In South Africa we should perhaps have called the Y2K bug something more indigenous – Tokoloshe 2000 would be appropriate, writes Gavin Foster
Remember the tokoloshe? The little man with the tail who was blamed for everything that could possibly go wrong? When the goats strayed it must have been the tokoloshe that made their keeper drowsy. When the miner returned to the farm after a year’s absence and found his wife six months’ pregnant it was surely the work of the tokoloshe. In fact, everything that went wrong was the work of that mischievous little demon. So millions of women stood their beds on piles of bricks wrapped in newspaper to keep the tokoloshe at bay.
But it is not only in Africa that paranoia rules. There’s been some expensive Y2K mumbo-jumbo going on in the rest of the world, too, and the day of reckoning is nigh. The prophets of doom cannot lose – if civilisation grinds to a halt they can cry, “See? We told you so!” If it doesn’t, there’ll be a chorus of “Look what a good job we did!” But whichever way the ball bounces, December 31 1999 and the small hours of January 1 2000 are going to be very busy times for their disciples.
In Japan, 96 000 troops will be on standby on New Year’s Day, along with seven destroyers and 130 warplanes, in case of millennium bug accidents. Chemical units across the country will be poised to handle possible incidents at nuclear facilities.
In France, Cabinet ministers have announced that they will be in their offices at midnight, ready to do the necessary if the world comes to an end.
Poland and other European nations will freeze their national rail networks for the crucial period on New Year’s Eve, and stock exchanges around the world have staff on standby all night – some have even hired caterers in case restaurants and delicatessens let them down and leave their staff hungry.
In the United States, the media and the computer industry have been on a three-year feeding frenzy, warning everybody that their computers are going to crash, their electricity fail, their investments vanish, their goats stray and their wives fall pregnant without their assistance.
Figuratively speaking, bricks and newspapers have been coming together in their millions. Even Nasa got into the spirit of things by rushing the space shuttle Discovery into the blue this month, far ahead of schedule, so its crew can fix the Hubble telescope and get back on to terra firma before midnight on the December 31.
“We’ve never flown a shuttle over the New Year before, and this year we’re certainly not planning to break that tradition,” said Nasa representative James Hartsfield.
The Russians show an admirable
disdain for the hype about The End of the World as We Know It. The Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov has said: “We will pass quietly into 2000, just as we have every other year. I think it’s best not to scare the little children of Russia.”
The Americans, of course, don’t believe them – old habits die hard – so Russian nuclear experts will reluctantly spend New Year at Peterson Airforce Base in Colorado, keeping a bloodshot eye on the eastern horizon for stray non-Y2K compliant Soviet missiles. Uncle Sam has also arranged free flights back State-side for non-essential embassy workers in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus, and has set up letter drops in central Moscow hotels so holidaying Americans can keep in touch when the telephone networks are knocked out. Here, in South Africa, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Tito Mboweni, has arranged for an extra R30-billion in cash to be available, in case there is a run on the banks, and the Minister of Transport, Dullah Omar, solemnly assures us that all of South African Airways’s pilots are trained to fly their aircraft in manual mode if needed.
Just north of us, Brother Bob Mugabe of Zimbabwe matches the Russians for insouciance. “Y2K problem? What Y2K problem?” he asks.
Greater Johannesburg claims to have spent R20-million on ensuring that computer systems are “compliant”, and the KwaZulu- Natal Department of Health budgeted R48- million for the task. Of that, R333 672 has already been spent on Y2K advertising – puzzling, in a province where health services are terminally impoverished.
That Y2K could be a problem there is little doubt. That it has been exaggerated out of all proportion is absolutely indisputable. But come January 1, our toasters will still make toast on demand, electricity and water, for people who have it now, will still be on tap, and the chances of a Boeing trying to land in your garden are slight.
But when the bills haven’t been paid, or the contract overruns its deadline or the dialysis machine is shut down due to insufficient funds we all know who to blame. And it won’t be the tokoloshe.