Rolling blackouts

Yesterday turned out to be quite a frustrating day. I had meant to watch some soccer and post a review of The Martian by Andy Weir, but our national electricity supplier decided to implement phased blackouts across the country to compensate for their gross incompetence negligence maintaining the grid.

So there I was all settled to stream the early afternoon Manchester Derby on my computer, fresh whiskey and soda poured, pretzels and chips neatly laid out by my side… when the bastards at Eskom decided to throw the switch. I wouldn’t have minded so much had it been earlier in the day as I had slept in late, but why the fuck at two ‘o clock in the afternoon?

When the power did come back on some six hours later, I was far too deep into the bottle and all interest in writing had dissipated… and Manchester United were probably either well into the post-mortem of their latest defeat at the hands of Manchester City, or into bottles of their own. Can’t say I feel too sorry for them; never did like that team much.

They say that the rolling blackouts, or load shedding as Eskom like to call it, will continue well into the week, maybe longer. I have all my fuck you’s nicely bottled up inside for when they do happen. Off course, the wankers at Eskom can hardly take all the blame; the fucking politicians have had a major role to play in the demise of the power utility. Yeah, I’m talking to you, you ANC half-wits.

Oh well, on to better things…

A fellow blogger who follows my posts regularly mentioned in an earlier post that he had nothing to fill the silly box segment of his daily blog, so I thought I would help him out. Now this really put a smile on my face and brightened up (fuck you Eskom) what would have been an otherwise gloomy Monday.

A Malawian diplomat who had once described dictator President Robert Mugabe as an idiot, refused to take up the post of envoy to Zimbabwe. He was quoted by Germany’s The Foreigner magazine in 2006 as saying:

Zimbabwe has an idiot — I am sorry, I know you are recording — but they have an idiot for president.

This guy Robert Mugabe, I hope that he lives a long time, so that one day he can go before an international tribunal. He is a horrible man.

Well done Thoko Banda, you have made my day. You earn a noddy badge; the only one I’m likely to hand out to a politician this year, or ever.

Now where’s the rest of that whiskey?

Vote.Them.Out.

I’ve been nursing this cold for a whole week, and it’s mildly annoying. On reading this article about President Zuma’s visit to a squatter settlement in the Western Cape (WC), I became more than a little infuriated. So I guess it’s time for another political rant before I log off and start watching Cloud Atlas which will hopefully calm me down.

The President exclaims that he is “…shocked to see my people live in these conditions.” He was referring to the Democratic Alliance (DA) who he says claims that “…things have improved.” The DA is in opposition to the ANC and is governing the WC – the only Province which is under their control, the rest being under ANC control.

The reality is that there are nine Provinces in South Africa, eight of which is governed by the ANC, of which Zuma is the leader. There are squatter settlements in all these other Provinces, in which people are living in squalid conditions that are equivalent to those of the WC, or worse. Zuma must think that “his” people are as ignorant as this poor woman (Pumla) from the WC squatter settlement who declared that she will vote for the ANC in the upcoming elections and stated that,

It’s just promises probably, but even if the promise is empty you still want that hope.

The reason the ANC are still in power is because there are far too many Pumla’s in South Africa, and far too many people who still believe in the ANC that once was. These people are misguidedly content to live on the hope that some day our politicians will make good on their many promises.

My anger turned to full-blown disgust when a statement was released to the press later this afternoon, in which the ANC stated that public statements that insult the President are “an abuse of the constitutionally enshrined right to freedom of expression.”

The spokesman went on to issue a veiled threat to the effect that:

…Elsewhere in the world, it is a criminal offence to insult a sitting head of state, and South Africans must, together, forge a common understanding on how we halt this impunity and abuse of democratic privilege.

The only countries I know of which actually prosecute and harass their citizens for criticising their President are those rune by demagogues, tyrants an tin-pot dictators. I’d like to think that South Africa is a proper democracy, but there are many, including influential people such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu who think we are on the slippery slope to tyranny.

The ANC that led South Africa to freedom from Apartheid is very different to the one led by Jacob Zuma. It has become in so many ways, a mirror-image of the apartheid era despots, under his leadership, or more accurately his abysmal lack of it.

It is abundantly clear that Zuma’s ANC must perish, so that the real ANC may rise in triumph once again. This can only be accomplished at the voting polls next year; it’s a pity we have to endure his Presidency in the interim.

End of rant; time for that movie…

Kim Jong-il (1941/42 – 2011)

Image via Wikipedia

What are the chances? Kim Jong-il dying at about the same time as Christopher Hitchens who absolutely despised the North Korean dictator. Some coincidence, yes?

While Hitchens’ death was mostly lamented and regretted, Kim’s death was mourned openly, as evidenced by this YouTube video, to a degree that is quite bewildering. Now that is deeply disturbing.

Either the North Korean people genuinely loved the degenerate old tosser, or the show of grief is a put-on by a fearful populace. I’m going with the latter.

The passing of this evil tyrant will be mostly welcomed by all people in the world who have their heads screwed on right, but it also leaves everyone a bit jittery about what’s going to happen to the country which has nuclear capability. Kim’s successor, his own son Kim Jong-un appears to be just as evil, if not more so, just judging by this picture embedded after fact number 14 of this article in The Telegraph.

Off course there are a few sub-humans in the world who are at this moment bemoaning the death of Kim Jong-il and the decimation of the Despots Club; most notably one Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe. And it’s only a matter of time until some dingbat in South Africa’s own dictatorship-in-the-making, the ANC, will come out publicly to sing the praises of Dear Leader.

Now if only Mad Bob would croak before the end of the year in less than two weeks; it would be a bumper year indeed for the obliteration of tyrannical pieces of fecal matter. Come on Santa, make it happen!

The African Way?

Every time someone in the South African government, or one of its pathetic minions such as the ANC Youth League fucks up, it’s become common practice for their detractors to comment that it’s the African way. And as one of the government’s most vocal detractors, I think we need to examine this concept more closely.

What is this African way that they are referring to? Is it greed, corruption, incompetence, arrogance, wastefulness, ostentatious behaviour, the tendency to be dictatorial? For crying out loud, this government and about every other government in Africa epitomize every one of these traits, and more. But, is it really an African phenomenon?

To be fair, many other governments all over the world indulge in some, if not all of these disgusting characteristics, so to single out Africa as a unique source of maladministration, is extremely disingenuous. Granted Africa has some of the worst culprits, but they are certainly not alone in this form of inhumanity to man; there is no other way of describing this behaviour as anything but man’s contempt for his fellow-man. Africa did not export this loutish behaviour to the rest of the world. And there are off course historical reasons why Africa has become associated with being one of the worst perpetrators of human rights violations, but that is the subject of another discussion.

What then is the African way?

For the most part, Africans are good people, but their apparent pre-disposition to accept the gross indulgences of their leaders, at a horrific cost to their personal selves, is annoying, to say the least. The simple awe in which they hold their leaders, fueled by the illusion that they are liberators meant to worshipped, is akin to the grip that religion has on the uncritical mind.

Is the African way then, to accept one’s lot in society with barely a whimper? Or you going to show your arrogant, egotistical, incompetent, corrupt, lazy, greedy, selfish, dictatorial, thieving leaders that it is no longer the African way to take this shit any more.