Textbook Tander Is Corrupting Education

South Africans are the undisputed world champions of the "MacGyver" lifestyle. Living in this country is like living in an ongoing episode of a survival reality show.When the taps run dry, we perform a rain dance toward our JoJo tanks. When the lights go out we recreate romantic 19th-century candlelit vigils, and we’ve learned to navigate potholes with the precision of lunar rover pilots. With true South African resilience, we’ve decided that if the state won't provide the basics, we’ll just build a parallel universe in our backyards.But you can’t JoJo tank a child’s education.You can’t "load-shed" their ability to read, there is no "workaround" for a missing textbook, and you certainly can’t bypass a corrupt procurement process by lighting a few extra candles and hoping for the best.Our children trust us to make sure they have the tools they need to make a better future for themselves and our country. But when the evil tendrils of corruption start wrapping themselves around our schools, threatening to deprive our children of their sacred right to an education, we cannot simply “make-a-plan” our way out of it.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dy-_XYpf

The War Machine: Who pays, who profits and who bears the cost

Every war in modern history carries two parallel stories. One plays out on the battlefield, in bombed cities, in refugee columns, in casualty figures. The other plays out in boardrooms, government budgets, and commodity markets. Understanding both stories does not require taking a side. It requires following the money and counting the human cost.Wars rarely have a single cause. They accumulate pressure over years, combining strategic interests, resource competition, historical grievances, internal political pressures, and ideology. What they share is that at some point, the key decision-makers concluded that the cost of fighting was lower than the cost of continued restraint.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dx9dBpMj

South Africa Has Become The Wild West

5.15am, her alarm goes off. She gets up early because they have not had power for two weeks so she needs to make a fire to boil water for breakfast and coffee for the family. She drives to work through the Johannesburg suburbs on roads so pot-holed, you would think you were in deepest, darkest Africa. She passes a train station that no longer has running trains. She stops at a traffic light that has not worked in months. When she finally arrives at the office, she has already paid the corruption tax four times.By now you should be asking yourself, ‘Where did the money go?’The money that was supposed to build power stations that work, roads that do not eat tyres, trains that actually run, taps that deliver clean water. Hundreds of billions of rand, collected from your taxes, your VAT, your fuel levies, your rates. Money that was supposed to build a country. GONE!This is not a political debate. It is about something far more basic: the gap between the life you are living right now, and the life you would be living if the money meant for infrastructure and services had not been stolen by people who were supposed to serve you.Click below to read the full story;https://lnkd.in/dFcc8ds3

We Are Paying With Lives

On 30 March this year, Emfuleni municipality finance official and mother-of-one, Martha Rantsofu, was shot dead outside a tyre shop. In broad daylight, and just metres from a police station. She was 39 years old.As a country, we are sadly all too familiar with shocking news like this, but Martha’s murder wasn’t “just” another random killing.Despite Emfuleni spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni denying Rantsofu was a whistleblower, Klippies Kritzinger, CEO of Vaal Business Corporation, said she told him she had uncovered fraudulent payments, procurement irregularities, missing municipal funds, and allegations of officials erasing debt in exchange for bribes.The Political Killings Task Team is now investigating her murder, which adds weight to the widely-held belief that she was murdered because she was a whistleblower.As I write, and despite mounting calls for the swift arrests of those responsible, none have yet been made. News reports quote the police as saying, “a high-level investigation is underway,” but that the official motive for Martha’s murder remains unclear.Click below to read the full articlehttps://lnkd.in/dfFwPkCe

With the South African Post Office, the cheque’s always in the mail…

Let’s be honest, if the South African Post Office was one of your employees, you would have fired it a long time ago.
For a start, it missed all but two of its 15 performance targets for the year ending 31 March 2025. Targets such as generating R1 million in warehousing revenue, growing logistics revenue by 16% and establishing an eCommerce mall to support small business development. It also failed to hit a key KPI of resolving all customer complaints recorded at the call centre within seven days.
 
It even, wait for it, failed to achieve the regulated mail delivery standard. Which drops the average South African squarely in the doo doo when it comes to receiving anything through the post. It’s not as though we’re exactly spoiled for choice for other options.
 
And in some case, there simply isn’t another option, thanks to the Post Office’s licence, which grants it “exclusivity of reserved postal services where it has monopoly over sub 1 kg items.”
 
I mean, you essentially had ONE JOB, Post Office…
 
Click the link to read the full story - https://lnkd.in/dzGnqesq

From Joburg to Woe-burg – Is there still hope for the City of Gold?

Anyone who loves Springbok rugby will be familiar with the Bomb Squad – the brainchild of head coach Rassie Erasmus that sees the Bok bench heavily laden (6-2 or sometimes even 7-1) with massive forwards. The idea is genius in its simplicity: let the starting line-up of forwards empty their tanks in the first half, and then substitute the entire lot with an intimidating group of world class replacements for the last 40 minutes.The latest “copy-cat” however, comes from a very different – and entirely unexpected – quarter.Johannesburg Mayor, Dada Morero, in his State of the City Address earlier this month, outlined a turnaround plan to tackle the city’s collapsing infrastructure, which included the introduction of a specialised “bomb squad.”As I’ve highlighted before in a previous article, our once proud and beautiful City of Gold is tarnished almost beyond recognition and needs around R200 billion just to affect necessary repairs to roads and other infrastructure, and address the many other pressing issues facing the city.The mayor referred to Joburg’s “state of rot” and said, “we need extreme actions to resolve our challenges.”The so-called Bomb Squad, which, in the mayor’s words, is a “a high-powered implementation impact team,” is a key driver of these actions.He went on to say, “This bomb squad will be led by the ANC Veterans’ League boss Snuki Zikalala, and will remove constraints that impact the City’s ability to create the Joburg we want to see.”It all, as usual, sounds very promising. But it begs one critical question:What does Mayor Morero mean by “removing constraints?” As far as I can see, the main constraint is a crippling lack of available funds to fix the myriad problems.And I’m not sure how even the biggest, strongest and most muscly bomb squad can make that problem go away.It’s something the mayor acknowledges, if a little reluctantly.Click below to read the full article https://lnkd.in/drtuVssr

Burning Billions. What's the true cost of keeping South Africa's lights on?

Lies, damned lies, and loadshedding…“In another 18 months to two years, you will forget the challenges that we had with Eskom.”Cyril Ramaphosa, then Deputy President, September 2015.In every state of the nation address since 2018, Ramaphosa has boldly claimed we’d soon be looking at load-shedding in our rear-view mirrors.In May 2023, he told us the end of load-shedding “should be in sight soon.”In August 2023, he claimed the government was doing “great work” to fix Eskom, and promised “by 2024, the energy crisis will be over.”The fact that Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, in a metaphorical rending of garments, said, “I’m the minister and I bear the responsibility, working with Eskom, so there’s no other person but myself. The buck stops here,” was little comfort to those struggling to keep businesses afloat, and families fed.South Africans are becoming mighty tired of ministers writing cheques they can’t cash.Click below to read the full articlehttps://lnkd.in/dCaWkmwN

Wage Rage - South Africa’s civil servants earn more than our doctors

South Africa’s civil servants are the highest paid in the world, when taken as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).According to studies by the IMF and World Bank, paying our civil servants consumes between 12% and 13% of GDP – that’s 3.5% higher than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average, and significantly more than economically strong countries such as the UK, US, Japan and Australia.In the past 30 years, the government salary bill has exploded from R55 billion in 1995 to R724 billion in the 2023/24 financial year – far above normal, inflation-related increases.Much of this happened under Jacob Zuma’s watch, and it put massive pressure on government finances. In fact, the state had to borrow money to fund this inflated wage bill, increasing government debt from R627 billion to R5.21 trillion in fifteen years.Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/dFJ72wjD

The Rise of Deepfakes: It's Time For A Reality Check

You may or may not have heard of the Gorilla Experiment.
Regular readers of my articles will remember it highlights what scientists call selective perception – the tendency of our brains to slightly close the curtains on the windows of our minds and focus only on the thing we expect to see/hear/experience at that moment.
In itself, selective perception is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a critical function of our brains. 

Enough is Enough - The Time to Take A Stand Against Corruption is Now

While assassinated whistleblower Babita Deokaran is surely turning in her grave, countless corrupt individuals continue to dance on it.
Whoever coined the phrase “Crime doesn’t pay” clearly never lived in South Africa.
The injustice of the situation is absolute, and the insult to Babita Deokaran’s memory is breathtaking.