One more way the world is unfair

The Wits campus is a bit of a fortress. When people in South Africa talked about opening the doors of higher education, they certainly didn't mean it literally. As a visitor, you can drive onto campus in a couple different places. The nice attendant at the boom gate gives you a slip of paper, and away you go.  There's only one walking entrance for visitors, however; at Senate House. You must show a photo ID, and tell them where you're going. The process takes significantly longer than driving, and security occasionally calls the person you're going to visit. And the reason the security folks gave me for the measures were because there had been computer thefts on campus. Really. Who takes computers and leaves with them on foot? And not in a car? Really? 

Spear/Smear of the nation destroyed

I'm not quite sure if I'm thrilled that art is still playing such a cutting edge role in provoking public debate, or morbidly fascinated that there aren't better things to worry about than the president's willy. For those not living in South Africa (or living under a rock), the Goodman Gallery has become The Place To Be in Joburg, when, in the savviest curatorial decision in history, they put up a Brett Meyer art exhibit including a picture of Zuma with his, ahem, hanging out (others have suggested that it could just as well be Vavi - this doesn't make quite as good a news story, though...). As an aside, the rest of the exhibit's quite clever.

The ANC's response was not quite so savvy; what was an opportunity to show a bit of humor and maturity instead sparked protests and court interdicts (which I can't imagine have a chance in the world of getting anywhere, except making noise in the papers....we were starting to get tired of Mdluli anyway). Given that South Africa has some of the strongest jurisprudence protecting satire out there, I'm not sure what the goal is (perhaps build support for certain presidential parts being covered by the secrecy bill?).

Anyway, it seems like every time these furors erupt in public discourse, I come away feeling very un-South African (maybe home affairs saw something to make them delay my ID book application). In very much the same way I feel un-American when the conversation turns to politics in Nebraska. I'm generally surrounded by 'leftish' public intellectuals, most of whom were strongly supportive of the ANC (and many of whom still are), while still being critical of the corruption, neoliberalism, materialism, and other nasties are now part of the ruling party. Whether or not I agree with their take on issues like this, I'm acutely aware of a complete chasm that exists in mindsets between them, and the ANC supporters protesting for the removal of the painting. I can't even blame this one on economic inequality, because I feel the same chasm when my mother starts talking about Sarah Palin.

In cases like this, you can't completely avoid the discussion of who's right (there's some sort of responsibility to public discourse to hash it out, at least until the newspapers get bored)....But at the risk of sounding like a marriage counselor, I'm not sure being right is the point (even though it's to know I'm right). The more important questions aren't battled out in the media...given all this, how can we still work towards all the things we do agree on? The current levels of unemployment are shocking whether you think the depiction of Zuma is racist of not. As the DA and Cosatu are at loggerheads about a youth wage subsidy, why is the discussion about the disagreement in means, instead of how to achieve the shared goal?

The ID saga continues

Feeling unusually hopeful on last week Wednesday, I called Home Affairs to check up on the status of my recent ID book re application. More on the saga here and here. I always start with the toll free enquiries line, and move from there. Bad news.

Once again, my application has been sent from Harrison street, and not received in Pretoria. This is a process that should take 2 days, and it's been over 3 months. Call center conclusion? I should go to Harrison street, figure out how they are sending my application, obtain 'some kind of tracking number or something' and then find out what went wrong.

I mull on this advice for a day, check with a friendly immigration-lawyer-friend to see if he can shed any light on the situation, and Thursday, I call Harrison street directly, in hopes that I won't have to go there in person. There are 3 numbers listed for the office on the dha website. Between Thursday of last week and this Tuesday, I spent 11 hours (count them, 11) calling them (automatic redial on skype), and nobody picked up.

So this Tuesday, I called the cell phone of the regional manager. She was polite, helpful, and sounded like she knew what was going on. Apparently, what is taking so long is that they must confirm my permanent residence permit. Issuing my permanent residence permit took 6 weeks, and confirming it has now taken 11 months, but nevermind. I should go to the first floor of Harrison street, and ask to talk to the supervisor of the ID section, who used to be (but is no longer) Thandi.

Once again, hoping to save myself a trip to Harrison street, I phoned, and this time, miraculously, got someone to give me a direct number to the ID section (I feel like this is a heavily guarded state secret). I am told that the applications generally take 3 months to reach Pretoria, and I should phone back next week Thursday. I've had the 'phone back next week Thursday' conversation with DHA many times before. I think it's the Home Affairs equivalent of 'don't call me, I'll call you'. I feel rejected. And may have to trek back to Harrison street one of these days. At least when my belly enters a room 3 steps before I do, I get some sympathy standing in the queues.

How public are any south african schools?

Being the neurotic planner that I am, I'm thinking about schools for Blob. I was feeling quite smug about living in Yeoville, where there are bunches of spectacular schools in walking distance. After having lunch with someone at a conference who is providing me with all sorts of baby advice, the smugness has turned to trepidation.

Boy, was I naive. Coming from small town America, I assumed public = you don't have to pay. You register the kid at registration time, the kid shows up when classes start, and twice a year you get hit up for the costs of extra music lessons or sports trips. Ha! Says The Dad. Apparently, public in South Africa means the state pays some base subsidy of the teacher's salaries. But 'good' public schools pay their teachers much more, and school fees make up this difference. Gosh, what a spectacular way to entrench inequality from the youngest possible age.

I always assumed Blob'd go to a public school (more diverse, still good education, less snooty)...but now I'm wondering. I did a cursory comparison of a good public school (king edward) and a good private school (sacred heart) both within walking distance of home, and they appear to charge comparable fees (R30,000/ year. Are they NUTS?! How can that be normal?), and from a cursory glance, they don't seem to have tremendous differences in socioeconomic makeup - if anything, the private school seems slightly more progressive. What to do...?  Seems like all other parents just suck it up and pay - maybe I should too, but it gives me the moral heeby-jeebies.

Anyway, I'm irritated at the claim that a school is public when fees are higher than lots of peoples total incomes. I feel like a fabulous constitution is being cheated. And, South Africa spends a higher portion of its national budget on education than any other country in the world....how can it be so grossly mismanaged?

I think every public servant should have to send their children to public schools, and use public transport. I bet both would improve more quickly (any time I say this in public, people look at me like I've grown a third arm. Is it really such an odd suggestion? It seems like a no brainer....).

Why is Home Affairs Like a Volvo Repair Shop?

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked the progress of my most recent ID book application at the Home Affairs call center yesterday. In an experience of de ja vu, I was told that my application was sent off from Harrison street a month ago, but has never been received in Pretoria. I should go back to the Harrison street office, and figure out what happened to it (for those of you who missed it, this is the same fate my other 2 applications met with, and I was always told first to wait - and wait, and wait - and then to reapply). Apparently, they should be able to 'explain to me their system for sending things to Pretoria', and give me tracking numbers. My optimism on this front isn't high. I asked if I couldn't just re apply in Pretoria, and was warned off with stories of terror should I get issued 2 ID books.

Meanwhile, The Dad has been having problems with his Volvo. It's the second time in as many years that he's had to replace the radiator. As an oldish used car, it needs a fair amount of TLC....but you generally don't plan to keep replacing the same parts. There is also a recurring oil leak, something funky that keeps springing up with the coolant....We have lurking suspicions that some of these ongoing problems are not being helped by the skills of the Volvo repair folks. They have generally been nice about charging at-cost for parts (when they've been defective but out of warranty), reducing labour costs, etc. Which is nice, though only helpful if the underlying problems eventually get solved.

So what we're both finding that the more incompetent the service provider is, the more tied you end up being to them. I can't leave Harrison street out of fear that if I go to some more organised Home Affairs office, my application is already irredeemably screwed up (and in fact, nowhere else will accept an application from me until things are fixed at Harrison street, because documentation on all my mis-sent applications is on the central Home Affairs system). Similarly, he can't go to any other more competent service center, because he would then have to fork out a fortune to fix all the problems caused by the first incompetent repair folks...whereas now, at least he can work with them through what's going wrong. And we can compare notes of our ongoing sagas. 

M&E Course at the University of Stellenbosch

Last year, I did a postgraduate diploma in monitoring and evaluation from the University of Stellenbosch. Since I had been working as an MandE practitioner for several years, I was quite excited about the course. My work environment really had the feeling of a social startup - a very dynamic and creative environment. While it was great to feel on the cutting edge of innovation on M&E, I was also familiar with the less exciting donor log frames, and wanted to get a sense of what more traditional M&E work looks like. The course came well recommended by some colleagues who had taken it a few years ago. It seems to be nearly the only offering of its kind in South Africa, so I jumped right in. The demand for the course is clearly high, with nearly 100 of us enrolled, ranging from new graduates to mid career professionals, many sent by government or their employers to learn a much needed skill. It's a shame the course was largely by distance, since networking with other students would have been one of the more valuable aspects of the course. 

While I did learn some monitoring and evaluation basics over the course of the year, I was tremendously disappointed by the quality of the course as a whole. The syllabus and readings were solid and thoughtfully selected; but that's pretty much the end of the good news. There were 3 contact sessions throughout the year. I went to the first two, but by the time the third one came around, I was so disillusioned that I gave it a miss. The lecturers were totally unresponsive, and we were graded more or less exclusively on how many references to various readings we used in each sub-section of assignments. While I'm all for objective grading criteria, this smacks of the demise of the American primary education system! At the post graduate level, such discouragement of original thought is ridiculous. 

Instead of spending the year learning about how to conduct a good evaluation, I spent most of the year trying to figure out what the lectures wanted.  After some very poor performances on assignments, I realised the quality of my argument was irrelevant, and it was better to submit something long, pedantic, repetitive, and obvious. This strategy served me increasingly well, and in the end I wrote a very, very long final evaluation report….It stuck religiously to the guidelines of the assignment and the best examples from previous years - and beyond that, I very little thought into it. It had about 10 times the organizational background and one tenth the analysis I would expect of any professional evaluation. The final product was so unhelpful that I rewrote it completely to be of use to the organization that volunteered to be evaluated. It was picked as one of the 'best examples' from the course, and will be passed on to next year's students. This was one of the few times I was horrified to have done so well on an assignment - I would have much preferred to fail! But instead, I lost any remaining faith I had in the value of the course. 

This course exists for people who will be working on M&E in our country - an absolutely crucial skill with service delivery crises at every turn, and with a newly created ministry of M&E. I feel like this new cadre of professionals is being sent the message that M&E is a tick-box exercise. That it's more important to cover your back by nitpicking about details, than to step back and think critically. 

I'm sure the explanations for my experience of the course are many - the course grew at a rapid rate (several years ago, when my colleagues who recommended it were studying, there were about 30 students). The professors were overloaded, trying to balance teaching with consultancy work. Since a large contingent of the students were foreign and it was mostly distance education, it may have been seen more as a money making tool for the university than a serious academic endeavor. Whatever the reasons, for the future of the profession in the country, I hope the university steps up its game in future years! 

Home Affairs

I'm thrilled to be a permanent resident in South Africa, and have the opportunity to get a South African ID book. When I applied, PR status was granted in absolute record time (it took about 6 weeks), and since that was the first permit I had applied for in a few years, I was starting to believe that things at the Department of Home Affairs were improving. My first experience with Home Affairs was in 2005 (prior to that, I had gotten permits while out of the country). A study permit reputed to take 30 days to issue, took almost 2 years. Since then, there has generally been gradual improvement with each subsequent application.

I've always managed to deal with home affairs with relatively good humour; it's part hazing process (weeds out the chancers; you have to really, really, really want to be here to get through it), part collective cultural experience (like complaining about Telkom), part participant observation research for my PhD. That said, when I went in to Harrison street last year in June to apply for an ID book, I wasn't heartbroken by the thought that it could be my last time in that building. Ha!

Since then, my application has been lost three times; I am now tied to the Harrison street office, because apparently once one application is lost, you must reapply at the same office or risk having a duplicate emerge some day (and, as the helpful call center lady said, you really really don't want that). Some office in Pretoria that processes permanent residence ID applications was moving in June last year (and possibly still is). Nobody knows if or when it will function. Neither the online feedback system nor the ministerial hotline have elicited any response. The call center tells me I must go back to Harrison street and reapply for the 4th time, even though there's no indication that my last application ever existed (I'm told that the reference number is 'impossible', even though I have a receipt with it!).

What could it be?  Some racket with the guys who take passport photographs (I've gone through 8 of them now)? Really bad luck? I'm planning to go back for another round of fun on Friday.

I'm also willing to bet my unborn child will get a US passport before I have a South African ID.... (I hope I'm wrong!)

Academia's arguments

Bill Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs are arguing so enthusiastically in the blogosphere that they are making new parts of speech out of each other. It's heartening that two such fabulous intellects are so passionate about making change happen. What's discouraging, though, is that they both seem more interested in arguing than problem solving.

Sachs says, people living in Africa are poor because of an unfortunate confluence of geography, history, and a complex mix of other things. People are literally dying of poverty. The aid that's being given isn't anywhere near enough to fix these things, that's crap. Solution: more aid.

Easterly says, people living in Africa are poor because of an unfortunate confluence of history, weak institutions, bad governance, and a complex mix of other things. People are literally dying of poverty. The aid that's being given to governments isn't making it to the people, that's crap. Solution: better aid.

Coincidentally, I find Easterly's assessment more interesting, but I'm let down by his conclusion. Giving aid to poor people (instead of poor governments) is a good way of making sure some of the short term objectives of aid are met - it's good when people can buy medicine, eat more nutritious food, and send their kids to school. But, it doesn't do much to fix the bad institutions, thus falling short of Easterly's own definitions of good aid. Even with Easterly's institutionalist understanding of the world, it's hard to argue with Sach's conclusion: levels of aid are scandalously low. When we know what works, and we can muster the political will, we should do more.

Governments have fallen radically short even of their own modest commitments. People living in many countries in the world are facing huge challenges of ineffective and corrupt governments, inadequate transport infrastructure, unfair terms of trade, gender inequality, and on and on. We need more AND better aid. The question isn't which is more important, given the information we have about the way the world works. There's a pretty high level of agreement (at least in civil society, if not in academia) about what is needed. The real issue is how we can make the change happen. Both Easterly and Sachs are disappointingly quiet on this.