More Moeletsi

Been reading up some more on Moeletsi Mbeki.

I'm starting to develop serious respect for the man. I'm never going to be that keen on his brother, but Moeletsi seems to be cut from a very different cloth. Or perhaps he feels that he's sufficiently disinterested in personal political power that he's able to say what he thinks (and he evidently does a lot of thinking). He's been sharply critical of his brother and the SA govt. on a number of issues, particularly Zim and Black Economic Empowerment.

A few excerpts:

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(From BBC News: 22-09-2004)

The average African is worse off now than during the colonial era, the brother of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki has said.

Moeletsi Mbeki accused African elites of stealing money and keeping it abroad, while colonial rulers planted crops and built roads and cities.

"This is one of the depressing features of Africa," he said.

Moeletsi Mbeki also said that South Africa should support democracy in Zimbabwe, and not tolerate violence.

President Thabo Mbeki has been accused of being too soft on his Zimbabwean counterpart Robert Mugabe.

South Africa should "not tolerate use of violence, torture and rigging of elections and, if necessary, we should support the opposition," Moeletsi Mbeki said.

He said that while China had lifted some 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line.

"The average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism. In the 1960s African elites/rulers, instead of focusing on development, took surplus for their own enormous entourages of civil servants without ploughing anything back into the country," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3679706.stm

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(From MineWeb: 10-09-2004)

[Responding to a question on Black Economic Empowerment]

MOELETSI MBEKI: ... And my view then, which is my view now, was that I said to the people who were explaining that that is not a development model. It is a wealth redistribution model. But the problems of South Africa are not wealth redistribution, the problems of South Africa are wealth creation and job creation in particular. In fact, we have had a lot of wealth redistribution in South Africa created as a result of the trade union movement, for example, and those are the normal processes of redistributing wealth. Black economic empowerment handicaps entrepreneurship, in my view.

MINEWEB: Handicaps it?

MOELETSI MBEKI: Yes, because it takes – and I have lots of friends who were involved in black economic empowerment deals – it takes the brightest among the black people who -- instead of devoting their energies to creating new companies, to creating new products, to providing and creating employment -- tend to spend most of their time, if not all of their time, looking for redistributing mechanisms to get shares in pre-existing companies. So what you are actually getting is that the brightest among the black people in this country, instead of creating wealth, building up their own companies, are becoming secondary fiddle players to the existing companies – and that in my view is not what is going to save our country.

. . .

MINEWEB: What about the argument that role models are being created for the black community?

MOELETSI MBEKI: You know, to tell you the honest truth, Alec, I think Ernest Oppenheimer is more of a role model to me or Anton Rupert or Donald Gordon, because they created real companies from scratch, they are making real products. If you smoke, you will be smoking a cigarette made by Anton Rupert, and there was no such a cigarette before. So those, in my view, are real role models. Now there are black role models. If you look at somebody like Herman Mashaba, who created Black Like Me. Black Like Me did not exist. It is a product. But now he is employing top chemists to create new products. You can take another guy called Omar Mothali, who makes furniture. He was inviting me the other day to come to a new showroom. So we have role models both black and white in this country, but they a’re creating real products.

MINEWEB: So the Mzi Khumalos, the Tokyo Sexwales and so forth would not in your opinion be the right kind of role model?

MOELETSI MBEKI: Well I am very nervous to name their names, because I am already in their bad books – one of them once promised that if he ever met me in a dark alley he will donner me. I wouldn’t like to go into names but, as I say: who created the premier products of South Africa? It is not that group.

. . .

MINEWEB: It seems as though we are a young democracy, we are learning as we go forward, we take a step ahead and then there is kind of half a step backwards and so forth. Do you feel, though, that BEE today – and I know, as you have explained to us, that it is on the wrong path – at least we are starting to head towards the right solution, or not?

MOELETSI MBEKI: I am afraid I don’t think so. For me, if I wanted to advance, which is what I think we should all be doing to advance our country, to grow its economy, to enrich its people, there is no shortcut. We have to develop our artisans, we have to attack our mathematics levels, we have to train our technicians and our engineers. This is what Asia is doing. If you visit China, which I do quite often, when you get into a hotel there’s a doorman there who is trying to ask you "can you correct my English?" because the doorman knows the globalising world uses English. He is learning English himself. So you have an enormous culture of learning which we do not have in South Africa, We have black economic empowerment. We are playing to a culture of entitlement rather than to a culture of entrepreneurship and a culture of learning.

http://www.mineweb.net/radio/classic_mining/346622.htm

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What can I say? The more I hear and read, the more impressed I am. And after his recent article on trade with China, I'm more keen than ever to start learning Mandarin.

And more convinced than ever that my future is tied to the East.

Hyperbole-8

It's good to see that the organisers of Live8 have been able to keep their sense of perspective.

At the start of the London event, an anouncer declared, "This is the greatest rock show in the history of the world."

A deejay on XM Satellite Radio (which broadcast the show on seven different channels), gushed about "the single most important concert ever."

And Chris Martin of Coldplay declared, with apparent belief in what he was saying, that "[This is] the greatest thing that's ever been organized in the history of the world."

Oh boy.

I was pleasantly surprised to read Moeletsi Mbeki (Thabo's brother) writing about the concert and the mindset behind it. Far from joining the hyperbolic bandwagon, he was critical of the naivite of real-world politics displayed by the event's organisers.

I couldn't find the whole article on the 'net - I think there may have been a publishing copyright issue which limits the newspapers' rights to electronic reproduction - but I found a few snippets this morning which will give you a taste.

In an open letter to Geldof et al., he writes:

"You, Sir Bob, your rock friend Bono and politicians such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown display a soft heart to Africa. But a soft heart will not cure the hard situation in Africa.
"I know that you and Tony Blair have been genuinely touched by the suffering of Africa. But, ironically, the contribution you are making is exacerbating the problem.
"The way things are at present, foreign aid, whether from individuals or government, promotes a lack of accountability in a country's rulers.
"If a government has a budget of ,say, £100 million and has to raise it by taxing the people, the citizens will want to know how the money has been spent.
"But if a donor says we will give you half of that £100 million in aid, the government's accountability is reduced by half."

And further on:

"Your heart is in the right place, Sir Bob, but you do not appreciate the unintended consequences of what you are doing.
"[Foreign aid] can lead to more starvation, not less. If you keep dipping into the maize mountains of America and Europe to provide food to Africa, when are the African people going to develop their own technology to incease production to feed themselves?"

He cites Ethiopia as an example of how this has worked in practice:

"The reason it cannot feed its people is beause it lacks the storage systems - weevils get into the dry storage - and the threshing process is not carried out properly. But there is little incentive to do anything about this. Stockpiles are not needed because every time there is a crisis the West is asked to give more food.
"If you want to solve poverty in Africa, then help create an etrepreneurial system that will generate wealth for the people."

And he pulls no punches with regards to the "plundering" of Africa by her own leaders:

"Few politicians in the West have ever questioned this systematic theft of a continent's wealth by its own rulers, fearing charges of racism and perpetuating colonialism.
"Those who do, such as George Bush, have been accused of being hard-hearted. But attaching reasonable strings to aid shows a clear head and not a hard heart."

...and, in possibly the bluntest comment about African politics from any public figure in recent years:

"Africa is not badly governed because it is poor. It is poor because it is badly governed."

Wow - a public figure in Africa with a deep intellect and a willingness to be honest and objective?

That's a pleasant surprise.

PS - also found an excellent article on the same subject here.

Dude, why the angst?

So there I was on Friday night drinking red wine with a friend in a particularly manky dive bar in Observatory when I had the most remarkable conversation.

I met this friend a couple months ago throu another mutual friend, and we get on extremely well and share the same twisted and bizarre sense of humour. Which is unusual, to say the least.

Anyhoo...

The problem with my sense of humour (and personality as a whole, come to think of it) is that I'm prone to make comments which are wildly open to misinterpretation (especially by girls). This is something which has sometimes proved disastrous in the past, leading to wrong assumptions, tearful misunderstandings, hurt feelings and a lot of quite unintended pain and heartache.

Which is no fun.

So it's something I'm trying to be a whole lot more conscious of, but in some cases it's difficult to avoid, especially as:
a) mixed messages, innuendo and leading comments are an integral part of my personality, and
b) people have a tendency to interpret things in whichever way best matches what they want the truth to be, and are loathe to risk disappointment by checking the veracity of their interpretation. (Although, as my friend Gav pointed out this morning, one often doesn't see the need for clarification, as one feels that the situation is already perfectly clear...).

Which brings us to Friday.

So we go out for drinks, and it's all good fun and great to spend time with her (as always). And then out of the blue she says, "So, what's going on here?"

And I'm thinking, "Wow, such directness! That's a first! In a good way!"

So anyway, we chatted completely openly about how we each saw the situation, which (VERY fortunately) was much the same way: basically, we both found each other very interesting and saw the possibility of a very good and very long-term friendship. Which is a very exciting prospect. And as nether of us is even remotely in a position to even consider the possibility of relationships, that actually works out really well.

With that all having been cleared up, the rest of the evening proceeded brilliantly, and we could both relax a lot more and stop worrying about unintentionally hurting a friend through misunderstanding.

And I was left thinking, "Now, why can't all communication be that open and straightforward? Why all the subterfuge and all the efforts expended on keeping up appearances? Why the unanswered (because unasked) questions? Why the misunderstanding? Why the confusion? Why tearful accusations of being misled? Why the pain? Why the anguished conversations with friends, sitting up late into the night trying to work out what something meant and what someone else is feeling? Why not just freakin' ask? And, when asked, why not just give a straight answer?"

But perhaps I'm oversimplifying.