ANC policies destroyed labs
I read with some cynicism and a sense of “I told you so” the article by Carolyn Raphaely titled “Toxic meltdown at forensic labs” (February 18). Other senior forensic scientists in this country and I have been warning about this problem for five or more years.
In fact, the situation is so bad that Western Cape Premier Helen Zille asked my advice in setting up a private forensic laboratory to deal with the backlogs. Transport MEC Robin Carlisle has become so despondent with the poor service of the health department’s blood-alcohol laboratories that he has, or is trying to, abandon laboratory tests for the less satisfactory Dräger breath-testing machine.
Raphaely says it all again. The department of health’s blood-alcohol laboratories have been in a shambles for about 10 years and deterioration continues unabated. The quality of many analyses is so bad they are of no use in court. The Salt River Mortuary in Cape Town is so far behind in toxicology analyses that senior staff are near despair. It is not much better in the rest of the country. All these analyses are expected to be done expertly, expeditiously and accurately by the state. The outcome of criminal trials depends on them. But they are not done expeditiously and accurately.
Aggressive affirmative action is one cause — the practice of giving jobs to people who are not competent to do the work, but who were previously disadvantaged. I have no problem with affirmative action, but I have a very real problem with its aggressive brother. When Michael Kokot was in charge of the Johannesburg Health ÂChemical Laboratory he was forced by the then health minister to appoint only young, black female graduates. Most of these were recent graduates. Each analyst was expected to complete 10 to 12 toxicology cases per month. Very soon productivity plummeted to two to three a month. Kokot resigned.
Dr Neels Viljoen, one of the finest forensic scientists in this country, resigned for much the same reason. He was expected to appoint people who had scored 6% and lower in a test set to check the chemistry knowledge of applicants to vacancies in the central police forensic laboratory in Pretoria. There, too, several million rands’ worth of cocaine went missing, never to be found. I am not aware of any action taken to deal with that oversight. Strike action by the staff of this central lab has also compromised forensic work at the laboratory.
Lest your readers interpret my comments as the ranting of an unrehabilitated old South African scientist hankering after the past, let me dispel these notions.
The auditor general said in 2009: “Various factors impacted negatively on the ability of the national department of health to execute efficiently and effectively its role/mandate of providing analytical, toxicological support and scientific evidence in support of drunken-driving prosecutions as well as establishing cause of death and analysing food samples.”
The root causes were given as “lack of leadership in the national department of health, inadequate monitoring and supervision, inadequate performance management”. Further investigation by the auditor general showed that the level of experience in the Johannesburg forensic laboratory was about one year. There was also a senior staff vacancy of about 20%. The backlog has climbed from 328 in 2000 to 4 574 in 2009 and is still climbing.
The auditor general is scathing about the laboratory’s accommodation, which will, in itself, have a negative impact on analytical performance. The Johannesburg laboratory was out of commission for most of last year. Failure to provide fuel for the back-up generators at the Pretoria laboratory resulted in extensive and expensive damage to the time-of-flight analytical equipment when the power failed.
Against this backdrop we must now read the health department’s right of reply in the issue of February 25. The piece complains that “neither article refers to the health department’s plans to address these challenges”. There is a good reason for this. The plans are of no value. We find ourselves in this mess because ANC officials failed to plan adequately in the first place.
The warnings have been frequent and detailed. They have been met by government denial at the highest levels. Racist policies of aggressive affirmative action, in which only blacks are appointed to government posts, have all but destroyed our forensic labs, to the detriment of all the people of this country. — Dr David Klatzow, independent forensic consultant
The icy truth about climate change
Mary Robinson’s passionate “World needs climate justice — now” (March 11) is a very nice article, very well written, but she is chasing the wrong cat. It is imperative that we reduce our consumption of non-renewable resources such as oil, gas and coal, but that has nothing to do with climate change.
The present warm spell started 15 000 years ago at the end of the last ice age; that’s about 14 800 years before the first person invented an external or internal combustion engine. Where is the logic?
Please call up “Climategate” on internet search engines and you will see how scientists in England, followed by others, manipulated information to hide the fact that the Earth was not getting warmer the way they predicted. The notion that “greenhouse gases” cause global warming is a factoid. A factoid refers to a lie invented and repeated so often that it becomes an accepted truth.
Hot CO² rises only a few hundred metres because it is a heavy molecule, twice the mass of water and three times that of surrounding gases. After cooling, it is pulled down in accordance with Newton’s law of gravity and temporarily piles up near the ground in places such as cities, in accordance with Coulomb’s law, where CO² on or near the ground prevents gases higher up from descending further.
CO² may be carried upwards by winds and convection currents for a while, but it cannot become a permanent greenhouse gas. In a Russian base called Vostok in the middle of the Antarctic, Russians, joined by Americans, specialise in ice-core drilling.
They use hollow tubes to drill and extract cylindrical ice samples. When water freezes it encapsulates and stores any dissolved atmosphere, minerals and organisms “as is”. This provides the most accurate available validation of the past.
Ice cores display hot and cold irregular and erratic cycles of roughly 100 000 years, where the increase from very cold to hot is fast, steep and relatively smooth, whereas cooling down happens at a much slower, stepped rate. We are in all probability on the verge of going down again. — Barend Alberts, Saldanha
‘Kuligate’ is an off-colour pun
Chris Roper’s column, “Kuligate is an off-colour joke” (March 4) was an instructive missive to Kuli Roberts, but I was stumped when I got to the part where “coolie”, according to Roper, “is a derogatory term for a coloured person”. Abhorrent as it is in any context, I (and no doubt many others) have heard this deeply offensive label applied elsewhere, though not in relation to so-called coloured people. I should know, having grown up in Athlone, on the Cape Flats, myself.
Had Roper not highlighted that the headline is a pun on the word “coolie” (“I’ve titled this column ‘Kuligate’, a pun on coolie,” he wrote) there would have been no problem understanding the point. Kuligate, Watergate, scandalous— we get it. But, having (wrongly) pointed out the connection, the pun is now based on a gross inexactitude. Consequently, the headline is now no longer valid. For it to make sense, the reader needs to believe, odious as it sounds (sorry), that “Kuli” = “coolie” = “coloured”.
But this is not the case and uncomfortable questions now start creeping in: what was the online editor thinking? What was his subconscious frame of reference at the time? Are we confronted here with an unfortunate case of a blind spot writ large (“coolie, coloured— same thing, right”)? If not, what is the explanation? We know that racial name-calling, insults and humiliation have been with us for generations too long in South Africa.
“Coloured” people, no more and no less than any other social grouping, should not have to be subjected to yet another off-colour reference — this time the result of avoidable stereotyping — no matter how unintentional. And ignorance is no excuse. It simply shouldn’t be perpetrated by media commentators in South Africa today, especially in these times of heightened racial-political sensitivity.
That said, I hope that Roberts has taken the trouble to read the column and has decided to engage in dialogue with Roper. Her writing skills would benefit immensely if she did and she would have learned something about satire, irony and metaphor (though sadly not about punning). She may even learn, as someone somewhere once said, that while it’s good to mean what you say, it’s probably more important to say what you really mean. Excrudescence, anyone? — Yazeed Fakier, Cape Town
An ANC election strategy
I have been following the rumpus about Jimmy Manyi’s racist comments. I find it disingenuous of elements in the ANC to deny there is a strategy to reduce the effect of the coloured population on the labour market in the Western Cape. The restructuring of the Employment Equity Act is central to this.
The ANC would like to reclaim the Western Cape, but the big stumbling block is the large number of coloured people who live here and vote against the ANC. If through legislation business is forced to employ black people in place of coloured people, then those coloured people would be forced to move to other provinces to find employment. This argument was put forward by Manyi. The effect would be to dilute the coloured effect in the Western Cape and so help the ANC at the polls.
Manyi’s remarks are an articulation of ANC and Cosatu policy. I am a senior manager at a manufacturing concern in Cape Town and I have had considerable pressure exerted by Numsa shop stewards to increase the number of black Africans in our workforce. Our demographics fairly reflect those of the Western Cape, but I have been told that they should reflect national demographics. This has been going on for at least four years.
Frankly, Trevor Manuel’s histrionics in response to Manyi are simply an attempt to convince the coloureds of the Western Cape that they are not under threat from the ANC. Watch this space — they are! — Name and address supplied, Cape Town
Good sense on tolls
Congratulations on your brave and sensible editorial on the Gauteng toll roads (March 4), especially in the context of a seething mass of mindless, populist responses. Somebody has to pay. It’s not that we didn’t want the highways. Is it fairer for motorised users to pay or poor pedestrians who spend 14% of their income on VAT?
While consultations were held, it’s clear that the South African National Roads Agency, one of the country’s most outstanding public-sector agencies, did not prepare adequately for the announcement of the tariff. It failed to publicise the fact that it brought the roads in at great speed and under budget. If it were a private contractor, we would be paying for its profit, not only its costs.
It should also be noted that the tariff will kick in only when the Gautrain is running through to Pretoria, giving commuters another option. I hope others are brave enough to speak out, like you, for good sense, and that the debate on the toll roads enters more rational territory. — Alan Hirsch