The+Thick+End+of+the+Wedge,+Peter+Bruce,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 22 January 2007
=The Thick End of the Wedge=


 * Peter Bruce**

CONSERVATIVE British MPs used to come to SA way back and marvel at how normal everything here seemed. “Read the papers in London and you’d think there’d be blacks hanging from the lampposts,” I remember one saying. John Carlisle, I think his name was. As far as he was concerned, apartheid was pretty ordinary stuff. For him, the reality was tranquil. The blacks he spoke to smiled and said they were happy. I was reminded of such wilful political blindness the other day when President Thabo Mbeki, dismissing crime as a perception problem rather than a death problem, said you could walk from Auckland Park to the SABC studios (a block away) without getting shot. Of course it’s possible. Probable even.

But the sad fact of Mbeki’s SA, and with which he will not deal, is that being shot, savaged or raped here is nevertheless a serious prospect.

I first thought Mbeki was being cynical. But his uncontrollable (and therefore not premeditated) default on crime (and AIDS) seems to be denial.

Yes, the president will concede, levels of perception are unacceptably high. There were 19000 fatal perceptions last year. A good friend of the chief of police has just been charged with one fatal perception and, last week, a narcotics perception. Mbeki trusts the chief of police, he says.

The president says he knows crime is not out of control because he travels around and speaks to imbizos. But it is impossible to be frank with Mbeki. If a peasant in Mpumalanga were to stand up at a presidential imbizo and complain about crime, Mbeki would argue with him until he won. That’s how he talks to people. Ask his many advisory groups how stilted their exchanges are. People who cross Thabo Mbeki are cut dead. At the imbizos, he says, no one raises fears of safety with him. What’s his point? That the problem doesn’t exist?

There’s no point getting hot under the collar about the president. Mbeki has just over two years to go and, in truth, he’s lost interest in us. Wipe yourself out in a celebrity drug binge or car crash and your family may warrant a presidential visit. But that’s all the sympathy on offer.

Mbeki knows the political game from here on in is all about a graceful exit. His thankfully conventional default on economic policy (basically, to leave things alone apart from colour tweaking) means he comes to the end of his term with more honour intact than many a departing leader. He’s made a political mess of the country, but not an economic one and, like scissors cuts paper, economy trumps politics. The trick for the next two years is to follow George Bush’s advice and to remember that “you can fool some of the people all the time and those are the people you need to concentrate on”.

YOU still have time to go out and buy the current issue of the FM. It has a fantastic cover story on the way the ANC is being eaten away from the inside by greedy officials securing contracts for themselves and their friends.

The article helped me crystallise something I have only half realised, and that is the way we have been overwhelmed in this country since the ANC took power in 1994 by projects. Have you noticed?

Everyone seems to be working on a project. Of course, it’s because projects have budgets and budgets are there to be bled dry by officials and consultants and friends. Some of the projects even have some sort of good intent, though usually only when government is not involved.

I wonder how many projects actually stand the test of time. Normally, it’s just build it and bugger off. Collect your cheques when you pass Go. A few years ago, it was decided to build a ferry over the bottom reaches of the Mbashe River in Transkei, to join the communities on either side. More than R20m was spent on building a magnificent winding road down the to the river and up the other side. The pont itself was a gleaming piece of engineering, powered by huge outboard motors. A new boathouse housed spares, petrol and staff.

Six months later the pont was gone; stolen or washed away, never to be replaced. The road is now a crumbling mess and the boathouse has burned down. Projectitis is incurable and it kills the one thing all successful societies take seriously — maintenance and the culture of caring for what you already have.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A363987**

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