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

Powered by ScribeFire.

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