Good taste is not the same as good governance

BYE OBAMA, HELLO TRUMP / 17 January 2017, 7:56pm
OPINION

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The US Capitol frames the backdrop over the stage during a rehearsal of President-elect Donald Trump's swearing-in ceremony in Washington. Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP


Renee Moodie is tired of glowing photo-essays about the glamorous Obamas.

This is going to be a very irritating few days – on Facebook at least.
On Friday, Donald Trump is going to be inaugurated as United States president. Barack Obama and family will take their bows and move on with their lives. My Facebook echo chamber, populated with journalists and eco-warriors and people of a politically correct persuasion, will be filled with shared photo essays of the gorgeous Obamas and many, many WTFs as our favourite American news websites (think Washington Post here) document all the varied failures of The Donald and his flashy family.


Donald Trump, accompanied by, from left, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump, Melania Trump, Tiffany Trump and Ivanka Trump, speaks during the grand opening of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. File photo: Evan Vucci/AP


Here's the thing though: the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.
I know next to nothing about American politics. Neither, I would wager, do many of the people sharing all those links on Facebook. I have no way, for instance, of assessing the truth of a fragment I spotted in the Guardian:
"President Obama will leave behind a distinctly patchy legacy on immigration, one that veers wildly from his reputation as “deporter-in-chief” to his determined efforts to secure legal status for millions of young undocumented immigrants and their parents. That less than flattering title has been bestowed on Obama by immigrant communities and civil rights groups dismayed by his record of removing more than 2.5 million people – more than any previous administration.
The latest figures from the Pew Research Center show that in recent times the Obama administration consistently sustained rates of removals well above those effected under George W Bush." (my bold)
What's this? Barack's administration has been deporting people while we have been admiring his oratory and his stylish, glamorous wife and daughters? How can that be? Is it even correct? Am I going to bother to do the research to check it out? Probably not. Why let facts stand in the way of easy hero worship?
But the facts matter. The reality under the shiny surface matters.
Terry Pratchett, as usual, applies his deep understanding of power and how it is wielded to sum this up in one rapier-like paragraph. In his novel Lords And Ladies, Granny Weatherwax says of a bunch of elves who are threatening the kingdom of Lancre: 'Glamour. Elves are beautiful.
They’ve got,’ she spat the word, ‘style. Beauty. Grace. That’s what matters. If cats looked like frogs we’d realise what nasty cruel little bastards they are.’
Every time I see another glowing tribute to the lovely Obamas I think this: just because I like the look of the Obamas, just because they appeal to my muddled left-wing sensibilities, just because they appear to be people of understated charm and sophistication, just because they radiate the kind of glamour that works for me, that does not mean that Obama has been a good president, or that he did not (perhaps) ruthlessly climb his way to the top of the Democratic pile to get to the White House. He is a politician and you don't get to be President of the United States by being nice to musicians and making dreadful puns over a Thanksgiving turkey.

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President Barack Obama accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama and his daughters Malia and Sasha, waves from Air Force One, upon their arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. File photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Just because Donald Trump looks and talks like an idiot (that hair, darling!), and has a family clearly deficient in good taste and liberal leanings, that does not mean he will make a bad president.
There do appear to be many skeletons in his closet and I really don't like what I've seen so far but we have no way of telling at this point what he will be like as a political leader. Much easier to make snap judgements about his appearance and be rude about his wife and children, who all have the distinct sheen of nouveau riche trash.
I have no way of weighing the real substance of an American president.
I don't live in the society in which the fruit of that person's actions can be experienced and assessed. I can take the surface view and regret the ending of the Obama era. I can dismiss Trump and his supporters as deplorable. But my estimations of good taste have got nothing to do with good governance. Unless we have made a serious study of it, we cannot understand how power plays out in a country as vast as the US simply by looking at pictures or viewing YouTube videos. So for my part, I will be keeping calm and looking for the tell-tale signs of glamour – and I won't be sharing links about the whole thing on Facebook.

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* Renee Moodie is a journalism trainer, writer and editor. See her site at www.safehands.co.za
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media

Seven Gauteng cops arrested for fraud

CRIME & COURTS / 17 January 2017, 7:57pm
Siphelele Dludla
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File photo: Seven police officials, five from Rabie Ridge and two from Benoni Police Stations, were arrested by the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks) at their respective workplaces.




Johannesburg – Seven South African Police Service (SAPS) members were arrested for fraud and corruption in Ekurhuleni on Tuesday.



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The seven police officials, five from Rabie Ridge and two from Benoni Police Stations, were arrested by the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks) on Tuesday morning at their respective workplaces.





They allegedly submitted fraudulent travelling claims of about R50 000 between the period of March 2014 and March 2015. Gauteng





MEC for Community Safety Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane on Tuesday welcomed the arrests, saying it would send a strong message to other officials that the province did not tolerate corruption.





"I applaud the South African Police Service for arresting these individuals and stopping them in their tracks to loot state coffers," Nkosi-Malobane said in a statement.





"This demonstrates our unwavering zeal to root out fraud and corruption, more especially in pursuit of restoring the integrity of our law enforcement agencies. We would not hesitate to act harshly to anyone who commits such crime."





The Hawks spokesperson Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi was not immediately available for comment but police are currently pursuing an eighth suspect who was not at work during the time of the arrests.


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Nkosi-Malobane said they expected the eighth suspect to hand himself over to the police soon. She said the seven would appear in court either on Wednesday or Thursday.

Women in technology? It’s an uphill slog

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Portugal - They are under-represented in the industry and sometimes made to feel unwelcome in geek-infested workspaces, but women are making their voices heard at Europe's largest technology marketplace.

Organisers of this week's Web Summit in Lisbon said nearly half its 53 000 attendees were women, helped by their offer of free tickets for female entrepreneurs in a drive to try to rectify a large gender imbalance in tech.



The scale of the industry's challenge remains immense. In France for example, 91 percent of startups are run by men, according to a study last year.

Rana el Kaliouby, chief executive of the artificial intelligence startup Affectiva, called for gender quotas in recruitment at tech firms.
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“Women are the majority of gamers, they spend the most time on social media, they make the most app purchases, but they're not part of the design process and the (development) of these technologies. That is a problem,” she said in Lisbon.


“When you don't get the female perspective, you miss out entirely on an opportunity to leverage that.”

The homogeneous workforce in the US technology industry became a hot topic after an attention-grabbing civil trial in 2014 that aired charges of sexism at a powerful Silicon Valley venture capital firm and disclosures by internet titans that workforces are mostly male, and very white.
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Hillary Clinton's agonising failure to break through the ultimate glass ceiling, in losing the US presidential race to Donald Trump, was a motif of discussion at the Web Summit as tech evangelists fretted about the consequences for their industry.

Tony Conrad, founder of the about.me blog site, said Trump's views on women and immigrants were “antithetical to everything we in the tech community believe in”.

“We already have gender imbalances in tech companies specifically. I don't know the impact specific to our community, but as a society the impact is going to be profound. It sends a really bad message.”

A long way to go

Still, there was recognition of the efforts in Lisbon, where the summit set aside a “Women in Tech Lounge” and organised several panels to discuss the gender question.

“There is this space (the lounge), coffee breaks and even events just for us, lot of opportunities to meet and discuss, for networking,” said Carla Barros, who heads strategy and marketing for a digital firm in Brazil.

The imbalance, however, remained plain in the makeup of panel discussions at the Web Summit, which likes to promote itself as “the Davos for geeks” and provides a platform for startups to hook up with venture capitalists and hear about new trends from industry leaders such as Facebook.

Of the 663 speakers on the various stages over the week, only about 100 were women.

“Even here, where we have a private space for women, you only have white men in their 40s speaking on stage. There isn't much diversity,” said Maria Ines, who heads digital marketing at a Portuguese hotel group.

“When you look at the upper hierarchy of companies, you can see only men. We still have a long way to go,” she said.

Female speakers included Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at software design company ThoughtWorks, a pioneering woman in tech whose panel was entitled: “I'm a technologist, not a female technologist.”

Ines underlined that at every level, “you must prove yourself much more” as a woman in tech when the overwhelming majority of executives, software writers and engineers are male.

While happy to have made some inroads on the imbalance, Web Summit organisers recognised the work ahead.

“It's a global problem and we are part of this industry,” said one of the Irish organisers, Mike Harvey.

“We know that there's much to do, specially on the stages. We scan the whole industry to find female speakers.”

DA to lay criminal charges against Eskom’s Molefe

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– The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Friday said it would be laying criminal charges in terms of the Prevention and Combatting of Corruption and for breaches of the Public Finance Management Act against Brian Molefe following his resignation as Eskom chief executive.

In a statement, DA Shadow Minister of Public Enterprises Natasha Mazzone said they had requested that Parliament’s portfolio committee on public enterprises to summon Molefe as a matter of urgency so that he can tell the truth about his relationship with the Gupta family under oath.

Eskom CEO Brian Molefe announced his resignation ten days after the release of Thuli Madonsela's State of Capture report. File photo: Simphiwe Mbokazi. Credit: INDEPENDENT MEDIA


“It is suspicious that he has resigned after we began the process of getting him to come clean under oath in Parliament,” Mazzone said.

“We furthermore see Molefe’s resignation as the first step in recovering Eskom’s damaged integrity - an important step in the right direction before the sovereign ratings decision at the end of the year.”
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Molefe announced his resignation on Friday, ten days after the release of former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s “State of Capture” report which raised serious concern about his conduct in relation to the Gupta family and their mining company Tegeta.


Mazzone said the African National Congress (ANC) had long trumpeted Molefe as some sort of saviour from load-shedding, while all the while he was putting the Guptas and President Jacob Zuma’s families in the pound seats, rather than rescuing Eskom.

“Despite Molefe’s protestations to the contrary, his resignation ‘for the benefit of the public and Eskom’ can be seen in no other light than that of an admission of guilt,” Mazzone said.
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“The DA will continue to expose the capturers of our state and will ensure accountability for those who are involved in the Zuma-Gupta mafia.”

Molefe said he would leave his post on January 1, 2017 in the interest of the power utility and the public it serves, and would take time off to reflect before deciding on his next career move.