The Rule of Three

So the South African election of 2014 is over.  Apart from a few scuffles, things seemed to have gone off pretty smoothly.  We now have the great advantage (over our friends in the US, for example) that we will be left in peace by the political parties for another four years.  As far as free and fair is concerned, there seems to be no question.  South Africa continues to do well.  Even the opposition parties haven’t complained much.  That must be a good indicator for a start.

Certainly there is no danger of fraudulent voting – at least not at the individual level.  “Vote early and vote often” doesn’t apply here.  I recall that a lot of heat was generated in Minnesota in 2012 when the voters were asked in a referendum to approve the requirement of identification for voting.  It lost.  Here there is no question.  When I arrived at the voting station yesterday afternoon, I had to present my barcoded identity document – only this is acceptable.  The barcode was read by a wireless reader, and presumably the information made its way to some central computer.  So that was that, right?  Wrong. When I reached the room where the voting took place and presented myself to an electoral officer, he took the ID again, and painstakingly searched through a print out of the relevant section of the electoral role until he found my name.  He then crossed it off by hand.  Well, computers can crash, I suppose.  You might think that the nation was now safe from any thoughts of electoral fraud on my part.  Not quite. Anyway, it seems that every check is done in triplicate in South Africa these days.  The final step was to paint my thumb nail with indelible ink, and then I was allowed to vote.  I will spend the next two weeks looking as though I hit my thumb with a hammer, but at least the nation is safe from a situation where the bar code computer has its memory wiped out and the man with the ruler and pen crossed out the wrong line.

As another example of rule of three, I had to fill out a form yesterday to become a director of a company.  Naturally, it wanted my ID number.  (It’s practically impossible to do anything in South Africa without that number.)  So I filled it in.  The next question gave me pause.  It wanted my birthdate.  Let’s leave aside why the Companies Office needs to know how old a director of a company is.  (Perhaps Warren Buffett would be too old to be allowed to be a director of a company here?)  The point is that the first six digits of your ID number here is your birthdate.  Is it because they want to check if you actually know your birthday?  (Getting it wrong, I suppose, would be a fair reason to disqualify you from directing a company.)  Perhaps it’s a sneaky way of checking that you didn’t invent the ID number in the hope that the computer had crashed because of all that voting data.  Well, I correctly transcribed it onto the form.  Next it wanted to know my age…

Another interesting example is the airlines.  When you buy an airline ticket over the internet here, it eventually allows you to move to payment.  You are required to fill in the usual stuff – card number, expiry date, and the three digit security code on the back.  (It seems that if someone stole your card, it would never occur to him to note this other information.)  Now a message goes to the bank and a text message comes to your phone with a long code you have to enter before the transaction times out.  Okay, two levels.  But then – even though the flight may be taking place months later – the airline insists on actually seeing the card when you check in.  Bad news if you're paying for another person.  I would love to know what this third check is about.  Maybe just to maintain the rule of three.

Oh, yes, the election.  Well, counting continues – I guess they have to do it three times – but at this point it looks like no surprises.  The Democratic Alliance comfortably holds the important Western Cape Province and the African National Congress everything else.  Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, who believe that nationalizing mines and banks is the route to wealth and jobs – at least for Julius – got over 5%.  Not too significant, but coming in third in their first outing gives one pause for thought.  The turnout was 75% of registered voters (yes, you have to register some months before the election: you need a bar coded identity document, and…  But you get the picture by now.)  The vote for the ANC was down a bit, but not enough to shake the grip of President Zuma on the ANC, I’m afraid.  Indeed, you can fool most of the people, most of the time.

Michael - Thursday

There are two subjects that I really don’t want to write about.  Of course once you’ve come to that decision, that’s all you seem to think about.  Maybe writer's selfblock?  The first topic is the South African election which takes place in just over a week.  Strangely enough, given the history of violent denial of democratic rights here in the past, the election hasn’t generated a great deal of enthusiasm.  Only around half the people who, over the last four years, became eligible to vote for the first time this year have bothered to register to do so.  Probably there is more interest in whether Hilary Clinton will run in 2016 than in what will happen here on May 7^th.  So if South Africans aren’t very excited about the election, why should outsiders care?

Zuma looking cheerful, as he should

Nevertheless, there was an interesting report at the weekend.  Our national Sunday newspaper released a nation-wide poll and the results were surprising.  At least to me.  They suggest that the African National Congress (ANC) government will receive pretty much the same percentage of the votes as they received in the last election.  So what? you ask.  Well, the conventional wisdom here is that the electorate is disgusted with the government.  The president’s shenanigans with multiple wives (and mistresses) and the widespread corruption – most recently exposed in a $21 million upgrade of his private residence at state expense – is decried by all.  Desmond Tutu, who has iconic status in this country, recently said he wouldn’t vote for the ANC, and so have several ex ministers.  Little has been achieved during the Zuma presidency; people are not better off (although the fault for that probably lies more with the world economy than Zuma’s cabinet).  Then the passing of Mandela was supposed to have freed a generation from a sense of obligation to vote for Madiba’s party. 

This love affair ended in tears

Yet it seems that old habits die hard if they die at all.  It is true that Zuma himself has taken a bit of a hit.  His approval rating has dropped three points to 62%.  62%?  Wow!  Wouldn’t Barack Obama be happy with that sort of rating on a bad day?  Zuma must be doing something right.  I wish I knew what on earth it is.

The predicted tally...sort of

Given that the ANC will win comfortably, the only real interest seems to be in who will place.  The Democratic Alliance which (in the said conventional wisdom) is seen as a white dominated party looks set to improve its position to near 25% of the vote, and firebrand Julius Malema will get less than 1%.  (That surprises me, but it’s a pleasant one.)  Agang led by the brilliant Mamphela Ramphele doesn't do much better.  (Not such a pleasant surprise.) And there’s still a plethora of other new parties touting alternatives to institutionalized corruption – at least in theory.

All this suggests one of two things.  Either people like me – middle-class whites who think of themselves as mature-age – are totally out of touch with how the majority of people in the country think (very likely) or the poll is unreliable because people may lie about their voting intensions, fearing some sort of reprisal (also pretty likely).  I suppose we will have to wait and see.

The other subject I really don’t want to write about is the Oscar Pistorius circus.  Stan and I even agreed not to write about it.  So much has been written already – not only locally but in the international media – that it’s hard to imagine what more can be said.  In case you are one of the tiny minority which has managed to avoid the story, para-olympian Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend – model Reeva Steenkamp – through the locked door of his bathroom on Valentine’s day last year.  He claims to have believed that an intruder had entered the house through the bathroom window and was about to attack him and Reeva, who, he believed, was asleep in bed with him.  I haven’t followed the case in detail, but the fact that he shot Reeva is common cause.  The issue is what he believed at the time.  If he knew it was her, it was murder.  If his story is true, it was at least manslaughter.  (Even in South Africa you can’t just shoot at an unknown and unseen person in the belief that they may intend to attack you.)  Of course, if he actually planned to kill her in advance, it's premeditated murder, but that seems very unlikely.  If this was the best plan he could come up with, I advise him not to choose a new career in mystery writing.  And between manslaughter and premeditated murder there is a variety of different offenses.

Prosecutor Nel knows what he believes

The judge is reputedly doing a good job, and she will have to decide in the end.  We don’t have a jury system in South Africa, and this seems a pretty good example of why I believe that is a good thing.  I certainly wouldn’t want to try to unravel this case and make a decision on Pistorius’ life on the basis of a crash course from the judge on the relevant law.  And I think with her experience, she will have a better chance than I would of correctly deciding what was in Pistorius’ mind when he repeatedly pulled the trigger.  Maybe the ultimate example of a why-dunnit.  We’ll have to wait and see on that one also.

Hopefully I’ll be able to write about something more interesting in a fortnight.  Of course that will be the day after the election…

Michael - Thursday

Theatre of the absurd

South Africa’s politics at the moment are pretty bizarre, given it has an incompetent, self-aggrandizing, polygymous president in Jacob Zuma, whose private residence in Nkandla, Zululand has been upgraded with state funds because of security concerns to the tune of $20 million or so.  

Zuma's state-funded private residence, Nkandla

This whole episode in itself is an example of the theatre of the absurd as one listens to all sorts of Zuma underlings trying to justify it.  An as-yet-unreleased report on the Nkandla expenditure by public protector, Thuli Madonsela, who is regarded as one of the honest members of government, is eagerly awaited.  We don’t know when it will be released, and there are rumours that an ex Commissioner of Police, the fired Bheki Cele, is demanding time to respond to allegations contained in it that the police failed to stop fruitless and wasteful expenditures.

The rumours also indicate that the ruling party, the ANC, is trying to delay the release of the report until after the elections in April.

However, the mind-boggled citizens of South Africa had their minds hyper-boggled over the last week, not by more antics by the ANC or its members, but by the opposition.

The main opposition party in South Africa is the DA (Democratic Alliance).  It is widely regarded as being the party of the whites, a hang over of various anti-apartheid parties of the past.  The head of the party is Helen Zille, an able politician, but white.  Of course this offers and easy target for the ruling ANC.

The DA controls the Western Province, in which Cape Town is situated, and has about 30% of parliamentary seats in the national assembly. 

Zille is smart enough to realize that the future of the DA is to transform itself into a party that does not have the ‘white’ stigma.

I need to take a little detour here to fill in some backstory.

The famous anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko had a life-long companion in a woman whose name is Mamphela Ramphele.  She is quite an extraordinary person – herself an anti-apartheid activist, banned by the apartheid government – she is also a medical doctor with a strong community-health focus.  She was once managing director of the World Bank, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, and is a successful business woman.

The remarkable Mamphela Ramphele

A year ago, she started a new political party in South Africa, called Agang South Africa, meaning Build South Africa, in her native tongue of Northern Sotho.  I was excited by this, because I found her approach to the future of the country refreshing.  I was impressed by her credentials and was cautiously optimistic that she would not be tempted by the potential pickings of being a senior government member.

Agang SA was likely to garner my vote at election time.

Back to the story.

So with only a couple of months before the next general elections, the DA’s Zille and Agang’s Ramphele decided to form an alliance.  Since the DA was an established party with decent infrastructure and grass-roots support, it looked to me that the very small Agang was going to be subsumed by the DA.  In return, the DA was going to put forward Ramphele’s name as its presidential candidate.

So on January 28, this new alliance was announced with the two women sealing their alliance with a kiss.

The kiss!

I thought it to be a good move for both parties and felt that the DA had taken a bold move to move towards being seen as a South African party, not a South African whites’ party.  The country was abuzz with the announcement.  It was unexpected; it was bold; and for the first time in many years, it offered something new in South African politics, something that had the potential to be a game-changer.

Now for the bizarre twist.

On January 31, three days later, Ramphele announced that she would NOT stand as the DA presidential candidate and would remain leader of Agang South Africa.

The country was boggled, nay hyper-boggled.

Walking the streets of Cape Town, one could see glazed eyes and shaking heads.  “What the F…?” was the question du jour.

It seems that in the rush to make the announcement – the elections are two months away – neither Zille nor Ramphele had thought through the details before calling a major news conference.  It seems that neither party had been adequately consulted about what was going to happen; for Ramphele to be the DA candidate, she would have had to be a DA member; but the Agang SA constitution prohibits an Agang member from being a member of another party.  Clearly Agang supporters must have revolted, forcing Ramphele to change tack.

Which is a great shame – I do think the alliance was a great idea and would have stirred things up against the ANC, which is suffering in the public’s perception.  There has been the Nkandla scandal; droves of its officials are seen as corrupt; and its management of municipalities has been dismal at best. 

So I think a great chance has been squandered.

I guess the lesson to be learned is that one shouldn’t call a national press conference unless one has all the ducks in a row.

And so the curtain comes down on yet another theatre of the absurd, and ANC members are parodying the Zille-Ramphele kiss at every opportunity.

And political cartoonist, Zaphiro, has had a field day.

Stan - Thursday