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What's the issue?

What's the issue?

Author: Tomas Yoko
Date: 2013-05-02
The Queen of Orange has abdicated and now the Prince of Orange will be sworn in. The land of cheese, clogs and daffodils erupts with joy and celebration. They are so sophisticated those Dutch.

Back home we have the usual shenanigans going on. It was only a matter of time before we had our own energy industry debacle. Now lets look at that word, debacle. One dictionary describes it such, "a sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco e.g: the economic debacle that became known as the Great Depression. See that word depression creep in, sneaky. But let's not lose focus here. Concentrate. Another sneaky word that slipped in there was ignominious, and it means humiliating, embarrassing, shameful, disgraceful, reprehensible, disreputable, discreditable as well as despicable. Am I making my point here?

The issue at hand that has me out with my dictionary is our very own Oilgate. Our South African national oil company PetroSA is now the subject of an alleged One Billion Rand DEBACLE!

With all the poverty, hardship and desperation we are sharing as a people, to see how this too will just get swept under the proverbial carpet makes me want to become a bed bug. I would just slip under this proverbial carpet and think of all the wonderful things I would find under there. OOOOH! I might heed the warning "be careful what you wish for." There must be quite a few skeletons under there. But think of the millions and billions stashed under the carpet. OOO my mouth waters at the thought.

PetroSA is apparently buying up tracts of Ghana with their purchase of Sabre Oil and Gas, our ex president Kgalema Motlanthe popped over there and bought Sabre "lock stock and barrel" unquote. Who did they buy it from? No, no, no you don't. As it is registered in the British Virgin Islands, their secrecy laws prevent anyone from knowing this. Hmmmm, interesting. I always thought Africa should be in total control of Africa's oil. But oil is such a sticky business, I'll move on from there quickly and talk about how Ahmed Karzai recently admitted to being on a secret US payroll. He reportedly has been receiving what they call "Ghost Money", bundles of cash in backpacks and suitcases amounting to tens of millions of US dollars. Oh for just one backpack, what I wouldn't do? Add to this debacle, the assertion that this unparalleled, (as far as we know or will openly admit), corruption of the Afghan government was sanctioned by the CIA. No surprises there.

So as we wake up slowly, Washington recently revealed some data on how China has 1,673 development finance projects at a value of around US$75 billion in around fifty African countries. I laughed at how America tried to point a finger of criticism at China for this and thought for a moment, "Sour grapes." While America and the west go about waging war, China quietly goes about waging business.

To the war rhetoric coming out of civic organizations on our North Coast, I would caution arrogant bull headed attitudes.