Khaos, Kaprice Konflation plus Klimate Change

This was a most illuminating week.
 

Some months ago a man who writes contemporary history and produced a popular current paperback called “How long Can South Afrika {Mzansi} survive the Looming crisis?” spoke at the Cape Town Press club and was reported stating that [in his opinion] the group of persons running Mzansi today, kollectively lack the skill and ability to run a medium sized British, [European] or American city.
 

I thought it [at the time] to be an assertively patronizing and inherently Koloniste type of observation: of the kind we traditionally expect from those leftover hardliners who don’t like change. Which shows how misinformed I am.
And then, realistically, South Africa’s budget is about the size of a largish British or American city. Not much to spread around.
 

This week Mzansi’s President: J. Zuma showed that he took his former ‘teacher’ [apparently*] to heart and publicly fired the Minister of Finance without, it seems apparent reference to any of his Kabinet with whom he was allegedly ‘konsulting’ only two hours earlier.
 
From what we all witnessed this week he has seemingly developed a serious disinclination to regard any of them, apparently, as having kredibility sufficient to discuss affairs. And some 72 hours later none of his kabinet had as yet, reportedly, muttered a word of any kind, about the inherently kapricious action [on present evidence and rationales: subject to review]: thereby demonstrating their seemingly apparent irrelevance to public affairs.
 

They would seem to be [in his view, presumably] an expensive kolektion of inherently useless appendages, albeit jolly good flunkeys, that one has to have around for patronage purposes, and who are not expected to do anything; even marginally effective, except kollekt their wonderful life nourishing pay cheques, and do as they are bid. And who commonly knows their workers if not their boss? It is a terrible indictment.
 

Last month some time the President caused outrage on social and other media when he told an assembled Party Conference gathering that he placed the Ruling Party [of which he is President] ahead of the State [Mzansi]. This week he has demonstrated via an apparently Kapricious action that he can fire who he wants at will and without restraint and that he is now Konflated with the Party.
 
In other words President Zuma is now the Ruling Party and vice versa: and all shall bow to his will or it’s “off with their heads” …
 
There have always been questions over the rudimentary nature of Mzansi’s democracy credentials; whether before or since 1994: and what else changes. It’s Lord Charles Somerset meets Charles Stuart 1st or perhaps Marie Antoinette with: “Let them eat cake”. He may of course find himself in a ‘Jamesian Fork’. Alternately, we may simply be participants in a revised version of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
 

And so Mzansi has thus now moved into the “Wonderland” phase of its national Development plan… the one behind the one that got stalled when the one that was supposed to be implemented wasn’t.
 

Well-done Mr. President. You showed them: None of this effete Labour Relations Act bullshit about fairness and procedure for you. I read Ex-Minister Nene’s acerbic ‘bureaucratese’ communication [in Business Report]; to someone he mistakenly regarded as a flunky … what a schmuck: thinking he actually had any power, to be so rude as to deny a lady her fancied toys. This is a free country and to hell with anyone who behaves like an old fashioned Koloniste: ‘Off with his head’.
 

And the rest of the Kabinet had better read the message and start getting their work done according to the plan so pure, before they too get shown the door for sure. There is far too much shirking and dodging bullets. One must reasonably deduce that he doesn’t bother to tell them what he is going to do, because [to him, presumably] they are inherently ineffectual, know nothing except prevarication: and they know nothing because, it would seem, they do nothing… Meetings are not doings, it seems. This is of course, speculation fed through untransparent performance.
 
There are rumours that the ingénue who has replaced the now ex-Minister N2 has some form of link to the lady who was so rudely treated by that former Minister that she ran to JZ crying foul… And [presumably] said: to him, put my man in, and we can all get our just deserts. The jury is out on that; and amazingly no formal or other media seems to be raising that idea: so maybe all those with exposed positions are running for cover… Or… perhaps the rumoured link is simply illusory. Later: instantly denied rumour, suggests the lady rebbuked was closer to someone else… There are also rumours of yet another baby in the stable? Time will tell.
 
The other part of my illuminating week was receiving confirmation from a local Climate Change co-author, of a book dealing with Climate Change Questions; that I am simply a writer of fiction: and that a few earthquakes have nothing to do with climate change. They were thus largely, contextually, irrelevant to the process [climate change] that results from human action [apparently].
 
Even the fact that there has been a statistically aberrational spate of them over the past fifteen years was irrelevant to climate change: and any opinion to the contrary was fictional… and go for it dude.
 
So since he is obviously correct … he is clever and a Professor of things geographic, I shall change the opening line on my website to say: “What if we have inadvertently disrupted the planet rather than shifted it.
 

And I am happy to return to my role as a writer of perhaps, largely unintelligible prose poetic science FICTIONAL crime stories. I found the idea that I was predicting things that are actually happening, to be too disturbing.
 
Anyway my own pretentions to prediction pale in comparison to those of the late Arthur Kepple-Jones in whose classic ‘dystopian’ work “When Smuts Goes” [published 1947] the events of this past week, involving the President and his [apparent] contempt for his cabinet, were almost scripted they have proved so accurate.
 
Nonetheless: I do think that unless this Financial ministerial ingénue turns out to be a secret prodigy, like the President himself… a man deprived of access to Letters in his youth who has garnered nourishment at the nipples of reality: and learned that all things are fakeable [like running a planet on vast oceans of fake money]: and that his latent genius at bringing countries back from the reaches of ruin, is untested and hence, ‘unpotentialised’[sic] [whatever that means].
 
In the probable absence of such evidence; [in fairness the palace is on fire and the fire brigade is on strike and because of the drought there is no water in the firepool. He is a man strapped to a coffin attempting to dig himself out of a grave.] then soon the number of local currency units needed to purchase one of the reserve currencies may well move into free fall… It’s done some serious ‘leapage’ already.
 

Perhaps there is a real reason the President fired the Finance Minister for perhaps doing his job too well [a not unprecedented action in the annals of despotic rule]. It may well be the President’s secret plan to crash the currency in order to bring massive hordes of tourists, to breathe in one of the worlds cheapest travel locations … Given that his, apparently, incompetent team have managed to bring the tourism numbers down recently, through some ill-considered bureaucratic demands. “Off with their heads!” demanded the Queens of hearts.
 
Also, notwithstanding all hope to the contrary the starving locals will; as they demonstrated so lovingly at Khutsong and many other places, pledge their troth to the President [in his new role as The Party] next year in the upcoming ‘riggables’ for local government administration. It is, if not ordained, almost probable, given that the supreme court’s recent rebuke over inept rigging procedures in some unpronounceable rural venue, have given the organisers plenty of time to remedy such remiss. The President understands that the only thing faster than social media is direct action.
 

Then they [the so-called ‘mob’] will believe the President is Omnipotent, when he calls for rains in March 2016 to end the drought; [el Nino predicts rain then] and is rewarded with flooding, in the run up to the election, thereby proving him to be THE ONE.
 
So thus I predict a Mugabe style ‘landslidish’ victory for the ruling party in the local elections, notwithstanding the rudimentary attempts by various outgunned and essentially credibility free parties, to pretend their way to power. Pres’ Zuma doesn’t hang out with Mr. Putin of Russia for nothing. There may also be some dead people: so we must all exercise care.
 
Now: having cheered you up; enjoy a wonderful festive end to the year and prepare to meet thy Climate Change requirements.
 

• According to the author of “How long will South Afrika survive” [see page xi; RW Johnson] as a young [subsequently retired] Marxist he ran underground lectures on Marxist Leninism, in the place formerly known as Durban, to large crowds of enthusiastic “young Zulu men” one of whom turned out to be Mr. Zuma: and [he says] generated a great reunion many years later when they encountered each other again.
 
• In musing on the direction the country [Mzansi] is heading towards, in December 2015; on the Eve of Reconciliation Day, I chanced across the following lines from Arthur Kepple-Jones’ 1947 dystopian satire. “When Smuts goes”[Page 200, 1950 publication.] “The South African Republic was in a different sort of danger. The “nation” was not the people of the country, but merely a small section, whose existence and identity depended on the subjugation of the rest. Liberate the Africans and the “South African Nation” would vanish from the scene, never to return.”
 
This too was predictive since we now universally, informally, live in the strange quixotic ‘Mzansi’… a word seemingly meaning only the random ‘South” [isiXhosa] or ‘Down’ [isiZulu] and it is only those whose “existence and identity depended on subjugation…” that still carry the original belief, along with some few who may be variously known as Model C’s, Cheeseboys or other more or less polite terms like “Clevers” [KLEVAS] or Dark Diamonds.
 
These latter have recently become concerned about the disappearance of previously undeclared national feeling; to the extent that the national anthem is now, by decree, being played each morning on the national SAFM radio station prior to the 06.00 news. It is noted that this decree is not being widely emulated.
 
• Picking up Kepple-Jones’ point, Johnson adds that what remained in Mzansi was “rent–seeking, gangsterism and the criminalization of the state.” [How Long Will SA survive… R.W.Johnson P.169] Ironically the basics: rent-seeking et al, for this was in place within a year of Kepple-Jones’ original publication and has since grown in scope and magnitude according to an increasing plethora of data… and even then it was simply a team switch.
 
• The ‘good’ news is that Finland reported this week [via Bloomberg] that they are going with the “Basic Pay” experiment that threads through the Internet podcast cyber serial: ‘The Jonker Memorandum’ [JM] [on this site] and will start in 2017. All other welfare falls away. Everyone gets the same basic paycheck monthly [it will be clawed back later at tax return time from those who actually work and receive pay.]. The Swiss are holding out for the moment on a proposal to vote on the same idea. All part of the JM story. And Mr.Schaeuble, the German finance man is currently convening a 7 Member group to discuss ways of introducing the Transaction Levy, that features as episode 75 of the Jonker, as a mechanism to pay for basic pay. So another prediction under way. Bugger about the seismic events though.
 
• Happy Festive konklusion to the year.
Eat drink and do the merry.
2016 promises to be weird.
Be ready to BE
OK! BE.