London Bridge attack: too right 'enough is enough' – but Britain must tackle uncomfortable questions

“Enough is enough” announced the British prime minister, Theresa May, outside Downing Street in the aftermath of the third terror attack in the UK in as many months.

Lasting change means moving beyond the rhetoric that follows attacks. Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/PA Images

Well I agree. Enough is enough. So maybe we could start by bypassing the call for peaceful vigils – beloved by those who are keener for us to turn the other cheek than to have the “difficult and embarrassing conversations” she now calls for? This is not to dismiss the hurt of those directly affected, but rather to bypass the encouragement of ersatz emotions by those who might prefer us to remain passive and disengaged.

Enough is enough, but what next?
Andrew Matthews/PA Wire/PA Images

Rather than being “united … in horror and mourning”, as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, consoled in her virtue-signalling statement after these attacks, maybe it is time we focused on becoming united in purpose – a purpose that ought not just reflect the “determination” to defeat terrorism as she narrowly defined it? A purpose that might offer something beyond terrorism for us all to focus on and present something more visionary to engage with – including for the nihilistic few to whom we have evidently failed to impart any sense of belief and belonging?

Sixteen years on from 9/11, might it not be time to move beyond the same old calls for more security that emanate from the usual suspects in self-interested quarters at such times? More recently, this has been augmented by demands, including by the prime minister herself, that the internet and social media platforms be censored and policed too. But the fact is that if you or I were to trawl through as many jihadist websites as we could find, we still would not turn into the morally bankrupt murderers that are committing these atrocities. This should give the lie to naive models of media influence impacting on hapless minds.

Likewise, to suggest that British foreign policy is somehow responsible for all that we see, or that supposedly understandable grievances emanate from the experience of racism and exclusion at home, is also to miss what matters most.

Britain has both overtly and covertly interfered in the affairs of others overseas for as long as I can remember, and well before that – usually much more forcefully and murderously than in the ways it does at present. That there is space for some kind of response to this does not dictate the nihilistic form that this now takes. That is what is new today and which most needs answering by those fond of such simplistic platitudes. To think in these terms holds us all back, including those elsewhere who are genuinely interested in liberation.

No racist society

Maybe it is time for some to note too, that British society is not the racist catastrophe presumed of those who prefer to talk up Islamophobia at such times. The new chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, appears to believe that we are all just one terror incident away from launching a pogrom against the Muslim community when she announced that: “The last thing we need is people … taking out their frustrations on people in other communities.” Where is her evidence for that? Not just self-reported slights at presumed offence and injustices, but serious incidents – incidents serious enough to warrant prosecution and conviction for an act of physical violence?

When I was young, I remember friends at school advising that they were going to beat up members of minority groups on a Friday night and inquiring whether others might care to join them. We don’t live in that world anymore and a good thing too. Good riddance to racism and homophobia. But at the same time, the race relations industry and others appear to have gone into overdrive turning every verbal mishap into a recordable offence. Can we talk about this too now?

What we do have is a problem that stretches far beyond terrorism and that will require a national conversation going much further than that envisaged by those proposing this today – a conversation that addresses the disconnection of the many from the political process, as well as the often self-indulgent engagement of the few within it. A conversation that challenges the moral capitulation of the old right as much as the political correctness of the old left.

One that asks why it is that, in an age when – despite there never before having been so many young people having so much focus placed on their emotions within their education – there are still a small, but growing, number of these who appear unable to handle setbacks and disappointment such that, at the margins, a handful think little of acting in this way.

We live in a time when many are told that they may cause offence if they express what they genuinely believe. When rather than engaging in robust debate, we are encouraged not to interrogate the beliefs and behaviours of others – and government legislates accordingly in the name of preventing terrorism. It is a world that the authorities – from all sides – that are calling for change today have helped to create. And this, just a few days away from a general election that ought to have encouraged just such debates to the surface. “Enough is enough”? Too right.

Bill Durodie, Professor and Chair of International Relations, University of Bath

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Dots on Naspers DSTV connected – conclusion – Naspers DSTV is captured

Yesterday I asked everybody to e-mail MultiChoice DStv (email – help@dstv.com) and requested them to ask Dstv if it is possible to have any DStv package without the inclusion of ANC 7 Zupta TV [channel 405 on their platform].

My e-mail also went in. The reply that came back was that it is not possible to have ANY DStv package without the inclusion of ANC 7 Zupta TV. Not even the cheapest one!

I have already been reliably informed that Multichoice DStv is paying the Guptas for the “rights “to broadcast ANC 7 on their platform. How much I am not sure, but the amount will be millions annually.

Therefore, we as subscribers get our annual DStv subscription raised every year so the Guptas can be paid millions per year, while the Guptas use that station as an anti-white and pro state capture propaganda mouthpiece for the Guptas. ANC 7 is such a blatantly propagandistic disinformation and hate spreading TV station that even Hitler would be jealous.
Why you might ask. Here is the answer:

IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL ROLL OUT OF TV signals.

Actually, digitalization has not happened yet. We are years behind the international norm in this matter.

Why? Three words and three dots – Multichoice, Faith Muthambi, and Mad Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
A Little bit of background first:

The process of digital migration of TV signals will require set-top boxes for people not already using the DSTV decoder sets. This set top boxes can be either encrypted or unencrypted. If government policy allows for encrypted set top boxes, competitors to DSTV can then compete with DSTV on an equal footing, because competitors like e-tv would be able to also sign up customers and ask a fee to watch their channels, like DSTV has been doing for years.

If the set top boxes are unencrypted, it won’t is possible for competitors like E-tv to compete with DSTV because E-tv won’t is able to ask fees because the signal is unencrypted, everybody can see free. The result is DSTV keep their monopoly.

Faith Muthambi has been supporting unencrypted set top boxes for years, against ANC policy. She has been conspiring with mad Hlaudi in this.

DSTV bribed mad Hlaudi to support unencrypted set top boxes. DSTV negotiated an R 500 million plus deal over 5 years with the SABC for the SABC to provide particular content to a 24-hour news channel to the DSTV bouquet, and Mad Hlaudi made big money out of this, a total bonus of about R33 million for himself. Ironically, this deal was revealed by News24, also in the Naspers stable.

Clearly, MultiChoice did do deals with Faith Muthambi and Mad Hlaudi.

We know Faith Muthambi, and Mad Hlaudi do the Gupta’s bidding.

In the light of Naspers’s long-term strategy to maintain a monopoly and a captured TV viewing public, can it be any surprise that Multichoice DSTV is so desperate to keep ANC 7 IN EACH AND EVERY BOUQUET THEY OFFER?

Are you surprised now that DSTV is so loyal to the Gupta ANC 7 TV station?

Their dots connected. Actually, I am a Naspers shareholder through investment funds, but I will shine the light where the light needs to be shined. Because: I am uncaptured.

Opinion by Daniel Sutherland
Published on  South Africa Today – South Africa News

South Africa urgently needs to rethink its approach to housing

Protests over housing at, an informal settlement near Johannesburg.
EPA/Cornell Tukiri

The recent protests over housing shortages in Gauteng, South Africa’s richest province and economic hub, have put the spotlight on the problem and the role of the government in providing it.

Housing is a contentious political issue in the country. Strict social engineering during apartheid meant that black people were disadvantaged. Cities were racially divided, and the black population forced to live far from places of economic activity and without public amenities.

When it came into power in 1994 the new government tried to address these issues through various strategies, initially focusing on building houses, then attempting to shift the focus from “housing” to “human settlements”. A new plan was announced in 2004, designed to address problems arising from the policies of the first ten years of democracy.

But problems have persisted, leading to protests across the country. This article focuses on Gauteng where the housing backlog is big and tensions have been running high.

Gauteng has a backlog of a million houses. The problem has been exacerbated by budget cuts. In addition, it is said that more than 100 000 people move to Johannesburg a year, making it impossible to address the scale of demand.

Recent events seem to imply that the government may be resorting to short-term measures to pacify anger and protest. But a major overhaul of housing policy is what’s actually needed.

The government’s response to housing protests

Pinning down the exact size of the housing backlog is difficult. What’s clear is that the government’s ability to deliver has declined. Protesters point out that they have been on housing waiting lists for many years. Extreme frustration has given rise to violent protests which have been growing in intensity.

People are unhappy with unclear time frames about when developments will take place. Tired of empty promises, they now want “time lines and commitments”.

The Gauteng government initially responded by outlining the projects it was planning. But these longer term visions are starting to give way to unrealistic promises being made at community meetings. These include plans to initiate land distribution and housing projects as soon as next month.

The danger is that government runs the risk of deviating from designing innovative, lasting solutions. Despite claiming that it’s committed to changing the way in which it manages demand; the more vocal residents are, the more the pressure piles up to continue providing houses in the same way.

This further delays the need to shift its focus from greenfields, peripheral locations to “corridors” that connect different parts of the disjointed city.

Successes and failures

South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution emphasised the right of everyone to adequate housing. This has been reaffirmed in subsequent Constitutional Court judgements, such as the celebrated Grootboom Case of 2000.

The housing programme is based on the Reconstruction and Development Programme of 1994. “RDP” houses became a colloquial term for free houses provided by the government under a subsidy programme.

South Africa’s mass housing programme has been hugely successful in terms of the number of houses built: nearly four million “housing opportunities” – serviced stands, houses or social housing units – have been built since democracy in 1994.

Yet the supply of houses has not been able to keep up with the increase in demand in urban areas.

And the government’s approach has given rise to rows upon rows of “one-size-fits all” houses located at the periphery of cities, far from work opportunities and services, reinforcing apartheid’s spatial patterns.

While it’s acknowledged that the country must think beyond free houses, and that sustainable human settlements must include socio-cultural amenities and jobs, not much has been done to make this a reality.

Government is fully aware of this challenge. According to Paul Mashatile, the minister in charge of housing for Gauteng:

RDP houses used to be built far away from anything. Today we are bringing RDP, bonded houses and rental stock together. We want poor people to live in the same space as everyone else.

In a bid to achieve this objective, and to increase the supply of houses, two years ago the government announced a programme to deliver mega housing projects. These and other government plans will, over the next few years, see people being housed in new developments.

But corridor developments and mega projects bring new layers of complexity. Can these be managed? Can demand be addressed and anger reduced? Can this be done fast enough?

Time for change

Models of delivery can’t continue to depend on the government. Instead, it should see its role as facilitating a diverse and multifaceted approach to ensure the involvement of many role players. This would result in different types of housing products and housing delivery methods that are less reliant on subsidies.

There are potential solutions that the government could pursue. These include:

• Rethinking government’s role as the sole funder. Diverse funding streams and the involvement of a range of stakeholders would allow for low cost and affordable housing to be an integral part of all city developments in well located, mixed income, mixed function, mixed community settings.
• There should be a shift away from ownership and more focus on rental options. Private developers must be supported to operate in the field.
• Delivery needs to be quick and efficient with minimal bureaucracy and delay, and must acknowledge the social as well as the technical aspects of housing.
• Policymakers must revisit the questions of who should be targeted, what housing products should be delivered and how they should be delivered. For example, there needs to be a shift away from individual subsidies and products to collective models of housing.

There has been surprisingly little innovation in the field of housing. It’s time for that to change, before it’s too late.

Amira Osman, Associate Professor in Architecture, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

As Trump smacks the climate, world must do better to save planet

As Donald Trump’s America drops out of the Paris Agreement, it’s high time to ask whether conventional approaches to sustainable development are enough to deal with the multiple crises facing the world.

A shift to a “green economy” is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But more is needed to build truly sustainable economies, which not only curb emissions, but also drastically reduce all the negative impacts on nature and society.

In my new book, Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth, I argue that the climate crisis should be seen as an opportunity to redirect our development trajectory away from increasing consumerism. We need to shift towards a much more intelligent economy rather than continuous exploitation of humans and nature.

Achieving such a “wellbeing economy” would be the best way to demonstrate how backward and self-defeating Trump’s strategy is.

Beyond consumerist growth

Since the 1950s development has been closely associated with continuous economic growth. While this has generated unprecedented consumption in the West and some emerging economies, it has also caused serious concerns among the scientific community and society at large.

In what has been termed “The Great Acceleration”, skyrocketing consumption has caused a massive increase in polluting emissions. But there is more: water use has multiplied and marine fish capture has grown exponentially, along with ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, depletion of natural resources and soil erosion.

Coupled with climate change, all these processes threaten not only further economic development, but our very existence on this planet. Besides all sorts of environmental problems, such consumption has also caused inequalities, stress, waste and a growing number of social tensions.

The concept of “decoupling” aims to address some of these problems. It suggests that the connection between growth and environmental degradation can be delinked by introducing clean technologies and renewable energy sources.

The decoupling promise has been the cornerstone of America’s climate change policy in the past few years. So much so that former US president Barack Obama has presented it as the silver bullet. He published an article in the journal Science arguing that the

decoupling of energy sector emissions and economic growth should put to rest the argument that combating climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.

Obama is right: fighting climate change need not imply a lower standard of living. There are good reasons to believe that a truly “green” economy, which puts people and planet at the core of development can massively improve our lives. It can deliver better jobs, reduce unnecessary expenses, help small businesses thrive and connect producers and consumers with a view to minimising waste.

But to do this, the world needs more than green technology. It needs to reassess what economic growth really means.

When growth outpaces efficiency

It is true that many production processes have become more efficient worldwide. Yet this hasn’t resulted in less overall pollution. This is because growth has outpaced efficiency by orders of magnitude. Most things we produce are now less polluting than before, but we produce many more things overall.

A massive conversion to renewable energies may result in “cleaner” growth. But there is a limit to the use of renewable energy sources too. Indeed, there is a finite surface to capture solar radiation, wind and tidal currents as well as geothermal forces.

There is also a limited amount of rare earths and other minerals, which are indispensable to build the PV panels and wind turbines that produce renewable energy. Moreover, the exploitation of such materials causes additional environmental damage. There is therefore an ultimate ceiling on “green” growth.

The other critical factor is that energy consumption is just one sub-section of the economy’s overall material consumption. The world consumes natural resources for many other things too, like buildings, roads, cars, computers and so on. Besides energy, the list of natural inputs to production is very long – from water to land, timber, iron, phosphates and so on. Once again, these are finite.

Without dismissing the importance of greening technologies, it must be recognised that many industrialised countries have been able to reduce their material consumption mostly because production processes have been outsourced to companies operating off-shore. In what looks more like a convenient facelift, the West appears to have shifted the responsibility for its pollution to the so-called developing world, mostly in East Asia, where the bulk of global goods are presently produced.

If such material impacts were charged to the countries where the final consumption takes place, many green economies wouldn’t look so green anymore.

The need for a different development model

But let’s imagine that it was possible to achieve a perfect separation between growth and all environmental consequences. This would still leave unaddressed a number of negative social effects that the current model of economic growth causes, from inequality to social stress and overworked people.

Unless the world develops social innovations and new governance models to radically alter how the economy operates, it may end up with traffic jams of electric cars, overworked assembly lines of PV panels and global conflicts to control the uranium fuelling the ever-increasing number of carbon-neutral nuclear plants.

Against this backdrop, the real focus of policy debate should be on the following question: Is the current approach to growth, which we are trying to ‘clean up’ through new technologies, really desirable in the first place?

The Sustainable Development Goals indeed demand change not only on climate policy but on a wide range of ecological and social issues, from inequality to social cohesion, from education to health care, from water to land, from fisheries to food. These are all issues that require a holistic approach. They can’t be fixed one at a time, as they are closely entangled and affect each other.

The good news

The good news is that, just as society has made technological advancements on clean energy, it has also developed new tools to build economies that increase human and ecosystem wellbeing while lowering material consumption.

As I show in my book, the world is replete with alternative business practices and socio-political innovations, which can help redesign our economies. They include cooperative banks, crowd-funding schemes and social benefit corporations.

The world is also seeing the emergence of community currencies, that is, forms of money that are controlled by the users themselves, either through local associations or through digital systems like the blockchain. And there is the continued rise of distributed renewable energy networks, open-source software and hardware as well as additive technologies (like 3D printing), which are revolutionising manufacturing.

All these processes are redefining the economy from the ground up, strengthening local economic production and supporting local businesses. They are not only creating good jobs, but they are reducing waste and other negative collateral effects by avoiding economies of scale and over production.

A truly green economy is a crucial step forward. But we can do better. Rather than holding on to a model of growth that wants us to maximise consumption at all costs, we need an economy that rewards optimisation. A balanced economy, centred on people and the planet.

Lorenzo Fioramonti, Full Professor of Political Economy, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Eight minutes on London Bridge: years of training led to lightning police response

Eight minutes. That is the length of time from the start of the London Bridge attack to the three terrorists being killed by armed police. The Metropolitan Police Service is rightly being heralded for the speed, courage and effectiveness of its members in ending a terrorist atrocity. But the success in their response which prevented more people from being injured and killed is, besides individual bravery, about learning from previous terrorist attacks, training and resources.

In the pre-9/11 era, the style of terrorist attacks frequently involved hostage takings in which terrorists sought to negotiate to achieve some set of aims, gain wider publicity and then try to get away with their lives. The most famous example of this was the attack at the Munich Olympics which stretched out for several days before ending with a botched rescue attempt at an airport and the killing of members of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists.

London has also witnessed hostage takings. In 1975, a six-day stand-off occurred on Balcombe Street in the city’s West End. Armed members of the Irish Republican Army, responsible for a series of bombings across London over previous months, took a couple hostage in their flat as they were being pursued by police. The hostage taking ended peacefully with the surrender of the terrorists.

More famously, in 1980 a group of six armed attackers stormed the Iranian Embassy in London taking 26 people hostage. After six days, they killed a hostage, prompting the Thatcher government to deploy the Special Air Service (SAS). The team of crack soldiers was famously caught on television going in to end the siege.

A new template for terrorism

The November 2008 attacks in Mumbai and the Paris attacks in December 2015 created a new template for the police to address. In both cases, teams of heavily armed and roving attackers attempted to kill as many people as possible while causing mayhem in the centres of major cities. Metropolitan Police specialists have been preparing for such a possibility for years now. Although, thankfully, Saturday night’s attack didn’t involve terrorists with firearms, those skills served them well in quickly dealing with the London Bridge attackers.
In 2010, a major police training exercise, also involving members of the SAS, took place in London with the aim of dealing with a Mumbai-style attack. A UK government spokeswoman noted at the time:

The police regularly train and exercise for a variety of scenarios with a variety of partners. It is right that we learn the lessons from previous incidents and that these inform and strengthen such procedures.

A helicopter prepares to land on London Bridge after the incident. PA

The 2015 Paris attacks only reinforced the need for police forces to be able to respond with speed and firepower. This approach was on display in London shortly after the Paris attacks, when officers carried out a training exercise involving a scenario in which armed terrorists attack a shopping mall, a scenario that occurred in Kenya in 2013. The emphasis was on the swiftness of the response and the need for officers to quickly engage the terrorists, even if that meant ignoring wounded civilians and putting themselves at greater risk.

A senior police officer made it clear that speed was of the essence: “We are asking them not to give first aid to the wounded. The most important thing is for them to get to the threat”.

But it’s also about having the resources to deploy against a threat. In January 2016, it was announced that 600 more armed officers would be deployed in London by the end of that year, boosting numbers to around 2,800 (or nearly 10% of the force). The number of armed police response vehicles was also doubled. More armed officers have been deployed in public places as well. These trends, in a country famously known for having unarmed police, will now only escalate.

The terrorism situation in the UK is clearly in flux. At the moment, the only pattern when it comes to terrorist attacks is that there is no pattern. The London attack appears to be in some ways a combination of the Westminster attack earlier in 2017 and the Lee Rigby murder of 2013. It differs greatly from the style of the May 22 Manchester attack. Nonetheless, members of the police will continue to prepare to deal with worst-case scenarios, based on previous attacks, that they hope will never materialise.
Published on The Conversation