Oyena Gwebityala

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.