South African energy giant lies about cheap tariffs

The ESKOM saga continues in South Africa. As I have said before here and here, the mismanagement at ESKOM and its governmental control has no end.

One of the mantras that ESKOM--and the government--continually repeats is that our electricity is the cheapest in the world. I never believed that for a moment. Not because I had facts to prove them wrong, but because we have all seen how open laagered and truthful untruthful this government and its corrupt cronies have been from the beginning. Their track record says it all!

Now, economist Mike Schussler said the claim of cheapest electricity is a lie! Schussler said that the research used by ESKOM and our government for the claim of cheapest electricity, used a "carefully selected group of industrial countries [...] rather than any developing countries."

He also said that out of a survey of 55 countries, 10 other countries had cheaper electricity than South Africa. Countries such as China, India and Russia.

Read the complete article here.

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Character in politics does matter

Read this very succinct article about the importance of character in politics called "'Non-Judgmental' Nonsense" by Thomas Sowell.

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Obama: Lying through his teeth

Thomas Sowell wrote a very interesting commentary on Barack Obama called "A Living Lie."

Here is a little taste of it:

"Senator Obama's election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.

"There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation -- nor any other significant legislation, for that matter.

"Senator Obama is all talk -- glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk."

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The Language of Fear by Michael Crichton

HT: Chris Ortiz

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Political Fictions Annihilated by Sowell's Facts

Many political decisions are made because of myths that have been repeated so many times that they have become 'hearsay' facts. Repeat something enough, and people will start believing it.

A case in point is the crime in South Africa. It is said that poverty in South Africa is the driving force behind crime. However, that does not follow logically. If poverty is the driving force behind crime then why do other countries that are way poorer than South Africa not have crime problems way worse than in South Africa?

Read more about fictional fallacies that have become public policies in this article called, "Sowell's Facts Annihilate Political Fictions."

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Ideas Have Consequences

The ideas we throw around in life have consequences. Watch out that your ideas don't come back to haunt you!




HT: Terry Rayburn

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Mbeki's quiet diplomacy WRT Mugabe

Zapiro's picture here puts it all in perspective. This is what you get from 'canned' diplomacy!

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Mafia blackmail tactics! ... from the government

Blackmail! Something usually used by criminal groups such as the Mafia!

Dictionary.com defines it this way:

black·mail [blak-meyl]
–noun
1. any payment extorted by intimidation, as by threats of injurious revelations or accusations.
2. the extortion of such payment: He confessed rather than suffer the dishonor of blackmail.
3. a tribute formerly exacted in the north of England and in Scotland by freebooting chiefs for protection from pillage.

–verb (used with object)
4. to extort money from (a person) by the use of threats.
5. to force or coerce into a particular action, statement, etc.: The strikers claimed they were blackmailed into signing the new contract.

As I have written in my previous post, ESKOM: The Illusion of Power, due to complete mismanagement and incompetence on the part of ESKOM (South Africa's ONLY electricity provider) and of the government, ESKOM had to approach NERSA (National Energy Regulator of South Africa) for a price hike of 53% instead of the 14% hike that was awarded to it.

Right on the heels of that shocker, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, said that if South Africans do not want to accept the 53% price hike this year, the South African public will have to take a 100% price increase in 2009! If that isn't blackmail, then I do not know what is! He is clearly giving us an ultimatum via a threat. He is clearly trying to coerce South Africans to roll over on the electricity price hike!

When the government, and its parastatals, treat its people in this way, it has become clear that they have overstayed their welcome. This saga will go down in infamy and names such as Alec Erwin's will forever be connected to it.

He further tries to bully us into accepting this price hike since it is so important for South Africa's hosting of the World Cup soccer tournament in 2010. This seems like emotional blackmail. It is sick! He knows that soccer in South Africa is big (even though our soccer team does not reflect that). In South Africa, soccer seems to be more about emotions than actual skill at times. Alec Erwin is clearly playing on this.

Further, ESKOM claims in its submission to NERSA for the 53% price increase, that these increases are necessary due to high increases in the cost of coal. I understand that if coal costs more for ESKOM to buy, then sometime or other they would have to pass those increases onto the public. However, it strikes me as truly odd that they are suddenly asking for all these price increases right after the load shedding started. Blaming coal prices is a ruse to hide their own incompetence in running the electricity provider.

Ten years ago, the management of ESKOM at the time warned the government that by 2007 South Africa would start running out of electricity if something was not done to remedy the problem. After all that time, they had done nothing to solve the crisis, and now the consumer has to pay up for their mismanagement and incompetence in running the energy supplier.

But, then again, this country has been run on injustice and subterfuge all along.

The injustice in this regard is that they want us to pay for their gross misconduct in running the energy problem in this country, and the subterfuge is that they are trying to hide the real reasons for the price increases behind so-called coal increases.

Our energy supply needs to be diversified urgently. One supplier for the country obviously is not the solution, and the consumer must be given a choice as to which supplier he wants to use.

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ESKOM: The Illusion of Power

I was not going to write about this issue. It simply is too depressing. It has become an analogy of the way this country is going!

Regression, back into the era of darkest Africa! The problem is, South Africa can hardly be spoken of as ever having been part of darkest Africa. Yet, here we are. South Africa is fast approaching that epithet at the speed of darkness.

It truly boggles the mind! True, in South African politics, and parastatals (such as Eskom), it doesn't take long for the next mind boggling trick up the sleeves of these institutions to be exposed.

Ten (10) years ago, the management of Eskom at the time warned the South African government of impending doom with regards to the country's power supply.

However, that little fact was only made known to the public a few months ago, after load shedding started being implemented in South Africa.

Once this episode started, and the government feigned an investigation into the load shedding by Eskom--government had known about this for 10 years already, remember?--the National Electricity Regulator of SA (Nersa) awarded Eskom a 14.2% price hike, effective from 1 April 2008.

Apart from this, Trevor Manuel, Finance Minister, announced in his budget speech in February, that the citizens of this country will be taxed on energy usage. Obviously, this is to make up for the billions of rands the government is "lending" Eskom to build its capacity up once again. So, it will be a 14.2% price hike, plus extra tax by the government on electricity!

But wait, it gets WAAYYY better!

Just a few days ago, it was brought to light that Eskom has asked for a 53% price hike! This hike will replace the 14.2% increase initially awarded.

First, those involved in allowing the situation to go this far and dumping this country into darkness should have been fired! Plain and simple! In any other company, if the top brass caused such chaos to ensue, they would have been fired, without apology! Yet, here in this Politically Correct Stupid country, these buffoons were probably apologised to for having thoughts of firing them! How absolutely ludicrous!

It is not just the management of Eskom that should have been canned! The Minister of Public Enterprise Surprises, Alec Irwin should also have been given the boot! So too the Minister of Minerals and Energy Atrophy, Ms Buyelwa Patience Sonjica.

Second, having run this country into darkness, the "fat cats" at Eskom are to receive performance bonuses to the amount of R9.22 Million at the end of March 2008. What would those bonuses have been if they actually ran a company that could provide the services they promised they could? R100 Million?

Are we to pay their bonuses for them?

It is absolutely sickening! The moral outrage! These evil men are going to receive millions, while at the same time they want South Africans to pay 53% more for their electricity! These monstrous "fat cats" are completely void of ethics! They should be taken to the wall and put before a firing squad! They do not deserve our mercy!

But, then again, God showed me mercy and so I will show them the same. Still, they should be fired! They should not be paid those bonuses. In fact, the bonuses that they were paid for the last 5 years should be demanded back by the company.

Third, Eskom management has proven by now that they are incapable of running Eskom successfully, and that they have truly messed it up, yet, they want the man in the street to pay for their mistake mismanagement!

Fourth, how dare Eskom ask South Africa for more money while they will continue to have these power cuts (load shedding)? Will Eskom's failures just never end? If I ask someone for more money, should I not first make sure that I can actually provide a good service to the client? Which client will pay for a service that is undeliverable?

Fifth, an electricity price hike will not happen in a vacuum! Almost everything will become more expensive overnight. However long that night will be while Eskom's rule of darkness continues! Once all these prices have gone up, our inflationary targets will not be met, since inflation will skyrocket, and then the Reserve Bank will increase interest rates. All of this will have a very negative effect on the country and will force our economy down into the doldrums.

What can I say, but, that there are dark days ahead of us?

I just wish government had the backbone to fire those responsible. Perhaps then our faith in justice will be restored.

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Shooting at Islam from the hip

On Feb 5, 2008, I showed through a pictorial post called "A sleeping Europe will be a Europe lost!", what a sleeping Europe can expect.

Here is an atheist (Pat Condell) that recognises Islamic issues for what they are and refuses to be politically correct, just like Islamofascists refuse to be politically correct.

Just hope that more in Europe will wake up to the fuming giant in their midst.



HT: Ms. Underestimated

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Barack: Not fit to be security guard at Wal Mart?

Pat Buchanan has written an insigtful commentary on Barack Obama's relationship with the vitriolic Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ.

Here are a few paragraphs:
"It is easy now to understand why Michelle Obama, before Barack began to win, had never once been proud of her country. Who could be proud of the America that lives in the malignant imagination of the Rev. Wright?

"Barack has now moved to separate himself from Wright's rants and removed him from the campaign roster. And he will likely be forced, with anguish, to turn his back on, repudiate, and reject his beloved friend and teacher.

"But it is too late for that. For Wright has, for millions of Americans, filled in the blanks about Barack. Wright tells us the kind of company Barack keeps, the kind of men he holds close, the kind of attitudes and beliefs he finds acceptable, if not congenial."

Read Buchanan's article, Pastor to the President? here.

A Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

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Non-Windows OS from Microsoft

"Want to see what a non-Windows-based operating system developed by Microsoft looks like?

"If you are willing and able to sign a non-commercial, academic Shared Source license, look no further. Microsoft on March 4 made the few-hundred-thousand lines of source code for Singularity Version 1 available for download from its CodePlex site. Microsoft made the announcement at its Microsoft Research TechFest 2008 event in Redmond, Wash.

"Singularity is an operating system and set of related tools and libraries that is developed completely in managed code. Singularity is not based on Windows; it was written from scratch as a proof-of-concept."

Find out more here.

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Open Letter to Barack Obama

Sherif Girgis wrote an open letter to Barck Obama. It starts like this:

"Dear Senator Obama:

"As an immigrant from Kenya, your father found new hope in America’s noble principles and vast opportunities. The same promise brought my parents here from Egypt when I was still too young to thank them. Now you have inspired my generation with your vision of a country united around the same ideals of liberty and justice, 'filled with hope and possibility for all Americans.'

"But do you mean it?

"As a legislator, you have opposed every effort to protect unborn human life. Shockingly, you even opposed a bill to protect the lives of babies who, having survived an attempted abortion, are born alive. Despite your party’s broad support for legal abortion and its public funding, most Democrats (including Senator Clinton) did not oppose the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. You, however, opposed it. Your vision of America seems to eliminate 'hope and possibility' for a whole class of Americans: the youngest and most vulnerable. You would deny them the most basic protection of justice, the most elementary equality of opportunity: the right to be born."

Read the rest here.

HT: Justin Taylor

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The difference between the heroes of the Alamo and the world today

Chuck Baldwin wrote an excellent article on the heroes of the Alamo and how they were so different to the jelly-kneed politicians and liberals of today.

"During this week back in 1836, the Alamo fell. For more than 13 days, 186 brave and determined patriots withstood Santa Anna's seasoned army of over 4,000 troops. To a man, the defenders of that mission fort knew they would never leave those ramparts alive. They had several opportunities to leave and live. Yet, they chose to fight and die. How foolish they must look to this generation of spoiled Americans.

"It is difficult to recall that stouthearted men such as Davy Crockett (a nationally known frontiersman and former Congressman), Will Travis (only 23 years old with a little baby at home), and Jim Bowie (a wealthy landowner with properties on both sides of the Rio Grande) really existed. These were real men with real dreams and real desires. Real blood flowed through their veins. They loved their families and enjoyed life as much as any of us. There was something different about them, however. They possessed a commitment to liberty that transcended personal safety and comfort."

Finish reading here.

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South Africa: Wounded in the eyes of the world

South Africa's image to the rest of the world has been tarnished so badly, will we recover from that image? The world is starting to see South Africa as just another African failure. Recently, the Australian Sunday Herald published the following article. I reproduce it here in its entirety for you to see. You can read the original here.

---

Wounded Nation

AFTER BATHING in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South Africans today are deeply demoralised people. The lights are going out in homes, mines, factories and shopping malls as the national power authority, Eskom - suffering from mismanagement, lack of foresight, a failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled engineers to other countries - implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos.

Major industrial projects are on hold. The only healthy enterprise now worth being involved in is the sale of small diesel generators to powerless households but even this business has run out of supplies and spare parts from China.

The currency, the rand, has entered freefall. Crime, much of it gratuitously violent, is rampant, and the national police chief faces trial for corruption and defeating the ends of justice as a result of his alleged deals with a local mafia kingpin and dealer in hard drugs.

Newly elected African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma, the state president-in-waiting, narrowly escaped being jailed for raping an HIV-positive woman last year, and faces trial later this year for soliciting and accepting bribes in connection with South Africa's shady multi-billion-pound arms deal with British, German and French weapons manufacturers.

One local newspaper columnist suggests that Zuma has done for South Africa's international image what Borat has done for Kazakhstan. ANC leaders in 2008 still speak in the spiritually dead jargon they learned in exile in pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin and Sofia while promiscuously embracing capitalist icons - Mercedes 4x4s, Hugo Boss suits, Bruno Magli shoes and Louis Vuitton bags which they swing, packed with money passed to them under countless tables - as they wing their way to their houses in the south of France.

It all adds up to a hydra-headed crisis of huge proportions - a perfect storm as the Rainbow Nation slides off the end of the rainbow and descends in the direction of the massed ranks of failed African states. Eskom has warned foreign investors with millions to sink into big industrial and mining projects: we don't want you here until at least 2013, when new power stations will be built.

In the first month of this year, the rand fell 12% against the world's major currencies and foreign investors sold off more than £600 million worth of South African stocks, the biggest sell-off for more than seven years.

"There will be further outflows this month, because there won't be any news that will convince investors the local growth picture is going to change for the better," said Rudi van der Merwe, a fund manager at South Africa's Standard Bank.

Commenting on the massive power cuts, Trevor Gaunt, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, who warned the government eight years ago of the impending crisis, said: "The damage is huge, and now South Africa looks just like the rest of Africa. Maybe it will take 20 years to recover."

The power cuts have hit the country's platinum, gold, manganese and high-quality export coal mines particularly hard, with no production on some days and only 40% to 60% on others.

"The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event," said Anton Eberhard, a leading energy expert and professor of business studies at the University of Cape Town.

"That's a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa's reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines."

To examine how the country, widely hailed as Africa's last best chance, arrived at this parlous state, the particular troubles engulfing the Scorpions (the popular name of the National Prosecuting Authority) offers a useful starting point.

The elite unit, modelled on America's FBI and operating in close co-operation with Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO), is one of the big successes of post-apartheid South Africa. An independent institution, separate from the slipshod South African Police Service, the Scorpions enjoy massive public support.

The unit's edict is to focus on people "who commit and profit from organised crime", and it has been hugely successful in carrying out its mandate. It has pursued and pinned down thousands of high-profile and complex networks of national and international corporate and public fraudsters.

Drug kingpins, smugglers and racketeers have felt the Scorpions' sting. A major gang that smuggle platinum, South Africa's biggest foreign exchange earner, to a corrupt English smelting plant has been bust as the result of a huge joint operation between the SFO and the Scorpions. But the Scorpions, whose top men were trained by Scotland Yard, have been too successful for their own good.

The ANC government never anticipated the crack crimebusters would take their constitutional independence seriously and investigate the top ranks of the former liberation movement itself.

The Scorpions have probed into, and successfully prosecuted, ANC MPs who falsified their parliamentary expenses. They secured a jail sentence for the ANC's chief whip, who took bribes from the German weapons manufacturer that sold frigates and submarines to the South African Defence Force. They sent to jail for 15 years a businessman who paid hundreds of bribes to then state vice-president Jacob Zuma in connection with the arms deal. Zuma was found by the judge to have a corrupt relationship with the businessman, and now the Scorpions have charged Zuma himself with fraud, corruption, tax evasion, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice. His trial will begin in August.

The Scorpions last month charged Jackie Selebi, the national police chief, a close friend of state president Thabo Mbeki, with corruption and defeating the ends of justice. Commissioner Selebi, who infamously called a white police sergeant a "f***ing chimpanzee" when she failed to recognise him during an unannounced visit to her Pretoria station, has stepped down pending his trial.

But now both wings of the venomously divided ANC - ANC-Mbeki and ANC-Zuma - want the Scorpions crushed, ideally by June this year. The message this will send to the outside world is that South Africa's rulers want only certain categories of crime investigated, while leaving government ministers and other politicians free to stuff their already heavily lined pockets.

No good reason for emasculating the Scorpions has been put forward. "That's because there isn't one," said Peter Bruce, editor of the influential Business Day, South Africa's equivalent of, and part-owned by, The Financial Times, in his weekly column.

"The Scorpions are being killed off because they investigate too much corruption that involves ANC leaders. It is as simple and ugly as that," he added.

The demise of the Scorpions can only exacerbate South Africa's out-of-control crime situation, ranked for its scale and violence only behind Colombia. Everyone has friends and acquaintances who have had guns held to their heads by gangsters, who also blow up ATM machines and hijack security trucks, sawing off their roofs to get at the cash.

In the past few days my next-door neighbour, John Matshikiza, a distinguished actor who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the son of the composer of the South African musical King Kong, had been violently attacked, and friends visiting from Zimbabwe had their car stolen outside my front window in broad daylight.

My friends flew home to Zimbabwe without their car and the tinned food supplies they had bought to help withstand their country's dire political and food crisis and 27,000% inflation. Matshikiza, a former member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre company, was held up by three gunmen as he drove his car into his garage late at night. He gave them his car keys, wallet, cellphone and luxury watch and begged them not to harm his partner, who was inside the house.

As one gunman drove the car away, the other two beat Matshikiza unconscious with broken bottles, and now his head is so comprehensively stitched that it looks like a map of the London Underground.

These assaults were personal, but mild compared with much commonplace crime.

Last week, for example, 18-year-old Razelle Botha, who passed all her A-levels with marks of more than 90% and was about to train as a doctor, returned home with her father, Professor Willem Botha, founder of the geophysics department at the University of Pretoria, from buying pizzas for the family. Inside the house, armed gunmen confronted them. They shot Professor Botha in the leg and pumped bullets into Razelle.

One severed her spine. Now she is fighting for her life and will never walk again, and may never become a doctor. The gunmen stole a laptop computer and a camera.

Feeding the perfect storm are the two centres of ANC power in the country at the moment. On the one hand, there is the ANC in parliament, led by President Mbeki, who last Friday gave a state-of-the-nation address and apologised to the country for the power crisis.

Mbeki made only the briefest of mentions of the national Aids crisis, with more than six million people HIV-positive. He did not address the Scorpions crisis. The collapsing public hospital system, under his eccentric health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, an alcoholic who recently jumped the public queue for a liver transplant, received no attention. And the name Jacob Zuma did not pass his lips.

Last December Mbeki and Zuma stood against each other for the leadership of the ANC at the party's five-yearly electoral congress. Mbeki, who cannot stand again as state president beyond next year's parliamentary and presidential elections, hoped to remain the power behind the throne of a new state president of his choosing.

Zuma, a Zulu populist with some 20 children by various wives and mistresses, hoped to prove that last year's rape case, and the trial he faces this year for corruption and other charges, were part of a plot by Mbeki to use state institutions to discredit him. Mbeki assumed that the notion of Zuma assuming next year the mantle worn by Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first black state president would be so appalling to delegates, a deeply sad and precipitous decline, that his own re-election as ANC leader was a shoo-in.

But Mbeki completely miscalculated his own unpopularity - his perceived arrogance, failure to solve health and crime problems, his failure to deliver to the poor - and he lost. Now Zuma insists that he is the leader of the country and ANC MPs in parliament must take its orders from him, while Mbeki soldiers on until next year as state president, ordering MPs to toe his line.

Greatly understated, it is a mess. Its scale will be dramatically illustrated if South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup is withdrawn by Fifa, the world football body.

Already South African premier league football evening games are being played after midnight because power for floodlights cannot be guaranteed before that time. Justice Malala, one of the country's top newspaper columnists, has called on Fifa to end the agony quickly.

"I don't want South Africa to host the football World Cup because there is no culture of responsibility in this country," he wrote in Johannesburg's bestselling Sunday Times.

"The most outrageous behaviour and incompetence is glossed over. No-one is fired. I have had enough of this nonsense, of keeping quiet and ignoring the fact that the train is about to run us over.

"It is increasingly clear that our leaders are incapable of making a success of it. Scrap the thing and give it to Australia, Germany or whoever will spare us the ignominy of watching things fall apart here - football tourists being held up and shot, the lights going out, while our politicians tell us everything is all right."

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