I am a South African, living here with my Hawaiian wife, because my country affords us equal rights before the law. But my diary today is not about equal rights for gays. It is about my encounter yesterday with a real-life Republican, right here in South Africa, which left me livid, shaking, and to a large extent, speechless, except for the occasional "WTF"...
Follow me over the jump, if you wish, for a blow-by-blow account of my First Encounter of the WTF Kind, with a ranting and raving Republican, as well as an attempt to analyse just WTF he was doing here...
Firstly, some background:
As some of you may know, I am an independent environmental management consultant, specializing in water quality and waste management issues. Prior to starting my own company, I was a Director in the South African Department of Water Affairs responsible for Water Resource Protection and Waste Management for a number of years. I often do pro-bono work for NGO's.
Currently, we have a problem with service delivery by small, rural municipalities. There are many reasons for this problem - redressing past imbalances, poor financial management, realpolitik, no space for the details in this diary. However, the net effect is that especially services relating to waste water treatment and waste disposal are either non-existent, or severely lacking in operation and maintenance. This contributes, together with especially mining activities, to pollution of our water resources, and poses serious health risks to the inhabitants of these towns, and downstream water users. The political structure makes intervention by national and provincial government quite cumbersome (our Constitution states that government should avoid taking legal action against each other in the spirit of "cooperative governance'. This means that water pollution is currently a serious concern in South Africa...
As government cannot/does not want to really take action, the citizens of these towns (more than 220) have organised themselves into rate-payer organisations, and these organisations are affiliated to a national umbrella body: the National Taxpayers Union (NTU). In terms of our legislation, citizen groups can declare a dispute against a municipality, and withhold their rates, if the municipality fail to deliver certain services. In about 40 of these towns, such disputes have been declared, and in a few towns, rates are being withheld by the NTU until the municipality put systems in place to improve service delivery. In one specific town, this boycott has been ongoing since 2007, and the local ratepayers union have taken over the services that is supposed to be delivered by the municipality.
And this is where I come in: the NTU have approached me and asked me to assist them with the development of a model for what they term a "Closed Loop Municipal System" as a pilot project in this town where the ratepayers have been running the municipal services since 2007. Initially, we only looked at energy recovery from biogas generated by the sewage works and the waste site, but since it is such a small town, the energy savings will be a drop in the ocean. When we started looking at nutrients, is where the financial viability started to make sense. Currenly, the going rate for commercial fertiliser is about R15000.00/ton (divide by ten for US dollars), and more than 80% of South Africa's fertiliser is imported. I have been chatting to Stranded Wind and G2geek about some of these ideas (the Kos is a wonderful resource!)
Yesterday's Workshop
In order to discuss some of these issues, and to capacitate their members (most of whom are laymen and women when it comes to water pollution issues), the NTU arranged an information sharing workshop, and asked me to do a presentation on the basics of municipal wastewater management, and some solutions for the problems they are encountering in their towns. The workshop was held today, in the small town of Cullinan, just about 30km from Pretoria, where the world's largest diamond was found
I usually start my presentations referring to the consequences of bad decisions, comparing the choice in the early 1990's between internal combustion engines and electrical cars, using images of global warming and the Iraq war to illustrate the point about the consequences of the previous generations' decision of going for fossil-fuel-based engines, which have to be sorted out by this generation, before i go on discussing the different types of sewage systems, and the consequences of each.
Just as I mentioned that the war in Iraq was basically a war for control over oil resources, someone in the audience said audibly "that's not true". I replied that we could argue all we want, but if it was not the case, why is America not invading Zimbabwe, and continued with my hour-long presentation, which was quite well received.
Enter Teh Republican...
After lunch, the programme showed that someone will address us on Solutions for Energy and Waste Problems. It turned out to be the heckler of earlier (shall keep his name out of this rant). He introduced himself (with a heavy Southern drawl) as a South African who now lives in North Carolina, and started his presentation by handing out little 'trophies', firstly to the lady who is the frontrunner in the town that has been in dispute since 2007, then to the guy who organised the workshop, and lastly to me, to 'receive the trophy on behalf of all attending (about 50 people) and for those who put in so much effort with their presentations'. I went forward, got the little fake-gold plastic thingy (price tag still on it - was about 2 dollars), and returned to my seat.
And then he started... giving a very fiery speech, and the more he talked, the more my jaw dropped...
He told the audience that he has all the solutions to our water and energy problems, but then we have to do exactly as he says. He said that it will be three easy steps: Step one is to organise and get everyone in the town on board - ok - no problem with that - and secondly, to make sure that the municipality go bankrupt, and then to establish a private company, take over the assets of the municipality, and buy what is left, and run it like a business... and then get him as contractor to implement his 'ultimate solution' to convert the town into a government-free energy-producing 'homeland' or 'free farmland'.
He started with the fear-mongering, saying that that if we dont do this, dont listen to him, we will end up like Zimbabwe, that Jacob Zumawill be elected with a 2/3 majority in our upcoming elections to be our next President, that Zuma is Robert Mugabe, but worse... and that if we don't want to have a second Blood River (a strong emotional image for South Africans, referring to an epic battle between the Zulu's and the Pioneers after a massacre of pioneer groups in 1836), we should do as he says, establish our free, commercialised 'enclaves', where we dont have to even take part in the elections.... and we dont have to be controlled by a government that will not take our interests at heart...
He went on to say that he has Teh Solution, and unfolded a drawing of an "Utopic Farmland Town", or "Freeland", and said that they have done this near Las Vegas in Nevada, and that everyone living there is happy, and getting richer by the day, without any government intervention. He gave no more details about this Utopia, apart from saying that it is completely self-sustaining. He said he knows that this is what everyone wanted: Teh American Dream of making your own destiny, of being able to look after yourself, to make as much money as possible (His exact words: "Come on, admit it, you all want it, and dont worry, I will still love you if you are honest with yourself...you want to be FREE, i offer you FREEDOM")
A lady (bigshot from one of the municipalities) interrupted him, asking him what the purpose of his presentation was. He replied that he is there to give us Teh Solution to All Our Problems. She said that his solution laves out something that is extremely important to us, namely democracy. That really fired him up... he told us that we are naive if we think that democracy will work in Africa, that he still loves us, even if we are naive, but that "Africa has shown over and over again that it does not understand democracy... and that it will always be a case of 'us' and 'them'... - the rest of the world, and Africa..." because Africa does not understand that every individual only have to take responsibility for himself, and that will bring individual freedom, and individual weatlh, and thats all that really matters...
At this point, I asked him if I can ask him a question. He said yes. I asked "Tell us, where do you live?" He said he did not understand the question. I replied, its easy, where do you have permanent residency? He said "North Carolina, but I visit Africa a lot... I know whats going on there".
I stood up, and walked to the front, handed him back his cheapskate 'trophy', and said: "You have NO right to come here and tell us how we should run our democracy, as you have no idea of the concept, or the spirit of 'ubuntu", and walked back to my chair.
Boy, did that set him off!! He said that I am entitled to my opinion, and he still 'loves me', in spite of it, but he will make an appointment with me to come and see me in 5 years, if he can find me within the decay all around us, that I must understand the "us" and "them" thing, and a couple more barely veiled rascist statements...
Oh, and another thing he said: "Stop spreading lies about the Iraq War. We have helped those people, we did not go there to steal their oil. Show me one picture of a soldier with a barrel of oil on his shoulder! I tell you, there is none! As for weapons of mass destruction, one of our detainees at Gitmo admitted that they DID have them, but destroyed(!) all of them the day before the invasion!"
Mah jaw hit da Flawr...
He went on to tell us that Bush saved the world from the evil dictator Sadam, and that he had written a book on his way for the future, and he started paging through the book, showing us "here i am at the RNC - that elephant is the symbol of the Republicans", "here I am in Congress", and "somewhere here is a picture of me and President Bush..." He continued with stuff like "we are just trying to help Africa, and it is a bottomless pit, not appreciating what America is doing for it, AIDS will kill Africans if they themselves dont succeed first, etc etc
I yawned visibly, got up, and went outside for a smoke. I did not talk to him again. I realised it will be a waste of breath to tell him a lot of things, such as:
- that the very truck which killed Morgan Tsvangerai's wife was driven by an employee of USAID...
- that the so-called "Aid" to Africa comes with strings attached (for example the Bush Aids assistance programme which was not extended to clinics offering birth control, as it was designed to please American religious conservatives)
- that Mugabe is being held in power in Zimbabwe by money from the British, Americans(Zimbabwe's strongest trading partner, and the reason why the dollar became the de-facto currency in Zimbabwe), as well as China; and the reason for this is the rich mineral resources of Zimbabwe
- that American, British and Chinese multi-nationals is partly to blame for some of the strange decisions of those currently in power in South Africa, for example to not allow the Dalai Llama to attend the Peace Conference
- that especially American and British multi-nationals cause much of the pollution of our water resources, and takes away the livelyhood of our poor rural communities, as they do in Alaska
- that "Aid" and "foreign investiment" often require African governments to lower their regulatory standards to accommodate investments by these multi-nationals, for example to not tax interest or capital gains made by foreigners who invest...
- that multinationals think South Africa's mineral resources belong to them, and have even tried to sue us to take what belongs to the people of South Africa
- that personal enrichment and individualism is not an ideology that will ever work under our Constitution, which is the most progressive in terms of protecting basic human rights, and is what protects us from power grabbing politicians
- that no soldier can carry a 'barrel of oil' on his shoulders, but that control over the oil resources of Iraq was neatly achieved by the invasion.
- that the 'individual enrichment' meme is part of what causes the problem in municipalities - more money for grand cars and higher salaries, less money for maintenance of wastewater treaetment
- that... (I could go on and on, but this rant is getting too long already!)
My Analysis
Firstly, I dont know what to make of this. What was he doing here, and what was he trying to achieve? He must have seen the invitation to the Worshop on the NBU website, and then contacted the organisers to tell them that he wants to talk about water and energy solutions... but his actual 'solution' contained no specifics on how to make this "Freedom Farm" work...
Secondly, I strongly suspect that he is one of the racist South Africans who emigrated after 1994, who could not stand to be under a 'black' government, and who found a comfortable home in the Republican Party of the USA... the barely veiled racism, the Africa is all bad, etc. What was interesting was that before I challenged them, he talked about "we", but after I called him out on where he stays, he changed his tune, and it was "we Americans" are SO trying to help YOU poor Africans...
What I do know, is that he must have had some training in how to do propaganda on empty rhetoric... the whole approach of 'praise the audience, then instill fear, then offer an utopia, all the time being a 'daddy' that 'loves' those who disagree..' was perfected by speakers of especially Fascist countries in the 1930's, and was used again by Bushco after 911... Who trained him?
What I also know, is that he is just a snake oil salesman, but one using Republican policies to try and sell his snake-oil in Africa...
Whatever... it does not makes sense
But I would like to hear what YOU think in the comments below