“Do you believe in black magic?” asked Tinus, a well-educated Ghanaian who has travelled abroad and now worked as an accountant for one of the larger companies in Accra.

“What do you mean?” I was a little stumped by this non-sequitor.

“In Ghana, we have bad people who cast evil spells so they can take away all your money, or steal your wife or your job.”

Tinus professed to be a devout Christian and I had visited his church with him in Accra, where he is revered as an elder. We had been working together on a gold concession that had produced handsomely for several months, until the gold suddenly dried up. I accepted this as an inevitable fact of geology, but Tinus was trying to convince me that I had been cursed.

“A preacher friend of mine contacted me this week and told me he had a vision. He knew we were mining gold, and that the gold had suddenly stopped coming. He is a man I have trusted for a long time. He told me that ju-ju men are taking the soil on which you walk and using it to make black magic, so the gold disappears and then you give up and walk away from the site. Then they will come and continue mining, so they can collect the gold you leave behind.”

The conversation was getting stranger by the minute. “Who do you think is doing this?” I asked.

“Frank, your foreman.”

“Frank! Impossible. He saved us many times from doing stupid things. Look,” I said. “I judge people by their actions and their results. Frank is the best thing that has happened to us. I cannot accept what you are saying.”

This had turned into a bizarre and somewhat alarming discussion, the intended effect of which was to poison me against Frank. I was aware of the petty jealousies that can sometimes arise between colleagues and co-workers, but this was a stretch too far.

“What I want to do,” said Tinus, “is bring a pastor with experience in these matters to reverse the spell that has been cast on the site.”

“Do what you want,” I replied.

The feticheur’s curse

Years earlier in Congo, while prospecting for diamonds there, I fell seriously ill with malaria and typhoid, losing 10 kgs in two weeks. My Congolese colleagues were convinced that I had been cursed. They regaled me with horrifying stories of feticheurs as they called them (witchdoctors) raining death and misery on their targets.

As my colleague Dominique told it, one man had approached a feticheur to solve his money problems. He was told to dig a hole in a certain pre-determined spot, wherein he would find an abundance of diamonds. Apparently all this worked out as planned. But the hapless individual, now rich beyond his wildest dreams, was told he should never again sleep on a bed. He had to sleep on the floor. Years later, while in the capital Kinshasa, he got drunk and was carried by friends to his hotel room. He woke up in the morning and, realising he was in a bed, had a heart attack and died on the spot.

Fantastic stories such as this keep alive the lore and mystique of black magic across Africa. In Ghana, the artisanal gold miners (known as galamsey) often turn to ju-ju to tilt the tides of fortune in their favour, but you seldom meet a successful galamsey. Success, in my experience, is more likely to favour those who prospect. The interest in black magic is still very much alive, though not nearly as robust as it was 50 years ago.

There are, however, some cultural peculiarities which are hard to explain. Luba women in Congo’s Katanga province are renowned as particularly faithful. If they are unfaithful to their husbands, Luba culture dictates that they may not return under the same roof as the husband, or else terrible tragedy will be visited on her, the children or the husband. In Mbuji Mayi, in Katanga province, there is a quarter housing unfaithful women who have deserted their families for fear of bringing disaster to their former homes. They often survive by prostitution, as if to confirm their diminished social status. I spoke to many Luba people about this, and there was no doubt in their minds that this cultural edict was so powerful that tragedy was certain if a Luba woman was unfaithful.

My conversation with Tinus sat uncomfortably with me for a few days until I could bear it no longer. Frank, in addition to being our foreman, was my friend. I discussed the matter with my Russian partner. We had noticed a change in Tinus’ demeanour of late, a kind of demonic greed that incubates and breeds in people of unsound mind.

What was Tinus’ plan? Did he want to cleave Frank away from us and then steal our mining equipment? My mind swirled with dark imaginings.

We decided to come clean with Frank.

Frank was outraged. “If God put the gold there, how can a ju-ju man take it away? If there is no gold there, it is because God did not put it there in the first place.” This was the sanest reading of the situation I had heard in weeks.

To accuse someone of witchcraft in Ghana, or anywhere in Africa, is no laughing matter. Frank reported the accusations to the chief of the village, who immediately summoned Tinus to account for his behaviour.

The village court

Tinus arrived the next day with wife and pastors in tow. To refuse a summons from the chief is likewise a serious matter.

The charges were read out against Tinus, his head bowed in shame.

One of our workers, it turned out, had spread the rumour that Frank had been involved in black magic for many years, that he had built his house over the corpse of a dead man, that someone else had died in one of his mining pits, and that he had invoked ju-ju spells on our mining site.

The chief turned to the worker from whence the rumour sprang: “When you first came here, your words were sweet. Now they are so bitter. Why is that?”

The worker, let’s call him Kweku, sat in stunned silence at the charges levelled against him.

The chief continued: “I myself am an elder of the Pentecostal church here. It was I that blessed Frank’s house when he started to build. Where did you get this information about black magic?”

Kweku denied emphatically that he was the source of the information.

The chief fired back: “I have a witness standing outside that I can call that will say you started the rumour.”

Kweku, Tinus and his wife Abigail suddenly fell to their knees to beg Frank for forgiveness.

Begging for forgiveness in Ghana is an admission of guilt.

Frank asked the supplicants to rise from their knees and in ceremonial flourish, granted them forgiveness.

A little later it was reported to us by a security guard at the site that Tinus had despatched two pastors to conduct their rituals to undo the supposed curse.

“Now the gold will appear,” proclaimed the pastor.

Emboldened by the pastor’s divine assurance, Tinus immediately shipped a dredge to the site to claim the gold he was promised would appear.

Our relationship with Tinus had soured beyond repair, so we watched events from a distance.

The daily tally of gold recovery was reported to us by our security personnel: one gram, two grams, four grams. Barely enough to pay the diesel to operate the dredge or pay the workers.

“They have failed totally,” laughed Frank, as we sat one evening to discuss the episode. “I told them that if God did not put the gold there in the first place, then they will find nothing. And so it is.”

And so it is.

If history teaches us anything, it is that inflation usually ends in violence.

The Johannesburg-based economic research house ETM Analytics, which has a strong Austrian bias, puts out a monthly “riot alert” based on the speed with which countries are debasing their currencies. It has been scarily accurate in predicting where trouble is most likely to erupt.

The research shows that those countries printing money the fastest are also those experiencing the most social unrest. ETM measures inflation in terms of the Continuous Commodities Index (CCI)*, which reflects inflationary trends almost immediately on the basis that monetary expansion debases the currency and increases the prices of commodity imports such as fuel and food.

Look who’s on the danger list: the world’s worst monetary abusers

NEW research appears to show a direct link between inflation and South Africa’s social violence. In the months before the Marikana massacre, in which more than 30 miners died, there was a spike in nondiscretionary inflation — the inflation the poor experience — from 3% to more than 10%. The same is true of the xenophobic attacks in 2008. Just before these attacks, nondiscretionary inflation surged to 20%. The recent violence in Sasolburg was also preceded by an acceleration in inflation.

Chris Becker, an economist with ETM Analytics, which produced the research, says SA could be headed for a world of trouble based on recent trends in the inflation rate experienced by the poor.

The consumer price index (CPI) averaged 5,6% last year, while average nondiscretionary inflation was 6,1%, spiking to 10,3% in October. The difference between the two inflation rates may appear marginal, but it is the volatility of nondiscretionary inflation that seems to be causing the trouble.

Nondiscretionary inflation hits the poor hardest. It is more volatile than the CPI, which is smoothed by the inclusion of items such as mortgage and technology costs. Taking these discretionary or luxury costs out of the calculation, ETM came up with what it calls nondiscretionary inflation.

Continues at source:

Social engineering gone mad
Photo: Alejandro Gabriel Alonso
Flickr.com

More than 20 years have passed since Nelson Mandela was released from prison, yet many – if not most – South Africans still labour under the falsehood that apartheid was a kind of Frankenstein creation spawned by Puritanical Afrikanerdom.

It was anything but. Scholarship on the origins and ideological praxis of apartheid has tended to focus on the political rise of the National Party in the years leading up to 1948 as a kind of spontaneous flowering of racial hatred directed at black South Africans. Unless we search for the truth behind this terrible chapter in South Africa’s history, schools will continue to spout half-baked slogans as a substitute for actual history. That would be a pity.

One need only read pre-apartheid South African history to know that racial harmony was fairly common in many parts of the country where government influence was weak.  Lawrence van der Post in Lost Sands of the Kalahari writes that he never witnessed apartheid in practice until he visited Natal as a young man in the early 1900s. Throughout much of the 1800s, commerce, trade and even inter-marriage between black and white was fairly common in areas such as the Eastern Cape.

Yet it remains true that most groups do practice some form of discrimination, however benign, in favour of their own. Muslims and Jews prefer to marry within the faith, though even here the tendency is towards assimilation.

Apartheid, however, was something entirely different. It was an effort to define a person’s identity in terms of racial science – hence, the ridiculous “pencil test” in the hair to determine whether a South African was black or white.

The story of apartheid is one of racial science. Most South Africans have heard of Hendrik Verwoerd, who is generally credited as the architect of apartheid. He left for Germany in 1926 to study at the universities of Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig, around the time that Nazi ideology had congealed around the failed artist, Adolf Hitler. Verwoerd was swept up by the radicalism of the Nazis though – and there is some dispute about this – he distanced himself from the Nazi obsession with racial genetics. He saw no real biological differences between the races, believing environmental factors were behind the “development of a higher civilisation by the Caucasian race,” as historian Herman Giliomee points out in his recently published book The Last Afrikaner Leaders.

Though born in the Netherlands, Verwoerd was an Afrikaner nationalist, obsessed with solving the problem of the “poor white,” which was a legacy of the Great Depression and the ingress of cheaper, black labour to the mines. He resolved to leave his mark upon this world with his grand scheme of racial separation as a kind of grotesque monument to the Old Testament. Giliomee believes Verwoerd was singled out for demonisation by the ANC, but was quite favourably received elsewhere.  ”A week before his death Time magazine described him as ‘one of the ablest white leaders’ Africa has ever seen. The Financial Mail published a special edition, entitled ‘The Fabulous  Years’ on the period 1961 to 1967, when South Africa grew by 30 per cent in real terms,” writes Giliomee. “There are many misconceptions about Verwoerd. It was not his stance on apartheid that won him staunch support among Afrikaners but his unexpected success in winning a republic. In private he was remarkably flexible about apartheid.”

Giliomee does not dwell much on the cult of racial science, perhaps assuming that its role in shaping Afrikaner politics in the last century is over-stated or now irrelevant.

In 1961, the late, great Thomas Szasz wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness.

He followed this classic with several more, notably The Manufacture of Madness and The Therapeutic State. He was a brave man, viciously attacked by his psychiatric colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s, but he persisted with his exploration of truth and liberty. Szasz was born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1920 and moved to the US in 1938. He studied medicine and psychiatry, and served two years in the US Navy in the 1950s.

What is astonishing about Szasz, like the Polish-born author Joseph Conrad, was his mastery of the English language. Szasz spoke not a word of English when he first arrived in the US (Conrad only learned English in his twenties when he moved to the UK). It was the author Bertrand Russell who alerted Szasz to “the beauty and power of incisive and unpretentious English prose.”

Szasz, who passed away last year, was a frightening adversary in debates, and few colleagues dared take him on. He was funny, caustic and ridiculed the absurdities of modern psychiatry: “If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”

He averred that psychiatry was unique among all professions in its capacity to commit people who have done no wrong to insane asylums by way of involuntary commitment (imprisonment). As such, it should more properly be labelled a branch of law than medicine. He was not against psychiatry per se, only what he called coercive psychiatry.

Szasz punctured the bloated pomposity of modern psychiatry by exposing its lack of scientific rigour. He coined the term “therapeutic state” to describe the control the state has assumed over one’s body, including the prohibition on self-murder. Suicide, he declared, is the most basic human right, as is the right to ingest psychotropic drugs or battery acid. Not that he advocated these positions – he was all about personal responsibility for one’s own decisions, good, bad or dangerous.

Szasz did a wonderful job of documenting the absurd history of this pseudo-science. Benjamin Rush, the founding father of American psychiatry, declared negritude (having a black skin) a disease, a form of leprosy. Fast forward 200 years and homosexuality became the disease du jour of the psychiatric movement. Fast forward a couple of decades, and kids fidgeting in class were labelled ADHD, drugged and zombified.

“Psychiatry…attached medical-sounding labels (“diagnoses”) to certain unwanted behaviours, exemplified by masturbation and homosexuality. Then, conflating diagnoses with diseases, they claimed to have discovered new brain diseases (Szasz 1991). In fact, they did no such thing. Instead, they medicalised human problems traditionally perceived in religious terms, transforming sins and crimes—such as self-murder, self-abuse, and self-medication—into sicknesses,” wrote Szasz.

This is where his forensic approach to language was brought to bear with such powerful effect. Like Voltaire, he demanded that the terms being used be properly defined.

There is no such thing as mental illness, declared Szasz, since it fails the standard scientific test for disease, as established by the German physician, Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), the originator of cell theory: a disease is a bodily lesion, objectively identifiable by anatomical, physiological, or other physicochemical observation or measurement. In other words, for an illness or disease to be present, it must be observable at an anatomical level, such as under a microscope.

Cancer, pneumonia and tuberculosis all meet this test. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Attention Deficit Disorders do not. These are simply forms of “misbehaviour” that psychiatrists have labelled and medicalised.

In fact, no mental “illness” satisfies the standard definition of disease. As pointed out by psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry, there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance in the brain unless one starts taking anti-depressants or anti-psychotic medication. None of the hundreds of other disorders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is the psychiatrists’ billing bible, meet the standard definition of illness.

Psychiatry hated Szasz for pointing this out.

In the space of a few hundred years the world has moved from theocracy to democracy to pharmacracy, he wrote. In times past, when people felt depressed, they talked to a friend, priest or doctor. Now they get prescribed anti-depressants. As Breggin points out, the most dangerous time is when you are first put on these medications, and then when you try to get off them. The withdrawal symptoms are horrendous. In Toxic Psychiatry, Breggin explains what happens: “Combining antidepressants [e.g., Prozac, Luvox] and psychostimulants [e.g., Ritalin] increases the risk of cardiovascular catastrophe, seizures, sedation, euphoria, and psychosis. Withdrawal from the combination can cause a severe reaction that includes confusion, emotional instability, agitation, and aggression.” Add to that suicidal thoughts and potentially violent behaviour.

All this is relevant in light of the recent mass shootings in the US. Virtually all shooters of the last decade have been on “therapeutic” levels of psychiatric drugs, something the mainstream press has belatedly recognised.

Tragic though these killings are, Szasz would at least be satisfied that psychiatry is at last getting the kind of spotlight it deserves.

Jon Rappoport over at lewrockwell.com spells this out brilliantly.

The boat people
Photo: clandestinaparis
Flickr.com

I remember the day I found out that Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s former leader, had been killed.

I was in the Bosua Beach Hotel in southern Ghana when CNN ran one of their “breaking news” inserts: endless repetitions of sparse facts and interviews with babbling heads offering wild and unfounded opinions about what would happen next.

I met many black Africans who had worked in Libya. The money was good, they said, but their treatment was abysmal. They were never anything but second class citizens. Police would stop them because they were black, extort bribes, and often deport them. The Africans put up with this because the money was better than anything they could earn back home, or because their ultimate destination was Europe.

The frayed cords of racial harmony held in check by Gaddafi’s men snapped once NATO unleashed the dogs of war. When the bombs started raining down over Tripoli and gangs roamed the streets in search of targets, the Africans turned for home and ran. They boarded buses for Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Ghana. Some clambered aboard boats bound for Italy.

Their dreams of a better life incinerated around them in a matter of days.

One returnee had an interesting story to tell. His name is Kwame, and he is 27 years old. He is one of 23 survivors from a boating catastrophe that killed more than 260 people attempting to cross from Libya to Italy in 2008.

That he survived a horrible boating disaster at sea is remarkable enough. But tragedy struck twice in the space of three years when the Nato bombs started falling in 2011, and he was forced to flee Libya for his home in Ghana.

Kwame has a look of self-assurance that sometimes inhabits those who have faced the worst of all possible endings, and somehow lived. God had a purpose for him, he assured me. That is why he was spared.

He had an easy smile and a gentle manner. Some weeks earlier I had hired him to do some construction work, and I was impressed with his work ethic and endurance. The other workers called him “Libya bugger” and I asked why so.

Tarkwa area, Ghana
Photo: roaminghomemaker, Flickr.com

While working in West Africa earlier this year I met a rapist.

Actually, I employed him in the company I was running in the rain forest area of Western Ghana. Let’s call him Jacob. He arrived to work one day with his face swollen, and deep cuts around his eyes and cheeks.

His demeanour was unusually sullen. Never the liveliest of workers, this day he was particularly inactive and this began to irritate me. I noticed the lacerations around his face, but feigned disinterest and moved away from him. I walked a distance down the road to Moosa’s farm house, and sat myself under a cocoa tree. Ten minutes later Jacob crept up behind me and sat on a rock some five metres away.

“Nana (a Ghanaian honorific meaning “chief” or “elder”), I am sick,” whispered Jacob.

“What happened to your face Jacob?”

“I got into a fight.”

“With who?”

“With some boys in the village.”

I plied him with more questions, but the answers were vague and indistinct. The most I could get out of him was that it had something to do with a woman. I knew that Jacob was a drinker, despite his theatrical averments to follow the path of righteousness while working for me.

I decided to get to the bottom of this and called Steven, a devout Muslim and de facto chief of the village known as Ten and a Half where the beating had been ministered with evident relish. My natural revulsion for violence cried out for justice.

Steven arrived some minutes later looking solemn and slightly disgusted.

Nothing happened in Ten and a Half without Steven’s knowledge. He was often called on to mediate disputes and adjudicate matters of village justice. He was well liked and had a reputation as a fair man. He would surely tender the truth.

“Steven, Jacob says he was beaten up by some boys in the village.”

“Is not telling you all,” snapped back Steven in anger.

In his broken English, he then started to fill in the details. Jacob had snuck into a woman’s room and raped her. What made it worse was that she was both deaf and mute, a disability that prevented her from crying out for help. Jacob was caught by some youngsters and was given a choice: either we call the police and you spend the next 15 years in prison, or you submit to village justice. Which will it be?

Jacob opted for village justice and was beaten within an inch of his life there and then.

I then understood why he had been absent from work for the previous two days. On seeing Jacob limping around the next day, the youngsters decided their beating had not been severe enough, so they repeated it.

As the story unfolded, I turned to Jacob, his eyes now focusing his shame on his feet.

“Is this true Jacob?”

Jacob replied that it was not rape, and that he had been flirting with the woman, who evidently reciprocated the interest.

Not true, snapped back Steven.

“Jacob, I think you need to go home and rest, and I need to think about this.”

The next day I asked Jacob not to return to work. He complied.

Months later I would see him in the village, stumbling from one bar to the next, smiling at me with no obvious embarrassment. On one occasion he summoned the courage to approach me for money, and I blasted him for his drunkenness.

“You told me you would stop drinking.”

“I forget,” he replied.

“You didn’t forget, you just lie.” His eyes turned once again to his feet.

Ten and a Half is the last of a line of villages straddling the main road from Tarkwa to the Iduapriem gold mine operated by Anglogold Ashanti in Western Ghana. The villages are spaced roughly a mile apart, hence the names: Mile Five (or Mafive in local pidgin), Mile Six, Mile Seven, and so on.

Of all the villages on this road, Ten and a Half is the only one without electricity. Its inhabitants are mostly farmers and artisanal gold miners, known locally as galamsey – a corruption of the English “gather and sell.” The better-off have generators to power light bulbs, music systems and TVs. The others get by with candles.

In the absence of technological distractions, alcohol and fecklessness abound. Hence, Ten and a Half has a reputation for attracting low-lifes. The galamsey place their faith in black magic, rather than prospecting, to sweeten nature’s endowment of gold.

A few months later I again met Jacob in the bush near the Bonsa River. “Crazy sample,” he said, beaming at me. He was now working as a galamsey and had found rich alluvial gold-bearing gravels near the river. Rich gravels in local terms is called “crazy sample.”

A week later I saw him again drunk in the village. He obviously cashed in his gold and spent it on liquor for himself and his new friends.

Such is the life of Jacob, the rapist. He is free to roam the village where he raped a woman and still participate in its meagre pleasures. He accepted his beatings and managed to avoid prison. The village, by all accounts, accepts him as one of their own. He begged for forgiveness, and it was given.

I doubt he will rape again. Perhaps village justice works. It is swift, brutal and effective – and, unlike prison, short-lived.

As for his drinking, I fear there is no hope.

Kept man: Jacob Zuma
Photo: Pan African News Wire
Flickr.com

Jacob Zuma is a man of gargantuan appetites. According to Gareth van Onselen, a senior analyst with the Democratic Alliance (DA), Zuma has cost the South African taxpayer R754 million over five years, broken down as follows:

R12,3 million       Salary over five years

R6,5 million         Medical aid

R2,75 million       Pension fund

R77,6 million       Spousal support

R3,67 million       Private vehicle

R234 million        VIP flights

R10 million          Additional flights

R72 million          Helicopter flights

R8,2 million         Ferry flights

R26,5 million       Accommodation – official residences

R238 million        Private residence

R60 million          VIP protection

R2,1 million         Hotels

All of this is detailed in Adriaan Basson’s newly released Zuma Exposed. It makes for disturbing reading.

Turn the page and we find that Zuma has six wives, four girlfriends and 21 children.

Turn the next page and we find his sons, daughters and wives involved in upwards of 70 companies, trusts or foundations. There is hardly a corner of the South African economy that his patrimony has not embraced.

Any utterance from the Zuma camp about the urgency of redressing inequalities in SA should be weighed against the above indictment.

When confronted with serious allegations of racketeering or fraud, the stock response is to plead a “political conspiracy.” This is precisely what de-frocked ANC Youth leader Julius Malema did when faced with charges of financial impropriety. He simply took a leaf from the Zuma playbook.

There isn’t a whole lot new in this book for those who have been following Basson over the years as a journalist at Mail & Guardian and City Press, but it is handy to have a chronicle of Zuma’s almost unbelievable journey to the top of SA politics. One is left with the clear impression that he is a ward of the state, and a costly one at that. The book details the back-room dealings that derailed Zuma’s prosecution in the arms scandal, his stacking of key ministries with loyal cadres, his apparent willingness to burn the village to save it, and his out-of-control libido. It’s a long fall from Mandela to here.

Former president Nelson Mandela identified Zuma as a financial problem child, and paid R2 million to help him clear his debts in 2000, as detailed by Mail & Guardian.

Here’s how Basson describes Zuma’s strange and meteoric rise from kept man to president of SA, having toppled former president Thabo Mbeki as leader of the ANC at the Polokwane conference in 2007: “He became president because enough ANC branch members believed he was the victim of a conspiracy concocted by Mbeki, the first generation of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) millionaires and the Scorpions (the now disbanded law enforcement unit). Mbeki’s so-called 1996 Class Project was also rejected by the left, who saw him as a cold-blooded capitalist with scant regard for the plight of workers and communists. Although Zuma had no track record in the union movement, he became a Trojan horse for desperate interest groups with bleak futures. And so they pushed a compromised man to the front because he had nothing to lose and was the only ANC leader brave enough to put Mbeki, who was seeking a third term as ANC leader, in his place.”

Basson also touches on another interesting aspect of Zuma’s staying power. He ran ANC intelligence from the mid-1980s, so he has the dirt on all the top people. This was an argument that came up when Zuma was facing corruption charges related to the R70 billion (the figure keeps getting bigger) arms deal. “Zuma’s suited strategists and grass roots supporters agreed: if this man starts to talk, he could take the party down,” writes Basson. “Such speculation was fuelled by Zuma himself, who told his supporters outside court that ‘one day’ he would reveal the identities of his persecutors.”

A court has already found that Zuma was part of a corrupt relationship with his former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, from whom he received more than R4 million in cash and benefits. In return, Shaik offered access to Zuma.  “Another court was to decide whether Zuma had accepted the money and benefits with a guilty mind. When the charges against him were dropped on the most dubious of legal grounds, Zuma had reason to be fearful.”

He took care of business by keeping the security portfolios in the clan, so to speak. Jeff Radebe became Minister of Justice, Nathi Mthethwa took over as Minister of Police, and Siyabonga Cwele was made Minister of State Security. All three were from his home province of KwaZulu Natal. Zuma protected them, even when Cwele’s wife was convicted of drug smuggling and Mthethwa “was exposed as a beneficiary of a dodgy crime intelligence slush fund.”

This book, says Basson, is not a biography. “I am an investigative journalist, interested only in the truth. Naturally, when a person is elected president of my country, I follow his every move and his money and interrogate every decision he makes in order to navigate through the bullshit and spin that South African journalists are increasingly being fed.”

In truth, Zuma has done precious little of benefit to South Africa. He has been woefully preoccupied with internecine battles in the grand cathedral of the ANC. This is the man who got off on rape charges, arguing in court that the sex was consensual, and protected himself against possible Aids infection by taking a shower afterwards. This is also the man who promised to champion a moral regeneration crusade in SA.

For those who argue that Zuma is indeed the victim of a political conspiracy, Basson provides evidence in the form of affidavits and charge sheets that at the very least cry out for rebuttal by the president.

Will he get his day in court? That remains to be seen.

That he is affable and a man of the people is beyond question. But how did a man so tainted by bad judgment and gross moral lapses end up president? It is a question that continues to baffle, even among the ANC faithful.

Here we continue with some tips on written communication. You can find Part 1 here.

It’s all Chinese to me
Photo: bibicall
Flickr.com

Sloppily written communication reflects poorly on the writer. Unfortunately, grammar is poorly taught in schools in this modern age, and students are forced to remedy this later in life. Make no mistake, the elegance and economy of your written word marks you as a person of intelligence and competence. Think about what you want to write, cut out the clutter and get your message across simply and sweetly.

That brings us to the next point:

6. Proof-read your message before sending it out. That means avoid grammatical and spelling errors. The mark of a professional is a well-crafted, brief and clear communication without errors.

Do not write: I wanna get ur answer on this matter like yesterday!

Rather put it this way: I would like your feedback on this as soon as possible.

Former professor of English at Cambridge, F.L. Lucas (1894-1967), had this to say about writing English:

“As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. You cannot fool all your judges all the time. . . . Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards – to impress. But long words, like long beards, are often the badge of charlatans. Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, to seem original. But really original people do not have to think about being original–they can no more help it than they can help breathing. They do not need to dye their hair green.”

Jacob Zuma: Can he last past 2014?
Picture: by DonkeyHotey from Flickr.com

The ANC has backed Jacob Zuma for a second term as president of South Africa. This news comes a few days after the release of Adriaan Basson’s book Zuma Exposed, which details the interesting circle of comrades surrounding the president. It also comes a week after Mail & Guardian ran an expose on Zuma’s questionable financial entanglements.

South Africa begins to feel like Israel, or France, or dare we say Zimbabwe, where those in high positions cling to office to escape their inevitable day in court. Zuma foiled attempts to get him to answer corruption charges related to the R60 billion arms scandal, which now appears as nothing more than a luscious pension fund for the ANC. As Basson points out, Zuma was by no means the biggest beneficiary from the scandal, but he remains dangerously tainted by it.

Around him he has selected ministers and officials, many of whom are equally tainted. We have a new deputy president in the form of Cyril “zero to billionaire in 10 years” Ramaphosa who sits on more than 200 boards, covering just about every sector of the economy. How can he possibly raise his voice in any matter of national importance without there being a conflict of interest?

Zuma attempted to redeem himself against the raft of allegations surfacing against him when he dwelt on the subject of tender corruption this week, estimated to cost the country R6 billion a year. But no-one takes this seriously until he answers questions about his own role in the arms scandal and related issues, such as the R200 million upgrade to his home at Nklandla.

“Who in their right minds could have approved the expenditure of more than R200 million? And to do it in that area, where you have this nice place standing up and just around there the squalor and poverty,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu told The Star this week.