Katgeveg!

I visited Bloemfontein for the second time in my life this week which happened to coincide with the annual curry cup final between the Freestate Cheetahs and the Gauteng Lions. For those of you who don't know, Bloemfontein along with Pretoria are supposed to be the cities that embodied apartheid above all others in South Africa's dark years. The locals are supposed to be a tough crowd, Afrikaans speaking and so passionate about their rugby team, the Cheetahs, that any suggestion that another team could beat them is supposed to be followed by an ass whippin' of note.

Orange people where everywhere. Orange flags were flying from the cars, shops were draped in orange, joggers wore orange socks and some loyal fellow had even airbrushed an orange Cheetah onto his restored 1960's Cadillac! 'Looks like the rumours about ass whompings might be true' I thought, 'these guys are nuts!'. Biltong was sold out and news arrived that the world cup winning Springboks would be in town for the final, hosted in Bloemfontein for a lap of honour. To call it fever pitch is to equate hurricane Katrina to a dust devil puffing harmlessly through a Fouriesberg mielie field. The local newspapers had dubbed the final as a 'Katgeveg' (cat fight!), which I thought was a pretty smart headline considering the Cheetahs were up against the Lions. The town was alive with crazed rugby fans and they were all in orange.

I was therefore slightly horrified when my business partner Allan randomly asked the biggest guy we had seen in Bloem if he was a Lions supporter and wanted to buy a red T-shirt. The guy's smiling retort was 'net om my gat te vee' (only to wipe my ass with) but all in good humour and actually wished Allan luck for the game. Now Allan could care less about who won the game but his amusement was peaked by stirring up the locals, presumably just to see if he could, so he tried harder. 'The lions are going bite those wimpy Cheetahs in half on Saturday with their massive teeth and then spit them out...ggggtoo', he fired at the next huge guy walking past...'only if you can catch us, you fat cats', the smiling orange fellow winked back.

Not getting much joy from the local huge white Afrikaans rugby fans, he found a tiny black guy in an orange T-shirt and said 'you are going to be sad on Sunday'. 'Why', said the confused stranger? 'Because the Cheetahs are going to be making a mew, mew and lions are going to be tuning GRRR, GRRR' he prodded. The little black guy stopped, turned around walked up to Allan and stared him in the eyes. 'Are you a Lions man?', he asked. 'GRRRR', said Allan. The little guy pointed his finger in Allan's face and said, 'Aaaaiy, when your lions are dead tomorrow and my cheetahs are still running around them laughing, come back here amalungu' staring at Allan like he meant it. Finally some anger from a fan, Allan was encouraged, gave the guy a pat on his back and offered him a lions T-shirt. The guy looked at him and said, 'never, never, I am Cheetahs for life. Down with the lions, down', winked at me and walked off.

This went on for a while but when Allan started picking on school girls wearing orange, I guessed it was time to head for the B&B. The Lions got trampled, the Cheetahs took it 20-18 and we fled but not before adjusting my perceptions of Bloemfontein. The city has friendly people of all colours and they stand together for their team without the crazy savagery I was expecting. In fact the biggest savage in town happened to be a temporary Lion's supporter, out for a bit of sport...

You asked, I did my bit...now its your turn Mr P

After a weekend of rugby highs and Lucky Dube's murder lows, I find myself compelled to write about the latter...and I am a HUGE rugby fan. I saw Lucky Dube in concert a number of times and it is a tragedy to have a man of his talent taken away from us.

In his world cup departure speech President Thabo Mbeki stated that he wished all of us to stand together and to help in the fight against crime. It is a phrase that has been thrown into every speech on crime and I would like to examine it. What does he mean exactly? Should we all become cops? Should we all stake out a corner on dodgy streets to snap photos of hijackers in action? I hope not. That would be promoting vigilantism and chaos.

So hopefully he means report crimes to the police when they happen and simply be a responsible citizen. I don't think anyone would NOT be doing these things already and this can't be the central problem facing police. I think the average South African is careful, vigilant, knows that 10111 is the number to call and won't hesitate if they are threatened. Hell people are even closing their suburbs off and building higher walls and installing tracking devices into their cars to deter criminals. People have organised marches against crime, demanded that more be done about crime to the point where Mr Ngakula, the safety and security minister, told parliament no less that South Africans who 'whinge' about crime should leave the country. So mixed signals are being sent out from those in power. Can the good people of South Africa do more or is that an empty request being used to divert attention from the real issue?

I guess it is all about priority. Where is crime and the will to fight crime on the government’s national agenda right now? Somewhere behind the transformation of our rugby team and the succession battle and that is probably why we have a problem spiralling out of control. Sort out the crime you get easier transformation anyway, you get stability, investment, you plug the brain drain, you promote reconciliation, you collect more tax from the newly invested foreign nationals which goes into HIV roll-outs, better health care and education all providing economic growth thereby further reducing crime.

If government really wanted to get those stats down and cut this nonsense out they could. They are, however, taking a half-hearted stab at it because most of them seem to share the thinking that pops up periodically…its all because of our past. Even if that was 100% true, and I do not buy that for a second, it is still simply an excuse from people who are not performing in their job. Excuses at the top level are not tolerated in the corporate world for non-performance, why should they be tolerated in government?

So I believe that Mbeki's speech was just rhetoric to be seen to be dealing with the issue of Lucky Dube's shooting in front of his children. Now just in case I was wrong and our president does, in fact want my help, I have put down a few ideas since none seem to be forthcoming from the guys in charge…

1) Get smart! Hire bright dedicated people into the police force and out-think the criminals. It worked superbly for SARS and paid itself off in no time. Why not the police? Why were they prepared to pay big salaries at SARS? To make more money out of tax, of course! Well, there will be an economic benefit if you sort out crime too, just not as obvious. Involve universities, business and communities. Out-think them. It is a radical problem needing a radical solution that may be complex and strategically involved.

2) Organise. Police stations should not be spending man-hours doing admin for the public when we have a crisis on the go. They should be focused on solving crime. Get rid of jobs that do not contribute to the cause like signing affidavits and making certified id book copies. Farm them out to other institutions.

3) Here is a radical one! Offer retired white male executives, those 'evil, nasty' men that benefited from apartheid, the chance to come in and use their lifetime of managerial skills, at a cut price for their country. They could manage the organisational side of police stations like a business and free the cops up to hit the bad guys? Any takers?

4) Use our army here and not in the Congo. Form units dedicated to certain types of crime. Units that hunt cash heist robbers, units that hunt hijackers and units that hunt armed robbers. Well-trained, well-equipped, highly mobile response units that respond quickly to certain codes with the intent to catch in the act. We are paying them salaries anyway and they could keep battle-ready in case of Zim’s invasion…;)

5) Alternatively, use said army to slowly take back streets of choice. Perhaps central JHB is a good place to start? Post two armed soldiers in radio contact on every street corner for a week. Any criminal stupid enough to commit a crime will be caught like a spider in a web and he will never be able to outgun the law. Arrest for the smallest crime. Keep this up until area is safe and then expand. Immediately return at first crime in safe area and repeat. Slowly drive criminals away from key areas.

6) Here is another radical one; form think-tanks of criminals in prison and allow them to redeem themselves and earn parole by working out where the next big crimes might go down or how to stop them or who to arrest. They think differently and might have a new angle. Success gets rewarded, they feel useful to society. Repeat offence after the program gets life and you get announced as a program member on your first day back in the slammer.

7) Stop these ridiculous courtroom and jail escapes. We are not fooled. It is either an inside job or the security is pathetic. Fix the one and root out the other. No more!

8) Use technology, cameras especially. We have state of the art video surveillance equipment to catch speeding motorists, why not expand that to a camera network in a city that can track criminals on recorded footage after the act? Follow them to an area, camera by camera, get pictures of their faces and publish them.

And so I could go on. I have listened to my president who voiced his own disgust at the death of Lucky Dube and I am working together with him to solve crime as he asked me to do. I have done my little bit today, I have shown I care. Now it is his turn to show me that he cares and that he has the WILL to fix this mess, regardless of who is responsible for it or how hard it is. Good people are dying, excuses are just not good enough.

I saw the funny side of SA crime this week. Now the rampant crime in SA is not very funny at all as Sir Anthony Sher's moving documentary so poignantly pointed out BUT those of us living here, wallowing in its stink so to speak have to find ways of coping with its proximity and this week we invented a new game to take the edge off. Let me explain...

My friend Mark got robbed. He is actually, despite being the victim of a crime, quite amused himself in a throw-up-the-hands kind of way. Firstly, burglars broke into his fenced complex and scaled the side of his 4-story building late one evening while he and his fiance were asleep in the house. The daring buggers swiped his laptop, their clothing and his mountain bike and had the audacity to lower all the loot to the ground using his windup extension cord! He phoned me pretty peeved the next morning (Sunday) but happy not to have run into them in the passage.

Monday, he arrived at work to discover that his offices had been broken into and that amongst other random things, his backup flash-disk for his laptop had been swiped - one year of data lost! Two days in a row. People clucked in sympathy but some of us started wondering, was it possible? A black little hat-trick was on the cards but we didn't dare contemplate it.

Tuesday brought amazing news! Although not directly, he had been a victim again! HAT-TRICK!!!!!!!!!!!! Thieves broke in and stole copper cables from a substation near his office and his whole factory stood still for a day while the council tried to fix the problem. The third one was under contention for a while but the panel gave it to him in the end...well done Markus, my first friend to get a hat-trick! Compulsory round at the Jolly Roger!

So Mark got the first 'hat-trick', Birnie has the award for 'best tackle' on a running cellphone thief, John is current holder of the 'biggest hit' for a beautiful open-hand slap on a rapist we caught in the park one morning on our weekly bike ride and I narrowly avoided the booby prize when some guy unsuccessfully tried to rob me with his finger (I could see it wasn't loaded). Starting to feel left out just a touch, I managed to snap up the award for 'harshest initiation by a team' when no less than exactly 15 guys, a full rugby side, with automatic weapons held up a happening bar and restaurant in Northern Joburg and chose me, out of the 400 people lying on the floor, to be the 'bag man'. It involved getting a gun in the face and going around asking my friends for their wallets and phones. Yes!!! On the scoreboard at last...

Sad, sick little game isn't it?

Why do cows have floppy ears?

I am reading a fairly well-known, if not infamous little scientific book at the moment. It is the kind of book that you see on a bookstore 'classics' shelf and think, 'damn I had should really read that so I know what all the fuss is/was about and so that I don't look stupid at some dinner party sometime'. So I bought the book. It has an innocuous cover displaying a perky, colourful tropical bird not mentioned in the text at all and certainly not the choice of the author, I am guessing. It was first published in 1859 and so you would guess that the science is mostly horribly out of date by now. Also you would expect the written English to be a little weird and hard to follow.

Wrong on both accounts.

The science is as relevant as the day it was written. There has, of course been a huge body of work added to it over the years, much like the work of Isaac Newton, but it is still most valid today and is a fantastic read, even for the layman (its not my field at all). There are admittedly a few bits that get involved and I chose to skip over them instead of paging backwards and forwards to the figures at the front of the book but mostly it is pretty easy to follow.

The language is simply beautiful. There is no other word I can use to describe its exact and pure style. There is not one unnecessary word. Every word is measured, weighted and used perfectly. Ideas are communicated in an honest, accurate and illuminating way. It contains a massive body of evidence on the subject, mostly everyday examples of things we see around us. I mean it starts off investigating why cows have floppy ears! We have all seen a cow's ears. No mystery there. Here is a snippet...

'When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points that strikes us is, that they generally differ more from eachother than do the indiviuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature...

Sterility has been said to be the bane of horticulture; but on this view we owe variability to the same cause which produces sterility...

Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears; and the view suggested by some authors, that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals not being much alarmed by danger, seems probable.'

I was not expecting to be moved to write about this book, Charles Darwin's 'Origin of the Species'. I expected to wade through it, add it to the bag and move on. After reading it, however, I am forced to say something. I am forced to say something to the people who refuse to read it or those who have read it and branded it false science or dismissed it out of hand because it conflicts with their beliefs. I am forced to say something to the 'creationists' and those who hide in a corner behind 'intelligent design' and monthly try to push that drivel into children's minds in school classrooms via the courtrooms. I am forced to say that this book is too good to be ignored. If you want to know where you truly come from, to understand how we come to be surrounded by such an amazing multitude of different forms of life here on earth, simply read this book! It does not pronounce, there are no ten commandments, no rules for you to follow, no threats, no violence, no war, no rape or murder, no human sacrifice, no misogynistic acts, no fire and no brimstone. Just simple answers to very big questions, miracles one might say.

You see, Charles Darwin wrote 'Origin of the Species' way back in 1859 simply to explain the things he saw around him. He explained why domestic animals almost all have floppy ears, why there are such a wide variety of different and weird looking pigeons, why similar finches all have different beaks on different islands in the South Pacific and why certain plants grow in some areas and not others. Not very evil is it? He explained natural selection, instinct and evolution based on actual experiments he had done ( many in his own garden, cranky fellow!) to prove that it works and made observations so simple as to be virtually indisputable. So if you are looking for mystery, the meaning of life, beauty, eternity and just a good eye-opening read, I recommend a dusty old book by a guy born almost exactly 200 years ago in 1809. He knew a lot more than most people, especially his detractors, know today and had the courage to publish it when the world was not yet ready to read it...