Race: a four-letter word

Let’s face it, race is still a big issue – if not the dominant issue – in South Africa. Bigger than hunger, unemployment and Aids. We have the genius of Dr Freud and a century of psychoanalysis to thank for the insight that denial is possibly the most dangerous way of dealing with any potentially explosive emotion. In a multiracial country with our history it is probably inevitable that the issue of race plays a role – is there – in almost every choice we make, every transaction we conclude, every work situation we enter. To defuse its explosive potential, we need to talk about it honestly and with empathy. The article in our last edition about something as out-of-the-mainstream as proposed amendments to the Copyright Act, by including just a few trigger words, has set off a correspondence from readers both angry and defensive.

See how the issue of race has muddied what could have been a constructive debate about the “ownership” of traditional knowledge and any other products of cultural tradition. Instead of addressing whether these cultural assets may be valued, protected and nurtured for the benefit of all – as they once were – without having to give them a market value, the debate is reduced to a fight to determine which opportunist bastard and his IP lawyer will manage to corner the market in tradition – the white one, or the black one? And the government proposes a (government-appointed) “committee of 12” – all, no doubt, with salaries, official cars and expense accounts – who will decide.

No doubt they’ll award the royalties from mampoer and buchu brandy to the town council of Orania. What of the royalties to be earned from the huge Saturday trade in boerewors? Which Tuscan gets the royalties on all those Sandton villas? Who gets to reproduce Bushman paintings? Surely kwaito, the Manenberg sound and Daar kom die Alabama are treasures that by tradition belong to all of us?

So what are they really talking about? Those ugly things: race and greed.

Is noseweek capable of making a comment about a flawed process without bringing race into it? Letter-writer Monica Seeber demands to know. Now there’s a case of denial. Race is already there, staring you in the face. But to answer the question: Yes – but with difficulty, ever since the ANC “deployed” race into every process.

Cell: another four-letter word

We thought we’d done a fair enough job in noses118&121 of warning the public about the cellphone “thief in your pocket” – but reader Yolanda Branca has written in to tick us off, as the amounts mentioned, she writes “were so small”. She was referring of course to individual amounts (R15 here, R50 there) – noseweek has no doubt that the global amounts concerned in the billing collusion between network providers and WASPS (content providers) are gigantic. But Yolanda’s truly shocking story opens new vistas on what may well be one of the biggest scams in operation on the planet.

She writes that in October 2008 one of her MTN bills (she ran several MTN accounts at the time) hit R5,000 – mainly due to hundreds of SMSs at over R7 each. Assuming an error she stormed off to MTN, but it was worse than she thought: by the time they got to talking, the November bill stood at almost R20,000 – and, yes, the hundreds of expensive SMSs were actually transacted on her account. The phone concerned belongs to Yolanda’s disabled brother, and she pays the bill because he’s on a disability grant. It transpired that after an email exchange with a girl he’d met on an internet site, she suggested they talk via SMS. As he had an SMS bundle, and her number was a standard MTN 083 one, he agreed.

MTN insisted to Yolanda that the WASP concerned had called her brother to inform him that the bill was running high, and that he had assured them this wasn’t a problem. He also allegedly agreed to pay the high fee per SMS. Yolanda now discovered she was not only paying for the SMSs her brother had sent, but also for the SMSs received from his female correspondent. It was an organised scam by an offshore “content provider”.

Yolanda discovered that the MTN fraud department “only communicates with the police”, and when she finally got to speak to someone in the MTN accounts department, the insinuation was made that her brother was obviously retarded (being disabled) and hadn’t known what he was doing. As Yolanda writes: “My brother suffers from cerebral palsy, and though he is physically disabled there is nothing wrong with his ability to think and reason. He would NEVER have agreed to their terms. I asked to listen to the telephone recordings, or see the SMS where he had agreed to the high SMS cost. I was told to contact the WASP on some godforsaken island. Needless to say I didn’t bother.”

As a single parent, and jointly financially responsible (with an elder brother) for her disabled sibling, Yolanda couldn’t afford a bad credit record. After failing to resolve the issue with MTN, she simply gave up and paid the bill. She won’t be renewing her longstanding MTN contracts.

She ends her letter: “Please do investigate these WASPS further. You could save a lot of people a lot of heartache.” We intend to do so.

Dear reader, if you have had a similar experience, let us know.

This outrage must stop.
The Editor