They demand that the Department of Education provide transport for learners who walk over 8km
By Mbulelo Sisulu
31 July 2017 Learners, teachers and SGB members outside Uviwe Senior Secondary in Scenery Park township. Photo: Mbulelo Sisulu
Parents
and learners of Uviwe Senior Secondary in Scenery Park township in the
Eastern Cape shut the school down on Monday. This came after their
requests for scholar transport to the Department of Education went unanswered.
Uviwe Senior Secondary has many times since 2009 asked the provincial
government to provide the school with transport for its learners.
According to the School Governing Body (SGB), the education
department had failed to meet its own promise to provide transport for
learners like 18-year-old Thandile Gujulwa. He is among a group of
learners that travels over 8 kilometres to and from school. This is
because there are no high schools in the neighbouring township of
Khayelitsha where he lives.
On 30 July, the SGB, parents and learner representatives met. They
decided to close the school until the department provided Uviwe with
scholar transport.
SGB treasurer Nwabisa Mgxwati told GroundUp that they were “sick and
tired” of empty promises. “Since 2009, this school has been applying for
scholar transport. Our government wants something to happen first in
order to act. There are many bodies that have been found in the bushes
where [Gujulwa] travels through when he comes to school,” she said.
Mgxwati said that they had informed the department last week of their
intention to close the school until their demands were addressed. “We
did not get answers from them,” she said.
Student leader Sibulele Sinqane said that learners supported the
shutdown. “The final exams are just around the corner but we [agree on]
this decision. We cannot be happy while other kids risk their lives when
they go to school,” he said.
Fundiswa Jose, Ward 5 committee member that deals with education at
the Buffalo City Metro Municipality, said she was concerned after
hearing about Gujulwa’s situation. Acting school principal Vuyani
Mgqolozane said that there was nothing the school could do when parents
and learners closed the gates on Monday morning.
Eastern Cape education department spokesperson, Mali Mtima, said the
department was aware of the matter. Mtima said that a committee has been
set up to deal with the issues at Uviwe. “We hope the committee will
fast track this matter so that kids can go back to classrooms,” he said.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
Most people are unaware of the severe impact ice has on the heart. from www.shutterstock.com.au
Methamphetamine (usually colloquially referred to as “ice”) is a major public health problem in Australia. When we think of methamphetamine-related death, however, we tend to focus on overdose. This is a very real and valid concern. But the extent of the problem extends far beyond drug toxicity.
Methamphetamine dependence is associated with an array of serious social, mental and physicalhealth problems that include heart disease, stroke, suicide, mood and anxiety disorders, psychosis, and violence. The footprint of methamphetamine is far wider than that of many other drugs. Close to half of deaths occur in rural and regional areas, a great many users are employed, and half have never injected a drug. These are not the “usual suspects” for drug-related death.
In a new study we looked at all of the methamphetamine-related deaths that occurred in Australia from 2009 to 2015. There were 1,649 such deaths over that period, and the annual rate doubled from around 150 a year to 300. Of these deaths, 43% were due to drug toxicity.
In the case of methamphetamine, overdose typically results in heart arrhythmias (where the heart isn’t beating properly) and seizures caused by the drug. Importantly, even modest amounts of methamphetamine may cause heart arrhythmia and death. The remainder, however, were due to other causes.
How methamphetamine affects the heart long-term
In a fifth of cases, death was due to methamphetamine combined with disease, most commonly heart disease. Methamphetamine is cardiotoxic, meaning it causes damage to our heart muscle, and causes disease in our arteries.
There’s a circular pattern here. Methamphetamine damages the cardiovascular system. The drug also places strain on this system by increasing the force of the blood against the artery walls (it’s a “hypertensive”). Users are then placing strain on damaged hearts. And this damage accumulates and does not reverse.
There’s also a real risk of stroke, and we saw 38 such cases among young people, a demographic not commonly affected by stroke. Importantly, the damage to the cardiovascular system occurs regardless of how the drug is used. Smoked, injected or swallowed – it is the drug that does the damage.
How methamphetamine fatally reduces inhibition
Methamphetamine is also associated with traumatic injury and death, as it causes a high degree of disinhibition, impulsivity, aggression and impaired critical judgement. There were 300 completed suicides related to methamphetamine over our study period.
There were around 300 deaths from suicide linked to methamphetamine, and the methods used were more violent, which is linked to the aggression, violence and aggravation caused by the drug.
Some 15% of all methamphetamine-related deaths were due to traumatic accidents, most commonly motor vehicle accidents. Methamphetamine users commonly believe the drug improves their driving. It does not. What it does improve is the risk of injury and death. All of these deaths were avoidable.
What can we do?
Knowledge of the risks is a start. Many users might assume a racing heart and chest pains are part of the experience of using methamphetamine and not realise these are signs of a system under stress. The heart disease we are seeing in methamphetamine users will be a problem for decades to come, long after they cease use.
In terms of our treatment system, drug treatment centres need to be aware their methamphetamine patients may be at risk of heart disease. Doctors also should ask about methamphetamine involvement if young people are presenting with heart conditions.
Over the past few years there has a been an intense focus on methamphetamine in the wake of evidence of increasing use and harms, including in rural and regional areas. By examining the causes of these deaths we have uncovered that, unlike many other drugs, the harms are very diverse, particularly with regard to the extensive association with heart disease.
This suggests that even if use goes down, we will have a major public health problem for our hospital and community health services for many years to come.
Another striking finding of this research is that very few of those who died were in treatment at the time. Our treatment services are already under intense pressure and this underlines the urgent need for more resources to go into treatment and trials of new medications.
Shane Darke, Professor at the National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW
By Zoe Postman
30 July 2017 Activists met in the Central Methodist Mission Church on
Greenmarket Square to mobilise for a march on 7 August. Photo via
Facebook (photographer unknown)
#UniteBehind held a public meeting on Saturday at the Central
Methodist Mission Church on Greenmarket Square in Cape Town to prepare
for mass mobilisation in support of the recall of President Jacob Zuma.
AmaBhungane journalist, Micah Reddy, explained the #GuptaLeaks and
its implications for democracy. The city’s biggest civil society
movements participated in the meeting, using the opportunity to mobilise
for a “People’s March” to be held on 7 August in advance of the no
confidence vote in Zuma in Parliament scheduled for 8 August. The march
will demand that Zuma be recalled by the ANC. Large protests are
expected to take place in Johannesburg on 8 August as well.
Reddy, one of the journalists recently attacked by (almost certainly)
Gupta-funded Black First, Land First (BLF), spoke about two examples of
“abuse of power” by the Gupta family and the government. The first
example was the extravagant Gupta wedding and the second was the
Transnet tender awarded to a Gupta linked company.
The R30 million wedding was funded by Free State Provincial
Government’s budget to start a community dairy farm. According to the
#GuptaLeaks emails, several well-known businesses were instrumental in
the money laundering process. Among these is one of the “big four”
auditing firms, KPMG, who wrote the R30 million off as “business
expenses”. [This is not an isolated example of KPMG turning a blind eye
to corruption. Read this. - Editor]
Reddy explained that this was an important example of how corruption
has a direct impact on communities who are supposed to benefit. [Other
multinational companies to be implicated in the Gupta corruption include
consulting firm McKinsey, and German software firms SAP and Software AG. - Editor]
Reddy also explained the second incident, which highlighted the
method the Gupta family uses to benefit from foreign investment.
Tequesta Group Ltd, a company owned by a Gupta affiliate Salim Essa,
entered into an agreement with Chinese South Rail (CSR). Tequesta’s
mandate was to land the tender for CSR to supply Transnet with over
1,000 locomotives. As a result, the Guptas earned R5.3 billion in
kickbacks and R10-million from each R50-million locomotive that Transnet
was buying. “I asked my friend to do a calculation of how many social
housing units can be built with R5.3 billion. R5.3 billion can build
53,000 RDP houses”, said Reddy.
While the #GuptaLeaks have been reported extensively in the
mainstream media, during question time, a member of #UniteBehind urged
Reddy to bring this information to communities, by which was presumably
meant townships and poorer areas in the country. He explained that some
people may think #GuptaLeaks is a politically motivated ploy against the
ANC if the information is not explained adequately.
Zackie Achmat, who co-founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and
is helping the #UniteBehind effort, used an analogy to explain the
scale of the Gupta corruption: “It’s like going to a bank, but you don’t
rob it. Instead, you go to the big bosses and steal money from
everyone’s bank accounts”.
Another member of the audience said that the post-apartheid
government has been captured by a minority once again: “Maybe we should
do what we did to get rid of the apartheid regime”.
A member of Equal Education raised the issue of access to education
and jobs for the youth. She explained that there are children in
communities who complete matric but are unable to find jobs or access
education due to the failure of government to create opportunities for
the youth.
Towards the end of the mass meeting, Equal Education, Right2Know and
Social Justice Coalition encouraged people to mobilise and participate
in the upcoming march. Vuyisa Mbayi, Organising Coordinator of Equal
Education, said that this is a “fight against corruption” because
corruption diverts money away from education.
Vainola Makan, from Right2Know campaign, urged people to act against
the state capture. “We didn’t allow it for PW Botha and we won’t allow
it for any president”, he said.
Axolile Notywala, Secretary General of SJC, concluded the meeting by
saying people need to march to tell the government: “We elected the ANC,
not the Gupta family”.
According to a report circulated on WhatsApp by Achmat, there are
many efforts underway by at least 16 organisations to mobilise for the
march. The march will start at 3pm on 7 August at Keizersgracht Street.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng making a ruling on secret ballots in Parliament at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
It happened as many suspected it would. South Africa’s Constitutional Court ordered that, despite the Constitution’s silence on the matter, the speaker of parliament has the constitutional power to prescribe that a vote on a motion of no confidence in the country’s president may take place by way of a secret ballot.
It also found that Baleka Mbete, the speaker of South Africa’s parliament, was mistaken when she decided earlier this year that she did not have this power. The court set aside her decision.
But the court didn’t go as far as the United Democratic Movement, and other opposition parties that had challenged Mbete’s decision, had hoped. It would not force Mbete to order a secret ballot in the upcoming motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma. It felt that this would go against the separation of powers, by unduly prescribing to parliament how it should carry out its functions.
Accordingly, the court ordered Mbete to retake the decision on whether to allow the secret ballot. It emphasised that in doing so, she must act rationally. It ordered that she has to take account of all surrounding circumstances, including the possibility that MPs may feel intimidated by their political parties to vote in a particular way.
The court emphasised that parliament has a constitutional obligation to hold the executive to account. Members must therefore act in accordance with their constitutional obligations, their consciences and their oaths of office.
From a constitutional law perspective, the court’s stance is undoubtedly correct. As always, it has shown great respect for parliament’s power to guide its own processes. At the same time, the court has clarified the extent of the speaker’s discretion in a way that aims to ensure that she, and parliament as a whole, exercise their powers in a way that is consistent with their constitutional obligations.
What the opposition asked for was always going to be a long shot. Wanting a court to order the speaker to exercise a discretion that is legitimately hers alone, before she has even applied her mind to the question, would involve a real stretch of the separation of powers.
So, what will Mbete decide? And will her decision, if it was to go against a secret ballot, be challenged? More pertinently, ought it?
Competing notions of accountability
Many believe that a decision not to hold the vote secretly would simply be a thinly veiled attempt to shield Zuma from accountability. Such a decision would therefore, if not irrational and unconstitutional, at least be unconscionable. But, as the Constitutional Court acknowledged, there are different, and perhaps competing, notions of accountability at stake here.
On the one hand, the dominance of the African National Congress (ANC) in parliament and its own internal structures of political accountability have seemingly compromised the constitutionally designed accountability of the executive to parliament. An open ballot could only exacerbate this.
On the other hand, a secret ballot would sacrifice MPs’ accountability not only to their party peers, but also to the country’s citizens.
How can we be assured that an ANC politician who votes differently under a secret ballot than she would under an open one is doing so based on her conscience rather than on some other, less honourable whim? What is to stop a cynical group of Democratic Alliance (DA) opposition politicians from voting in favour of retaining Zuma because they believe that his continued scandal-prone presidency would better serve their chances in the 2019 election? Would it not make it more difficult for such politicians to subvert the public interest in these ways if the citizenry, and their fellow MPs, could see them?
Perhaps South Africa’s current political crisis is so dire that these seemingly far-fetched hypotheticals don’t matter. Perhaps they represent bridges the country should cross sometime in the future.
But making rules (and rulings), especially for the naughty kid in class, is seldom wise.
South Africa is moving into an era in national politics where the ANC is not nearly as dominant. This means that coalitions will be the order of the day. In this new era, one or two votes in a parliamentary motion may make all the difference. Will the country still think secret ballots were such a good idea?
Danger of destabilisation
Early in June DA mayor Michael Holenstein was removed by a motion of no confidence through a secret ballot in Mogale City, west of Johannesburg. Both the motion and the secret ballot were called for by ANC councillors. The ballot was granted by the ANC-affiliated speaker.
The DA and their coalition partners unsuccessfully opposed the secret ballot. As it happened, the secret ballot provided the opportunity for one of their own to betray the coalition and led to the motion being carried with 39 votes to 38.
Near-comical irony and intrigue aside, this saga illustrates all too vividly how the diminished accountability (to both electorate and party-political peers) afforded by a secret ballot opens motions of no confidence not only to a politics of conscience, but also potentially to one of backstabbing and pettiness.
On top of this, governance in Mogale City is said to be suffering as a result of the successful motion. There are fears that service delivery is being paralysed and that the destabilised, hung council may be put under administration.
The consequences of a motion of no confidence in the president will, of course, be far more destabilising. For one thing, Section 102 of the constitution requires the entire cabinet to resign alongside the president, should the motion pass. A member of parliament deciding how to vote on a motion of no confidence in Zuma is therefore also deciding whether to throw the entire national government into disarray, however temporarily.
This might well be preferable over another day of a patently compromised, Zuma-led government. But there is value in ensuring that such a hefty decision is made only after due deliberation, and is made openly and with courage of conviction. If such courage should prove to be lacking in the members of the majority party, should South Africans not be allowed to see this and to think, in turn, about the vote that in a constitutional democracy can and should matter far more: their own?
In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published after a long period of rejections. The detective finally made his debut that November in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual – the story narrated as always by his faithful assistant Dr John Watson.
Long before any mention of the deerstalker, pipe or magnifying glass, Watson informed us of Holmes’s love of his violin:
That he could play [violin] pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites.
When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognised air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee.
We later discover in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1893) that this violin is a Stradivari, the Italian hallmark of violin perfection. Few readers will have thought this more than a pleasing additional dimension to Holmes’s more famous characteristics. I believe it is much more than that.
Doyle may have been using this violin to give us a vital clue to the enigmatic character of Baker Street’s most famous resident. If so, it has gone unnoticed for 130 years. Let me lay out the case one step at a time.
Fiddles and forgeries
The piano and the violin both rapidly grew in popularity in the Victorian era. No craftsman was more famous than Antonio Stradivari of Cremona (Stradivarius is the Latinised name that usually appears on the labels). Along with other great Italian names such as Amati and Guarneri, these fabulous instruments became much sought after.
In many cases, however, the violins were not real. Forgers took advantage of people’s ignorance, conning those seeking the finest old Italian violins by creating cheap factory-built instruments and labelling them as masterpieces.
One notorious example was the case of Hodges vs Chanot of 1882, which exposed Georges Chanot as falsely presenting a violin as having the Carlo Bergonzi imprint. It was popular in the press and well known to the general public.
Many of these forgeries are still with us today. Walk into most local auction houses in the UK and I guarantee you will find at least one old Victorian violin, strings broken and looking a bit sorry for itself. Inside will be a label for Antonio Stradivarius or another old Italian maker. Buyers will be left in no doubt that it is a fake rather than a fortune.
Context, dear chap
Academics and fans have done much work into tracing the origins of Doyle’s stories and characters. We know Holmes was partly modelled on Joseph Bell, a surgeon and medical lecturer whom Doyle would have known as a student at the University of Edinburgh.
We know he was influenced by the Victorian public appetite for true crime and detective fiction. We see, for example, the hand of James McLevy, Edinburgh’s first police detective.
McLevy published a series of incredibly popular true-crime books in the 1860s based on cases he worked on. The way he consulted medics and scientists at the University of Edinburgh seeking new ways of solving new crimes in an age before forensics is very similar to Holmes’s near-forensic approach to detection.
More recent version.
Also exceptionally popular was James McGovan. McGovan too appeared to be a detective who had investigated the streets of Edinburgh. It only later came to light that the books were fiction, written by a well known Edinburgh violinist named William Crawford Honeyman.
The McGovan books came out between 1878 and 1884, which heavily overlaps with Doyle’s own time in the city (1876 to 1881). This makes it highly probable that Doyle was familiar with the series at the very least.
The Real Cremona
The final McGovan book is Traced and Tracked, or, A Memoire of a City Detective (1884). It includes a short tale called The Romance of a Real Cremona, about McGovan’s investigation of the theft of a Stradivari from a stately home near Edinburgh. During the investigation, McGovan interviews the owner, a Mr Cleffton, and asks about the value:
“Worth £400 – refused £200 for it the other day, [Cleffton] continued […]
"£400!” I echoed. “Is it possible you gave that sum for a fiddle?”
“No, not quite so much, but that’s its value,” he slowly admitted.
“How much did it cost you?”
“£40”, he rather reluctantly answered.
Watson tells a similar story about Holmes in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. He talks about how the detective had “purchased his own Stradivarius, which was worth at least five hundred guineas, at a Jew broker’s in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings”. Note that both instruments were bought for significantly less than their supposed value.
Another similarity is that in both stories, the violins passed through the hands of a pawnbroker. In real life, it was very common for fake instruments to move through pawnbrokers as a way of removing the identity of the forger or reseller.
In the Real Cremona, McGovan visits a Mr Turner, an “eccentric connoisseur” who “had a craze for buying fiddles which he never did, and never could, play upon”. In Doyle’s original sketched notes for his detective, Holmes was to be a collector of rare violins.
This never made it into the books in the end, yet it does say in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes “prattled away about Cremona fiddles, and the difference between a Stradivarius and an Amati”. Certainly, he demonstrated the same Victorian collector’s enthusiasm as Mr Turner.
The language that describes playing the violin is also comparable. In the Real Cremona, Cleffton comments that “some of the servants may have taken it [the stolen violin] out to have a scrape”, and that the violin was of no use to another character “for he is only a wretched scraper”. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson talks about how Holmes would “scrape carelessly at the fiddle”.
To be sure, scraping violins appear elsewhere in Victorian literature. But it is one more unmistakeable similarity with Honeyman, and at the very least illustrates how Doyle was steeped in the same Victorian context.
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that the McLevy story came out in 1884. This was two years after Hughes v Chanot and various other documented suspicions around classified Stradivari adverts that appeared around the same time.
As a violinist himself, Honeyman would have been particularly familiar with these cases. Indeed, in his later writings on the violin, he tells a story of a violin bought for £22 by an unwitting gentleman, dreaming it would be worth £1,000, but was actually worth no more than £5.
Case closed?
In short, the very strong implication in both the Real Cremona and the Doyle books is that the Stradivaris are not genuine. They are products of the Victorian forgery trade.
Which begs the question: if Doyle deliberately wrote this detail into the Holmes books, what was he trying to say about him? Perhaps it points to the detective as a flawed protagonist, cutting through his greatness at solving crimes to remind us he was not infallible.
Every time Holmes puffed his pipe and explained to Watson who the culprit was, there appears to have been one unsolved case under his nose that he didn’t even know about. Perhaps Doyle was laughing about it quietly to himself until his own death some 40 years later.
Another striking finding of this research is that very few of those who died were in treatment at the time. Our treatment services are already under intense pressure and this underlines the urgent need for more resources to go into treatment and trials of new medications.
This might well be preferable over another day of a patently compromised, Zuma-led government. But there is value in ensuring that such a hefty decision is made only after due deliberation, and is made openly and with courage of conviction. If such courage should prove to be lacking in the members of the majority party, should South Africans not be allowed to see this and to think, in turn, about the vote that in a constitutional democracy can and should matter far more: their own?
Every time Holmes puffed his pipe and explained to Watson who the culprit was, there appears to have been one unsolved case under his nose that he didn’t even know about. Perhaps Doyle was laughing about it quietly to himself until his own death some 40 years later.