This is not even a conversation to be had in this day and age!

Oh my it has been a long time, did you all miss me?! Man this full time working thing, it is so full on, it just owns my life and it is particularly hard when you are properly engrossed in what you are doing, time just seems to sail away. I cannot believe that next week it will be a full year since I took on this role and to be honest it has only been once that I seriously considered packing it in and that was for a principle issue rather than a work issue, but I managed to get over myself and pressed on.

I trust that your mind has allowed you to live your best life this year! This note is long overdue, but it is only now, sitting in Seoul with a bit of time to ponder, no one knocking on my door to go to this meeting or the next that I fully have time to engage with this topic, which in my heart is very dear and very serious. It was brought to the fore once again a few weeks when I attended a conference with some pretty inspirational people doing some great work on this continent, Africa, as well as during the US presidential elections…

And the topic I speak of is the continuous questioning of women’s ability.

Now if you are one of those people who in anyway think that as a man you/we are more superior than a woman in any way, I will say wooow wooow wooow, take a seat please. And I am not saying this for point scoring or applause, it is just that I feel hopelessly guilty for being so quiet on this point because in my mind that such thinking is generally accepted to be…to put it quite frankly…. bull pooh!

So, I will look at it from my own practical experience right. So, at home when I was about 6/7 life was hard in Ghana, famine etc. My pops got a good opportunity in Swaziland and he had to leave us to see the lie of the land etc. We also couldn’t travel because my ma was pregnant with my youngest bro. So for 15 – 18 months or so it was my ma and us kids, and to make matters worse, apparently I was a handful when I was younger, I prefer to say I may have been perhaps a little misunderstood, but be that as it may, ma had her hands full, watching over us youngsters and working first whilst pregnant and then with a new born. Pops too was working hard, perhaps struggling with being away from the family, having to fend for himself, making sure that the nest was being well put together for our imminent arrival. Ma was back home, soldiering hard, working, going to the market, washing the kids, disciplining us, feeding us, teaching us… If I am honest, I’d take pops’ hardship over ma’s any time. J

Speaking about pregnancy, so as a man, you drop a seed, sure you have to deal with some level of ‘volatility’ for 9 months or so…admittedly caused by you TO AN EXTENT, but that is your job, no morning sickness, don’t see our bodies transforming, don’t have 3-5kgs growing inside of us causing us discomfort when we sleep and don’t even let me get to the birthing process, we just stand there and say breathe baby breathe….COME ON MAN!!!

And then the baby is born and mostly guys go to work and ladies stay home and rear the youngster, breast feed, listen to their wailing, lack of sleep, change pooh nappies, clean vomit. Have you ever tried to carry like an infant for say 5 minutes, after a while my darn bones start to cease, ladies do it for minutes, hours like it aint no damn thing!

That’s not even the end of it, a mama will always be a mama, no matter how old you are. I am 40 years old and to this day my mother can call me to tell me to drive safely cos she heard on the news that it is raining in Cape Town…she lives in Joburg, now that is deep right, not saying pops isn’t deep with us, but it is a different kinda depth!

Now you want to tell me women aren’t at LEAST, at a bare minimum, equal to me…GERRAAARRHERE MAAAN! Shoo I’d honestly go as far as saying in my world they are a superior being to me.

Now that is some of the like simple life things. Let me relay another experience. So at school right, in my standard there was this lady, Rachel Mary N. Luzuka, she’d blaze us all in class, like BLAZE…and she did this for years on end, and to show it was no fluke the woman took the fight to UCT to show others how much she blazed! Speaking of UCT, if I looked at my class the top scholars were littered with overachieving women! Whether it was through natural intellect or sheer hard work they outdid MANY a male counterpart. She carried this on through the workplace too, excelling in all her roles thus far. Talking about the workplace as well, if you want something done and done well, 9 times out of 10 if you ask a woman she will deliver well beyond your expectations.

I look at the US elections, let’s take the personalities out of it because both candidates had a way of rubbing people up the wrong way. Judge the candidates purely on experience and what is required in the oval office, because in as much as we say change may be good, I think understanding the various arms of government and the inner workings of the system, is key to be ‘president of the world’ right?! Now if you look at it just purely on that basis and she may have made some mistakes in her time, but come on people, Secretary Clinton was by far, but LIKE FAR, the most qualified and most presidential in her conduct out of the 2 candidates….BUT LIKE BY FAR!!!

Now it may not be true of all women and it is not saying that men aren’t equally capable, but come on world, is it not time that we stepped up as men and applauded these fine beings that our maker graced our earth with?! You can’t tell me that because you have muscles and can moer someone when you run out of words to say, which I think shows the limits of your intellect, therefore automatically disqualifying you as a human in my eyes….but wait I digress, just because you have muscles, how does it make you any better?

Yes women are….are….choose your words well now Yaw, the word that keeps coming to the fore is ‘crazy’ but that isn’t the word I want to use, they have moments of being ‘otherwise to what I may consider logical’, but my word if we have to weigh it all up, I don’t even get why this has to even be a conversation?!

I absolutely love these lines from the grandmaster 2Pac’s song keep your head up:

“And since we all came from a woman

Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman

I wonder why we take from our women

Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?

I think it's time to kill for our women

Time to heal our women, be real to our women

And if we don't we'll have a race of babies

That will hate the ladies, that make the babies

And since a man can't make one

He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one

So will the real men get up

I know you're fed up ladies, but you gotta keep your head up”

Shine on sisters! And gents…let’s clap for the ladies man, let’s stand up for  the ladies, cos it sure ain’t easy in some ways…in the club aah wa different story, life’s too easy J

Stay blessed my people, and if you don’t think you are blessed and you are sitting at a computer or your cellphone out of the sun or rain and reading this with your own 2 eyes and able to make sense of what I just typed, then I would cordially ask you to perhaps take a moment…

A vote with no home...

27/05/94 poignant day in South Africa’s history. I found myself looking at my life and pondering how life would have turned out had it not been for some brave relentless folk who even in the face of death, were willing to stand up so we could all be counted. The recognizable face of this collective is I guess the ANC, but there were many Biko, Suzman, Sibukwe, Leon Sullivan, Tutu, First, etc. who played an equally prominent role. It’s quite poetic that almost at my ponderous moment, I read a post on Facebook that listed some of the ridiculously insane laws that the apartheid government and instituted against the majority who just accepted it. Imagine you come into my house and you tell me what I can eat, wear, say or do! WOW! But to the anti-apartheid heroes, I thank you….we thank you

A direct result of this day was this very robust constitution we have which was visible in its full glory on the 31^st March 2016, when the Constitutional Court of South Africa declared that Mr. Jacob Zuma had been errant in not adhering to the findings of a chapter 9 institution (the Public Protector, Human Rights Commission, Commission for the promotion and protection of rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, Commission for Gender Equality, the Auditor General and the Independent Electoral Commission). These institutions were established in chapter 9 of our constitution to guard democracy.

Many people believe that it wasn’t such a big deal…but let me paint a picture for you.

1)    A sitting president,

2)    Taken to court,

3)    The court rules AGAINST him

4)    IN AFRICA

Not often do such scenes play out on this continent, and I had to savour that moment and let it all sink in, people tried to steal my glee by asking me to think beyond the consequences of the ruling, but I just wanted to bask in freedom and the power of a solid constitution for at least 24 hours.

As expected 24hrs later reality set in and Nkandla part 3 played out. Part 1 was a long drawn out series in parliament made up mainly of denials and interesting versions of the truth. Part 2 was so theatrical, a grownass sweaty man, with some willing puppets, on live tv, to try and demonstrate to me that a SWIMMING POOL is a FIRE POOL, ‘ni**a please’!! Then there was part 3 where sanity prevailed (court case). But now instead of accepting fault and begging our pardon, it was…but he said, and I didn’t know and blaaaah, and that was most disappointing for me. I was taught at a very young age to try my best not to do any wrong, but if I did, I should own it, ask forgiveness and work my way back into the good books but not you Mr. Jacob, nothing is ever your fault, reminds me of a song by James titled “Out to get you”.

You see I don’t entirely blame Mr. Zuma for his actions. Would I do such things, I think not, but there are many people that will get away with what they can get away with. The corruption charges, rape charges etc. many of them COULD have been fabricated and some of these have been defended in court, but this one wasn’t, own it! But then he is but a man, who is fighting to maintain his position under the sun, this is all he knows and has known, what will he do when he leaves office? Cough jail cough…

My biggest gripe/disappointment lies at the feet at the ANC, not that they really care, but I truly do. How can a liberation movement that managed to catch the imagination of the whole world allow this to be its new reality….my reality?! And I am not dismissing any of the good it has done, because it has done plenty good, but most of the memory of the good that has been done is being eroded at a supersonic rate, by the status quo. Are failing state owned entities, run seemingly by inept individuals, collapsing education systems, reported mismanagement of public funds…is this the freedom you fought for? Is this the freedom, Tambo, Sisulu, Sobukwe, fought for? How can it be that you allow this to be our reality, how can it be that you allow the respect and admiration I once had for you to wane? How can you leave my vote that you fought so hard for with no home? There are so many good people within your structures, why is your silence so deafening?

WHY?

I too am privileged

Interesting start to the year in South Africa, I am well pleased that we are finally speaking about it! If you are born American, ‘upper crust’, white, male, able bodied, straight, the chances of you and your family prospering are almost guaranteed... Privilege does exist! Someone told me about a kid’s analogy of privilege in relation to South Africa and it went something like this: ‘Privilege is like we are sitting in class and the teacher asks us to throw a crumpled piece of paper into a rubbish bin in the front of the class. The kids in the front of the class will have a better chance than the ones at the back, in South Africa, the kids in the front are generally white kids and the ones at the back are blacks” WOW!!

At varsity, I stayed at my mate’s digs, his folks had bought him a house to stay in and our rent was part of his pocket money, I had about 5 jobs at the time. I remember cycling home from work at the gym on Sunday afternoon and watching the guys having a ripper recovering from last nights rave. I didn’t think it was privilege at the time, I was doing what I had to do to get where I needed to be. Oooh and then there is ‘black tax’, it’s hard out there. So now you have ‘made it’. You have to pay off a student loan, get a car, a house etc. AND ON TOP OF THAT, you have Auntie Serwaa and Uncle Jojo that you have to send cash back to in the village or folks you have to look after cos they spent what they had to make sure that you did better than they did.

Privilege is marching because travelling overseas is that much more expensive, but when human beings are mowed down by the police in Marikana, not eve a peep, yep I too am guilty.

I too was privileged. I grew up in the Transkei, attended a great Cape Education System school. Only after school did I realize how fortunate we were to attend such a school during the height of apartheid. Looking at my past school photos, I noticed that in the early years, the only class mates of colour were kids of expats or south African kids whose parents had some influence. Insane right?

Apartheid might be a dead system, but its effects are like embers that people choose to throw kerosene onto. Yes it’s been 21 years since the first democratic election but nothing has changed significantly in the lives of many. The haves continue to feed off the fruit the system offered, the have nots continue to feed off the offshoots/leftovers. Employment Equity/Affirmative Action may limit some job opportunities, but the economy isn’t in a great shape at the moment generally. Only those with the means and support structures are able to book a ticket overseas and make it there, when they’ve had enough, they come back and either start a job of find a job in a top firm or go back…because we can.

A friend of mine and I were having a conversation the other day and she was telling me about a guy she met that was a ‘black’ version of a friend of hers, why did she have to use the word black? Why couldn’t he just remind her of her friend?

A south African economist posted a tweet “More than 25 years after Apartheid ended, the victims are increasing along with a sense of entitlement and hatred towards minorities….” If I read it, which part of what he is saying is 1. Not true 2. Racist? I can not comment on his intentions or frame of mind when he wrote this, but if I read this it makes sense. The victims of apartheid have definitely increased. More people have been born into squalor, lack of opportunities, indoctrinated with hate and anger and the use of race as a first judgment of another. There is a growing sense of entitlement amongst all parties, haves want to continue having, have-nots want to have some of this deal called the New South Africa. There is a growing hatred towards minorities for sure. Minorities could refer to foreigners too right? I think he left out is that there is also a growing hatred/fear towards the majority. We are so blinded by race that it is our default position. If Moeletsi Mbeki had written this I doubt anyone would have batted an eyelid.

I look at this country and since 1994 it has mainly been the disenfranchised that have been ‘offering the olive branch’. TRC hearings, not too many haves even bothered with it. Rugby, the embodiment of the old guard, 1995, RWC, the formerly opressed rallied behind the Boks hard. Rugby went to Soweto, red carpets were rolled out and what an experience that was. On the other hand, I remember when soccer was banned at Newlands in 2001 and it had to be taken to parliament.

Sure the haves worked damn hard to build their wealth and status in this country, but please tell me who works harder than a lady who has to wake up at 4.30am, make sure her kids and husband (if he’s at home and not on a mine somewhere) are fed, washed and ready for school/work…walks a few km to a taxi rank, sits in how many taxis so she can get to my house before 7.00 so I can get to work before 8, sit in my air conditioned office, having meetings and run spreadsheets on my fancy laptop, whilst she scrubs my floors, feeds and walks pets/kids, washes and irons clothes, leaves to get home at some ungodly hour, feed the family, washes up goes to bed…repeat...all this for a mere fraction of what I earning working my ‘hectic’ office job.

So can we accept that a lot of people’s stations in life are a DIRECT result of what was a system of indoctrination, empowerment and protection of the minority at the absolute expense of the majority. Miz Sparrow is as much a victim of apartheid as anyone else. And please don’t kid yourself and think that in this country she is alone in her thinking you aren’t being honest with yourself!

Ok so now that we have accepted that privilege exists, what now? That is where the game changing occurs if you ask me. Clearly we can see that in South Africa the government is overwhelmed by the task at hand. Firstly park that get over it and move on talk. Empathy! We as corporate South Africa and citizens stand to lose if we don’t do something about it. Blaming the government or trying to protect your ‘turf’ or right to exist won’t assist.

This whole #feesMustFall saga, I got to thinking I got to where I am in life because my I was fortunate enough to have parents that instilled in me the value of education as well as the opportunity to receive good education from great educators. A EUREKA moment! Education is a key to solving many of our woes. I have amazing friends so I knew if I was thinking as such, many would definitely be thinking something similar so I sent out a tweet and just like that we are almost done setting up an educational trust with 32 people committed to contributing R10 000 a year (that is roughly R833/month) for 4 years…R1.3mil. That is hopefully 10-13 potential engineers, accountants, scientist, engineers etc. not to mention the multiplier effect in the communities they come from. Either by way of assisting those around them or inspiring others.

I didn’t write the above to tell you how great we are, no no, many of us are armchair critics, we sit with our iPads on Twitter, FB, News24 and cry foul about the state of the nation, then we go back behind our high walls and watch DSTV. Yes we pay taxes etc. but the situation is dire and it needs all hands on deck and everyone of us can make a difference no matter how small. That’s if we care, else I guess keep complaining.

We are the sum of our parts and we are stuck with each other the sooner we all shut up and step up the sooner we fix it.