Choices, choices, choices & 
To pick up your son, or not to pick up your son That is the question,
Whether tis nobler in the mind to let him walk home by himself
And get kidnapped or killed just by chance
Or to take arms with you in your car
And when you're threatened, shoot them. Maybe you die and sleep
But more, by sleep we mean we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That living in SA has become. Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep perchance to dream. Ah, there's the rub
For in that sleep of death what hopes may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.

I mean no disrespect to the memory of Sheldon Cohen nor to the Bard of Avon, but to me the most famous quotation from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a poignant salute to innocence, and an agonizing indictment of the hypocrisy and immorality to which every South African has become heir.

Apologists right across the spectrum from Gun-Free South Africa to the South African Communist Party to SA Good News to the ANC to the mostly incompetent SAPS and even to the sheeple voters make a great brouhaha of the choices we have in South Africa.

We have the choice to stay or leave, says Chunky Charlie; to vote or abstain, says the IEC; to speak our minds or shut up, say certain newspapers. It seems that having choices is so important it is enshrined in the Constitution.

Don't like the radio station? Switch it off. Don't like the newspaper? Don't buy it. Don't like the service at the shop? Go somewhere else.

Don't like getting shot in your car? Don't pick your son up from soccer practice.

The callous killing of Sheldon Cohen, waiting for his son at soccer practice, this week highlighted how human life has been allowed to be discounted to the point of worthlessness in a country where we have so much choice.

Cohen's murder has rightly enraged a nation, but it's been 14 years in the making. Fourteen years of depleting law enforcement. Fourteen years of turning a blind eye to crime and incompetence. Fourteen years of letting standards slide. Fourteen years of dithering, filibustering, cowardice and lame excuses. Fourteen years of chanting meaningless songs about machine guns. Fourteen years of telling us everything is nxa. Fourteen years of corruption and self-enrichment (check the only three decisions Zuma Simpson's drinking buddies have made in 40 days). Fourteen years of endangering every one of us by deliberately fragmenting social morality. Fourteen years of nepotism, cronyism, kakistocracy, idiocracy, arrogance and good old plain stupidity. Fourteen years of blaming the past and anyone else who gets in the way.

But don't forget folks, we have choices.

And now as the deadline looms for e-filing of tax returns, we have the same issue of choices. And Sars, as always, is hell-bent on making it as difficult as electronically possible to register by continuously changing the goal posts, never answering calls for help and ignoring written requests for simple assistance. It's symptomatic of the grand national malaise; the disease of don't-care. Pretty much like dialing 10111 or writing to the president or ranting in a blog.

Of course, you have the choice not to pay your taxes.

But then catch-22 comes into effect and all your choices are taken away.

We have the choice to drink milk, price collusion or not; to buy bread, artificial inflation or not; to accept sub-standard journalism or not; to go out at night or not; to trust the banks or not; to believe in the good of people or not; to believe the lights will come on when we hit the switch or not; to believe we will be treated fairly or not; to trust the policeman at the roadblock or not. To stay or not. To take the law into our own hands or not.

We can choose how we respond to events. Yeah, fat lot of good that did Sheldon Cohen: "Gee, they shot me in the neck. Shame, they must be from a disadvantaged background. Ah well, looks like I'm going to die. Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika &"

It shocked me to the core one day when I came home from work as crime reporter for the Pretoria News and showed my wife the front page: a huge story with banner headlines about a botched bank robbery in which three crooks, a policeman and a bank teller had been killed and three people, including a child, had been injured. I was so proud of the work I had done picture byline, the lot.

But Debbie didn't see that. She saw and felt the tragedy, the suffering, the sense of loss, the brutal inhumanity of it all.

I was so ashamed, so devastated, so disgusted with myself that I had become so callous and inured to the suffering I was reporting on. When death and brutality face you every moment, it is easy to become comfortably numb.

I think about that every time I see one of James Nachtwey's powerful images or hear embedded journalists reporting from the West Bank or Darfur.

But we're lucky in South Africa, a land alive with possibilities. A paradise of choices.

Tell that to Sheldon Cohen's family. Tell that to the families of the 18 000 people who will have been murdered by this time next year. Tell that to the women and children who are raped every 20 seconds. Tell that to the 9 000 people this year who will see no choice but to take their own lives.

It is long overdue that our inept rulers choose to do their job properly or get out of the way and let others more competent do it. Where we will find them I don't know, but we're alive with possibilities. And we have the choice.

Jacob Zuma to be next SA President - IOL December 22, 20076

Nothing will stop African National Congress president Jacob Zuma from becoming the next president of South Africa, the party's KwaZulu-Natal secretary Johan Mchunu said on Saturday. He was speaking at a beachfront celebration in Zuma's honour in Durban.

Zuma was not there and was not expected either. He was thought to have spent the day at his home in Nkandla. He cancelled a visit to Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini in Nongoma earlier on Saturday, reportedly tired after arriving back from Polokwane later than planned. Zuma was scheduled to attend an event in Greytown on Sunday, but it could not be established whether he would indeed be there.

"He is a tried and tested leader and will never fail the people. He is a man of honour and integrity and he will be on of the best presidents for the country," Mchunu said. The beachfront celebration was attended by, among others, Foreign Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad, KwaZulu-Natal Premier S'bu Ndebele, Transport, Community Safety and Liaison MEC Bheki Cele, and Durban mayor Obed Mlaba Mlaba told Sapa the celebrations would continue into the evening with 4 000 people expected to attend. These included members from all ANC branches throughout South Africa, and the ANC Women's League and ANC Youth League. "We just have to celebrate before Christmas because this is our victory," said Mlaba.

The event reminded ANC members of the formation of the ANC and the election of its first president Dr John Langalibalele Dube - a liberator, activist and a man of his people, he said. "Zuma is like Dube. He is a man who is concerned about development, he is very passionate about education and hopefully he will be the next president," said Mlaba.

By late afternoon, the party was already in full swing with ANC delegates - most of them sporting ANC T-shirts and shorts - dancing or sitting on sofas around tables drinking while watching Zulu dancers from ten marquees set up on the beachfront. Mchunu stressed that the celebration was also to thank ANC supporters for believing in Zuma. - Sapa

Wall Street Journal : Friday December 7, 2007 The Native Paranoia of Thabo Mbeki
By R.W. JOHNSON

CAPE TOWN -- South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki risks a humiliating defeat within his own party, the African National Congress, which may even see him ejected from office before his term ends in May 2009. In the run-up to the national Polokwane conference in a fortnight, his arch-rival Jacob Zuma has crushed him in a party-leadership nomination poll and the media are preparing the public for a Zuma presidency.

Mr. Mbeki appears to be an increasingly isolated figure. He has angrily shrugged off suggestions that he withdraw his bid to continue as ANC party head and seems to be in denial over Mr. Zuma's impending triumph. He still has too much power not to be feared but much of the old public deference is gone. The word here is that Mr. Mbeki's circle of advisers has shrunk to one or two intimates. Newspapers are full of quotes by anonymous cabinet ministers, expressing their doubts about the man they once followed blindly.

What worries people is that his judgment and behavior have become increasingly erratic. Recently he startled a public gathering by asking what "tik" was. Tik is a heroin derivative widely used in the Cape. There has been massive press coverage about the hideous damage the drug has done to many young people, frequently causing violent and criminal behavior. It was as if the President lived in another country, was only visiting here and asking the sort of innocent questions that tourists may ask.

Similarly, when at the last ANC policy conference the rank and file made it brutally clear that they did not want him to soldier on, that they wanted to avoid having two centers of power (i.e., Mr. Mbeki as state president and Mr. Zuma as party president), Mr. Mbeki's response was, let's say, bizarre. He immediately rushed to a TV camera to express his willingness to continue if the people twisted his arm to do so.

"It's as if he's Joan of Arc, listening to strange voices. He's certainly not listening to ours," said one bewildered cadre and former admirer.

For years now Mr. Mbeki's political style could only be described as paranoid. He's always casting himself as a victim, accusing others of "hidden agendas," suggesting that his rivals within the ANC are plotting a coup against him. Any sign of opposition could only be explained as the machinations of Western imperialists and their local reactionary clients. Recently he warned his parliamentary caucus of "mercenaries and counterrevolutionaries," leaving them wondering who exactly he meant.

Then there are his statements on AIDS -- such as that HIV has nothing to do with the illness because "a virus cannot cause a syndrome" -- and his belief in a plot by big pharmaceutical companies to assassinate him. One missive he sent to then President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair on the subject of AIDS was so wacky that Mr. Clinton thought it must be a fake.

Similarly, his siding with Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is also based on a conspiracy theory: that Western imperialists are trying to overthrow radical regimes in the region and that if Zimbabwe "fell," South Africa would be next. While Mr. Mbeki himself has been careful enough not to say this in public, his spokesmen have repeatedly made that point for him.

This paranoid trait is accentuated by a streak of narcissism. Mr. Mbeki sees himself as a major intellectual figure, towering above the rest of his party -- and there was never a shortage of sycophants to confirm this view. He spends hours surfing the Internet, where he gleans odds and ends of (half-) knowledge which he uses to second-guess AIDS scientists, unemployment statisticians, actuarial analysts and so on. He peppers his speeches with quotations suggesting a vast knowledge of literature, and his weekly online letter includes earnest essays on anticolonial history from Haiti to Sudan. Typically relying on single or dubious sources, these would be full of historical howlers. (For instance, in one such tractate, he wrote of British Governor Charles Gordon coming to conquer Sudan when actually he came to effect a withdrawal.) Mr. Mbeki's aides told me that Fidel Castro was once amazed to find their boss creeping off to write these weekly lectures, protesting, reasonably enough, that he could get other people to perform such work.

Mr. Zuma's dogged and gradually successful campaign appears to have exacerbated Mr. Mbeki's paranoia. His online letters are now full of tirades, not simply against critics or opponents but "enemies." The press is allegedly engaged in a systematic campaign of denigration aimed at his overthrow.

Equally eccentric has been Mr. Mbeki's patronage of Ronald Suresh Roberts. The author and lawyer once famously lost a libel suit against the Johannesburg Sunday Times, the country's biggest newspaper, for an unflattering portrait of him. The court found Mr. Roberts to be "vindictive and venomous." And yet, Mr. Mbeki chose this man, who was censured by the Law Society for his improper behavior, to write his official biography -- titled, without a hint of irony, "Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki." The book is a hagiography of schoolboy standard, purporting to show that Mr. Mbeki never was an AIDS denier, and that he always was a multiparty democrat. In fact, Mr. Mbeki, a graduate of Moscow's Marx-Lenin Institute, once wrote articles in praise of the Algerian one-party state. According to this rewrite of history, Mr. Mbeki never supported Mr. Mugabe and actually criticized him.

It was child's play for critics to punch holes in this oeuvre -- and in any case, even after the book's launch Mr. Mbeki was ringing up another biographer, Mark Gevisser, to volunteer an AIDS-denying document he had penned himself, in which AIDS scientists are compared to Nazi concentration camp doctors and black people who accepted their medicines as displaying a slave mentality.

More recently, Mr. Mbeki staggered critics by sacking his deputy health minister because she had spoken out against the high infant mortality rate in an Eastern Cape hospital, saying that the situation there was part of a national health emergency. Mr. Mbeki, who is fiercely protective of his health minister (who supports his AIDS denial) not only insisted that 200 dead black babies a year in that hospital was perfectly normal but inserted into his argument a long and prurient analogy about 1960s miniskirts and what they revealed and suggested, claiming that media coverage of the event was concealing and suggesting but not exposing the truth. This juxtaposition of miniskirts and dead babies shook many who had hitherto overlooked the president's eccentricities. When he later sacked the public prosecutor and threatened to arrest the editor of the Sunday Times for publishing that the health minister was a drunk and had a conviction for stealing from comatose patients, it only further damaged public confidence.

His opponents, particularly the backers of ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma, are by now so bitterly alienated from him that if Mr. Mbeki fails to be re-elected as ANC president next month, they could well try to remove him also as president of the country. For this is the terrible irony of Mr. Mbeki's life. His paranoia has led him to offend so many of his former supporters that he has conjured up the true paranoid nightmare: For it really is true now that his opponents are conspiring against him, that he is cornered and that his enemies may triumph. Naturally this winds up Mr. Mbeki even more. The next month or two are going to be a difficult time in South Africa.

Mr. Johnson is southern Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times, and author of "South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation" (Phoenix, 2004). 

Launch of new Book by SA Author John van der Ruit : SPUD!

The book is based on the writers experiences at a private boys boarding school in Natal and is an hilarious read for SA ex-pats and locals alike!  Find it at your local bookstore. This book has been a blockbuster best seller in SA and there is even a sequel that has just been published in SA - watch out for it as well!

Scott Manning
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