The Polish were racist towards Ramaphosa's delegation, fulstop.

 Let me add my two cents worth on this saga.

I find it shocking that the media including South African media are insinuating that Poland did nothing wrong, but rather incompetence by the South African government was the cause of Ramaphosa's security delegation being held up at Chopin airport.

This was the president of a country, therefore it is very likely that all people travelling on the plane would have had diplomatic passports. The plane itself is likely to have had diplomatic status meaning that everything on the plane would have been diplomatic bag.

Diplomatic bag (it is not a literal bag) refers to goods having diplomatic status. Diplomatic bag is not subject to inspection by any other country and goods inside the diplomatic bag are not inventoried for inspection.

Typically diplomatic bag is used to convey correspondence between embassies and their countries. The status is also given to the goods accompanying or belonging to a diplomatic official.

I should also make it clear that transportation of weapons by diplomatic bag is quite normal. The Americans always do it for the Marines who guard their embassies.

The only incident that I know of when diplomatic bag was violated happened when Zimbabwe opened British diplomatic bag in 2000. An entire six tonnes of it.  Read paragraph three of the BBC news report on the incident here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/672786.stm.

Americans have got marines guarding their embassies the world over. The weapons of those marines are conveyed in diplomatic bag meaning they are never inventoried for inspection by the host country.

Besides inventorying weapons meant to protect a national leader could give away the security plan of the leader and should never be done.

So the claim of "undeclared military weapons" is absolute hogwash. If those weapons are part of diplomatic bag so what? They are not meant to be declared.

Secondly, diplomatic passports are so-called because they give special rights to their holders. One of those rights is you do not have to apply for a visa, wherever you are going.

You go to any country and if that country does not like your presence they issue a diplomatic note giving you 24, 48 or 72 hours to leave. If there were people travelling on national passports the practice is to put them back on the plane they came with, but that does not affect holders of diplomatic passports.

I am not sure what Poland means when it says there were undeclared people on the flight. Maybe they mean that the list of people on board did not correspond to the flight plan. But flight plans are a safety mechanism and have got nothing to do with diplomacy.

If Poland had prevented the delegation from leaving airport premises that would be understandable. But preventing them from even coming down the steps of the aircraft is another level of racism. Clearly, the insinuation is that the Africans were going to contaminate Polish soil and buildings with something sinister. Maybe some horror African disease.

Lastly, on the so-called photocopies, diplomatic correspondence is by means of letters between the ministries of foreign affairs. Meaning that the DIRCO in South Africa would have written letters to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland. Travellers would have been carrying copies of those letters because the originals would have been sent to the Polish ministry.

Poland may not have had the time to respond, but at every international port of entry, there are protocol officers to deal with such diplomatic matters. That means Polish protocol officers at Chopin airport would have taken the letters and verified them with their Ministry of foreign affairs if needed.

Protocol officers are there precisely to prevent incidents like this, where diplomatic travellers are inconvenienced due to misunderstandings. Nobody is explaining why the protocol mechanism did not work at Chopin airport.

Poland did not issue any diplomatic notes during this saga which means they did not find diplomatic fault with the delegation or its luggage.

Instead, reasons that apply to non-diplomatic travellers are being given by Polish officials.

By the way, several Western leaders have travelled to Ukraine via Poland and their delegations are usually more intrusive than Ramaphosa's delegation yet we have not had similar issues. The Americans and the British will not allow anyone to inspect the weaponry and security apparatus, yet both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have travelled to Ukraine without this kind of hullabaloo. Not to mention American secretaries of state who typically have a much bigger security footprint than Ramaphosa had.

There is nothing to blame South Africa for as far as I can see. When travelling with such a large delegation it is impossible to get every nitty-grit detail in perfect order. Which is why protocol mechanisms exist at ports of entry.

The Polish were just being racist. It is sad that the white-owned media in South Africa seem to be siding with their racist brethren by shifting the blame to South Africa. By doing that they can then rant about incompetent blacks in their quest for apartheid apologism.

Kalanga and Karanga: Is there a difference?

Kalanga and Karanga are not tribes. If we are to be puritanical both names refer to a religion that was called the Mwari Cult by Europeans, before they later decided to steal the name Mwari and apply it to their god Jehovah (or Yahweh to use the original Hebrew transcription).

Makaranga or Makalanga (just like the names Christian and Muslim) encompass many groups of different ethnic origins that adopted the culture and way of life.

1. Who instigated the first Chimurenga? According to the history you were taught in school it was a Matabele High Priest or the Mlimo of Matopos who sent an emissary to Mashonaland. The British are at a loss as to why the Matebele would send an emissary to the Shona and most books either skirt around the subject or openly admit that they can't explain. The books also do not talk about what happened to the 'Mlimo'.

The Mlimo was assassinated by Frederick Burnham and Bonar Armstrong when he was leading a ceremony at Matopos. That is what brought a quick end to the war in Matabeleland.

The more important question is who was he? According to writings from the time, he was "High Priest of the Mwari, chief rainmaker (Wosana) of the tribe Makalanka." What this means is that he was not a Ndebele as we are taught in our schools but a 'Makalanka'.

If you listen to Kalanga folklore it gives very high prominence to Tjibelo and Tjibundula as important ancestral families of the Kalanga. Now ask yourself where did the emissary send by the Mwari priest go. He went to Mashayamombe and the surrounding people. Where was the Mashayamombe located and what is the area called today? Chivero. Where is Chivero if I may ask you?

Now go back to 1896 and try to find an explanation for why the Mlimo, who was recorded as a Makalanka at the time, would send an emissary to Chivero area. Does the relationship need to be more obvious? Or by the way, to explain Tjibundula let let me just draw your attention to Paul Matavire's song "KwaChiwundura vakandisungaaa!"

You may be asking yourself how come the people of Matopos are called Kalanga while those of Chivero are Karanga. (For now I don't have the time and space to tackle the misrepresentation that Karanga are only from Masvingo. Karanga are found as far afield as Mozambique's Uteve, Barwe and Tavara people. "Rove ngoma muTavara wee!". And possibly Zambia's Lozi people)

2. To answer your curiosity let me introduce you to the topic of transcription, how to represent spoken sounds in written form. When European missionaries came, they grappled with the problem of how to translate the bible into local languages. Local languages did not have a written form.

At first, different missionaries came up with different approaches. A mission station would try and come up with a written form for the language spoken around its location. However given dialectical differences even among mutually intelligible peoples, this resulted in many different transcription systems. An example of a local writing system now defunct is the original Kalanga which used Tj for the Ch sound in Shona or Tsh in Ndebele. This writing system survived in place names which is why many maps had the name Tjolotjo for Tsholotsho.

Even when writing accounts in English or other European language, explorers and missionaries often struggled with how to render given names of places and people. Thus you may find Nengomasha (who was an army general for Munhumutapa Gatsi Rusere) written as Ningomaxa or Ninkomaxa by different authors.

This happened with tribal names as well. Makalanka, Makalanga, Makaranga, Makalaka.

The many transcription systems made printing the bible, especially in those times when letters for lithography presses had to be carefully handcrafted, a very expensive exercise.

Eventually, missionaries started exploring ways to make printing the bible cheaper. To this end, in 1929 they hired a professor of Bantu Languages from the University of the Witwatersrand, Clement Martyn Doke. He spend a year interviewing natives in Southern Rhodesia before he came up with a recommendation.

The missionaries held a conference at Dadaya where Doke presented his recommendations among them a recommendation for Unified Shona. There was some debate on what name to call the language before Shona was agreed upon. From that point on the name Shona was used by missionaries in Southern Rhodesia.

On the other hand, the South African government did not quite agree with Doke's findings, and they used the name ChiKaranga, which they stopped using around 1955.

Going back to 1930 the missionaries agreed that to make printing the bible as cheap as possible, the country would be divided into only two regions along administrative lines used by the Southern Rhodesian government.

Everyone inside Matebeleland province would be taught to read and write Ndebele using the Nguni alphabet, imported from South Africa. Thus the Venda, Tonga, Kalanga, Nambya, etc were all now forced to learn Ndebele even though they didn't natively speak it.

Everyone else (Victoria, Manicaland, Midlands, and Mashonaland provinces) would be taught to read and write in the new Unified Shona that Clement Doke had recommended. The Shangani were thus forced to learn Shona.

As for Unified Shona itself, it was mainly based on Zezuru, Kaanga, and some Manyika. Why? The main missions driving the process, St Ignatius Chishawasha, Domboshawa, and Waddilove were in Zezuru speaking areas, Mogenster and Dadaya were in Karanga speaking areas, St Augstines Tsambe and Mt Selinda were in Manyika and Ndau areas.

I use the name Karanga with reservation. It was not the name used by missionaries for the dialect. Rather they called several related dialects from Victoria Province the Victoria Circle dialects. It is from this where the name ChiVhitori comes from.

The name Karanga itself was considered for the unified dialect but, after some debate, was discarded in favour of Shona. Some entities continued to use it though, which is why you find some of the earliest Shona textbooks may have titles like Chikaranga Chamandiriri.

Now for the last part. As you know the Nguni alphabet does not have R, while the newly proposed Shona alphabet did not have L (despite the R in Chikorekore sounding close to L).

Thus speakers of the same language were taught two different ways of writing the same or similar words. Those in Matabeleland were taught to write Kalanga while those in the rest of the country were taught to write Karanga. To be more accurate, they were simply taught they were Shona with the name Karanga returning to popular use after independence. Even it was used as a replacement for ChiVhitori which is totally incorrect. It should have been used as a replacement for the name Shona itself.

Now add to this mix some Europeans who could not properly pronounce local names, or who did not know how to render local names they found already written. Being British, these Europeans used British pronunciation for letter combinations. Thus the NG in Kalanga became soft like the English letter combination NG. (instead of being pronounced with a hard sound like in "blank" it was pronounced with a soft sound like in "belonging"). Victims of British mispronunciation even include country names Botswana and Uganda. Not to mention the district Buhera (which is why Uhera has become Bhowera?).

That in a nutshell Cde explains the main source of the difference between the names Kalanga and Karanga.

Most of those taught in Shona, except the Shangani, were fortunate that their native dialects were very close to the Unified Shona thus they could still speak them while writing in the new alphabet. Most of the differences are tonal.

For those in Matabeleland, it was a different story. They were essentially forced to abandon their native languages for the vastly different Ndebele.

Given that the people running the system were racist supremacists, they attached the social narrative that everyone had to speak Ndebele because it was the 'superior' language. They did not elevate to the same level as theirs though. When this narrative filtered down to the villages, it was often presented along the lines that if you were Nguni you were superior to those around you.

This is one of the reasons you find that people from Matabeleland are almost insanely fixated with being Nguni.

For the rest of us, it means nothing, if you are a muBarwe you are a muBarwe, and if the next man is a muHera so what? But in Matabeleland, it's a different story. Everyone wants to be Nguni. This was done to entice people away from their native languages under the perception that if you speak Ndebele you get closer to being Nguni.

Remember the main narrative which affects everyone including the Shona to this day, was that if you spoke English and adopted English mannerisms and culture you became superior to the rest of the natives. That is why kutaura Chirungu, especially with near-perfect accent, is considered a social construct of sophistication by the mentally colonized.

But I digress. Kalanga and Karanga are exactly the same thing (keeping in mind that there are many different marudzi in both groups). The divergence was caused firstly by different  alphabets and then by different colonial socialization of communities

Tanzania did South Africa a very huge favour

 According to Bheki Cele Tanzania "requested" that "prisoners" be transported on a privately chartered plane.

To quote "Minister of Police Bheki Cele told Parliament the request to transport prisoners on a privately charted aircraft came at the behest of the Tanzanian government."

What he could have more accurately told MPs is "I am clueless about international law and diplomatic protocols."

South African sovereignty ends at the South African border line. South African state institutions such as the police, therefore, have no authority whatsoever beyond the borderline. That applies to each and every country in the world.

In short, SAPS cannot effect an arrest on Tanzanian soil. SAPS cannot take custody of any person whether South African or not on foreign soil, e.g. Tanzanian soil. The only places where South African sovereignty is recognized outside of the borders are the premises of accredited embassies, high commissions, and consulates.

However even if Bester and that oh-so-beautiful woman were placed in an embassy and SAPS took custody of them there, they would still need to cross sovereign Tanzanian ground to get out of the country, so that is not practical at all.

Secondly, Bester is not was never a convicted prisoner in Tanzania. So Cele should be made to understand that while in Tanzania Bester was not an escapee. He was just another illegal immigrant.

That gave Tanzanian authorities the right to arrest him and his chick BASED ON TANZANIAN LAW. Tanzanian state institutions were the only ones with the authority to take custody of him on Tanzanian soil.

In short Tanzanian police could effect an arrest. Tanzania had the right to try the duo for any crimes committed in Tanzania before handing them over to South Africa.

However, like most countries, Tanzania chooses to deal with illegal immigrants administratively by just deporting them.

Here is the key thing that Cele needs to understand, deportation from Tanzania is affected by the Tanzanian state using its state personnel, in this case, the Tanzanian Immigration Department. No country in the world uses the personnel of a foreign state for functions such as deportation.

Deportees from Europe come accompanied by immigration officials from the deporting country. Therefore insinuations that Tanzanian officials wanted a free ride to South Africa are nothing but ignorant insults.

That is Tanzanian Immigration Department officials needed to take custody of deportees and hand them over only when they arrive at the receiving country's port of entry.

That procedure is an international standard. It is not Tanzania asking for a free plane ride from South Africa.

In fact, Tanzania did South Africa a very very big favour. The norm is that deportees are sent back to the country they ARRIVED FROM.

Bester and Nandipha were travelling by road. So chances are they entered Tanzania via Malawi at Mbeya or via Zambia at Tunduma. Although they were being assisted by a Mozambican, there is no chance they would have travelled through the violent Cabo Delgado or Nassa provinces which are the Mozambican provinces that border Tanzania.

So if Tanzania had wanted to be technically correct, they would have insisted on handing Nandipha and Bester to Malawi, or Zambia. Then they would then have had to be handed to Mozambique or Zimbabwe before making it back to South Africa.

So Tanzania did South Africa a huge favour by politely asking, instead of invading Tanzania with their police, if they could send a private jet to expedite the deportation. Otherwise, they could have had to buy commercial tickets out of Dar es Salam.

I do not think airlines would have agreed as Bester had no valid documentation. Not to mention the complication of arranging transit visas as there are almost no direct flights between SA and Tanzania. A transit visa for Bester would have been impossible.

Yes, members of a state armed wing entering another country IS AN INVASION. That is why, on borders like between China and India, India and Pakistani, Israel and Lebanon, or Israel and Syria we regularly read of violent clashes, that are caused by police or soldiers from one side straying onto the other, leading to exchanges of live fire.

So Tanzania was simply asking South Africa to follow international law and diplomatic protocols.

I know South Africans like to think they are more special than their African brothers. However when contrasted with how Dubai handled the matter of deporting the Guptas, how Tanzania handled the Thabo Bester should have taught South Africa a very important lesson that a brother is a brother. If Bester had made it out of Sub-Saharan Africa South Africa would never have got him back as easily as they did.

Boksburg Tanker Explosion: The Physics Behind it

LPG (liquid petroleum gas) has a boiling point of -44°C at atmospheric pressure at sea level. That means at room temperature (20°C) it occurs in gaseous form.

However, remember that the boiling point is dependent on pressure. The higher the ambient (surrounding) pressure, the higher the boiling point.

Thus to keep LPG in liquid form it has to be highly pressurized.

At typical room temperature (20°C) LPG needs 836 kilopascals to turn it into liquid form. That is 8 times the atmospheric pressure of 101kPa. Given that Boksburg is 1700m above sea level the actual atmospheric pressure would be less than 101kPa.

In order to keep the LPG liquified, a very strong container is needed to withstand this high pressure.

One may ask why liquify the LPG? To make it easier to transport. Liquid occupies far much less volume than gas. Your 9 kg cooking gas would need a container the size of a pickup truck if it were not liquified.

When a high-pressure vessel containing a liquid is suddenly compromised, the liquid will instantly turn into vapour leading to a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion). The BLEVE is not exothermic (generating heat) but it is forceful and will spread the vapour over a wide area. If the vapour is flammable (such as petroleum gas) it will then mix with air (which contains oxygen) and ignite causing another exothermic explosion within milli-seconds of the BLEVE.

Thus a typical tanker explosion is a 2 stage explosion. First, there is a BLEVE which envelopes a wide area with flammable vapour. If there is a flame in the area that ignites the vapour then there is an exothermic explosion that burns everything that is now enveloped in petroleum vapour.

The likely sequence of events in Boksburg. When the tanker scrapped its top against the bridge, the compromise did not cause an instant complete loss of pressure. There was a continuous escape of gas which caught fire and burnt continuously. It is likely the continuous flame heated a portion of the tanker. Heat weakens metal. At some point about an hour after the initial accident, the casing of the tanker got weak enough to rupture and cause a BLEVE.

Within milliseconds people standing near the tanker would have been enveloped in highly flammable vapour. Because there was a flame already present within milliseconds that vapour ignited burning people. Victims of the secondary explosion are likely to have been burnt all over the body. Victims of a purely exothermic explosion are usually burnt only on the side facing the explosion with the worst injury being caused by the blast wave, not by the heat (broken bodies rather than burnt bodies).

BLEVEs are not uncommon in the LPG industry. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPVEsQaGB0) documents some of the worst BLEVEs. Most of these BLEVEs caused few fatalities. In one involving a railway tanker train, no one died even though a rail tanker was tossed several hundred meters by the explosion.

The reason for the very high number of casualties in Boksburg was the lack of management of the scene. The only person who understood the risk and tried to keep people as far away as possible from the scene was the driver.

State authorities did not appreciate the risk. First, they send out the wrong type of responders, firemen with normal fire tenders. Second, they did nothing to manage the vicinity. An evacuation order should have been issued for several hundred metres around the scene.

BLEVE-initiated explosions can toss very large projectiles for several hundred metres. In this case, it looks like the tanker trailer was not tossed several metres because of the weight of the bridge above it. If that bridge and railway tracks had not been there that tanker could have landed on someone's house.

The media and public sentiment seem to be focusing on the person who made the initial mistake, the driver. Yet the biggest culprits here are the authorities. They clearly lacked the knowledge to appreciate the risk and expertise to manage the scene. Forces should have been sent to evacuate people and keep them several hundred metres away from the scene. Fire tenders capable of throwing fire suppressants several hundred metres should have been sent, not ones that need a man to take a hose close to the fire.

Naledi Pandor is right that it does not help that the politics of Zimbabwe are vindictive, rancorous and full of "if I can't have it, you can't have it too" attitude.

But I do not agree those politics are the reason for the tanking economy.

The reason for the tanking of the economy is corruption, cronyism, overregulation and extortionist mentality by government.

The government has been using regulation to close down economic space and create monopolies controlled by the cronies of politicians. For example, private transport operators have been forced to close or subcontract to ZUPCO (Zimbabwe United Passenger Company) are government owned entity so corrupt that it has only survived through a dripline of handouts, and now the forced redirection of private transport investment for its benefit.

Even the cornerstone of Zimbabwe's household economy, small to medium scale rural agriculture has not been spared. Farmers are forced to deliver produce to government owned entities such as GMB (Grain Marketing Board) who pay in fits and starts or not at all. Yet such entities "loan" the produce delivered to the companies of politicians and their cronies who then engineer ways to get their "loans" and "accounts" written off.

An example of the "writting off" of debt is when foreign currency debt owed to private players such as Miekles Hotel was "taken over" by government which then did not bother to pay despite Miekles hotel winning a court case.

The closing of economic space for small businesses means that the owners and their employees often go to look for ecomic space in neighbouring countries particularly South Africa.

For example before I came to South Africa I was running a transport company in Zimbabwe. I parked and sold the trucks after I was approached by RBZ officials demanding that I reptriate ALL foreign earnings that I had invoiced for. This is despite that transporter brokers deducted supplies such as diesel, tyres and driver allowances before paying the invoice. For example if a broker provided material worth R7000 and I invoices R10000 for the trip that meant that I would only get paid R3000 by the broker. But that government of Zimbabwe wanted all R10000 "repatriated" to Zimbabwe at the penalty of prison. I chose to leave the business than regularly haggle with and bribe RBZ officials.

In the same yard I parked my trucks in Zimbabwe there were people who started off selling diesel stolen by truck drivers around Harare. Soon very high ranking officials (an army colonel and senior intelligence official) started supplying diesel from government "allocations" to those young men. Truckloads of diesel taken straight from NOCZIM (National Oil Company of Zimbabwe) were offloaded into drums and sold on the black market at a time the country was facing severe fuel shortage. Needless to say in the space of a year the sigubhu pushers had more than 10 trucks.

As long as government services are provided at extortionist daylight robbery proportions economic space will remain closed for small and medium enterprises and small business owners and their potential employees will continue flocking to neighbouring countries particularly South Africa, for the economic space they are denied at home.

South Africa needs to tell Munangagwa to stop the corruption and cronyism. Sanctions are an irritation but not an economy killer. Chamisa is largely irrelevant.

If South Africa wants to stop the tide of economy refugees from Zimbabwe, the former needs to be very direct and frank that corruption and overregulation need to end. Particularly the forced surrender of foreign earning to government is a nuclear bomb to the economy. Stop that and Zimbabwe's economy will start to turn around.

South Africa: The Land Question: Restoration of a Viable Social Economy For the African Majority

 The land question is not just a issue of correcting a historical colonial injustice. It is a life and death matter about fixing the social economy of African society that was destroyed by the racist, supremacist  and abusive dispensation over the past century or two.

The land question did not arise out of colonial settlers needing farmland, it arose out of colonial capitalists being very very desperate for cheap labour. The land question is about the violent wrenching of the African people from their agricultural-pastoral social economy to force them into job dependency.

In the late 1800s the mushrooming mining industry of the Witwatersrand was desperate for labour. The African community, then, was living in a social economy revolving around pastoral and arable agriculture. The Africans needed their time to tend their livestock and till their land. They did not have the time to work in the colonialists' mines and factories.

So dire was the labour situation that the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wenela) was formed in 1902, followed by the Native Recruitment Corporation (NRC) around 1912, to recruit labour from neighbouring countries and the region. The NRC recruited mainly from Lesotho and later Transkei. Wenela recruited from the north and had offices as far as Tanzania but the bulk of the workers came from the Rhodesias (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi) and Mozambique.

It is a topic for another day but let me briefly point out that these two organizations are the ones that introduced and cemented a culture of labour migration to South Africa throughout the region, not recent events like Mugabe's rule or the end of Afrikaner led apartheid. Apartheid was a mere interruption to the labour migration trend.

By the way these organizations still exist today in the form of TEBA Limited.

The desperation for labour eventually spawned a strategy of denying local blacks self-reliance. That is why the Native Land Act of 1913 banned Africans, not just from owning land, but from renting land in 93% of the country. Thus Africans were squeezed into tiny areas to deny them self-reliance. or forced to become tenant labourers, effectively recreating medieval English society of serfs (commoners) and lords but this time along racial lines.

The strategy of turning Africans into cheap labour has been extremely successful. Who can raise their hand and deny that the majority of today's black South Africans are just a pool of very cheap labour desperately trying to drive away competition from regional labour that was also invited by the same 1900s strategy that made locals landless.

With this knowledge at hand, it should be clear that land reform is not just a matter of grabbing land and giving it to blacks (although that will work in the very long term) but a strategy of fixing the social economy of blacks by returning them to a measure of self-sustenance on the land.

That will not work without some measure and effort to reskill Africans with some basic agricultural skills. Afrikaners only became successful farmers because of heavy subsidies, affirmative action and of course abundant cheap labour during the apartheid era.

Does land reform work? It is working in Zimbabwe. Seventy percent of Zimbabweans live in rural areas growing their own food. They have little need for a cash economy. One of the reasons why Zanu-PF regularly wins elections is that every year it provides free agricultural inputs to rural dwellers.

The Zimbabweans who are in SA are mostly former city dwellers and others who choose to be dependent on the cash economy.

To get cash, unless you have assets, you need a job. But what do you need cash for? To buy food and pay for shelter (rent). If you have access to enough land sufficient to grow your own food, you won't need much cash once you build your home on that same piece of land.

My own mother was living in Harare until 2003 when Mugabe's land reform took place. Then she got 6 hectares and access to a common grazing area on a former white owned farm. She now has 15 head of cattle and chicken runs with capacity for 1000 chickens. I depend on her for food when I am home.

What is keeping Zimbabwe's economy in the doldrums is not land reform but corruption. South Africa has got that too, plenty of corruption. The early signs of the cost of corruption on the economy (shortages and high energy prices (petrol and electricity)) are already showing in South Africa. Another sign is a dysfunctional public service (police, civil servants who are reluctant do their duty to serve you unless you pay tshotsho, or are high-profile individual).

I believe strongly strongly that the land question is not a civil rights issue. It is above all a social economy and social justice issue. Protecting the property rights of those who own too much land based on past racial and colonial abuses will not prevent revolution that is coming.

As long as the social economy is based on impoverished cheap labour, revolution will happen. It is only a matter of time.

Political blame shifting and responsibility dodging will not solve South Africa's electricity crisis.

 After reading Gordhan's response to MPs in parliament about load shedding my heart sank. It seems he and the current Eskom chief executive's belief is that load shedding is caused by poor maintenance. The poor maintenance narrative being clever way of insinuating that incompetent blacks are responsible for load shedding.

I sincerely hope that Gordhan and his team do not actually believe that the mere presence of whites in top management of Eskom is what is required to stabilize Eskom. Because if that is their thinking, it means they are clueless about the problem they are dealing with.

According to the report Gordhan said, "The bottom line, honourable member, is that until we can put a few more thousand megawatts onto the system we cannot be definite. To achieve more output, the utility would have to do better maintenance and operations."

He did not mention more power stations or sources. Yet the simple truth is the power stations South Africa currently has simply cannot generate enough power for a fully served population (not partially served like under apartheid).

Gordhan and his team do not support their claim that load-shedding is caused by poor maintenance with any facts. There should be accurate reliability statistics. Figures like mean time to (MTTF) failure, mean time to repair (MTTR) and the overall availability of units as a percentage of the time the units are operating relative to total time they are expected to be  operating. Detailed reliability figures and root cause analysis are the only way of truthfully telling why units are failing too often and whether the root cause of downtime is lack of maintenance.

The poor maintenance narrative also whitewashes the simple fact that since the dawn of democracy the growth of electricity demand has far outstripped the growth of supply. The number of people supplied with electricity has grown from 14 million people in 1994 (35% of the population then) to over 51million people (85% of the population) now. That is three and a half times demand growth.

Yet electricity generating capacity has grown from 38 gigawatts to 58 gigawatts only. That is a one and half times growth in supply. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to figure that what is required is a rapid growth in supply.

While it is easy to grow the distribution network (demand side) because it is cheap and quick to add suburbs and factories to the distribution grid, growing supply is difficult. It requires massive lumpsums of money and lengthy construction periods to build power stations. That is why upfront planning must be meticulous for decades into future.

In this case upfront planning FOR THE ENTIRE POPULATION was non-existent under apartheid. When the ANC took over they focused on the easy part, growing the distribution network which can be easily dealt with in municipal budgets. Growing the supply which requires a massive national budget was not adequately funded.

It is my belief that the ANC were not correctly advised on growing the electricity supply capacity. I have mentioned before that the apartheid government had plans to tap into the hydro-capacity of the big rivers to the north.

Matimba-Insukamini 400KV transmission line (in black).

Despite then ongoing hostility with independent African countries, they built the Cabora Basa to Midrand DC transmission line. They also built the Matimba (near Lephalale) to Insukamini (near Bulawayo) high voltage transmission line which was completed in 1995. That was part of a strategy to transmit power from the north down to South Africa.

The question is how come the ANC did not follow through with the strategy? The ANC are politicians, and it would have been up to the energy experts to make the politicians understand. Did the politicians fail to listen? Or did the energy experts not offer their advice knowing that the shortage of electricity would become a political club to bludgeon the ANC with in future. Clearly in the November 2021 election that has just passed the ANC was clobbered to below 50% and load-shedding was one of the reasons cited by its voting base.

My biggest concern is the discussions going on around the electricity issue are just not correct especially since de Ruyter took charge of Eskom. There is a lot of waffling about maintenance. Yet the fact of life is that there is always scheduled and unscheduled maintenance on any power grid.

The conventional wisdom is for electricity supply security your capacity should be about 20% more than your peak demand. At the very least it should be 10% more than your peak demand.

That is where the figure of 6gigawatts more being needed in South Africa is coming from. The country has a capacity of about 58gigwatts and 10% of that is 6gigawatts. That is based on the assumption that since we are experiencing a supply shortfall at 58GW, that must be the peak demand.

Regional power transmission strategy. Power transmission lines
between countries are in red.

The second issue I have is there seems to be no coherent enunciation of where the extra electricity supply is going to come from. Especially given promises to eliminate coal in 15 years made by Ramaphosa in Glasgow.

De Ruyter keeps talking about past and current corruption. All and good, but the absence of corruption is not going to create the extra generating capacity that is lacking. The being no corruption simply means you can use what you have more efficiently.

Unless De Ruyter is a messiah who can feed thousands with two fish and five loaves there is no way he can end load-shedding in the next 2 years or so. Stopping corruption is simply stopping thieves from stealing a fish and loaf from the meagre collection, but even without the thieves, it is still not enough.

What South Africa needs to hear from De Ruyter is the vision and strategy of where the 6gigawatt shortfall in capacity is going to come from. Mind you that figure is based on an assumption that the peak capacity now is the peak demand as well.

Given that there are people who want electricity but are not even connected to the grid, actual peak demand is likely to be higher. I am going to throw bones here because I do not have reliable statistics but my guess is actual peak demand now should be around 70gigawatts.

Going back to the news reports that triggered this blog post, it is clear that Minister Gordhan and the Eskom executive are busy waffling politics. None of what has been reported as coming from them over the past few months comes anywhere close to a coherent energy strategy.

Nearly all of it is political blame-shifting tinged with insinuations that recent black executives of Eskom are incompetent or saboteurs. He is engaging in some rubber-man antics to dodge responsibility for South Africa's electricity woes. Granted he is just another jockey appointed to ride a dead horse (De Ruyter's his own words) he is not clear what his plans to acquire a live horse are. Even a donkey will do as long as it is alive.

Since the dawn of democracy South Africa has needed a strategy to expand electricity availability very rapidly. It does not look like any serious as effort has been in place and load-shedding are the chickens coming home to roost.

References

1. Increase of power transmission capacity in South Africa-Zimbabwe interconnection by means of SVC - ABB Ltd public document.
2. The Southern African Power Pool: Regional Cooperation - a slide by DR Lawrence Musaba
3. De Ruyter: It's a 'myth' that state capture at Eskom is over - News24 report
   
4. There is a plan to end load-shedding, but it will take time: Pravin Gordhan - Timelive report
   

Karanga and Kalanga are one and the same thing

In Zimbabwe there is often debate on whether the Karanga and Kalanga are different peoples. Here is my basis for concluding that they are actually one and the same thing.

Prior to 1929 missionaries were trying to invent writing systems for the regions they operated in. The writing systems were largely based on the 26 letter English alphabet, with different combinations of letters chosen for different syllables.

For example the Mogenster missionaries used bgo resulting in name spellings such as Zvobgo and Dangarembga. In the unified Shona agreed upon after 1930 this became Zvobwo and Dangarembwa but respective families did not change their name spellings.

Similarly Dadaya mission used Tj in names such as Tjolotjo (changed after independence to the Nguni spelling).

In 1929 missionaries hired Clement Martyn Doke, professor of Bantu languages at the University of the Witwatersrand to conduct a study and come up with a unified writing system. This was motivated by the need to try and print one bible version for the whole of Karanga speaking areas Mashonaland, Manicaland and Victoria Province. A version that did not have to take into account the different dialects of Karanga.

After Doke's paper was presented at a conference at Dadaya the missionaries settled upon a unified writing system for different Karanga dialects.

There was a huge debate on what to call the unified writing system, with contention between the names Karanga and Shona. The missionaries eventually settled upon the name Unified Shona. Later in the 1960s through the work of George Fortune the government of Southern Rhodesia modified the writing system slightly and called it Standard Shona.

However in 1930 a crucial decision was made that results in people in Mashonaland and Matabeleland thinking that they are different people when they are actually the very same people.

The missionaries decided that everyone in Matabeleland would be taught to read and write using the Nguni alphabet imported from South Africa (that is how Tjolotjo becomes Tsholotsho) which included groups that did not speak Ndebele at the time such as Venda, Tonga and yes the group now named Kalanga.

Everyone in the rest of the country would be taught using the new Unified Shona alphabet (including the Tsonga/Shangani group).

As you know the Nguni alphabet does not have R and the new unified 'Shona' alphabet did not have L.

Thus the name of an ethnic group was written differently by those Matabeleland in those in the rest of the country.

While those in Matabeleland were taught to write Kalanga, it meant exactly the same thing as Karanga which those in the rest of the country were being taught to write.

Now throw in European mainly British missionaries and officials who did not speak the local languages very well. They pronounced what they saw written down as they would in their own language.

Thus Kalanga instead of sounding "Kalanka" was given a soft G sound from English as in "being", "doing", etc.

Kalanga was not the only victim of such mispronunciation. Another notable example is Buhera which is actually Uhera or Vuhera. The neighbouring Botswana and its capital Gaborone are also examples of victims if Anglicized mispronunciation.

So the bottom line is Kalanga and Karanga are exactly the same thing written differently then pronounced differently due to Anglicization of the pronunciation.