Uh oh!

I've just been to the gate of our complex and spied a minor Matterhorn of black and orange rubbish bags. Seems as if our Tuesday morning collection didn't take place and that the DSW strike has spread this far.

The litter crisis widens

The Natal Mercury, of September 30, 2008, reports that Durban Solid Waste workers trashed the city yesterday, emptying litter bins onto the pavement and obstructing traffic. The workers were demonstrating in solidarity with the striking bus drivers and because they now also want to become full-time employees of the city???? It comes as news to me that they aren't.

In the same issue of the Mercury, there is a follow-up report on the chaos and litter left on the beachfront last Friday night by celebrating pupils. Metro Police spokesperson Supt. Joyce Khuzwayo is quoted as saying the force had not anticipated the influx of revellers. She said buses loaded with pupils had come from as far afield as the Eastern Cape.

It would probably infringe on their human rights so I don't suppose we could turn them away at Tollgate in future. Next time, let's ban all glass containers and get enough police and army to keep a lid on things when they start going pear-shaped.

The bus strike continues

The Natal Mercury, of September 29, 2008, reports that the buses could be off the streets for another two months. The drivers are objecting to having to work for Remant Alton and I can't say I blame them much. The lack of transport is causing all sorts of problems, as you might expect, and it's all down to the municipality's fatally flawed decision to sell off the bus service in the first place. I've got a car, thank God, but I feel for all those who do not.

Beachfront trashed

Making the front page of The Sunday Tribune, of September 28, 2008, is report describing the horrific amount of litter, including huge quantities of broken glass, left on the beachfront on Friday night, September 26. The carnage was put down to youngsters celebrating the end of the school year but the party must have been a far cry from those in my day. We just wouldn't have been allowed to run riot and smash glass to the extent that people had to turn from the beaches the next day because it wasn't safe to walk.

A former municipal employee apparently contacted the Metro Police and was told that they had only had 20 staff on duty on Friday night who were unable to control the situation. I didn't see the devastation but I did got through town at about 6:30 on Saturday morning and, to say that the streets were disgustingly littered, would be a gross understatement.

We have time and money to change street names and build vast new stadiums but we don't have enough money for esssentials like adequate policing and, for that matter, enough firemen to do the job of keeping us safe.

The strike continues

The Mercury of Wednesday, September 24, 2008, reports that Remant Alton (our lovely bus company) has fired over 350 bus drivers for participating in an illegal strike. The strike was precipitated by Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo's article on the background to the ongoing bus debacle which I reported here.

The drivers were reported in Wednesday's Mercury as saying that they did not want to work for Remant Alton, because of its history of financial mismanagement, and that they would prefer to work for the municpality. Naidoo replied to the drivers by saying that the munipality was not in a position to take them on. I can imagine how that soothed the drivers' passions.

The Mercury of today, September 25, 2008, reports that Remant Alton was to use trainee drivers and advertise for new staff in an attempt to beat the strike.

The comment was made along the way by Naidoo that the city could not break its contract with Remant Alton unless it defaulted. So why buy the buses from the company? The best course would have been to let it go bust and for the municpality to take over the bus service. It seems to me to be the height of folly to buy the buses back from them but, despite their poor history, let them still run the service.

There are few details available as yet but city management have come up with what seems like another harebrained scheme. This time they have some notion of getting the minibus taxi operators involved in the running of the bus service once remant Alton's contract expires in late 2010. More details as and when...

King Dinuzulu unwrapped

By now now King Dinuzulu should have been unwrapped on his plinth facing Louis Botha in Botha Gardens at the bottom of Berea Road. Ooops! I mean King Dinuzulu Road, of course. I took a swing past the gardens on Friday morning to find that the King had been removed from his hessian, cleaned, and re-wrapped in plastic and packing tape in readiness for the formal unveiling the following day.

The king on his plinth across the park from Louis Botha who was first the first prime minister of the union of South and who released him from prison. In the background are the Technikon buildings.

Also in the the park, to practice for the parade on Saturday, were the State President's Guard. They looked smart enough but why not one our local regiments like the Durban Light Infantry, for example. There's more politics there, I'll be bound.

The ceremony on Saturday was also to formally rename Berea Road after the King.

Strike on the buses

An article in the council mouthpiece Ezasegagasini Metro, which accompanied the Mercury on Friday, September 19, 2008, had an unintended consequence when it caused an impromptu strike among staff members of Remant Alton, the company which sort of runs our bus service. The article was written by Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo and was intended to lay to rest the puzzlement felt by most citizens when it was learnt that that the bus service had originally been been sold to Remant Alton for R70-million and was being bought back for a R405 million.

Naidoo pointed out that included in the deal were many buses that had been bought by Remant Alton since acquiring the service. He said that the R405-million purchase price included 514 of Remant Alton's best buses and some equipment.He said that the municipality would buy a further 162 new buses which would all be leased back to Remant Alton until their contract expired in 2010. The operation of the bus service will then be farmed out to a number of smaller operators. Crucially, the article said that the deal applied only to buses and equipment and not Remant Alton staff. Accordingly, many of them went on strike leaving commuters stranded, as reported here in the Independent Online. It's not yet clear what the outcome will be.

Dear Derek: I said before the last sale that it would be a mistake to privatise the bus service. Farming it out to small operators would be another mistake! Public transport is not something that can be done really well at a profit.

A good decongestant?

It all came on very suddenly but I ended up in Ireland for a couple of days last week and reinforced the affection I have felt for the place since I first set foot there in 2001. I am also more convinced than ever that Guinness really is good for me!

What has all this to do with a blog concerned largely with happenings in Durban? Well, both Durban and Dublin have been suffering from traffic congestion and, in particular, from container trucks travelling to and from the harbour. Both cities have harbours pretty close to the centre of town which has the potential to cause great congestion. This has happened in Durban's case, as we all know well, but the Irish have more or less solved the problem by digging a whacking great tunnel from the port, under the city, to the freeway. You don't see the trucks in town any more and its a great help. The job must have huge but it was completed and opened since I left in 2001. Here some more information about Dublin Port Tunnel and here's a video of it, courtesy of YouTube.



I was lucky enough to be driven through it because it is also a great shortcut for cars going to the airport. I wasn't lucky enough to have a ride of the other new transport innovation to come to Dublin. When I was last there, there was some talk of building a tram system to cut traffic congestion. The tram, known as the Luas, now has two lines running into the city and offers cheap fast transport. Here's video of it, again courtesy of YouTube.

No corruption here!

President Mbeki, speaking at the Naval Review mentioned in the previous post, declared that there was no corruption involved in the acquisition of frigates and submarines for the SA Navy. Hmmmm. Well, that will likely never be proved one way or the other, but there was certainly stupidity involved in the purchase. Quite apart from the fact that the weapons seemed far too sophisticated for any enemy we are likely to encounter, it has recently emerged that the navy is after new patrol boats and the inference is that they can't afford to run the new frigates

King Dinuzulu and others

The Mercury of September 5, 2008, reports that the SA Police Service has sprung a surprise on is members and declared them all to filling vacant posts. Everyone is going to have to reapply for their positions and only have days to to do so. Nobody is apparently going to lose their jobs so I wonder what the whole thing is for.

President Mbeki has reviewed the Navy's fleet and the paper carries a picture of our four frigates in False Bay. I hope that having all four of them at sea at the same time hasn't blown the Navy's budget for the year...

There has been a very weird thing going on in the park adjacent to the Technikon at the bottom of Berea Road. It has a statue of General Louis Botha, the famed Boer war leader and first prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Something like two years ago, a statue of King Dinuzulu was erected in the park but was left wrapped in hessian until it could be officially unveiled. Now, two years later, the unveiling still has not occurred but the Mercury did report that KZN Premier S'bu Ndebele has announced that the unveiling of the R600000 statue will happen this month. I can't imagine why it has taken so long, but doubtless the King will be glad to see the sun and to be free of his itchy hessian coat, at long last.

An article by Patrick Compton in the paper reveals that the brain drain is just as bad in cricket as it is in other sectors. He lists over 30 names of South Africans players playing for county sides in England, and gives the example of a recent game between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire which had 10 South Africans playing in it.

It seems a no-brainer for me that talented white youngsters may seek a career abroad in the face of racial quotas, inspired by affirmative action principles, which apply to South African cricket teams. Add to that a highly attractive pay package, and we may soon have the situation where team talks in the England dressing room are conducted in Afrikaans.

ANC backtracks, slightly

According to the Mercury of September 3, 2008, it seems as if the local ANC, who run the city, have been told by their KZN branch to back off from attempts to rename Mangosuthu Highway after Griffiths Mxenge. Two violent protests, and the certainty of much more where that came from, have prompted the change of tack. The city is adamant that all the other name changes will still stand and I'm not that hopeful that a court case in progress, in which opposition parties are challenging the name changes, is going to help much.

It was the Nationalist Party and Apartheid thing to force things on people without regard to their feelings on the matter. I seem to remember that someone once commented along the lines that the more things change, the more they remain the same. How true!

The thing that could end up finishing off this country, as far as I'm concerned, is the bery hard-arsed approach that our new rulers display. The people with the skills to run the place may have received them as a benefit from Apartheid but, even if it wasn't fair, they are still the ones with the skills.

The bad thing about skills is that they take a long time to get and cannot quickly be replaced if they are lost. Again, it may not be fair, but it seems logical to me that the way to proceed with the owners of such skills is to use kid gloves. It should also be remembered that a majority of these people voted for democracy in the referendum.

They won't understand when someone then comes to them and says in a very democratic way: "Your street is going to be renamed and I don't care what you think or feel about it". That alone, probably wouldn't be enough to send them hurrying off to emigration seminars but it could very well be the final staw for people already worried about the high crime rate, affirmative action, and whether their kids can get a good education and jobs.

Deadline will be met

The Mercury of September 2, 2208, reports that about half the new street name signs have been put up around the city and that the rest are expected to be up by the deadline at the end of November. The same paper has a full-page (page 7) listing of the people who have been honoured by the city by having streets renamed after them. The great majority were members of the ANC, the SA Communist Party or the UDF, with a sprinkling from the Natal Indian Congress.

Sea water quality

I've mentioned here and there in these pages that Durban has lost the internationally recognised Blue Flag grading on its beaches. The surprising part, for me, was that the city decided not to reapply, but to introduce its own grading standards. The whole thing is pretty complicated and I'm grateful to Tony Carnie's article in the Mercury of September 1, 2008, for shedding a bit of light on the subject.

What's at issue is how to measure the levels of faecal contamination in the sea water off our beaches and how to determine what the unsafe level is. There are many organisms that could pose a threat to bathers but the city has chosen to follow World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations that tests are done to determine the levels of e.coli and enterococci in the water. These two organisms are used as indicators and the thought is that, if you count how many there are, you can assess how many other baddies are present.

There doesn't seem to be much scientific objection to this way of going about things but the arguments start when it comes to deciding what the acceptable levels of e.coli and enterococci in the water are. The WHO says that seawater can be classed as excellent in quality if it contains less than 40 units of enterococci per 100ml of sea water. The standard for excellent water quality decided on by Durban is that it should have less than 100 units of enterococci per 100ml.

The WHO says that seawater should be classed as poor if the it contains more than 500 units of enterococci per 100ml which, they say, gives swimmers a more than 10% chance of contracting gastroenteritis. Durban has defined poor quality water as that which contains over 2000 units of enterococci per 100ml of sea water. Durban's standards do not seem consistent with the WHO ones, and that that's where the arguments start.

The city's water and waste chief Neil McLeod argues that enterococci flourishes in warmer tropical waters and that you'd get more of them in the seas off Durban, without a corresponding increase in the quantity of other harmful organisms. Scientific opinion seems spilt on this matter leaving at least some room for doubt either way. Durban's response seems to be less cautious than in other locations, such as in New South Wales in Australia. The state has beaches with cold water and beaches with warmer water but has apparently decided to adopt the WHO standards across the board. This will be until it is proved whether warmer water with increased levels of enterococci is really as safe as colder water with lower levels.

Waiting until there's proof! Now, there's a novel idea.

Brain drain

Yesterday's Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008, had an article by a reporter and photographer who had ventured into town to canvas opinions on the street-renaming. Those interviewed seem to have been predominantly from previously disadvantaged groups, for whose benefit the changes were allegedly made. They included business people, street traders, taxi drivers and shoppers and most still seemed to be using the old names. Some respondents didn't know that there had been changes.

There was also a long article on the skills shortage which is partly due to the exodus of skilled individuals from the country but also to retirements and resignations and the fact that not enough people were being trained. The 2007 national scarce-skills list reveals that there is a shortage of about a million skilled people. These include 20700 health and welfare support workers and 25000 health diagnostic professionals (??) and midwives and nurses.