The terror of anti-terrorism laws and why Facebook, Twitter and Google’s fail to protect privacy

Over the past couple of days I have seen quite a few articles in which people have been complaining about Facebook invading people’s privacy, being creepily Big-Brotherish and encouraging online stalkers. The tide also seems to have turned against Google, with the ever-unpopular Street View cameramen admitting that they had “inadvertently” downloaded private data from household Wi-Fi networks, including sensitive information such as passwords and e-mails.

It’s no secret that law enforcement officials and security forces the world over can or will soon be able to hack into anyone’s Facebook, Skype or e-mail accounts and collect data such as private conversations, photographs or status updates to gather information about suspected criminals.

The trouble I have with this is: how do officials decide who is a potential criminal or terrorist? Do they use racial and religious profiling? For over twenty years, key-word technology has been developed as part of state security. Mention the word “bomb” or similar such terroristy word over the internet, the phone or in a text or e-mail and a little red flag is raised somewhere on a server.

Of course, most of the time it’s a false alarm. Nevertheless they must be looked into, which takes up time and resources. And the technology has to get more and more sophisticated as the years go by, because more and more people are getting connected and internet traffic is growing exponentially year-on-year.

The anarchist in me would suggest that everyone should put the word “bomb” in every single e-mail you send out and say it on every single phone call you make, and if millions of us do it, it might make their servers explode and their operations director commit suicide.

However, the real threat to our privacy is not just Facebook, but the whole kit and caboodle. Facebook, Twitter and Google and the millions of app developers and advertisers watching your consumer habits. Turning your computer on or using your mobile phone means that you are leaving a trail of your behaviour on servers all over the world. Your IP address. Your friends. Your shopping habits. Your Google searches. Your location. You think that just because your “add your location” option on Facebook is disabled that no-one will know where you are?

Puh-lease, biatch.

Everyone’s cellphone is a tracking device. GSM technology allows network providers to track the location of a mobile phone using cell tower triangulation methods. Even if you have a Nokia 3310.

Most passports are now so-called biometric or electronic passports. These passports contain RFID chips which can be read from up to 30 feet away, enabling your personal information to be read and updated on a central database without your knowledge whenever you are travelling with your personal documents. And those are just the RFID chips we know about. There may very well be others that we are not aware of, hidden away in things we would never suspect.

Calls can be tapped and Facebook/Twitter communication can be logged. Even Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls such as Skype can be monitored, recorded and traced.

I would say that Twitter is becoming a larger threat to privacy than Facebook. With the new revamped version of Twitter, conversations between groups of people can be seen and analysed, and multimedia platforms are available on separately-developed but interlinked applications. The more worrying aspect of Twitter is that most people’s Twitter accounts are public, meaning anyone can see them, whereas the vast majority of Facebook accounts are protected by privacy settings.

Some people can Tweet up to 100 times in one day, leaving nothing about themselves to the imagination but the regularity of their bowels. That means that just about anyone can get a good feel of who you are, what you do and what your political stance is just by reading your Twitter feed.

Naturally, there will be a mindless sheep here somewhere saying, “but if you haaaaaven’t done aaaanything wrong, then you don’t have aaaaaanything to fear.”

Well, you smug little anal-retentive government-employed drone, you are more plastic than flesh and bone. Every normal person has something to hide, whether it is a big something or a small something. Everyone has committed some kind of a sin that they wouldn’t want the entire world knowing about. Everyone is guilty of something and hopes that they are clever enough to fool the world into thinking that they are moral, law-abiding citizens. There is no such thing.

The wonderful thing about life is that mistakes and bad judgement can be left in the past and there is always the opportunity to turn over a new leaf. But that was before governments got all 2.0. Now, nothing will be forgotten.

In the United Kingdom, the deceptively-named “Interception Modernisation Programme” (IMP) will require all mobile phone and internet service providers to collect and store the "traffic details" of all internet and mobile phone use in the country. In the face of several concerns about this legislation, there have been a sudden slew of terrorism scares, from a crazy old lady who stabbed her MP to printer ink cartridge bombs defused “seconds from detonation” at UK airports. Convenient, eh? I get the feeling that the laws will be pushed through in the wake of the Islamophobic hysteria, as it always is, and we are once again stuck with a law that has stripped us of our privacy and placed us inextricably in the Orwellian sphere.

Statistics released by the British government suggest that under the Regulatory Powers Act of 2000 (RIPA) – meant to combat terrorism - one in every 78 people is placed under state-sanctioned surveillance each year, with well over half a million official requests to access private information by councils, police and other officials in 2008, for infringements of the law such as benefit fraud, illegal fly-tipping and bringing a dog into the country illegally.

And the worst part? People who were found to have done nothing wrong, not even to have breached a council by-law, are not entitled to be informed that they were the subject of a surveillance operation.

Between CCTV, credit and debit cards, cookies on our computer, wiretaps on the phones and RFID chips in our documents, the net is closing in on Joe Soap, not Osama bin Laden. And governments all over the world are using terrorism as an excuse to ensure that no deed, good or bad, goes unpunished. And of course there is reality television to keep us all glued to the box while our civil rights dissolve like ice in the Sahara desert.

The next time Facebook asks you “what’s on your mind?” I’d suggest you think twice before you tell it the truth.

Addicted to the Matrix

“Hi, my name is Hajira and I’m addicted to the Internet.”

“Hi Hajira!”

Phew, you say to yourself, that cow is finally getting the help she needs. You might be right about the cow part, but the only problem is that the support group is an online one…

It’s a common problem faced by many of us – we spend so much time on the internet that our relationships, activities and work in the real world come off second best at times.

Remember the real world? The place where you could reach out and grab somebody’s hand, feel the blood pulse beneath the skin? The place where you could be reasonably certain that your friend is actually a young lady and not a middle-aged man who breathes heavily and keeps the Kleenex handy whenever you post a new profile picture of yourself?

I think the only thing that keeps us coming back to the real world is food. When we can eat food on the internet, we won’t ever bother to press the disconnect button.

That sign on the door that says “On lunch - back in 15 minutes!” will be staying up much, much longer than that. Even the prospect of real, sweaty, fumbling sex can be passed up these days in favour of, ahem, “researching” one’s more taboo proclivities in a much more glamorous format.

Recently, a Korean couple who starved their baby to death while they looked after a virtual baby at the internet cafe showed the world how far this thing can go. Just give them a bowl of shark fin soup in their virtual world and they wouldn’t have even resurfaced to find out that they had killed their own kid.

So now there are only three categories of people who still exist in the real world. They are as follows:

1. “Celebrities” – these people have to go into the real world to have pictures taken of them passed out in the gutter with their underwear around their ankles. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be famous for anything. They do occasionally pass their time in cyberspace by having Twitterfeuds with other "celebrities".

2. Politicians – often found running amok (impregnating random women, embezzling taxpayers’ money, running over joggers, etc.) in the real world because everyone else is in cyberspace stalking other people they don’t like and playing Farmville.

3. Poor people – these people don’t have computers so we think their opinion doesn’t really matter until we realise it’s election time again. Can often be found burning tyres in service delivery protests, but still can't be expected to think outside the box when putting a tick in the old ballot box.

On the other hand, living completely in the virtual world might mean that we get to eat whatever we want and still stay virtually thin. If they develop a decent mutton biryani then I’m buying myself a plot of land in Farmville. Hyuk.

Checklist - How Jacob Zuma knows when he's doing it right

Jacob Zuma knows he’s doing it right when:

1. An entire day goes by and Julius Malema is not made fun of in the press
2. The national police commissioner's daughter tells him she is not pregnant after all with his 47th child
3. A new law is passed requiring all men to have a minimum of ten wives
4. The African Christian Democratic Party stops trying to book him into the same rehab clinic as Tiger Woods for sex addiction
5. Helen Zille decides to form an alliance with the ANC to disband the Democratic Alliance in return for a position as Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs under Marthinus van Schalkwyk
6. Schabir Shaik really does die of a terminal illness so he can say “I told you so!” about letting him out of prison early
7. COSATU and the ANC Youth League agree to go on regular playdates at Zoo Lake so they can bond better.

Forced removals

I have been doing a bit of research for one of my short stories, and the subject matter was Johannesburg in the early 1960s. I am absolutely transfixed by the stories I have read, the pictures I have seen and the sad relics that still remain today. The Mayfair / Fordsburg area is something that gets under your skin - if you allow it to - and never leaves you. Every time I drive around this area I am transported to another time.

Mayfair was a white suburb, built for poor whites working on the railways. Fordsburg was also a predominantly white area into which some Indians moved around the 1950s. Fietas, otherwise known officially as Pageview / Vrededorp, was an area which is remembered by most of the people who inhabited its colourful streets with sad regret and painful nostalgia. Sophiatown was a suburb initially developed for whites, but after the government slapped a sewage plant next door to it, the owner of the land began to sell the remaining land to Indians, coloureds and blacks.

I try to see all this history when I am out and about. Now it is Mayfair and Fordsburg that are the colourful, vibrant areas, much like Fietas of old. Today, these two neighbouring suburbs are filled with Indian Muslims, Indian Hindus, coloureds, Pakistanis, Somalis and even some old whites who never sold up. Yes, there is practically a drug dealer on every street corner. It is also a place of stark contrasts. The old burnt-out shell of an old railway house can exist merrily with its drug-addicted occupants right next to a brand new two-storey, five-bedroom house with a Mercedes and a BMW parked in the garage.

I prefer the old houses, myself. I’m an old-fashioned kind of gal. When you are in an old building with a history, the soul is filled with appreciation in a way that can’t be obtained from standing in a shiny new building, full of glass doors and stainless steel trimmings. The house I live in is a typical old railway house, with beautiful hardwood floors, dado rails, pressed metal ceilings and a fireplace in the lounge. When I look up aimlessly at the patterns on ceilings I do so wondering what kind of people lived in this house over the years and whether they too looked up at the ceilings in the same way I do now.



Whenever I have reason to cross the divide of seventeenth street, I enter completely into the past. For who can roam the streets of Fietas without being haunted by ghosts of the people who were forcefully removed from this place? Unlike Sophiatown, the people of Fietas were evicted over a long period of time, due to resistance from the residents and a lack of concerted organisation on the government’s part. And unlike Sophiatown and District Six, Fietas was sort of half-demolished. Some buildings were only partly torn down, and remain to this day, ghostly reminders of the destruction wrought by the apartheid regime. And of the houses that were demolished properly, relatively few new ones were built upon the vacant stands that were cleared for the sake of the whites.

Fietas is a sad, seldom-visited museum. Its patches of unkempt grassland speak volumes about the children who grew up in the houses which now only exist in their fast-fading memories and crinkled back-and-white photographs. Its grand mosques speak of a time when the surrounding neighbourhood was a community. The solitary remains of its dilapidated 14th street bazaar tell little of a trade mecca that invited patrons of every race from far and wide.

I can also imagine the terror and the sadness felt by the residents of Sophiatown in 1955 when they were rounded up by heavily-armed military personnel like dogs and put on trucks headed for the South Western Townships. The whole area was then razed to the ground by government bulldozers and the area re-developed for whites. It was as if Sophiatown never existed. The new suburb was named Triomf (Triumph in Afrikaans) – a final kick in the teeth to the people who grew up listening to the sounds of jazz music and tsotsitaal in the vibrant township.

Did those residents of Fietas, Sophiatown and District Six ever think that the cruel regime under which they lived would come to pass bloodlessly? Did they think it would happen in their lifetime? Did they think they would ever get rid of the Special Branch coming into their homes late at night? Did they ever conceive that their grandchildren would grow up going to school alongside children of all different colours and religions, and that they would be free to study what they wished, apply for any job they wanted, marry whomever they wanted to and live wherever they pleased? And finally, did they imagine that a non-racial, democratic South Africa would be a utopia? Would you choose to live in Fietas in the fifties or Mayfair in 2010?

Social media gives mainstream media the finger

At the start of a new year and decade, it is a time to pause and reflect upon both past, present and future, a way, if you will, to mark a large “You Are Here” in red on the timeline. It is a time to note emerging trends and make predictions about the year ahead.

One thing that cannot have failed to have grabbed everybody’s attention by now is the rise of social media. You would have to be living under a bridge, or approaching your second heart bypass, to be unaware of things like Twitter, YouTube, blogging and Facebook and the impact that these media are having on modern society.

The younger generation of the world is one that demands many things. This crowd is not known for their patience or understanding. They want to have contact with their peers at the touch of a button and they expect news and information to be constantly at their fingertips.

They are also not very good at keeping things to themselves. While I would call this “oversharing”, teenagers and twentysomethings are telling the world about their angst, their heartaches, their funny stories and the things that make them angry.

Their thirst for information is insatiable. Sure, they might not be reading as much as their parents or grandparents, but they are adept at gleaning the bare facts from 140 characters or less. Their parents had to go to the library and search through dusty old tomes for the information they sought, learning to summarise and make their own notes from printed textbooks. But now all that is required is to pick up a mobile phone or turn on a laptop, point it in the general direction of Google or Wikipedia and the gist of the information is absorbed.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that the mainstream media, generally led by wrinkly men with a grey hair or twelve, are struggling to keep up with the spread of news and views on the internet. These would be “unauthorised” news and views. They haven’t been vetted. These stories never sat on a news editor’s desk and the angle of the story wasn’t carefully calculated.

You could argue that it has turned the entire internet into a large corporate office, rife with rumour and gossip, snatches of misinformation whispered between cubicles. But on the other hand it could be said that it keeps the fat cats on their toes and checks their ability to get away with murder without creating a tsunami of whispers and suspicions.

The rise of the use of Facebook and Twitter as means of communicating news has led to many young people questioning the role of the mainstream media and the relevance thereof.

A typical case in point was the recent gathering of about 1400 Gaza Freedom Marchers from 48 countries. They gathered in Cairo, Egypt, intending on travelling through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza and holding a demonstration to draw attention to the plight of the people living in Gaza under blockade, a year after the Israeli attack on the area.

The Egyptian government refused to open the Rafah crossing for them and Egyptian police attacked a group of European female demonstrators, punching, kicking and tearing off headscarves. One French protester reportedly died of her injuries.



Through all this, however, these images were nowhere to be seen in the international media such as the BBC or Sky News, and nowhere in the local media outlets. This is a clear indication that the news corporations are too concerned with toeing the political line. Bad press for the Israelis is something they usually avoid at all costs – even when the cost is a human life.

Climate change is also a big bone of contention which threatens to turn on world leaders and bite them in the rear ends. With the leaking of documents at the Copenhagen climate change summit, the world saw a cancerous clot of greedy bureaucrats stuffing up the last real chance we had to undo decades of pollution and reckless consumerism.

Perhaps an inevitable conclusion is that the social media-using millions will begin to grow restless in the coming years when it begins to sink in – years of inaction and cover-ups by politicians, as thick as thieves with the newsmen. Unfortunately, this may mean years of unrest and demonstrations, perhaps also civil disobedience from protesters and heavy-handed punishment from governments clutching desperately onto power.

I sincerely hope that when the discontent reaches fever pitch it will usher in some kind of new era where ethics and accountability prevails, but the undying cynic in me is prone to point out that the “free” world is more likely to end up resembling the end of George Orwell’s prophetic but terribly depressing novel, 1984.

Freedom fighter extraordinaire

WARNING: this blog post has been written from a sardonic point of view. If you find yourself running low on humour, please visit the SABC’s website and you should be fine after a few minutes.


I have been a veteran in the struggle against apartheid since 1993. Yes, the year I arrived in this country, at the tender age of twelve. As young as I was, I was nobody’s fool. Although I was slightly disappointed to be unable to see any Zulus throwing spears up at the aeroplane on the way to Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, I figured that since it was a public holiday, even Zulu warriors needed a break from throwing spears at the whites.

No, you would never catch a bright person like me, brought up in God’s own country (just to make it clear, this would be England), being ignorant about African current affairs. Although I will admit that when I heard the news about Nelson Mandela being released from prison after 27 years, I struggled to understand why everybody was making such a fuss over a convicted criminal. But I was only a pipsqueak of eight back then. To be sure, I knew by the time I moved to South Africa in ’93 that Mandela was a very dangerous man.

Since we were brought over by a white South African family with whom we were living, I had the advantage of being able to learn a lot about South Africa very quickly. Yes, I learnt all about the kaffirs, and how they were all ready to kill us in our beds and take our BMWs.

We had two maids, Pinky and Mabel. They used to speak Afrikaans very oddly, I thought, with all sorts of funny clicking noises and no-one could understand them when they did that. I gathered that it was some kind of secret code. Eugene Terre’blanche will tell you that there are enemies everywhere, and boy, was he ever right.

Since the elections were fast-approaching, there was little to do except instruct the women and children in combat shooting. We stocked up on baked beans and candles, sandbags and ammunition. We kids were told to practice re-loading firearm magazines until our fingers bled, for it was us children who would be relied upon to reload for the adults when the bloodshed began.

The time of the elections was nearly upon us, and we went on what could possibly have been our last holiday. It was a long and weary trek in our air-conditioned BMW down to Richards Bay, and we outspanned when we got to the lobby of the hotel. For some unknown reason I became embroiled in a political discussion with a black man sitting in the lobby. Fancy me, an educated Englishwoman of twelve, imparting my erudite political views to a savage!

Nevertheless, I asked him politely who he would be voting for in the elections, to which he replied he would be voting for the National Party (an old party from the times of apartheid and the last bastion of hope for the whites). I was very pleased with this man’s valour and common sense, and I remarked that the National Party was the ideal party to vote for, because as I put it, “things will stay just exactly as they are”.

I think that from the way the poor man's face dropped in utter horror, that he probably made sure that he was the first person in the line at the polling station on the first day of voting, and I’m almost 100% certain that the tick he made was next to the box that read “African National Congress”.

So you see, I really was doing my bit for freedom even back then, when I had more pimples than common sense.

Bah! Humbug...

Many things irk me, indeed. And I am usually quite vociferous about them, so you readers already know that. Perhaps it is my British heritage coming out of the woodwork here, but I like to have a little moan and groan now and again. But I find South Africans, white, black, pink and purple, simply have no idea how to complain, and this leads us to being what I think is a terribly exploited country when it comes to consumer goods.

South Africa is a country governed by fat cats. And I’m not just talking about politics. We have allowed big business to make walking a**holes out of us. We are paying far too much for the following:

* Mobile phones
* Fixed line phones
* Electricity
* Supermarket food
* Banking

And those are just the obvious ones. We all know that we pay the highest mobile phone and fixed line phone charges in the world and by the time Eskom is finished with us we will be paying the highest electricity prices in the world. And despite ICASA forcing the cellphone operators to drastically reduce their interconnect fees by next year, I still don’t think that’s good enough.

You could be forgiven for naively thinking that Pick n’ Pay was a distant relative of Tesco in the UK. But I’ve shopped in both shops, and let me tell you where Pick n’ Pay is royally stuffing up. Tesco has a generic brand, a brand which covers just about everything from over-the-counter medicine to chocolates to electronic goods. These products are anything from, I'd estimate, 40 to 75% CHEAPER than the branded product.

This is (stay with me now, South African boys and girls) the whole concept of “we give it to you cheaper because the packaging is cheaper” thing.

So why do we accept Pick n’ Pay’s No-Name brand as being MORE EXPENSIVE than the branded products? And no, it really doesn’t taste any nicer. I have noticed this anomaly on a very wide range of products, from toilet paper to frozen vegetables. Where it is cheaper, it will just be a few cents below the others.

Then Pick n’ Pay has the famous trick of charging you MORE to buy in bulk than to buy the smaller items. Plus they put the bulk item on “special” to make you think it’s cheaper! They should be held accountable for robbing the man on the street for so many years. And it’s not only Pick n’ Pay, to be sure, but they are the ones who are the most blatant and unapologetic about it.

Now on to the banks. I hope that there is a special place in hell reserved for South African bankers. They charge you for everything – including just looking to see how much money you have. They charge you to withdraw money, to deposit money, to write a cheque, to deposit a cheque, to make a transfer, to receive a transfer, to draw a statement, to replace a lost or stolen card, to pay for transactions using your card, and I could go on and on forever.

In the United Kingdom, as bad as the weather is, you don’t pay for banking. Obviously you pay interest and charges on your debts, but that’s just about all. All the things I mentioned above that you have to pay for here in South Africa, are free there. Perhaps that’s why the banks nearly collapsed when we had the economic crash in 2008, because they haven’t spent years and years siphoning money off millions of people who don’t know any better. The South African banks didn’t even bat an eyelid when the recession hit here, because they were too busy sitting in their money tower and diving into the piles of cash like Scrooge MacDuck.

Capitec have recently come out with some ads criticizing their partners in crime peers in the industry for high charges, bad service etc. Their main selling point is that you pay zero fees when you pay for something using your debit card. Whoop-de-do. They still charge for everything else – I’ve seen the charges brochure.

As far as services go, I’ve never seen a country where business is so quick to swallow your money and then laugh at you when you expect good service in return. And don’t even think of asking for a refund – after two hours of listening to elevator music on hold, you’ll just end up having a tantrum like an overgrown 2-year-old because no-one calls you back or answers emails and they’ll still laugh scornfully at you. This is especially true for anything to do with the telecommunications industry.

Perhaps it’s not just a case of the consumer not complaining enough – maybe it’s the media we can place the blame on, for not drawing enough public scrutiny to this matter. And I think we can also blame the people we elected to office for not raising questions and putting pressure on big business on behalf of the ordinary citizen, but on their salaries they can afford to be ripped off.

Sarafina III

(Click on the cartoon to enlarge)

It emerged on Wednesday that the South African Department of Human Settlements, previously known as the Department of Housing, has spent over R22,5 million rand on producing a play to "educate" people about their efforts. This ridiculous waste of money even beats the scandal provoked by the Department of Health's R14 million production of Sarafina II to educate the public about HIV and AIDS.

The previous minister, Lindiwe Hendricks (now the Minister of Defence), signed off on the play and its expenses during the 2008/9 financial year, despite the fact that the backlog of people waiting to receive government housing is so APPALLING it has backed right up to 2 million and the expected bill for fixing up existing shoddily-built RDP houses is expected to top R1 billion.

I'm sure the play was very effective in furthering the aims of the Department (to steal as much money as possible from the poor and place it in the pocket of the family member who produced the play). After all, it's only a recession...

"Every one of you is a guardian"

In a world of six billion people, survival is an important part of life. India is a perfect case in point; where in a country with a billion inhabitants, the act of merely getting a place to sit on a train has become something you could easily be maimed over. Capitalism, consumerism and industrialisation are the key proponents of inequality in democratic countries, but in all other types of economic models that have tried and failed, poverty and inequality have always been enduring problems.

Should the CEO of a large corporation be allowed to have a Lear jet and a castle in Scotland while the employee who manufactures his products in a Chinese sweatshop earns less than a dollar day? Is it right for an actor to get paid millions of dollars for appearing in one movie while 246 million children around the world are classified as child labourers? Should the entertainment industry be glorifying sex and the objectification of women when a million children are exploited by the commercial sex trade every year?

“Every one of you is a guardian, and responsible for what is in his custody. The ruler is a guardian of his subjects and responsible for them; a husband is a guardian of his family and is responsible for it; a lady is a guardian of her husband's house and is responsible for it, and a servant is a guardian of his master's property and is responsible for it." - Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. (taken from Sahih Bukhari, [Book #46, Hadith #733])

This saying indicates how far we have strayed from the natural order of life, responsibility, justice and humanity. Many guardians seem to have turned a blind eye while their wards are violated in plain sight.

This puts me in mind of another quote:

"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues." - Rene Descartes

Money and the acquisition thereof is the primary objective of almost every human being on this planet. Even if we don’t like the system, we toil away at whatever we can to make a living for ourselves and our families. For people who live above the bread line, money is something we always need more of, because we are always desirous of the latest technology, a better car or our own home. Money is the primary source of stress, a leading cause of divorce and it makes those who have it think they are better than those who don’t.

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting in on an HIV workshop for refugee women and one of the things I noticed was the huge divide in desires between the haves and have-nots. The facilitator asked each woman in the room to say what made them happy. The non-refugee (and obviously better-off) women who were there to assist, like myself, said our families made us happy, or gave some arty-farty intellectual response to this question. But almost every single refugee sitting at that table said that two things made them happy; food and money.

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

So apart from a lot of talk and no action, what is the point of this post? Maybe to remind all of us that this is the world we live in. We may not be able to change it by ourselves, but walking past the person sitting on the roadside with our noses in the air, while we wait for our governments to sort out the mess is just plain hypocritical.

Maybe we need to find a way to pass on our skills, be they in agriculture, English, computer literacy or entrepreneurship to the people who need it most. Perhaps we need to mentor a disadvantaged person, or adopt an orphaned or abused child.

What we don’t need is another million-dollar talk shop for our leaders, where little or nothing ever gets accomplished.

"A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities." - Dalai Lama

We also need to be so much more vocal about the things in our society that we know are unacceptable and unjust. Up until now, we have never spoken out. But laissez-faire may just be passé for 2010.

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s foolish to think that one little blog post could change the world, or make this broken, overpopulated, sick world an altruistic utopia, but if we all exhorted one another to enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong (to paraphrase the Qur’an), perhaps we would be less likely to forget.

I will climb down off my soapbox now, but not before I leave you with these beautiful words of wisdom from the Mahatma:

"The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles."
Mohandas K. Gandhi

Peace,
Hajira

Through the looking glass

Sometimes when I'm reading news on South Africa, I think I'm reading a post on the satirical news site www.hayibo.com. I laugh away, reading the ridiculous quotes and story. Then, a few paragraphs on, I realise it's actually real. And people have actually said those things.

Julius Malema himself is a walking Hayibo post. Everything that comes out of his mouth is prime fodder for the writers. They don’t even need to change anything.

Take, for instance, the story where he refuses to be nominated as Drama Queen at the Feather Awards, accusing organizers of questioning his sexuality. Or the one where he calls IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi a “factory fault” and the IFP a “terrorist organisation”

Everything that spews forth from the retarded brat’s spittle-flecked mouth is pure hatred. No-one is spared his idiotic vitriol. Today I saw a journalist had used the words “no-one is spared his sharp tongue”. I would hesitate before I said that anything connected with JuJu is sharp. His whole being is blunt, rotund and ignorant. The sharpest part of him is his bald, shiny, vacuous head.

But everything, from Eskom’s tariff hikes to the ANC spending millions on cars for their ministers, makes me feel as though I’m living in some sort of surreal topsy-turvy world where day is night and wrong is right. All it means is that the spin doctors are doing their jobs, I suppose.

The scary part is that the youth of this country support Malema, the government supports the electricity hike and no-one can do anything about the ANC’s spending spree. The dollar has weakened, petrol has gone down and South African stocks have strengthened, but the price of food and basic necessities still goes up and service delivery still goes down. And no-one is going to stop it.