“Did you follow through?”
I can no longer remember what this was about, but it occurred to me that this is a peculiar South African weakness. Sales people know how to follow through. They know the next pay packet depends on it. But in other disciplines it appears to be our weak point.
As an example, I was tasked several times over a period of a few years to capture the database of union members for a transport worker union. There was a union dispute: the court wanted to know which particular union, of several, had jurisdiction and for that they needed to know the membership count of each union. The other two unions had theirs, but this union didn’t. The union with the most members would have jurisdiction. I assembled a pair of data capturers, we captured union membership, and heard to great satisfaction later that the union had won their case.
My dad would have said “Well, blow me down!”, because, a year later, the same thing happened again and once again the (same) lawyers approached asking us to recapture the (same) membership database. The union leadership looked a little sheepish about that. The first time it had been only a few thousand. this time it was treble that. So I assembled a quartet of data capturers and we worked for longer and recaptured their membership. Once again we were later pleased to hear that the union was victorious.
The third time was another two years later, and this time it was my turn to utter “Blow me down!”. This was getting like Ground Hog Day. The (same) lawyers and unions (very sheepish “office bearers” this time) approached us for a quote to (re)capture their membership.
By this time the Union membership was ten times that in the first capture. It was serious stuff, because we were told that we had very few days to do this capturing and we were talking about somewhere in the region of 60,000 members. I again assembled a team and we worked in shifts of eight hours per shift around the clock for 4 days and nights.
I slept very little for those four nights, because the job of weeding out duplicates and maintaining the database fell on me. The capture team were typists, capturing data from handwritten A4 pages. The reason why it was so serious was that the employer had this time fired 14,000 workers. Of those, four thousands had occupied houses owned by the employer and they were evicted as well as losing their jobs. I can just hear union haters singing “Those with the days, my friend”.
The case was won again, the union’s 14,000 workers were reinstated, 4,000 back with a roof over their heads and everybody was happy. They were even happier in this last case, because at this third repetition the employer (who was each time ordered to pay costs) decided that these court cases were getting very expensive and to save money in the long run it cut its losses and installed debit orders on worker wages to automatically have their union dues paid, forever saving the repeated database expense exercise.
It was never necessary again for that particular union to recapture their membership database. Nice. But, the first two rounds are an example of what I mean by follow-up. You would think that this union learned its lesson and would make an effort to keep its membership database up to date. It is easy enough to do, but no. I learned later from one of the shop stewards that they had never done so. They took, each time, all the thousands of A4 data capture forms back to their offices, stuck them somewhere in a corner and left them in boxes. We were never able to find what happened to the floppy disk database backups I created.
Their new funded computers, and extensively trained operators (also funded by some Scandinavian entity), mysteriously did nothing. I visited their office once in later days about another issue, and was depressed to see PCs gathering dust on their desks, switched on. but untouched, with only a languidly swirling screensaver on display. I tapped a key on one PC, and the screen cleared to reveal a fresh game of Freecell.
The employer itself was famously bad at follow through. As I have written elsewhere, they achieved the world speed record for Cape Gauge rail with Metroblitz, did Pretoria to Bloemfontein in less than four hours, only to be too tired to follow up, and they returned to their slumbers. In those days they employed 200 thousand workers. Today that has decreased to less than 70 thousand (both TRF and PRASA combined), and they don’t cope with running passenger main line trains any more. Premier Classe was a joy to travel on, even became famous on social media for a while, but they messed it up.
All this is about things that started well, but came to nothing, hence my insight that S Africans are not the greatest at follow-through. Follow-through was the first thing I learned in cricket. We follow the batting stroke through, follow a bowling action through. It is about grace and balance, about symmetry and neatness and doing a job properly and to the full.
The union never followed through with their database. The problem we have now is that these people became our government, and they are still nearly as clueless about IT. Small entities may do without IT, but Ignoring IT never bodes well for big organisations. Transnet struggles along, and Prasa has said goodbye to its main line passenger trains. As for other follow throughs, Joule made an electric car I thought was better looking and possibly better than the Nissan Leaf. Then, poof. Nothing. People seem to just give up. With the Joule, they “pulled the plug”. There was another promising vehicle, based on the Citroen Mehari. Started well, and vanished. The MO is: get funding, eat it all up, and go home.
I thought, given that labour law and the rest of law are such close cousins, that our Justice system would follow on our excellent labour lawyers’ examples, computerise, and set an example. YouTube SONA podcaster Mike Sham blames SITA. Maybe it is the procurer’s fault, but I think lawyers are as much to blame. They are complicit in Stalingrad strategies, and appear to enjoy the paper system enough to exploit it to gain postponements, and to accept “lost dockets”. To me, postponements are the scourge of the justice system, and the Zondo Commission is one massive, R700 million lost docket. Government is Out to Lunch.
Lawyers are busy people, and they can’t be expected to do someone else’s jobs: government is the rabbit hole to beat them all, yet thirty years is a long time to Carry on Failing. We are beginning to look like a generational, national Carry On Series. We’ve had 31 years freedom from apartheid, and “Carry On” made 31 films.
I recently spent 18 months of my life attending Helen Joseph Hospital’s various clinics. That is another insightful story on tech-failure, but let’s not get side-tracked onto public health. The common factor between the union and HJH was computers. Every room (there are hundreds) in HJH, and every ward, has a computer lying unused. I will say this, the ones in the wards are spotlessly clean, no dust gathering. It is just that none of them are used. They just lie there in strong mesh cages, so dood soos ‘n mossie. Some, in some departments, are being used out of sight somewhere, to capture patient treatment records. I know they do that, because my doctor in the Western Cape was able to check on one of my HJH procedures.
The trouble was that here was no detail on the HJH capture. My doctor was able to confirm only that the procedure was done, not find the result. So, do not, for a moment, get the idea that this data is on par with that of private health IT in practice. It is hidden from sight, almost as if they are guilty about it. Their Hearing Clinic uses PCs correctly, and they were the only clinic in HJH that I can honestly say was up to scratch. They answered phones, responded to messages, and communicated.
Other departments didn’t, and are overrun with paper. Appointments are made (often in pencil) in A4 ledger books, and I found clinics in darkness after lunch. There is clearly no leadership when people treat jobs as mornings only gigs.
As Sham points out, SARS and the Treasury appear to work okay, and we know that both are tech-savvy. The conclusion is that where IT works (and Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has proved it again), everything works better. So, why didn’t the public legal fraternity, given they saw that apartheid was beaten largely by tech-savvy law firms, follow up, and computerise properly? Our justice system is a mess of paper, like HJH.
And that leads me to my own conclusion here. South Africa needs to fix only one thing, and the rest will fall in line. That thing is the justice system. It won’t take an army of leaders, it just needs someone with the nous and industry of an Ian Cameron, or a Chris Pappas, or the cool analytical eye of a Prince Mashele. I remain convinced that the thing that claws at public morale and self esteem in SA, and curses us to fail, is the justice system. Everyone knows what is fair, so they know the opposite. “Unfair” is the ruling ethos of our time, and nobody will fall into line if we don't, every last one of us, get due process.
As everybody saw, our President felt content enough about things in the White House to reduce the issue of Kill the Boer to Kill Everyone, and that somehow makes it alright. Words fail me.
There is one question I put to every visitor I meet from an overseas country. Try it yourself. Ask your overseas friends. It’s not rocket science. That question is:
“During your stay, have you seen a policeman or woman?”Most, in the country for two to three weeks, can’t remember seeing a single one. And naturally my next question to them is:
“And do you feel safer now?”What police we have are mostly looking after grootkoppe. It sticks out a mile to Mike Sham and me that if you want people to believe in common law and fair play again, the complete justice system needs to up its game to a quick-response credible system that is able to call on DNA and fingerprint databases in milliseconds, not years, and dockets need to live on the cloud, where thugs and “fixers” can’t get at them: where both child selling and sitting on millions in couches get justice.
Tronkstraf for the rich. I wish.