A Literal Bargain

Back in the day, we workers in England (I worked in manual labour there for four years) would buy a copy of the Daily Whatever, tuck it under our arms, and dash for the tube or bus. That same pattern was echoed all over the world. In Mzansi, for a time, it cost (“two and a half cents for”) a tickey. The Daily Blah was a habit, and it was trusted. Nobody talked of “fake news”. There were inaccuracies, but fake news signals intention. “Fake news” is a phrase made popular by a sitting president. It takes a conman to know one.

Whether you wanted sports news, horsey-odds, hatch-match-despatch column, or the “skinner”, we generally got more than we paid for, and dropping a tickey into a jam tin was a system everyone understood. It was as simple and trusted as a shovel or a shoeshine. I have no interest in any newspaper justifying the subscription model, just because they used to do it for print news. Newspaper subs were terrible, anyway. We fought every month.

So, Daily Maverick, let me make a suggestion: instead of us dropping coins into a jam tin, let us just tap our phones, once a day, only when we want to read, and you contact us at month end to ask:

“Pay x cents for x days for DM via [A]irtime or [D]ata?.”

Please make it a few cents only, because

• it will be something where you are getting nothing, and
• we won’t quibble about refunds.

And please deposit my milions for this suggestion into my bank account. If Kenneth can get millions for PCM, why not me for this?

Koebaai Koerant

Few foresaw, when music took a dive, that print media would follow. Yet, as RWJ would say, “here we are”. Now, it is deemed worse, because - OMG 😱! - democracy will take a dive along with journalism. And we all need democracy, don’t we?

Well, now. I don’t know. Business thought everything was very neat, orderly and fine for a generation under apartheid. It just didn’t suit business to stretch it to forty years. The way some people still talk, we did very well without democracy. I think you are beginning to sense that I am not wholly enthralled by business. Yes, it makes the world go round, but if that is so, then why are we in such a sorry place? I think it is because business is trained in excuses. There is a even euphemism for excuses - “spin”. Whatever we think of business, there is only one job description out there: it is called “How to not get fired”.

News, most agree, is essential to democracy. Yet, it is a twist to say we govern by the people, for the people in our current electoral system: we have a one percent gets it all system. But, ok, we do have more freedom of speech than Australia and England, some people that I know have said. And we do have the PAI Act. Not every whistle-blower has survived, but hey, we are not seeing mass emigration to SADC or anywhere else in Africa. I do wonder though if there are more SA blacks in London than in Ulundi.

Rephrasing all this, it is fine for music and culture to die, because all they do is keep you sane. But journalism must not be allowed to die, because, it keeps us informed. Ooh! How exciting! We can all walk around mentally unwell now, because we are informed. I can just hear BJ Vorster, unafraid of Mkhonto we Sizwe, because

“Security agencies is priepêrdt”.

This time around, it’s fine, because we is informdt.

Cue Gavin Stewart

Gavin Stewart was yet another ‘family member’, in and out of the Cook home in Scotsville. He started journalism as cartoonist “Mudd” in Nux, the UNP student newspaper. Gavin was the first person I know who realised the coming of “no hot lead” meant “no lead time”. Now, with phones, we routinely get disasters - and the skinner - straight from “the peoples’ devices”.

As soon as his Rhodes University journalist department mocked up bromide pages for Cue, the ten-day Grahamstown Festival Newspaper, he knew that the days of “lead time” (pun intended) were over. No more hot leaden metal typesetting. Within months, that changed to Ventura Publisher and Aldus PageMaker, and copy passed digitally, straight from Atex or its PC workalike, XYWrite II.

Gavin’s student, my niece Robin Taylor, along with a team of other hectically tired student journalists, would stand in line to deliver the page mockup to Grocotts Daily Mail. Within months, the copy & paste became fully digital. Nothing was ever the same again, and Grocotts, the oldest newspaper in SA (but for a week’s closure), became the first to digitise. Gavin went on to make Kugompo’s Daily Despatch into one of the best newspapers in the country. It has just started a website. Robin still has the style book created by Gavin for Cue.

Tiekie Koerant

Nothing has ever really replaced the worker’s “thrupenny” newspaper. Workers read the daily newspaper on our way to work, but soon, says Elon, there won’t even be jobs. So, nothing will ever replace the threepenny rag (not even X). There are other humbugs: payment is easy online, but not if you want to pay “sixpence”. And who wants to go all cryupto-secure to buy a daily rag?

Paywalls don’t do sixpence. They want fat subscriptions. That is their operating model, they say. Sounds like their problem? I will subscribe to Netflix, it is entertainment. But not a daily, because it is a democratic necessity. It’s a nice catch expecting us to go and sit in on council processes, but

• they can’t fit us all in
• our workplaces would fire us
• they cancel without warning, and
• they don’t reimburse our taxi fares.

No! Government must pay for civic reporting, and I see no reason, as outlined below, why they can’t pay for journalists as well, in every dorp in South Africa. The operative phrase is “redistribution of wealth” and it can be better than R350. If they can redistribute wealth to flakey “politcians”, why not to journalists, who will actually give us something for our money? It is really cheap and easy to do. We don’t need to do the whole national newspaper kerfuffle.

I claimed to be hacker-ok, and to offer a solution and here I go with the quest for ‘The Daily Blah’ or ‘Dorpsraadblad’ or ‘Izindaba Zika-Blah Blah’. The exemplary Daily Maverick is threatened with extinction. Let the Europeans and Americans consign their newspapers to the dogs, but not us here in SA. Let the councils fund journalism.

• Start with a dorp - Colesberg? But there is nothing wrong with Somerset West.
• Anywhere there is a town council
• Every:
• • Budget item
• • Expense
• • purchase
• • invoice

in every council, country wide, is recorded into a the “standard council app”, automatically updated in real time to a public ledger page, as in this simulation:

View the Live Municipal Ledger Simulation

Dorps are nearly all much the same. Service delivery is not rocket science, nor is bookkeeping. If “the app is the bank is the transaction” Everybody, at home or abroad, can see what is going on, in real time. No more Keystone Kops, trying to catch people for tenderverneukery last year or in ’toeka se dae’.

A modest mini-PC can do all this, 24/7 without breaking a sweat. Every council in the country is now networked. The first question the talentless drone accountants will bleat is:

“Where will the money come from?”

Government feels nothing about paying at least R2 million each per annum for fifteen political parties. The rationale is “paying for democracy”. So it is logical they can pay for reporting on councils, too.

Everybody and their cousins suspect the majority of those political parties are a person, a secretary with a cellphone, and an address. They also know that most of these do nothing in parliament. It is a nice scheme. I am thinking of doing it too. I can easily afford the secretary, cellphone and BMW with tinted windows, and live very happily on the balance of the R 2 million per annum.

We can’t afford NOT to do the Tickey Paper.

Metric	Figure
Total Hardware Cost per Unit	R11,000
Useful Lifespan	5 years (1,825 days)
Daily Cost per PC Setup	R6.03
Total Procurement (257 Municipalities)	R2,827,000
Combined Daily Cost (All 257 PCs)	R1,549.71
Daily Cost per SA Citizen (National)	R0.000025 (~0.0025c)
5-Year Lifetime Cost per Citizen	R0.045 (~4.5c)

LIFETIME COST is … a tickey and a half. Call me a liar for 1.5 cents. But. no, don’t. Because I meant a tickey per day, not a tickey every five years.

The money saved with ‘democratic information’, just disabling verneukery, will pay for thousands of local journalists, all over the country, adding media comment to the Daily Council Blah, including mandatory ads for cultural events.

Note I did not add a software cost. That’s because I believe commercial banks would be missing out by not paying for it, and will queue to get the business:

“The app? The app is “the transaction is the report” - is free to us because the processing bank funds the software, eliminating procurement bottlenecks and giving the banks clear commercial incentives to compete for payment rails. "

Software cost to the people: R0.0c.

The real battle begins: lawyers, accountants, and anyone with entrenched interests will pull every trick in the book. Their problem is they do not control the Treasury. It is public knowledge when and how much the Treasury drops a grant to a municipality. Civil movements wiill not be slow to co-opt local businesses into proving work done, especially those threatened by slow or no payment. Businesses are constantly watched by other jealous businesses. The truth will come out.

You can’t beat hackers. Best not to even try, whether the mayors like it or not. Blue light brigades can’t help here.