WHAT does a South African do when he has absolutely no idea what else to try? Set up a commission of inquiry, a review commission or a panel of experts. These phrases are as much a part of the policy lexicon in this country as losing crunch matches is a part of our national cricket team’s psyche.
The latest commission is tasked with reviewing the roles and functioning of our various state-owned enterprises. So we can expect for the umpteenth time to hear tired ideological arguments about the merits and demerits of privatisation being rehearsed.
It does not, however, take an expensive German strategy consultant or an overzealous MBA graduate to realise that the problems with our state-owned enterprises are fundamentally practical rather than ideological. This is not to say that politics or ideology are irrelevant in making sense of, and reversing, problems within our state-owned enterprises. But these political aspects often obscure other realities of equal importance.
These other realities are much more mundane and so generate less excitement; they lie on the strategic, operational and organisational fronts. The review commission would do well to reflect on how political leadership can lend a hand on these fronts rather than mostly kicking around high-level arguments about the general pros and cons of full or partial privatisation.
A simple example illustrates the point bluntly. One of Transnet’s near permanent problems is delivering coal to Eskom in time to generate enough electricity so we can watch Generations uninterrupted. This requires Transnet to deliver the contracted amount of coal tonnage and to do so within the agreed times. Yet, every year Transnet falls short of what they need to deliver.
This is sad for a couple of reasons. First, it is cheaper to rail coal to some power stations than it is to transport the stuff by road. Second, the trucks that do the road transportation kill pedestrians more often than trains do. Third, the carbon emissions from our trains are less than those from the trucks, which is not an unimportant consideration in this green day and age . It is therefore cheaper, safer and greener to have ramped-up coal volumes delivered to Eskom by rail. This would result in a net saving on the production cost of electricity and ultimately reduce our electricity tariffs.
Transnet keeps failing to deliver. Shockingly, it fails to deliver because of embarrassingly basic operational and organisational inefficiencies that could easily be fixed. The core problem, to take our case study further, is that the turnaround time for getting trains from coal mines to a power station and back to the mines is much higher than what any optimisation model tells us it should be.
It is here, however, that common sense and practical insight overtake politics and ideology. If a train breaks down, and a driver needs an engineer, it does not help if he does not know who to call. Or, if a driver’s eight- hour driving shift is over, but the train itself has not yet reached journey’s end, then a replacement driver needs to be waiting at the spot where the current driver will get off.
This requires a manager in charge of his drivers to know every train’s journey, map out on a white-board the times when trains will reach key points along the route, and then get the drivers assigned to start at appropriate times at appropriate spots with a bakkie or kombi ready to shuffle them around.
I have no doubt that discussing such practical intervention sounds about as exciting as listening to the president deliver his state of the nation speech. But that is exactly my point. Politicians need to restrict their role to allowing career civil servants to get on with it. That should be the point of political oversight.
You do this not by deploying a cadre to head Transnet Freight Rail but rather appointing someone with a nerdish, career- long obsession with trains and goods. That is the sort of person who will get excited about what business teachers call spaghetti charts and figuring out how to untangle them. Such folks have the know-how to help a team think through the operational inefficiencies that prevent a place like Transnet from having trains that run at the optimal turnaround time when they take coal to customers such as Eskom.
Political appointees often cannot even understand the PowerPoint presentations of pricey consultants. Many are semiliterate, financially, and certainly not apt to lend a hand in brainstorming micro-level inefficiencies within their particular enterprise.
A couple of important conclusions follow. First, political leadership and oversight of our state-owned enterprises are not inherently poisonous. Rather, political oversight needs to be aimed at improving state-owned enterprises operationally, organisationally and strategically. The old privatisation debate is a red herring. Second, and related, political oversight should be provided at the highest levels, coming from directors-general and cabinet ministers. Within the state-owned enterprises themselves, appointments, right up to CEO level, should be based solely on industry knowledge and expertise.
Fewer commissions, better industry headhunting and greater capacity development are the things that the president should be insisting on. If not, the developmental state will remain a dream deferred.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=108977
Friday, May 14, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Mbeki government's Aids denialism in chilling detail
Debunking Delusions; The inside story of the TAC
by:Natahan Geffen
Jacana Media 2010
review: Eusebius McKaiser
Nathan Geffen's admirably balanced and meticulously crafted Debunking Delusions; The inside story of the Treatment Action Campaign is a proverbial page turner.
The book is a permanent public record of our country's shameful recent history of state-sponsored Aids denialism, and highlights the proliferation of quack remedies for HIV and Aids.
You walk away with a palpable sense that we ought, in Mandela-speak, "never again" to allow a South African government to get away with callous disregard for evidence-informed health policy interventions in the face of a public health challenge.
Geffen tells the denialism story in chilling detail. It is bad enough that quacks may emerge of their own accord, courtesy of delusions of ideological grandeur. But the lifespan of such evidence-averse quacks, not unlike flies attracted to a dustbin promising sustenance, can be lengthened by a culpable political leadership whose wayward beliefs and actions conduce to their existence. The middle chapters are self-contained studies of some of the bigger names in Aids denialism like Tine van der Maas and Matthias Rath, individuals who are not merely destructive on their own but particularly so in the context of a state machinery that legitimised their pseudo-scientific gobbledegook.
Geffen quotes Van der Maas in an exchange about her methodology for testing the efficacy of her garlic and olive oil remedy. Asked whether she had monitored the remedy's impact on patients, she responded, "when you do not hear from patients, they usually are doing well. If they have a problem, they usually phone...".
Besides these remedies not being endorsed by any peer-reviewed, respectable scientific journal, sheer commonsense would suggest that a needlessly dead human being cannot pick up a phone. It is truly mindboggling that supposedly educated folk with reflective capacities, including Thabo Mbeki or Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, could have been enthralled by the likes of Van der Maas.
These quacks are not the cause of political denialism. The relationship between quacks and other denialists is one of mutual dependency. The quacks found a political environment that enabled them to peddle their wares. The political denialists, in turn, were given pseudo-scientific language to justify irrational conspiracies about racism-fuelled, Western-led pharmaceutical attacks on black Africans.
Geffen reminds us, for example, of a former provincial health minister, Peggy Nkonyeni, who once claimed "... that there is this thing called bioterrorism or biological warfare. This is where people can manufacture a virus and target a particular community that will be spread amongst a group of the population".
The ridiculous implication, of course, is that HIV is an invented weapon of mass destruction.
The book includes some honest discussions that give it intellectual balance. There is a remarkable discussion, for example, about shortcomings of the first AZT trial. This trial lasted less than six months and consequently the medium-term impact of the drug was not well-understood. This, in turn, resulted in the initial marketing of the drug being based on an exaggerated set of claims about its efficacy, side-effects, and so on.
Needless to say, treatment for HIV and Aids have come a long way since, and the overall efficacy of AZT and other anti-retroviral drugs are beyond medical dispute.
The book suffers two excusable shortcomings. The minor shortcoming is that it was a literary mistake to try and weave into the overall analysis a subtext about the life of one Andile Madondile.
This was Geffen's attempt to pull a Johnny Steinberg by offering us a bit of narrative journalism. We were supposed to see the human side of the quackery story. But this device does not work. One long soliloquy is placed in the mouth of Madondile. His story does not span the book. We do not get to know him. This tactic was unnecessary. There is a place for that kind of narrative and it's in a project where the person's actual life takes centre-stage in a full study of the human impact of denialism.
Most importantly, the subtitle of the book is inaccurate. As Geffen states: "After nine years of non-stop fighting with the pharmaceutical industry and government, the TAC leadership, worn out and cranky, had an unpleasant internal fight in 2007, resulting in several high-profile resignations.
"Having been involved in that argument, and having the utmost respect for my colleagues with whom I fell out, I will not say more on this."
It is therefore a marketing ploy to describe the book as the inside story of the TAC. That story has yet to be told. But this is not a big tragedy. What the book is actually about is something of greater public importance, a well-written account of a social movement's brilliant role in holding a stubborn state and government responsible for its immoral political actions. Geffen can be more than proud of this illuminating effort.
http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5461716
by:Natahan Geffen
Jacana Media 2010
review: Eusebius McKaiser
Nathan Geffen's admirably balanced and meticulously crafted Debunking Delusions; The inside story of the Treatment Action Campaign is a proverbial page turner.
The book is a permanent public record of our country's shameful recent history of state-sponsored Aids denialism, and highlights the proliferation of quack remedies for HIV and Aids.
You walk away with a palpable sense that we ought, in Mandela-speak, "never again" to allow a South African government to get away with callous disregard for evidence-informed health policy interventions in the face of a public health challenge.
Geffen tells the denialism story in chilling detail. It is bad enough that quacks may emerge of their own accord, courtesy of delusions of ideological grandeur. But the lifespan of such evidence-averse quacks, not unlike flies attracted to a dustbin promising sustenance, can be lengthened by a culpable political leadership whose wayward beliefs and actions conduce to their existence. The middle chapters are self-contained studies of some of the bigger names in Aids denialism like Tine van der Maas and Matthias Rath, individuals who are not merely destructive on their own but particularly so in the context of a state machinery that legitimised their pseudo-scientific gobbledegook.
Geffen quotes Van der Maas in an exchange about her methodology for testing the efficacy of her garlic and olive oil remedy. Asked whether she had monitored the remedy's impact on patients, she responded, "when you do not hear from patients, they usually are doing well. If they have a problem, they usually phone...".
Besides these remedies not being endorsed by any peer-reviewed, respectable scientific journal, sheer commonsense would suggest that a needlessly dead human being cannot pick up a phone. It is truly mindboggling that supposedly educated folk with reflective capacities, including Thabo Mbeki or Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, could have been enthralled by the likes of Van der Maas.
These quacks are not the cause of political denialism. The relationship between quacks and other denialists is one of mutual dependency. The quacks found a political environment that enabled them to peddle their wares. The political denialists, in turn, were given pseudo-scientific language to justify irrational conspiracies about racism-fuelled, Western-led pharmaceutical attacks on black Africans.
Geffen reminds us, for example, of a former provincial health minister, Peggy Nkonyeni, who once claimed "... that there is this thing called bioterrorism or biological warfare. This is where people can manufacture a virus and target a particular community that will be spread amongst a group of the population".
The ridiculous implication, of course, is that HIV is an invented weapon of mass destruction.
The book includes some honest discussions that give it intellectual balance. There is a remarkable discussion, for example, about shortcomings of the first AZT trial. This trial lasted less than six months and consequently the medium-term impact of the drug was not well-understood. This, in turn, resulted in the initial marketing of the drug being based on an exaggerated set of claims about its efficacy, side-effects, and so on.
Needless to say, treatment for HIV and Aids have come a long way since, and the overall efficacy of AZT and other anti-retroviral drugs are beyond medical dispute.
The book suffers two excusable shortcomings. The minor shortcoming is that it was a literary mistake to try and weave into the overall analysis a subtext about the life of one Andile Madondile.
This was Geffen's attempt to pull a Johnny Steinberg by offering us a bit of narrative journalism. We were supposed to see the human side of the quackery story. But this device does not work. One long soliloquy is placed in the mouth of Madondile. His story does not span the book. We do not get to know him. This tactic was unnecessary. There is a place for that kind of narrative and it's in a project where the person's actual life takes centre-stage in a full study of the human impact of denialism.
Most importantly, the subtitle of the book is inaccurate. As Geffen states: "After nine years of non-stop fighting with the pharmaceutical industry and government, the TAC leadership, worn out and cranky, had an unpleasant internal fight in 2007, resulting in several high-profile resignations.
"Having been involved in that argument, and having the utmost respect for my colleagues with whom I fell out, I will not say more on this."
It is therefore a marketing ploy to describe the book as the inside story of the TAC. That story has yet to be told. But this is not a big tragedy. What the book is actually about is something of greater public importance, a well-written account of a social movement's brilliant role in holding a stubborn state and government responsible for its immoral political actions. Geffen can be more than proud of this illuminating effort.
http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5461716
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
