Gerald Potash

Hello again,

Tony Leon and Jacob Zuma have very little in common, other than both being former leaders of political parties, but this week they both attracted a great deal of press.

A letter written by JZ has made lots of news this week.  Accused No 1 is a cry-baby and he is forever looking for sympathy. Always, but always, he plays the victim. This week the letter he wrote, 23 pages, got him back onto the front page of most of the country’s newspapers. The letter addressed to the ANC after that long NEC meeting last weekend is wherein he again complained that he has been left out in the cold, saying that the ANC has never protected him. Ag, shame.

COSATU, the trade Union closely linked to the Communist Party, who are ANC partners/allies in the ruling Tripartite Alliance, has warned JZ to stop playing the victim and to accept the Constitution that served him so well while he was President.

JZ’s time of Stalingrading is surely speedily coming to an end. One of these days the Constitutional Court will deliver its judgement on his errant conduct towards the Zondo Commission and I fully expect that the police will be coming to Nkandla with an orange uniform to take him away soon. I certainly agree with Brandan’s observation that time is running out for JZ.  This cartoon was in Business Day early this week.

Radical Economic Transformation (RET) is the glue that keeps the main “corruption faction” in the ANC together. Ace Magashule and Accused No 1 are in this together —both are accused of serious corruption, etc,  and both are out on bail awaiting their trials on multiple charges—-and any attack on them, no matter how legitimate, by them gets turned into a war against against the poor (blacks, the RET-faction) by the rich (whites, White Monopoly Capital–WMC). But the RET faction has been seriously unhinged, notwithstanding Ace’s strong very recent support, as was again seen in the ANC NEC meeting last weekend and then again this week. It does seem as if, at last, Ramaphosa and his faction is winning in the engine room of the Party. An important indicator of this was early in the week-end long ANC NEC meeting when an important position came up for election. The two candidates were the Minister of State Security, Ayanda Dlodlo, a very close Zuma ally, against Dr Gwen Ramokopa, a Cyril supporter. The vote was decisive and the good Dr won easily.

The Defence Minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, allegedly illegally received wads of money in notes to the tune of at least R5 million. Are you surprised to read this? You shouldn’t be. This is SA and she is a loyal ANC cadre for which she was appointed to cabinet by Accused No 1.                                                                                                

The claim of corruption against her has been made by General Bantu Holomisa, in a letter sent this week to the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on Defence giving details and dates of when and how she received the money.

Watch this space.

Leon Louw, of the Free Market Foundation, won a R100,000-00 bet he wished he had lost! He bet Vuyani Jarana, the former CEO at Vodacom, when he was appointed as head-Honcho at SAA that he wouldn’t be able affect a turnaround at the State airline as he had said he could, in 3 years. Jarana said he would pay from his own money if he lost the bet and last week he did pay.

Jarana said it had to do with lack of government support and has resigned his position.

Apparently our airline is about to fly again. I doubt it. 

SAA is bankrupt, having got rid of most of its planes and staff and it is unable to pay salaries. Even the pilots—who remain unpaid—are now striking! They want to be retrenched and say that they are sick & tired of the BRP– business rescue practitioners– continually moving the goal posts.

Who has ever heard of airline pilots striking? Wasn’t Rico so right when he drew this cartoon last year when the Government wasted yet another R10 billion Rand given to the hopeless SOE:

Mondli Makhanya, editor of City Press wrote his op-Ed this week about the fake-news pandemic sweeping, not only the press, but even the social media platforms all over the world and we are no exception.

As I was reading this I thought of Iqbal Surve’s IOL News-group and what they write but also what they don’t. 

Well, there hadn’t been too much publicity about all the bank accounts for his entire Group (Sekunjalo Investments) having been completely closed down by ABSA, one of our largest banks.

The bank’s reason? They say that there is just too much risk.

You are surely not surprised to hear that there has not been a word written about it in the Cape Times or any of his other newspapers. Yesterday Survé wrote a long rambling piece in his newspapers defending his stance and blaming our censorship of the press for his Group’s perilous state. What rubbish! But rubbish is what they mainly print.

When is the PIC going to press Survé properly for the R4.3 billion they irregularly gave him? They want their money back. 

I must say, talking about fake-news and Mondli Makhanya; the front page of his City Press on Sunday headlined with a story about Ace Magashule’s followers intending to shut-down all State institutions with strikes this week. It’s not true. It was false news.

Is SA a failed State? The political commentator, Aubrey Matshiqi has no doubt that it is. In a TV interview on Tuesday this one time ANC member and freedom fighter, refers to the City of Ekuruleni (to you that is Springs /Benoni/ and all the small villages around them on the East Rand) to illustrate his point.

Ekurhuleni is where raw sewerage flows into your yard and into your home and the electricity goes off four times a day. There is a recent videoclip doing the rounds on WhatsApp showing the total devastation of infrastructure in the City. It is almost unbelievable, except that it is real. 

(I have the clip on email and can send it on to you you want to be depressed.)

Matshiqi blames the melding of the ruling party with the functioning of the State.  Corruption and lack of efficiency are the root causes, he says.

He didn’t need to mention the huge potholes in the roads and the stench from the enormous amount of uncollected rubbish just lying about.

The ANC has a lot to answer to.

The DA has prepared 24 questions to be asked of Ramaphosa when he comes before the Zondo Commission later this month. Lots of those questions have to do with cadre deployment and it is just so obvious how damaging that has been to SA. But cadre deployment is also racist. 

One of the questions that will be put bluntly to Ramaphosa, as head of the ANC, is that he surely knows that our Constitution separates State from Party and yet the cadre deployment and loyalty to the party are the main criterion for the State employment process which is direct ANC policy and is not allowed.

The price of electricity went up sharply, as did the price of petrol, this week. Now those without electricity are often simply those who probably just can’t afford to pay for it anymore.

And the total tax collected on your petrol bill is just more than 36% of the total you just spent to fill up. We remain the highest taxed country in the world.

On that score, however, there is a little bit of good news. SARS collected a whole lot more tax than they had budgeted for. R38 billion more. This could mean more money for roads and schools. That’s good news. More good news is that the IMF lifted its global growth projections as it expects additional fiscal support to come from a freer economy because of the Covid vaccine rollouts. And the Rand is strengthening.

Our Chief Justice, Moegeng Moegeng, is appealing the Judgement made by the Judicial Conduct Committee, that he should apologise within 10 days for his statements about Israel that he made in a webinar last year.

His appeal of more than 30 pages, is based on the fact that the Judgement is “exceedingly flawed, poor and shallow”.  In his appeal, Mogoeng took particular umbrage at the demanded scripted apology. “It bears the hallmarks of something intended to bring one down to his knees — to crush, to humiliate, written for a pupil who cannot yet ‘read for comprehension’,” he said.

Here it doesn’t pay to defend Israel, as Tony Leon has also again learnt this week. The vitriol and hatred spewed on the editorial pages of (especially) the Sunday Times has again shown how united the many factions of our population are towards only Israel. The fact that Leon was pointing out, not how perfect Israel is, but how biased and bigoted the foreign policy of this country is, by continually attacking only Israel while cosying up to countries like China (where concentration camps —they have more than 60—and are building 16 more) and Syria, where unarmed civilians in their thousands have been brutally murdered by the army. Never ever is there a word about that from SA. The ANC’s continued cosying-up to Zimbabwe is another example of support for gangsters and rogues. These countries receive nothing but warm praise and close co-operation from our government. And from these countries our Ambassadors are not withdrawn. Indeed we have close and warm working relationships with the skunks of this world.

But Tony Leon has been in the press again this week for his views on Musi Maimane, former Leader of the DA. In his latest book, Future Tense, he explains exactly why he refers to Maimani’s leadership of the DA as “an experiment gone wrong”.

Boy, has this evoked reaction!!……

From Maimane and everyone else.

I am afraid it is not doing the DA any good at all.

The world champion and I tune in to lots of webinars. If the lectures are not interesting you can simply click “leave”, switch off your computer and do something else.  School was never that good. The reality is there are very few switch-offs indeed.

This week to add to our ‘never miss’ “Lockdown University’’ lectures we tuned into two fascinating, but very different, presentations.

On Monday we tuned into Dr Leonard Suransky who was as compelling as his subject was frightening. He spoke about China and how they are taking over the world. The political scientist and educationalist took us along the old Silk Road, the trade route that linked China to the West.  He explained how the Silke Route has developed from then to now and how we are all affected and will become even more so. Have you seen how many Chinese shops there are on the Fish Hoek Main Rd, he asked us? The Chinese tentacles are strong throughout Africa, much more so in Asia and do you know that they are even building a major highway in Israel? The computer you are reading this newsletter on, he pointed out, was almost certainly manufactured in China. 

His sage advice; learn Mandarin, if not you or your children, then make sure that your grandchildren do.

Then on Tuesday we listened to Adrian Gore of Discovery tell us (me!) to be more positive and optimistic about SA. When things are tough, that’s when there are opportunities, and he pointed out that the GDP of SA has done very well vis-a-vis other countries. He says this is a good time to invest here.

Gore spoke at length about Discovery (his Co) and what they were doing about vaccinations. He also spoke very highly of Cyril Ramaphosa and said that he likes him very much. He considers him, fair, genuine and committed.

Our cricketers have just completed an ODI series against Pakistan. We lost 1-2 (I am getting used to writing that score).  The first match went down to the very last ball. Then the Proteas won the 2nd test while yesterday going down rather badly, but now with half of our regular team not available as they are off to India to play in the lucrative IPL. 

Spurs chucked away a golden opportunity of getting back into the vitally important “top four” on the Premiership log on Sunday with the coach (Clive) and I watching on the couch. Conceding a goal in the dying minutes of the game to chuck 2 vitals points away just goes to again show how hard it is to be a Spurs fan.

As always, love to all,                                                                                 

Gerald