Guy Lundy’s Future Fit blog is moving
October 26, 2006
The new home of the Guy Lundy blog, Future Fit, is being moved to http://blog.guylundy.com.
Please update your Favourites/Bookmarks and RSS feeds.
Kind Regards,
Rafiq Phillips
Urban sprawl is counter-intuitive
September 27, 2006
With the current rate of urbanisation in South Africa, local authorities are working hard to provide housing for the poor in metropolitan areas. However, they are making a mistake that will dog us for generations to come by continuously building one house per property in increasingly larger circles around the main urban centres. Not only is this a continuation of apartheid urban planning, which ensured that the poorest had the furthest to travel to get to work; it is also counter-intuitive.
Increasing sprawl puts strain on the transport infrastructure and requires much greater investment in infrastructure to provide water, sewerage, electricity, and so on because all pipes, cables and other necessities have to stretch further. We should be going for a more urban, high-rise approach, with areas closer to the CBDs being upgraded and built up. This is much more in line with the approach in Europe and much of South America than the disastrous urban sprawl we see in Los Angeles and other US cities.
Authorities will contest that they are encouraging densification, but if one looks at Johannesburg, for example, the densification is taking place in areas that are still spread very far apart. This doesn’t help alleviate the existing problem of overloaded infrastructure, it only serves to exacerbate it.
Future police power
August 29, 2006
The MEC for community safety in Gauteng, South Africa, recently announced the launch of Operation Iron Fist, a plan to squash violent crime and secure a safer future for the province. It could be called Operation About Time, because it is time the South African Police Service took a harder line. For too long they have been worried about upsetting their “customers”, forgetting that a lot of those “customers” are very nasty people who respond best to a zero tolerance approach.
Continue Reading…
Inadvertently creating supporters for the wrongdoer
August 24, 2006
Those determined to bring down Jacob Zuma and destroy his future political career by pillorying him in the media should learn from the recent experience of Israel in Lebanon. When Hezbollah first kidnapped Israeli soldiers, Israel actually had quite a number of sympathisers in Lebanon… Continue reading
Home Affairs Hypocrisy
June 30, 2006
The new advertisement being run on South African television by the Department of Home Affairs is hypocritical in the extreme. The advertisement calls on South Africans to be more welcoming to refugees. It hints at the similar hardships that struggle heroes who left South Africa went through.
Short termism and Rand obsession
June 30, 2006
The panic that is accompanying the so-called slide of the Rand at the moment is typical of the short-term mindset that bedevils South African business. It shows lack of foresight and future focus.
Continue Reading…Tolerance and Respect
June 30, 2006
Vuyo Mvoko’s article in Business Day, “Intolerance and slaughter: the dry white heart of SA’s suburbs” (30 June), is an 
interesting insight into the challenge we face going into the future as new South Africans. To move forward positively as one nation, and to complete the as-yet-unfinished process of reconciliation, what we need more than anything else is tolerance and respect – from all cultures. Unfortunately, too often in South Africa these values are supplanted by egos; people determined to fight rather than to understand.
Vodacom should be unlocking African potential
June 9, 2006
(Published in Business Day, June 2006)
The leader article “Expansion into Africa too costly – Vodacom” (Business Day, 6 June) is disappointing. It reflects a misplaced Afro-pessimism that is at odds with the optimistic climate displayed at the recent World Economic Forum on Africa, with its focus on opportunities.
Moving the boundaries sets a precedent
June 9, 2006
(Published in the Cape Times, May 2006)
Bringing up children teaches one a tremendous amount about setting boundaries. One learns very quickly that if a boundary is set and the child is then allowed to step over it, they will do so again in future. If one allows this to happen on several occasions, one is asking to be defied again and again.
What constitutes an economic meltdown?
June 9, 2006
(Published in Business Day, June 2006)
On 30 May South Africa’s Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, was quoted in a Reuters interview as saying that South Africa would support Zimbabwe in the event of an economic meltdown. Now I don’t know if “meltdown” was the word that she actually used or if that was journalistic licence, but I am interested to know what constitutes an economic meltdown.
Surely a meltdown is a process, and not an event. In fact, even a collapse would be a process and not an event. In that case, the fact that Zimbabwe has the world’s highest inflation rate at over 1000%…
