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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The legality of the action initiated by Prasa under dispute in court
By Ihsaan Haffejee
2 June 2017
Red Ants carrying out the eviction at the Bekezela informal settlement in Newtown. Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee
Update: Late on Friday, 2 June, the Gauteng High Court set aside Prasa’s Writ of Ejection, suspending the eviction. Justice Carlese ordered that insofar as the eviction had been carried out already, evictees were to be reinstated.
Hundreds of people from the Bekezela informal settlement in Newtown have been forced onto the streets after the Red Ant Security Relocation and Eviction Services (Red Ants) evicted them from their homes.
Residents say shortly after 8am, men carrying out the eviction descended on the informal settlement and began throwing people and their goods onto the street.
By mid-morning, Carr Street was filled with the household belongings of the residents.
Thando Hlatshwayo had just got ready to leave for work when he claims he was beaten and forced off the property without having the time to collect any of his documents or possessions.
“These people did not provide us with any warning. They just come with violence in the morning and chucked us out of our homes,” said Hlatshwayo.
Residents staged a protest. Rubber bullets were fired at them. A man whose car was stoned crashed into another vehicle.
Residents claim members of the Red Ants took their valuables, cash and cell phones.
After numerous complaints to the police, members of the Metro police searched the vehicles transporting the Red Ants and found various stolen items hidden in bags under the trucks. The items were confiscated, but no arrests were made.
The City of Johannesburg has gone to court to stop the eviction which was initiated by Prasa.
When GroundUp left the scene, people were still looking for their household items on the street. Many were unsure as to where they will sleep tonight.
Red ants carrying out the eviction at the Bekezela informal settlement in NewtownRethabile Tlaile, a migrant from Lesotho, feeds her seven-month-old baby on the side of the road after she was evicted. In the bag behind her are all the possessions she managed to salvageNelisiwe Simelane holds 11-month-old baby Zenande as she sits with some of the contents of her home on Carr Street after she was evictedResidents attempt to find some of their belongings which were dumped in the street by the Red AntsA woman searches for her belongings Thabani Mahlobo, who makes a living looking in rubbish bins for recyclable materials, tries to find his ID document. He returned home from work to find his residence trashed and contents missingA resident with his cat which was killed during the evictions. Metro Police find items which were stolen from the residents on the trucks used by the Red AntsMetro Police gather stolen goods recovered from the Red Ants
There has been surprisingly little innovation in the field of housing. It’s time for that to change, before it’s too late.
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.
