Heated civil society meeting debates secret ballot

Opposing positions presented by Makhosi Khoza, Bantu Holomisa and Steven Friedman

By Barbara Maregele and Natalie Pertsovsky
12 July 2017

United Democratic Movement (UDM) leader Bantu Holomisa at Community House in Salt River on Tuesday during a panel discussion hosted by #UniteBehind, a coalition of civil society organisations. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

ANC MP Dr Makhosi Khoza made headlines across the country recently by breaking ranks with her party. She has publicly supported a secret ballot in the lead up to the vote of no confidence in President Zuma.

“I was questioning, how do you divorce yourself from your moral compass from the decisions you make in Parliament? After that, I received numerous death threats. I was told that people would be coming to my house. Those who use social network will know my address because the ANC Youth League posted it online because they were going to picket at my house,” Khoza told a panel discussion at Community House in Salt River on Tuesday evening hosted by #UniteBehind, a coalition of civil society organisations .

Loud gasps and remarks of dissatisfaction could be heard in the hall when Khoza revealed that her daughter had also received death threats.

“We all believe in transparency and accountability, but we are here talking about real people who have gone through real situations. They are now sending these threats to my daughter. Why should I die in silence?” said Khoza.

But Director of the Centre for Democracy at the University of Johannesburg Steven Friedman said a secret ballot would “leave the door open to corruption”.

“The way a democratic system works is on precedent. If we have the secret ballot on this issue, then what other issues will be voted on using secret ballots? If we go this route this time, we open the way for more secret ballots, more unaccountability, and more brown envelopes,” he said.

Director of the Centre for Democracy at the University of Johannesburg Steven Friedman said a secret ballot would “leave the door open to corruption”. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Also on the panel discussion was United Democratic Movement (UDM) leader Bantu Holomisa. The UDM took the matter to the Constitutional Court which ruled that the Speaker of the National Assembly has the power to decide whether a vote of no confidence in the president can be held in secret.

Holomisa said, “There are many implications for MPs who feel that Zuma has lied and they no longer want to tow the party line. They will be intimidated and labelled as someone who is ungovernable or may even be killed.”

Holomisa said that should the Speaker opt to not grant the secret vote, she will be expected to provide reasons for her decision.

“If the electoral system was transparent and promoted accountability, we wouldn’t be talking about this today. Mbeki was withdrawn overnight and no one made an issue about that. Zuma must face this secret ballot because he has threatened his own people. This secret ballot is going to protect those who want to vote and follow their own conscience,” he said.

But Friedman disagreed. “There are people in this country who want to buy politicians, and that’s part of what state capture is all about. If you have a secret vote, it is a lot easier to buy over politicians than if it were done in public.”

“Those who are elected, need to explain to us what they do and why they do it. You cannot have accountability if the people you voted for do things in secret,” he said.

Friedman said that he was willing to “make a pretty large bet” that the results of a secret vote would be the same as if it were done in public.

Khoza said, “I don’t think we will have a true reflection of what some MPs truly stand for if you tell some of the MPs that tomorrow they will not get an income if they don’t vote along the party lines,” she said.

Friedman replied: “The argument that MPs are worried about losing their salaries is one I have no sympathy for. If you’re a public representative then you have to accept that your job is to look after the interests of the people who voted for you.”

Chairing the event, Axolile Notywala, general secretary of the Social Justice Coalition announced that the #UniteBehind coalition will be having a mass march to Parliament at noon on 8 August to urge the ANC to recall President Zuma.

People’s vote

In anticipation of the Vote of No Confidence, the #UniteBehind Coalition, which includes the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), Equal Education, Women’s Legal Centre, Sonke Gender Justice and Right2Know, has been setting up polling stations in the Western Cape allowing citizens to cast their votes against or in favor of Zuma.

“The polling stations are meant to say that ANC MPs must vote President Zuma out,” said Notywala. “It’s a way to show individual people on the ground have had enough.”

According to Zukie Vuka of #UniteBehind, the coalition set up polling stations in Delft, Khayelitsha, Mowbray, Rondebosch, Fish Hoek, Mutual Station, and Maitland.
Notywala said they will announce the results from the polling stations the same day as the Vote of No Confidence.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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David Duke on South African Farm Murders (VIDEO)

David Duke speaks about the situation in Southern Africa that the mainstream media would rather have you not know anything about!

Kill the Boers, the song is sung by the majority, and for years now, nothing is done to stop the killing of farmers. Horrific, gruesome and senseless murders of innocent people that plague the country, yet the government fails to act.

To watch the video - please click on the South Africa Today Link - 

David Duke on South African Farm Murders

 

Children with disabilities grow old waiting for schools

Department has doubled placement but waiting lists are growing

By Moira Levy
12 July 2017

A year ago, <a href="http://www.groundup.org.za/article/21-year-old-wheelchair-just-wants-go-school/">GroundUp reported on 21-year-old </a>Montoedi Nyangweni (photographed here with his mother, Nokukhuthala) who stopped school at grade 6 because of his disability and wants to return to school. He is still not in school and he needs a wheelchair. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi

At a meeting of the Basic Education Portfolio Committee on the provision of education for children with disabilities, MP Sonja Boshoff (DA) raised serious doubts about the department’s claim that there are 11,461 disabled learners waiting for schools.

Boshoff believes the department’s figure does not come close, given that past figures place the number of children not in school because of disability at 300,000. Waiting lists for special schools increase every year, and those still waiting are getting too old to attend school as there are age limits for admission to schools.

The committee had called in the Department of Basic Education for a progress report on delivery of inclusive education and special education for children with disability.

Boshoff said she had seen children with disabilities in Mpumalanga who are out of school, but the provincial education department informed her it had no waiting list. The province says all children with special needs have been placed in ordinary schools until space is found for them in special schools.

KwaZulu-Natal reports 2,769 children with disability on its waiting list. The waiting list in the Eastern Cape is 2,160.

The South African Schools Act says that no learner should be put on the waiting list; their names are supposed to be placed on a central database if schools cannot accommodate them.

The Constitution, the National Development Plan, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Incheon Declaration of the World Education Forum were referred to in the committee meeting. They all confirm that the state has a commitment to provide schooling for children with disabilities.
The number of children with disabilities receiving some form of education has almost doubled over the last 15 years, according to the department.

It reported there are 464 special schools in South Africa and another 715 “full service” schools that make some sort of provision for children with disabilities.

The committee was satisfied to hear that the department had reached its target of placing more than 240,000 such learners in schools at the last count in 2015.

The numbers may have improved and R477-million was set aside this year to assist learners with severe to profound intellectual disabilities to access support and quality education, but even 11,461 is a lot of children awaiting intervention.

Recent evidence has also shown a number of the “full service” schools do not have the basic facilities required to qualify, such as ramps, suitable toilets and support staff.

Often little or no provision is made for children with disabilities in poor and rural areas. There are only 11 special schools in the Northern Cape and no units or special classes attached to ordinary schools throughout that vast province.

Other departments need to play their part

In response to questions from committee members who wanted to know when the last audit of special schools was conducted, Dr Moses Simelane, Director for Inclusive Education, said the official number of children living with disabilities who are out of school is close to accurate since the department has entered into a memorandum of understanding with StatsSA.

What also helps keep track is the department’s cooperation with the departments of social development and health, Home Affairs, and the South Africa Social Security Agency.

The department said it cannot achieve anywhere near universal education for the disabled unless other government departments, like Health and Transport, play their part.

The provision of transport across the provinces is skewed. Provinces like Limpopo and Mpumalanga do not have enough school transport for special schools and fee-paying schools are required to fund their buses, which have to adhere to certain requirements.

Children with disabilities are kept at home for many reasons. These range from incontinence to the dire shortage of properly trained educators equipped to deal with possible medical emergencies.
But of most concern to the committee was that the majority of children with disability are stuck at home because there is not enough space to accommodate them.

Another concern was that special schools have not been declared “no fee” schools and many parents were unable to pay the fees.
Director General Mathanzima Mweli agreed that the time has come for special schools to be declared no fee schools. He said the department needs to prioritise this.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Why cash remains sacred in American churches

Why do people need cash in churches?
Billion Photos/Shutterstock

On Tuesday, June 27, it will be 50 years since the first automated cash dispenser – which came to be known as an automated teller machine (ATM) – was inaugurated in London.

Just thinking about it brings a smile to my face. I belong to the generation who stood 45 minutes to an hour to deposit or cash checks in the pre-ATM era. I remember getting yelled at for taking my bicycle through the drive-up line at the National Bank of Detroit to avoid the much longer line inside. It did not take me very long to become an early adopter of the magical cards and 24-hour banking.

Later, in my work as a historian of American religion, I extensively studied the role money has played in religious life. In my book, “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism,” I retold the American history of the nation’s largest religious stream in terms of the search for money to pay for religious ministries and the purposes for which churches spent the money they collected.

So, what impact did ATMs have on church life?

Giving to the church

Fundamentally, the legal separation of church and state in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States did more than simply assure freedom of religion – it privatized what until then in Europe had been a public good and provided funding under the auspices of the state. In the U.S., religious leaders and their ministries had to increasingly depend on voluntary donations and to appeal ever more strenuously for those gifts.

Over the 19th century, various church support schemes were tried and abandoned. What in Europe had been a discreet offering with alms boxes kept at the back of the church (alms for the poor) became a central ritual activity in America. In most American weekly church services, offering plates were passed around to finance all of church activities. As giving became very public, one of the features of the weekly offering was, of course, that all gathered could see who was giving, if not how much.

Once the age of plastic money arrived, all of this ritual and financial necessity in American churches was jeopardized. ATMs began appearing in churches, providing a way for people to come up with the ready cash to give to God and their church.

Nature of money

There are social and moral dimensions to money.
Andrei Korzhyts

So, why did people need cash in the first place? To answer this question, it is important to first understand the nature of cash in context of religious life.

The German sociologist Georges Simmel famously noted that the essential, almost magical quality of money is that it is fungible – that is, it is exchangeable or replaceable. Individuals can use the same US$100 to buy drugs, feed a frugal family for a week, buy a designer scarf or give it to God in an offering plate.

Indeed, as we know only too well, money is a universal currency to purchase things of incommensurate worth. However, as sociologist Viviana Zelizer explains in her memorable book, “The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies,” not all money is the same – there are social and moral dimensions to money that are frankly surprising.

To illustrate, Zelizer narrates the striking example of Marty, a 1950s Philadelphia gang member who would donate to the church only the 25 cents that he got from his mother – not money from robberies. When asked, Marty provided a clear distinction between different sets of money. He said,

“Oh, no, that is bad money; that is not honest money.”

But the money he got from his mother was earned through hard work so “he could offer it to God.” Marty is the kind of person who, when asked, “Who would know? would reply, "God would.” The point is, not all dollars are equal – individuals have some strong ideas about clean and dirty money, or just appropriate and inappropriate money.

Here is where ATMs come into the story.

Donations in the age of ATMs

Automated teller machines started to make their first appearance in the lobbies of evangelical churches just over a dozen years ago. It was important for churches to have something to put into the collection plate, and it was important that it be cash that people actually possessed – not a promise to pay someday on their credit card accounts. Thus, the ATM allowed evangelicals who didn’t carry a checkbook or a wallet full of cash not to be embarrassed when the offering plates or baskets came around.

ATMs began to appear in churches to increase donations.
Mingo Hagen, CC BY

Marty Baker, pastor of the Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Georgia, was widely credited as the first to install two ATMs in the church lobby in 2005. The first year the donations produced $100,000. They more than doubled by the next year to more than $200,000. He was so successful in increasing giving by making cash available (up 18 percent over pre-ATM machine levels) that he took it one step further, by introducing the “automatic tithing machine” that took cash out of the giver’s account and deposited it directly into the church’s coffers. This new ATM was beginning to virtualize the all-important collection. Some users responded by placing their receipts in the plate at the appropriate time in the service.

The tithe, of course, refers to the tenth of one’s income conservative Protestants are largely taught to pay to the church in gratitude for what God has done. It is a sacred obligation, and the cash money is a serious matter.

There are two interesting dimensions of this appearance of ATMs and churches to consider. One is the strong affinity between cash and conservative evangelicals. For many evangelicals debt is a form of bondage – a message conveyed through conservative radio financial guru Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University to tens of millions of his followers on AM radio each week in his call-in programs. Ramsey teaches how to “dump debt, budget, build wealth and give like never before!” The building of wealth is a corollary to eschewing debt and it makes Christians free, in Ramsey’s view to be godly.

The point is, money isn’t just a fungible means to various ends, it is sacred to these believers.

In cash we trust

The second dimension for consideration in the appearance of ATMs in the lobbies of evangelical churches is that they signaled something by their very presence: America was in fact becoming a cashless society. The debit card that people carried in their wallet could be just as good as cash anywhere else, but in the sanctuary, cash was the appropriate offering.

So as in the ancient world where Jews from all over the world exchanged their secular coins in the Court of the Gentiles in Jerusalem’s Second Temple for coins with no image on them that they could use inside to make various offerings and purchase sacrifices, today’s believers also needed to make an exchange.

Those ancient believers were obeying the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt make no graven images,” Exodus 20:4–6). American Christians were, by contrast, partial to greenbacks with the words, “In God We Trust” on them.

Who would’ve guessed 50 years ago when the automatic teller machine was invented that this modern human financial interface would also play a part in the interface between human beings and their God?

James Hudnut-Beumler, Professor of American Religious History, Vanderbilt University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Corrupt state owned enterprises lie at the heart of South Africa's economic woes

Demonstrators march against corruption in South Africa.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings

The prevailing economic crisis sweeping through South Africa is a direct result of economic mismanagement largely shaped by the looting of state owned enterprises.

Many are in deep trouble. Sheer incompetence and corruption has pushed entities like South African Airways and the South African Broadcasting Corporation closer to financial collapse. Serious questions are being asked about the legality of multi-billion rand procurements at Transnet and the state power utility Eskom.

The scale of the problem has been brought into sharp relief in recent weeks by two developments that show corruption in state owned enterprises has been unfolding for years. The first was the release of a report written by academics: Betrayal of the Promise. The second was the leaking of 200 000 emails which point to dubious links between the Gupta family, senior politicians and officials.

The country stands to slip deeper into crisis unless the lust for loot is stopped. The economy is already in deep trouble. It’s in recession, and worse is to come. The second quarter GDP figures will reflect that a third rating agency has downgraded the country’s credit rating.

There are some indications that the tide may be turning but the job of reforming the state owned enterprises will have to go beyond just replacing board members. It must also focus on ensuring greater accountability financial responsibility, and performance management.

Unfortunately the severely fractured African National Congress (ANC) is incapable of reversing the slide. Instead, it’s more concerned with outsmarting the growing opposition to President Jacob Zuma’s rule suppressing internal rebellion, and maintaining the crumbling patronage network.

Unaffordable

The increasing inefficiency in state owned enterprises continues to put pressure on the country’s fiscus. This is not something it can afford. Ratings agencies have made it clear that they’re monitoring continuous bailouts and government guarantees. This is because they pose a serious threat to government’s fiscal balances and policy priorities.

Government guarantees to state owned enterprises stood at R467 billion at the end of 2015/16. Standard & Poor’s forecasts they will swell to over R500 billion by 2020 – 10% of South Africa’s current GDP. This is more than twice the government contingents in year 2015/2016.

These bailouts have weighed on the fiscus, pushing government debt into dangerous territory. Even before the downgrades South Africa’s debt burden was higher than other emerging markets. Moody’s forecasts that total government debt will reach 55% of GDP by 2018 and will continue to rise after that.

The reason government continues to bail out state owned enterprises is purely due to the fact that they are being managed badly.

The recent board and management scandals at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, South African Broadcast Corporation, South African Airways and Eskom indicate that there has been little commitment to improve governance and address operational deficiencies. Instead some senior ANC officials claim that a call for reforms is anti-transformation.

The financial markets are increasingly unwilling to tolerate such excuses. This can be seen by the recent subscription failure of Transnet’s bond auction. And some private asset managers have become extremely cautious about lending money to public entities.

The way forward

The new Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba has so far failed to inspire confidence. Allegations that he is deeply mired in the web of scandals are not helping the situation.

Gigaba recently declared that state owned enterprises are functioning well and doing “great work”. This is surprising given the rot being revealed on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, the patronage network that stands accused of milking state owned enterprises has started to crumble. This includes the axing of Hlaudi Motsoeneng from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Molefe from Eskom. Ben Ngubane has resigned as chairperson of the Eskom board.

There are also signs that public and private pressure is forcing some government ministers to take responsibility for their departments. Examples include Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown, Communications Minister Ayanda Dlodlo and the Minister of Police Fikile Mbalula.

Nevertheless, the key implication of the Gupta emails is that reversing the deep damage inflicted on the country must start with reforming state owned enterprises. Reversing the rot will take decades. It should begin by ensuring that measures agreed last year are implemented.

These include:

• holding the corrupt public servants to account,
• closing loopholes in public procurement to ensure that history isn’t repeated, and
• appointing suitably qualified and experienced technocrats rather than unqualified politically connected individuals.

Finally, some state owned enterprises will need to be privatised. This is because they operate as monopolies in key sectors which is perpetuating gross inefficiencies. Only privatisation will end these distortions.

For many years, government has claimed that South Africa’s many challenges could be overcome by adopting policies of a “developmental state”. This would entail active state involvement in economic activity and using its resources to tackle poverty and expand economic opportunities.

But the ongoing revelations show that even before South Africa can consider becoming a developmental state, it will first have to root out the ingrained predatory state. Only then can investor confidence begin to be restored, recovery restarted and rating downgrades reversed.

Misheck Mutize, Lecturer of Finance and Doctor of Philosophy Candidate, specializing in Finance, University of Cape Town and Sean Gossel, Senior Lecturer, UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.