Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
I see The Great Professor Jay Naidoo is up to his Indian rope tricks again. Should racist-bashers bulge to the previous sentence, let rest. I use the term, Indian rope trick, in its flattering sense. As a part-time magician, I have only praise for illusi ons that both delight and confuse.
What The Great Naidoo is now threatening to perform is his gaudiest illusion to date. In a Sunday Times article headed “Government seeks the hyperspace slipstream”, Jay springs from his mirror-box, this time to “signal the advent of Internet technology i n public governance.”
He announces what he casually terms “GovNet” – soon to be renamed “NaiNet”? When Govnet gets going, every last citizen will get connected electronically to the South African bureaucracy.
Prof Jay says citizens won’t only get 24-hour access to their civil servants, they’ll also get the Internet and a silk purse of other “service access points”. Not exactly what E M Forster meant when he said, “only connect”, but at least along precisely o pposite lines.
Like the subtle illusionist he is, Jay likes to explain his bleak magic in advance. The entertainment lies in the way that the only things that seem to vanish when Jay waves his wand are great sledges of public money.
Here’s Jay’s latest merry ruse. First, Telkom – presumably also by magic – will blanket the nation in high-speed fibre-optic telephone lines. These will then be used to introduce the persistently-disadvantaged citizenry to the benefits of the information highway
People like the Ingwavuma district goat-herder, Sijiya Sighohle. After he’s milked the nannies, fed the chickens, got that last marrow down off the roof, chopped some wood and patched up the hole in the thornkraal where the hyenas got in last night, Siji ya limps gratefully into his Sigcau Ecoshack, boots up his Govnet laptop and shoves in his smartcard.
Here Sijiya sits, at last in touch with global values. A functioning Makathini Flats-raised ndoda (man) with a first wife and a couple of undernourished youngsters who no longer have a school, let alone a teacher. Sijiya’s second marital bead is set on l ocal beauty, Violet Mzwenyane, who’s shortly coming up for sale. He knows that if he ever puts her with child she will undergo the risk of a home- delivery since they closed down the hospital because Thabo Mbeki needed its funds for urgent Virodene research.
Dusty fingers flick. For the next four hours the hyenas may dine in peace while Sijiya has a video conference with the some fellow goat-herders in Afghanistan.
To coughs of his restless children, he checks his e-mail, updates his dog licence, applies for a passport, inputs his VAT returns, visits the Hustler website or latches on to the Hubble telescope.
Half-way through some fascinating radiospectrographic analysis of Junovian ammonia clouds, the Govnet laptop eats Sijiya’s smartcard.
And so you begin to realise the equatorial span of The Great Jay’s deceptions. Employing virtuoso misdirection, Professor Jay now explains that having every last South African connected via Govnet to its eager bureaucracy, will make them all quite capabl e of living and, ideally, thinking exactly like one another.
What Jay doesn’t explain is that what both he and his inquisitive bureaucracy will also have is unrestricted access to the specific, the intimate, life of every one of the tax-paying stooges attached to the thin ends of the GovNet high-speed fibre-optic lines.
Enough of the metaphors. Anyway, it’s impossible to be funny about Jay Naidoo for more than a few minutes. Between all the giggling and snorts, reality inevitably leaks through and you end up in acute figment withdrawal.
Clearly this new Cabinet of ours has lost all touch. Can it claim to be a responsible political life-form when it gives approval to something like these freshest of Jay Naidoo’s danglebrain ambitions.
For whatever reasons, we South Africans are sitting in a country cracked by violent crime. Our resources, both natural and realised, are being plundered, our health services are in ruin, millions are starving, homeless, out of work. Our struggling spiri tual coalition as a nation is being adulterated into “brand recognition” by commercial sports administrators and advertising men. All the unpleasa nt rest of it. We are on the edge of a rattling fall.
What does the Cabinet do? It tips the nod to looney tunes, extravagant and ultimately dehumanising notions. It tells Jay Naidoo to soak up great lakes of public money in the establishment of a slight ly disguised Big Brother.
The man needs to be stopped, not encouraged.