Talks between taxi association and SA Taxi Finance Holdings broke down
By Ihsaan Haffejee
15 June 2017 Trucks were used to block the N1 highway near Allendale.
According to police spokesperson Wayne Minnaar, the trucks were hijacked
and the keys stolen so that they could not be moved. Photo supplied
Thousands of commuters across Gauteng were left stranded after
mini-bus taxis of The South African National Taxi Association (Santaco)
embarked on protest action by blocking major highways between
Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The protest follows the collapse of negotiations between the taxi
association and South African Taxi Finance Holdings over the cost
of Toyota Quantum vehicles.
“Some members of the taxi industry have been hard hit by the high
interest rate of 28% and the R15,000 per month payment. We can’t take it
anymore. There will be no taxis running and we advise commuters to seek
alternative transport,” said the spokesperson for Santaco Gauteng Ralph
Jones.
National highways including the N1, N3 and N12 were blocked as well
as secondary roads that could have been used as alternatives. In the
south of Johannesburg, there almost no taxis operating. The N1 at the
Grasmere toll as well as sections of the Golden Highway were cut off to
traffic. Commuters were left stranded on the side of the road.
Jeremy Xaba from Finetown was worried about missing a day of work and
was searching for an alternative way to get to Johannesburg. “I am
doing small work on construction, but you know if you don’t pitch for
work you do not get paid. So I’m going to lose out on a day’s wages if I
can’t get to Jo’burg,” said Xaba.
Other commuters were seen walking towards the highway in the hope of
getting lifts from passing motorists, while many gave up and headed back
home.
Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Wayne
Minnaar said: “Quite a few trucks were hijacked and keys were stolen for
the purpose of blocking the highway. This happened by the Allandale
off-ramp‚” said Minnaar.
The bus services for the Gautrain were also suspended because of
taxis blocking the entrances to stations and employees unable to reach
their workstations.
The Gauteng Department of Education also urged parents to keep their
children home for their safety, and said it had told principals to give
children who could not make exams today another opportunity. Gauteng MEC
for Education Panyaza Lesufi said that no child would be penalised for
not making it to school.
The University of South Africa (UNISA) said it was aware that some
students were unable to reach their exam venues on time and students
would be allowed to apply to defer their exams.
SAPS Gauteng spokesperson Kay Makhubela said that the police
impounded 18 taxis that were blocking the highway on the N1 near
Allandale.
The Santaco leadership said it would be mobilising drivers on a march
to the SA Taxi Finance offices in Midland today, where a memorandum
would be given to the directors citing its grievances.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
This is a Foundation Essay for The Conversation Global. Our series of Foundation Essays provide an in-depth investigation of a particular global challenge. In this piece, Andrea Saltelli asks what’s behind the worldwide crisis in science.
Worldwide, we are facing a joint crisis in science and expertise. This has led some observers to speak of a post-factual democracy – with Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump the results.
Meanwhile, science has been challenged as an authoritative source of knowledge for both policy and everyday life, with noted major misdiagnoses in fields as disparate as forensics, preclinical and clinical medicine, chemistry, psychology and economics.
Perhaps nutrition is the field most in the spotlight. It took several decades for cholesterol to be absolved and for sugar to be re-indicted as the more serious health threat, thanks to the fact that the sugar industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s, which successfully cast doubt on the hazards of sucrose – while promoting fat as the dietary culprit.
Destructive trend
We think of science as producing truths about the universe. Triumphs of science, like the recent confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves and the landing of a probe on a comet flying around the sun, bring more urgency to the need to reverse the present crisis of confidence in other areas of the scientific endeavour.
Science is tied up with our ideas about democracy – not in the cold war sense of science being an attribute of open democratic societies, but because it provides legitimacy to existing power arrangements: those who rule need to know what needs to be done, and in modern society this knowledge is provided by science. The science-knowledge-power relationship is one of the master narratives of modernity, whose end was announced by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard four decades ago. The contemporary loss of trust in expertise seems to support his views.
Still, techno-science is at the heart of contemporary narratives: the convictions that we will innovate our way out of the economic crisis, overcome our planetary boundaries, achieve a dematerialised economy, improve the fabric of nature, and allow universal well-being.
The appeal of reassuring narratives about our future depends on our trust in science, and the feared collapse of this trust will have far-reaching consequences.
The cult of science is still adhered to by many. Most of us need to believe in a neutral science, detached from material interests and political bargaining, capable of discovering the wonders of nature. For this reason, no political party has so far argued for a reduction in science funding on the basis of the crisis in science, but this threat could soon materialise.
The crisis in science is not a surprise – some scholars of history and philosophy of science had predicted it four decades ago.
Derek de Solla Price, the father of scientometrics – literally the scientific study of science – feared the quality crisis. He noted in his 1963 book, Little Science, Big Science, that the exponential growth of science might lead to saturation, and possibly to senility (an incapacity to progress any further). For contemporary philosopher Elijah Millgram, this disease takes the form of disciplines becoming alien to one another, separated by different languages and standards.
Jerome R Ravetz noted in 1971 that science is a social activity, and that changes in the social fabric of science – once made up of restricted clubs whose members were linked by common interests and now a system ruled by impersonal metrics - would entail serious problems for its quality assurance system and important repercussions for its social functions.
Ravetz, whose analysis of science’s contradictions has continued to the present day, noted that neither a technical fix would remedy this, nor would a system of enforced rules. Scientific quality is too delicate a matter to be resolved with a set of recipes.
A perfect illustration of his thesis is the recent debate about the P value – commonly used in experiments to judge the quality of scientific results. The inappropriate use of this technique has been strongly criticised, provoking alarm – and statements of concern – at the highest levels in the profession of statistics. But no clear agreement has been reached on the nature of the problem, as shown by the high number of critical comments in the ensuing debate.
Philip Mirowski’s recent book offers a fresh reading of the crisis in terms of the commercialisation of science’s production. Scientific research deteriorates when it is entrusted to contract research organisations, working on a short leash held by commercial interests.
Science-based narratives and the social functions of science will then lose their appeal. No solution is possible without a change in the prevailing vision and ideology, but can scientific institutions offer one?
The supremacy of expertise
Here the stakes are high and perverse systems of incentives entrenched. Many scientists are highly defensive of their work. They adhere to the deficit model, in its standard or glorified form, whereby if only people understood science – or at least understood who the true experts were – then progress would be achieved.
Scientists often subscribe to the myth of one science, and promote actions for or against a policy based on their position as scientists. In a recent case, more than 100 Nobel laureates took a side in a dispute over a genetically modified rice, a rather complex case where more prudence would have been in order.
Climate is another battlefield where the idea that “science has spoken” or “doubt has been eliminated” have become common refrains.
There is an evident tension between this view and what takes place in the arena of evidence-based (or informed) policy. Here legislation developed to fight racketeering is used by activists and scientists to target their peers in the opposing faction, in hot fields from climate to biotechnologies.
The science of economics is still in control of the master narrative. The same craft that failed to predict the latest great recession – and worse, directly engineered it thanks to its financial recklessness – is still dictating market-based approaches to overcome present challenges. By its own admission, the discipline, which supported austerity policies with a theorem based on a coding error, has little clue as to what to do if the global economy will face another downturn.
The economic historian Erik Reinert notes that economics is the only discipline impermeable to paradigm shifts. For economics, he says, the earth is round and flat at the same time, all the time, with fashions changing in cyclical shifts.
One can see in the present critique of finance – as something having outgrown its original function into a self-serving entity – the same ingredients of the social critique of science.
Thus the ethos of “little science” reminds us of the local banker of old times. Scientists in a given field knew one another, just as local bankers had lunch and played golf with their most important customers. The ethos of techno-science or mega-science is similar to that of the modern Lehman bankers, where the key actors know one another only through performance metrics.
Change takes place at an ever-accelerating pace; the number of initiatives to heal science’s diseases multiply every day from within the house of science.
Increasingly, philosophers warn that not all is well in our ever-stronger symbiotic relation with technology. The effects of innovation on jobs, on inequality, on our way of knowing and of making sense of reality, are all becoming problematic. Everything moves at a pace that frustrates our hope of control.
What can we do?
If this wave of concern will merge with the science crisis, then important facets of our modernity might be up for discussion. Will this lead to a new humanism as hoped by some philosophers or to a new dark age, as feared by others?
The conflicts described thus far involve values in conflict, of the type dealt with in something called “post-normal science”. Many dislike the name of this approach for its postmodern associations, but appreciate its model of extended peer communities. These communities bring together experts from across disciplines – as different disciplines see through different lenses – and anyone affected or concerned with the subject at hand, with possibly different views about what the problem is.
Today, extended peer communities are set up by some activist citizens and scientists. This format encourages a humbler, more reflexive attitude. It suggests to citizens a more critical and participatory attitude in matters of science and technology, with less deference towards experts.
If this process leads to reform in science and challenges the monopoly of knowledge and authority – as to some extent we see happening in health - then we might go some way to rebuilding trust in one of the most important facets of modern life.
On Christmas Day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used his website to tell the world that he was not an atheist any more. In this way, the billionaire used Facebook to express his feelings about religion, like many social media users before him.
My research shows how debates about religion on social networks bring out passionate emotions in users. I found that conservative Christians who discuss contentious issues about religion on Facebook debates often do so in emotionally charged ways.
It seems that simply being religious may sometimes trigger particular emotions and reactions to the topic of religion. But it is not only devoutly religious media users who get pulled into debating religion online or feel very strongly about it: hardcore atheists may also harbour strong emotions about religion, or rather, anti-religion. Discussing topics of faith can strike very close to home for those who strongly identify as either religious or anti-religious.
As a whole, Facebook users who passionately discuss religion online seem to be triggered by their own identity (as religious or non-religious) and an emotional involvement with the theme of religion.
Religion is increasingly viewed as highly politicised, not least due to the way that it is frequently covered in the news. Numerous studies have shown that news stories with emotional cues tend to both gain audience attention and prolong audience engagement.
It may therefore come as no surprise that online debates about religion are packed with emotional cues that evoke strong reactions from those who participate in them. This sets the stage for passionate online debates.
Of course, emotional conflicts are not new, and social media is not the only thing that makes emotions fly high and low.
Studies of the way media audiences may shape conflicts are still relatively scarce. But by taking several of the existing studies and comparing them with my own ethnographic study of a Norwegian Facebook group whose members wish to promote the visibility of Christianity in the public sphere, it is possible to discern a number of similarities in how media users “perform conflict” in emotive ways.
Across several types of conflicts in Northern Europe, media users respond in unmistakably similar ways: by claiming to be the silent majority; by making moral and normative claims about right and wrong; and resorting to blame-and-shame tactics. Even the same type of vocabulary is in circulation across many issues.
The emotionally charged way that media users engage with a variety of conflicts points to very similar mechanisms that serve to amplify and multiply conflicts, for instance, through scapegoating.
Typically, media users are highly expressive of anger, which they direct at the perceived enemy, that is, whoever is deemed responsible for an intolerable state of affairs. The anger is often set off by trigger themes and emotional cues, and leads to escalation of the conflict itself.
Triggering emotions
In Europe, religion is a common trigger theme, but so are immigration and climate change. These issues all seem to consistently fire up the public, and are more likely to induce spiralling arguments and the escalation of conflicts.
Emotional cues are particular words or phrases that serve to heighten emotional involvement. For instance, calling politicians “dictators” or stating that one’s opponents’ are “in pact with the devil” or calling them “imbeciles” can heighten the emotional stakes in a debate.
Media users regularly vent their anger in charged emotional ways. gfkDSGN/pixabay
One of my most intriguing findings was the discovery that media users employ very similar terminology to attract attention from other debaters and to incite further involvement in the debate.
Employing emotionally charged phrasing, such as calling the unwanted status quo “a tumour”, “toxic disease”, or “poison” are suitable phrases to get other social media users’ blood pressure soaring. Near identical terminology that describes a problem as “disease” and those responsible as part of “a dictatorship” or “the likes of North Korea”, is surprisingly common across all the cases of mediatized conflict I compared.
Media users also responded in very similar ways to thematically different conflicts. The one thing that all of these conflicts had in common though, was that they dealt with trigger themes. Trigger themes have the power to ignite feelings, at times explosive ones.
Raging against the machine
Not only is there an omnipresence of emotion in many online debates about religion and other contentious themes, but the presence of anger is pretty striking too. Those who rage against the machine tend to scapegoat a variety of groups, such as politicians, immigrants or Muslims.
Scholars Asimina Michaeliou and Hans-Jörg Trenz use the term “enraged fan” to describe the angriest of the angry, the ones who are livid about nearly everything. But there are other shades of angry.
In the Norwegian Facebook group, depending on who is raging - the anger is directed at politicians, all religions, Islam or Muslims, secularism, atheism and at times simply the daftness of co-debaters. Put together, all this rage leaves a pretty obvious footprint on the online discussions in the Facebook group.
Still, I believe there is a danger in focusing too much on anger. In my reading, anger may be the emotion that is most clearly expressed, but more complex emotions may well lie at the heart of the enraged utterances.
Bad religion?
Online conflicts with inherent trigger themes, such as those that tug at core religious and identity issues, tend to evoke emotional responses, which, in turn, inspire social media users to perform the conflict in ways that multiply the dispute or disputes.
My study concludes that there needs to be a trigger theme for social media users to perform in particular ways, but that the trigger theme need not be religion.
Trigger themes appear to be an integral part of the dynamics of online conflicts and inspire a heightened state of emotion among audiences, regardless of the topic. In fact, media users appear to react to conflicts in remarkably similar emotionally charged ways, whatever the subject of debate. Religion is just another trigger for the emotions we express online.
The larger grain borer beetle attacks crops like maize and cassava, threatening food security. Shutterstock
This article is the first in a series The Conversation Africa is running on invasive species.
Let’s say you’re travelling from Uganda to South Africa for business. You finally arrive at your hotel after a long day and decide to change before dinner. You unlock and unzip your luggage, but there’s something in your bag that you didn’t pack. As you reach for a clean shirt, a moth flies out. Did that come with you all the way from Uganda? It’ll be fine, right? Surely, something so small won’t cause any harm.
Species are intentionally or accidentally transported by humans between continents to regions where they are not native. With the help of humans or by natural means like flight, these alien species can also spread within continents.
Their spread within continents can be rapid, affecting both the ecology as well as societies and the economy. Unfortunately, it’s really challenging to prevent species from spreading. Given the vast amount of people and goods that are transported between and around continents they can easily be moved across oceans as well as between countries.
The spread of alien species within Africa is increasing. Since 2000 more alien insect pests of eucalyptus trees have spread to other African countries from South Africa, than have been introduced to these African countries from other continents. To manage the spread of these alien species countries need to co-operate, communicate and share information and skills..
The spread of alien species
Many alien plants and animals have been introduced to Africa from other regions and then have spread from country to country, often having devastating effects.
Take the larger grain borer beetle, (Prostephanus truncatus) which is thought to have arrived on the continent in imported grain from Mexico and central America. The beetle was introduced to Tanzania before 1984, Togo before 1981 and Guinea before 1987. It then spread across the continent and within 20 years could be found further south in South Africa.
The beetle attacks crops such as maize and cassava, threatening food security and the livelihoods of the poor. Infestations often destroy maize that’s been stored by farmers, forcing them to buy maize as well as lose income they could have earned from selling any excess.
But alien species don’t just arrive from abroad. Many that are native to parts of Africa have also spread to countries on the continent where they are not native.
An example is the fish commonly known as the Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) which is native to rivers on the east coast of southern Africa. Fishermen have transported the Mozambique tilapia to other areas and it is now found in river systems in southern and western South Africa and Namibia.
The Mozambique tilapia is a popular species for fishing but it can pose a threat to native fish and has been responsible for the disappearance of native species in some regions.
The spread of alien species within Africa is by no means a new thing. For instance, the bur clover (Medicago polymorpha), a plant from northern Africa, might have been accidentally transported by humans to South Africa as early as 760 AD.
A high and increasing threat
Recently a number of alien species have spread extremely rapidly across the continent, posing a particularly high threat to food security and livelihoods.
The fall armyworm, native to the Americas, was first recorded in west and central Africa in early 2016 and then in South Africa in January 2017. Shutterstock
One is a caterpillar known as the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda). The species, native to the Americas, was first recorded in west and central Africa in early 2016 and then in South Africa in January 2017.
The moths of the armyworm are strong fliers and the species may have spread through flight to South Africa from other African countries. Although the species attacks a wide range of crops, it poses a particularly serious threat to grain farmers. It is extremely difficult to manage.
Another example is a wasp known as the bluegum chalcid (Leptocybe invasa), which is native to Australia. In 2000 it was detected in Israel and shortly afterwards it was reported in Uganda and Kenya. From there it spread rapidly to many African countries including Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Tanzania and was finally detected in South Africa in 2007. The insect probably reached Israel on live plant material and spread into Africa the same way, or was carried by people travelling between countries.
The wasp causes swelling or growths on eucalyptus trees, which can lead to decreased growth and tree death. As eucalyptus trees are an important source of income and fuel, this species could have an impact on the livelihoods of locals in these countries.
Preventing the introduction and spread
Once a species is introduced to one African country it’s highly likely it will spread to others on the continent because borders checks are weak.
The introduction and spread of species could be reduced if countries introduced biosecurity systems. These are used extensively in countries like Australia and New Zealand and involve using technology to check for alien species when people and goods enter a country. In Australia this involves inspecting goods, vehicles and luggage before they enter the country.
But even these systems aren’t a guarantee that species won’t spread. African countries would need to work together and share information and skills. This would also allow countries to prepare for the arrival of species, and to draw up plans to reduce their impact.
This is a tall order. But as a country’s defence against alien species introductions is only as strong as that of its neighbours, such action would benefit all of the countries involved.
Modern societies are usually defined as relatively unreligious, dominated by money and power rather than belief in gods. This idea marks them out as modern when compared to traditional societies as well as highlighting the many issues of modernity including capitalism, growth, overproduction and climate change.
But why are we so sure that secularisation and the dominance of politics and economics are in the DNA of modern societies? Our answer to this question defines and confine our problem-solving ability.
A recent article in the journal Futures shows that most strategic management tools and models of the future have a strong bias towards politics, economics and science, thus systematically neglecting religion, law, art, or education.
Given this bias is unconscious and unjustified, we risk constantly looking at solutions to wrong problems.
We undertook big data research on the digital database created by the Google Books project, which has scanned and digitised over 25 million of the estimated 130 million books ever published worldwide.
To systematically screen this huge collection of text, we used the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a free online graphing tool that charts annual word counts as found in the Google Books project. The Ngram Viewer comes with an intuitive interface where users can enter keywords, choose the sample period, define the desired language area, and modulate the shape of the graphical output.
One of our challenges was to find the right keywords. For this, we used an open source tool by Jan Berkel.
The result was a list of the 10,000 most frequently used words and strings in books published between 1800 and 2000. This period covers a considerable proportion of the era commonly referred to as modernity and is regarded as reliable data by Google.
We repeated the procedure until we had compiled one list each for English, Spanish, Russian, French, German, and Italian. We then screened the word frequency lists for terms that make unambiguous and distinct keywords. Money or God make good examples of such keywords, whereas we omitted terms such as tax or constitution as they refer to both politics and economy or law.
Finally, we entered stacks of the five most frequent religious, political, economic, and other pertinent keywords to run comparative analyses of word frequency time-series plots as displayed by the Google Ngram Viewer.
The figure below shows word frequencies of combined religious, political, economic, scientific, and mass media-related keywords in the English-language Google Books corpus between 1800 and 2000.
Since we analysed a considerable proportion of humanity’s collective memory between 1800 and 2000, and since the outcomes of our research resemble classical electroencephalography (EEG) recordings (see figure), we also linked our research into the global brain discourse.
The basic idea here is that the worldwide network of information and communication technology acts as the global brain of planet earth. In this sense, our electroencephalographic big data internet research is the first example of a global brain wave measurement, which was heralded by Peter Russell in his 1982 book The Global Brain.
Secularisation, much politics, and no capitalism
Looking at the global brain wave recordings (figure below), we find that our method performs well in capturing the expected decline of religion (orange line), which, by the way, is less significant in Spanish and Italian.
The chart for English language shows notable interactions between the two world wars and the significance of politics (blue line), and we find similar interactions in other areas, too.
In the Russian segment, the importance of politics is considerably increased during the (post-) October Revolution period and even more dramatically so in the context of the second world war.
Word frequencies of combined religious (orange), political (blue), economic (purple), scientific (red), and mass media-related keywords (green) in the English-language Google Books corpus between 1800 and 2000. Authors Google Books Ngram Viewer query, Author provided
In the French case, the years around the first world war see a steep rise in the importance of politics, whereas the interaction during the second world war is much more moderate. The German data follow a similar pattern as the French, but exhibit the dramatic rise of politics in the post-second world war era, peaking at around 1970.
The rise of the importance of the mass media corresponds to the timeline of the information age (green line). What we do not see, however, is the dominant position of economy (purple line) in modern societies. There is a short period between 1910 and 1950 where economy was second to a much stronger politics.
This image of a war economy is the closest approximation to a capitalist situation to be found in the English segment, in which the economy is outperformed by science (red line) soon after the second world war and by mass media in the 1990s, ranking fourth at the end of the sample period.
There’s no sign of the golden age of capitalism in the 19th century either, as narratives of the Industrial Revolution would lead us to believe.
The charts for the other languages also do not support the idea of modern societies as being capitalist or otherwise dominated by the economy. The only exception is the French segment, where economy has been second again to a much stronger politics since the end of the second world war.
Economy ranks third in the Russian segment only from the late 1950s to the 1990s and in the German segment not before the 1970s, and well below par in the Spanish and Italian segments.
New god of modern societies
Our big data research hence suggests that modern societies are heavily politicised; most investigated societies are clearly secularized, with reservations applying to the societies where Spanish and Italian are spoken; and that science plays a remarkable role, ranking second in the English-, Russian-, and German-language areas in the second half of the 20th century.
None of the investigated societies is dominated by the economy, with the minor reservation discussed above applying only to French. Even this finding reflects only the idea of capitalism as an economy-based political ideology, not the idea of the primacy of the economy.
The major finding of our research is that political power rather than economics has dethroned religious faith as the dominant guiding principle between 1800 and 2000.
Our data definitely suggests that, despite all contradicting ideologies or habits of mind, the economy is of only moderate importance to modern societies. This implies that, in the future, we may wish to think twice before we continue to label our societies as money-driven, economy-biased, or simply capitalist.
One major shortcoming of our research is that it focused only on books. But this focus is adequate as the ideas of capitalism and the primacy of economy have been developed precisely in the books we investigated.
The idea that the definitions of modern societies as capitalist or economy-dominated are probably rooted in misconceptions rather than modern scientific worldviews may be counter-intuitive or even shocking for both capitalists and anti-capitalists.
Acknowledgement: Our research was first presented at 2016 City University of Hong Kong Workshop on Computational Approaches to Big Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities. I am grateful to Jonathan Zhu and the entire team of the Web Mining Lab at the CityU Department of Media and Communication for the invitation to Hong Kong as well as for valuable feedback.
If this process leads to reform in science and challenges the monopoly of knowledge and authority – as to some extent we see 
This article has been co-published with 
This is a tall order. But as a country’s defence against alien species introductions is only as strong as that of its neighbours, such action would benefit all of the countries involved.
Acknowledgement: Our research was first presented at 2016 City University of Hong Kong Workshop on Computational Approaches to Big Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities. I am grateful to Jonathan Zhu and the entire team of the 
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