WHY A MINIMUM WAGE IS A VERY BAD IDEA

Dear Cyril Ramaphosa, Deputy President of South Africa,

          Surely the most important thing we need to do in our country at the moment is to ensure that the millions without a job get work, any work at any rate.

          By forcing a minimum wage of R3 500 on all employers, all you are doing is looking after the people who are already in a job when our unemployment rate is sky high at 26% and rising.

          And it could even cause some workers to lose their jobs if their employers can’t afford the new rate. By far the worst aspect is that at the same time it will ensure that a lot of those without work will never, ever be able to get started.

Letter in The Times

          In its analysis of this plan the Institute for Race Relations also believes that it will “only further limit the access to the labour market” for the unemployed.

          Sir, which would your prefer to have; a regular job that pays say R2 000 or even less per month or no job at all. Imagine, if you can, that you also have a wife and two children to support and her job as a domestic came to an end because her employer could no longer afford to pay her the minimum wage stipulated for her category when that came into force a few years ago.

          How many domestic workers lost their permanent jobs and are now working on an hourly basis a few days a week because a minimum wage was decreed for them?         

          I almost missed out on a career in journalism because of the minimum wage for reporters that was in force in Britain when I started. Typically it was a union idea -the National Union of Journalists.

          I was 22 when I arrived there from South Africa determined to become a journalist. The only problem was that according to what the Union decreed an apprentice started at 17 so a 22 year old had to be paid the rate of somebody with five years experience.

          Hardly surprisingly I battled to find anybody to take me on, even though I was happy to work for just about nothing to get a foot in the door.

Letter in The Times

          Eventually I was accepted by one of the few papers in the country that didn’t recognise a union and nobody bothered about this because it was so small. That’s where I started on a pittance and I was actually married at the time.

          It was a real sweat shop that consisted of the editor, a sadistic news editor and three very green reporters – me, another guy and a girl who was in tears almost every day. The turnover of the staff was such that after eight months I was the most experience reporter.

          It was the fastest learning school I ever experienced. For instance on my first day in a little town I had only been in for a few days the news editor asked me to report on an accident. He gave me the address and when I naively asked where this was he flew into a rage and told me to damned well look it up on the map.

          You had to report just about everything that happened there to fill the paper and if the news editor heard you had passed the registry office without noticing the confetti in the street that showed a wedding had taken place there was hell to pay. You would then be grilled by him and the editor for an hour or more.

          The training I got there enabled me to write for just about all the major British newspapers as a freelance and become an investigative journalist on The Star and the Sunday Times in Johannesburg. All of this would not have been possible if that minimum wage had been rigidly enforced.

          Of course unions love minimum wage regulations because they do what they do best; they destroy enterprise and reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator. They also ensure that nobody works at a rate that will undercut their members.

          Pandering to them however does nothing to ensure that the majority have a job, any job as long as they can earn something.

          Fortunately like so many of our African National Congress master plans a minimum wage is unlikely to work because the policing will be so bad. We have lived in the same place for the last 10 years and nobody has ever come to us to ensure that we pay our maid the required minimum.

          Regards,

          Jon who believes that anything that stifles freedom of choice in the job market can only be bad, very bad.        

  

Power corrupts in millionaires' paradise

Dear Helen Zille leader of the Democratic Alliance,

         As the leader of South Africa’s main opposition party you and your colleagues are always taking pot shots at our African National Congress Government for corruption and a host of other wrong doings.

         But if you are going to be a policewoman you should make sure that your own party’s record is perfectly clean and if there are lapses you should personally step in to put them right.

       The question is: Are you going to do that in Plettenberg Bay?

As you know that’s where so many of our country’s rich and famous have their seaside homes. And most of them are undoubtedly DA supporters.

         But that’s no excuse for turning a blind eye to what the Sunday Times has just revealed.

        It was quite shocking to see how Plett’s Bitou Municipality, which your party now controls after it had been run by the ANC for 16 years, is doing exactly the same dubious kind of thing that the ANC has been up to for years.

       Power corrupts they say and this is ringing ominously true at Plett.

         The paper told us that after the DA took over Bitou last year it found the R10-million IT system didn’t work. A common occurrence in ANC run government organisations.

         So the DA sacked the supplier Lefatshe Technolgies. This started another jobs-for-pals scandal so typical of our administrations all over the country.

         Big hearted billionaire Jeremy Ord came to the rescue of the beleaguered town where he has a home. He just happened to be Chairman of Dimension Data, a world wide IT company that was bought last year by Japan’s NTT for R22-billion.

         He undertook to get his firm to evaluate the council’s IT at no cost, although you would have thought this would have been done before the existing supplier was given notice.

         The DA was so delighted with Ord’s free assessment that in December last year it decided to bypass normal tender procedures and give Ord’s company a R4.3-million short-term assignment to sort out the mess.

         Bitou’s manager Terry Giliomee justified this by saying they got no other quotations because there was not enough time. Ha! Ha! Ha!

         Council’s letters showed that as far back as August last year Lefatshe had been told its contract would end on December 31. Not enough time. Ha! Ha! Ha!

         It looks as though the ANC has been gleefully feeding the paper the dirt. They didn’t have to look far. One of your councillors Johann Brummer gave them just the ammunition they needed.

         In a December email to Bitou officials about a problem at Plett’s poshest restaurant he wrote: Remember that Lookout is a Plett icon and hang out for some very powerful people – like Jeremy Ord and others who have supported us generously in the past.

         That sent your members scrambling to find a reasonably explanation for this political gaffe. One of them said, We don’t confirm who our donors are. Nobody told Brummer about that. Ha! Ha! Ha!

And Ord was not saying anything either. Ha!  Ha! Ha!

         Everybody knows that No comment means YES.

       Please Helen don’t let the DA go the way of the ANC. There’s enough skulduggery in Government already without your party starting.

         Regards,

         Jon, a concerned tax payer and specialist IT illiterate looking for a Government job, who won’t say which party he donates to for fear of victimisation. 

P.S. Do you mind if I send thanks from the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman to Rob Rose and Bobby Jordan for a very comprehensive report.  I presume they won’t tell you which party they support.

Read my book 'Where have all the children gone' on Amazon.com  It's a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.

Great Walls of Shame

 Dear Minister of Police,

         In South Africa the very rich are ignoring history and it’s the fault of your Government.

         It teaches us that high, thick walls were a great means of defense in the days when the only weapons available were bows and arrows, swords and the like. Then with the advent of gunpowder and artillery the wall became obsolete.

         The most famous wall of all is the Great Wall of China. That was effective for centuries. Now it is nothing more than a tourist attraction.

        But South Africans are determined to turn the clock back by building thicker and higher walls to protect themselves from gangs of burglars, rapists and murderers, who are invading homes all over the place, often armed with up-to-date weapons. Put these walls end to end and who knows one day they could stretch as far that one in China.

         It all happened after the advent of your African National Congress Government in 1994 because you let crime get completely out of hand.  

         Nowhere are these walls more evident than in Johannesburg. There, as the crime levels have gone higher and higher, so have the walls. Up and up they go as money, bricks and cement gets poured into them at an astonishing rate. 

         Many have got one up on the one in China. A wall five meters high, higher than the average house, is not considered enough protection by itself, it still has to have an electric fence on the top.

         I’m sure there’s one round your house. And how much of our precious resources are going into these fortifications when they would be far better spent on uplifting the masses?

         The next logical step in the great fortify-your-home race would be to have a moat inside the boundary ramparts with a drawbridge at the gate. That would provide an extra obstacle for the cat burglar, who arrives with ropes and pitons or a grappling-iron.  

         In the morning the gardener could fish out the ones who could not swim. Think of all the prestige a moat could bring. For the slightly less, well healed owners it could double as a swimming pool.

         Everywhere the rich are barricading themselves like a tortoise going into its shell. But like the tortoise they have to come out some time and that’s when they are so vulnerable to predators.

         The predators are after their flashy limousines, their diamond rings, their big bucks, their cell phones and anything else of value. As you know they think nothing of killing to get what they want, or just for the thrill of it. It’s scary and the more you’ve got the scarier it gets.

         For every meter a boundary wall goes up those prying eyes on the outside are registering that as the owner has so much to protect, they will have be more ingenious or  more vicious to steal what’s inside. 

         So does it really pay to advertise wealth with those high walls in a land where the majority can not afford to build just one meter of one of them?  

         Some walls are so high that for the people inside and their neighbours sunrise in winter is close to mid-day with sunset around the middle of the afternoon. Talk about interfering with nature.

         And what’s worse is that an environmental impact study is not required before permission is granted to put one up. Protection is the new buzz word that over rides everything else.

         Of course people can have their 4X4 , their fancy BMW or Mercedes Benz armour plated, the equivalent of having a wall around their vehicle.  It will enable them to get in and out of their fortress without being hijacked or shot.

         But once they’ve left their home environment this moving safe deposit box only keeps them in one piece as long as they don’t get out of it.

         These high walls are already becoming obsolete as ingenious crooks have come up with a Trojan horse. They rent a home inside the ramparts of a posh townhouse complex and continue to rampage among the rich.

         Will the day ever come do you think Mr Minister, when the Great Walls of South Africa will be nothing more than tourist attractions?

         Will there be a time when a guide points to the walls and says, Those were built to keep invading hordes of thieving, murdering have-nots from plundering the homes of the haves. But fortunately these days they are no longer necessary. They remain just a reminder of our evil past.

         Sadly I don’t think I’ll live to see that day unless we get a new Government that can tackle the crime problem far more effectively than you and your colleagues are doing now.

Talk, talk and more talk without effective action will never get the job done.

Yours truly,

Jon, a Chinese trained wall builder of distinction. 

P.S. It doesn’t do much to discourage crime when our country’s overall Police Chief gets 15 years for corruption and his successor is suspended for much the same thing. 

Buy my book ‘Where have all the children gone?’ on Amazon Kindle  It’s a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.

     

Racist census to continue dividing a nation

Dear Statistician General Pali Lehohla,

         What’s it feel like to blow money on a grand scale on nothing more productive than bits of paper? And to make matters worse you are doing it without a thought for the majority who live in slums with nothing better to do than riot and trash the place.

         Eighteen years after racialism was supposed to have replaced 40 years of White domination that spawn the hated apartheid system in South Africa and kept Blacks as serfs you are still at it - classifying people according to colour. 

         Refresh my memory; what colour gets preference when Government jobs are dished out?

         Now that the Black African National Congress Government is in charge you are having an expensive census to put everyone in their place; Blacks, Whites, Coloureds, Indians, Chinese and any other colour of the rainbow nation that you can think of.

         It’s pure, unadulterated racialism.

         Surely we are all people now, all 50-million of us. So when your 300 000 part-timers call round at houses shortly, with those 75 question forms, everybody should refuse to complete the colour question.

         I hear we’ll be asked a host of things designed to improve the lives of everyone. Like: How often do you have sex? Have you done it outside your racial category? Have you had aids? If so how many times and in what racial group was the person who gave it to you?

          Sorry I’m wandering. What I really wanted to tell you is I’m organizing a National Census in opposition to your official one. I was shocked to read that you are only going to have the results of your one two years later when it’s completely out of date unless you expect us to put breeding on hold while you do your sums. And that’s stretching it even for African Time. And it’s going to cost a very reasonable R2.8 billion plus.

          I don’t know which Government official’s salary that equates to but no doubt the meddling press will tell us, if they are still allowed to by next year. I don’t suppose you’ll be happy about my rival census but South Africa’s a free country; at least it was yesterday.

          Mine will be a cut price one. With any luck you will have a lot to thank me for because it will make the official one unnecessary and the nation will save a packet.  Oh! I forgot your Government is not in the business of saving tax payer’s money. It’s on a glorious spending spree for the good of the few at the expense of the many.

          I’m calling for volunteers to go to their nearest shanty town and question just 10 hut owners and their families. Here’s what they will be asked.

          1. Have any of the ANC’s Promises become a reality for you and give us an idea of how they have improved your life.

            1.1 How long have you lived in abject poverty?

            1.2 How many times a year do you get a square meal?

            1.3 Have you been forced to connect electricity illegally?

            1.4 How many times has your shack been burnt down in the last year?

            1.5 How many people, above 20, live in your one roomed tin hut?

Then come the Billion Dollar questions as it were which you may not be too happy with, but I’m afraid I have to ask them to complete the picture.

            2 Have you heard of the Government Census scheduled for October 2011? If so answer the following:

            2.1 What would you do with R2.8-billion?

            2.2 Have you ever eaten a 14 page census form? If so did it alleviate your hunger?

            2.3 How many houses for the poor do you think could be built with that money?

            2.4 How many trees do you think would have to be cut down to produce the paper to record all the questions for 50-million people? And if you had the wood instead how long would it last your community when used for heating and cooking?

          I know it’s being a bit familiar but do you mind if I call you My Pali from now on; it’s so much friendlier? You have to be Pali to go into people’s homes and ask them all kinds of intimate questions.

Imagine how long it’s going to take, especially among unsophisticated people with huge families, to fill in forms with 75 questions. In our President’s house, as an example, it could take a week or more at a rough guess. What with all his wives and I don’t know how many children.

How does it help to know things like in the Western Cape 35 000 of us live in houses with brick walls and corrugated iron roofs while another 20 000 have houses with tiled roofs and no walls.

Your Government won’t do anything about it anyway.

At the end of the day My Pali the exercise won’t feed or house anybody and you will have blown enough to keep the poor in food for years. Is that something to be proud of?

                   WHEN OH! WHEN IS YOUR GOVERNMENT GOING TO GET ITS PRIORITIES RIGHT BEFORE OUR SIMMERING SQUATER CAMPS BOIL OVER INTO THE REST OF THE COUNTRY?

                 Yours,

       Jon, Classified: Unemployed, homeless, starving. Race: Other. 

Broadside for the Navy - racialism or the usual bungle?

Dear Johannes Mudimu, Chief of the South African Navy,

          We all know your kids, if you’ve got any, could float a more impressive array of boats in their bath than our Navy can do at sea. You have the dubious distinction of being in charge of a joke.

          I accept it’s not your fault that the African National Congress Government has wasted billions on useless ships and submarines. But some of the bungles that followed were under your command.

          How embarrassing it must have been for you when one of the three new, Type 209 German submarines that we got at a paltry 285 -million dollars each was put out of action by a Navy Incompetent. That’s one of the ranks in our tin pot Navy isn’t it?

          He put a plug in the wrong socket during a switch over from the shore to ship electrical supply. The sub’s been out of action now for three years. But as luck would have it your Navy has only managed to train enough submariners for two subs so we didn’t need this other one anyway.

          As you know one of the subs was bashed because the entrance to the sub base in Simon’s Town is too small for this kind of sub. And in keeping with our Government’s proud, naval tradition there are no plans to widen the entrance.

          These are just some of the examples of the screw-ups that you no doubt have had to try and deal with during your tenure.   

       But just because we might lose a few submarines or ships here and there because your guys are technologically backward there’s absolutely no excuse for not paying people who have worked faithfully for the Navy for years..

          Michael Fielding has lectured on Warfare Communications at the Naval Staff College in the Muizenberg suburb of Cape Town for more than 30 years. You might have heard of him. He even developed some of the courses.

          In spite of the fact that he had not been paid for a year and was owed 50 grand he still turned up to give one of his lectures. You can imagine how surprised and upset he was by what happened as he was just about to start. He was told in no uncertain terms that he could not carry on. He had to hand over his notes to one of the officers there.

          Not surprisingly he immediately thought that racialism had raised its ugly head. You see he is White and as you know members of your Black ANC Government have been making loud, anti-white noises lately. So much so that Professor Ben Turok, an MP and long time ANC stalwart stated openly that these "crude reference to race reinforce the perception that we are moving away from a non-racial society towards a Black republic."                                       

      
Needless to say Turok is also White.  

          So which is it Vice Admiral Mudimu, racialism or one of those bungles that your Navy has become famous for?

          "Nobody tells me what's going on," Fielding told me. " It's very worrying." He added that he had written to the Admiral and I assume that means you.

          Fielding is such a loyal Navy supporter that even after the way he had been treated he offered to mark projects at no fee.

          However Commander Keith Abrahams, who is in charge of the Staff College, tells me that everything is hunky-dory. 
         It was all caused by an administrative glitch while they were waiting for the latest approved guest lecturer's list to be finalised.

          Fielding, he assured me, was on the new list and would be getting his money. The key question Vice Admiral sir is…. WHEN?

            The ability to communicate clearly, I would say, is essential to any well run force and more especially a navy as you have the sea to contend with as well as any enemy that you might be facing.

          So imagine what could happen without the likes of Fielding to train your officers. You could get a communication like this:

          'Sir we’ve just lost another one of our submarines. A dive order was given and due to a communication glitch somebody left the hatch open. I’m afraid that we have to put it down to the fact that communication lectures had to be abandoned because we couldn’t get anybody who was prepared to work for nothing.'

          Yours sincerely,

          Jon, who once paddled a  dugout canoe down the Congo River.

P.S. Admiral I was wondering whether you’ve every captained a ship or commanded a sub. I see on the Navy’s website that you joined the ANC in 1975 and served in its army in exile set up to topple the White, apartheid Government that was in power at the time. And you received your military training in central Africa, East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Hunt for South Africa's Holy Grail

Dear Sipho Pityana, Businessman and dreamer,

          Help! Help! We need everybody’s help to find our country’s Holy Grail.

          But what chance have we got when some of the best brains in South Africa like you believe that a myth will rid the country of its chronic corruption.

          The Constitutional Court (Concourt) has decided that it was wrong for the Government to disband the special crime-busting unit the Scorpions in 2008 when it looked as though its sting was getting much too close to the tail of our President Jacob Zuma.

          It was probing a bribes scandal involving Zuma and his former financial adviser Schabir Shaik.  Shaik got 15 years for his lack of political influence while the case against Zuma was abandoned on some vague grounds that he was being politically persecuted.

          We couldn’t have that could we? That’s how much it pays to have the full backing of the African National Congress.        

          The Government replaced the Scorpions with the more manageable Hawks. And it was this that was unacceptable the Concourt ruled.

          The reason for its judgment, as you know, was that the Hawks were insufficiently insulated from political influence in its structure and functioning. It gave the Government 18 months to produce another independent investigating unit as if the Scorpions had been so influence free.

          Eighteen months? That’s African time with a capital A because nothing can be done now in this country of ours least of all in legal circles?

          The court’s misguided concept is being perpetuated by the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, which you founded. Writing in the Sunday Times you revealed that this Council believes that corruption can be solved by having a statutory agency free of political or any other form of influence with civil society involved in the appointment of its leaders.

          Sipho why can’t you realise that this is what fairy tales are made of? Where in the world could you find a group of people that could be that impartial least of all in South Africa?

          It’s nice to dream Sipho but when you wake up you will realise that your concept will never materialise any more than the decision of the Concourt judges.

          All of you are putting the cart before the runaway horse that nobody has yet been able to catch.

          Your Council’s idea is made even more impossible because you say your special unit must be appropriately resourced by the Government with taxpayer’s money. You go on to tell us that there are already a range of agencies with a mandate to investigate acts of corruption but their effectiveness is hampered because they are not dedicated crime busters (You can say that again) and nor are they truly independent.

          You recapped on the fact that our previous National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption and his successor General Bheki Cele has had his honesty questioned by the Public Protector, Thule Madonsela over a dodgy lease for a new police headquarters.

          But all you do is skate round the real problem.

          Our campaign, you say, is intended to marshal the courage, principle, selflessness; energy and sacrifice that saw us not only bring down apartheid, but also establish a constitution that is a bulwark against arbitrary rule, abuse of power, corruption and criminality.

          More fine words Sipho, but as Chairman of this new Council of yours shouldn’t you be leading the way by showing a lot more of that courage that you talk about?

          Be realistic. That Constitution of ours that some misguided souls say is the best in the world has done sweet tweets to stop the abuse of power, corruption and criminality in our country.

          And you haven’t got the courage to openly name that runaway horse that I was talking about.  

          How ironic is this? The leader on the same page as your article in the Sunday Times told us that the court ruling was passed by a narrow majority with the Chief Justice, Sandile Ngcobo – appointed by Zuma to the job in 2009 – writing a minority opinion against the ruling.

          The paper also told us, this trickle of justice might not be sufficient to reverse the tide of corruption, but it is a timely reminder to the powerful that the law still stands above them. As if they care?

          It can’t get much more depressing than that. That trickle is drying up fast.

          So unless we catch the real source of the problem and have it put down we will go on looking for the Holy Grail of an independent investigation unit forever. And for those who don’t want to face it the PROBLEM IS THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS GOVERNMENT.

          Yours respectfully

          Jon, a Realist who likes to call corruption what it actually is and in South Africa its name is the ANC.

Buy my book "Where have all the children gone?" on Amazon.com   It's a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.