I feel deeply uncomfortable with the way James Myburgh makes his argument. And it is certainly impolitic in that he will lose most of his black readers by showing absolutely no sensitivity to the experience of racism in South Africa.Nevertheless, it is also clear that the “transformation” agenda in the legal sector has increasingly become a dual agenda of (1) Africanisation (driven by a crude racial nationalism/nativism) and (2) establishing a more subservient bench. The two are not the same, but both are dangerous. The real transformation agenda needed — building a jurisprudence and legal tradition that is respectful of people and is rooted in the values of the Constitution — is all but lost. This is the real tragedy. The question of whether the crude racial nationalism creeping into all spheres of life in South Africa — understandable, perhaps, but also very deeply harmful, not least the goal of a non-racial society — can in fact be called “extreme racism” is worth reflecting upon. I am inclined to think it can. But I will write about this later.

Minority applicants who dare apply for appointment have, under the Zuma presidency, been subjected to a modern variant of ‘trial by drowning’. They are asked by the racial psychopaths on the JSC if they support the ideal of ‘demographic representivity.’ If they say no, they are excluded from consideration for having opposed ‘transformation’. If they say ‘yes’ they self-exclude themselves, as their appointment would quite obviously obstruct the attainment of this goal. So, Marshall is certainly correct to claim that the ANC has attained its racial goals in the judiciary speedily and on an impressive scale. Whether this is “great cause for pride and celebration” is more open to question. It represents, for one thing, the triumph of extreme racism. One of the founding texts of modern German anti-Semitism – Adolf Stoecker’s 1879 pamphlet “What we Demand of Modern Jewry” – called for the “limitation of appointments of Jewish judges in proportion to the size of the population.” Should South Africa really be proud that, a hundred and thirty years later, the ANC has adopted the same limitation, when it comes to the appointment of white (including Jewish) judges in South Africa? It is also untrue to pretend, as Marshall does, that this has done no harm to the quality of justice in South Africa. As a matter of simple arithmetic: excluding three quarters of the legal profession, including the great majority of your top advocates, from appointment to the bench can hardly do the institution any good.

Fucking shameless is what Radebe is.

The selective quotation from the SCA judgement and a blithe comment that the Simelane could not be blamed for writing a letter that contained a patently illegal instruction because the Minister had signed the letter, suggests that Minister Radebe either holds the view that the SCA and the Constitutional Court are wrong about the nature of the NPA’s independence and that the executive is therefore justified in ignoring the courts, or that it is perfectly fine to appoint a person as NDPP who writes letters that is in breach of the law.

Either way, the statement by the Minister seems to confirm the view that Simelane was appointed not because he was fit and proper, but exactly BECAUSE he was not fit and proper.

Shocking stuff.

TRENGOVE: I see. The NDPP also enjoys Constitutional independence in the exercise of his powers and the performance of his functions, correct?

SIMELANE: It’s been argued so, yes.

TRENGOVE: I beg your pardon.

SIMELANE: It’s been argued so, yes he does.

TRENGOVE: It’s been argued so?

SIMELANE: Yes.

TRENGOVE: No, it’s not being argued, the Constitution says so, correct?

SIMELANE: It says what?

TRENGOVE: It says that the – are you not acquainted with the Constitutional entrenchment of the independence of the NPA?

SIMELANE: I have heard arguments to that effect.

SIMELANE: Well I am correct, because he himself would say that you are the accounting officer, so you deal with the issues.

TRENGOVE: Have you taken legal advice on the issue?

SIMELANE: It’s pretty straightforward, it doesn’t need legal advice in my view.

TRENGOVE: Won’t you answer the question. Have you taken legal advice on the question?

SIMELANE: No.

[...]

TRENGOVE: You said you took no legal advice on this issue, correct?

SIMELANE: No, I don’t remember really getting counsel opinion on it. No in fact, yes I think you are quite right, we actually did, we got the opinion of Adv Maleka, yes now I recall and Adv Khoza, yes we did.

TRENGOVE: Mr Simelane, you said you took no advice. You repeated that same answer and then when you saw me turning up a document you changed your mind.

SIMELANE: No you are quite wrong. What I was trying to recall was what the opinion was and it actually covered quite a lot of issues, more than this one specific issue. So I am quite correcting myself that we did actually get an opinion on a whole range of issues about the role of the NDPP. If I recall that was our opinion yes.

[...]

TRENGOVE: Yes. You were intimately involved in the preparation of the papers.

SIMELANE: Absolutely.

TRENGOVE: And in those papers one of the grounds, one of the accusations advanced against Mr Pikoli is precisely this difference of opinion between you and him, correct?

SIMELANE: Yes.

TRENGOVE: And yet you don’t tell the commission that you have taken legal advice on the question.

A letter on Race, Racism and Eskom to Anthony Harding and  Ramolope Norman Makhutle

Dear Tony and Ramolope

Innumerable incidents involving race and racism are experienced in our country on a daily basis. I want to relate to one particular personal experience.

A couple of months ago, I was in a customer service queue at a Standard Bank branch in a small rural town in the Western Cape. Two very poor Afrikaans Coloured people (a woman and young man) were behind me and a white Afrikaans man joined us. The customer service assistant was a very friendly Afrikaans-speaking white woman.  I asked her if there was a bookshop in the area when she started serving me. She did not know of any bookshops in the area. The white man explained that the neighbouring town had a good second-hand bookshop.

The assistant went to speak to the manageress, then returned and asked me to wait while they sorted out my account.  Then, she literally looked-over the Coloured woman and young man and served the white man. I looked at the Coloured people who shook their heads in resignation when I looked at them shocked.  I said politely: “Jammer, maar hierdie kliente was eerste in hierdie tou.” (Excuse me, these customers were first in the queue.) “Ag nee”, she said, “hulle het mos tyd.” (Oh no. They have time.) I asked her to call the manageress immediately and protested the racism. The white man and woman angrily ignored me and I blocked the area till they apologised and served the Coloured people. As a middle-class Afrikaans Coloured person from the City enquiring about books, I was acceptable to the club.

This incident demonstrates the superior and high-handed  conduct of middle-class service workers across the industry, especially in banking and upmarket stores towards working-class and poor African, Coloured, Indian and White people.

I tell this story not to imply that all Afrikaans-speaking people are racists. Instead, I want to illustrate the web of patriarchal attitudes towards Coloured people in the rural areas reinforced in commerce at the highst levels.  The silent acceptance of this regime by Coloured people is also a factor that must be adressed.

Let me start of by saying that every one of us carries prejudices of the past and present in every aspect of our daily lives.  These prejudices include sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and all forms of racism.

I acknowledge without reservation that many of us, African, Coloured, Indian and White struggle against the odds to confront our personal prejudices. Some go further to engage in anti-racist and social justice movements.

I also unequivocally support affirmative action on the grounds of inequality including race, class, gender and disability. The intellectual dispossession of Black (African, Coloured and Indian ) people, then and now, requires a recognition that we have equal potential to be competent, efficient and effective.  The equal potential has regrettably been equated with equal competence.  There is a fear among us as Black people to recognise our lack of competence because many white people misconstrue it as “natural” stupidity from a racist point of view – this must be openly addressed without accusation. On the other hand many white people fear affirmative action because they have never faced competition from Black people in the open market.

I have no qualms in saying that it is unjust to provide a bursary to a private school educated Black child but not a poor or lower middle-class White child. Both deserve a bursary from the state. One for past injustice and the other for present class inequality.

I have no doubt that many middle-class or even bourgeois Black people are confronted with racism and its dehumanising impact, but we have the class position from which to resist racism as individuals. A poor Black worker finds it almost impossible to say to an employer: “I will sue you for racial (or any other) prejudice.”

The above statements should clarify my position on the usual race discussions – “we are not all the same” “middle-class balck people also suffer the indignities of race”, or “affirmative action is unjust”.

ESKOM, MAROGA AND THE CLASS POSITION OF BLACK EXECUTIVES

Race and racism in South Africa as elsewhere is complex and we do not speak of it openly except in times of national crisis.  Such is the case with Eskom, Armscor, SAA and other areas of management failure in the state. Eskom in particular is central to the lives of everyone in South Africa and many others in a number of Southern African states.

The racial and ethnic background of Eskom’s incompetent and arrogant former CEO may be a factor in his perfomance and resignation as you suggest in your response on FaceBook. However, his dominant identity is one located among the black upper classes. Jacob Maroga is also part of a dominant strata of black executives in state enterprises and the public service. Catherine St. Jude Pretorius, a young Coloured woman and friend from a working class Cape Flats family wrote: “I agree, the constant irrelevant use of “racism” as a defence makes it difficult for us to confront REAL racism”.

You asked a fair and important question:  “Ms. Pretorius what is ” REAL” racism?”. Then, you raised the important questions of inter-personal relations in the psychology and perceptions of people black and white. Is this only a part of the picture?  I will try to venture an answer from another perspective. This is a perspective of class and economic interests in relation to race and racism.

RACISM, CLASS AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR

Racism in our country is constructed daily through class and gender inequality, and perpetuated by local and global corporations and the state.

For example, workers in the mining, textile, construction and other industries struggle for survival as anonymous and invisible Black – African, Coloured and Indian cheap labour.   This survival is inhabited by hunger, the stench of sewage, illness, fear of criminals, alcoholism, transactional sex and many more injustices that working class and poor African and Coloured people encounter as a “fact” of life. In this sense, the mining and other industries that sustain South Africa’s exports on the global market also perpetuate the indignity of Black workers.

The drive towards slave wages by global corporations using workers from China and Bangladesh to Colombia and Lesotho reinforces not only a class apartheid but a structural racial division and contempt.

The racial contempt in the service industry against Black African and Coloured people by their employers is manifested in low-pay, terrible conditions of service and daily humiliation.  Despite high profits, the tourism and service indsutry forces Khayelitsha and Bishop Lavis to serve the City of Cape Town while its people live in squalid and abject conditions. Of course, there are young white workers especially in restaurants who also face the burden of low wages and management by terror. However, they do not face racial the humiliation everpresent (either in the perception or reality) in the master-servant relationship of the service industry.

White, Indian and Coloured customers regularly display a racist impatience against over-worked and low paid workers across the service industry, from restaurants to banks.  Coloured workers in supermarkets serve in dejection as their race and class inequality make them invisible (at best) or objects of contempt to middle-class people of all races.

Decent qualitative and quantitative studies on racism in the private sector must still be done, but anyone who critically reflec
ts on these questions will find it hard to come to a different conclusion.

RACISM AND THE STATE

The post-apartheid state unintentionally relegated the majority of people – predominantly working class and poor, urban and rural Black people – to second-class citizenship. The education that a township child receives is unequal and maintains racial inferiority. Argued differently, the unuequal distribution of  public services and goods such as education, health,  housing, land use and sanitation reinforce racial inferiority . The primary users of public services and goods are working class and poor African, Coloured and to a very limited extent Indian and White people.

The state imparts racism in the daily humiliation faced by people in housing, education and health. No-one can argue that the government (as opposed to the state) intends to perpetuate and reinforce racism.  It is the social and economic choices and constraints faced, and made, by the government and implemented by the state that constitutes structural racism.

The public service has been dramatically transformed in its racial compostion, and to a significant extent in its gender composition.  A powerful white dominated civil service was restructured to a public service where management at all levels is Black. However, it is Black people that have suffered the consequences of its incompetence, laziness and corruption most of all.  White people do not intrude in the civil service except as the material ghosts of the past.  The Constitution demands a non-racial state and professional, open, accountable, ethical and effective public service. The restructuring of the entire state apparatus has failed non-racialism.   Instead, the state is Africanised and promoted former homeland bureaucrats because they are Balck. In its service provision, the state discriminates against poor and working Black (predominantly African and Coloured) people.

Race and racism is not addressed except in cases of middle-class promotion, competence and demand for access to resources.  The only form of racism against poor and working people that enters public discourse is hate crimes against black people. Structural racism perpetuated by big business and the state never enters our conversation. Race is contested by middle-classes black and white in their attempts to gain and entrench privilege and inequality.

I am arguing dominant trends. There are individuals of all races and all classes from big business to the poorest communities who resist racism on a daily basis  This fact should not obscure what you correctly call the personal relations and inter-relations of domination and subordination we all experience. These  relations are built on the fears and prejudices everyone imbibed from our ancestors, and their roles in conquest (in the pre-colonial as well as colonial periods), apartheid and “rainbow” racism.

Barbara Hogan condemned the racism used by Maroga and his supporters as a defence to obscure the fundamental problems withinEskom. Maroga is gone because of an arrogant incompetence supported by the class interest of upper-class people of colour..She is also correct that he is not the only one to blame for the Eskom debacle.  Our short memories have erased the racial nationalism and arrogance of Mbeki ministers of Public Enterprises including that of the late Stella Sigcau and Alec Erwin.

A non-racial society must be built on the foundations of social justice, freedom and equality for all. This requires all of us to struggle for the rights enshrined in our constitution including:

1. An equal, quality education system that restores dignity to every person.
2. An efficient, effective, equitable and quality health service for all.
3. Clean water, sanitation, street lights and decent housing.
4. Safe and secure streets, homes, playgrounds, schools and communities with a prioritisation of gender-based understanding of the right to freedom of the person and her psychological and bodily integrity.
5. Local and SADC regional public and private investment on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan
6. Global trade, investment, finance, agriculture and other agreements that establish a local global minimum wage, working conditions, environmental codes that are enforced.
7. A movement for social and political integration among people to end hate crimes on the basis of race, homelessness, sexual orientation, Jewish, Muslim, immigration identities.
8. The recognition by each of us that when we look a person in the eyes to greet we recognise their humanity.  This is the most important and difficult of all the above tasks for citizens locally and globally.

Regards

Zackie Achmat (Centre for Law and Social Justice)

FACEBOOK COMMENTS

Anthony Harding to Sid Luckett

I am not a fan of blackouts and lack of clarity on the national strategy to face a social and economic crisis. (I have looked at the issue for some time, and also agree with Barbara Hogan speaking in parliament yesterday that it cannot be dumped at the door of one person, Maroga.)
I must assume that you have not understood … Read More my writing on this in my text on ‘Lekgoa.’ The ‘Lekgoa’ book is all about context, based on my training and experience using complex tools of social analysis in various social contexts, as well as understanding of the pre-conscious functioning of the limbic (emotional) system of the brain. Context is not just about material, objective context, and this is at the heart of the concept of ideology. ‘The past is not dead. The past is not even the past.’
I am looking at the content of Maroga’s response (not necessarily to validate it completely), because it reflects a view of whiteness that is not just his own perception, but is part of deep social discourse in black communities, and is expressed very clearly, particularly in the Sotho language group/ culture/ polity (Sepedi) that Maroga comes from. Denial does not address the problem that the behaviour which characterises whiteness is self-evident to others, and is unresolved. I think it is disingenious to respond superficially to this.

Ramolope Norman Makhutle

It is pity that some concerns about racism at Eskom were never addressed, instead the minister crticised those that sounded an alarm bell.

For as long as these issues including competency and support are tackled, we will walk this path again.

Eskom has attracted attention because of perhaps 2010 and the threat of blackouts, but recent history tells us that quick fix solutions have instead become long drawn and the process of repalcement and support staff is not an easy process…. Read More

At this particular point the focus is on so-called public entreprises, it is common knwldge that the private sector has
been bleeding jobs and runs to the state to extract conccessions by dangling a carrot to the ruling class.

General Nyanda for example wants to transform the cellphone industry and the CEO’s are whinning. It must be remembered that these companies were formed and accelerate in growth at the expense of you and me.

If we want state enterprises to be profitable and sustainable, what price are we willing to pay? Transformation of big headed boards that think they are an end all know all.

The self-same chairman has precided over the Eskom board and Maroga for the past two years. You cannot tell me they have not discussed plans to pull South Africa out of the abyss particularly at the time when the power was going on and off.

The leadership crisis is more than meets the eye. Particularly that som
e political parties have an unpunished access to confidential information that sometimes is not even finalised.

What has changed is that there are no longer prolonged load shedds, but the danger is still emminent.
One way or the other the public is till going to pay for any solution.

If I did not know better I would say corporate African leadership is in crisis.

Mon at 6:38pm ·

Thanks to Gavin Silber for grammar and style edits. The opinions are all mine and I hope that they open a discussion that is productive.

ENDS

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious.

• from the issue
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This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” (Little, Brown; $25.99). Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes.

Foer was just nine years old when the problem of being an “eating animal” first presented itself. One evening, his parents left him and his older brother with a babysitter and a platter of chicken. The babysitter declined to join the boys for dinner.

“You know that chicken is chicken, right?” she pointed out. Foer’s older brother sniggered. Where had their parents found this moron? But Foer was shaken. That chicken was a chicken! Why had he never thought of this before? He put down his fork. Within a few years, however, he went back to eating chickens and other animals. During high school and college, he converted to vegetarianism several more times, partly to salve his conscience and partly, as he puts it, “to get closer to the breasts” of female activists. Later, he became engaged to a woman (the novelist Nicole Krauss) with a similar history of relapse. They resolved to do better, and immediately violated that resolve by serving meat at their wedding and eating it on their honeymoon. Finally, when he was about to become a father, Foer felt compelled to think about the issue more deeply, and, at the same time, to write about it. “We decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story,” he says.

Foer ends up telling several stories, though all have the same horrific ending. One is about shit. Animals, he explains, produce a lot of it. Crowded into “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, they can produce entire cities’ worth. (The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.) Unlike cities, though, CAFOs have no waste-treatment systems. The shit simply gets dumped in holding ponds. Imagine, Foer writes, if “every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity.” Not surprisingly, the shit in the ponds tends to migrate to nearby streams and rivers, causing algae blooms that kill fish and leave behind aquatic “dead zones.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement.

Read this article. Read the book.

Excellent article about quackery in history.

Carbolic smoke ball: fake or cure?

By Clive Coleman BBC Radio 4

The curious case of the carbolic smoke ball forced companies to treat customers honestly and openly and still has impact today.

The 1892 case of Carlill and the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company is an odd tale set against the backdrop of the swirling mists and fog of Victorian London, a terrifying Russian flu pandemic, and a forest of unregulated quack medicines offering cures for just about everything.

It is a case known to legal students the world over. It is also seen by some as the birth of modern consumer protection – as it helped to define in law the trading relationship between a company and its customers.

The carbolic smoke ball was a peculiar device marketed as a cure for various ailments including influenza. It consisted of a rubber ball, filled with powdered carbolic acid. You squeezed the ball sending a puff of acidic smoke right up a tube inserted into your nose. The idea was that your nose would run and the cold would be flushed out.

Cash or cure

The company making the ball advertised it in the Pall Mall Gazette offering a £100 reward to anyone using it correctly who then contracted influenza. They deposited £1,000 in the Alliance Bank in Regent Street to show the money was there.

The advert also contained testimonials from a raft of aristocrats and clergy – the Victorian equivalent of today’s celebrity endorsement.

It was seen by one Mrs Louisa Elizabeth Carlill. She bought a ball and used it, as directed, three times daily for nearly two months, then promptly caught the flu. Not surprisingly she claimed her reward from the company.

The manufacturers ignored two letters from her husband who had trained as a solicitor. They finally replied saying that if used properly they had total confidence in their product.

Ladies in Victorian London take the air to ward off the ‘flu

In order to protect themselves against a fraudulent claim they stated Mrs Carlill would have to attend their offices at 27 Princess Street, Hanover Square, London each day and have her use of the ball checked by their secretary.

Mrs Carlill sued, claiming there was a contract between her and the company. The company denied there was one. She won her case in the High Court.

Perhaps the worst sentence I have ever seen.

However, upon closer inspection and application of basic tools of analysis into Jara argument, it becomes quite clear that calling for a “new democratic Left” is in fact nothing but another sadistic ploy by schadenfreude communists hell-bent on implanting confusion in the hearts and minds of the people of this country.