The Scuffle With Home Affairs Continues

I had three unsuccessful attempts to apply for a new ID card at a Durban Home Affairs office. Eight to nine hours in the cheery batho pele / people first environment can be draining. The jolly, communicative staff make the experience all the more memorable.

I again tried booking online, something I'd attempted before with as much success as an EFF by-election campaign.

 Several attempts yielded no fruit. I, of course,  knew that calling the helpline would be as useful as waiting for Eskom to get its act together. I tried nevertheless. And was duly rewarded with The Silence of Desolation. I then wrote to the given email address, not expecting much. To my surprise I received this answer 6 days later.

Good Day Sir/Madam
Thank you for writing into the Department of Home Affairs contact centre.
Please note we have included below the link to book an appointment at the office. Should the office that you want to visit not be on the list then you will have to do a walk-in at that office.
https://services.dha.gov.za/#/authenticate/identity
The site is working.
Kind Regards 

I imagine that the six days were spent analysing my letter, perhaps looking for the deep undercurrents, symbolism, imagery and so forth. Well, let me not be churlish. At least an answer did arrive this year and this month. Yes, the site does work, after a fashion. If you have the patience to repeat the steps up to six times, you will probably arrive at the Nirvana of being able to book a date. Now this is where the fun really starts.

I chose a period from July to the 21st of August. A noticed popped up with the joyous news that there were no slots available during this period. Why the 21st of August? Well, because one cannot proceed  beyond that fateful date on the booking system. Perhaps Home Affairs knows something. The return of the Lord, foretold by Mr Zuma? So there are no available slots until the 21st of August. And beyond that date none may venture. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 would have loved this.

Is there some elaborate joke that only I am unaware of? Is there a bunch of people sitting in a darkened room somewhere laughing their heads off.

 "Look, he's really tearing his hair out. Tee hee, hee."

 By the time I got to the 21 August Catch 2023,  I could no longer contain myself. The laughter was loud, hysterical, abandoned. I did not even hear the men in the white coats come in. They have kindly allowed me a respite from the starched white jacket so that I can write this.  Let this serve as a warning to any innocent who may think that dealing with Home Affairs is a straightforward, normal transaction. Be warned. There are two dozen of us here in the nice white rooms, still laughing our heads off.

Sorry, I have to go. Time for our pills.

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

Twitter Trash

 Dear Twitter Person

Your tweet below says much between the lines.

"White people are mad apparently they have reported @Julius_S_Malema to the SPCA for slaughtering a cow without covering the cow face without putting a cloth so it could remain calm 🤣🤣🤣"

Let's switch this around:

" Black people are...They.... "

Remind you of something? Yes, those mindless adherents of the brutish apartheid cult. My, you have learned well. 

If the clownish Twitter police actually used their brains and could read for understanding, they would be more concerned about this sort of ranting than about trigger words taken out of context.

Comments like these abound. They are boringly similar because they all come out of an empty space where clichès and slogans rattle around. And intelligent thought fears to tread. 

Racist generalizations are the first step. Anything can follow. All the way down to the "cockroach calling" of Hotel Rwanda. People who have nothing positive to offer their country tend to wallow in this murky stuff. Grow up, for Pete's sake. Or, at least, for your own sake.  Everything that follows your first four words might be logical and reasonable, for all I know. Those four words place you  in the deep cave of those who move in the darkness of unreasoning mental grunts, twitches and tics.

Inevitably, there was a rash of responses from other dwellers of darkness. 

Out of such intimacies between mindlesness and an uncritical acceptance of racist rubbish are born the ugly progeny of hatred and division. In this case, I would support abortion. In a struggling, divided South Africa, better such comments die stillborn.

Our country needs critical  thinkers. And doers. Parrots are a dime a dozen.

Yours in the struggle against mindlessness.

Richard

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

Vote

Dear fellow South Africans. 

I have been thinking seriously about who to vote for in 2024. 

There is that party whose 'walking, killing machine' of a revolutionary leader struggled to kill a tethered cow. Of them the less said the better.

I want to correct the misconception that the ANC has been useless. Lest we forget here are some of the magnificent achievements of the liberation movement in recent times:

Who gave us the wonderful concept of smallanyana skeletons?  Sometimes in my dreams I see the little fellows doing a merry, Zuma - style jig in a cavernous cupboard.

 Medicine carried by head all the way from Russia - who else could have dreamt up such a brilliant concept? No freight cost, no problems with bureaucracy, no chance of those precious medicines being spoilt. 

Edison never made as dramatic a breakthrough as did our electricity minister. 'A reliable supply of electricity will ultimately lead to the end of load shedding'. Not a lightbulb moment but a lightning bolt moment.

 No other party, not even the imaginative EFF, could have unveiled the intuitively innovative idea of tackling those spirits from the Anglo-Boer war, that are the cause of all our problems. What  serendipity.

Kudos to the party that first gave fokol to the people of South Africa then went International, loading a Russian ship with the same precious product. Come 2024, I should think there will be lots of fokol on offer. Judging by their achievements and contributions, they've been stockpiling the stuff.

Mister Cele's crime-fighting formula will be discussed and debated at police conferences around the globe for years to come.  PG = CG squared, i.e. population growth equals crime growth multiplied. One can already see the benefits of this discovery in our grim battle against crime. 

And of course there's the fraud, corruption, conspiracy, violence and assassinations  that not even the best Netflix series could provide. 

Who would not vote for this party?

They have certainly liberated me from any and all Illusions that I may have had about liberation movements that become governments. I have also been liberated from any notions that I had that politicians could have motives nobler than greed and the acquisition of power and loot. 

Of course, with that sterling record, what

intelligent person would not want to vote for the heroes of the Movement?

An excerpt from an earlier post, 'Gone Too Far,  Too Far, sung to the tune of 'Que Sera, Sera'. (https://thescuffle.blogspot.com/2022/09/gone-too-far-too-far-tune-of-que-sera.html)

Now as the learned lawyer said,

Everything's effed up toe to the head. 

My buddies ask me: "Is there some hope?"

I tell them patiently:

Corruption trip B E.

We're  stuck with the ANC.

The future's catastrophe,

With the ANC. 

So bizarre, bizarre.

 Gone too far too far.

You've got to be asleep not to see the unique qualities of this unique political party.

Yours in the struggle for some real representation.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

No Place Like Home Affairs

 Dear Home Affairs and ANC

I once described your service, (a misnomer, if ever I heard one), in terms associated with post-digestive waste.

I apologize. I did not do you justice. It's infinitely worse than that. When I think of the nine hours spent outside your model of 'batho pele / people first', many words come to mind -  words beginning with F, C, S...  Suffice it to say that it's a fudding disaster.  Incidentally, I did not get to see the inside of the bustling beehive of excellent activity. Not this day.

Your staff are the frothy cream on top of the concoction that you serve up. A security gentleman warned us about the skelms promising to speed things up for a fee. So far so good. He explained that those who had booked would be attended to first. That is wonderful, except that it's impossible to book on a  system designed by Fred Flinstone - on a bad day. When this was pointed out, his helpful response was:

"Yes, sometimes there are system problems. Just keep trying".

Till the Good Lord returns (to quote a model of ANC leadership excellence)?

Someone asked if there was a queue for senior citizens. A 'yes' or 'no' would have sufficed. But our customer service hero was determined to go the extra 1.6 kilometres.

"This is not SARS", he pointed out helpfully. "Just follow the queue and imagine that you are at SARS." No irony detected here.

Don't we love Home Affairs humour?  I imagine that that gentlemen was the star student in your Customer Service Excellence training courses. 

The rest of his contribution  for the day was standing in a doorwaiy. Oh, and wisely not getting too involved when a fight almost broke out over queue jumping claims. 

As the long day declined towards closing time, the people next in line asked if they should leave, or stay on in the hope of  being attended to.

"The supervisor will decide", he replied.

The supervisor was still deciding as the desperate hopefuls watched the doors close in their faces. This poster boy for government service cannot answer the simplest of questions.

What purpose does such an employee serve? Apart from consuming oxygen that could have been put to much better use.

Gangrene has to be removed. Cancer, the same. You guys live with this mess day, month and year in and out. And you've never felt moved to do something significant about it? And you have managers and supervisors that you pay to manage and supervise?  The only news I've ever seen about enterprise and innovation at your department involves people selling documents at R50 000 a shot. 

A small point. When you have rats and cockroaches scurrying around a building, you can be reasonably sure that they're not there because of cleanliness and good housekeeping. You have vermin scurrying around, selling queue places. It's not a good environment. Not one you can be proud of.  Ah, but we dispensed with that stupid, colonialist notion of pride in work long ago, didn't we? 

Government departments around the world are renowned for indifference, maddening bureaucracy and piss-poor service . You have refined it to an ignoble art.  The torture is exquisite. It is like being caught in a cross between Monty Python and Catch 22.

People actually vote for this.

People truly believe that you can govern a country in the twenty-first century.

I have to repeat this: isn't it fascinating that the one department that works efficiently,  online and off,  is the money collector, SARS?  I wonder what that tells us.

Yours in the struggle.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

Plotting Paul's Fall

 Dear Mr Mashatile

I read that you told City Press, in an exclusive interview, of a plot to oust you.

I do enjoy your party's goings on. They often read like a cold war spy novel or the shenanigans in some Eastern European country (like Bulgaria). Far more exciting than the dull doings of your typical   government of a democratic country. Does this stem from your party's fascination with the enlightened ways of comrades in those parts?

Mr Zuma wrote a book that flew off the car boot. I would not  be too concerned about being ousted. You could write a thrilling best seller. A title you might consider is  'Plotting Paul's Fall'. Has a ring to it, doesn't it? It should be a piece of cake. You already have the plot. I think it wou,ld beat having to listen to, and make, yawn-inducing speeches about things you haven't been able to do for almost thirty years. And are you not tired of the same old songs and dance moves?

Until then, some hints about watching your six, gleaned from contract experience with the KGB, the CIA, MI5 to 6 and the XZQR. 

1. Use shop windows and reflective surfaces to check for tails. 

2. Never use the same route twice. Three times is okay.

3. Tie shoelaces at intervals as an opportunity to do a visual sweep of your surroundings. (Also if they come loose). Should you not have lace - up shoes,  carry a yellow dustcloth to wipe your shoes at regular and irregular intervals (keep 'em guessing).

4. If you spot anyone leaning against a lamppost reading a newspaper regard that with great suspicion. The following are dead giveaways:

  A. The newspaper is upside down

  B. It's a foreign language newspaper

  C.  The reader is wearing dark glasses

  D.  It's pouring with rain

All of the above also applies to a reader on a park bench

  5.  Dart into a shop or alleyway at the slow approach of any SUV with tinted windows. Particularly if such approach is accompanied  by the sudden playing of eerie music 

6. Use disposable cellphones (we are currently running a special on those).

7. The professional services of MERDE, (Mann Enterprise for the Resolution of Dire Emergencies),  are at your disposal

The platinum package will have us on speed dial.

Of course, none of this will help if the plotters can plot worth a darn. But it will take your mind off plots and give you something interesting to do. 

I would also check your office environment for a mole. This has nothing to do with plots but is merely a gardening tip. We do that too, as well as garbage collection for influential clients. We will even sift through your garbage for any incriminating stuff, which we will then sto..., I mean, destroy, lest it fall into the hands of those less scrupulous than we are.  

You were recommended to us as someone who may need our services. I cannot reveal the identity of the recommender as it may constitute a conflict of interests.

I notice that the plotting revelations surfaced after the roadside incident. Nothing inferred here, sir. I just noticed it.

Just by the by, I am concerned that my favourite investigative journal, The Daily Sun, despite their wonderfully imaginative stories and headlines, may face fierce competition and pressure, as your party continues to churn out the most intriguing stories.

Yours in the perpetual struggle against plotters.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

The Crying Game

 Dear Ms Kievit (Minister of Something)

A dramatic picture that, of you weeping at the sight of the havoc wreaked, allegedly by Israeli settlers, in the Palestinian town, Turmus.

Some Shakespeare to comfort you, from Hamlet:

'Leave wringing of your hands.

Peace, sit you down, and let me wring your heart,

For so I shall, if it be made of penetrable stuff, 

If damned custom have not brazed it so,

That it is proof and bulwark against sense...'

Do you have some tears left for the havoc wreaked by the protection services thugs who savagely beat two citizens at home?

Someone implied that they may have brought it on themselves by trailing the ruffians. I am deeply concerned about the quality of the stuff that such people are smoking, inhaling or injecting. Another opined that they may have disturbed the bullies. For heaven's sake, is it not clear enough that the brutes are already seriously disturbed?

Governments elsewhere try to make life easier for citizens: capping some costs, offering free or cheaper services to the vulnerable, and other initiatives. Your comrades, not content with squeezing citizens  relentlessly,  steal as well. Isn't that worth a drop from the tear glands?

Then there are the unthinkable abominations : neglect leading to death of vulnerable people (Esidimeni)  neglect leading to needless deaths and damage in KZN, the theft of billions meant for healthcare, disaster relief and the upliftment of South Africa's people. There's  the horror that is Eskom, the horror that is just about any government department dishing out torture daily and not giving a damn. 

And your comrades want to spend millions and billions on statues. Statues, for crying out loud! As you did.

Gross neglect and dereliction of duty have allowed our country to become a playground for the vilest. Rape, assaault, robbery and murder reign. Worth a sob or two, oh you of tender heart?

From Wilfred Owen's wartime poem, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth':

'What passing bells for those who die as cattle?'

Young and old die as cattle, but you and your comrades are dry-eyed. And we are not in a war. Or...

'South Africa ranks as one of the most violent and dangerous places in the world. The Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) published its Global Peace Index (GPI) for 2023, showing...'

You had a hand over your eyes in that heart-wrenching picture. Perhaps, if you and the comrades removed your hands from your eyes, you would see what we see. 

Of course, the obvious, commonsense answer is that all of you need to go. Unfortunately, we have never been strong on commonsense here. 

We prefer the crying game.

Cry the beloved country.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

Viva EFF

"Besides spending close to R4million buying food hampers, two plate stoves etc in the recent by elections in KZN, The EFF hired a helicopter for 4 days costing hundreds of thousands to shuttle Floyd Shivambu around diffrent venues in the area. After all this The EFF was TOTALLY rejected by the people. Question is where is all this money coming from

We need truly caring , hardworking public officials who don’t only show up during elections- we r gatvol"

From the ever-dependable Twitterati newsfeed.

Dear EFF Comrades

Could this be true? 

If so, I am devastated at the news that all of your efforts were in vain. I,  like many others,  am enchanted by your strategies and policies that will ensure lots of free stuff for us all. I understand that that includes our fence crawling  brothers from other parts of the continent. 

More importantly, I come not to scoff but to help. (Except insofar as the  slang meaning of 'scoff' applies, i.e. 'eat). I don't believe that you have visited our  suburb. I'm sure that I would have heard the helicopter. Unless of course I mistook it for the police helicopter that rattles over so frequently.

Now, if you come this way, I believe that I can be of great assistance. All that I would ask in return is one of those food parcels with a bundle of notes tucked into it. You could afford that easily because you would not need a helicopter here. We have minibus taxis galore. Fares are quite reasonable for the times that we are in. Some of them will get you to your destination much quicker than any expensive helicopter would. You would certainly have my vote. I believe that that is a substantial improvement on zero votes. Should the bundle of notes be of a thickness that allows for generosity, I  could also guarantee you some votes from friends who are going through difficult times. Not as a bribe,  you understand. Rather as a foretaste of things to come when you ascend the steep staircase of power. Should you not have sufficient cash on hand, my VBS account details are below. 

Someone was concerned about where the money is coming from. I believe that it is far more useful to focus on where the money would be going to. I agree that we need caring, hardworking officials. And yes, you have set a good example. It is hard, exacting work flying around in helicopters, assaulted by the noise of motors, buffeted around by KZN winds and fighting nausea. Floyd must have been exhausted.  But happy in the knowledge that he was doing his bit to fight poverty, oppression, WMC, Stratcom, colonial clerks, Jan van Riebeeck, bloody agents, white tendencied counterrevolutionnaries and the CIA. 

Yes we are indeed gatvol of officials who only show up during elections. Unless of course they pad those food parcels with bundles of cash. Why should our president be the only one to have fun with bundles of cash?

Do let me know when you are available for a campaign. I am providing a similar service to several political parties. Nonetheless,  I am sure that I can fit you in.  After all, who would not want to lend a hand to the party of the poor and the downtrodden? Just a point of order sir. I would take all of those two-plate stoves and food hampers back from those people so ungrateful as to not return a quo for your quid. Let the manipulative buggers braai. You will not find me so ungracious. 

Yours in the struggle for a caring, hardworking approach to political office.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723