions of hits the Bloggosphere receives daily, I am presenting you with my fictional scenario instead of doing the Easter egg thing:

In 1998 we all read that India and Pakistan, between them, exploded six nuclear devices, over a period of some six months, as I understand it. Even if it was a year these explosions were inherently simultaneous in geological time.

Applying the principle of the double-tap body shot, to the planet, there is a possibility of a fatal dissonance and that we are truly in ‘the last days’. To elaborate: We know that the shock effect of two bullets striking the human body in close succession over a tight piece of space, say about ten centimetres apart, could knock a large human down, where one or even two or three or even four or more may not. This is why military people are trained to use double-taps, repetitive double shot bursts, and why Heckler and Koch [for instance] make a three-burst firearm, the VP70 9mm Luger fitted with an eighteen shot magazine, as their weapon of choice.

We know the planet survived the double blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well, maybe it didn’t and we’re only just starting to notice it. Then there were others Bikini Atoll and the whole fifties test series in the years leading up to the general treaty to abolish testing. Well maybe the planet survived. But what if the resonances of those explosions began to play a tune as they merged with the natural resonance’s of the planet: from the fifties to 2006, may be long for us but for the world it’s less time than it took to write this sentence.

Now we have six nukes in succession in 1998. That was new. That was three double taps, with maybe one, ever so slightly dissonant. Perhaps, rather like a nail being driven into a plank with successive blows with a hammer, a slightly disyncronous blow causes the nail to bend perhaps marginally perhaps badly.

Now it is still only six nuclear blasts; it’s not going to have an impact like six meteors crashing into the planet. The overhead object that allegedly exploded over Jakarta and was reported briefly on page four in the Star newspaper [Jozi] a few days prior to the Big Tsunami [22 December I think]-a Christmas or two ago, didn’t cause the planet to disintegrate, assuming it had anything other than co-incidence to do with the huge tidal wave that engulfed Banda Acre immediately afterwards.

A bunch could do. But could six nuclear devices of indeterminate strength? We don’t know [well maybe more technically empowered bloggists than me, out there reading this would know?] But we do know inescapably that the global climate has suddenly become far less predictable than it had seemed to be only a generation ago and that perhaps the sudden global conversion by all the various spheres of society over this decade to the global warming theory of degeneration and decay is suspicious like a hand of Marabaraba, except as you know, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I trend to chaos theory. We fool ourselves most of the time and the rest of the time we have no idea what is going on. We’re all still in Plato’s cave staring at the shadows on the walls.

Maybe, during the two decades or more that people have been warning about the immanence of disaster from all the environmental damage wrought by our fossil fuel devouring industrial techno culture, this issue was compounding; and suddenly we are experiencing battering ram upon battering ram of ‘weather phenomena’: earthquakes tsunamis, hurricanes the like. We are assuming that all this is the outcome of What we’ve done to the planet and I’m by no means suggesting that it is not-it is pretty obvious from the growing body of verifiable data that radical change is occurring and that its speed of increase seems to be accelerating. The idea that this is exclusively a natural outcome of the past few centuries of industrialisation is seductive-easy to blame. On the other hand we have experienced a series of earthquakes in Afrika reported this past year: in central Afrika and in Mozambique-that is unusual. Further, on another other hand, maybe we have had an intervention. Not a divine intervention as some might choose to suggest: but a mistaken intervention in the form of three double tapping nukes. Mistakes happen all too frequently and this 6-nuke thing could have been a mistake.

So. So my fictional scenario went on as follows.

What if the battering ram of six astronomical explosions in quick succession mixed with a spice of dissonance from earlier slightly off key shots has dislodged the planet slightly-Do the people who explode these devices take the planet’s vibration patterns into account when they go bang-or is it like it was then- all nationalistic fervour overriding scientific common sense.

What if the planet was knocked off key by a micron or two, the most marginal of wobbles, but it doesn’t return to quite the same place on the rebound. And that initial micron gradually turns the spin onto a subtly different route; and naturally it cant stop and the movement has sent up ripples of change as the planet adjusts to the new momentum. The most marginal of movements but like the lash on the end of the whip those on the surface are closest to the end. We didn’t have the competence to pick up the tsunami until it was done what are the probabilities we can even measure with consistent 24/12 accuracy a few microns here and thee in the planets axial direction. Fiction? Perhaps; but in a post Katrina world incompetence is an overriding probability.

It was notable that the ‘Ringing’ had shaken up the entire tectonic belt, east and west extending along the tectonic plate formation as far west as Algiers and Athens I believe and East to beyond Banda Acre in the south and Japan in the north and including a huge disaster in Kashmir. It shows no sign of letting up. The city of Bam in Iran disappeared a few years ago; another urban facility went this past month. Even New Orleans has disappeared and is barely making a comeback indicating just how difficult it is to fit repair work into the world’s incredibly busy schedule. And so Iran finds itself in a new epicentre in an emerging scenario that has all the finest overtones of fiction

Before this period of destruction ends we could quite possibly see the annihilation of the American east coast line when one of the point elements in the rumbling belt of tectonica referred to above, the island of Cumbra Vieja in the Canaries gets whacked in the last ringing resonance of those earlier blasts and falls back into the sea. In doing so it fulfills Earthwatch’s most dire prediction for the planet, not to mention that of Mr Bill McGuire who predicts this disaster in his book Apocalypse. He believes it will happen in January 2011. The planet will survive this, although the global financial system all but collapses and the USA becomes increasingly moribund as it handles the catastrophe wrought upon it with little appearance of having learned anything at all from Katrina.

I speculate as part of my own hypothesis that the event occurs on the 23rd of December in 2012, which is a date apparently referred to by the ancient Mayans who predict that the date heralds the next great age of the human race.

It may be possible that a strategically placed nuclear device could be exploded under Cumbra Vieja to trigger off such an event, which could be hailed, in a new jihad reminiscent of the great sixth century expansion of a new ‘enlightenment’, as an ‘Act of God’. It would certainly be a sensible move for a country with Iran’s credentials as an Islamic State to deal its enemy a possibly mortal blow, to add misery to the possibility that the planet itself may have experienced a near mortal blow [from a human perspective] back in 1998 and we are experiencing the irrevocable aftermath.

And for this reason it would be sensible for Iran and the fundamentalist Jihadist clique to bully the world with their demonstrations of robotically controlled behaviour in support of their totalitarian ideology in order to get their nukes up and running. It’s a great theme for a novel and it’s on our doorstep.

So we have two threads running: the planet is in trouble and we need a diversion that can buy us time to figure out what to do. Overtly at least the Yanks have run out of ideas, leadership and courage and ultimately they are hanging in space by their own bootstraps in an amazing new experiment in economics-the binary rule. The Fed rules.

It is an incredible thought that the human race with all that it has achieved could well be on the way to a partial melt down that could obliterate a considerable part of the species and we are almost unaware of the danger.

Cheers it’s all happening slowly really: have another gin.

The role of murder as an [inadvertent]/unintended outcome of State policy.

One is no sooner admiring the orchestrative skill with which we slide from a disturbing razz ma tazz election result into the great Zuma alleged rape headline season than one is brutally reminded, in the week that the movie Tsotsi made its play on the theme of redemption, that we are plunged back into the increasingly murky maelstrom of ‘realpolitik’.

Frankly the public excoriation of the young woman accuser in the Zuma alleged rape trial must rank as the most distasteful event of the year so far and reveals all too starkly the inherently feudal nature of our new Afrocentric society. I am increasingly of the opinion that this concept of Ubuntu, or humanness, as my textbook would have it, is merely a carefully camouflaged variation on feudal servitude. Free people do not need to be polite to each other unless they choose to be.

However it is the seemingly random execution of a four year old child that truly shifts the spotlight to a process that has been all to familiar over the past few decades and which seems to have been permitted to slide offstage, as it were.

The strategic murder of people opposing the direction of the State was an all too familiar theme of the old regime. High profile murders of such as those of Steve Biko, Rick Turner, David Webster and a string of others referred to simply as the such and such four or six or whatever, made headlines when they occurred and have rightly been the subject of subsequent post transformation investigation; and were, we now know, part of a wider pattern of murders: that were supposed to have ended with the new order of things.

Nonetheless there have been a rising number of murders over the past few years that also raise questions about the nature of the society that we are in process of becoming.

First off there is the sheer weight of slaughter over the past twelve years. More than a quarter of a million people have died violently since 1994. The alleged civil war in Iraq following the Bush invasion has yet to claim this level of massacre. They sheer fact of the overall difficulties the State has experienced in dealing with violent crime could be interpreted as simply policy-like the silence on Rumbabwe’s slide to a completely previously unexplored form of economic development.In amongst the general chaos it is most statistically probable that high profile people will get taken out in the process.

However there are those covert politically aligned deaths that are seemingly random and yet are not-perhaps-that truly tease the consciousness of those who concern themselves with such things…Before you shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ I am not suggesting conspiracy of the obvious kind but rather the random process typical of something like Chaos theory that amplifies trends and transforms them into movements, and in retrospect converts them into conspiracies whereas they simply manifest certain basic laws, of thermodynamics, as one example for instance.

We have become used to the idea that the province of KwazNat is a place of political assassination over the past two decades and the numbers are possibly in triple figures now. These murders range from the seemingly random shootings of politically associated figures by roadside gunmen, to the wholesale slaughter of entire families in rural hotspots and the direct slaughter of urban figures in their own doorways. There was even an assassination of some floor-crossing politician by an enraged citizen, which most of us applauded notwithstanding the odiousness of the act.

It is rather like the endemic taxi violence as random operatives seek personal advantage through acts of ‘enlightened self-interest’ by bumping off potential rivals before they themselves are bumped off.

The spotlight moved to the Free State more recently when a prominent political figure was gunned down in his driveway. There was an attempt to pin it on his widow but that seems to have fizzled out, as does the investigation**. Another investigation that seems to have run into a dead end was that of the overweight heavily politically connected Johannesburg Mining figure allegedly shot in a random ‘botched’ hijacking. [**We pay more attention to things local in our city and that murder was ‘out of town’ and therefore only of limited appeal so I may have missed the conclusion should there have been one.]

The most recent and certainly one of the more sinister developments is this week’s apparently random and motiveless execution of the four-year-old granddaughter of the Judge President of the quaintly named ‘Transvaal’.

Now this may of course transpire to be no more than an unfortunate coincidence as a gang of unredemptive ‘Tsotsis’ make their violent way through their seemingly normal day: jackrolling, raping, looting and pillaging in the new way for which we are globally notorious. Nonetheless it is hard to avoid the thought that a powerful figure has been brutally reminded of his vulnerability.

In another incident this week a politically connected woman was apparently also found murdered. She was found dying from gunshot wounds in her car, and according to the radio report I overheard appeared to have been yet another botched hijacking. Last weekend three members of the ruling party were shot dead in a political assassination in the old Kwaznat.

One is reminded when such events occur, of Lenin’s post transformation strategy in the now defunct soviet union when he opened the prisons and cut the murderers loose to wreak random and therefore terrifying, paralysing horror on the citizenry. Stalin’s later variation on this was the ‘liquidation’ of opponents or potential contenders for power: the difference being that we are a democracy and all things are equal, and there is a free market in liquidators.

The sheer fact that it proved impossible to find a judge from the new ruling class to supervise the Zuma alleged rape trial with each proposed candidate carefully recusing himself indicates a disturbing level of ‘de facto intimidation’. That the case must now be heard by a member of the former oppressor class who may at best be regarded as one who would discriminate indiscriminately in a court case, plus the violent behaviour of the supporters all point to a re-enflaming of long suppressed political schisms. What is also certain is that within the next decade these leftover jurists from a less than salubrious past will have retired and moved on and have been replaced with persons of a more compliant disposition. These new jurists may well have been pre-conditioned to present verdicts that are politically approved.

When this trend is coupled to proposed legislation aimed at restricting the independence of the judiciary then it is small wonder that the rand is beginning to head off to a less than desirable place, as outsiders begin to clear the decks in preparation for what many are beginning to regard as the ‘Zanufication’* of the body politic. [ZANU is the ruling cadre in Rumbabwe: an emerging failed State in Africa. They have functioned for decades as a corporate entity that has assiduously looted the assets of the country they have plagued for decades. Most of their plans were conceived as being in the ‘people’s interest’ and all have now failed miserably [depending on one’s point of view] Now they are so desperate for more loot that they have decided to slaughter the golden goose in the interests of short term gain. From their perspective this is an extremely sensible policy; because they will soon offload the colonialist associated oppressors from their midst and will aquire new partners who will be content with a 49% share of the remaining bird. Broadly they have now run out of options and this gives all the rest of the stooges the chance to make one last big hit before dinner’s over.]

Back home the ruling party bosses are smugly, and with good cause, counting their wonderful score [from about half of the population]. General incompetence and failure to perform have been reinforced with approval-There is no general incompetence and failure to perform-these are media led fantasies-. the people are happy and content and they are pretty used to waiting.

Nonetheless there is an old Zen koan that states that the moment of one’s greatest triumph is simultaneously the moment of ones greatest failure. It is possible that we have now reached that Zen moment.

Having fooled most of the people most of the time the ruling party now have to start fooling everyone all over again and the cracks are opening up in the superstructure. As they destroy their opposition their internal cracks become more apparent-making it ever more difficult to satisfy a widening glut of trough swillers. Will electricy be their Achilles heel? We want no Achilles heels they called back…down with heels.

Cheers.

Absurd prediction of the moment: Come September everyone who isn’t already in the ruling party crosses the floor leaving behind them a litany of failed opposition leadership. [Assuming such a metaphor is possible].

Final absurd prediction: Mr Zuma’s strategy of plumbing the depths of his accusers sex life may eventually work to his disadvantage. To the extent that it has revealed a pattern of previous rapes, it will allow the judge to compare her emotional responses to those earlier traumas, under cross-examination, with her testimony in regard to her accusation. A high level of congruence between the various states of response would indicate that she is telling the truth.

Cheers
El Bloggo.

Weblog 15th October 2005-10-15
Dateline: Jozi

Is the planet beginning to show signs of disaster fatigue?

In this past year alone the devastation caused by natural disasters
Has been enormous with damages surely beyond a trillion dollars [US.].

The total for the decade is probably two trillion and rising. Think about it. The city of Bam-[ in Iran] gone. It may never be rebuilt. Then just the biggies: Algiers, Greece Turkey Iran and over to the other end of the tectonic plate system that runs from and along the Himalayas through South east Asia and the radiating spray from there to Japan and China, not to mention the islands of Sumatra et al. All of these places have experienced natural disasters over the past few years and this discounts the many more places that have experienced servere flooding. Now we have this vast explosion of horror in Pakistani Kashmir. Perhaps this is all not as natural as it appears.

All the people who have for decades denied that there was such a thing as Climate change are now jumping about to demand that present disasters are normal; that the pattern of earthquakes recorded annually is roughly unchanged. But notwithstanding that the weather patterns are now acknowledged to be altering somehow the pattern of earthquakes, flooding, drought and fire is supposed to be ‘normal’. I dispute this.

What makes me think that the rate of disasters is increasing is spurred by a report that the plea by Malawi [among other Southern African States] for food aid to feed huge numbers of people who are slowly starving has been met by a stony silence.

People’s hearts usually go out to those who are in trouble but suddenly there are so many people whose otherwise orderly lives are being suddenly and abruptly demolished forever that pity runs into a myriad of constraints-

We have a new emerging paradigm for AID. Those who deserve help such as the victims of natural disasters get it-albeit slowly due to the vast scale of the need. Those whose horror is perceived to be an outcome of foolish policies designed for aggrandising purposes on the part of ideologically fundamentalist leaderships or straightforward corrupt administrations, are it would seem to be left to sort themselves out. We saw this earlier this year with Niger where desperation was alleviated at the very last minute after wide scale television footage of starving humans was broadcast to the planet’s hard working citizenry..

It is this Blog’s speculation that this subtle shift of mercy activity is prompted by a growing understanding that the present pattern of disasters will continue: swinging pendulum like along the Himalayan fault line as the reverberating shock wave from a series of multiple Nuclear ‘test’ blasts continues to seek out the weaknesses in the fissure. These nuke tests you will remember took place a few years ago in a tit for tat power contest between two ancient enemies India and Pakistan. Since then we have had a surge in bad natural disasters.

This geological reverberation is a process I have called ‘the Ringing’ in some fiction I have concocted for my own desultory entertainment. In my fiction ‘the Ringing’ was an historical event [from my fictional perspective: the tale being set about a century from now] The penultimate climax [ in my fictional concoction] comes in 2012 AD. On this date and roughly in line with an old Mayan prophecy New York is demolished .

Like Bam and the great Tsunami, it happens around Christmas day, when an island called Cumbre Vieja, in the Grand Canaries, that is at the top of the Earth watch ‘bad possibility’ list, falls down, as predicted; and drowns New York and the American East coast which will largely disappear in much the same way that Banda Aceh just-vanished. But, pshew, this is simply a fictional concoction by NiK-It’s not really happening it?

Maybe…what is not fiction though is that the scale of disaster is growing with each event and the response rate are beginning to look “punchy”; and Cumbre Vieja is at the end of the plate faultline that seems to be reacting so violently to the Indo- Pakistani nuclear exchanges..

The response to the disaster in Pakistan has been slower than the response to Katrina, which was already widely condemned. Maybe there just aren’t enough disaster relief personnel drifting around the world waiting for disasters to happen; plus there is this glut of disasters presently.

So it looks like the world could rapidly run out of compassion for those who are widely perceived to have played while history rampaged on its own private rodeo. And the first sign of this fatigue could be represented by the almost unprecedented failure of the Southern African appeal as at a week or so ago. With the Pakistani disaster this past week intervening the Malawian’s cries can barely be heard above the clamour from wretched millions in diverse places.

On the other hand perhaps these disaters are normal and the failure to feed Malawi is just a bit of bad PR.

I suspect though that we must stand by for overwhelming demands for help from our northern brothers. These seem to be People who are being unfairly condemned to genetic extinction because they could not compete with free food. It is arguable that the supply ogf free food over decades has fuelled a wonderfully corrupt syastem that is barely functional, and serves only to keep the Wabenzi class in SUV’s while the populace remain slim n trim.

It isn’t fair to stop supplying free food to people who have gotten used to it. Like the poor citizens of New Orleans we saw recently on our TV screens these are people who have been helped for so long they have lost the capacity to save themselves. Now in the past few years about one hundred million or so have this year been added to the list of people to be helped.It seems the world’s helping hands may be overwhelmed.

We [in SA] may have to decide what we are going to do about them [ MAlawians n all] given our own priorities- We are already supporting twelve million citizens with grants and aid and they are not shrinking the numbers could grow by another five million withing three years so aid is costing.

We have our own fatigue issues.

NiK