Oyena Gwebityala

Over the past few months, the world’s central banks have been fighting a wild fire. When one flame was put out an even stronger one blew up some other place. And by and large the efforts of these monetary authorities can be judged as have been successful, albeit undesirable. We have seen the predominantly capitalist economies of the USA and Britain nationalizing banks in these countries. Now anyone who knows a bit about economics will tell you about 2 things that are good for any economy’s financial system; firstly it should be stable and secondly it should be free (from large scale government intervention). Sure in these turbulent times it would seem we can’t hold on to both ideals. The question is why, and the answer at first seems disarmingly simple. We can’t let the banks fail, so lets give up on the sovereignty.

There are 2 opposite ideas prevalent in conversations about bail outs and the likes. These are the idea of letting large banks fail vs the possible moral hazard a bail out would cause. I will just share my thoughts on both arguments.

As to the argument about big banks; there is a level of credibility to this argument. Some of the banks at risk of failing in the USA especially have quite a large chunk of that country’s banking market share. And their failure could hurt the US financial system. But is this reason enough to make tax payers pay for their risk taking? Consider for instance in the USA that banks are required by law to take out deposit insurance for all it’s deposits. So if these banks fail, the man on the street will not be hurt, so any bail out is really for shareholders who know that there are risks in buying shares, and not citizens. The second argument that bail out proponents propound is that such a large scale failure of banks could lead to a collapse of these countries’ financial systems and they quickly point to Asia to add extra weight  to these claims. Firstly I would say, “the markets clear” and this is the quick retort that bank owners and managers threw around to governments when governments tried to regulate them more. This tune has changed quite fast. But it should not. The reason banks were able to sell these exotic derivatives in the first place was because they ignored the risk management processes that governments had advised them to take. Most notable among these is the Basel II accords having finalized in the early 2000’s very few market economies have headed these accords and this crisis might just be the result of poor risk management policies within these banks. So now why should governments who have always been told  that the markets clear be expected to believe otherwise now? Secondly I would say the Asian situation is completely disanalogous with this current situation, especially if you consider the hardest hit economies in the current situation. The USA and Europe are fairly stable economies (on the most part) and it is ridiculous to think that we could ever see the kind of capital flight here that we saw in Asia, and the main reason is where would it go? When capital flies, it needs a place to land and the world without Europe and the USA would not be able absorb the kind of capital that we are talking about here.  As well going back to my “the markets clear” statement. The market is starting to show signs of clearing in the United States. We have seen over the past few months, banks that were thought to be juggernauts being sold off. We can see that there is a market for cheap banks.And who is to say that by the time this is all over all these banks will not have been bought?  So no, a financial market failure in the USA and Europe is highly unlikely, not because investors like what’s going on, but because they have no where else to go and because the market clears. And thirdly I would say even if one could prove that a market crash would happen, I would say Asia recovered and became more prudent at that, and these economies would do the same. Perhaps what they need is this kind of failure, so that they watch their risk taking a bit closer in future.

And as to the second argument of moral hazard; it is quite possible that moral hazard will occur as a result of a bail out. Because what a bail out says to these banks is that you have us by the balls. It says ” we can’t let you fail because you are too big”. With such sweeping statement to banks, well you might as well trow out the risk management codes, heck close down the risk management departments in these banks.  The problem with a bail out is that it lets banks get away with it and that is a bad thing.

I was having one of those beer in hand-around the hubbly conversations that I like so much the other day. And my friend and I were talking about fitting in and this is something I have been thinking about quite a lot subsequently. How do people become cliques, political party comrades, religious organisations?

I thought the answer to this question was simple, but when I thought about it, I did not have a ready answer. My wise friend and I ended the night by agreeing that the wrong way of doing it would be to define ones self according to the group they belong to or wish to join. Rather the group shouldconform to one’s character before one joins it. But how many times do we all end up in groups that don’t conform to our personalities? Remember your friends in high school whom you would not be caught dead with now, remember the choir, the boy scouts (for whities)?

This then begs the question, are our allegiances meant to be transient? And I would say yes, there are people I know I will lose contact with after varsity… intentionally. I think to define one’s self as part of any group forever is tantamount to one saying that they don’t intend to change, surely when you get married for instance your debaucherous friends from varsity might have to go. Of course there are exceptions, best friends, ex-girl friends you might still like etc. But otherwise everyone else goes.

What I am struggling with now is: when does this stop? Cliché: A rolling stone gathers no moss. Do you know the divide by 2, subtract 50 and take the square root rule? Probably not, because I just made it up, but I think there is some truth to it. So if you take the number of facebook friends you have and perform the above mentioned mathematical actions, you are left with the number of real friends you have. I would hate to wake up at 50 and realise this was less than 10.

So as I move up and along and as I shed some friends and pick new ones, I will have my facebook friend list at the back of my mind. So should you

I am still reeling from a public debate I watched yesterday, not because it was particularly good (it might as well have been a one man show), but because of its content. The debate was about a new expropriation bill that was before parliament recently and has now joined the national health insurance bill on the shelf. The bill in its entirety is very disturbing.

Here are a few characteristics of the bill:

1) The minister (I’m assuming of land affairs) has the right to expropriate any property from its current owner if this is viewed to be in the public interest (the definition of public interest is vague and open to much abuse)

2) Property is not just limited to land; it includes intellectual property, shares in companies, banks and other businesses

3) The victim of the expropriation has no legal recourse at all; the only time an expropriation can be challenged in court is if it’s not procedurally correct. However the reason for the expropriation itself is not up for discussion.

4) Although there is compensation, this compensation need not necessarily be the market value of whatever property is being expropriated

I don’t know about everyone else but I find this bill very draconian. Taken to its most watered down version, the government could force a wealthy person in Sandton to move out of his 10 bedroom house (assuming he stays alone), because it would be in the public interest to house a family of ten living in a 2 bedroom house in Alex. Or if one invented a drug for say AIDS that was too expensive to buy, government could legally (under the bill) violate the intellectual property rights of that person to produce the drug anyway. Don’t even get me started on the banks, hospitals, private schools and fuel companies whose blood COSATU has been baying for.

In my opinion this policy gives far too much power to government officials who have already shown that they can use power to further their own aims, even against public good e.g travel-gate, arms deal etc. Government has become synonymous with corruption, giving them a window to this much power and this much resources could be a very dangerous thing to do.

As well this policy could retard the economic growth advances that we have been making in the country. Very few investors would want to build factories here if their property rights were not guaranteed. As well farmers would have even less off an incentive to make their farms very productive if their land could be taken that immediately and without proper compensation.

One of the guys in the debate asked me how I as a black man could be worried about intellectual property rights; and that is just the main problem with the bill and its proponents. In the haste to redistribute resources in this country those in power have forgotten that new wealth can be created as well. Government is happy about giving black people shares in existing companies, ignoring completely that a better way (though perhaps more difficult) would be to encourage entrepreneurship among the previously disadvantaged. So I might not need intellectual property rights now, but I will in the future, when I start inventing stuff. The only man who made sense in that debate pointed out quite correctly that “government is too concerned with rich people to have time for the poor”

In closing, the bill will come before parliament again next year; I would encourage all of us to contribute during the public hearings on the bill. If there was ever a reason to pick up a cause this is it. Our economic freedom is at stake.

I like to think I am an invincible guy, a guy you can’t scare easily. But alas I am not and I have come to realise that more these past few months than ever before. I am afraid now for two reasons.Firstly I am faced with decisions that will affect the rest of my life. How my life is 20,30 years from now will depend mainly on the  decisions I make in the next two months or so. And that has put the fear of God in me. What if I screw it up? What if I look back in 20 years time and realise that I hate my life and I am too old to change it? Secondly I am re-assessing my priorities, because quite frankly I doubt that I am happy with the way they are right now. A friend articulated in his blog something I had been thinking about for a very long time; which part of my life is actually mine? What choices had I made because they made me happy and which ones had I made because they made other people happy and thus made me fit in?

The second reason is the scariest thing I have ever had to contend with, because taken to its most elementary level,it means that I might have wasted my life. Moreover the second reason does not only require me to make good choices in the near future,it requires me to make changes, to cut things and add new ones and change is scary, but this kind of change leaves my stomach in knots with fear, and I hate fear,so I will plunge in. Over the next two to three months nothing will go unchecked, everything that can be changed will be considered and if it makes me happy then it stays otherwise I am cleaning out the closet. Religion, friends,the music I listen to, everything will get an assessment.

Scary but necessary. Everyone arbs around the world seeking true happiness, enlightenment and all that hippy jazz. I will be my own Guru. And I am glad I won the quiz (for another post) because now I don’t have to work over the end of year break, which means I have 3 months to consider this.

And as I end this post I would like to ask you reader; Which part of your life is yours?

Ponder that.

This is the first post I have written that is not about me, I’ll try doing this more. But I want to talk about behaviour that I have found very weird within our society. A few months ago the Wits SRC got some money from senate to distribute to deserving societies. What struck me and almost everyone else was that some unknown society called the MPSA got what was as far as I recall the largest amount in grants from that money. As it would turn out later, one of the SRC people involved in deciding on the grants was the president of this society or something along those lines.

And this leads me to the weird bit, how could this guy have thought that giving that large a sum of money to an unknown society would not raise some eyebrows?

It would seem that this is the kind of oversight that plagues the whole ANC (the Wits SRC is formed by the ANC). I have been reading the FM lately and there have been cases where people fight over and even kill for power. Not because they believe in leading society in the best way possible, but because they want to control tender processes and the top government jobs. Now my question to such people is how. How can you think that owning a company that wins all the tenders that you give out is acceptable or even justifiable? How can you think employing a person with barely a matric to directorship positions is ok?

It was upon pondering these questions that I found the answer. They just don’t care. No one is going to call them on it and their own moral grounding is a little bit higher than a baby’s.

And the worst part is we have been here before, we have seen what happens to countries that ignore merit and reward only loyalty, all the good people go and as one debater once said to another, the country (economy) goes down.

What can be done you might ask. Well for now nothing really. In any other country that purports to be democratic I would say we will outs them at the polls next year. But that won’t happen. The ANC will win next year’s elections, they don’t even need to campaign. And the will win the ones after that and the one’s following those. They will win every election until we have an opposition in this country that does not try to deny what this country is. We are a post oppression country, we have a very divided society and we need some form of redress. He who realises this wins. All we can do now is say, FOR SHAME.

I see many of my friends are thinking about the same thing that has been on my mind a lot lately i.e. what happens to the dreams we had in our youth, what happens to wanting to conquer the world and saving all the poor and marginalized? I won’t pretend to know what happens to everyone or even most people. What I know is what happened to me and perhaps that is a good start for any inductive proof process.

But before I go on about what happened I best begin with what I wanted to do when I was say 18 or 19. I wanted to be the best president the developed world will ever see, I wanted to go save souls in Nigeria and other nations where I felt needed to have souls saved (I am a christian you see).

Then something happened, I can’t tell you what it is now, but maybe some day. All I can say now is that it was tragic and it happened to a person I love with all my heart. And after that the developing world and the lost souls of Africa seemed to matter less and less until they did not matter anymore. All I want now is to make life better for myself and my loved one, to show this particular person that life is not the bytch that it’s been for the passed few years. And that means I need some security, a picket fence and a hedge oh and a bulldog just to seal the deal.

Don’t get me wrong, I will still travel the world on 7 seas (as the song goes), but I won’t give up my day job to be on the mission field or for the country. I have just realised (like Richard put it) that I am ordinary, I get hurt like everybody else and my loved ones get hurt as well. And the basic mammalian instinct has kicked in, my survival and that of my loved ones comes first.

It was a painful reality that I have had to face, and I won’t even try to fight it. Let me close this post by saying here here to a 20 year bond and car insurance!

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!! I have just realised that I have 3 months of full time varsity studies left. I started looking back at what I had done in varsity, had I achieved what I set out to do, had I done all the things I had planned to do. And the sad answer was yes and NO. Yes I have achieved all I set out to, but only academically, I get a degree in 3 months time and that’s all I will get from Wits.

No I have not done all the things I planned to do that one cold and long car ride from the Eastern Cape. And that is where my problem is. I am entirely to blame; I focused on other things that I thought made me happy and on the most part I chickened out. In my entire life I can remember one event that I fully regret, it had to do with debating (the story of my life) and I hate how regret feels, so I am not going to put myself out on it’s path again. In the next 3 months I am going to do all the things that I planned to do, and I have already started doing some. Here under is a list of the things I planned to do when I got to Johannesburg/Wits and it’s broken down into 2 parts; 1) Stuff I wanted to do on my way to Johannesburg and 2) Stuff I wanted to do from my first month at Wits:

1)     

–       Eat Sushi (still think it’s disgusting)

–       Get a piercing (Ouch! But ok)

–       Bleach my hair (No pictures)

–       Wear my pants below my ass for a week (My mom would skin me alive so no pictures- I’m very scared of that woman)

–       Walk around with untied shoelaces for a week (Again my mom)

–       Buy a whole chicken and try to eat it alone (Always thought it would defeat me)

–       Lose lots of wait and audition for an advert on TV (I’ve tried to lose for a week in the past 3 years and considering the point above I will have to try harder)

–       Cut a pair of jeans and wear it (Mom again)

–       Have a joint ( My dad would arrest me- so maybe not)

–  

–       Go to a mosque (Salam malequa – I think )

–       Date a person from a different race group (White, Indian or coloured?)

–       Go to a live concert (Don’t know why I have never done this)

2)

-         Sit on the library lawns (Check, might do it again)

-         Bunk a lecture for no valid reason (my window of opportunity has passed for that one, I need that degree)

-         Go to a party on campus (check, not doing it again before I graduate)

-         Score a 100% for a test/exam (Have come close - 98% but never quite)

-         Kiss someone and run (should have done this in grade one, now it might just be misconstrued as sexual harassment so I’ll pass)

-         Swim in the pool by the matrix (Too deep I can’t swim well)

_Fall madly inlove and get my heart broken (I don’t know if this can happen in 3 months)

That’s about all the things I can remember wanting to do at some point in the past 2 years. So now I’d like to ask all my friends to keep me accountable here. Ask me what I have done each week and maybe with your help I can beat my chicken syndrome.

The big O

I am a big believer in diversity. I always try to make friends from as diverse backgrounds as possible. From Alexandra township to Sandton city and every place in between;I have friends from there. I have white friends and Chinese friends and almost any other race that chooses to grace Wits with it’s presence. The last thing I want is to make friends with people like me, I get enough of me when I am alone thank you very much.

The reason I am going on about the type of friends I make is because I want all my friends to know that I made them because they are different to me not because they are similar. So just in case you were wondering, I don’t know who Billy Joel is and I have never heard the Bohemian Rhapsody, as much as you don’t know who Tandiswa Mazwai is and you’ve probably never heard Somagwaza, and no I have never eaten curvier and I think sushi is disgusting, in the same way that you have probably never eaten sour milk and mphokoqo and you think tripe (the insides of a sheep) are disgusting.

So what am I saying here? I am saying I like people who are different from that’s why I make friends with them, I don’t want my white friends to call me mfethu because guess what? I have enough black friends who will. And there is something to learn in our differences. I had never had of the concept of poached eggs until I heard some of my white friends talking about it (only white people would make poached eggs), and now one of my friends has promised to make some for me one day (I can’t wait). And if you want, I can teach you how to make pap, samp and magwinya (just don’t make them when I come over to your house, I want white, Indian or Russian food depending on your race) and we can learn something from one another. After all that’s why we make friends at least that should be why.

I have just started applying for jobs as I am in my final year of varsity. And I have just realised something; I will be some company’s BEE employee! It does not matter if my marks are great (like they are ok maybe not) or if I give them the best interview performance they have ever had (like all debaters should be able to) I will still go down as a tick on their scorecard and that makes me really angry.

Many of the friends that I have shared this sentiment with say it does not matter as long as I get the job at the end. But you see, that is not who I am, I am a competition freak, I take losing well but I thrive on winning and I like to know that when I get stuff (job included) it’s because I have somehow earned it and that I was the best guy there, not because I happen to have more melanin than some of the guys there. That is why I hate BEE on a personal level.

But I hate BEE on a more philosophical/general level as well. This is because there are 2 implications that I feel are inherent in the whole BEE policy. 1) That black people aren’t smart enough to thrive under an equal opportunity SA: Now don’t get me wrong, I am well aware of the fact that most black people are not equal to say their white counterparts, I went to Mbuqe JSS and Zingisa CHS, hardly your larny schools, but once I came to Wits and got 5 months away from getting a degree in applied maths and economics my claim to being educationally disadvantaged sort of fell away. I read the same curriculum as everyone and get marked on the same standard as everyone (I hope). But even if I was somehow disadvantaged, I think I would have appreciated a well equipped primary and high school more than a hand me down job. And my black friends who went to St John’s and other private schools can’t even claim this disadvantage. I wonder what their “previous disadvantage” is. 

2) That white people would never willingly employ black people: I think if anyone claims that BEE does not make the first implication then surely they must admit to saying it makes this one, because otherwise why would we need BEE? The reason I have a problem with this implication is because I am a reconciliation kinda fellow and would like to think that this country is heading for a future that is free from discrimination of any kind. Even if white corporate captains were the sort of racists that assumption 2 makes them out to be, I don’t think it would make any business sense to not employ black people if they were the best people for the job. Many black people now leave university in the top 15% of their classes and to not employ these people in light of our skills shortage would be corporate suicide. So why force corporates to do what makes business sense to do anyway, assumption 1 maybe?

Again don’t get me wrong, I am not naive enough to think that we could just have a completely equal opportunity SA at this time in our existence. I support some areas of the BEE policy, so when it’s prioritising education spending to previously disadvantaged areas, I would give it a thumbs up, even when it’s government prioritising supporting black business start ups I would give BEE a thumbs, because I think government should try have more black people getting a good quality education and I think government should try encourage the emergence of more black businessmen. I just don’t think government should interfere with companies’ human resource policies because in all likelihood they will stuff it up and if they don’t they make people like me doubt if they deserve their jobs.

So I am off to fill in those job applications and there is very little I can do about my predicament except not find a job, which would make me sad as well. So I have resolved to get a job and if anyone offers me a management position on my first week of work, I’ll probably bitch slap them, before leaving the country!

This is my first ever blog post ever! I hope it will be one of many (thanks Rich for hooking me up) in the next few years. As my life takes different directions (and there will be many times when this happens) I will keep everyone updated through this blog.

Before I get carried away, let me just tell you a bit more about myself. My name is (as you might have already guessed) Oyena Gwebityala. I come from the dusty city of Umtata in the Eastern Cape. I am currently reading for a bachelor of Economic Sciences degree at Wits. I enjoy debating and debating and debating.

I hope you will get to know more about me in the coming months and years

Cheers for now.