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When confronted with troubles on the home front, with Kortbroek Malema’s shenanigans or spats between various ministers or members of the alliance, he has often dithered and looked like a man too scared or too intellectually weak to lead. Sitting on the fence and saying nothing in ten different ways can only work for a while when one is supposed to be the leader of the most powerful party in the country and the President of the nation. At some point his enemies are going to decide that he is a weak man, out of his depth intellectually, and then they will pounce. (And I am not talking of Helen Zille, here, I am talking about his enemies within his own party and within the alliance.)

But it was when the President was called upon to make decisions that could affect his own personal fortunes, that he has shown his truly dark side. On more than one occasion he has failed dismally and has acted like a man with no regard for the Constitution and the law. Thus he purported to appoint Menzi Simelane as head of the National Prosecuting Authority despite the fact that Mr Simelane is not a fit and proper person as required by the law. This he obviously did because Mr Simelane had indicated that he would take instructions from the executive when leading the NPA.

It is very difficult not to conclude that the appointment of Simelane was Zuma’s insurance policy to prevent any further legal troubles. If the DA application to have the decision to drop charges against the President reviewed, is successful, Simelane will make sure the President is not prosecuted. By purporting to appoint Simelane, our President did not act in the interest of the country but in his own naked self-interest and in doing so he acted unlawfully and besmirched the office of the Presidency

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was “the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility”, said Christian Aid. “Rich countries have bullied developing nations,” fumed Friends of the Earth International.

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as “a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”.

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Obama’s fake ’deal’

In the end, like all good disaster movies, it came down to a nail-biting, nerve-jangling finale where it was impossible to predict what was going to happen next. The real action began on the morning of the final day. Amid rumours that, since he had arrived in town, Barack Obama had been locked in closed meetings with small groups of hand-picked countries, those of us lucky enough to still be in the Bella Centre (by this stage the UN had barred all but 90 of the 14,000 accredited NGO participants – I’d got in with my press pass) awaited his Friday morning speech with something approaching the hysteria that greets a film star.

Our leading man had finally arrived. Would he be able to use his unprecedented stock of international goodwill to break his own negotiators’ intransigence, stand up to the battalion of corporate lobbyists working tirelessly to sabotage things, and somehow charm everyone into reaching a half-decent deal?

I have to admit to being caught up in the moment. I allowed myself to believe in the Obama fantasy. I forgot, fatally, that he’s a US President, and so found myself doubly disappointed when he behaved not as hero but as villain. Delivering a brusque, stern, charmless speech devoid of any new concessions, he had one message for the rest of the world; get in line with what the US wants, which is what’s on the table now. Period.

The next few hours were tragically farcical. With no Obama-led breakthrough, the deadlock looked terminal – surely they’ll just have to admit failure? But negotiating texts kept being leaked. Over five hours we saw as many draft agreements trickle out from behind the closed doors, each getting successively weaker. Behind the scenes, one delegate told me, ‘it’s like the last hours of the Titanic; everyone running round shooting each other and stealing their money.’

Then, suddenly: news! Obama was holding a press conference. What was he going to announce? No-one knew. We stampeded in the direction of the press conference room, to be told that it was taking place elsewhere with just the White House press corps. We should wait, though, because the EU would give their own press conference here straight afterwards.

We waited. And waited. Around 9.30pm those with laptops/blackberries got the news first – Obama had announced that there was a deal! The Copenhagen Accord!! What was in it? No-one knew.

Finally the EU spokeswoman took to the stage. At last, some answers. Or not… ‘I’ve just discovered that the EU has gone into another round of negotiations so we have to cancel this press conference, sorry,’ she told us. If there’s a deal why are they still negotiating? Something fishy was clearly going on.

Charging back towards our computers, I bumped into a developing country delegate. ‘It’s NOT a deal. It’s still just a draft. Obama cooked it up with a few countries, outside of the UN process, announced it as a deal in a press conference, is already on a plane back to the US, and most developing countries haven’t even seen the text yet, let alone agreed to it!’ he briefed me, breathlessly. ‘People are furious!’ he said before dashing off into an emergency meeting.

I got my hands on the text. It was appalling – not worth the paper it was hastily photocopied on. The (inadequate) 2 degree target was in there, but no specific emissions reductions targets to achieve it. The year by which global emissions should peak, present in some of the afternoon’s drafts, had been dropped. The measly financing that had been on offer just a day ago had mysteriously shrunk. The agreement on forests, said to be completed, had disappeared. It delayed all substantive decisions to this time next year. And it wasn’t legally-binding. It was several steps back from where things had been before negotiators had even arrived here…

Furious final hours

Emotions were getting high in the Bella Centre. I was not alone in struggling to contain my anger at the way Obama had imposed this non-deal on the world. Of course, I was well aware of the sheer naked power of the US and the brutal way in which it’s wielded. But it’s still really disturbing to witness it in action like this. ‘I mean, it’s only the bloody future of humanity at stake here’, I ranted at anyone who’d listen. ‘300,000 people are dying every year from climate change. How can these politicians be so fucking callous?’

The UN plenary to discuss the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ was finally convened well after midnight. Its chair, the Danish Prime Minister, told countries they had an hour to discuss the draft, then they would agree it.

At this point, fury bubbled over. Tuvalu – a tiny low-lying Pacific island, was the first to refuse to sign: ‘It looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future,’ its representative fumed. Bolivia and Costa Rica backed them up in rejecting the Accord. Other developing countries also refused to bow to pressure. The Venezuelan delegate, bleeding from whacking her desk so hard trying to get heard, accused Obama of a coup against the UN. ‘This is asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries,’ railed Lumumba Di-Aping, chair of the G77 group of developing nations.

The rumpus carried on throughout the night. Unable to stand any more, I snuck out sometime in the wee small hours to join the sub-zero protest outside, and then get some sleep. A bleary-eyed compromise was finally reached mid-morning – ultimately pushed through by the UK. Because of steadfast opposition by several countries, the UN would merely ‘note’ the accord. This gives it no standing of any kind. But there was a final, desperate sting in the tail: only developing countries who sign up to it will get access to any of the financing.

The blame game

Immediately, the blame game began. The US and UK, who persist in calling it a ‘deal’ when it patently isn’t, say the fault lies squarely with China for blocking progress, and with the developing nations who prevented the adoption of the pathetically pointless ‘Copenhagen Accord’. 

This is laughable. There is plenty of blame to go round – hardly anyone comes out of this well. But the true villains of this particular piece were the high-emitting industrialized nations – and the US most of all – who came to the table prepared to offer so little whilst demanding concessions from everyone else, and who then imposed a bogus ‘deal’ when the UN should have simply admitted failure and begun a re-evaluation of the entire process.

Read the whole thing, not just this excerpt.

Eric Schmidt misunderstands privacy. It is certainly about more than concealing law-breaking and, as Hannah Arendt argues, the existence of a private realm where we are shielded from the constant glare of others is actually critical for the health of a public realm. But Bruce Schneier on the other hand misunderstands totalitarianism. It is not about the surveillance or the ability of the state to pry into my private life, it is about its willingness to do so. What made Stalinism scary is that you could be arrested if your wife informed on you — not that what you say to your wife cannot be kept secret. So we must guard against the totalitarian impulse of the state, but Google is the wrong focus for that struggle.

Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users’ privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC’s recent “Inside the Mind of Google” special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a “trusted friend,” Schmidt responded, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Unfortunately, Schmidt’s statement makes it seem as if Google, a company that claims to care about privacy, is not even concerned enough to understand basic lessons about privacy and why it’s important on so many levels — from protection against shallow embarrassments to the preservation of freedom and human rights. In response to Schmidt, Security researcher Bruce Schneier referenced an eloquent piece he wrote in 2006 that makes the case that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.” Schneier writes:

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

I don’t have much love for Eskom, but this is a disgraceful comment from an eminent economist.

Schussler also criticised electricity being free for poor households. “But government doesn’t think that way. They want to be in this Marxist, socialist kak.”

To make matters worse, 6% of electricity in the country was stolen. “That is not fair,” he complained.

If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore “has to be done,” then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it. . . and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty.

The events of the last few of weeks, involving stolen professional correspondence between a small number of leading climate scientists—so-called climategate—demonstrate my point. Both the theft itself and the alleged contents of some of the stolen emails reveal the strong polarization and intense antagonism now found in some areas of climate science.

Climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles. The consequence is that science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums for ideological battles are ignored.

I feel deeply uncomfortable with the way James Myburgh makes his argument. And it is certainly impolitic in that he will lose most of his black readers by showing absolutely no sensitivity to the experience of racism in South Africa.Nevertheless, it is also clear that the “transformation” agenda in the legal sector has increasingly become a dual agenda of (1) Africanisation (driven by a crude racial nationalism/nativism) and (2) establishing a more subservient bench. The two are not the same, but both are dangerous. The real transformation agenda needed — building a jurisprudence and legal tradition that is respectful of people and is rooted in the values of the Constitution — is all but lost. This is the real tragedy. The question of whether the crude racial nationalism creeping into all spheres of life in South Africa — understandable, perhaps, but also very deeply harmful, not least the goal of a non-racial society — can in fact be called “extreme racism” is worth reflecting upon. I am inclined to think it can. But I will write about this later.

Minority applicants who dare apply for appointment have, under the Zuma presidency, been subjected to a modern variant of ‘trial by drowning’. They are asked by the racial psychopaths on the JSC if they support the ideal of ‘demographic representivity.’ If they say no, they are excluded from consideration for having opposed ‘transformation’. If they say ‘yes’ they self-exclude themselves, as their appointment would quite obviously obstruct the attainment of this goal. So, Marshall is certainly correct to claim that the ANC has attained its racial goals in the judiciary speedily and on an impressive scale. Whether this is “great cause for pride and celebration” is more open to question. It represents, for one thing, the triumph of extreme racism. One of the founding texts of modern German anti-Semitism – Adolf Stoecker’s 1879 pamphlet “What we Demand of Modern Jewry” – called for the “limitation of appointments of Jewish judges in proportion to the size of the population.” Should South Africa really be proud that, a hundred and thirty years later, the ANC has adopted the same limitation, when it comes to the appointment of white (including Jewish) judges in South Africa? It is also untrue to pretend, as Marshall does, that this has done no harm to the quality of justice in South Africa. As a matter of simple arithmetic: excluding three quarters of the legal profession, including the great majority of your top advocates, from appointment to the bench can hardly do the institution any good.