Politics.za

The NCOP has approved the first section of the Children’s Bill and after reading the article it seems like another bill that will be passed without proper thought going through it.

The bill does a number of things (like set up a national sex offenders database) designed to protect children. It also has banned circumcision for boys under the age of 16 unless done for medical or religous reasons. Note that cultural justification is not included. That is if you have your child circumcised because it is a long cultural tradition you can go to jail, but if you do it because the Bible/Koran/Flying Spaghetti Monster said so then that’s okay. Not the most consistent law is it?

How traditional cultural circumcision amongst the Xhosa/Zulu will be affected by this I can’t say. I suspect that 16 year age limit will allow it to carry on as per normal. This will also be a very hard law to enforce. Xhosa/Zulu initiation camps usually take place in rural areas (or in bushland close to urban areas) and I can’t see the police running from hut to hut checking ID documents of initiates.

The Mail & Guardian have released their report card rating cabinet ministers (and leaders of the opposition, that “C” must get Tony Leon depressed).

One thing about this report card, and the one released by the DA, that gets to me is the high marks for Minister of Science Mosibudi Mangena. In my books opening a single radio telescope, no matter how internationally prestigous, does not warrant such a high rating. South Africa, if it ever wants to hit that 6% GDP growth rate, is going to need a lot more engineers and scientists than what’s currently coming out of our universities and technikons… oops universities of technology… ah screw it I’m calling them technikons. And the number of students with higher grade maths and science coming out of our secondary education system is abysmally low. Minister Mangena needs to get together with Minister of Education Naledi Pandor and get a science/engineering plan of action in place. Double stat!

It’s not just glossy reports costing taxpayers millions, the salaries of top city management in Cape Town alone will cost R10 million this year. Now Cape Town Mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo said that those salaries are needed to “attract top people who had had experience in the private sector” which is true, in order to attract talent into government you need to pay them for their talent.

But if Cape Town municipal manager Wallace Mgoqi was in the private sector and was doing such a crap job as he is doing in the Cape Town municipality (N2 gateway project stalling, jewelery district tender fiasco, city parking contract going to obviously fronted BEE company, the list goes on… trust me) he would’ve been fired ages ago.

Instead he’s probably looking forward to his 25% of annual salary bonus.

Everyone wants to look good. Especially for the boss. Which is why government departments will be spending nearly R40 million rand on nice colourful annual reports. That’s a lot of glossy paper (I hope).

Well if you thought renaming a few suburbs and streets was going to cause administrative nightmares does Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi have a doozy for you. Apparently the reduction of the number of provinces is firmly on the table.

That’s right. After spending millions of Rand building provincial government, constructing grandiose provincial legislatures and paying massive provincial civil service salaries (read the Sunday Times career section and you’d think the North West province was the largest employer in the country with the way they’re hiring) national government has decided “meh, maybe we don’t need them after all”. I mean the National Council of Provinces (the other house of parliament, or did you forget) is pretty much irrlevant these days anyway so let’s just get rid of the whole charade.

Someamongus over at South Africa Blog thinks that this is just a threat from the executive to get the provinces back into lock step and that’s a valid point. Of course the ANC national parliament has passed a few laws and then later had to go back and redraft them when it was clear the laws weren’t just going to work (remember the draft Immigration Act?), so this might just be the same thing on a much larger much more expensive scale.

Personally I think it might be the sign of a nervous ANC. The ANC knows that it’s biggest weakness heading into municipal elections in 2006 and national elections in 2009 is it’s lack of service delivery and it seems some in the ANC higher up beleive provincial government is probably getting in the way. From the article it seems Mufamadi believes service delivery can be done much more efficiently with only national government (providing the money) and local municipalities (doing the implementation). While this idea has some merit, it can be done without disbanding provinces and I get helluva nervous when something like ANC electoral strategy could be causing major constitutional rewrites.

• As expected Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel gets top marks – 8/10.
• And also as expected Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalang Msimang gets a big fat zero.
• Suprisingly Minister of Communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri gets a 5, which frankly is 4 points too much. It took 4 years to get the SNO licensed (and it won’t be up and running for at least 6-9 months), ICASA is a mess and toothless and Telkom is ripping the public off as best they can. I refer you to myBroadband for the gory details.
• Minister of Tourism and Environmental Affairs Marthinus ‘Kortbroek’ Van Schalkwyk gets a respectable 6/10 mainly for environmental achievements. Tourism is still strong but with the highly publicised recent attacks on tourists in Cape Town he better keep his eye on the ball.
• Minister of Transport Jeff Radebe’s score held steady at 4/10 despite MetroRail still being unsafe and unreliable, traffic gridlock beginning to choke Cape Town and Johannesburg, taxi recapitalisation still nowhere to be seen and of course, Gautrain.
• Minister of Science Mosibudi Mangena score increased to 7/10 mainly thanks to the SALT telescope. But that’s something that won’t affect many actual South Africans and the continuing (and alarming) lack of skills in science in engineering in South Africa should have lead to a much lower score.

The IEC has stated that in next years local municipal elections there will be no special voting. That is if you can not physically get to the polling station where you are registered you will not be able to vote.

But here’s a telling quote from IEC official Mawethu Mosery

We know that many people will suffer, but there is nothing we can do because special voting during local government elections is administratively impossible

Oh for pete’s sake it’s not “administratively impossible” because plenty of other countries manage to do it with no problems. Here’s how it works:

1. Have voters who will not be able to physically vote call an IEC hotline to ask for a postal voting card. Some identity verification is done (fax copy of ID, go to IEC office etc etc).
2. IEC sends a voting card with a return envelope to voter and explains that the card must be returned by the 15th April.
3. Cards returned on time are counted, which should not take long at all seeing as they’re expecting 200 000 people to be affected by these rules, and the voters are made ineligible to vote on March 1st (to avoid double voting).
4. Updated voters rolls are distributed to local election polling stations by 28th April.
5. Normal municipal voting takes place as per normal with postal votes being added to the totals.
6. Democracy prevails!

So when can I expect my call up to IEC HQ?

Well the Gautrain has been approved and I’m fully expecting the guys from Commentary to start their campaign of sabotage sometome soon.

And this is probably one of the few topics in SA today where conservatives and arch-leftists agree, that the Gautrain will cost too much and do too little. It’s estimated that the Gautrain will reduce congestion by 20% but congestion in Gauteng is increasing at 7% a year. So in the three years it will take to build it will reduce congestion to… today’s level. This is what running in place feels like.

Jacob Zuma was formally charged with rape today. I expect the support he had from COSATU/SACP to disappear soon as well.

This week’s Sunday Times is a veritable smorgasbord of ANC bickering and infighting.

Firstly is the front page story that ANC Secretaty-General Kgalema Mothlante is being investigated as the source of the fake emails that laid out a conspiratorial plot between Deputy President Mlambo-Ngucka nad businessman Saki Macozoma to get rid of Jacob Zuma. This is another blow to the far left of the ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance who, while now trying to distance themselves from Zuma, had highlighted Mothlante as a possible replacement as “champion of the left”. Looks like they might have to get keep on looking. Perhaps they should try an Idols-type reality show (titled “Comrade Champion” naturally) where public entrants will be critiqued by a panel of judges (my picks: Jeremy Cronin, Blade Nzimande and international celebrity judge Hugo Chavez) in a variety of categories: Megaphone slogan shouting, populist speech writing, the popular (but much maligned by women’s groups as demeaning) red t-shirt modelling competition and the grand final task: the ability to dodge and recover from a verbal beatdown by Thabo Mbeki.

There is one cause for concern in the above report on a possible investigation: the police are planning to raid the NIA. Now if you remember the debacle that was the Scorpions raid on the offices of Shabir Schaik’s attorneys (where guns were almost drawn between Scorpions agents and SAP officers) then you, like me, are hoping the SAP send only those officers with the coolest of cool heads. And no guns.

Secondly is the article highlighting Tokyo Sexwale’s speech where he demands national government stop sending out “double messages” about AIDS and do something about the reality of the situation. No doubt that speech has endeared him even less to Thabo Mbeki.

And thirdly the infighting in the Western Cape ANC continues with opponents of lame duck Premier Ebrahim Rasool accusing him of paying journalists for good press. Ivan Flynn, editor of the Argus, has supended political editor Joseph Aranes and journalist Ashley Smith. As the article in the Sunday Times pointed out this reeks of the Information Scandal all over again and if true could be just as devastating.