On the one hand, there is an underlying philosophy that says all information should be made public and that we have a right to know what is being said behind closed doors. In a country faced with the prospect of a Media Tribunal and with a prevailing hostility to the media from many in government, I would usually support any attempt to rip back the covers on nefarious deals, sinister conversations, backhanders and perception-fiddling from those in power. Where communication is between two paid officials – or even one official and another non-public servant – and it is intended to manage a deception or crime, I’m all for grabbing it and turning it into a headline. And I think whistle-blowers on such activity should be protected and celebrated for their bravery.

Some of what Wikileaks has published is important. Jack Shafer, writing on Slate.com, says the leak “shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand.” It is important that we know that, and uncomfortable for those in power to realise that they haven’t gotten away with it.

On the other side of the coin, though (and this is what bugs me), a mass evacuation of the bowels of American diplomacy onto computer screens around the world, while titillating and intriguing for the person on the street, isn’t a managed leak. It’s unnecessary and doesn’t serve to prevent or reveal a crime. And so it smacks of sensationalism for headlines sake.

The world of diplomacy is a mystery to me. Like many others, I enjoy spy movies where you can pretend to get an insight into the hidden machinations of foreign governments and their agents. I have often wondered what world leaders really think about each other – it is all smiles for the cameras, handshakes at the press conference accompanied by a friendly, bland “the engagement was fruitful” media statement. But as the doors of the conference room swing shut and world leaders are left alone, the leaders re-humanise. As Barrack Obama sinks into his pillow for the night at some big summit, he turns to Michelle and says…..what? Does he like David Cameron and Vladmir Putin? Does he think Gaddaffi is a gigolo? Would he dance with Angela Merkel? I’d love to know. But I don’t need to know, and that’s where Wikileaks crosses the line – their currency has moved from being what we need to know to keep the world safe and our leaders honest, to what we merely enjoy finding out. It is tabloid journalism for the New York Times reader.

Diplomacy is important. Those glib statements and public smiles are as necessary as they may be dishonest. For countries to get on with each other and avoid blowing each other up, the relationship can’t be managed like a marriage or real-world friendship. Diplomacy is a delicate dance around egos, issues, personalities and conflicting pressures. Yes, it is insincere and occasionally dishonest. But I, for one, would rather prefer that Barrack Obama looks Kim Il-sung in the eye and says “nice tie, and thank you for that delicious puppy-stew” and not mean it, than is brutally honest with him (“the tie is too garish for your Salvation Army suit and the puppy was tough and overspiced”) and bring on a nuclear war. Hell hath no fury like a dictator scorned.

And so publishing en masse decades of private communications between governments strikes me as being gratuitous. Wikileaks would argue that we have a right to know what gets written and said behind closed doors. My question is….do we? From where do we derive that right? The inner workings of diplomacy, the tactical shuffles between foreign powers need to be, well, diplomatic. Boy meets girl, they have a good evening together, the next day boy SMS’s his best friend to tell him how it went. Does girl have a right to know what the SMS says? Sure, she may desperately want to know, but isn’t it better for the steady growth of their relationship and the delicate rules of engagement that surround first encounters that his true feelings get revealed in a different way, over time? The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe’s real views on Robert Mugabe are interesting and nice to know, but let’s not confuse that with some sort of imagined right.

And that’s my problem with Wikileaks, and also my dilemma. A wholesale, unfiltered dump of information like this is gratuitous and doesn’t draw any distinction between what is critical information and what is simply salacious. The dilemma is, and I see this clearly, that in order for it to be filtered someone needs to do the filtering, which already imposes an agenda onto the information. It is an unresolvable dilemma, so the question becomes – who do we trust more?

It’s difficult to write of Wikileaks without some mention of the man who runs the place. Particularly when his own personality and behavior give such vital clues to the real reason behind the site. Watching him perform, it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than that he thinks he is in his very own spy movie. His brow is creased with the importance of his purpose, his burden is heavy, but he soldiers on in the name of free information. Jack Shafer, again, describes him best: “he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions.” Quite.

And don’t expect any top secret documents to be leaked from the trenches of Assange’s war. Former staffers who speak publicly of his ego and paranoia are smeared and described as “peripheral figures… spreading poison”.  Assange is often less than honest himself. On 19 October this year he vehemently denied that Wikileaks was about to publish tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the Iraq war. Three days later, he did just that. Then there is his interview with CNN where, peeved at the way things were going (the interviewer dared to go down a line of questioning that questioned his credibility), he walked out in a huff. A short while later he tried to defend himself to CNN’s Larry King, saying that he took offense because CNN should have been focusing on the real issues – those who had died in Iraq, and not on the tabloid stuff. In other words, Assange wants to set the agenda. And despite his veneer of loved-up openness, he knows what is best for the media to report on and will insist that they listen to him. The old schoolyard taunt “he can give but he cannot take” springs to mind. Why should every American diplomat and embassy staffer be fair game – regardless of what they have written or who they are – but yet Assange himself has things he refuses to talk about? No matter what Wikileaks puports to be, it is also a massive monument to Assange’s ego.

The world is a dangerous place these days, and the stakes in the political game are high. Corruption is rife in both government and the private sector, and the media have a critical role in investigating and telling us about it. I want a free, robust media, and we need a knight in shining armour. But I don’t think that Julien Assange is it.

He runs a blog at www.juliusmalema.co.za – not a bad looking one, actually. Short on words, big pic (and who said the internet doesn’t reflect real life?) Check it out while you can…because it could well get deleted in a week or two. A WHOIS search for the ownership of the domain juliusmalema.co.za shows that someone hasn’t being paying the bills – and the domain is earmarked for deletion. That means that it goes back into the mighty domain pot in the sky and it is first come first served….and with, apparantly, a national fixation around impersonating the mighty Twitter-killer, I reckon there are dozens of wannabees sitting with fingers poised to snap up the domain the second it becomes available. Then it’s anybody’s bet as to what will happen, and what the reaction will be.

Fortunately for Mr Malema there is a precedent and cybersquatting on domains is (marginally) easier to fix than a flood of Twitternators (my word, feel free to use it or, in the ANCYL’s case, miss-spell it in a press release). They could do a Madonna (no, not wear pointy nipples and sing about being a virgin….although that does have a certain appeal) and appeal to ICANN, as she did in 2000 to retrieve her name from a squatter.

Or they could just pay the bill. It’s only R50 and, really Mr Malema, it is probably a lot easier.

Here’s the screengrab, click to see it full size (ANCYL – that’s, um, the little clicky buttony thing on the LEFT hand side (the hand you don’t shake with) of the mousy looking thing with a wire coming out of it next to your computer, which is the shiny thing in front of you….no, not your BMW….oh never mind. Ask someone else to show you.)

PS Love the email address given as the invoicing address. The optimism of Youth. But it does explain why they haven’t been getting the invoices – they’re arriving in Kgalema Mothlanthe’s inbox.

WHOIS Screengrab

If that happened in any other city the Democratic Alliance would have come out guns blazing, smoking the airwaves demanding judicial inquiries while making snide references to expensive motor cars, all coated with piety and sugary self-righteousness. But not this time round. Because this time the “bungle” was the DA’s. It happened on their watch. So instead of demanding that heads roll, we have to hear the Mayor Dan Plato come out and say “If it were not for the financial downturn we would not be in this position.” What complete and utter bungling bollocks. One of the things Neilson said in the interview this morning is that someone forgot to include the price of the busses in the project plan. Huh? How is that anything to do with the financial downturn? How is that anything other than complete dereliction of duty? With a small dose of stupidity sprinkled over the top. And why, when the chamber of highly paid councilors were reviewing the plan, did no-one stick their hand up and say “Um, guys, there aren’t any busses on here. I thought this was a bus system.” Then there was some VAT left off the budget. No-one spotted that either. And then virtually every single line item on the budget, according to Neilson, was underestimated. When Aden asked the perfectly sensible question: “Why did Council not pick this up?” Neilson did the verbal equivalent of coyly kicking his shoes through the dust and shrugging his shoulders. “We trusted the experts” he said.

Here’s the wake-up call Mr Neilson: We trust you not to trust the experts. We trust you to question them, interrogate them, fight for every line item in every budget. We trust you to ask if you don’t know something. We trust you to pick up mistakes. And above all else we trust you to come clean when something has gone wrong, and to do so before it is too late.

But here’s the most interesting thing about the story (and forgive me if I don’t get the timeline 100% right, I was driving at the time). The way I understand it is that the initial budget of R1.3 billion was approved in August last year. Shortly thereafter it became evident that things weren’t going according to plan. Investigations began. The budget was increased. But it was all pretty quiet and kept under wraps. It was then clear that even the increased budget wasn’t going to be enough. But we knew nothing about all that. Until today when the story broke that the budget had slowly ballooned to more than three times the original estimate. So why was it kept quiet? The answer is fairly self evident – 22 April 2009. Let me jog your memory – that was the day the country voted. In the course of that election, the DA won the highly contested Province, largely on a ticket of “What we have done for Cape Town we can do for the Province”. At that stage most people thought that the DA was doing an okay job in the Mother City, What would have completely scuppered their careful campaign would have been the news that what they were doing for the City was driving it deeper into debt through incompetence and bad planning. So they did what most politicians would do…they kept it quiet. And even now, after the story has broken, there is no word from Helen Zille who was Mayor of Cape Town when the plan was approved. She’s gone strangely quiet and sent her minions out to do the damage control. Accountability M’am? You were Mayor, after all.

The DA’s handling of this has been shameful and they have lost the moral high ground. Next time they encounter corruption or incompetence in another Province or in the National Parliament they are going to have to sit meekly by instead of leaping to their feet and demanding that someone gets sacked. I look forward to the day they try. And meanwhile I’ll weep for the loss of a credible opposition.

I’m still on holiday – on the tail end of a relaxing two weeks in Kimberley (is there any other way to be in Kimberley?) and while I have spent hours staring at my screen, I haven’t spent any time actually writing any actual words. Which isn’t great for a blogger and explains the dip in my Google stats over the last few weeks.
What I do have instead is a list of things I’d like to blog about. Here it is (in no particular order):

1. A rant about the quality of cheap Chinese toys. This rant will invariably descend into a mini-rant about how, when I was a kid, we used to make all of our own toys from left over poodle and bits of string. This is just curmudgeonly and boring, so I probably won’t actually write it.

2. Some thoughts around the ANC Youth League, asking why the party needs a Youth League anyway. Granted it had a role to play in the struggle days when underground mobilisation of the youth was everything – but surely a sophisticated party in a modern democracy should be about cohesion and strength in numbers? And having a separate body just adds to the noise? The Youth League will invariably agree with the “Mother Party”, when it doesn’t it gets slapped on the wrists, so why do we need something that simply echoes agreement all the time? Ah yes – let me answer my own question: It’s about the comedic value of giving Julius Malema sufficient status and power to ensure that he stays in the headlines and provides us all with a good laugh as the economy, the arms deal, AIDS and OBE conspire to undo the great work of the elder statesmen of the ANC.

3. Decaffeinated coffee. I mean, really. You can’t be serious? It’s like marketing erection-free condoms.

4. A list of the Christmas presents I received in ascending order of how much I liked them.

5. I had a head-on collision with a pigeon the other day and arrived at my destination to find it buried head first in my radiator grill. It’s tiny grey arse was flapping and feathering in the wind, even though it must have been dead for several hours, and I refused to touch it. Next morning it was gone. Where?

6. I wish Fred Khumalo, Ndumiso Ngcobo, Ferial Haffajee and Mondli Makhanya  would all stop writing. Forever. They’re showing me up and, seeing how they cut to the heart of hugely complex issues with razor-like precision and articulate their essence makes me want to curl up into a little ball and sob quietly to myself. What’s the point of even trying to be a blogger or writer when they’re the competition?

7. A rant about the warmongering in the Middle East. I actually began writing this one, and got as far as giving it a title. But reading how perfectly Mondli Makhanya articulated the issue in last week’s Sunday Times (see 6 above) made me give up before the first sentence was written. (For lovers of pointless information, the blog was going to be entitled “Israel: Grow Up”)

8. The stupidity of New Year’s resolutions. What is it about 31 December that turns people into fun-loving, stranger-kissing, self-improvement wankers? I blame Dr Phil. And Oprah for the other 364 days a year.

9. A list of things I’d like to blog about.
Oh well, happy new year. I’ve achieved one out of nine. And probably won’t get to the rest, so come back soon for something fresh.

(Source: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/diary.asp?show=President%20Mbeki)

No, you nerd, the important thing here is not that he only scored a Google pagerank of 4/10 for importance (relative to Jacob Zuma whose Wikipedia page scores 6/10, making him 20% more important). It’s the fact that his official diary is telling us what we’ve all known for years. He’s not doing anything.

This got me to thinking about politicians who have too much time on their hands and the trouble they can cause. The US Congress is a good example (they have, after all, an unpopular lame-duck president from a different party presiding over them, and everyone is more interested in the Obama-Clinton race than in actually getting something done). So the “Joint Economic Committee” had a choice. Either finish off that game of strip poker they began during the Clinton impeachment campaign a few years back (the honourable representative for Wisconsin still regrets how Edna failed to point out the hole in his jockeys before he left for work that morning); or analyse 10-million flight records supplied by their pals over at the Department of Transportation. OK, let’s be honest. Those humourless jobsworths over at DOT didn’t actually send the data over. Someone just found the pages turned upside down in the photocopy machine while they were trying to make copies of the lunch menus.

In any event, data, or so the saying goes, is only data if it is read and a press release is issued. So it had to be analysed. Or at the very least the most junior member of the committee could be persuaded to stop playing Grand Theft Auto on his laptop, and told to cut and paste everything into Excel to see if anything interesting came up. He was, and it did.

Apparently, the committee found, US airlines are responsible for the biggest economic tragedy since, well, Ronald Reagan.

Last year, in America alone, 320 million hours were lost due to flight delays. That, dear voters of Puerto Rico (who everyone now seems to give a damn about), is unacceptable.

Let’s do the sums.

320 000 000 hours = 13 333 333,33 days = 1 904 761,90 weeks = 36 630,04 years

Now the average life expectancy of Americans is 77,9 years.

So the number of lifetimes lost a year through flight delays = 470,22

Or, consider this. What if the amount of time spent waiting around airports or circling overhead was instead focused on a more noble pursuit? The good members of the Joint Economic Committee can think of nothing nobler than the Nobel prize for Economics. (In fact many of them are hoping to be awarded it in a year or two). The average age that people are awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics is 67. And so, without airline delays, we could have found 546,72 more prizewinners.

Or maybe movies are your thing. While waiting for their plane, Americans could watch the new Indiana Jones film 154 838 709 times. I’ve seen it once, and regretted it. Imagine the mass depression the nation would face if every second person had to endure it? (There are 304-million people in America).

You get the picture? Now you know why the committee was so stunned. One of them mentioned it to a mate on the “Committee for the Environment” while they stood next to each other at the congressional urinals during a lunch break (staring fixedly at the wall in front of them, ignoring the foot tapping from Larry Craig in the stall behind them), who rushed off to tell Al Gore. Gore crunched some numbers, projected them onto the cinema-sized computer screen behind his desk, checked his hair and then clambered aboard his forklift ladder to take a closer look. He was amazed. And so, breathlessly, after checking his hair again, he had to tell us just how amazed he was. As a result of flights being delayed, an extra seven million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide was being released into the air. That’s more than the annual emissions of Namibia, Iceland, Fiji, Swaziland, the Falkland Islands and Samoa combined.

And — let us not forget — this data considers only flights from US airlines. Imagine if Nationwide, Aeroflot and Kulula were added to the mix. Al Gore would do himself an injury trying to show how high those graphs go. The study also fails to count hours spent searching for lost luggage (which, as I’ve already demonstrated, logically leads to more lost Nobel Prize winners). British Airways and Terminal 5 have a lot to answer for.

So what does all this have to do with President Mbeki?

Well the answer is fairly obvious. He’s been accused of late of being an absentee president — jetting around the world while his country burns. His diary, meanwhile, appears empty which means he’s either lying next to his pool sipping cocktails, or he’s stuck at an airport somewhere. Based on what the US Congress is telling us, I reckon the latter is more likely. But don’t worry. He’ll be back with us in 470 lifetimes. And not a moment too soon.

While all that was going on, I was sent another screen grab from the president’s inbox at the Union Buildings. Here it is (click on the image to see it full size):