Clive Simpkins

If thugs and disreputable people in our SA govt worry you... take heart.

In the chaos that was Israel's election and following the ouster of former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tzipi Livni, you may have missed this now outdated but no less sinister piece of information...

From Skynews.com: Netanyahu Unveils 'Hotch Potch' Government

8:12am UK, Tuesday March 31, 2009, Dominic Waghorn, Middle East correspondent

Benjamin Netanyahu comes in from the wilderness today after 10 years in opposition to return for a second stint in power as Israeli Prime Minister. (This is not the sinister bit - read on).

 

Many see Netanyahu's Middle East peace pledge as an empty gesture. It has taken him seven weeks of horse-trading to cobble together a coalition government. You can call it a broadly balanced centrist government or a terrible hotch potch of disparate groups, depending on your point of view.

(This is the sinister bit). From the right, there is Avigdor Lieberman (pictured) once a nightclub bouncer, now ultranationalist leader of the Yisrael Beitenu party. To his critics he is racist, anti-Arab and extremist.

He once pleaded guilty in court to hitting a child in the face and he is currently being investigated for corruption. He will be the government's foreign minister (and is now also deputy Prime Minister). Lieberman is right-wing but fervently secular, an opponent of the religious factions that have such power in Israel's diverse, small-party politics. ends.

My comment: 'May the Keeper of Israel watch over them and their Arab neighbours.'

UPDATE 31st May 2009. A real anti-democratic ugly is about to be perpeyrated by Avigdor Liberman and his party. Read here.

Thabo and Manto will share an apartment in Hell

Erstwhile President Thabo Mbeki and his (thank you God! equally erstwhile) Minister of National Health, Manto Beetroot'n Garlic Tshabalala-Msimang will long be remembered for their genocide of tens of thousands of South Africans. How? Why?

His incomprehensible self-serving sophistry on HIV and AIDS. Hers ditto. His dithering with 'quiet diplomacy' whilst he helped keep his Stalinesque buddy Robert Mugabe in power for umpteen years - therefore making himself the surrogate executioner of thousands of Zimbabweans.

He protected Manto too - through thick and thin. After all, they fled the country via Tanzania and cadre loyalty swamps rationality under all circumstances. Innumerable examples validate this.

Her legacy is public hospitals that are ill-equipped and unable in many cases to provide even rudimentary care because she's single handedly forced nurses and pharmacists into working elsewhere in the world, in order to survive financially. But total dolt that she is, she recently and gloatingly signed 'an accord' (heaven help us) on live TV in Burundi to allow Burundian citizens 'who can't get adequate care in their own hospitals' to come overload ours even further. Showing, she bridled disingenuously, 'that Africans can find solutions to their own problems...'

Maybe if she hadn't got her wrecked liver replaced in the Folateng unit of about-to-be-unpronouncably-renamed Johannesburg hospital, but had to queue for up to 8 hours to get a pill, like thousands of indigent pensioners, she might think and behave differently. If ever a transplant was wasted - it was this one. Letting her die would have been a favour to the nation. It would have speeded up ARV treatment. It would have brought better care to babies and mothers. Medical schemes would not have wasted countless hours, vast sums of money and intellectual resources in combating her demented policies. Pharmaceutical companies would not be seriously considering abandoning South Africa and replacing themselves with agencies to distribute their meds in this country. My favourite pharmacist would still have his one person business and might not have been driven into taking a placement in Oregon, USA.

And so to the report below. We think we're a civilised democracy? I think not. We're just another African basket-case with an ever-thinning veneer of money-driven chutzpah and momentum. But we are not good, moral, compassionate people. We deserve the incompetents who largely populate our government. Viva Barbara Hogan, Viva!

 

Timeless Leadership Principles

Here's something Jeremy Maggs published in Upfront Magazine for me a few years ago. But the principles remain timeless. Click on the picture to enlarge for reading or to print.