Month: October 2014

The Curse of Apathy

The Curse of Apathy

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

dalai&saIn an incredibly sycophantic move, South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma has denied the Dalai Lama a visa to attend a convention of living Nobel peace prize laureates in Cape Town.

The convention was supposed to begin a week from today, but Late last week the laureates announced they were suspending the October 13 get-together and relocating to a yet unnamed country.

Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said her government “has embarrassed the country.”

The laureates decision not to go to Cape Town followed the South African government’s refusal to elaborate on why the Dalai Lama was not given a visa. Fourteen of the 21 laureates sent a letter to President Jacob Zuma asking him to reverse his decision.

The initial decision to hold the convention in Cape Town, which would have been the first time in Africa, was a coup for the wildly popular Desmond Tutu, himself a Nobel laureate, who was instrumental in ending apartheid.

The ending of apartheid was the reason that Nelson Mandela, and at that time the president of South Africa, Willem de Klerk, shared the 1995 prize.

“I am ashamed to call this lickspittle bunch my government,” Tutu said in a statement.

This is actually the third time that the Dalai Lama has been denied a visa. The last time was for Tutu’s 80th birthday celebration.

China and South Africa have a very close relationship, and interestingly, it is less because of aid and investment than trade. South Africa is China’s leading trade partner in Africa.

China has publicly promised to lobby for more power in the UN Security Council for Africa. Given the political turmoil in Africa’s other powerhouse countries, Egypt and Nigeria, any such aggrandizement would likely benefit South Africa.

China has often snubbed the world prize, as a number of prominent and usually dissident Chinese have been made laureates.

Most Chinese believe it is a political tool, and as such, South Africa’s president’s refusal to embrace it should be seen as strictly political, say the Chinese.

One might also bring up sour grapes. Jacob Zuma is one of the most corrupt and least loved of South Africa’s big man politicians. Many in the country wonder how he has managed to stay in power.

He’s received none of the multitude of accolades and awards that many of his comrades-in-arms against apartheid, like Mandela and Tutu, have.

What perplexes me is how younger South Africans don’t seem to care to the extent I thought they would. Their lives are getting better, however incrementally, but key economic indicators like the spread between the rich and the poor is growing.

I suppose like at home, war fatigue has spilled over into political fatigue. Your average Joe has become exhausted by being fed up.

And so long as things on a day-by-day basis don’t seem to get worse, major if immoral power policies leading to oligarchical control just don’t raise enough ire.

It’s called the curse of apathy.

When Wrong is Right

When Wrong is Right

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

whenwrongisrightImagine Ray Rice walking into court followed by Eli and Peyton, Adrian Peterson, a few veterans like Mike Ditka and then a couple hundred high rolling NFL fans.

He’d be saying, “Some people think I did something wrong. Maybe I did. But I had to,” or maybe not ‘I had to’, rather “They understand why I did.”

And that understanding spans the gamut from being cuckoo to especially stressed. And in any case, it’s acceptable because, gdi, we need that guy playing the game!

And … he wouldn’t have done it, if he didn’t have to.

And since that “have to” spans the same gamut from being cuckoo to especially stressed, we get in a loop that we can’t get out of.

This is exactly what’s happening with the President of Kenya.

Next week President Uhuru Kenyatta will leave the Nairobi airport surrounded by probably hundreds if not thousands of cheering supporters for The Netherlands, where he’s on trial for crimes against humanity.

Whether World Court officials will allow his entourage to enter the vaulted halls of the ICC with him, he will be accompanied to the portals by at least four other Heads of State, maybe more, and by more than 100 elected Kenyan members of Parliament.

The facts in Kenyatta’s trial have come out in the press, mostly, since important witness after important witness has been so intimated that they’ve dropped out or disappeared. So now the spent prosecutors at the World Court have little facts left to present.

The facts as most of us believe them but which have not been able to justly be presented in court are pretty simple. The national election of 2007 was close. The current head of Kenya’s opposition from its second largest tribe, Raila Odinga, was neck and neck with the then president of Kenya running for reelection, Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki was a Kikuyu, the largest tribe and the tribe of Kenyatta.

Kibaki was old, Kenyatta was young. Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, is the “Father of Kenya” and its first president.

Widespread violence followed the election and the country was brought to its knees. Almost 1500 people were killed in horrific violence and a quarter million displaced, of which dozens of thousands remain so today.

There were absolute differences in ideology clashing, but the violence was tribal.

The settlement forced on Kenya by Britain and the United States was brilliant. Kibaki and Odinga shared power for almost five years. During that time a new and fabulous constitution was adopted.

The settlement required Kenya to determine the cause of the violence and prosecute those responsible. The settlement went further: Kenya had a certain window of time to attain this justice, and if it failed, then the World Court in The Hague would step in to do the task.

Kenya failed. Parliament tried several times to create courts and procedures for this most important attempt at national justice in its history, but at the end of the day, an invitation was sent to the World Court.

The World Court did not really want to do this. No indictment for crimes against humanity had been issued before the court was invited by Kenyans to start searching. Normally, the court issues indictments, as it did in Liberia for example, in response to individual petitioners. There were no individual petitioners with individual grievances from Kenya. The Kenyan Parliament invited The Court to take over, and it said, OK.

When it finished its several years of investigations, fully supported on the ground in Kenya by Kenyans, indictments were issued.

One was against the country’s current Vice President. The other was against Uhuru Kenyatta.

We know from leaked testimony and tapes that Uhuru Kenyatta, then a powerful political leader and Member of Parliament, organized and managed partisans in widespread murder and thuggery of the rival tribe.

This is against the law. It’s a crime against humanity.

But Kenya is doing pretty well, right now. Like all the rest of the world, the happiness and prosperity is happening mostly at the top, but the social fabric is peaceful. An unexpected war in Somalia, thrust upon it mostly by British, French and American interests, is not easy, but Kenya is handling it pretty well.

Skyscrapers are popping up all over. Roads are being built faster and better than in the U.S. Business was booming and is now humming along pretty well.

Even President Obama sat with Uhuru in the White House.

Like Rice, maybe he did do it. But take Rice or Uhuru out of the spotlight, out of their circles of power, and what happens? The team loses, and we just can’t afford that.

How Can I Help You?

How Can I Help You?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

indiavssacallcenterReady for someone at the Help Desk to really help you, maybe even in English? It may happen, and you’ll have South Africa to thank!

Huge grants from Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation among others are working their way through the South African system to help its worldwide call centers grow quickly enough to meet demand.

South African call centers are the Dyson vacuum cleaner in the consumer help desk market. Their quality is unrivaled, but their expense is high and as a result for years their growth has been anemic compared to major rivals like India.

The reason is pretty simple: The South African per capita income is nearly three times that of India ($11,500 compared to $4,000 according to the World Factbook.)

The metric is useful because it translates almost exactly into what a call center in one country costs versus on in a different country, including the largest single component of cost, salaries.

But in the last few years, American companies in particular have begun to react to bad reviews of their call centers.

“Consumers are fundamentally unhappy with the state of customer service,” a widely cited April survey of call centers concluded.

You knew that! Purdue University discovered this more than a decade ago: Poor call centers more than halve an otherwise expected product repurchase rate by a consumer (78% vs 32%).

Nevertheless, the cost savings of a distant land’s call center for the last decade were actually considered more important. And since virtually all of your competitors were doing the same, the sting was spread around and diluted.

That was the case … until a few years ago. The consumer public simply started to get fed up. Competitors emerged from the Great Recession with cash reserves, and better call centers seemed a promising sales point.

In walked South Africa.

South Africa has had a vibrant call center industry for more than twenty years. But it’s never been large, because it’s been expensive. Roughly 30,000 individuals have been employed rather steadily in these centers.

Suddenly, demand exploded.

“We have [lately] had to focus more on skills development than on marketing,” a leading spokesman for the industry recently told South Africa’s Financial Mail.

In other words, not enough employees available to work.

The pace at which global companies are now requiring better service from their call centers surprised the South African industry. Demand for South African centers now requires nearly 60,000 employees, or twice as many who are currently trained.

As a result, the industry is now poaching employees from the hospitality industry. Pay as a consumer visible employee in areas like hotels has never been high in South Africa, so the fit seems good.

And helping out are the American companies who prefer the South African worker to the Indian worker. Microsoft’s huge grant may be self-serving, but the Rockefeller grant is more general.

The half million dollar grant from the RockefellerFoundation is specified strictly for the training of disadvantaged youth.

And call centers are actually coming back to the U.S. In a perfect example of a capitalistic world that for once seems to be working, a major Indian call center company recently announced opening up a call center in Dallas that will employ 1,000 people.

Of course while the U.S. per capita is more than three times South Africa’s (which as stated is more than three times India’s), the per capita income of Texas’ working poor isn’t impressive. Another way of looking at it is that Texas is as “profoundly” rich as India. That’s why India is coming to Dallas and not to San Francisco.

So for the time being, the entre is open to South Africa. And frankly, with the highest child poverty rate in America in Dallas, I think I’d rather opt for a South African kid from Port Elizabeth telling me how to reboot my system than a roper from Ft. Worth.