Centre of the Universe

South Africa is an interesting country, and if you think you know completely it – even as a local you would be severely mistaken.

Yesterday, despite having lived in SA my whole life, I had my first experience of visiting one of our infamous townships (Du Noon), and despite the fact, that I literally live 2km away from Du Noon, it is like an entirely different world than what I am used to.

South Africa is one of the countries in the world with the largest difference between standards of living between the rich and the poor, and that was very apparent to me yesterday.

You have a small rich elite, who all drive snazzy new 4×4’s, BMW’s and Mercs, who all live in big mansions. Then you have the struggling middle-class, who can barely afford to pay rent and keep food on the table (which we are firmly a part of), and then at the economic bottom, you have the working class which mostly live in townships and squatter camps in the most primitive of conditions imaginable. The sad thing is that the majority of our population lives this way, especially when you consider that unemployment sits around 30%, and that even if you do work, most working class jobs pay an absolute pittance in South Africa.

The reason why I had to go to into the township, was because one of Claudias former colleagues lives there, and since we are packing up our stuff in preparation to move to the Netherlands, we promised to give her a few bookcases, and had to go drop it off.

Once you enter the township, all resemblence to anything you know before just disappears. Building materials are anything people can get their hands on, roads are narrow, most people have no other transport otherthan their feet, and houses are tiny. The main street is bordered by little shops selling discount items. A few of the shops even use old shipping containers as their building.

In Du Noon, a house tends to be a little bit of a misnomer. To gve an example, Letitia (to whom I was giving the bookcases) had one of the bigger houses in her street. It was built out cement bricks, unlike most of her neighbours whose houses were made out of corrugated iron.

Her house consists of only one room, with two beds in it, the cooking area, and a tiny walled off section for the toilet. That is all of it. And here I complain about my tiny house with two bedrooms a lounge and kitchen, and her entire house is smaller than my garage.

Letitia’s house was impeccably neat though, and she was proud to show off her house to me – as she ought to be. She has done well with what she has.

Despite the fact that most people who do not live in the townships and squatter camps fear them greatly, since most of the criminal element tend to originate from them, my experience yesterday showed that most of the inhabitants are decent respectable and most of all friendly people who are just trying to make it through life. I did not feel threatened once while I was in there, despite the fact that I was not quite comfortable in these unfamiliar surroundings.

I know I struggle immensely to make ends meet every month, and I earn ten times what these people earn – sometimes even more.

South Africa might be pretending to be a first world country, but until these poor people get lifted out of poverty, we will be firmly stuck in the third world. From first hand observations, I certainly think it is time that South Africa’s politians take out those silver spoons out of their mouths and start doing something to alleviate the suffering of their people.

The pictures are kindly provided by www.capetown.dj

Taxes are the bane of everybody’s life. No one likes to pay tax, but we all know we need to.

Yesterday, I submitted my tax return, and I must say that it was a painless, quick and easy process. The SA Revenue Service allows eFiling, which is a great way to electronically submit your tax return.

The great thing about this is that the form you need to complete comes pre-populated with all the IRP5 data from your employers, so most of the time, doing your tax is simply a matter of double-checking that everything is right and then clicking submit.

It is most surprising to find a government department that works so well. The South African government is full of corruption and ineptitude – I just need to mention Home Affairs, or Eskom to send shivers down any South African’s spine – but the revenue service is the one efficient bastion out of the lot.

At least they can get something right…

As a programmer, I am no stranger to projects that have ended up being late and/or over budget. Every programmer can tell you the horror stories. But being R3 billion over budget even blows me away.

I am talking about the new Bus Rapid Transit system that Cape Town is building to help ease traffic congestion, and provide some infrastructure for the Soccer World Cup next year.

The original plan was to have four phases, to be completed by 2020, and costing about R10 billion in total. Phase one, which is due to be completed by mid next year, was forecast to cost R1.4 billion.

Construction has been going on for a while now, severely affecting my route home from work every day, and causing taxi drivers to protest about the extra competition.

Well, recently it turned out that someone had miscalculated the budget, and a scaled down version of phase one would cost R2.35 billion. That is almost double the money for a much smaller project than originally intended. I then heard today that the budget had grown to R4.2 billion!

How on earth does a project like this end up costing 3 times as much as the original estimate resulting in being R3 billion over budget?

And if you want to know how much the extra cost is going to cost an average Capetonian? There are according to Wikipedia, about 3.5 million people living in Cape Town, which means that the extra budget amounts to R850 per PERSON in Cape Town. I think that puts it a little bit more into perspective….

You can read more at News24.

A few days ago, I saw an article which said that the German soccer team were advised by their security firm that when they came to South Africa next year for the Soccer World Cup, they should wear bullet-proof vests when they venture out of their hotel rooms.

The reason for this is that South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and they just trying to be careful. It is overreacting a slight bit, but does give a very interesting view as to how South Africa is viewed on the world stage.

Crime exists everywhere in the world, but South Africa has one of the highest rates of crime. Now, how exactly do South Africans handle this war zone we live in? We just simply carry on with life.

Crime is the number one topic we South African love to complain about (justifiably so), yet life goes on. We may live behind electric fencing and burglar bars, but very few fear walking down the road. We know that there are risks, and we try to minimise them as much as possible – you could say that South Africans are a heck of a lot more street-wise than our overseas counterparts. We don’t show off flashy items such as cellphones or expensive jewelery in risky places, and are always aware of our surroundings.

But has it reached a point where we need bullet-proof vests? I think not. We may be street-wise but we certainly are not petrified of getting gunned down.

I will say I understand the German security firm’s stance, and I certainly think that South African crime is out of control, but I still feel safe enough to walk down the street leaving the body armour to the security guards who patrol our streets.

The news came out today that the price of fuel in South Africa is going up by 34c per litre again beginning of next month, pushing the price over the R8 per litre mark again.

While I could complain for hours about the high fuel prices, there is another something else that I never quite fully worked out. Why does the media in South Africa follow the price of Brent Crude oil.

Whenever the world oil price is quoted on TV, or in the newspapers, or on the radio, the ONLY price that ever gets quoted is Brent crude.

The problem with this is that South Africa does not import much Brent Crude oil. Most of our imports come from the Middle East, with much of the rest coming from Africa. I was reading a report that we may soon be getting large amounts of oil from Angola. And most of this oil sells for a different price than Brent Crude.

Sure, the differences in the prices between regions would not be vastly different, but why aren’t those prices ever quoted? What makes the price of Brent Crude so special?

I think it would be a very justifiable proposition that the price we see in the media for oil, should be the average which we as South Africans are paying for oil, or perhaps a split of the prices which are relevant to us. It would certainly make trying to estimate the next petrol price increase easier.

South Africa has always had strikes this time of year as employers and unions renegotiate employment contracts. However, I am not sure if it is just me, but it seems as if we have had a rather ludicrous strike season this year.

We have had our usual strikes – there was the mineworkers who seem to strike every year, the municipal strike, Metrorail (our train service), the bus strike, prison warden strike, and talk of a tax worker strike, Telkom, the post office is still on strike, the workers contructing our 2010 Soccer World cup projects wanted higher pay, and more that I can’t even remember.

There have been quite a few more unusual ones that has stood out in my mind.

First there was the doctors strike. It was an illegal strike, but doctors have just become fed up with being paid a pittance and expected to work in abysmal conditions. They were demanding up to 50% increases, while government was refusing to budge. Then when they striked, they fired close to 300 of them, only having to rehire them all, as South Africa has a huge shortage of medical staff, due to all our doctors leaving for better pay and conditions in other countries. Out of all the strikes, I actually supported this one.

There was the taxi strike. They were striking because government is implementing better public transport systems like the Bus Rapid Transport system, and they cannot handle a little bit of competition, so they choose to make everyone’s a life more miserable than they already do (you can only understand this when you have had to fight with taxis on the road who are a law unto themselves).

Then, there was an illegal protest by the national defence force. It got so bad that the police force were having running battles with the defence force in from of the Union buildings in Pretoria. I think it is just a little bit scary when a group of trained soldiers start running amok.

Now also the traditional healers are protesting. They are demanding recognition by medical aids and the medical council. Just a brief description of a traditional healer – they claim to have the ability to talk to your ancestors, divine the future, and heal you using ‘muti’, which are essentially herbal remedies, some of which work, and others I am a little doubtful of.

I wonder if the next group to strike will be the politicians saying that their expensive cars are not expensive enough, or Eskom to demand more money to cover their huge losses. Things can’t get any more crazy than they already are!