DAYS TO GO!

DAYS TO GO!

DAYS TO GO!

DAYS TO GO!

Stappled Condoms-others' Joke our Reality !

Isn't it sad and maybe reflective when what other see as a joke and blog about, has actually happened in South Africa and maybe effected the life of those who relied on the service!

http://www.iambetterthanu.com/2007/11/13/safe-sex-for-idiots/#comment-771

Africa & The CDM

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) arrises from the Kyoto agreement and is essentially a mechanism that finances renewable energy projects. As part of the mechanism Designated National Authorities are established as focal points. Looking at the map below of all CDM projects Africa is clearly a looser.

Without South Africa, there are only 5 projects in sub Saharan Africa. The dot in Mali is an error, its a Honduran project.

Africa has 33% percent of the DNAs and manages just 2.5% of the projects!

With all our talk about not wanting handouts and the massive rural energy and sanitation problems, why don't we perform better? Maybe its because we spend our time enthusing about a one off junk windmill and how it shows how brilliant we are and leave it to the politicians to be a DNA and presumably spend their time strategising & concretising.

MAC WIDGETS

This post is written on a Mac widget - its quite amazing that these things work so easily.

Another widget tells me the temperatures in my computer, the speed of the fan and the number of cycles the the battery has been through.


I can listen to radio stations, check the current dewpoint in Pretoria, see the 5 day forecast and send Gmail!

The downside is one can spen hours playing!

What A Garbage Strike Teaches Us

Today my problems resulting from the Tshwane Municipality's failure (outlined in all its misery below) were solved by an entrepreneur who travelled the smelly streets of Tswhwane offering to remove garbage for a fee!

So what did I learn?

• There are entrepreneurs in South Africa - I think this is brilliant although it cost R20
• The Tshwane Municipality has no clue about customer care either proactively or reactively
• The Municipality doesn't have a toll free complaints number - it would cost them a fortune

The Story

Since at least last week Tuesday, Pretoria's garbage has not been collected. The garbage bins stand overflowing in the streets. Driving past is an experience in stenches.

And still I have received no notification or information from the municipality. Trying to use the complaints line was farcical at the start - long waits / cut offs etc meant we were unable to get any information about why the garbage wasn't collected.

We eventually heard from friends and saw that there was an 11/09/07 press release on the Tshwane website. This was apparently the first attempt at direct communication.

So today I tried enquiries again and had luck. Seemingly waking someone on the number from the website. When asked when I could expect my garbage to be collected, he was clearly annoyed, said he "didn't have a clue" and rattled off a number which took several retries to allow me to get it correctly.

Now the only good bit in the story - the lady on the line was totally helpful and seemed unperturbed by what could not have been the first call of the day. I can expect my garbage to be picked up after a 10 or 11 day delay!

So what did I learn?

• Entrepreneurship does exist amongst South Africans
  
• The Municipality has made no attempt to communicate with me about the suspension of service - although they have all my contacts and a meter reader was at my house today and could have dropped a note
  
• The municipality's telephonic communication is not toll free and is really useleswith this. No company would survive with this kind of service
• There is always a silver lining - the entrepreneur and the lady who gave me information

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A Culture of Denial - Perceptions

In April I started a post which lay as a draft until now.

I pull it out now and dust it off, because the concerns expressed here by the press at a national level and myself at a local level have not gone away, but seem to be showing themselves in another way.

We have the worry of an Eastern Cape Hospital making the news for the shocking symptom (high infant death rate) of a poorly functioning health system troubled by a lack of accountability and concern. I suspect that since we all have seen how the health system is functioning and are worried about the apparent lack of performance management, it seems plausible and we are concerned.

But it soon turns out that the deputy minister is misguided (and later dismissed) the hospital superintendent a fraud (and later suspended) and the data wrong (whose head rolled for that)! Then we find that the data provided to refute the accusations was for April 2006 to March 2004 and there seems to be lots of equipment that arrived just in time for the ministers visit.

I'm not a journalist so don't try and put irrefutable proof on the table - its perceptions that count and in this case it doesn't seem that nice!

To me it looks likes the Government wants to deny the problems exist and have made it go away - but if the parallel to my story in the unpublished post is there, we run the risk of others not knowing there was a problem and failing in the same way - which could cost lives in this case.

This weeks Mail & Guardian editorial identifies the consequences of President Mbeki's denial of the AIDS pandemic. It then describes the Presidents apparent denial of a crime problem in South Africa.

This has real parallels to my observation that South African Enterprise Development Project (vegetable gardens, small bakeries, chicken rearing, food processors being the ones I know well) implementors have a very wasteful approach to implementing projects that are supposed to help the poor. They install their unresearched ideas, put up the sign & cut the ribbon, promote extravagantly, recognise the failure, try to fix it, fail because of a lack of capacity, start the next project & forget about the first failure.

The result is:

• because of the lack of capacity they can't identify the real error
• because of the desire to forget the failure they don't share
• because they don't share someone else does the same somewhere else

and we end up with failures everywhere although the impression is that we had succeses

Sheepdonkey Does A Brilliant Job

Until now the sheepdog "looked after" sheep - now in South Africa the donkey (Sheepdonkey?) have taken over the job.





As stated in the video, Sheepdonkeys have reduced the loss of lambs to predators, something which I don't believe Sheepdogs achieved.

Part of a feature from AgriTV

Nitpicking - is it really?

Just heard a question to a spokesman for the Premier of the Eastern Cape on 702, about the possibility of merging the Eastern and Western Cape to form one larger province. He responded that it was an ANC issue and therefore the premier would not comment.



It is of course parliament that decides on such things not a political party.



Is this nitpicking? or should we respect the role and value of parliament? Doest it just indicate the strength of the ANC or is it something deeper.





Remember: nitpicking is quibbling over insignificant details

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The link of the Day

This will be a regular posting - presenting a link through a discussion of its value to me.



The Manual for Home and Farm Production of Biodiesel by SW Mathewson



A thorough but simple and well explained manual for anyone interested in Bioethenol, and who in agribusiness isn't today.



The manual is available online at http://journeytoforever.org, and as indicated by the table of contents below is comprehensive.

Chapter Index

Chapter 1 AN OVERVIEW

Chapter 2 BASIC FUEL THEORY

Chapter 3 UTILIZATION OF ALCOHOL FUELS

Chapter 4 ETHANOL PRODUCTION - GENERAL DISCUSSION

Chapter 5 PROCESSING STEPS COMMON TO ALL MATERIALS

Chapter 6 PROCESSING STEPS SPECIFIC TO SACCHARINE MATERIALS

Chapter 7 PROCESSING STEPS SPECIFIC TO STARCHY MATERIALS

Chapter 8 PROCESSING STEPS SPECIFIC TO CELLULOSE MATERIALS

Chapter 9 YEAST AND FERMENTATION

Chapter 10 INDIVIDUAL RAW MATERIALS

Chapter 11 DISTILLATION

Chapter 12 DRYING THE ALCOHOL

Chapter 13 MASHING AND FERMENTATION EQUIPMENT

Chapter 14 DISTILLATION EQUIPMENT

Chapter 15 SOLAR STILLS

Chapter 17 PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Chapter 18 THE FUTURE

There is real detail in the manual down to understandable and practical drawings.

CONSTRUCTION OF A REFLUX COLUMN

DIGIVU

20/05/07

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Vodacom Super 14 Final

Not only:

the first Vodacom Super 14 Final in South Africa

but:

the first South Africa Only Vodacom Super 14 Final

and:

the first South African Vodacom Super 14 Champion

Not True, Even in Black and White

The bottle of juice calmly claims to be "100% cranberry juice" containing apple, cranberry and other fruit juice.



What it should be is 100% pure fruit juice with cranberry! Quite a different claim for the heath conscious consumer looking for the benefits of cranberry, but getting a mainly apple juice.

Hi Blood

While I am often annoyed at the level of English in South Africa, especially where it can effect efficiency and effectivity, I am also fascinated by some of the words we use.

In English we are used to biro meaning pen, scotch meaning cellotape and hoover meaning vacuum cleaner but as a white South African I miss much:

"high blood" is even used in the INTERNET e-commerce for a herbal remedy for hypertension

"checkers" for a plastic bag and brilliant advertising for checkers

"look up and runs" for packets of chicken head and feet

"zo zo" for a small room in the back yard of a house

"hippo" for the round roofed township house

just a few really interesting words, but there must be thousands - send them in and I'll start a Colloquial South Africa Website and publish if we get enough.

By the way a look at the web shows many lists, but to me mainly uninteresting Afrikaans based slang - I am sure there's something much more interesting out there.

• http://www.capeoptions.com/slang.htm
• http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/tt/634bf/
• http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-south-african-slang-words
• http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/links.htm
• http://www.southafrica.info/plan_trip/travel_tips/questions/saenglish.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_slang_words
• http://www.southafrican.za.net/sa-slang.html

Changing Place Names - A Solution?

A few weeks ago I wrote about the changing of street names in Machadodorp, quite liking the idea but seeing some of the interesting issues around the process.

I didn't, however, address the one that effects me to some extent - how to remember the new names and match them to whats still in my map. What about this from www.iol.co.za ?

I first put this up with my tongue in my cheek, thinking it was rather weird. But maybe while the old sign is still usable, its not a bad idea, especially for all those tourists we want to attract.

A final thought - what a difference between all that Durban's Point Road represented and what the Great Mahatma Gandhi represents.

The Market is King

Small business success is ALWAYS linked to a market thatwill buy the product. But a simple as it seems its not easily taken to heart.



Mary Jane knows that and puts it very clearly (SABC 15/03/2007), surprisingly it not always considered - you would see this in the rest of the interview, where she says it twice more in response to the questions.Small business success is ALWAYS linked to a market that will buy the product. But a simple as it seems its not easily taken to heart.

Machadodorp Musings III

Helping Hawkers?

The hawkers (under the tree & in the insert), the old unoccupied building (across the intersection) and new building shows a flawed process. I have seen in many places including KwaNgwanase, Bazana, Soetfontein and am sure it happens over and over again.



Local government (with a desire to help the poor) see the hawkers and, maybe pressurised by some of the old guard, want to get the hawkers off the road. They don't think of using the empty buildings nearby but build new ones. They presumably consult (but not well enough) the hawkers and design and have something built like that at Maschadodorp. They expect to attract the hawkers and get them to move into the new building.

However, the hawkers don't find any advantage in moving, possibly for one or more of the following reasons:

• the rent is too high - anything is a lot more than nothing (happened in Mellville)
• its too hot inside as its just a corrugated iron roof (I have seen this in Soetfontein)
• it doesn't meet the behavioural needs (women sit on the ground in front of counters selling from the floor in KwaNgwanase)
• its not as pleasant and socially open
  

I of course can't assure you these are the real and the only reasons, but then its not my job to build these centers. I have informed the municipal manager of this post & given her the right of response.

However, with all the failures, I believe its the duty of local government to identify the real problems and share there experiences so that others don't blunder after them.

These small stalls obviously were not an enormous cost but the problem is that similar errors are made with many public buildings (including many similar stalls, Majadje Food Processing Center in Limpopo, Community Center on road from Josini to KwaNgwanase ... - all possible future stories.)

Innovation in Department of Home Affairs?

Morning Live, the SABC morning TV news, had another gem today. Talking of the


they said "... the plans includes a crack down on corruption and incompetency and other innovations include the separation of immigration ..".

Yes, it is unfortunately rather innovative to address address corruption and incompetency in this department.

Related was the comment by the minister that they needed unemployed & retired chartered accountants on a part time basis, who should co-operate to serve their country - had she stopped to think how the country served those who were pushed out of the very places which now need them.

Machadodorp Musings II - Street Names

The street name change was facinating and a bit comical and full of symbolism. The old black and white sign showing its age and not really standing straight.


A block down the road two young guys in some sort of official bakkie putting up the new coloured sign (Batina Jele) onto the old pole. The assistant to the "sign attacher" said Jele was a local comrade in the struggle but that he wasn't sure exactly what he did because "I am still too young"

The questions is raises is why has it taken so long for the majority of the population of the area to get the street renamed and why didn't we use entrepreneurs to do the job?

9 months to my Second Life!

Today in 9 months time I stop my formal worklife and start my Second Life.

The parallel to pregnancy is obvious and today is therefore the conception of my Second Life. Then comes developing, growing and finally coming to a new world. There's also a parallel to reincarnation but I can't figure that one.

Tourism Good News

The minister of the Environment today announced an increase of 4.5% in visitors to South Africa for the 9 months to September 2006 and projected that this would result in a record year for 2007. That is good news!


Of interest in the information was a 9.7% growth in American and 42.4% growth in Russian visitors. Maybe the Americans have got over their fear of flying, while the growth in Russian visitors is noted as being off a small base.

The biggest growth is in visitors from Africa (18.3%) - I hope this is not just all the politicians and civil servants we host and often pay for eg the Pan African Parliament.

Machadodorp Musings I

Sitting in the car on the corner of General Smit and Potgieter streets in Machadadorp four things catch my eye:

• the hawkers across the road selling fruit and other food under the tree - there were others on other intersections
• the empty buildings all around
• the two new buildings each with 4 rooms with road facing counters
• the two guys down the street changing Potgieter street to Batana Jele street
  

and one my ear

• Trevor Manual on radio presenting a "internationally benchmarked budget" illustrating governments growing expenditure and real successes

Together they lead to questions that are important to success in South Africa

• why do we move so slowly
• why does development not reach the "Machada dorps" of South Africa
• why don't we learn from others

that maybe link back to one answer

• we don't have capacity and expertise in the organisations spending the money

with one solution

• truly involve those who used to do the job as mentors and teachers for those who now have to do it.

A Quick View of News

The 06:00 news on SABC 2 today had 6 stories

• one on civil unrest
• five on crime
  

Is this an overzealous crime reporter or does it reflect the state of crime is South Africa - SABC is after all close to the Government, who feel its a waste for people to talk about the problem.

Just to build on my previous comment on the state of English in the civil service. The mayor of a considerable town said

"... we have rebuilded houses ... we have managed to provide our people stormwater...given them services as far as sewer is concerned ....."

In another part of the story a shack dweller complained that his home was always flooded - thanks Mr Mayor. Sarcastic I know and maybe not critical here but the man runs a town, which gives rise to possible errors!

Identifying Africa's Constraints Now?

The following is an extract from NEPAD's newsletter which I receive by email. It is not archived on their site - that stopped in February 2006.

Is this not our problem in Africa - after 5 years of NEPAD and 7 of the African Union, do we really still have to create "a common understanding of capacity gaps and constraints" and outline a "process" "towards developing a strategy".


Another high level group is going to meet for 3 days, probably from the Addis Sheraton, to continue identifying, analysing, formulating and conceptualising; not even reaching concretising and planning let alone the implementation stage.

I believe we have the international Development and NGO community to thank for this they have overdeveloped the planning skills and underdeveloped the doing skills through their systems.

Public Service Capacity

The following exerpt from a call for bids in the Northern Cape got me thinking


what should we really expect from the English of Public Servants - can we really accept being

"..herewith invited to the supply of ... "

should we worry that they want

"..a broiler house typical to that of a poultry farm.."

or is that just being pedantic. But lets hope the same level of English is not used in the call otherwise we start to get difficulties in adjudication and in the contract otherwise...

But at a more significant level this is obviously the start of an attempt to create jobs with taxpayers (my) money by getting into the private sector. Lets hope at least they have an experienced business man (lets not train someone with no drive to be an entrepreneur) to run things. Otherwise it will go the way of many project, examples of which I can relate from experience:

• build something fancy but most often not approipriate
• put up the sign saying who did it
  
• get the minister to cut come and cut the ribon
• see it all on TV and the Good News site
• try, with out sufficient capacity, to get it to work
• forget about it - infact don't tell anyone what didn't work, which would be very useful
• go on to the next one

Then one level more what of the municipality - well they have obviously made a bunch of people happy finding a new name and developing a great logo (only excuse the quality it was a scan from the Sowetan) but does the poor work in publishing their call reflect their real capacity.

If you can't communicate how can you manage anything, let alone a municipality and what do you do with taxpayers money - interfere with the business men who really know how to manage and control. OK so they are not all supermen, but they are not using/loosing my money.

Its all very cynical, but what can we contructive can I do about it?

Looking for the Good and Bad

I have been trying to find really good and bad news to grow my South African Good, Bad & Wierd collection.

I visited the Why South Africa Sucks Blog and found only nonsense - how these people live I am not sure, it must be misery.

I also visited the South Africa Good News Site and found news items that were just what any successful country would be achieving anyway.

So where am I going to find my stories? Anyone have any suggestions.

Retirement

So now to the main reason for starting this blog. I stop formal employment at the end of November when I retire from the CSIR where I have worked most of my life.

I speak of a second life because I don't want to see this as the end of my working and contributing, but rather as the start of working for myself - maybe a little bit less formally, a little less exclusively and a little less commercially.

There is of course a lot I need to do in the next ten month like organising investments, changing medical aid, buying computers, completing projects, establishing contacts, redesigning websites (SAFPP & DIGIVU) to support where I am going and more worryingly doing the things I haven't even thought of!

And that's where I thought this blog could come in.

I first thought I would just throw myself on the mercy of the INTERNET, claiming to be destitute and ask for donations to support a person trying to turn his work experience into community benefit - as many have shown a few cents from millions is significant.

But more seriously, I am sure there are many people out there who can give advice and make suggestions that will help me and eventually others!

I'm not evensure what the assitance is but hope to get ideas and suggestions.


PS I really don't like the look of this blog so will be addressing that when I have some content!

High Level of Violence in Robberies

Today I was going to start posting on retirement, but heard this on the news.

... a police spokesman said they were beriesabout the high level of violence in home robberies...

Implying that they were not worried or couldn't address the robberies.

I dont want to rant and rave about how bad things are and how its going downhill - they aren't and it isn't. Rather I want to ask if the problem is not one of management in the Police Force. I have heard from a aquaintance, in charge of a small township police station, that the majority of the people there simply "don't care".

Don't we all see this in our contacts with the public service? I also know that people at the higher levels of government are worried about the Public Service not serving the Public, but don't seem to be able to get things to happen.

All we need is for people to want to serve the Public! and to be told how we can help!

Why I Started Today

I have been thinking about a blog for some time and was definitely going to start talking about my experiences as I move out of formal employment.

I have also always wanted a place to comment on the things (little and big) that make South Africa so different - the Good, the Bad & the Wierd. I have tied websites at times but that's difficult to do regularly. But today I heard my first posting on SABC News.

... tour of superb performing schools in this region, to find a way to galvanise this begining and ensure that end of year results are able to be even more improved and much better ...

I am not a good English writer, even though many tried, but this kind of waffle makes me smile!