Thomas Johnson - The Blog

First, to clarify the post's title, I have no connection with Gareth Cliff or pay-TV M-Net. I'm not an M-Net subscriber. I don't follow Idols SA or Cliff's shows or tweets. However, I'm interested in M-Net's recent firing of the former Idols judge for his tweet, the details of which are well-known, and his subsequent legal action suing M-Net for R25 million for breach of contract and defamation. Just as Standard Bank was cowardly and hypocritical for suspending economist Chris Hart, M-Net was hypocritical for dismissing Cliff for, according to him, "lacking empathy", especially after other Idols judges, Unathi Msengana and Somizi Mhlongo, also caused outrage with their social media comments in 2015. Msengana and Mhlongo are black, Cliff is white. By comparison the Gauteng Department of Sport and Recreation only suspended employee Velaphi Khumalo, with pay after a few days for his tweet saying whites must be killed the same way Hitler killed the J...

In every generation people think what they are going through is the worst.   Shakespeare (“ A glooming peace this morning with it brings/The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head/For never was a story of more woe”) felt so too. The First World War was called the “War to end all wars”.   But World War II saw mechanised horrors from the sky, fire bombs and death camps.  Post-war brought killing fields in Africa and Asia (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), cold war and escalation to nuclear Armageddon. In South Africa, after apartheid, we beheld a brief period of promise and enlightenment – the Mandela years – until quickly we lost the way, and went back to recriminations and hate, that beast that lurks within us.   In 1995 South Africa’s Human Development Index was 0.741; in 2014 it was lower at 0.666.   Counter-intuitively, during apartheid, it rose from 0.66 in 1975 to 0.741 at the start of our democratic age. So th...

In February 2001 during the State of the Nation address President Thabo Mbeki announced a “sustained campaign against poverty and underdevelopment”.   This took the form of urban renewal projects (URP) and integrated sustainable rural development programmes (ISRDP).   Run by 21 municipalities selected on need, including Cape Town, they were a mix of soft infrastructure, economic and community development and job creation projects. A 2006 completion report found poverty had declined in those municipal nodes.   However, other assessments that supplemented and fed into it contradicted its universal, rosy findings and indicated shortcomings with individual programmes, and that expectations of inter alia poverty reduction and economic development had not been met.   (The report’s flaw was it conflated and attributed social transfers – free services, etc – and bulk infrastructure projects to the URPs/ISRDPs that were never part of the latter.) This ...

President Jacob Zuma yesterday announced a commission of inquiry into free higher education . Taxpayer subsidies for higher education are R25 billion at the moment. Free higher education would need an additional R71 billion . Assume this happens, what priorities would be shifted aside - health, with its unobtainable R250 billion National Health Insurance scheme, transport, basic education ...?  The list is long. South Africa's six million taxpayers, who are increasingly hard-pressed, cannot afford it and government knows this. What has finance minister Pravin Gordhan repeatedly stated about financial responsibility since his reappointment last month: that we will only do what we can afford .  Should it be implemented, what will it do to government debt and fiscal responsibility that ratings agencies and investors demand? In very few countries around the world is free higher education a reality. Why does the ANC always believe it can it reinvent the wheel - succ...

Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille is proud of the the city's expanded public works programme (EPWP).  Unfortunately, EPWPs are desperate, subsistence and very short-duration efforts to create income for unemployed beneficiaries.  Its like plugging a leaking dam with a finger. Over-staffed municipalities and over-paid municipal workers can do the work more efficiently.  In other words, taxpayers are paying twice - EPWP and permanent employees - for the same service. (In fact, this what they are already doing for other services - security, health, education etc.) During an interview on CapeTalk on January 13 De Lille said jobs were created, but avoided saying how effective, across the board, the programmes are in creating long term jobs. If she did she would reveal the number of permanent jobs created - posts or wage bill - pro-rata across all programmes.  There are a multiplicity of reasons for the country's low-job situation.  Perhaps the most...

There is never a dull moment in South Africa, although a lot of it is not positive. We ended 2015 with the president, for obscure reasons only he and his confidential advisors understood but to do with taking control of the treasury as their private bank, firing respected finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, who did his job, only to replace him with the unqualified and unknown former mayor of a dorpie whose constituents burnt his house down in protest over his alleged incompetence. The collapse of the currency and markets in the wake of Nene’s firing propelled the usually somnolent and indifferent business leaders and bankers, who really control the economy, to make urgent representations to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. The rest we know – South Africa was saved, for the time being, with Pravin Gordhan’s (re)appointment as finance minister, but the damage was done and shareholders – our pensions and savings – lost R171 billion and the rand fe...