Interesting developments

As we well know, the regime has some strange friends who do strange things that are conveniently overlooked. Furthermore, they run some strange projects of their own. What on earth is down-blended weapon graded uranium? It seems like a multi-purpose material. Is the PBMR just a cover for other things?
Russian warheads to fuel SA
South Africa will use uranium downgraded from old Russian nuclear warheads to fuel its planned pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR), according to public enterprises minister Alec Erwin. "On the PBMR, that uranium we will bring in from Russia, which is down-blended weapon graded uranium," Erwin said. The PMBR is based on old German technology and has been modified by South African scientists. A pilot fuel plan with an initial annual production of 270 000 tennis ball-sized uranium dioxide spheres or pebbles is being developed at Pelindaba, South Africa's nuclear research facility north of Pretoria. The PBMR facilities - essentially mini-reactors regarded as extremely safe by their developers - will all use Russian uranium and would be located around the country, including Coega, the new harbour development off the coast of Port Elizabeth in the east of the country, according to Erwin.
Is China Africa's new imperialist power?
GEAR and NEPAD aim at attracting more trade and more foreign investment, and China fits both bills. Intelligence Minister (and ageing Young Communist League politburo member) Ronnie Kasrils enthused in a glossy book China Through the Third Eye: South African Perspectives - funded by the China Chamber of Commerce and Industry in SA - that China’s building boom, including the controversial Three Dams project on the Yangtze that will displace 1-million people, “is a construction engineers’ dream”. This is a good thing, it seems: “If China is to remain a sustainable economy, it has to speed the transition from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy.”

Chief state spin-doctor Joel Netshitenzhe claimed in the same book that “South Africa and China share mutual goals as both countries are committed to ensuring a better life for all their citizens. Both aim to lower the levels of poverty.” Given the state-enforced poverty of the Chinese people, one wonders what Netshitenzhe has in mind when he praised the role of the Chinese state propaganda machine for “the rigour and focus with which China uses information to mobilise people around common objectives and a shared vision…”

A chill settles in one’s bones when one reads him hailing the “diversity of voices” in the Chinese media, while studiously ignoring state censorship and the complicity of Western search engines such as Yahoo in helping China jail political dissidents.

The view of SACP deputy secretary general and one-man think-tank Jeremy Cronin is even more revealing. The SACP, terrified that the bubble of “real, existing socialism” was washing down the drain with the restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, sent a delegation there in 2001 to check things out.

Cronin and his delegation were clearly wowed by their CCP hosts: he quotes a 1999 central committee document that “The public-ownership economy, which includes the State-owned economy, is the economic basis of China’s socialist system… China must always rely on and bring into full play the important role of the SOEs to develop the productive forces of the socialist society and realise the country’s industrialisation and modernisation…” China, it seems, is socialist as well as capitalist! What are we to make of such confused thinking?

Home Affairs considering ID audit
The Home Affairs Department is considering a forensic audit to find out how many fraudulent identity documents are in circulation. However, the final decision on the feasibility of an audit would take into account the impending introduction of the smart card ID, which would possibly identify fraudsters and drastically reduce fraudulent IDs through a structured multi-level identification service, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said.
Kortbroek gets new teeth
Government is proposing powerful legislation to ensure that SA's 3 000 km coastline is made pristine and kept that way. The Department of environmental affairs & tourism spokesman is adamant that the Integrated Coastal Management Bill will be used conservatively amid fears that government could stick to the letter of the law, which provides it with new draconian powers over private properties. But the draft bill's 105 sections and three schedules are necessarily tight to protect a vital economic and natural resource. How they will be applied is crucial but the rights given to environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk are powerful.
Booming car sales hobble RAF
South Africa's booming car sales have hit the Road Accident Fund hard as accidents increase and more people claim compensation. The RAF's latest annual report attributed the increase in claims to an increase in motor vehicles on the roads and increased public awareness of the fund. About 1 million new vehicles have been added to the country's roads due to an expanding domestic economy enabling more people to afford cars. For the RAF, the boom has meant a corresponding increase in vehicles involved in accidents and people claiming compensation. The fund settled a whopping R5,131-billion of claims last year, compared to R3,105-billion in the previous financial year. The National Treasury gave the RAF R2,7-billion in March after it technically went bankrupt due to mismanagement, fraud and corruption. The insolvency saw outstanding claims soar to the current 443 399 from 216 648 in 2002.

Liberation before education

The students (learners in regime-speak) who wrote Matric in 2006 were the first who completed their entire school career in the new, improved, post-apartheid, non-racial democratic South Africa. And they got the finest education and did very well. Meanwhile, in the real world the picture is very bleak.
Scary trend in Matric results
The declining pass rate is of grave concern and shows that the Education Department is failing the youth of this country and its future economic prospects. This year's matric pass rate is a mere 66.6% - a decline of 1.7% from 2005 - which means that a third of those who wrote the matric exams failed the core test of their schooling. In KwaZulu-Natal the situation is even worse, with a pass rate that has dropped from 70.5% in 2005 to 65.7% this year. The scary fact is the education system is failing to supply South Africa's youth with the necessary tools to graduate from secondary to tertiary education or from schools into the market place. What makes it worse is that this is the third year in a row that the results have declined, on top of which the number of learners who received exemptions and the number who passed matric maths and science on Higher Grade also dropped.
Matrics depressed about future in SA
A national counselling centre says a large portion of an average 200 calls a day have come from depressed matriculants in the Western Cape, despite the province's 83,7 percent pass rate. The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag) has been inundated with calls from matriculants who failed their exams or, having passed, were concerned about their futures. The phone calls had eased up recently but they were ringing off the hook when the results were released.

Mandela Has no Clothes

Tailored guilt comes in varying shades; most of it is black on white. Penance being paid can be worn as many garments, be it a Mandela pin, a Bono/Geldoff Save-Africa rock concert, affirmative action, South African black economic empowerment or a Brangelina Black-baby adoption shopping-spree. Uniform in complexion, all are interwoven with a single strand displaying the conscious intention of its Western wearer to placate a troublesome conscience.

On the catwalk of guilt those who strut their stuff in white are invariably assured of popular acclaim in a moral universe subsisting on blame. To clothe a multi-colored world in the most preciously-held Western ideals demands absolute dedication to perceived universal designs (e.g. freedom, democracy, human rights, and scientific/universal truths). Wearing the most ill-fitting clothes of Western design, Africa continuous to steal the limelight by virtue of parading its moral nudity as enlightened purity. And no amount of African horror can stain the liberal perception that all is to be gained by allowing Rousseau's Noble Savage to dictate the high ground of 21-century morality.

Mandela has, in a recent poll, been voted as the most admired leader in the world. Admired for what? Well, basically for being the best dressed African in Western clothing. Having adorned himself with all that we in the West deem as virtuous, Mandela (as a symbol of African moral purity), has been elevated to the position of judge and jury of all that is good and evil in this complex world we live in.

Credit should be given where it is due; Mandela certainly struts his borrowed clothes like a model of the highest repute (e.g. Naomi Campell), but does the Emperor have any real (home-spun) clothes? People tend to forget that Mandela is of 'noble' birth. I.e. his forefathers (and peers) were/are the dictatorial leaders of the Africa we have become so accustomed to ever since the West ventured to the shores of the Dark Continent. It suffices to say that he was born to lead, come hell (his ex-anti-capitalism) or high water (Apartheid). It also goes without saying that all leaders want freedom...to rule! But does the quest for freedom automatically translate into adherence to human rights& dignities and true democracy? Even a cursory glance at modern-day Iraq tells us that certain Western assumptions can be used as weapons of mass distraction.

Getting back to Mandelatopia; there were no human rights in pre-colonial Africa, nor were there any freedoms for the individual, scientific progress (a written language, the wheel, etc); nothing we can now, given our own civilization's journey through history, recognize as remotely progressive. In short; there was no Afro-Atlantis, something recalcitrant liberals conveniently forget in their suicidal quest to clothe the Other in their ideals in the hope of straightening the crooked timber of humanity....for all eternity.

Be that as it may, how well does/did Mandela's Western clothes fit him? The most prudent way to judge a leader is to look at his/her legacy. Hitler was a brilliant leader, but what were the consequences (legacy) of his actions? One only has to look at the legacy of the American Founding Fathers to realize what a magnificent contribution they made to humanity as a whole. Their efforts may not be appreciated in modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan, but they surely cannot be blamed for trying to enlighten the unenlightened. Mandela's legacy on the other hand is definitely not as commendable as lauded ad nauseum in Oprahverse.

When it comes to acknowledging universal scientific facts, he failed abysmally. For example, he blatantly ignored dire warnings by the Apartheid government that AIDS will have a devastating effect on the black population. With 800 blacks dying of AIDS per day in South Africa - and having buried his own son because of AIDS, the Emperor must surely take a long hard look at himself in the mirror every morning. Hell, even his chosen successor, Mbeki, still does not belief that AIDS is caused by a virus! It is therefore also no wonder that America asked the Apartheid government to dismantle its nuclear weapons, lest Mandela's old cronies (Arafat, Ghadaffi, Castro, etc) get hold of technology that would have emboldened them to live out their own dictatorial instincts...power at all cost!

When it concerns Western-induced moral imperatives, Mandela also fails to make the grade. He has never, not once, criticized Mugabe's horror regime in Zimbabwe, even though Mugabe exemplifies everything that he (Mandela) is praised (and given a Nobel Peace Prize) for opposing. Moral schizophrenia is nothing new on a continent whose fate is determined by Golem-like* leaders who will not hesitate, for one moment, to use the end to justify the means.

These are but a few examples of how ill-fitting the Emperor's clothes really are, if he has any! What is good enough to wear for the Western goose is obviously not good enough to adorn the African gander. And yet we still 'feel good' when heaping accolades on those who defile the very fabric of all that we hold dear. Africans are above reproach! The race-card is the Joker that always wins the hand for those who excel in the politically-correct game of populist power-poker.

In short; we keep on washing Africa's blood-stained garments with a Macbethian vigor (White Guilt) hell-bent on tearing asunder all that our hard-earned conscience (e.g. the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the American Constitution) shed a million tears for. Who abolished slavery? Who ended slavery and Apartheid? It definitely wasn't Africa. Slavery is alive and well on the Dark Continent; child soldiers, black-owned white sex-slaves and ethnic Apartheid still soil the very ground intended to bear the fruit of our US$ half-trillion investment in Africa's upliftment, not to mention the millions of Westerners who have died to make the world a better place for all humanity.

We surely have taken on a tremendous task in endeavoring to tailor the world according to our designs. Whether our garments will be fashionable in times to come, is obviously best left to the modeling of human history. But, lest we deny ourselves, let us not further the agendas of the naked who have managed to slip into (and under) our moral skin in order to make the Emperor appear clothed.
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Unhappy new year

Minister fails to reach taxi scrapping target
Government's aim to scrap 10 000 old taxis by the end of the year in its multi-billion-rand taxi recapitalisation programme has not been met. "The target as such is not what we intended to achieve because of procedures in the scrapping process," said Sam Monareng, the transport department spokesperson. Jeff Radebe, the transport minister, told taxi operators in March this year that he intended to have 10 000 of the country's oldest taxis scrapped by December. All of 6000 taxi operators have volunteered to scrap their taxis. Perhaps they should count involuntary scrapping as well.
Matric pass rate down by 2%
The national matric pass rate dropped almost two per cent this year, with the blame being put on absenteeism, bad management and lack of infrastructure at schools. Pupils aren‘t scoring high enough to further their education. Unacceptably high levels of absenteeism were reported among educators in poorly performing schools. Pupil absenteeism is also a growing concern. The reasons for this included drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, cohabitation, social grant payments, poverty and customary rites. Despite appeals to traditional leaders, he said, Grade 12 pupils were undergoing rites at critical times of the year and absenteeism was frequent on either side of school holidays.
No freebies for the Mbekis
In contrast to the British leader Tony Blair and South African Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, President Thabo Mbeki is apparently not taking any freebies and is taking his holidays according to the rule book. Mukoni Ratshitanga, Mbeki's spokesperson, said that the president had taken no one except his wife and "essential security personnel" on his recent vacation to Tanzania's Serengeti plains. The president had been accompanied by a large party of perhaps close to 20 people during his stay.
Here comes South Africa 2010...ready or not
Fifa gambled on the host nation for the World Cup, and it’s already a tense race against time. As for Fifa, the owner of the World Cup, the tournament will arrive quite soon enough: lately, its president, Sepp Blatter, has looked at his watch and given it a tap as he surveys the preparations. Of the 10 stadiums earmarked for the tournament across South Africa, four are not much further than site-clearing, and one is not there yet. The 2006 World Cup had barely wound down in Berlin when a few of the game’s chancers thought they glimpsed an opening. John O’Neill, the then chief executive of Football Federation Australia, seemed to be offering an alternative when he spoke of “all sorts of question marks” over South Africa’s readiness.