Civil society organisations are holding polls at train stations
By Tariro Washinyira
6 June 2017
Members of the public cast their vote on Zuma’s presidency outside Observatory train station. Photo: Tariro Washinyira
On Monday and Tuesday, a coalition of civil society
organisations under Unite Behind and Save SA held a public poll at three
train stations – Observatory, Rosebank and Mowbray, asking people to
“vote Yes or No to the Jacob Zuma presidency”.
Since April, the two organisations have been holding the polls in
different areas – Maitland, Plumstead, Tableview and Khayelitsha.
Lynne Wilkinson, one of the organisers, said, “The intention is to
count the votes and present it in Parliament during the no-confidence
vote against Zuma, and say this is what people want.”
“Different organisations are fighting for health care, clean safe
toilets, social grants and education, but we believe Zuma is a barrier
because of his corruption,” she said.
Wilkinson said commuters had been responsive and took time to vote even though they were rushing to work or home.
After casting her vote, Ma Dlamini [she did not give her first name]
said Zuma should go because many black people were suffering.
David Lydall of Save SA said a few people, who want Zuma, were not
happy with the campaign, but a lot of people were saying he should go.
A number of civil society organisations support the “People’s Vote”.
These include: Alternative Information and Development Centre, Centre
for Environmental Rights, District 6 Working Committee, Equal Education,
Financial Sector Campaign Coalition, Ndifuna Ukwazi, PHA Food &
Farming Campaign, Right 2 Know, SAFCEI, SA First Forum, Save SA,
SECTION27, the Social Justice Coalition, Sonke Gender Justice, the
Treatment Action Campaign, Triangle Project, Trust for Community
Outreach and Education, the Women and Democracy Initiative and the
Women’s Legal Centre.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
The bad news keeps piling up for South Africa’s economy. Shutterstock
South Africa has been rocked by news that it has slipped into a recession after its gross domestic product (GDP) declined 0.7% during the first quarter of 2017 after contracting by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2016. Jannie Rossouw explains what it means.
What is a technical recession?
It’s when an economy suffers two consecutive quarters of negative economic performance. It refers to shrinking economic output, sometimes also known as negative economic growth or economic decline.
In short, it implies that the economic activity of a country is declining. This is never a good thing. In South Africa’s case it’s particularly serious because the country needs strong economic growth to make inroads into unemployment, which currently stands at more than 27%.
South Africa desperately needs a strong economy for other reasons two. The first is that the living standards of its citizens can’t improve without economic growth. The second is that the economy needs to grow for the government to be able to increase revenue to meet its growing social welfare budget.
There are other ways to describe a recession, although the technical definition is one that’s generally accepted. Other definitions include “an economy performing below potential” or “an increase in the output gap”. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that there’s a technical definition for a recession, but no agreed definition for a depression (as in Great Depression of the 1930s).
South Africa’s economy showed marginal positive growth for 2016, although it then contracted in the fourth quarter of the year. With similar contraction in the first quarter of 2017, the country entered a technical recession.
If the economy shows positive growth for the remaining three quarters of this year, South Africa will avert a recession for the calendar year 2017.
What caused it?
Economic activity contracted over a wide range of sectors, including construction, manufacturing and transport. Only mining and agriculture made a positive contribution to output growth. All other sectors contracted.
This reflects subdued demand throughout the South African economy. The data on the first quarter confirms what many small and medium business owners have been saying since the beginning of 2017 – that demand is down and that business conditions are tough.
The important question is whether this recession will continue in the second quarter – April to June, or whether there will be a turn around to economic growth.
Who’s to blame?
It’s difficult to say who is to blame. But it must be noted that recessions are rare events, as policies are generally aimed at economic growth. This is the second recession experienced in the post 1994 South Africa.
Rapid economic growth depends on investment, which in turn is dependent on confidence and positive expectations of the country’s future. President Jacob Zuma’s administration doesn’t instil confidence. This partly explains subdued investment. The recent credit risk downgrades into sub-investment grade has made South Africa a less attractive investment destination.
The lack of confidence is also reflected in suppressed demand, which in turn results in contractions in economic output.
How do we get out of it?
Investment is required to get South Africa out of its depressed economic conditions. Investment will boost demand in the economy, with positive spill-over effects into a number of sectors.
Naturally restoring South Africa’s credit risk rating to investment grade would help boost investment. A better credit rating would reduce the risk of investing in the country.
The upcoming credit rating decision from global credit rating agency Moodys’ is going to be a critical moment. This after two big rating agencies Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poors downgraded some of South Africa’s instruments into sub-investment grade. A downgrade from Moodys’ will trigger massive capital flights which will exert further pressure on the economy.
What company are we keeping? Are other countries in the same boat at the moment?
South Africa is joining a growing list of countries which have slipped into technical recessions. These include Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea and Venezuela. It’s important to remember that a country’s status can change from quarter to quarter depending on its growth rate. This means that an assessment of economic growth or recession status needs to be made based on the most recent data.
Some 13 people ‘disappear’ in Mexico every day, and the country is on track to record 30,000 homicides this year.
Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
This year Mexico celebrates the centennial of Juan Rulfo, one of the 20th century’s greatest Mexican writers.
His first novel, Pedro Páramo (1955), tells of a man travelling through Comala, a ghost village that “sits on the coals of the earth at the very mouth of hell.” Comala is haunted by Páramo, a brutal local potentate who, offended by the villagers’ indifference to the demise of his loved one, has starved them into half-alive shades.
Rulfo’s work embodies the mad violence that the country endured in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921).
And today, a hundred years after Rulfo’s birth, Mexicans are once again facing a rancorous power struggle and unforgiving bloodshed.
That makes Mexico, now in the eleventh year of its war on drugs, more violent than war zones such as Afghanistan or Yemen, the study claims. Its death toll is surpassed only by Syria’s 50,000 conflict deaths in 2016.
The country where life is worth nothing
The IISS report found an eager reader in US President Donald Trump, who retweeted a Drudge Report link to an article on Mexico’s violence.
But in a joint statement by the foreign and interior ministries, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called IISS’s assertions “unsubstantiated” and said the report was based on “dubious methodologies”.
He also argued that the report incorrectly used legal terms related to armed conflicts, asserting that not all homicides in Mexico are related to the war on drugs and that neither organised crime groups nor the involvement of the army in law enforcement can be legally considered evidence of an armed conflict.
Trump officials recanted his citation of the IISS report after conferring with Mexican officials.
Technically, the Mexican government’s critiques are correct. Criminologists usually calculate crime rates as the number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies for every 100,000 persons – not as a gross figure, as IISS has done.
Using that methodology, UN figures places Mexico’s homicide rate at 16.4 murders per 100,000 residents, which is significantly lower than Brazil (25.2), Venezuela (53.7) and Honduras (90.4).
But the numbers are still bleak: according to the Peña Nieto administration, Mexico had 7,727 homicides from January to April 2017. If this trend continues, warns Alejandro Hope, a public security expert in Mexico, some 30,000 people will have been killed by the end of this year. This would be Mexico’s highest murder rate since the 1960s.
This nightmare of unremitting violence is inflicted by both criminal organisations and agents of the Mexican state: national death by anomie, or lawlessness.
A bloody May
The same day that the government denounced IISS’s report, the Mexican news agency Diario Cambio published a video of the Mexican army carrying out what appeared to be an extrajudicial execution. After a skirmish with suspected fuel smugglers in the town of Palmarito, Puebla, a soldier fired directly into the back of an injured man’s head.
Mexico’s army has been accused of extrajudicial killings for a decade. (Warning: graphic content)
The video reveals, in cold blood, the worst of the human rights violations perpetrated by the army during the decade-long war on drugs.
Just hours later, in the northern state of Tamaulipas, a group of gunmen killed a human rights activist, Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez. Rodríguez had become a leader in the movement of families searching for missing loved ones after she found the remains of her 14-year-old daughter Karen, who disappeared in 2012, in a hidden grave in the town of San Fernando in 2014.
In Mexico, 13 persons “disappear” each day, according to a research developed by the weekly magazine Proceso and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE).
Five days after Rodríguez was murdered, Javier Valdéz, an award-winning Mexican journalist known for covering the drug cartels, was killed in Culiacán, the capital of the western state of Sinaloa and former home of the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Valdéz was pulled from his car by several gunmen and shot dead in the street around noon. He was the sixth journalist murdered in Mexico in 2017, making the country the world’s third-deadliest place for reporters, after Syria and Afghanistan.
The guilty silence
Mexico’s president responded to the violent events of May by gathering his cabinet and the country’s governors and promising more resources to help journalists and human rights advocates under threat. He also increased funding for the special prosecutor’s office tasked with investigating crimes against these groups and called for better coordination between federal and state authorities.
After announcing these measures, Peña Nieto held a moment of silence for the murdered journalists. In a symbolic and emotional scene, shouts of “justice!” were heard from reporters covering the event – an indictment of the Mexican state’s guilty silence in the face of so many murders.
The state, simultaneously bloated and impotent, has few answers to offer the Mexican people, in part because it is simply waging a war owned by someone else, namely, the United States.
On May 18, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged the role American drug consumers play in driving Mexico’s lawlessness crisis, telling reporters that Americans “need to confront” that the US has caused the ongoing drug-related violence in Mexico.
“But for us,” Tillerson said, “Mexico wouldn’t have a trans-criminal organised crime problem and the violence that they’re suffering. We really have to own up to that.”
Yet days later, the Trump administration, full of contradictions, released a budget proposal foreseeing US$87.66 million in counter-narcotics aid to Mexico in 2018 – a 45% reduction from the 2016 outlay.
And so Mexico has become Rulfo’s Comala, the phantom realm of damnation in which “those who die come back to get a blanket after going to hell.”
Voices of hope
Amid the bloodshed, though, there is hope.
On May 28, hundreds of indigenous representatives came together at the National Indigenous Congress to nominate María de Jesus Patricio Martínez as their independent candidate for Mexico’s upcoming 2018 presidential election.
Patricio Martínez is a Nahua woman and a traditional healer. “Our participation in politics,” she said, “does not seek votes [but rather] pursues life.”
Before representatives of the Mayas, Yaquis, Zoques and other indigenous peoples, Patricio Martínez called for healing, resistance and renewal. The time has come to work for “reconstituting our peoples, who have been beaten for many years,” she said.
In Mexico, as in Comala, survival is the ultimate political challenge. But, alas, the Peña Nieto government does not dare to embrace it.
“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.
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.
South Africa is joining a growing list of countries which have slipped into technical recessions. These include Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea and Venezuela. It’s important to remember that a country’s status can change from quarter to quarter depending on its growth rate. This means that an assessment of economic growth or recession status needs to be made based on the most recent data.
In Mexico, as in Comala, survival is the ultimate political challenge. But, alas, the Peña Nieto government does not dare to embrace it.
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.