I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Congress of the People: a political obituary
I NEED to collect my black suit from the dry cleaners today because I am attending a funeral service tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit tender, however, so I am not sure I’ll have the strength to attend. But it is going to be a huge funeral service and as someone who was not very close to the deceased, I might, at the risk of sounding macabre, get away with not being missed.
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Nic Dawes was right to publish but Zapiro was wrong to ask him to
We all know by now, of course, that Zapiro has caused another minor storm in a cartoon teacup. There has been a lot of conversation over the past few days reflecting on the thorny question of whether or not the Mail and Guardian should have published the offensive cartoon. Opinions, even among editors, differ widely.
Ferial Haffajee from City Press opined that she may have resigned in the face of a seemingly intractable moral dilemma: her intuitions pull in two different directions; on the one hand, the free speech champion in her demands that she should publish, but a sense of respect and awareness of religious sensitivities that are not unimportant, in her view, pull in a different direction.
Ray Hartley from the Sunday Times expressed a more firm conviction that he would not have published. Peter Bruce from Business Day and Sunday Independent's Makhudu Sefara declined my tjatjarag sms-attempts to solicit their views.
Nic Dawes, from the M&G, justified publication in part on the basis that he would not have published the Danish cartoons which were more clearly Islamophobic, in his view; this cartoon, however, did not have such overtones....translation: Zapiro did not plant bombs in Muhammad's turban, and that's the critical and relevant moral line for Mr Dawes.
Who is right? Well, ethical debates are not logical puzzles. One sad fact about the divisive nature of this debate is a lack of understanding by all who hold strong views - on both sides of the issue - that ethical debate is inherently murky. Yes, some arguments are stronger than others. I have yet to see a compelling moral argument for racism, for example. But these clear cases obscure the majority of inherently difficult cases.
Sometimes (and this cartoon debacle is one such case, contrary to the convictions of BOTH libertarians and religious fundamentalists) ethical debate must end, however unsatisfying, in rock-bottom intuition differences about how to balance competing ethical considerations. I can therefore only put and explain my own view. You may or not agree with it.
Bluntly put, I think that the M&G, qua newspaper, and Nic Dawes as editor, were spot-on in their decision to publish the cartoon. In an ethical twist, however - which may or may not satisfy those who agree with my endorsement of Dawes' judgment - I think that the cartoonist, Zapiro, should have exercised self-censorship by NOT submitting the cartoon in the first place. Let me explain this seeming paradox and argue for it.
Let's describe the cartoon in case you've not seen it. In the cartoon, the prophet is seen lying on a reclining chair in a shrink's office with a speech bubble that exclaims, "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!" Next to him is a newspaper with a headline that states ‘"Everybody draw Muhammad"' Day. A sub-header reads, ‘Fatwa on cartoonists'. This raises an obvious question: should the newspaper have published the cartoon?
First, there can be no doubt that freedom of expression, and media freedom more generally, are critically important cornerstones of our democracy. It is easy to rehearse the general moral arguments in favour of these freedoms and so justify and understand their place in our constitutional edifice. In essence, an open, deliberative society, which is what we are striving towards as part of the normative vision for this country, requires all of us to have relatively thick argumentative skin so that we could thoroughly and honestly debate issues that are critical to the growth and development of our nation.
Questions that centre on religion and religious identity are no exception. The point of the media, in turn, is to act as one important vehicle through which these freedoms can be enjoyed. The media's role is not to close down debate but to facilitate it. And, barring legal limitations on free speech, the media should, in general, err on the side of avoiding pre-publication censorship and deferring instead to the marketplace of ideas for sensible speech to be distinguished from senseless speech. Decisions about what counts as speech worth publishing are fraught with personal and institutional biases and that is why, in borderline cases, one should err on the side of publication.
With this general principle in hand, it seems to me that the M&G was justified in publishing the cartoon. The cartoon potentially occasions a number of substantive debates, such as the difficult question of what those of us who do not subscribe to a particular denomination should make of injunctions that stem from that denomination.
On a meta-level, the cartoon also raises the classic debate of what moral limits there should be on free speech. These limits are often context-specific so it is worth raising the question afresh, periodically, rather than assigning the debate to history as if one timeless moral truth had been established for all contexts henceforth.
An editor then needs to balance the benefits of potentially healthy conversations that might arise from the cartoon's publication with the less desirable possibility that some people might take offense that their prophet is depicted at all. The paper regarded the principle of freedom of expression, in this particular instance, to be overriding.
This is not to suggest that there should be no limits on free speech. There are legal limitations already. These legal limitations, such as prohibitions on hate speech or private law that prohibits speech that injures one's reputation, are good. They are also justified on independent ethical considerations.
But the mere fact that someone takes offense does not count as a reason to limit freedom of expression in a particular instance. There has to be a more demonstrable harm suffered by someone or a group or the likelihood of, say, imminent violence. These are difficult determinations. But it seems to me that too many devout religious followers assert a non-existing right to not be offended. No one has a right to not be offended by someone else's speech acts.
It is therefore bizarre that so much value is being attached to the offensiveness or blasphemous nature of the cartoon by some of the critics of the M&G's decision to publish. Why should the offensive nature count as a reason to limit a cartoonist's right to lampoon? And, in the absence of a right not to be offended, it seems that there is little further legal ground on which religious followers might rest their case for why the newspaper ought to have censured its cartoonist short of proving hate speech.
My view, of course, is an articulation of free speech and media freedom that rest on a very wide interpretation of what ought to be legally permitted in a liberal society. No doubt argument might yet be put for why, even in an open, deliberative society, greater moral and legal weight should be placed on the offensive or blasphemous speech acts. I have not, however, come across such an argument over the past few days.
Yet, despite this defence of the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon, we could still ask whether Zapiro himself made the right judgment call. The answer is not an obvious yes. We have to distinguish the cartoonist's right to lampoon and offend from his decision to do so.
Artistic and intellectual freedom, in my view, justify the implicit decision by the editor to defer to the cartoonist's personal judgment on what cartoon to publish. This is not to say an editor should never intervene. But, as Dawes pointed out, he would have stepped in as editor if this cartoon resembled those published in Denmark, which were more demonstrably Islamophobic, such as the one which depicted Muhammad as wearing a turban made of bombs. But Dawes rightly decided that in the absence of outright hate speech, he will defer to the cartoonist.
This leaves us open to ask whether the cartoonist needed to exercise his right to offend. And it seems to me that he could have opted for self-censorship without thereby losing sleep in a fit of bother about whether he is becoming meek. He would not be losing his general power as a provocative commentator. Instead, self-censorship would be justified by the contextual fact that the politico-religious sentiment of the day requires sensitivity on the part of artists, writers, commentators. This is context-specific and need not translate as a slippery slope towards a permanent erosion of substantive media freedom.
The reality is that many, even if not all, Muslims do feel deeply about the question of whether or not their spiritual head is depicted at all - with or without a buffet of bombs and heavenly virgins. The question is why us non-believers are hell-bent on showing off our legal right to piss off these particular segments within the Muslim world? Why get tjatjarag just because you can?!
We need to distinguish not only between legal and moral norms, as I often insist, but in fact also add to that distinction by recognising (at the risk of making hard-ass libertarians laugh out loud), considerations of etiquette. The SOLE set of norms that defenders of Zapiro have relied on have been the legal ones; shades of moral argument (not fully cashed out) sometimes lurk in the background.
But, no one has meditated on the personal judgment call that the artist himself can and does make about how to respond to a range of considerations, including an etiquette of decency, when there is no major moral, epistemic or other gain to be had from producing a particular artwork. I refuse to believe that Zapiro's cartoon has added an iota of value to our general understanding of, or debate about, religion or free speech.
We learnt nothing we did not know on Thursday morning. It was therefore dispensable, not least in the face of these ethical pressures and considerations of etiquette, which are not morally eliminable. This is NOT - I repeat - to suggest that his legal right should be clipped (and hence my support of Dawes); but it is to offer a critique of his personal judgment about submitting the cartoon to Dawes in the first place. He should have probed his own motivations much more deeply.
The greater moral here is that cherishing our freedoms in a new democracy need not imply a boisterous assertion of each right on every available occasion. Why offend just because you are entitled to?
In the end, therefore, the newspaper was right to not mess with the cartoonist's legal entitlement to express himself freely. But our beloved cartoonist, in his turn, was ethically hasty in choosing to exercise his right to lampoon just because he can. Or because the brute, masculine demonstration of a right seems to have become his sole mark of exhibiting artistic and intellectual freedom.
Self-censorship is boring but sometimes appropriate and certainly not necessarily a sign of the erosion of our freedoms. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed with me.
Ferial Haffajee from City Press opined that she may have resigned in the face of a seemingly intractable moral dilemma: her intuitions pull in two different directions; on the one hand, the free speech champion in her demands that she should publish, but a sense of respect and awareness of religious sensitivities that are not unimportant, in her view, pull in a different direction.
Ray Hartley from the Sunday Times expressed a more firm conviction that he would not have published. Peter Bruce from Business Day and Sunday Independent's Makhudu Sefara declined my tjatjarag sms-attempts to solicit their views.
Nic Dawes, from the M&G, justified publication in part on the basis that he would not have published the Danish cartoons which were more clearly Islamophobic, in his view; this cartoon, however, did not have such overtones....translation: Zapiro did not plant bombs in Muhammad's turban, and that's the critical and relevant moral line for Mr Dawes.
Who is right? Well, ethical debates are not logical puzzles. One sad fact about the divisive nature of this debate is a lack of understanding by all who hold strong views - on both sides of the issue - that ethical debate is inherently murky. Yes, some arguments are stronger than others. I have yet to see a compelling moral argument for racism, for example. But these clear cases obscure the majority of inherently difficult cases.
Sometimes (and this cartoon debacle is one such case, contrary to the convictions of BOTH libertarians and religious fundamentalists) ethical debate must end, however unsatisfying, in rock-bottom intuition differences about how to balance competing ethical considerations. I can therefore only put and explain my own view. You may or not agree with it.
Bluntly put, I think that the M&G, qua newspaper, and Nic Dawes as editor, were spot-on in their decision to publish the cartoon. In an ethical twist, however - which may or may not satisfy those who agree with my endorsement of Dawes' judgment - I think that the cartoonist, Zapiro, should have exercised self-censorship by NOT submitting the cartoon in the first place. Let me explain this seeming paradox and argue for it.
Let's describe the cartoon in case you've not seen it. In the cartoon, the prophet is seen lying on a reclining chair in a shrink's office with a speech bubble that exclaims, "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!" Next to him is a newspaper with a headline that states ‘"Everybody draw Muhammad"' Day. A sub-header reads, ‘Fatwa on cartoonists'. This raises an obvious question: should the newspaper have published the cartoon?
First, there can be no doubt that freedom of expression, and media freedom more generally, are critically important cornerstones of our democracy. It is easy to rehearse the general moral arguments in favour of these freedoms and so justify and understand their place in our constitutional edifice. In essence, an open, deliberative society, which is what we are striving towards as part of the normative vision for this country, requires all of us to have relatively thick argumentative skin so that we could thoroughly and honestly debate issues that are critical to the growth and development of our nation.
Questions that centre on religion and religious identity are no exception. The point of the media, in turn, is to act as one important vehicle through which these freedoms can be enjoyed. The media's role is not to close down debate but to facilitate it. And, barring legal limitations on free speech, the media should, in general, err on the side of avoiding pre-publication censorship and deferring instead to the marketplace of ideas for sensible speech to be distinguished from senseless speech. Decisions about what counts as speech worth publishing are fraught with personal and institutional biases and that is why, in borderline cases, one should err on the side of publication.
With this general principle in hand, it seems to me that the M&G was justified in publishing the cartoon. The cartoon potentially occasions a number of substantive debates, such as the difficult question of what those of us who do not subscribe to a particular denomination should make of injunctions that stem from that denomination.
On a meta-level, the cartoon also raises the classic debate of what moral limits there should be on free speech. These limits are often context-specific so it is worth raising the question afresh, periodically, rather than assigning the debate to history as if one timeless moral truth had been established for all contexts henceforth.
An editor then needs to balance the benefits of potentially healthy conversations that might arise from the cartoon's publication with the less desirable possibility that some people might take offense that their prophet is depicted at all. The paper regarded the principle of freedom of expression, in this particular instance, to be overriding.
This is not to suggest that there should be no limits on free speech. There are legal limitations already. These legal limitations, such as prohibitions on hate speech or private law that prohibits speech that injures one's reputation, are good. They are also justified on independent ethical considerations.
But the mere fact that someone takes offense does not count as a reason to limit freedom of expression in a particular instance. There has to be a more demonstrable harm suffered by someone or a group or the likelihood of, say, imminent violence. These are difficult determinations. But it seems to me that too many devout religious followers assert a non-existing right to not be offended. No one has a right to not be offended by someone else's speech acts.
It is therefore bizarre that so much value is being attached to the offensiveness or blasphemous nature of the cartoon by some of the critics of the M&G's decision to publish. Why should the offensive nature count as a reason to limit a cartoonist's right to lampoon? And, in the absence of a right not to be offended, it seems that there is little further legal ground on which religious followers might rest their case for why the newspaper ought to have censured its cartoonist short of proving hate speech.
My view, of course, is an articulation of free speech and media freedom that rest on a very wide interpretation of what ought to be legally permitted in a liberal society. No doubt argument might yet be put for why, even in an open, deliberative society, greater moral and legal weight should be placed on the offensive or blasphemous speech acts. I have not, however, come across such an argument over the past few days.
Yet, despite this defence of the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon, we could still ask whether Zapiro himself made the right judgment call. The answer is not an obvious yes. We have to distinguish the cartoonist's right to lampoon and offend from his decision to do so.
Artistic and intellectual freedom, in my view, justify the implicit decision by the editor to defer to the cartoonist's personal judgment on what cartoon to publish. This is not to say an editor should never intervene. But, as Dawes pointed out, he would have stepped in as editor if this cartoon resembled those published in Denmark, which were more demonstrably Islamophobic, such as the one which depicted Muhammad as wearing a turban made of bombs. But Dawes rightly decided that in the absence of outright hate speech, he will defer to the cartoonist.
This leaves us open to ask whether the cartoonist needed to exercise his right to offend. And it seems to me that he could have opted for self-censorship without thereby losing sleep in a fit of bother about whether he is becoming meek. He would not be losing his general power as a provocative commentator. Instead, self-censorship would be justified by the contextual fact that the politico-religious sentiment of the day requires sensitivity on the part of artists, writers, commentators. This is context-specific and need not translate as a slippery slope towards a permanent erosion of substantive media freedom.
The reality is that many, even if not all, Muslims do feel deeply about the question of whether or not their spiritual head is depicted at all - with or without a buffet of bombs and heavenly virgins. The question is why us non-believers are hell-bent on showing off our legal right to piss off these particular segments within the Muslim world? Why get tjatjarag just because you can?!
We need to distinguish not only between legal and moral norms, as I often insist, but in fact also add to that distinction by recognising (at the risk of making hard-ass libertarians laugh out loud), considerations of etiquette. The SOLE set of norms that defenders of Zapiro have relied on have been the legal ones; shades of moral argument (not fully cashed out) sometimes lurk in the background.
But, no one has meditated on the personal judgment call that the artist himself can and does make about how to respond to a range of considerations, including an etiquette of decency, when there is no major moral, epistemic or other gain to be had from producing a particular artwork. I refuse to believe that Zapiro's cartoon has added an iota of value to our general understanding of, or debate about, religion or free speech.
We learnt nothing we did not know on Thursday morning. It was therefore dispensable, not least in the face of these ethical pressures and considerations of etiquette, which are not morally eliminable. This is NOT - I repeat - to suggest that his legal right should be clipped (and hence my support of Dawes); but it is to offer a critique of his personal judgment about submitting the cartoon to Dawes in the first place. He should have probed his own motivations much more deeply.
The greater moral here is that cherishing our freedoms in a new democracy need not imply a boisterous assertion of each right on every available occasion. Why offend just because you are entitled to?
In the end, therefore, the newspaper was right to not mess with the cartoonist's legal entitlement to express himself freely. But our beloved cartoonist, in his turn, was ethically hasty in choosing to exercise his right to lampoon just because he can. Or because the brute, masculine demonstration of a right seems to have become his sole mark of exhibiting artistic and intellectual freedom.
Self-censorship is boring but sometimes appropriate and certainly not necessarily a sign of the erosion of our freedoms. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed with me.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Is it immoral to have lunch with David Bullard?
WOULD you be seen dead having lunch with David Bullard? Would you give him a platform to express and debate his views? In case you have forgotten, Bullard is the former Sunday Times columnist who was in famously sacked for a column judged to have expressed racist views about blacks and aspects of black culture.
Well, I would happily be seen having lunch with the man. And I would happily invite him to express and debate his views on a public platform. In fact, I did both those things last week. My lovely friend, Financial Mail columnist Justice Malala, rebuked me. He expressed two concerns.
One is the fear that I might have legitimised racism by playing with Bullard. The other, less sexy, fear is that I might be a catalyst for Bullard to derive financial benefit from racism.
Inviting someone to debate their views does not count as approving the content of their beliefs.
It simply signals a fearless commitment to free speech.
I enjoy debating people who hold different views to mine, including views that might be considered bigoted, rather than only wallowing in the company of those singing from the same hymn sheet as I do.
The error that Malala makes is to confuse the substantive value of debate as a dialectical process for thrashing out issues, with the independent question of what debaters on a public platform think of each others’ viewpoints.
For example, if someone convened a public debate about the morality of homosexuality and invited Jon Qwelane, the country’s most famous homophobe, I would give my gay bottom to be allowed the opportunity to debate him.
Would it be reasonable to interpret my excitement as legitimising homophobia?
All we could say, until we hear what I actually think of Qwelane, is that I, Eusebius McKaiser, am an equal opportunities interlocutor. We could not say that accepting the invite to debate Qwelane is irrefutable proof that I am a self-hating gay man.
If anything, my motivation to accept an invitation to share a platform with someone such as Qwelane would be to humiliate him by exposing the content of his beliefs as evidence-insensitive, badly formed and also immoral. Valuing everyone’s right to speak does not indicate that I regard everyone’s views as equally justified. Malala misses this critical distinction.
Furthermore, from a strategic point of view, it is important to allow uncomfortable views to be exposed to the sanitising light of public debate.
The truth is that hundreds of thousands of South Africans share Bullard’s analysis of the state of the nation, including his views about black culture.
Equally, millions of South Africans agree with the content of Qwelane’s beliefs about gay people.
These social facts, however offensive to our sectional, suburban sensibilities, are not going to go away through non-engagement.
It is a bit like hoping your drunken uncle will never come out of his room to embarrass you when your friends of more sober habits come over for a do.
Why not deal with the alcoholism once and for all, openly? Why not deal with the racism and homophobia once and for all, openly? By sweeping these views under the carpet you simply allow them to fester in dark, moist spaces conducive to fomenting further hatred.
You also become susceptible to a charge of intellectual sloppiness.
Legitimate sub-debates such as the question of what constitutes racism, for example, are likely to be ignored when we regard some views as beyond the moral pale.
For example, was the column by Bullard dark humour that failed horribly or was it straightforwardly racist?
Also, can we separate judgments about an article from judgments about a writer’s character? Or does one clear expression of racism fatally occasion a judgment of racism, regardless of a writer’s life narrative up to that point? These are terribly important questions which Malala is unlikely even to raise if his squeamishness gets in the way of his intellectual curiosity.
As for the less sexy worry about making money off racism, I indeed would be horrified if someone did that. But I am not sure it would stop me from engaging them.
In the case of Qwelane, as a taxpaying citizen I have moral political right to be angry that my government is paying him from our taxes to spread hate speech.
However, if some white, right-wing breakfast club invites Bullard to address them after his appearance on my radio show, then so be it. They can spend their money as they see fit.
After all, if I was being naughty, I could equally claim that some TV channels and some print media outfits pay some of us darkies to express the anger of rich whites (many secretly loving Bullard but publicly condemning him in a fit of insincerity and so preferring to endorse black Bullards).
These whities dare not speak for themselves lest, like Bullard, they too are ordered by their bosses to go out to lunch until Jesus comes back. Instead, they egg on the growing number of black Bullards.
Billy Joel must have foreseen democratic SA when he lyrically declared honesty to be such a lonely word.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=109642
Well, I would happily be seen having lunch with the man. And I would happily invite him to express and debate his views on a public platform. In fact, I did both those things last week. My lovely friend, Financial Mail columnist Justice Malala, rebuked me. He expressed two concerns.
One is the fear that I might have legitimised racism by playing with Bullard. The other, less sexy, fear is that I might be a catalyst for Bullard to derive financial benefit from racism.
Inviting someone to debate their views does not count as approving the content of their beliefs.
It simply signals a fearless commitment to free speech.
I enjoy debating people who hold different views to mine, including views that might be considered bigoted, rather than only wallowing in the company of those singing from the same hymn sheet as I do.
The error that Malala makes is to confuse the substantive value of debate as a dialectical process for thrashing out issues, with the independent question of what debaters on a public platform think of each others’ viewpoints.
For example, if someone convened a public debate about the morality of homosexuality and invited Jon Qwelane, the country’s most famous homophobe, I would give my gay bottom to be allowed the opportunity to debate him.
Would it be reasonable to interpret my excitement as legitimising homophobia?
All we could say, until we hear what I actually think of Qwelane, is that I, Eusebius McKaiser, am an equal opportunities interlocutor. We could not say that accepting the invite to debate Qwelane is irrefutable proof that I am a self-hating gay man.
If anything, my motivation to accept an invitation to share a platform with someone such as Qwelane would be to humiliate him by exposing the content of his beliefs as evidence-insensitive, badly formed and also immoral. Valuing everyone’s right to speak does not indicate that I regard everyone’s views as equally justified. Malala misses this critical distinction.
Furthermore, from a strategic point of view, it is important to allow uncomfortable views to be exposed to the sanitising light of public debate.
The truth is that hundreds of thousands of South Africans share Bullard’s analysis of the state of the nation, including his views about black culture.
Equally, millions of South Africans agree with the content of Qwelane’s beliefs about gay people.
These social facts, however offensive to our sectional, suburban sensibilities, are not going to go away through non-engagement.
It is a bit like hoping your drunken uncle will never come out of his room to embarrass you when your friends of more sober habits come over for a do.
Why not deal with the alcoholism once and for all, openly? Why not deal with the racism and homophobia once and for all, openly? By sweeping these views under the carpet you simply allow them to fester in dark, moist spaces conducive to fomenting further hatred.
You also become susceptible to a charge of intellectual sloppiness.
Legitimate sub-debates such as the question of what constitutes racism, for example, are likely to be ignored when we regard some views as beyond the moral pale.
For example, was the column by Bullard dark humour that failed horribly or was it straightforwardly racist?
Also, can we separate judgments about an article from judgments about a writer’s character? Or does one clear expression of racism fatally occasion a judgment of racism, regardless of a writer’s life narrative up to that point? These are terribly important questions which Malala is unlikely even to raise if his squeamishness gets in the way of his intellectual curiosity.
As for the less sexy worry about making money off racism, I indeed would be horrified if someone did that. But I am not sure it would stop me from engaging them.
In the case of Qwelane, as a taxpaying citizen I have moral political right to be angry that my government is paying him from our taxes to spread hate speech.
However, if some white, right-wing breakfast club invites Bullard to address them after his appearance on my radio show, then so be it. They can spend their money as they see fit.
After all, if I was being naughty, I could equally claim that some TV channels and some print media outfits pay some of us darkies to express the anger of rich whites (many secretly loving Bullard but publicly condemning him in a fit of insincerity and so preferring to endorse black Bullards).
These whities dare not speak for themselves lest, like Bullard, they too are ordered by their bosses to go out to lunch until Jesus comes back. Instead, they egg on the growing number of black Bullards.
Billy Joel must have foreseen democratic SA when he lyrically declared honesty to be such a lonely word.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=109642
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Beware the power of words
Language is such a bloody curse.
On the one hand it possesses the most amazing transformative power. The most palpable example from our recent history is the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) talks in the early Nineties.In a very fundamental way it was the use of the most appropriate political language that served as a catalyst for the democratic process to get under way.
When negotiators chatted well into the early hours of the morning, they were not merely looking to achieve a practical outcome, however important that was. The very act of speaking constituted political activity.In a positive way the political negotiations were the earliest steps towards a recognition that the proverbial other is one's moral and political equal. The outcomes, a democratic election and a normative vision enshrined in the Constitution, were important concrete goals.
But the political grammar of that time constituted positive, transformative speech acts.
Sadly, the power inherent in language is also susceptible to abuse. Just as an inspirational declaration from Martin Luther King that he has “a dream!” can galvanise a people to continue its struggle for political and social freedom, so the words “kill the boer!” can instil fear in thousands of human beings accidentally born into a white skin through no fault or choosing of their own.Language can, therefore, be pernicious, violent and anti-transformative in the hands — or mouths — of irresponsible and unethical public officials and politicians.
All of which brings us, some 20 years after the Codesa talks, to teenage democratic South Africa. Political language, unbeknown to many of our politicians, betrays the state of our politics in stark, naked terms. Sadly, it is becoming self-evident that political grammar in democratic South Africa is as violent as ever, but for a brief euphoric lull in the mid-1990s and another about to hit us in the form of the World Cup.
It is important that we recognise the symptoms that betray and occasion this violent political grammar.It is not clear whether it is surprising or unsurprising that often the most violent political grammar comes from the ruling ANC.The formation of the Congress of the People (Cope) saw the break-away crowd being referred to by some of their former political bedfellows as cockroaches, baboons and, that more enduring of dated insults, enemies of the national democratic revolution. Calling a political opponent a cockroach is violent speech act.
This example is powerfully illustrative of three general facts about political grammar: It exposes your psychology; it has an impact on an audience; and it constitutes a living record of the state of a society, in particular, its political space.Calling a political opponent a cockroach, for example, is evidence of vicious ill-will on the part of the person who throws that label in the direction of another human being.
Quite apart from the public impact of the statement or what it says about the political space of the time, it reveals something deeply disturbing about the psychology of the speaker in the first instance.A useful analogy here is to think of more general instances of hate speech. If you call your black colleague a k*****, the performance of such a speech act tells us something about your own state of mind. Even in the absence of someone hearing you utter the words (say, for example, you think the word or utter it under your breath), the speech act is a powerful piece of evidence of the presence of a less than flattering moral psychology.
Sadly, the violent political grammar that is becoming commonplace in SA today means that the work done during the early 1990s in getting our politicians to see each other as fully human is being eroded by the development of a political psychology that is more vicious than virtuous.Besides telling us something about the psychology of a political actor, violent grammar also has violent consequences. Singing lyrics such as “Bring me my machine gun!” and “Kill the boer!” instil fear in others.
It does not matter whether the intention of the speaker is not to instil fear. If there is widespread perception that these words constitute a real threat to others, an attempt to direct and curtail the speech and behaviour of others, then such words take on a violent colour that cannot be wished away on the grounds that they emanate from an innocuous mindset.Our political actors need to realise that just as pointing a gun at someone is a violent act, even if you do not mean to kill them, so the uttering of violent grammar constitutes a wrong even if the intention is not to hurt.
This is not, heaven forbid, to suggest that all rhetorical flair must be taken out of political discourse. And it is important that political players across the political spectrum develop thick skins so that robust debate can be possible rather than thwarted. Why else did we fight for such civil and political freedoms as the right to free speech?
The point, however, is that moral constraints on free political speech are apt even in liberal democracies. Too many of our politicians are becoming drunk on democratic freedom and misunderstanding the moral limits of speech. Violent political grammar is, in a very real sense, non-speech.
This brings us, lastly, to the tragic historic fact that such linguistic weapons of mass destruction do not merely tell us something about the headspace of politicians nor do they “merely” have bad consequences.They also constitute a record of our times. Just as a majestic speech by Mandela that “never again” will we live in a racist society records the conciliatory mood of the early 1990s, so the violent language of our times will embarrass us in the eyes of future generations doing a stock-take of the trajectory we were on some 16 years after our first set of democratic elections.
Yes, not all political parties or all leaders within the ANC engage in these actions. But the mere silence in relation to an overzealous youngster like Julius Malema smacks of blameworthy indifference on the part of the elders. It is not only physically violent protests that could break our democracy. Violent political grammar is sometimes equally powerful.
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-05-14-beware-the-power-of-words
On the one hand it possesses the most amazing transformative power. The most palpable example from our recent history is the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) talks in the early Nineties.In a very fundamental way it was the use of the most appropriate political language that served as a catalyst for the democratic process to get under way.
When negotiators chatted well into the early hours of the morning, they were not merely looking to achieve a practical outcome, however important that was. The very act of speaking constituted political activity.In a positive way the political negotiations were the earliest steps towards a recognition that the proverbial other is one's moral and political equal. The outcomes, a democratic election and a normative vision enshrined in the Constitution, were important concrete goals.
But the political grammar of that time constituted positive, transformative speech acts.
Sadly, the power inherent in language is also susceptible to abuse. Just as an inspirational declaration from Martin Luther King that he has “a dream!” can galvanise a people to continue its struggle for political and social freedom, so the words “kill the boer!” can instil fear in thousands of human beings accidentally born into a white skin through no fault or choosing of their own.Language can, therefore, be pernicious, violent and anti-transformative in the hands — or mouths — of irresponsible and unethical public officials and politicians.
All of which brings us, some 20 years after the Codesa talks, to teenage democratic South Africa. Political language, unbeknown to many of our politicians, betrays the state of our politics in stark, naked terms. Sadly, it is becoming self-evident that political grammar in democratic South Africa is as violent as ever, but for a brief euphoric lull in the mid-1990s and another about to hit us in the form of the World Cup.
It is important that we recognise the symptoms that betray and occasion this violent political grammar.It is not clear whether it is surprising or unsurprising that often the most violent political grammar comes from the ruling ANC.The formation of the Congress of the People (Cope) saw the break-away crowd being referred to by some of their former political bedfellows as cockroaches, baboons and, that more enduring of dated insults, enemies of the national democratic revolution. Calling a political opponent a cockroach is violent speech act.
This example is powerfully illustrative of three general facts about political grammar: It exposes your psychology; it has an impact on an audience; and it constitutes a living record of the state of a society, in particular, its political space.Calling a political opponent a cockroach, for example, is evidence of vicious ill-will on the part of the person who throws that label in the direction of another human being.
Quite apart from the public impact of the statement or what it says about the political space of the time, it reveals something deeply disturbing about the psychology of the speaker in the first instance.A useful analogy here is to think of more general instances of hate speech. If you call your black colleague a k*****, the performance of such a speech act tells us something about your own state of mind. Even in the absence of someone hearing you utter the words (say, for example, you think the word or utter it under your breath), the speech act is a powerful piece of evidence of the presence of a less than flattering moral psychology.
Sadly, the violent political grammar that is becoming commonplace in SA today means that the work done during the early 1990s in getting our politicians to see each other as fully human is being eroded by the development of a political psychology that is more vicious than virtuous.Besides telling us something about the psychology of a political actor, violent grammar also has violent consequences. Singing lyrics such as “Bring me my machine gun!” and “Kill the boer!” instil fear in others.
It does not matter whether the intention of the speaker is not to instil fear. If there is widespread perception that these words constitute a real threat to others, an attempt to direct and curtail the speech and behaviour of others, then such words take on a violent colour that cannot be wished away on the grounds that they emanate from an innocuous mindset.Our political actors need to realise that just as pointing a gun at someone is a violent act, even if you do not mean to kill them, so the uttering of violent grammar constitutes a wrong even if the intention is not to hurt.
This is not, heaven forbid, to suggest that all rhetorical flair must be taken out of political discourse. And it is important that political players across the political spectrum develop thick skins so that robust debate can be possible rather than thwarted. Why else did we fight for such civil and political freedoms as the right to free speech?
The point, however, is that moral constraints on free political speech are apt even in liberal democracies. Too many of our politicians are becoming drunk on democratic freedom and misunderstanding the moral limits of speech. Violent political grammar is, in a very real sense, non-speech.
This brings us, lastly, to the tragic historic fact that such linguistic weapons of mass destruction do not merely tell us something about the headspace of politicians nor do they “merely” have bad consequences.They also constitute a record of our times. Just as a majestic speech by Mandela that “never again” will we live in a racist society records the conciliatory mood of the early 1990s, so the violent language of our times will embarrass us in the eyes of future generations doing a stock-take of the trajectory we were on some 16 years after our first set of democratic elections.
Yes, not all political parties or all leaders within the ANC engage in these actions. But the mere silence in relation to an overzealous youngster like Julius Malema smacks of blameworthy indifference on the part of the elders. It is not only physically violent protests that could break our democracy. Violent political grammar is sometimes equally powerful.
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-05-14-beware-the-power-of-words
Friday, May 14, 2010
Why commissions are not the way to fix SOEs
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
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
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
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