GAUTENG
COMMENT, by Pete Bower
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 17 No 5
May 2016
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FRONT COVER
Alpaca enjoying its lunch at the
Walkerville Agricultural Show last
month. See pages 18 and 19 for more
pictures.
SA’s tragic comedy
I
n the arts there is a genre of writing and performance called tragicomedy which, as the word suggests, is used to describe work that
has both tragic and comical elements in it. Thus, a tragicomedy could
be a funny play with a sad, dark ending, or, equally, it could be a
serious work with sufficient elements of humour in it to lighten the mood, or even a
funny ending, that it qualifies as tragicomedic.
Much like the political situation in South Africa today.
I don't wish to whitter on about the Nkandla scandal and the constitutional crisis it has
caused any more than I want to rejoice in the departure from these shores of the
Brothers Gupta. Nor do I want to try to unpack just what the hell is going on at Eskom,
Denel and elsewhere concerning the Gupta family, the Zuma family and everybody
else caught up in this toxic maelstrom. For, while these things are important and will
have a denouement (hopefully to the betterment of our country) sooner or later, there
are actually more down-to-earth, but far more important, things that we should be
concerned with right now.
And they're things that have been on the radar of concerned society for yonks. Like
spiralling food prices. Like education. And healthcare. And service delivery, (aka
sanitation and water), and if it wasn’t all so sad it would be funny.
Take the worrying increase in the cost of basic foods. We've read a lot about how the
drought has caused a largely failed maize crop. Well, it's affected a helluva lot more,
besides. Bought potatoes at your supermarket recently? Or meat? Or chicken?
Facebook's newsfeed is almost awash with pictures from shoppers of price tags of
foodstuffs that are just staggering. And if you're a smallholder with poultry, you'll know
how you wince each time you buy a bag of broiler mash or laying pellets. (Given the
state of lay of our few hens at present I calculate the individual cost, given that feed is
pushing R300 a sack, of my breakfast eggs at more than R10 each!)
The food price issue is very worrying and if you think rock throwing and tyres burning
on a road in protest because toilets don't work or electricity has been cut off is bad,
start worrying about crowds of angry hungry people storming supermarkets and
shopping centres in search of food.
The solution, for those that would have done so, would have been to start growing
their own food.
In a perverse and roundabout way, South Africa's dreadful public education system has
had (and will continue to have) a disastrous effect on family food security.
How? Because in many schools children are taught by rote, by untrained teachers,
using a syllabus that does not equip them to enter adult society able to fend for
themselves. Thus their brains are not developed to be active and enquiring and they
lack practical skills, such as how to wield a hoe, sow a seed or tend a plant. You would
have thought that, in a country where babies still die of malnutrition, that teaching a
pupil how to grow the things with which to feed him or herself would be the very basic
skill-set passed on by the education system.
Given the poor education picture, which results in a system spewing out functional
illiterates year after year, efforts by government to print and publish useful little how-todo-it booklets on all manner of basic agriculture are going to achieve less than they
deserve to and, sadly often result in no more benefit that a profit for the printer.
And the